This one we couldn't lose. Right?
A half-inning in and already the team from the good old USA -- Lewisville, Pa., just 90 or so miles down the road -- was eight runs to the good on the interlopers from Japan. No one loses an eight-run lead in the championship game of the Little League World Series, right?
Not in America's Pastime. Not in, you know, that game we either stole from the British, or that Abner Doubleday didn't invent, or that was once so synonymous with this country that Japanese soldiers in some green Pacific hell used to taunt American Marines with shouts of "(Bleep) Babe Ruth!"
But that was years ago, in World War II.
Japan's one of our staunchest allies now. More to the point, their kids are better at baseball than ours are.
And so, the team from Japan blinked once yesterday, then came out swinging. By the third inning, the game was tied, 10-10. By the time the Japanese kids laid on five gilding-the-lily runs in the sixth, the title was theirs, 18-11, the fourth Japanese victory in the LLWS in six years.
That nearly matches Taiwan's record of five straight LLWS titles back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and here's what really stings: America's all-time record against an international opponent in the LLWS championship game is now 15-35.
Fifteen-and-35. Even the Cubs have a better all-time won-loss, and they haven't won the World Series in 107 years.
What this tells us is America's Pastime is merely past its time, and probably long past its time. American kids spend theirs summers playing soccer and basketball and (preparing for the real American Pastime) 7-on-7 football now. Baseball, for a lot of them, is just something they used to play.
These days, you have to leave the country to find places where it's still a consuming thing, an irony that's not all that ironic. America, after all, has always been a champion exporter. Those kids from Japan, they're just the legacy of America's post-World War II benevolence. We helped our beaten enemies to their feet, and then -- although we'd actually introduced them to the game some years before -- we handed them baseball bats.
Which, of course, they used to full effect in Williamsport, Pa., on Sunday afternoon.
If only we'd introduced them to badminton instead.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Wall-y world
These Republicans. I swear, they're more fun than kittens on Red Bull.
Right out of the box you've got the First Lord of Wackadoo-ness, Donald Trump, pumping up the nitwits by saying he's gonna run out all those dirty Mexicans and then strong-arm their government into building a wall across Texas and points west. Among other fanciful tales.
Not to be outdone, here comes Scott "The Edukashun Governor" Walker, shifting into me-too mode by saying, you know, a wall across Canada wouldn't be a bad idea, either. Gotta keep out those hockey players and other dangerous subversives, after all.
It's such a crowd-pleasing show that now I'm thinking, why stop there? If you're gonna build a Mexican wall and a Canadian wall, why not go all the way and build a wall for every state?
Surely South Dakota must be getting fed up with all those North Dakota lowlifes crossing the state line to get away from Bismarck's winters, and also to Hoover up all the good paying jobs at WalMart and Burger King. It must get wearisome to order a Whopper and chicken fries at a Sioux Falls drive-thru, only to be confronted at the window by some doofus from Minot who can't even speak proper South Dakotan.
And what about right here in Indiana?
God knows we could use a wall to keep John Calipari on the Kentucky side of the river where he belongs. Ditto Tom Izzo and Jim Harbaugh up there north of the Michigan line. And Ohio?
Lord. Don't even get the Blob started.
Who can count the times Urban Meyer has sneaked over here with his phony green card to steal football players? And that Thad Matta, he's just as bad. Tell me we couldn't use a wall to protect us from their kind, and also to keep out the riffraff from Van Wert and Antwerp.
You say you want to play college ball?
Fine, Be a good Hoosier, then, and do it right here at IU or Purdue. Those people in Ohio, they're nothing but trouble.
Nine out of 10 nitwits agree.
Right out of the box you've got the First Lord of Wackadoo-ness, Donald Trump, pumping up the nitwits by saying he's gonna run out all those dirty Mexicans and then strong-arm their government into building a wall across Texas and points west. Among other fanciful tales.
Not to be outdone, here comes Scott "The Edukashun Governor" Walker, shifting into me-too mode by saying, you know, a wall across Canada wouldn't be a bad idea, either. Gotta keep out those hockey players and other dangerous subversives, after all.
It's such a crowd-pleasing show that now I'm thinking, why stop there? If you're gonna build a Mexican wall and a Canadian wall, why not go all the way and build a wall for every state?
Surely South Dakota must be getting fed up with all those North Dakota lowlifes crossing the state line to get away from Bismarck's winters, and also to Hoover up all the good paying jobs at WalMart and Burger King. It must get wearisome to order a Whopper and chicken fries at a Sioux Falls drive-thru, only to be confronted at the window by some doofus from Minot who can't even speak proper South Dakotan.
And what about right here in Indiana?
God knows we could use a wall to keep John Calipari on the Kentucky side of the river where he belongs. Ditto Tom Izzo and Jim Harbaugh up there north of the Michigan line. And Ohio?
Lord. Don't even get the Blob started.
Who can count the times Urban Meyer has sneaked over here with his phony green card to steal football players? And that Thad Matta, he's just as bad. Tell me we couldn't use a wall to protect us from their kind, and also to keep out the riffraff from Van Wert and Antwerp.
You say you want to play college ball?
Fine, Be a good Hoosier, then, and do it right here at IU or Purdue. Those people in Ohio, they're nothing but trouble.
Nine out of 10 nitwits agree.
Shake down the pixels
Old school wasn't born beneath Touchdown Jesus' gaze, but it grew to manly adulthood there. So it's safe to assume there might be some consternation among Domers at this latest affront to the memory of Rockne and Leahy and all the other icons.
In the other words: What the hell is Notre Dame thinking, installing a videoboard and (ugh) ribbon boards in the House That Rockne Built And Lou Renovated? Who are we, Purdue?
Yet the boards will come in 2017, athletic director Jack Swarbrick announced this week, and the true outrage is that Rockne likely would have approved. The man was nothing if not a PR visionary, light years ahead of his time in flacking Notre Dame as a national brand. And modernity in pursuit of that goal was something he embraced wholeheartedly.
And so the videoboards will come, and Rockne will not so much as turn a hair in his grave. And the old-schoolers will learn to deal with it.
After all, they learned to deal with the idea of Notre Dame playing in something called the Pinstripe Bowl, after decades of being above even the Cottons and Oranges in the commercial vulgarity that is bowl season. They learned to deal with apparel company logos on the Irish uniforms. They learned, in time, to deal with a more obstructed view of Touchdown Jesus if expanded seating (and expanded revenue) was the tradeoff.
And so, bring on the videoboards. And consider the possibilities.
I mean, what could be more purely Notre Dame than looking off to the south on a game day and seeing a skyscraper-sized image of Pat O'Brien outlined against the blue-gray sky, reciting the Gipper speech from "Knute Rockne, All-American?"
Tell me Knute isn't gonna love that.
In the other words: What the hell is Notre Dame thinking, installing a videoboard and (ugh) ribbon boards in the House That Rockne Built And Lou Renovated? Who are we, Purdue?
Yet the boards will come in 2017, athletic director Jack Swarbrick announced this week, and the true outrage is that Rockne likely would have approved. The man was nothing if not a PR visionary, light years ahead of his time in flacking Notre Dame as a national brand. And modernity in pursuit of that goal was something he embraced wholeheartedly.
And so the videoboards will come, and Rockne will not so much as turn a hair in his grave. And the old-schoolers will learn to deal with it.
After all, they learned to deal with the idea of Notre Dame playing in something called the Pinstripe Bowl, after decades of being above even the Cottons and Oranges in the commercial vulgarity that is bowl season. They learned to deal with apparel company logos on the Irish uniforms. They learned, in time, to deal with a more obstructed view of Touchdown Jesus if expanded seating (and expanded revenue) was the tradeoff.
And so, bring on the videoboards. And consider the possibilities.
I mean, what could be more purely Notre Dame than looking off to the south on a game day and seeing a skyscraper-sized image of Pat O'Brien outlined against the blue-gray sky, reciting the Gipper speech from "Knute Rockne, All-American?"
Tell me Knute isn't gonna love that.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
A notion too far
I wouldn't know Paul Newberry of the Associated Press if he clonked me on the head with a paving brick. But I do know this photo here.
It hangs on a narrow scrap of wall above the closet in my den, and I know its dark history like I know the contours of my own flesh. It's from a certain May morning 60 years gone, a black-and-white moment frozen forever and yet not frozen, because beyond it there are terrible things waiting. And so the moment becomes what comes after it, too, an indelible double exposure that makes you want to put your hands up and say "no" and "wait" and "turn back now."
But of course they never do.
Of course the 33 race cars frozen in that moment from Memorial Day of 1955 keep going, through the long sweep of the second turn at Indianapolis and into what awaits. They're on the parade lap, in the photo; shot from behind, all you see are the rear ends of cars and the backs of helmets. Of the men wearing those helmets, there is scarcely a glimpse.
And yet amid all that blank anonymity sits a man named Bill Vukovich, who has little more than an hour to live. Somewhere else are 17 other human beings who will go on from that moment and that day to die in race cars. The top five finishers that day will all die. Two others besides Vukovich won't survive the summer.
In response -- and in response to the unspeakable tragedy that happens at Le Mans a month later, when a car rockets into the crowd and kills 81 people -- there are widespread cries to abolish motorsports. To make them gone. To declare them too savage for the sensibilities of a world that, against all available evidence, fancies itself civilized.
The cries don't exactly fall on deaf ears. But they fail anyway.
They fail because speed is a narcotic, and it will always draw men (and women) to it. It did so in the 1950s, when violent death reached a critical mass but people kept climbing into race cars anyway. And it's doing so now, even as IndyCar mourns the passing of a rangy, genial Englishman whose absence diminishes us all.
And who has spurred the familiar refrain that motorsports -- or at least IndyCar racing -- has become too savage to tolerate.
Which brings us back to Paul Newberry.
In the wake of Justin Wilson's death Sunday, he wrote a column this week calling for the end of IndyCar racing, saying its carnage across the last two decades was intolerable.
"Going back to 1996, eight drivers, six fans and one track official have been killed at IndyCar events, either in the current series or its predecessors, the Indy Racing League and CART-Champ Car," Newberry wrote. "One death is too many, but compared to two other major series, Formula One and NASCAR, IndyCar's mortality rate is simply unacceptable."
He has a point, particularly in regard to NASCAR and Formula One. NASCAR hasn't had a death since Dale Earnhardt was killed at Daytona in 2001. And since Ayrton Senna died in 1994, Formula One has lost just one driver -- Jules Bianchi, who died in July of head injuries suffered in last year's Japanese Grand Prix.
IndyCar's record is appalling in contrast, and yet so much of it owes to mere chance. When Scott Brayton died at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1996, he died not because the car he was driving was inherently unsafe, but because he ran over a piece of debris, cut a tire and was flung into the wall at exactly the right angle for his head to make contact with the concrete. And Wilson's death was an utter, horrific fluke; had he come by a nanosecond sooner or later, or altered his line through the corner by the tiniest fraction, the piece of Sage Karam's nosecone that struck his head would have missed him.
This is not to let IndyCar off the hook. It has spent 20 years trying and largely failing to get out of its own way, with the height of folly coming in 2011, when it staged a race at Las Vegas that never should have been run. The oval there was too tight and the field (34 cars) too large, and it cost Dan Wheldon his life.
Newberry makes the case that IndyCars have become too fast and too dangerous for every oval, but the cars they're running now are not appreciably faster nor more unsafe than the cars they were running 25 or 30 years ago. And yet, prior to 1996, there wasn't the frequency of death and life-changing injury we've seen since.
The sport at least seemed safer then only because it was better run. That's simply the truth of it.
So what do you do about that?
Newberry's suggestion that you replace the Indianapolis 500 with another NASCAR race is absurd, and not just because it would be a financial disaster for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. More than two decades in, NASCAR's yearly visit to the Speedway has become a crashing failure, with the Brickyard 400 playing to half-empty houses. The prospect of another half-empty house on Memorial Day weekend -- particularly in contrast to the annual 250,000-plus the 500 currently draws -- would surely be something IMS would fight to the bitter end.
This is particularly true with the 100th anniversary coming up next May, and because all of this comes against the backdrop of the scintillating racing the 500 has produced in the last 10 years. Five of the greatest races in 500 history have happened in the last nine years; the last two 500s have produced perhaps the two greatest finishes ever.
More to the point, no one has died. No driver has died in the race proper, in fact, since 1973. That makes both NASCAR and Formula One look positively bloodthirsty by comparison.
Yet Newberry wants to abandon the 500 -- the most iconic event in motorsports -- and make it just another failed NASCAR race?
Too many powerful forces would doom that, not the least of which is the sheer weight of history. Replace the 500? You might as well replace the Super Bowl with a bowling tournament or the Kentucky Derby with a quilting bee. Certain events cut so deeply into their historic channels that altering their courses is as much a fool's errand as altering nature itself.
And, in the case of the 500, an unnecessary one. Suggesting otherwise undercuts Newberry's entire argument, a great deal of which is not necessarily over-reactive. Getting rid of the entire sport is -- if for no other reason than, had IndyCar not existed last Sunday, Justin Wilson simply would have been courting fate in some other howling piece of machinery. And perhaps as likely would have found it.
That's simply the sad way of these things. It is now, in the wake of Justin Wilson's death. And it was on a certain May morning in 1955 -- when a photographer lifted his camera to his eye and froze for all time a moment that was darkened by all that lay beyond.
It hangs on a narrow scrap of wall above the closet in my den, and I know its dark history like I know the contours of my own flesh. It's from a certain May morning 60 years gone, a black-and-white moment frozen forever and yet not frozen, because beyond it there are terrible things waiting. And so the moment becomes what comes after it, too, an indelible double exposure that makes you want to put your hands up and say "no" and "wait" and "turn back now."
But of course they never do.
Of course the 33 race cars frozen in that moment from Memorial Day of 1955 keep going, through the long sweep of the second turn at Indianapolis and into what awaits. They're on the parade lap, in the photo; shot from behind, all you see are the rear ends of cars and the backs of helmets. Of the men wearing those helmets, there is scarcely a glimpse.
And yet amid all that blank anonymity sits a man named Bill Vukovich, who has little more than an hour to live. Somewhere else are 17 other human beings who will go on from that moment and that day to die in race cars. The top five finishers that day will all die. Two others besides Vukovich won't survive the summer.
In response -- and in response to the unspeakable tragedy that happens at Le Mans a month later, when a car rockets into the crowd and kills 81 people -- there are widespread cries to abolish motorsports. To make them gone. To declare them too savage for the sensibilities of a world that, against all available evidence, fancies itself civilized.
The cries don't exactly fall on deaf ears. But they fail anyway.
They fail because speed is a narcotic, and it will always draw men (and women) to it. It did so in the 1950s, when violent death reached a critical mass but people kept climbing into race cars anyway. And it's doing so now, even as IndyCar mourns the passing of a rangy, genial Englishman whose absence diminishes us all.
And who has spurred the familiar refrain that motorsports -- or at least IndyCar racing -- has become too savage to tolerate.
Which brings us back to Paul Newberry.
In the wake of Justin Wilson's death Sunday, he wrote a column this week calling for the end of IndyCar racing, saying its carnage across the last two decades was intolerable.
"Going back to 1996, eight drivers, six fans and one track official have been killed at IndyCar events, either in the current series or its predecessors, the Indy Racing League and CART-Champ Car," Newberry wrote. "One death is too many, but compared to two other major series, Formula One and NASCAR, IndyCar's mortality rate is simply unacceptable."
He has a point, particularly in regard to NASCAR and Formula One. NASCAR hasn't had a death since Dale Earnhardt was killed at Daytona in 2001. And since Ayrton Senna died in 1994, Formula One has lost just one driver -- Jules Bianchi, who died in July of head injuries suffered in last year's Japanese Grand Prix.
IndyCar's record is appalling in contrast, and yet so much of it owes to mere chance. When Scott Brayton died at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1996, he died not because the car he was driving was inherently unsafe, but because he ran over a piece of debris, cut a tire and was flung into the wall at exactly the right angle for his head to make contact with the concrete. And Wilson's death was an utter, horrific fluke; had he come by a nanosecond sooner or later, or altered his line through the corner by the tiniest fraction, the piece of Sage Karam's nosecone that struck his head would have missed him.
This is not to let IndyCar off the hook. It has spent 20 years trying and largely failing to get out of its own way, with the height of folly coming in 2011, when it staged a race at Las Vegas that never should have been run. The oval there was too tight and the field (34 cars) too large, and it cost Dan Wheldon his life.
Newberry makes the case that IndyCars have become too fast and too dangerous for every oval, but the cars they're running now are not appreciably faster nor more unsafe than the cars they were running 25 or 30 years ago. And yet, prior to 1996, there wasn't the frequency of death and life-changing injury we've seen since.
The sport at least seemed safer then only because it was better run. That's simply the truth of it.
So what do you do about that?
Newberry's suggestion that you replace the Indianapolis 500 with another NASCAR race is absurd, and not just because it would be a financial disaster for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. More than two decades in, NASCAR's yearly visit to the Speedway has become a crashing failure, with the Brickyard 400 playing to half-empty houses. The prospect of another half-empty house on Memorial Day weekend -- particularly in contrast to the annual 250,000-plus the 500 currently draws -- would surely be something IMS would fight to the bitter end.
This is particularly true with the 100th anniversary coming up next May, and because all of this comes against the backdrop of the scintillating racing the 500 has produced in the last 10 years. Five of the greatest races in 500 history have happened in the last nine years; the last two 500s have produced perhaps the two greatest finishes ever.
More to the point, no one has died. No driver has died in the race proper, in fact, since 1973. That makes both NASCAR and Formula One look positively bloodthirsty by comparison.
Yet Newberry wants to abandon the 500 -- the most iconic event in motorsports -- and make it just another failed NASCAR race?
Too many powerful forces would doom that, not the least of which is the sheer weight of history. Replace the 500? You might as well replace the Super Bowl with a bowling tournament or the Kentucky Derby with a quilting bee. Certain events cut so deeply into their historic channels that altering their courses is as much a fool's errand as altering nature itself.
And, in the case of the 500, an unnecessary one. Suggesting otherwise undercuts Newberry's entire argument, a great deal of which is not necessarily over-reactive. Getting rid of the entire sport is -- if for no other reason than, had IndyCar not existed last Sunday, Justin Wilson simply would have been courting fate in some other howling piece of machinery. And perhaps as likely would have found it.
That's simply the sad way of these things. It is now, in the wake of Justin Wilson's death. And it was on a certain May morning in 1955 -- when a photographer lifted his camera to his eye and froze for all time a moment that was darkened by all that lay beyond.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Thundering bygone
The man was a throwback, and it's not everyday you can say that about a guy who went 6-11 and 275. The only individual ever likely to throw Darryl Dawkins anywhere, after all, was Darryl Dawkins.
When he died yesterday of a heart attack at 58, you remembered the handles he invented for himself (Sir Slam, Chocolate Thunder), and that he claimed to hail from the Planet Lovetron, and that he was a shatterer of worlds, or at least of backboards. Even now, you can't think of him without also hearing the tinkling of glass, and without remembering his charming habit of naming the dunks for which he became famous.
My personal fave: The "If You Ain't Groovin' Best Get Movin', Chocolate Thunder Flyin', Robinzine Cryin', Teeth Shakin', Glass Breakin', Rump Roastin', Bun Toastin', Glass Still Flyin', Wham Bam I Am Jam."
This upon the occasion of breaking his first NBA backboard.
But if his legacy was to introduce breakaway rims and make the NBA a sunnier place, it was also to usher in the era of the manchild. Moses Malone was the first kid to jump to pro buckets right from high school -- he went from Petersburg, Va., to the Utah Stars of the ABA in 1974 -- but Bill Willoughby and Dawkins were next, entering the NBA draft in 1975. They were the lineal of descendants of a line that stretched off toward Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, and included far more failures than successes.
To the extent that the NBA eventually instituted its 19-year-old age limit, a bit of good intention that has turned college basketball into a bus stop for high school stars who now need somewhere to pass the time for a year before turning pro. It's changed the essential nature of college hoops, and not for the good. And it's utterly unnecessary, given that one year makes no more than an incremental difference in the maturity level of kids that age, and that, in any case, if the NBA were serious about seasoning raw young pros, it could simply stash them in the D-League for a year.
But the NBA won't do that. And so there is a whiff of nostalgia now at Chocolate Thunder's passing, the lingering scent of a bygone era. You wonder now, if he'd come along in this century instead of the last, if his career would have looked any differently. And you come to the inescapable conclusion that it wouldn't have, that delaying his entry into the NBA a year wouldn't have altered his essential nature (or his career trajectory) an iota.
Chocolate Thunder at 18 was still Chocolate Thunder at 19, after all. And at 21 and 25 and 30 and, yes, 58.
Some things a single year can never change. Most things, in fact.
Something the NBA should pause to consider, as it pauses to remember.
When he died yesterday of a heart attack at 58, you remembered the handles he invented for himself (Sir Slam, Chocolate Thunder), and that he claimed to hail from the Planet Lovetron, and that he was a shatterer of worlds, or at least of backboards. Even now, you can't think of him without also hearing the tinkling of glass, and without remembering his charming habit of naming the dunks for which he became famous.
My personal fave: The "If You Ain't Groovin' Best Get Movin', Chocolate Thunder Flyin', Robinzine Cryin', Teeth Shakin', Glass Breakin', Rump Roastin', Bun Toastin', Glass Still Flyin', Wham Bam I Am Jam."
This upon the occasion of breaking his first NBA backboard.
But if his legacy was to introduce breakaway rims and make the NBA a sunnier place, it was also to usher in the era of the manchild. Moses Malone was the first kid to jump to pro buckets right from high school -- he went from Petersburg, Va., to the Utah Stars of the ABA in 1974 -- but Bill Willoughby and Dawkins were next, entering the NBA draft in 1975. They were the lineal of descendants of a line that stretched off toward Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, and included far more failures than successes.
To the extent that the NBA eventually instituted its 19-year-old age limit, a bit of good intention that has turned college basketball into a bus stop for high school stars who now need somewhere to pass the time for a year before turning pro. It's changed the essential nature of college hoops, and not for the good. And it's utterly unnecessary, given that one year makes no more than an incremental difference in the maturity level of kids that age, and that, in any case, if the NBA were serious about seasoning raw young pros, it could simply stash them in the D-League for a year.
But the NBA won't do that. And so there is a whiff of nostalgia now at Chocolate Thunder's passing, the lingering scent of a bygone era. You wonder now, if he'd come along in this century instead of the last, if his career would have looked any differently. And you come to the inescapable conclusion that it wouldn't have, that delaying his entry into the NBA a year wouldn't have altered his essential nature (or his career trajectory) an iota.
Chocolate Thunder at 18 was still Chocolate Thunder at 19, after all. And at 21 and 25 and 30 and, yes, 58.
Some things a single year can never change. Most things, in fact.
Something the NBA should pause to consider, as it pauses to remember.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Just add Ws
So, by now, everyone in America knows Steve Sarkisian's shame. Outside of college football proper, they might even know who he is.
He's the latest head coach for one of the country's most storied programs, USC. And his shame is that, last Saturday night, he turned up drunk at Salute to Troy, a major event for boosters and others who want to get close to the program, and he did what drunks do: Make an ass of himself.
Spewed profanities. Said every other school in the conference sucked. Pretty much did everything a man has to do when he wants to pour gasoline on his career and burn it to the ground.
Remember Gary Moeller, the Michigan coach who got squiffed one night at a restaurant and was hastily ushered to the exit in Ann Arbor?
Of course you don't. Exactly the point.
Anyway, Sarkisian been playing catchup ever since, issuing a public apology and then calling a news conference on Tuesday to apologize again. The wonder is that he was still around to call a news conference, given how brutal the corporate environment is in 2015. Second chances are rarer than the dodo these days.
Sarkisian is apparently getting one, though, and it doesn't take a cynic to know that's precisely because the prospects for the Trojans this fall look exceptionally bright. They're finally out of the NCAA hoosegow, where Pete Carroll landed them before fleeing to the NFL. They've got another stud quarterback in Cody Kessler. And the preseason coaches' poll has them ranked 10th and favored to win the Pac-12.
So Sarkisian's path to redemption seems fairly straightforward. If the Trojans win 10 or 11 games and win the conference, no one's going to remember Salute to Troy. If they go to South Bend and whip Notre Dame and then whip everyone in the conference, Sarkisian's profanities that night will become a punchline for the faithful. This being L.A., they might even become USC's new favorite cheer.
Winning, after all, cures all ills, including overly sharp memories. And so it will be truly amazing to see how quickly 10 or 11 wins can transform "He embarrassed the university" into "That Steve, what a character."
And if USC doesn't improve on last year's 9-4 record?
Well, Sarkisian's gone, of course. Or at least on his way to being gone. Because, you know, 9-4 isn't gonna cut it at USC -- and besides, have you heard what the guy did at Salute to Troy?
He's the latest head coach for one of the country's most storied programs, USC. And his shame is that, last Saturday night, he turned up drunk at Salute to Troy, a major event for boosters and others who want to get close to the program, and he did what drunks do: Make an ass of himself.
Spewed profanities. Said every other school in the conference sucked. Pretty much did everything a man has to do when he wants to pour gasoline on his career and burn it to the ground.
Remember Gary Moeller, the Michigan coach who got squiffed one night at a restaurant and was hastily ushered to the exit in Ann Arbor?
Of course you don't. Exactly the point.
Anyway, Sarkisian been playing catchup ever since, issuing a public apology and then calling a news conference on Tuesday to apologize again. The wonder is that he was still around to call a news conference, given how brutal the corporate environment is in 2015. Second chances are rarer than the dodo these days.
Sarkisian is apparently getting one, though, and it doesn't take a cynic to know that's precisely because the prospects for the Trojans this fall look exceptionally bright. They're finally out of the NCAA hoosegow, where Pete Carroll landed them before fleeing to the NFL. They've got another stud quarterback in Cody Kessler. And the preseason coaches' poll has them ranked 10th and favored to win the Pac-12.
So Sarkisian's path to redemption seems fairly straightforward. If the Trojans win 10 or 11 games and win the conference, no one's going to remember Salute to Troy. If they go to South Bend and whip Notre Dame and then whip everyone in the conference, Sarkisian's profanities that night will become a punchline for the faithful. This being L.A., they might even become USC's new favorite cheer.
Winning, after all, cures all ills, including overly sharp memories. And so it will be truly amazing to see how quickly 10 or 11 wins can transform "He embarrassed the university" into "That Steve, what a character."
And if USC doesn't improve on last year's 9-4 record?
Well, Sarkisian's gone, of course. Or at least on his way to being gone. Because, you know, 9-4 isn't gonna cut it at USC -- and besides, have you heard what the guy did at Salute to Troy?
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
A little help-side D, please
So now the punchline, on the occasion of what seems to have become a regular summer thing: Just call 'em the Booze-iers.
This upon the news that once again alcohol has made certain underaged college kids at Indiana University do dumb stuff, namely get caught with alcohol. Again it was two IU basketball players; this time the culprits were Emmitt Holt and blue-chip freshman Thomas Bryant, who were nabbed by excise officers trying to hide bottles of vodka while sitting in a car in a convenience story parking lot.
Holt's involvement is particularly egregious, given that this is the second time he's turned up in an alcohol-related incident in the wee hours. Bryant's involvement is particularly dismaying, given that he's Tom Crean's ticket to a better life -- i.e., he's the inside presence whose absence was the only thing that kept Indiana out of March Madness' swankier districts last spring.
Or so the theory goes.
The other theory out there now is that isolated incidents have become a ruinous culture within the IU program, and Crean needs to be called to account for it. Lack of institutional control is a hammer the NCAA wields with unbecoming ease when the occasion calls for it; lack of institutional control surely has become an issue with Crean's program, and one which athletic director Fred Glass must seriously consider now that five alcohol or drug-related incidents -- involving Holt, Bryant, Devin Davis, Hanner Mosquera-Perea, Stanford Robinson, Troy Williams and Yogi Ferrell -- have stained the program in the last year-and-a-half.
Or so the theory goes.
My theory?
This isn't about Crean. Ultimately, it's about his players.
Ultimately they're the ones who must take ownership of the program, who must take to heart what basketball at Indiana means and what it should continue to mean. Those five national championship banners swaying in the air currents at one end of Assembly Hall may set the standard, but they're worthless swatches of fabric unless breathing human beings choose to maintain that standard. What they represent is merely a dead past without someone to carry it forward.
In this, there is only so much a head coach can do, and Crean has done it. Curfews have been imposed. Suspensions have been handed down. Mosquera-Perea and Davis were kicked off the team. Holt, as a two-time offender, is likely to be next. What a head coach can do, outside of babysitting 15 college-age men 24/7 or locking them in their rooms, Crean has done.
Now it's up to the players.
Now it's up to the players who aren't getting caught in parking lots with vodka bottles to call a meeting, close the door and say "This (bleep) has to stop." To point fingers. To call out who needs to be called out. To remind everyone, and not gently, what's being put at risk here.
Quinn Buckner filled that role, once upon a time. Innumerable others have across the years. That no one yet has filled it for this team -- at least not effectively -- is something for which you can blame Tom Crean. It is the one thing for which he is most indictable, because he's the one most responsible for the team he puts together.
Something vital seems missing in this one. Maybe that's an unfair assessment, but that's how it looks from outside the ropes.
Listen. College kids have been getting nicked for underage drinking forever, and college kids always will. But a different standard applies to those kids who have been hired to feed the corporate maw of big-time college athletics. And it's up to the ones who recognize that to set straight the ones who don't.
Those banners can't sustain anything by themselves. But they are useful reminders sometimes, especially in cases such as this.
And so, as the architect of three of those banners used to preach: A little help-side defense, if you please.
This upon the news that once again alcohol has made certain underaged college kids at Indiana University do dumb stuff, namely get caught with alcohol. Again it was two IU basketball players; this time the culprits were Emmitt Holt and blue-chip freshman Thomas Bryant, who were nabbed by excise officers trying to hide bottles of vodka while sitting in a car in a convenience story parking lot.
Holt's involvement is particularly egregious, given that this is the second time he's turned up in an alcohol-related incident in the wee hours. Bryant's involvement is particularly dismaying, given that he's Tom Crean's ticket to a better life -- i.e., he's the inside presence whose absence was the only thing that kept Indiana out of March Madness' swankier districts last spring.
Or so the theory goes.
The other theory out there now is that isolated incidents have become a ruinous culture within the IU program, and Crean needs to be called to account for it. Lack of institutional control is a hammer the NCAA wields with unbecoming ease when the occasion calls for it; lack of institutional control surely has become an issue with Crean's program, and one which athletic director Fred Glass must seriously consider now that five alcohol or drug-related incidents -- involving Holt, Bryant, Devin Davis, Hanner Mosquera-Perea, Stanford Robinson, Troy Williams and Yogi Ferrell -- have stained the program in the last year-and-a-half.
Or so the theory goes.
My theory?
This isn't about Crean. Ultimately, it's about his players.
Ultimately they're the ones who must take ownership of the program, who must take to heart what basketball at Indiana means and what it should continue to mean. Those five national championship banners swaying in the air currents at one end of Assembly Hall may set the standard, but they're worthless swatches of fabric unless breathing human beings choose to maintain that standard. What they represent is merely a dead past without someone to carry it forward.
In this, there is only so much a head coach can do, and Crean has done it. Curfews have been imposed. Suspensions have been handed down. Mosquera-Perea and Davis were kicked off the team. Holt, as a two-time offender, is likely to be next. What a head coach can do, outside of babysitting 15 college-age men 24/7 or locking them in their rooms, Crean has done.
Now it's up to the players.
Now it's up to the players who aren't getting caught in parking lots with vodka bottles to call a meeting, close the door and say "This (bleep) has to stop." To point fingers. To call out who needs to be called out. To remind everyone, and not gently, what's being put at risk here.
Quinn Buckner filled that role, once upon a time. Innumerable others have across the years. That no one yet has filled it for this team -- at least not effectively -- is something for which you can blame Tom Crean. It is the one thing for which he is most indictable, because he's the one most responsible for the team he puts together.
Something vital seems missing in this one. Maybe that's an unfair assessment, but that's how it looks from outside the ropes.
Listen. College kids have been getting nicked for underage drinking forever, and college kids always will. But a different standard applies to those kids who have been hired to feed the corporate maw of big-time college athletics. And it's up to the ones who recognize that to set straight the ones who don't.
Those banners can't sustain anything by themselves. But they are useful reminders sometimes, especially in cases such as this.
And so, as the architect of three of those banners used to preach: A little help-side defense, if you please.
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