Alrighty then, 2020. You can take your seat now.
No. Scratch that.
Here's a pink slip. You are fired, 2020, for being a giant, braggy, hold-my-beer douche. Pack up your things and vacate the building. Go stand in the unemployment line with 1914-18, 1930-45 and all those other douche-y braggy hold-my-beer years.
Oh, and 2019 says bye and thanks for taking the heat off.
That's because you are the worst, 2020, and we haven't even gotten to halftime. First you throw a pandemic at us. Then you add something called a Murder Hornet, which sounds like the spawn of Thanos but is actually a steroidal death-stinging insect straight out of a 1950s horror flick. And then, just for chuckles, you kill off John Prine and Al Kaline and Glenn Beckert and Mad Dog Mike Curtis -- and now Mad Dog's legendary coach, Don Shula.
Don Shula! God, you suck, 2020.
Shula passed Monday at the age of 90, and what you can say about him is you won't have to bother carving his likeness on the Mount Rushmore of football coaches. That's because his profile already looked as if it were hewn from granite. Honestly, has anyone ever looked more like a football coach than Don Shula?
He played some pro ball and then he coached a lot of pro ball, and no one did it better. He stalked a sideline in the NFL for 33 seasons, 26 of them with the Miami Dolphins. No active coach is within 55 wins of his 347 career total, and of course no one has ever done what his Dolphins did in 1972 -- which is run the table, going 17-0 and beating the Washington Football Club 14-7 in the Super Bowl.
What's fascinating about that is how much his legacy as a coach hinged on that spotless season, and the Super Bowl that capped it.
Before the 'Fins beat the Over The Hill Gang, see, Shula was the Mr. May of NFL coaches. He could get you there, but he couldn't take you home. That was his rep.
He'd gotten the Colts and the Dolphins to two previous Super Bowls, and he lost them both. And of course the one loss was the most infamous in Super Bowl history -- Super Bowl III, in which Shula's Colts were 17-point favorites and got beat by Joe Namath and the Jets.
Mike Curtis was the linchpin of those Colts' frightening defense. Which Namath undressed. Which in turn cemented Broadway Joe's own legacy, because he was never quite so good again.
In any event, it's odd now to think of Shula as a failure, but by the unfair judgments of professional sports, he was up until the '73 Super Bowl. As he himself always acknowledged, he was the dreaded Guy Who Couldn't Win The Big One.
And then, he wasn't.
And then, he became the guy who crushed everything in his path enroute to winning back-to-back Supes. And he became the guy who got to the Super Bowl with David Woodley as his quarterback (and Don Strock in a key supporting role). And he became a Mount Rushmore guy.
Now he's gone.
Stupid 2020.
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Monday, May 4, 2020
Four dead
Half a century on now since that sunny Monday when kids killed kids in Ohio, and I am wondering what we've learned. I am wondering if we ever learn anything.
Half a century on, and we are as divided as ever.
Half a century on, and corrupt leaders still use that division to prop up their corrupt regimes.
Half a century on, and if it's not Tricky Dick condemning those damn commie kids, it's Duplicitous Donny calling black football players "sons of bitches" for kneeling quietly with their heads bowed, while praising as "good people" armed white mobs occupying statehouses.
Half a century on, and I wonder what would have happened if college kids on an American campus had been geared up like some half-assed militia, the way some of the protesters in half a dozen states have been. I'm guessing a lot more than four dead in Ohio.
In any case, here is something I wrote five years ago, on the 45th anniversary of that sad American Rubicon we now call, simply, "Kent State." With just a few revisions, it still applies today:
The numbers sound so bloodless, 50 years later to the day and date.
Thirteen seconds.
Sixty-one to 67 shots fired.
Thirteen casualties.
But half a century on, Jeffrey Miller's blood still runs black on the white pavement in that iconic black-and-white photo. A 14-year-old runaway named Mary Ann Vecchio becomes an historic figure as she kneels screaming beside him. And on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, May 4 is a day of somber remembrance, because things changed in America that day, fundamental things, hearts and minds and what it took to unlock them.
And so, today, the Blob is calling timeout. It's taking a brief detour from the sports world. My Blob, my rules.
I'll take this detour because I was 15 years old at the time, and my mind was made up. If four students died and nine were wounded on an American college campus that day, they had it coming. They shouldn't have been where they were. They shouldn't have confronted the National Guardsmen who were there to restore order after a violent weekend in which the ROTC building at Kent State burned to the ground. Law and order had to be imposed, at whatever cost.
Then I read an interview with the father of one of the victims, a rock-ribbed right wing establishment type. And when he wondered aloud what the hell these people were thinking, opening fire on a bunch of American college students as if they were some alien invader, my mind was no longer made up.
It's rare that you can pinpoint the exact moment when your social and political sensibilities reach full flower, but that moment was mine. I started calling bullshit when I saw it and I haven't stopped since.
Those four who died that day, for instance: Three were walking either to or from class, which means they were exactly where they were supposed to be -- i.e., where either they or their parents were paying for them to be. One was an ROTC student himself, a bit of irony lost on the haters.
The Guardsmen, conversely, were not the villains of the piece, either. They were scared kids not unlike the kids upon whom they fired, and they panicked. In the photos and video of those 13 seconds, their commanding officer can be seen beating on their helmeted heads, screaming at them to cease fire.
Kent State was a tragedy all the way around, in other words. It's what happens when those in power stop listening to those who have none, and when battle lines are drawn instead of consensus.
You'd think we'd have learned this lesson by now, but half a century on we seem not only to have forgotten it but to have in fact gone in the opposite direction. Battle lines are not only drawn now, they're set in stone. Consensus is viewed as weakness. Those in power not only don't listen to those who have none, they turn those who have none into the enemy because the moneyed interests to whom they answer view them that way.
I wonder, if Kent State happened today, what the reaction would be. Regrettably, I don't think it would change nearly as many minds as it did in 1970, when the nation supposedly was even more polarized than it is now. FoxNews would label those who died dirty commie thugs hired by George Soros to Tear Down America, or some such nonsense. MSNBC would label the Guardsmen who opened fire heartless automatons at worst and untrained hooligans at best. And there would be those who would mindlessly advocate shooting more of our citizens in the future if they didn't stay in line, taking their cue from a gossamer-skinned president who can't abide dissent himself.
And what would all that teach us about America, half a century on?
That we haven't learned a damn thing, sadly. Not a damn thing.
Half a century on, and we are as divided as ever.
Half a century on, and corrupt leaders still use that division to prop up their corrupt regimes.
Half a century on, and if it's not Tricky Dick condemning those damn commie kids, it's Duplicitous Donny calling black football players "sons of bitches" for kneeling quietly with their heads bowed, while praising as "good people" armed white mobs occupying statehouses.
Half a century on, and I wonder what would have happened if college kids on an American campus had been geared up like some half-assed militia, the way some of the protesters in half a dozen states have been. I'm guessing a lot more than four dead in Ohio.
In any case, here is something I wrote five years ago, on the 45th anniversary of that sad American Rubicon we now call, simply, "Kent State." With just a few revisions, it still applies today:
The numbers sound so bloodless, 50 years later to the day and date.
Thirteen seconds.
Sixty-one to 67 shots fired.
Thirteen casualties.
But half a century on, Jeffrey Miller's blood still runs black on the white pavement in that iconic black-and-white photo. A 14-year-old runaway named Mary Ann Vecchio becomes an historic figure as she kneels screaming beside him. And on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, May 4 is a day of somber remembrance, because things changed in America that day, fundamental things, hearts and minds and what it took to unlock them.
And so, today, the Blob is calling timeout. It's taking a brief detour from the sports world. My Blob, my rules.
I'll take this detour because I was 15 years old at the time, and my mind was made up. If four students died and nine were wounded on an American college campus that day, they had it coming. They shouldn't have been where they were. They shouldn't have confronted the National Guardsmen who were there to restore order after a violent weekend in which the ROTC building at Kent State burned to the ground. Law and order had to be imposed, at whatever cost.
Then I read an interview with the father of one of the victims, a rock-ribbed right wing establishment type. And when he wondered aloud what the hell these people were thinking, opening fire on a bunch of American college students as if they were some alien invader, my mind was no longer made up.
It's rare that you can pinpoint the exact moment when your social and political sensibilities reach full flower, but that moment was mine. I started calling bullshit when I saw it and I haven't stopped since.
Those four who died that day, for instance: Three were walking either to or from class, which means they were exactly where they were supposed to be -- i.e., where either they or their parents were paying for them to be. One was an ROTC student himself, a bit of irony lost on the haters.
The Guardsmen, conversely, were not the villains of the piece, either. They were scared kids not unlike the kids upon whom they fired, and they panicked. In the photos and video of those 13 seconds, their commanding officer can be seen beating on their helmeted heads, screaming at them to cease fire.
Kent State was a tragedy all the way around, in other words. It's what happens when those in power stop listening to those who have none, and when battle lines are drawn instead of consensus.
You'd think we'd have learned this lesson by now, but half a century on we seem not only to have forgotten it but to have in fact gone in the opposite direction. Battle lines are not only drawn now, they're set in stone. Consensus is viewed as weakness. Those in power not only don't listen to those who have none, they turn those who have none into the enemy because the moneyed interests to whom they answer view them that way.
I wonder, if Kent State happened today, what the reaction would be. Regrettably, I don't think it would change nearly as many minds as it did in 1970, when the nation supposedly was even more polarized than it is now. FoxNews would label those who died dirty commie thugs hired by George Soros to Tear Down America, or some such nonsense. MSNBC would label the Guardsmen who opened fire heartless automatons at worst and untrained hooligans at best. And there would be those who would mindlessly advocate shooting more of our citizens in the future if they didn't stay in line, taking their cue from a gossamer-skinned president who can't abide dissent himself.
And what would all that teach us about America, half a century on?
That we haven't learned a damn thing, sadly. Not a damn thing.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
The month of May. Part the first.
I wrote this today for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It's the first in a series of columns that will run through the month of May. Because there will be no month of May as we know it, it's my recollections, from 40 years of covering the Indianapolis 500, of four of the more memorable ones. It's also my chance to throw in a plea for all good Blobophiles to subscribe to the JG, on account of local journalism is a vital public service and the hedge-fund vandals and corporate vultures are taking it away piece by excruciating piece.
To keep that from happening here, go to this link and sign up. Do it today.
You always remember your first. People still say that, don’t they?
To keep that from happening here, go to this link and sign up. Do it today.
You always remember your first. People still say that, don’t they?
And so it’s
May and the grass is green and the flowering trees in our yard are soft white
ghosts against the dawdling twilight, and here I am. Here I am at Indy again.
That would
be the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the uninitiated, a vast sprawl of
grandstand and lantern-jawed oval that comes with its own ghosts. One hundred
and nine years of roaring bloodstained history have happened here, a century
and change of the brave and the foolhardy chasing immortality and sometimes
finding the end of their days instead.
Now their
ghosts crowd close every May, and here I come into the mix: Twenty-two years
old, Indy nerd, a kid sportswriter for the late lamented Anderson Daily
Bulletin. And for the first time, I’m covering the Indianapolis 500.
The year is
1977, and if I know where I am, I have no idea what I’m doing. Naivete is the
province of all just-turned-22-year-olds, but never more so than when the
just-turned-22-year-old grew up loving Indy and now finds himself covering
Indy.
And so I saw
myself chatting up Mario Andretti over cups of espresso, just the two of us.
Saw A.J. Foyt slapping me on the back and calling me “pard.” Saw Johnny
Rutherford – good ol’ Lone Star JR – inviting me into his garage for a little
bourbon and branch water; Gordon Johncock and Wally Dallenbach drop by, and
there is manly talk of popoff valves and what the heck Danny Ongais thought he
was doing entering turn three the other day.
None of this
happens, of course.
What does happen,
once that precious credential is draped around your neck like the Medal of
Honor, is you park somewhere in the Great Plains of the infield. Then you follow
the Oregon Trail to the media center – which, instead of the palatial suite you
imagined, is a tiny, unadorned room in an unremarkable cinderblock building, jammed
with long tables and raftered with cigarette smoke.
Lunch is no
catered spread, but a Track Dog and some greasy fries grabbed from a vendor
down in turn one.
So much for
the glamour and romance of covering the Greatest Spectacle In Racing.
What I remember
most about that first race day is the immensity of it, the numbing sound and sheer
human mass. The reek of methanol – one my colleagues dubbed it “Speedway funk”
-- boring a hole in your nasal cavities. The surf mutter of 300,000 people
talking at once. The shattering blare of 33 rocket ships coming to the green;
the merciless sun of a 90-degree day, the seventh-hottest 500 on record.
Somewhere in
all of that, as I gasped from the pressbox across the track down to Gasoline
Alley and back again through the heat and the humans, history was happening.
Janet
Guthrie, the first woman ever to qualify for the 500, started in the middle of
Row 9 and departed after 27 laps. Tom Sneva, who ran the first official 200-mph
lap in qualifying, started on the pole.
And A.J.
Foyt started second and won, inheriting the lead with 16 laps to run after Johncock,
who had dominated all day, broke a crankshaft and drifted to a stop in turn
one. It made A.J. the first four-time winner in the race’s 61-year history.
I never got
close to him that day. I spent most of it chasing my sweating tail like the
rookie I was; my biggest “get” was a quote from the famously reticent Ongais
after he dropped out on the 90th lap.
“Danny, what
happened?” I inquired breathlessly as he race-walked through Gasoline Alley.
“Mechanical
problems,” he said.
You heard it
here first.
Later,
trudging back through the infield, I encountered someone else with mechanical
problems: A drunk sleeping it off beneath the front of a car, as if he were changing
the oil.
The guy
never moved. Neither did I, stuck in traffic again.
But before I eventually got out that
afternoon, I knew one thing.
I
couldn’t wait to come back.
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Un-Twin-Spired
I'm gonna miss the Kentucky Derby today.
The sun will shine, the air will be warm with fake-ID summer, and I won't be putting a couple of bucks on the nose of the Irish horse with the trainer named Sir Ian Tweed-Cummerbund.
Who will then fulfill my every expectation by running like a can of Alpo.
I will not get to hang at my favorite joint to watch Doug the bartender/restaurant manager correctly pick the winner again. I will not get to say "That's a fine woman that hat is wearing." I will not get to predict which horse will smell a trap and refuse to load into the starting gate, or to say what I always say about gray horses.
Don't bet 'em, is what I say. They're frequently slower than erosion.
I don't know why the Bastard Plague stealing this particular sporting event will leave a bigger hole than others for me, but it will. As I am the first person to acknowledge, I am the last person to come to for horse-racing knowledge. I don't know a fetlock from vapor lock. The only thing I know about furlongs is they're a pretty fur piece. And if you asked me who my favorite jockey is, I'd probably say Tobey McGuire.
From, you know, "Seabiscuit."
I was never a horse guy, in other words. But back in my sportswriter days, I became The Journal Gazette's sort of unofficial Horse Guy, on account of I'd covered the opening of Hoosier Park in Anderson and therefore landed on Churchill Downs' mailing list. And so every spring leading up to the Derby, I'd get reams and reams of faxes (as I said, this was back in the day) about everything that was going on beneath the twin spires.
Most of it, of course, might as well have been written in Sanskrit. There was a lot of stuff about Hi-De-Ho walking the shedrow, and Shooby-Do-Wop breezing a quarter. I had no idea what any of that meant, except maybe Hi-De-Ho needed to get out more. But I passed it along.
And yet ...
And yet, the Derby always fascinated me. On my list of sporting events I never got to cover, it's right up there at the top.
I have no idea how I would have covered it, of course, knowing next to nothing about it. To which my tens of readers would no doubt have responded "Like that's ever stopped you before."
In any event, today will have a hole in it, sunshine, fugitive summer and all. One more piece of weirdness to chalk up to these weird and twisted times.
Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I'll go breeze a quarter.
I don't know what that is. But it sounds kinda fun.
The sun will shine, the air will be warm with fake-ID summer, and I won't be putting a couple of bucks on the nose of the Irish horse with the trainer named Sir Ian Tweed-Cummerbund.
Who will then fulfill my every expectation by running like a can of Alpo.
I will not get to hang at my favorite joint to watch Doug the bartender/restaurant manager correctly pick the winner again. I will not get to say "That's a fine woman that hat is wearing." I will not get to predict which horse will smell a trap and refuse to load into the starting gate, or to say what I always say about gray horses.
Don't bet 'em, is what I say. They're frequently slower than erosion.
I don't know why the Bastard Plague stealing this particular sporting event will leave a bigger hole than others for me, but it will. As I am the first person to acknowledge, I am the last person to come to for horse-racing knowledge. I don't know a fetlock from vapor lock. The only thing I know about furlongs is they're a pretty fur piece. And if you asked me who my favorite jockey is, I'd probably say Tobey McGuire.
From, you know, "Seabiscuit."
I was never a horse guy, in other words. But back in my sportswriter days, I became The Journal Gazette's sort of unofficial Horse Guy, on account of I'd covered the opening of Hoosier Park in Anderson and therefore landed on Churchill Downs' mailing list. And so every spring leading up to the Derby, I'd get reams and reams of faxes (as I said, this was back in the day) about everything that was going on beneath the twin spires.
Most of it, of course, might as well have been written in Sanskrit. There was a lot of stuff about Hi-De-Ho walking the shedrow, and Shooby-Do-Wop breezing a quarter. I had no idea what any of that meant, except maybe Hi-De-Ho needed to get out more. But I passed it along.
And yet ...
And yet, the Derby always fascinated me. On my list of sporting events I never got to cover, it's right up there at the top.
I have no idea how I would have covered it, of course, knowing next to nothing about it. To which my tens of readers would no doubt have responded "Like that's ever stopped you before."
In any event, today will have a hole in it, sunshine, fugitive summer and all. One more piece of weirdness to chalk up to these weird and twisted times.
Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I'll go breeze a quarter.
I don't know what that is. But it sounds kinda fun.
Friday, May 1, 2020
The problem with all this
Look, I don't know how this all plays out. Neither do you.
Neither does your governor. Neither does Norm down the street with his MAGA hat and his AR-15 and his marching orders from partisan conspiracy kooks. And certainly neither does the raving ninny in the White House, who by now is no doubt roaming the halls in the dead of night having imaginary arguments with paintings of long-dead presidents.
Maybe, as states begin to re-open for bidness against the advice of the more learned among us, proper precautions will be observed and there will be social distancing and the COVID-19 curve will continue to flatten. Or, more likely, as with the beaches in Florida, people will flock back to restaurants and bars in droves, and Norm and the rest of his buddies will get sick and then make others sick, and the whole deal will ramp up again.
Me, I'm an odds-weigher. And I don't like the numbers here. So I don't go anywhere until I see what happens to Norm and his fellow guinea pigs.
In any event, the only thing I really know is Bob Bowlsby is making a hell of a lot of sense right now.
What the commissioner of the Big 12 said the other day, in an interview with SiriusXM Big 12 radio, is he's confident college football will start up again on Labor Day or thereabouts. He's just not as sure what happens after that.
People starved for college football may get their college football, at least initially. But then ...
"I worry more about the end of the season and the postseason than I do the beginning parts of the season," Bowlsby says. "If the virus comes roaring back in the traditional flu and virus season in November, December, through March, I wonder if we're going to get the basketball seasons in, I wonder if we're going to get the (College Football Playoff) in, I wonder if we're going to get the NCAA Tournament in."
That's the uncomfortable truth about this, see: We can take all the precautions we want, but that doesn't mean the Bastard Plague is going to vanish. More and more epidemiologists are thinking it's going to be with us in some form or another for good. And until a vaccine is developed, it will continue to be lethal to the more at-risk among us.
So you can bring back college football, even in empty stadiums and with all due precautions, and then what happens? What happens if players get sick from one another and take it to back to the dorms and the classrooms with them, and then the general population starts to get sick?
Absent a vaccine, here we go again.
Or, not. Like I said, I don't know. But Bowlsby's point is well-taken.
Meanwhile, NASCAR has announced it's starting back up on May 17, at Darlington. There will be no fans and no practice and no qualifying. Everyone will just hop in their cars and go.
Maybe that will be precaution enough. Maybe it won't.
Such a nasty word, that maybe.
Neither does your governor. Neither does Norm down the street with his MAGA hat and his AR-15 and his marching orders from partisan conspiracy kooks. And certainly neither does the raving ninny in the White House, who by now is no doubt roaming the halls in the dead of night having imaginary arguments with paintings of long-dead presidents.
Maybe, as states begin to re-open for bidness against the advice of the more learned among us, proper precautions will be observed and there will be social distancing and the COVID-19 curve will continue to flatten. Or, more likely, as with the beaches in Florida, people will flock back to restaurants and bars in droves, and Norm and the rest of his buddies will get sick and then make others sick, and the whole deal will ramp up again.
Me, I'm an odds-weigher. And I don't like the numbers here. So I don't go anywhere until I see what happens to Norm and his fellow guinea pigs.
In any event, the only thing I really know is Bob Bowlsby is making a hell of a lot of sense right now.
What the commissioner of the Big 12 said the other day, in an interview with SiriusXM Big 12 radio, is he's confident college football will start up again on Labor Day or thereabouts. He's just not as sure what happens after that.
People starved for college football may get their college football, at least initially. But then ...
"I worry more about the end of the season and the postseason than I do the beginning parts of the season," Bowlsby says. "If the virus comes roaring back in the traditional flu and virus season in November, December, through March, I wonder if we're going to get the basketball seasons in, I wonder if we're going to get the (College Football Playoff) in, I wonder if we're going to get the NCAA Tournament in."
That's the uncomfortable truth about this, see: We can take all the precautions we want, but that doesn't mean the Bastard Plague is going to vanish. More and more epidemiologists are thinking it's going to be with us in some form or another for good. And until a vaccine is developed, it will continue to be lethal to the more at-risk among us.
So you can bring back college football, even in empty stadiums and with all due precautions, and then what happens? What happens if players get sick from one another and take it to back to the dorms and the classrooms with them, and then the general population starts to get sick?
Absent a vaccine, here we go again.
Or, not. Like I said, I don't know. But Bowlsby's point is well-taken.
Meanwhile, NASCAR has announced it's starting back up on May 17, at Darlington. There will be no fans and no practice and no qualifying. Everyone will just hop in their cars and go.
Maybe that will be precaution enough. Maybe it won't.
Such a nasty word, that maybe.
Thursday, April 30, 2020
A path no longer resisted, Part Deux
Well. That didn't take long.
Remember yesterday, when the Blob was noting there must be considerable sweating going on in college buckets, now that three prize recruits (i.e.: revenue generators) from the class of 2020 had opted for the NBA's G-League pathway program?
Suddenly all those prospective one-and-dones had an alternative to spending a limbo year helping What's This School Again add to its pile. Instead, now they can get themselves started on making their own pile -- and, being the good American capitalists they are, that sounded like a much better deal.
You will thus not be at all shocked the NCAA's top governing body came out Wednesday in support of a proposal that cuts college athletes in on the endorsement pie. That is, if a school's apparel partner wants to use the student-athletes' images to sell shoes and tees, the student-athletes should be able to sign their own deals with those companies to do so. And, OK, they should also be able to get paid for other work, as long as it's not their schools that are paying them.
Amazing how a little leverage can bring people around.
The G-League pathway program provides just that leverage, and, lord, how the unbelievers were converted. The colleges, after all, long have maintained the fruits of their lucrative enterprise were for them alone. The kids were getting a free education, weren't they? So they should quit bellyachin' and keep being complacent billboards for their schools' bidness deals.
Meanwhile, the jing kept rolling in and coaches kept making more and more money, blithely reneging on their juicy contracts the moment Bigger U. dangled a juicier one. They could leave, but the kids couldn't unless Coach signed off on it.
And then ...
And then, that old debbil Choice showed up for some of those kids. And the colleges miraculously began sighing and saying, "Yeah, OK, you got us. You're right. We've been screwin' you all along."
The free market, baby. It's a beautiful thing.
Remember yesterday, when the Blob was noting there must be considerable sweating going on in college buckets, now that three prize recruits (i.e.: revenue generators) from the class of 2020 had opted for the NBA's G-League pathway program?
Suddenly all those prospective one-and-dones had an alternative to spending a limbo year helping What's This School Again add to its pile. Instead, now they can get themselves started on making their own pile -- and, being the good American capitalists they are, that sounded like a much better deal.
You will thus not be at all shocked the NCAA's top governing body came out Wednesday in support of a proposal that cuts college athletes in on the endorsement pie. That is, if a school's apparel partner wants to use the student-athletes' images to sell shoes and tees, the student-athletes should be able to sign their own deals with those companies to do so. And, OK, they should also be able to get paid for other work, as long as it's not their schools that are paying them.
Amazing how a little leverage can bring people around.
The G-League pathway program provides just that leverage, and, lord, how the unbelievers were converted. The colleges, after all, long have maintained the fruits of their lucrative enterprise were for them alone. The kids were getting a free education, weren't they? So they should quit bellyachin' and keep being complacent billboards for their schools' bidness deals.
Meanwhile, the jing kept rolling in and coaches kept making more and more money, blithely reneging on their juicy contracts the moment Bigger U. dangled a juicier one. They could leave, but the kids couldn't unless Coach signed off on it.
And then ...
And then, that old debbil Choice showed up for some of those kids. And the colleges miraculously began sighing and saying, "Yeah, OK, you got us. You're right. We've been screwin' you all along."
The free market, baby. It's a beautiful thing.
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
A path no longer resisted
You don't know who Daishen Nix is, unless you're one of those obsessed individuals who cruise recruiting websites 24/7 and hang on the word of every teenager with a crossover dribble. But maybe you should.
He's blazing a trail, you see. Same as Dan'l Boone and Lewis and Clark .'n' them, kinda.
Daishen Nix, it seems, is one of those teenagers with a crossover dribble, a five-star point guard from Nevada whom UCLA thought it had locked up. That was until Nix decided to de-commit -- and not to go to some other bulwark of academics and chunky apparel deals.
No, sir. Nix ain't doin' the college thing. He's going straight to the NBA via the G-League, which the NBA made accessible in the fall of 2018 by unveiling the G-League pathway program.
The way it works is, a kid coming out of high school can go to the G-League for a year until he turns 19 and is eligible for the NBA draft. That way he can spend a year learning what the pro life is all about, and skip making a pile for John Calipari or Mike Krzyzewski.
The Blob has been pounding the drums for this for a good long while, although why the NBA doesn't go all the way with it is beyond me. In other words, why still make a kid wait a year? If he wants to enter the draft straight out of Millard Fillmore High, let him do it. Then, if he gets drafted, assign him to the G-League for a year.
That's essentially what the NBA is already doing, after all.
In any event, Nix is now the third player from the class of 2020 to opt for the G-League, enough of a trend to perhaps have the colleges sweating and yanking at their collars a bit. But it's hard to feel very sorry for them, given that this pretty much just their chickens coming home to roost.
See. as much as they lament the advent of the one-and-done culture in college basketball, and blame the NBA's asinine 19-year-old rule for it, they've certainly not been shy about exploiting it. There are One-and-Done U.'s all over America now, baldly transactional programs banking all the coin they can from their short-timer mercenaries. How can they now complain when those mercenaries decide to act like, well, mercenaries?
Seems to me that's just the kids getting what they're supposed to get from their college experience.
An education.
He's blazing a trail, you see. Same as Dan'l Boone and Lewis and Clark .'n' them, kinda.
Daishen Nix, it seems, is one of those teenagers with a crossover dribble, a five-star point guard from Nevada whom UCLA thought it had locked up. That was until Nix decided to de-commit -- and not to go to some other bulwark of academics and chunky apparel deals.
No, sir. Nix ain't doin' the college thing. He's going straight to the NBA via the G-League, which the NBA made accessible in the fall of 2018 by unveiling the G-League pathway program.
The way it works is, a kid coming out of high school can go to the G-League for a year until he turns 19 and is eligible for the NBA draft. That way he can spend a year learning what the pro life is all about, and skip making a pile for John Calipari or Mike Krzyzewski.
The Blob has been pounding the drums for this for a good long while, although why the NBA doesn't go all the way with it is beyond me. In other words, why still make a kid wait a year? If he wants to enter the draft straight out of Millard Fillmore High, let him do it. Then, if he gets drafted, assign him to the G-League for a year.
That's essentially what the NBA is already doing, after all.
In any event, Nix is now the third player from the class of 2020 to opt for the G-League, enough of a trend to perhaps have the colleges sweating and yanking at their collars a bit. But it's hard to feel very sorry for them, given that this pretty much just their chickens coming home to roost.
See. as much as they lament the advent of the one-and-done culture in college basketball, and blame the NBA's asinine 19-year-old rule for it, they've certainly not been shy about exploiting it. There are One-and-Done U.'s all over America now, baldly transactional programs banking all the coin they can from their short-timer mercenaries. How can they now complain when those mercenaries decide to act like, well, mercenaries?
Seems to me that's just the kids getting what they're supposed to get from their college experience.
An education.
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