A porous defense

Another day, another Florida State quarterback behaving badly. Where do the Seminoles find these guys, Paul Crewe Prep?

(Yes, that is a "Longest Yard" reference, Blobophiles. The original "Longest Yard", not the dopey remake. The "Longest Yard" in which Paul Crewe, the quarterback/felon protagonist, is portrayed by Burt Reynolds, who ... played football at Florida State. So you see, there's more to the Blob's madness here than just some desire to go old school).

At any rate, now there's video of D'Andre Johnson slugging a woman half his size in a bar, and let the standard excuse-making begin. His attorney: He was provoked by racial epithets, and, anyway, she swung first. One of his former teammates, now with the Bills: How come the woman isn't being charged, because she swung first?

Well, yes, she did, in the sense that a 5-year-old takes a swing at you while playing in the backyard.  And it was after Johnson tried to elbow her out of the way, then put his hands on her when she confronted him. And he's a quasi-professional football player who's twice her size and to whom she posed no physical threat.  And when are these guys gonna learn to just walk away?

Probably never. It takes a man to do that, and football players good enough to get recruited to Florida State rarely are men. They're pampered children with the sensibilities of pampered children, having been told for half their lives they're special and the world owes them more than it does the common ruck. And so, here's Johnson on tape punching out a woman, a candy-ass move that's a direct result of all that wrongheaded entitlement.

Kudos to Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher for immediately dismissing the kid, but not too many kudos. D'Andre Johnson, after all, was not a Heisman Trophy winner for a team with legitimate national championship aspirations. Jameis Winston was, and so Jimbo was considerably less decisive where he was concerned. In fact you can make the argument that he wasn't decisive at all where Jameis was concerned.

And so the beat goes on, with only one redeeming notion: At least Johnson's attorney didn't try to argue that he was just standing his ground, per Florida law.

Of course, there's still time.



 
   

Homegrown

So he'll move on now, from a homegrown career that was almost entirely homemade. Kaleigh Schrock got the cutesy nickname "Schrocky Balboa" because of his willingness to drop the gloves anywhere, anytime against any cementhead imported for the purpose. But somehow there was always more to it than that.

Like his almost-namesake, he was the hometown guy who came up mostly from nowhere, riding heart and want-to and a gift for leading by example. In 2009, he came to camp with the Komets as a face in the crowd who would have been even more anonymous had he not been from Fort Wayne; he stuck because Al Sims couldn't bring himself to cut this kid who left everything he had on the ice every single minute of every single shift, and who would have thrown down against the young Ali if that's what was required of him.

Six years later, he'll walk away with two rings from two leagues and the captain's "C" on his sweater, and there have been few better. When the Komets made him captain at midseason in 2013 with the team in disarray and the shadow of the Captain, Colin Chaulk, still seven leagues tall, it looked to some like a woeful mismatch . As usual, Schrock proved us all wrong.

Everything he learned while watching Chaulk own the locker room he applied, and by the end of the season the Komets were in the ECHL playoffs and it was Schrock who owned the room. He did what the best of them do, which was lead by example. If he didn't always skate a regular shift, and some fans carped that he was taking up a roster spot better used on a more talented body, they missed a  home truth that was as glaring as it was subtle: The Komets were a demonstrably better team when Schrock was on the ice.

He brought hustle and energy and an edge the team simply was lacking when he was out of the lineup. And perhaps -- just perhaps -- he brought perspective, too.

Fort Wayne may not be a destination in the ECHL, a minor league more truly a developmental league than any the Komets have previously inhabited in almost 65 years. But it's not just a bus stop, either. There is a weight of history behind the franchise unique to this level, and there is a defined Komet Way that goes with that.

Schrock, having grown up in its sphere, was supremely qualified to instill that. If the prospects lugging their bags into town each fall were destined to wear any number of logos on their chests in the coming  months, they should at least understand what was back of the orange fireball they would wear here. And why it demanded their respect.

Schrock, who grew up wanting only to wear that fireball, would certainly clue them in. And now that he's walking away at 30, a decision hastened by a severe eye injury he suffered this past season, the biggest question out there is who will next wear the "C", and if he will have as much understanding of what it means as Schrock does.

Which, of course, is what we were all wondering when Chaulk took his leave.

If there's a finer legacy than that for Kaleigh Schrock, I can't imagine what it is.

Queens. For a day.

Of course we paid attention, for two hours. It was Fourth of July weekend. It was the World Cup. And Carli Lloyd was Captain America, scoring twice in five minutes, then scoring again with a shot from midfield that will ring to the touch forever.

And so, USA 5, Japan 2. And so, Abby Wambach and Christie Rampone, the wily vets, raise the Cup together. And so, America lifts a glass, roars, says, "Damn, we're good!"

But what now?

That is the question, isn't it? And don't we already know the answer?

Sure we do. The more astute among us were already clueing us in before it was even over Sunday, observing that it was refreshing (and somewhat dismaying) to see women's sports actually occupy more than a blip on the national radar for once. And then observing it will just as quickly be gone as soon as the glasses are empty and everyone heads back to work today.

As with all such judgments, this isn't completely accurate. Professional tennis these days, after all, is basically Serena Williams And Them Others. And if women's sports are indeed treated too often with condescension and indifference by the national media, its OCD in this instance probably has as much to do with the sport as it does with outright chauvinism.

Women's soccer may vanish from the radar between World Cups, but so does men's soccer, at least for the country at large. So the talking heads at ESPN will yap about the U.S. women for a day or two, and then, because it's soccer and not the NFL, they'll move on. Can't steal precious air time from iconic NFL moments like First Day Of Camp Stretching, you know. Let's go live to Anderson, where Andrew Luck is about to lead the Colts in jumping jacks!

(Apropos of nothing, but the best line I've heard about ESPN comes from fellow Indiana sportswriter Andrew Smith. He notes that he likes to say ESPN's coverage calendar consists of five things: The NFL season, the NFL Draft, NFL free agency, whatever LeBron is doing, and NFL training camps).

The more relevant question, for me, is how different will be the impact of this World Cup from the one Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain et al won 16 years. The little girls who painted their faces and screamed for Mia in 1999 went on to become the launch pad for what happened yesterday. The example of '99 became the seedbed for everything that has come after, and what has come after is a women's national team that, even if it didn't win the World Cup for 16 years, has consistently been one of the premier sides on the planet.

It's a legacy that, 16 years later, will likely render the impact of  this World Cup team less dramatic, but perhaps as enduring in its own way. In '99, girls who never would have played soccer before played it because they wanted to be Mia; now those girls already play soccer. Carli Lloyd and Abby Wambach and Alex Morgan just give them something new to aim for.

And maybe not just the girls, either. The most obvious difference between 1999 and 2015 is that it wasn't just little girls painting their faces and waving their flags, it was little boys, too. Hero worship is far less respective of gender than it used to be, and that's a good thing. Kids, male or female, need all the positive examples they can find these days. So if your son or daughter is growing up in a world where the acceptable Fatheads on the wall in either of their rooms include both LeBron and Carli Lloyd, consider yourself rich beyond measure.

And ESPN and every other national sports conduit, consider taking notice. More than once every four years, that is.


 


       

A creeping separation

Once upon a time I could have looked at a list of likely All-Star players and known exactly who every one of them was.

I could have named the teams they played on even if those teams weren't listed. I could have identified them by position. I could have run down the list of pitchers, American and National, and told you who was a righty and who threw portside. I probably could have gone on to tell you who threw gas, who threw junk and who were the subversives (Paging Dan Quisenberry ... paging Kent Tekulve ...) who released the ball from beneath their beltlines.

Now?

Now I have the New York Times in front of me this a.m., and here is a list of the players, American and National, likely to be picked for the All-Star game a week hence. I recognize Andrew McCutchen, because he's a Pirate. Ditto Gerrit Cole. I recognize Mike Trout, Jose Bautista, Brett Gardner, Nelson Cruz, Prince Fielder, Albert Pujols, Anthony Rizzo, Max Scherzer, Madison Bumgarner, Bryce Harper, Buster Posey, a handful of others.

But Nolan Arenado? Todd Frazier? Joe Panik?

Francisco Cervelli? Yasmani Grandal? Stephen Vogt?

Sorry. Got nothin'.

Even the players I do know, I'm not sure what teams half of them play for. Of the 14 pitchers listed on the National League side, I can identify 10. Of the 13 on the American side, I recognize six.

Most of this is due my own waning attention to baseball, but my waning attention is a symptom of a larger issue. If the game has slipped away from me, it has slipped away from a lot of the country. Although the ballparks still draw, baseball's national presence has dwindled to the point where the World Series has become just a part of the landscape in October, and not a particularly significant part. A nothing NFL game between, say, Jacksonville and Buffalo clobbers it in the Nielsen's.

And it's not just because the small-market Royals played in the Series last fall. Even the game's heavyweights -- your Red Sox, your Cardinals -- get buried by the NFL.

The demographics tell us baseball is increasingly the province of an older, whiter, more male audience, not an encouraging marker in a society that is increasingly younger and more racially and culturally diverse. Kids still play the game, but American kids -- and particularly African-American kids -- do not. If you want proof, check out a single A roster sometime; a smattering of white American kids, the odd African-American, and a pile of guys from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela and points south.

Baseball there is what it used to be in America, two generations ago.  Baseball here ...

Well.  There are other options now if you've got a child who loves games, and the other options are winning. Soccer. Basketball. Hockey. Even football, despite the queasiness engendered by the way the industry leader bungled the concussion thing.

Denying you've got a problem virtually ensures  the problem will explode in your face, sending ripples to places you never imagined -- like, say, youth football. That's what the NFL did, and that's the price it's paying.

As for baseball ,.. once upon a time, you couldn't turn on your TV without seeing some baseball star hawking something. Who could forget Mickey Mantle weeping over his Maypo, or Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine sulking in a Nike ad because Chicks Dig The Long Ball?

Now you turn on your TV, and it's all Peyton Manning, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and various faces from the NBA -- faces with whom we are so familiar, the ad sometimes doesn't even bother to identify them. Yes, that's LeBron, that's Steph Curry, that's Jabari Parker. Got it.

And baseball?

The other night, an ad popped up on my TV. It featured Adam Jones, the Baltimore Orioles' star outfielder. I knew that because Adam Jones was wearing his Orioles uniform.

And if he hadn't been?

I wouldn't have known him from, you know, Adam.

Sad.


 

    

A few independent thoughts

I am here to declare my independence, on this day before The Day. It seems the right time.

I declare my independence from sentences that begin with "You know, those hotdogs, you don't know what's in 'em."

I declare my independence from other sentences that begin with "You know, there are carcinogens in charcoal."

I declare my independence, this day before The Day, from the flawed notion that if you confer justice on someone, finally and rightly, you're somehow being unjust to someone else. Welcome to America to gay Americans who have too long been told they weren't worthy of all its blessings. And the rest of you, get over it. This isn't an assault on your freedom or your religion or anything else, and it never has been.

I declare my independence from the equally flawed notion that removing lost-in-the-past symbols from official places where they are almost ludicrously inappropriate does not mean you have to go completely insane about it. I mean, really, the Dukes of Hazzard? The Civil War itself?

A flag of rebellion against the American government (and of officially sanctioned oppression of a goodly number of Americans) has no business flying proudly on the grounds of an American governmental entity. And if a corporate entity like NASCAR has decided that flag doesn't square with its values, it and its partner venues have every right to request its patrons cool it with the Stars and Bars.

It's not gonna work, of course, for the excellent reason that when you tell an American he or she can't do something, he or she is going to do it, no matter how addled it is. That's why sales of Confederate flags have gone through the roof. So, good luck, NASCAR, with policing the infield at, oh, Talladega, for instance.

More pointless yet was TVLand's decision to yank the dopey old Dukes from the airwaves, as if they were the lineal descendants of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" or some such thing. The Dukes have as much to do with slavery and its tragic legacy as "Hogan's Heroes" had to do with the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz, but by God there was a Confederate flag on that car, so out it went. Mindlessness raised to a high art.

As are the sporadic attempts now to demonize remembrance of the Civil War, as if study of the War itself is somehow shameful. This is especially relevant to me, a Civil War nerd who has always conflated Independence Day with the three days that precede it. Eighty-seven years after the signing, on the slanting, rocky fields south of Gettysburg, Pa., the national crisis came to its tipping point. Either we were going to be a whole nation, or we were going to be two nations that could never have achieved much of anything without each other. And Gettysburg decided that.

One-hundred fifty-two years ago today, at somewhere around 2:00 in the afternoon, all of that came to its final shattering climax. The history books have never gotten Pickett's Charge exactly right -- Pickett, for instance, actually commanded only a third of the 12,000-plus troops engaged in his namesake action -- but it was demonstrably the pivotal moment of the war, and probably of this nation's history. It's why, decades later, in "Intruder in the Dust," William Faulkner penned that immortal passage about 13-year-old Southern boys and how they always hold fast to that moment before the brigades stepped off and whatever they imagined they were fighting for still seemed possible.

Then it all went to pieces in smoke and flame and, yes, valor, because marching across a mile of open ground into a hurricane of shot and shell is nothing if not courageous. To deny it because it was ultimately in service to, as Ulysses.S. Grant put it, "one of the worst (causes) for which a people ever fought" is, again, mindless.

I've stood beneath the trees on Seminary Ridge a dozen times and looked out across that mile of ground, the Copse of Trees that marked Pickett and Co.'s target impossibly tiny in the distance. And every time, I marvel at the sheer brass of it. It's why I have no issue with the extravagant monuments to the North Carolinians or Texans or Mississippians along that stretch of roadway, nor with the tiny Confederate flags that bloom always around them. In that place -- and in that one place, I would hold -- they are entirely appropriate.

That is, of course, a contradiction of sorts. But then, we are a nation of contradictions; they were enshrined in our Constitution by our endlessly bickering founders. The Civil War was fought to resolve those contradictions -- and while it did so, it also spawned contradictions of its own.

I'm not sure that's the kind of thing we celebrate when we celebrate America on Independence Day. But it's part of who we are.

And so, I declare my independence from obsessing about it. Happy Fourth.   

Off the Pace

So, remember a couple of years ago, when the young Indiana Pacers were reaching the Eastern Conference finals every year, Frank Vogel was a boy genius and it appeared Larry Bird was putting together the next great power in the East?

Yeah. Me, neither.

Interesting stuff here from Bob Kravitz of WTHR in Indy, on an unraveling that seems to be proceeding apace. Yes, that's David West, the Pacers' resident grownup in the room, opting out of his deal for several reasons, none of them reflecting well on Bird and the Pacers' brain trust.

One, he's leaving because he doesn't think the team can win, and at his age it's about rings and not jing these days.

Two, he doesn't like the way the team jacked up Roy Hibbert, basically trying to run him off by saying he was headed for the bench next year if he didn't opt out of his deal.

Along the way Bird apparently  head-faked the media about West's intentions, saying before the draft he didn't know nuttin' while West was insisting the Pacers knew full well his intentions by then. It's never a winning move to jerk the media around, something Bird should know by now. But then, there are a lot of things he should know by now that apparently he doesn't.

Chief among them is you don't piss off the leader of your locker room. Bird has apparently done that, and now West is in the wind, and Hibbert's back although the Pacers clearly don't want him -- and because they talked so publicly about benching him, they've lost any leverage they might have in trying to move him.

What team is going to give up anything of value for a center upon whom you've so obviously given up? No one with a lick of sense is going to part with much for someone you've so loudly identified as a spare part.

That ship sailed the second Bird and Vogel started trying to force Hibbert out the door. And it hardly bears adding where it is that ship has sailed.

Yes, mateys.  That is an iceberg dead ahead.

Look who showed up

And there my internal pessimist goes, tumbling off the cliff. Have a nice trip, dude. Yes, you're finally right. This isn't going to end well.

You're in for a sudden stop down there on the rocks, because the U.S. women's soccer team finally got off their duffs. I don't know where it's been, but the team we were all supposed to see finally showed up in the semifinals last night, and Germany is packing its bags because of it.

The U.S. beat the top seed 2-0 and now it's on to the finals, and, yes, I was wrong. I've been predicting doom for the U.S. women all tournament long, because they struggled to score and at times didn't even look like they were trying to. But something changed in the China game, and it kept on changing last night, when the U.S. got much the better chances and made it pay off with Carli Lloyd's penalty shot and Kelley O'Hara's header off a neat bit of ball movement in the box.

To be sure, we can all wonder how it would have gone had the Germans not gagged on their own penalty shot, Celia Sasic sending it wide of the post even after Tonya Harding down there in the U.S. net guessed wrong and dove the other way. Put the U.S. behind for once, and it might have been different. But somehow I think they would have gotten it done anyway, if only because they were finally pressing the attack.

Taken as a whole it was their best performance of the tournament, and now they'll go into the final as the presumptive favorite against either Japan or England. They're confident, they're playing their best soccer and Tonya now has five straight shutouts.

(And before we go on: Yes, I know her name is Hope Solo. I also know she shouldn't be playing, for reasons the Blob outlined some time ago. And I know it was a journalistic low point for Fox last night when it allowed her to basically tape her own player feature after refusing to be interviewed by Fox. At that point you say, "Sorry. We're not your spin doctors. You want to tape a segment, we're asking you questions about your inner Tonya. You don't want to do that, we're not putting you on the air." Thank God for Alexi Lalas, who, at the end of the Solo piece, pointedly mentioned the way she was allowed to control her own message).

I don't see the Americans losing now. I don't see them losing unless they go back to tiptoe soccer in the final, and I can't imagine their brain trust being dumb enough to do that.

The pessimist is dead. OK, not dead, but he's not moving around much down there.

Good riddance.