A Plagued landscape

Look, maybe Kansas wins anyway. It's possible.

Every changed reality is still a reality, so maybe No. 2 Baylor still shoots like it forgot how, still looks half-a-bubble off plumb, still loses for the first time in this Bastard Plague college basketball season. It's not like the Bears were playing Directional Hyphen State Tech, after all. No, Kansas was itself ranked (No. 17), and had won 17 of its 25 games coming in, and had won five of its last six games. So maybe the Jayhawks still win in a season not warped all out of round by the Big Sick.

Doesn't mean Baylor coach Scott Drew didn't have a point, postgame.

His point was the Bears were the best shooting in the nation, and so there could be only one reason why they missed 20 of 26 3-point attempts. four days after missing 17 of 25 against Iowa State. And that reason was rust. That reason was the Bastard Plague.

See, until that game against Iowa State on Tuesday, COVID-19 issues had postponed Baylor's last six games. The Bears hadn't played in three weeks. They hadn't even practiced for almost that long. So, yeah, it didn't sound like plain old excuse-making when Drew called COVID-19 protocols Baylor's "kryptonite."

Without the Dali-esque topography of this Plague year, after all, the Bears wouldn't have had a three-week black hole in the middle of their season. They likely wouldn't have needed overtime to crawl past 2-18 Iowa State, the worst team in the Big 12 and one of the worst in the nation. And if they might have still lost at Kansas yesterday, it's doubtful they would have gone down by 13.

Which they did, 71-58.

So now the Bears have a scuff mark in the loss column, and we're once again left to wonder if this entire season should come with a giant easy-to-apply asterisk. Because the way it's played out almost certainly is not the way it would have played out without the hillocks and switchbacks created by playing a college basketball season in the middle of a pandemic. 

In big ways and small, it's altered everything. Without the Plague, to begin with, there would still be traditional home-court advantages. Now there are none. How many road teams have benefited from that, and how many home teams have been unable to use it for fuel the way they usually do?

Maybe, as with Baylor-Kansas, the outcomes would have been the same anyway. But if not -- if all the postponements and all the games in sterile all-but-empty snakepits did in fact have an effect -- how much different would the coming NCAA Tournament look? How many teams that slide off the bubble in a couple of weeks would not have done so?

We'll never know. Just as we'll never know if Baylor would have run the table -- or if, for that matter, they might have already lost to someone whose own season has been disrupted by this alien landscape.

Yessir. Go find that asterisk.

Dying young in a small town

I don't know why my radar works the way it does. I don't think anyone does.

As with everyone some things ping mine, and some things don't. Some are things everyone in the nation knows about, and some are things that only break hearts in a small corner of that nation.

The small corner today is LaGrange, In., in LaGrange County. 

It pinged my radar because two young men died in a car crash up there the other day, and it was all over the local news and Facebook and the Magic Twitter Thingy. This is partly because Tyler and Chace Curtis were both high school athletes, baseball and wrestling, and there is nothing more poignant than an athlete dying young, as A.E. Housman told us. And if high school athletes are the lords of creation in their world almost everywhere, that is nowhere more true than in a small school in a small town.

Tyler and Chace Curtis were high school athletes at Prairie Heights, which sits on a stretch of two-lane blacktop just south of U.S. 20, east of LaGrange and west of Angola. Just 414 students go there in four grades, which means there's a good chance pretty much everyone knew Tyler, 16, and Chace, 14.

Both young men were thrown from the car Tyler was driving when it breasted a hill on a county road in neighboring Steuben County, left the highway and hit a tree almost head-on. The impact tore the car in two; Tyler died at the scene and Chace died in the hospital a day later.

The accident happened shortly before 5:30 on Thursday afternoon, one of those late February days when the mercury breaches 40 and the sun shines at a particular angle that whispers of approaching spring. By Friday afternoon, there were flowers at the base of the tree on C.R. 675W, and the brothers' baseball jerseys -- 8 and 27 -- were on display, covered with a hieroglyphic scrawl of teammates' signatures.

In the photos one of the local news websites ran with the story, Tyler is turning hard on a pitch at the plate. Chace is standing on the Prairie Heights football field with a blue Homecoming court sash across his chest, rocking a righteous throwback mullet. They look like exactly what they were, two high school kids with spring and baseball and their whole lives spread luxuriously before them.

I can't tell you why all of this hit me so hard. I haven't been a full-time working sportswriter in these parts in almost seven years, and in my 28 years at The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette I don't think I ever covered a sporting event at Prairie Heights. I don't think I ever talked to any coach or athlete or administrator there. So their pain right now is not something I can connect with on a molecular level. 

But I have written about other high school athletes dying young in other small towns. I've listened to coaches and teammates and administrators struggle to put the loss into words.

I've seen the hole that loss leaves, and the ways those left behind try to fill it: The jerseys covered in heartbroken signatures, the uniform numbers painted on the grass of a football field, the flowers and other tokens left outside an athletic facility or a scarred tree on a county road, the February fields beyond still frosted with retreating snow.

Thankfully, I haven't had to write about those things often, as those things go. But once is enough. 

No one knows that better right now, I suspect, than the community of a certain small school in a certain small town, hard by a stretch of two-lane blacktop.

Bear-ly possible

Well, this can't happen. You can bet your throwback Decatur Staleys jersey on that.

First, Russell Wilson's agent says his client isn't demanding a trade, says he's just fine with staying in Seattle, doesn't know how these things get started.

Then his agent says but if he were to be traded, there are only four teams to whom he'd want to go. Which of course is how these things get started.

The four teams?

The Saints. The Cowboys. The Raiders. And ... your Chicago Bears.

Let me tell you why the latter is never-ever-ever going to happen.

It's never-ever-ever going to happen because history is a badass, and history will swat the notion of Wilson-to-the-Bears into the cheap seats like Dikembe Motumbo swatting a floater in the lane. History will not allow an elite quarterback to suit up for the Bears, because the Bears don't do elite quarterbacks. Never have. 

You have to go back to Sid Luckman to find a Bears quarterback who would have been considered elite in his time, and Sid Luckman has been dead for 22 years. He last played for the Bears in 1950, when the Cold War was a thing. Since then it's been a little Billy Wade and a dash of Jack Concannon and Bobby Douglass, and a dollop of Vince Evans and Gary Huff and Peter Tom Willis and even Doug Flutie.

Oh, and Jim McMahon -- who wasn't that good, either, but won a Super Bowl because he had a great defense and got to hand off to Walter Payton a lot.

These days the QB1 is Mitch Trubisky, who pretty much fits the Bears quarterback template like he was born to it. He's OK, but not too OK. He can do the math, quarterback-wise, but don't make him do trig or calculus. He's the 2021 Bob Avellini Action Figure, which doesn't yet come with Kung-Fu Grip.

What he isn't is Russell Wilson. Nor ever will be.

No, Russell Wilson in a Bears suit is something history and its sidekick tradition simply will not allow, lest it unleash horrible cosmic events. An awful disturbance in the Force would happen if somehow Russell Wilson stepped foot in Halas Hall. The heavens would rain fire. Frogs would speak Latin. George Halas himself might rise from the dead, wondering what fool thing those damn McCaskeys have done this time.

So ... no. Wilson-to-the-Bears is possible, but it's not possible. So put it right out of your mind, Mikey in Winnetka.

Yeah, I know. History's a friggin' Cheesehead.

Miller('s) time?

These are the dark days in Riverdale, for Archie and the gang. Riverdale High just lost another big game. Jughead has fallen in with a bad crowd. And Archie ...

Well. Did we mention Riverdale High just lost another big game?

In our incarnation, of course, "Archie" is Archie Miller, and Riverdale High is Indiana University, which, way back in the Before Time, was better at basketball than football. Now the Hoosiers don't just have a football team but a FOOTBALL TEAM, and the basketball team is a beige collection of knockabouts clinging to a "tradition" that seems as distant as the Battle of Hastings these days. 

Those five NCAA championship banners hanging in Assembly Hall, for instance?

Ancient as the Bayeaux Tapestry. And about as relevant.

This is because the Hoosiers are now 12-11 and 7-9 in the Big Ten, and in the space of four days have blown big leads to two other beige outfits. First they jetted out to a 19-6 lead at home against a gaggle of Michigan State imposters, only to blow the lead and the game. Then, last night, they led Rutgers 23-8 before lying down on the tracks and letting the Scarlet Knights thunder over them, outscoring them 27-8 the rest of the half and running the lead to as much as 20 points in the second half.

The final score was 74-63. And in one stretch, Rutgers, a 13-9 outfit that had lost five of its previous eight games, outscored Indiana 62-27.

All of which, of course, means the howling for poor Archie's head has reached 747-amping-up-for-takeoff decibels.

That he's not been what he seemed to be when he was at Dayton is obvious now, after all. That he's never even been what Tom Crean was until the lost-in-the-past yokels ran him out is even more obvious, and perhaps more significant.

Crean's teams, after all, won Big Ten titles and reached Sweet Sixteens and even landed a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament one year. And Miller?

Hasn't come close to that, in four seasons. On his watch, Indiana has regressed to a middle-of-the-pack Big Ten program, down there with the Minnesotas and Penn States and (until this season) Illinoises. In Miller's three previous seasons, they've finished tied for sixth, tied for ninth and tied for 10th in the conference. 

This season?

Right now they're ninth, with Michigan and roadies at Michigan State and Purdue still to come.

Speaking of the latter, Archie Miller has never beaten Purdue. And the Hoosiers have yet to reach the NCAA Tournament on his watch -- although they might well have last year had the Bastard Plague not wiped out the Madness.

And so now talk of hot seats and buyouts, and the dawning realization that not only are Miller's Hoosiers wildly inconsistent and schematically easy to defend, the talent level is mostly a mirage, too. Outside of Trayce Jackson-Davis and perhaps an emerging Armann Franklin, the Hoosiers simply aren't that good. They may be getting their share of Indiana Mr. Basketballs, but you didn't see a lot of Dukes and Kentuckys trying to elbow Indiana out of the way for most of them. 

So is this Archie's last stand, then?

Maybe.

Only maybe, because, this being corporate college athletics, economics come into play here. Show Miller the road now, and the buyout is a chunk. And that is likely going to provoke a long hard think for the powers-that-be, given the bite the Plague has taken out of the athletic budget.

Miller's Hoosiers could make that an even tougher call if they'd happen to jump up and  beat Michigan in a few days -- or, even better, take down the Purdues in Mackey next week. That could actually happen, because this Indiana team has at least had a weird propensity for springing the occasional Iowa City Miracle on everyone. But right now?

Right now it doesn't look likely. Right now this is a team that has too much give-up in it -- or so it would appear.

And that buyout, consequently?

Looks less and less scary every day. 

Grim echoes

Ben Hogan is who you thought of, when you saw that silver SUV lying at the bottom of a ravine with its front end gnawed off. You thought of 1949 and a different car and a Greyhound bus coming head-on, and a different transcendent golfer flinging himself across the front seat at the last moment to shield his wife from the impact.

That collision cost Ben Hogan a year on the golf course, and left him with a permanent limp.

This one?

Who knows, as we absorb the single-car crash that left Tiger Woods' lower right leg essentially ground to dust. The injuries are horrific: Multiple open fractures -- i.e., bones protruding from the skin -- shattered bones in the ankle and foot, the entirety now held together by pins and metal rods after an hours-long surgery.

And so Ben Hogan, popping into the head of anyone who knows anything about golf.

Me?

I thought of Hogan, sure. But then I thought of A.J. Foyt.

Who turned his feet to dust up in Elkhart Lake, Wis., one afternoon in 1990, when his brakes failed coming into a hard right-hander and his car became an unguided missile, taking flight and arrowing into a dirt embankment. The impact basically folded his feet back on themselves; the pain was so bad Foyt, the toughest man who ever strapped into a race car, begged the safety workers to hit him in the head with a hammer and put him out of his misery.

He survived, of course. Even raced again, sort of, although his racing days were pretty much over from that moment. It was a year before he could walk again, and, 30 years later, he feels that afternoon to this day when he sets off with a gait that has been off-kilter since.

One more thing: A.J. Foyt was 55 years old when Elkhart Lake happened, and hadn't been a force on the track for some time.

Tiger Woods is 45, and, except for the blip that was Augusta in 2019, he hasn't really been a consistent force on the golf course for some time.

To be sure, even now, no one moves the needle like Tiger. If he's playing on the weekend, and he's remotely within shouting distance of the lead, the TV numbers are a Saturn V rocket. But if he misses the cut ... well, not so much.

The man can still play this game, because he was the best there ever was at his peak and that doesn't just disappear. But after five back surgeries and knee surgeries and lord knows how many more dents and door-dings, he's a very old 45.

Just as A.J. was a very old 55, when he took flight that day in Wisconsin and destroyed his feet.

As for Hogan, the analogy is the obvious one, but perhaps it's  not as exact. Hogan was 36 the night his car met that Greyhound bus head-on, for one thing. He was at the height of his powers, or at least coming to that height. Like Tiger, his injuries were extensive, too -- there was hardly a bone in his body above the waist he didn't break -- but he was younger, and he was Ben Hogan.

A Texan, like A.J. Tougher than a jailhouse steak, like A.J.

And so he was back on a golf course before a year had passed, and won the U.S, Open not very long after that. He went on to win five more majors and dominate the 1950s, playing always in pain and always with a limp.

It was one of the most remarkable stories in the history of any sport. And if Tiger manages to get back to competitive golf, and actually manages to win again to boot -- two exceedingly dim "ifs" at this point, if we're being honest -- that could well be the most remarkable story in the history of any sport.

That's because he's a decade older, and the damage is to his lower extremities, and it's extensive to say the least. And it's because he was already rehabbing from a fifth back procedure when he went off that winding downhill road early yesterday morning.

I don't know if that means this is the end of him as a professional golfer. But I do know what anyone with a soul is hoping right now.

Which is that Tiger Woods' story, from here on out, unfolds a lot more like Ben Hogan's than A.J. Foyt's.

By(e) the number

 I get prerogatives. They're not the same thing as traditions, exactly, but they live in the same neighborhood and their kids go to school together.

So I understand why some people are upset with Colts wide receiver Michael Pittman, because he won't give up the No. 11 he's worn all his life. He was asked to do this, respectfully, by Carson Wentz, the quarterback at whom the Colts just threw a pile of money. That's because 11 has been Wentz's number all his life, too.

It was Wentz's absolute prerogative to do this, as both A) a big deal quarterback, and B) a big-deal quarterback whose contract is far more hefty than Michael Pittman's.

The prerogative for Pittman, therefore, is to give up the number.

But he won't. 

And somehow I kind of admire him for that.

Let everyone else call him a bad teammate and say he's creating a harmful rift between receiver and quarterback, and that he's helping get Wentz's working relationship with the Colts off to a sour start. All of that's true only if everyone decides not to be a grownup about this, however. And I sense Wentz will be, and that the Colts locker room is not the sort of place where non-grownups are welcome.

There's also this: It's Pittman's number.

For that reason it strikes the Blob as wrong, somehow, that he should be regarded by some as the bad guy here because he won't give it up -- even to a quarterback with a fatter paycheck, and even to a far more accomplished player at this point in their careers.

Now, I suppose enough heat could be applied from certain quarters to convince Pittman to concede, and that next fall Wentz will be wearing No. 11. Or not. Joe Montana, after all, finished his career wearing No. 19 in Kansas City because his number (16) was also Chiefs' legend Len Dawson's number, and had already been retired. So Montana shrugged and pulled on a new number.

Didn't seem to bother him any -- even though Montana had four rings, and would retire as perhaps the greatest quarterback in history up to that point.

Maybe Wentz will follow that example, and pull on No. 19 for the Colts himself.

Oh. Wait ...

The weirdness of it all

Some days you have to stifle yourself, as Archie Bunker used to say when he was in full Misogynist Jackass mode. This especially happens as you get older, and the world becomes more strange -- and lord knows it's never been stranger then in the Age of the Bastard Plague.

And so to the latest occasion when I caught myself starting a sentence with "Back in MY day ..."

The "sonny" being inferred.

In any event, this time it was prompted by a tweet from my friend and former sportswriting colleague Justin Cohn, observing the weirdness of our times. See, he was covering a Mad Ants game at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum -- except the Mad Ants weren't at the Coliseum, but half a country away in Orlando. So Justin  was covering it by watching the game on a screen and then (presumably) getting quotes on a Zoom call and writing a gamer off that.

All together now: Back in MY day...

Back in my day, when we didn't have to worry about Bastard Plagues, covering a game remotely would not only have been technologically problematical, it would have been a flagrant violation of the Sportswriter Code. Any conversation suggesting such a thing would have gone like this:

Sportswriter: Hey, boss, the weather's lousy outside. How 'bout I just watch the Purdue game on TV and write my story off that instead of driving all the way to West Lafayette?

Sports editor: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA ... no.

But strange times call for strange measures, so now this is how a sportswriter occasionally has to work his gig. 

Oh, they still travel to cover games, a lot, but when they get there nobody's home. Covid protocols mean they're covering the games in empty or nearly empty arenas/stadiums. I can't imagine how bizarre that must be, and how curiously deflating. It must be more like covering a particularly intense practice scrimmage instead of an actual game.

All that's missing is who calls shirts and who calls skins.

And covering a game the way Justin covered the Mad Ants last night?

Well ... back in MY day (sonny), there was a certain sportswriter for a certain publication who was widely suspected of having done the same thing for a particular IU basketball road game. No one on press row could recall seeing him there before, during or in the postgame. But the next day, there was a game story with his byline, complete with quotes and a dateline from the game's site.

In the insular sportswriting fraternity, this was regarded as the worst kind of fraud, and made him an object of scorn. Or at least it did in the city where he worked at the time.

Today, of course, it's just the way you have to do things sometimes -- only it's done up front, and minus the phony dateline. 

Weird. So damn weird.