One W. One no-decision.

 They packed the Thomas and Mack Center in Vegas last night for a summer-league NBA game, and it was ... a summer-league NBA game. Which is to say, a whole lot of hoopin' was done, some of it worth watching.

Also, you couldn't conclude a thing from it.

The draw, of course, was the No. 1 pick in last month's draft, Victor Wembanyama -- aka Wemby, aka The Big W. He was not particularly impressive, missing 11 of his 13 shots and scoring just nine points in a tick over 27 minutes. He also got tired, he confessed, which might have been expected considering he's 7-5 and a 16-ounce beer outweighs him.

He's a really tall penknife with feet, in other words. Turn him sideways and he vanishes.

But he did have three assists, and five blocks, and eight rebounds, and showed us flashes of why so many think he's a special talent. And the sellout crowd got to see a 7-5 guy put the ball on the floor and take it to the tin, which is not something you see every day.

So score The Big W's debut a no-decision, with Wembanyama admitting what was obvious: He's got a lot of learning to do.

On the other hand ...

Well, on the other hand, by last night he'd already racked a W. So he had that going for him.

The W came out of Vegas, too, and it was the local constabulary who delivered it. Vegas police concluded there was nothing to an incident involving Wemby, Spurs security and former singer Britney Spears, whose celebrity card expired some time ago.

Seems she wanted to meet Wemby just like the rest of America, and so, assuming her celebrity card was still valid, she marched up behind him in a Vegas nightclub and put a hand on his shoulder. Spurs security, doing its job, shoved her hand away (Don't touch, missy, you could hear them saying). In doing so Spears was struck.

Supposedly it was because the security guy backhanded her, which seemed unlikely. The police concluded she'd actually smacked herself in the face when her hand was pushed away.

Ado about next to nothing, in other words, and shame on the social media knee-jerkers who thought the incident showed Wembanyama was already becoming yet another entitled young athlete. First of all, it was the team's security, not Wembanyama's, so Wemby wasn't in charge of them. Hard to fathom, therefore, how it was any reflection on him that Britney smacked herself in the face.

So, yeah. Call it a W.

And a to-be-determined-later.

A death in the family, Part Who Knows

I remember Johnie Cooks.

I remember he was a linebacker the Colts took second in the draft in 1982, two years before they abandoned Baltimore for Indianapolis. A terror at Mississippi State, he was one of the league's top defensive rookies in '82, and thus was a name we all recognized that first season in Indiana.

He was at Anderson College with the rest of the Horseshoes that  summer for training camp, when none of us had much of a clue. Was that Mike Pagel back there in the pocket, or Johnny Unitas? Weren't running backs Randy McMillan and Curtis Dickey, going to pile up eleventy-hundred yards apiece and grind defenses into disgusting chewed-up defense bits? And Cliff Odom, Barry Krauss and, yes, Johnie Cooks -- weren't they the All-Pro backbone of a fearsome D?

Look, there's reserve linebacker Gary Padjen knocking over a garage in a local TV ad. How tough is that?

Tougher'n Colts coach and legendary hard-ass Frank Kush, by golly. You could take that to the bank without a co-sign.

And then ...

And then, the Colts broke camp and the season started and they were what they were, a 4-12 football team. And the legendary hard-ass didn't make it through the season, fired with a game to play.

And now, a bunch of years later, he's gone. And so is Johnie Cooks.

He died this week at 64, and not for the first time my immediate reaction was "But he wasn't that old!" It didn't seem that long ago, after all, since that first summer in Anderson when he was a starter and we all sweltered and marveled that an actual NFL team was here among us. Truthfully it never does.

But you know what?

It really hasn't been that long ago. Because Cooks really wasn't that old.

He was, however, an NFL linebacker for a decade, initiating and receiving car-crash contact week after week. It takes its toll, all of that. Just go sit in the hotel lobby in Canton, Ohio, on Hall of Fame weekend, and watch the parade of broken bodies hobble past, old beyond their years.

Almost 60 former NFL players have died so far in 2023, and the year's barely half over. Some of them saw their full measure of days and more -- Jim Brown was 87 when he passed, Joe Kapp 85, and 24 others were in their 80s or 90s -- but a distressing number did not.

Charles White, at 64. Calvin Muhammad, also 64. Clark Haggans at 46 and Sonny Gordon at 57 and Tracy Johnson  at 56 and Stanley Wilson at 40 and a bunch of others who didn't make it to 70, or barely did.

And, sure, you can't blame the football threshing machine for all of them. Some died of cancer and some from various other ailments, and one, 35-year-old Ryan Mallett, got caught in a riptide and drowned in Florida. And then there were former Lions and Chargers linebacker Jesse Lemonier and Browns defensive end Chris Smith, who were just 25 and 31 when they died this year.

I couldn't find the cause of death for either. Suffice it to say they're two more NFL players who are no longer with us, but should be.

And of whom, again, we can only say this: "But he wasn't that old!"

Pickled

 That day in Spiece Fieldhouse it was July and humid and the place was one big sweaty drum section, making its sound in a syncopated whap-whap-whap that came from everywhere and could only be called Baller Jazz.

It was the sound basketball makes in the summertime, when a million kids with a million dreams hit the road for this tournament or that tournament or some other tournament.

This day it was the USSSA Boys National Basketball Championship, and there were 1,500 ballers there with 1,500 look-at-me signs hanging around their necks for the college coaches in their shorts and sandals and golf shirts emblazoned with their school logos. On a dozen or so courts, kids were taking it to the tin or pulling up for the J or flushing a dunk (with authority!). It was like being in a sneak-squallin’, ball-callin' house of mirrors, one multiple exposure after another.

And it was Spiece Fieldhouse's DNA -- a beating basketball heart in a basketball state, where the jerseys of famous Hoosiers hung from the rafters and Hoosier basketball memorabilia that greeted you the instant you stepped in the door.

You can say goodbye to all that now.

Blame market saturation or market demand or the weather, if you like, but mainly blame the rise of pickleball. Last anyone looked it hadn't yet taken over the world, but it had all its outlying provinces surrounded And now that includes Spiece Fieldhouse, erstwhile hoops mecca.

At the top of the week, local media ran stories about the demise of the Fieldhouse, or at least the basketball part. This summer they'll close the place down, tear up the basketball courts and replace them with pickleball courts. Demand, meet supply.

Somewhere John Wooden just rolled over in his grave and uttered a most un-Wooden-like scream. Pickleball over basketball? In Indiana?

Well, yes. It's for all the reasons listed above: The market is full to the brim with basketball tournaments and basketball facilities, including right here in the Fort. But there's a market for pickleball, whose popularity is exploding.

And, no, I don't know why.

Oh, it's not that I have anything against it, or bear it a grudge because I got hurt playing it (I didn't, because I haven't). And I suppose it keeps our senior citizens occupied, and as one myself I can say that's not a bad thing.

Pickleball is great for seniors, because it's kinda like tennis if you shrunk it in the dryer. It’s Giant Ping-Pong is what it is, and you play it with a kinda ping-pong ball and an oversized kinda ping-pong paddle, and it sounds a lot like ping-pong.

Pock. Pock. Pock. And an occasional, satisfying thwock! when you really lay into one.

Tennis players, or so I've been told, tend to hate it, because pickleball is taking over their courts in places. Also the whole pock-pock-pock thing drives them nuts. Which I can understand, because I could see how it might eventually feel like audio waterboarding.

And yet ...

And yet, pickleball is THE thing now in leisure sports, precisely because it's so versatile. Seniors can play it, kids can play it, professional athletes can play it. In fact there's both amateur and professional competitive pickleball, with tournaments everywhere.

So, it's here to stay. And Spiece is merely filling a need by converting to it. It's one of those bidness decisions, and from the looks of it a pretty shrewd one.

Get ready, Fort Wayne.

The basketball whap-whap-whap is gone. Here comes the pock-pock-pock.

Going Fo(u)rth

 There's a tiny American flag jabbed in the dirt in my front yard this morning, and I know how it got there.

It was me. I'm the culprit.

I put it there to remind myself we still live in a country worth all the noise that went rattling around the neighborhood last night, even if it's also worth wondering how it survives its citizenry. We are a proud, brave, venal and stupid people, we Americans, capable of great acts of sacrifice and nobility and equally appalling acts of hatred and and violence. We are human beings, in other words.

It's tempting, in these riven days, to think we have never been so divided, never been so susceptible to fear-mongers and demagogues and the crass self-interest of those who gleefully feed on our worst impulses.  The history nerd in me recognizes this for what it is, the endless recycling of themes that go back to the founding of the republic. Everything that is in America, you see, also was.

The appalling fear-mongering over illegal immigration, for instance, has ever been thus. If the worst elements of American society refer to those coming up from Mexico and Central America as an "invasion" (with all the implied menace of that charged word),  those same elements used the same rhetoric when refugees from the Great Famine in Ireland began landing on our shores in the 1840s. Ditto the Asians, Italians, Russians and Eastern Europeans who followed in succeeding years.

All of them, or the great majority of them, came to America fleeing oppression or violence or religious persecution or poverty. All of them crossing our southern border today, or the great majority, are fleeing much the same thing. And all of them were portrayed by the aforementioned elements as murderers and rapists and terrorists and drug-dealers, coming to take our jobs and our security and our very lives.

A hundred years ago, there was even a foreshadowing of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. During the crafting of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 -- the most restrictive and baldly racist anti-immigration legislation in American history -- one of the crafters, a man named John B. Trevor, looked to the south and feared an "undesirable mongrel immigration" from Hispanic populations.

Listen to the rhetoric coming out of Washington today. Not a hell of a lot different, if in fact there is a difference.

And yet, as a country, we've achieved great things despite all this -- with the significant contribution of those successive waves of immigrants the worst of us swore were an existential threat to America itself. Yeah, not so much, Bubba.

But so it goes in a nation that has endlessly wrestled with the concept of freedom and to whom it applies, and which is no more loud and contentious and divided by that debate than it's ever been.

If today's Right demonizes the Left and vice-versa, after all, both are only following the example set by our forefathers, who perhaps demonized one another even more egregiously. Helped along by every bit as vicious a partisan press as today's, the Jefferson Republicans branded the Hamilton Federalists as  "monarchists" who wanted to return the young America to a state of servitude to a king; the Hamilton Federalists responded by branding Jefferson a liar, a hypocrite, an atheist and a proponent of mob rule.

Both were probably on the mark, to some extent. And hugely off it in the main.

Which brings me back to that flag planted in the dirt in our yard.

Some people think by putting it there I'm declaring myself in league with the "patriots" who use the flag and the troops and the Star-Spangled Banner as cover in the pursuit of blatantly un-American aims. I say people can think what they want, this being America. And since it is, no one gets to dictate what putting an American flag on my lawn on the Fourth of July means to me.

It means America ain't perfect. But I'll still take it over anything else you've got.

A day for firsts

OK, so I'd never heard of the guy, either. Van Ginsburg, was it? Van Grizburger? Van Morrison?

Something like that.

But, nah, his name is Shane van Gisbergen, and he's from New Zealand, and late on a storm-tossed day on Lakeshore Drive and Michigan Avenue, he was showing the world his own Miracle Mile. The street course was new and crawling with slick spots from earlier downpours, but he never turned a wheel wrong. Ran down Chase Elliott and ran down Justin Haley, and then drove away from both at the end as chill as can be.

And there it was: First NASCAR street race in Chicago; first guy to win his first Cup race since Johnny Rutherford won one of the Daytona qualifiers for Smokey Yunick: first Kiwi ever to win a Cup race. A day for firsts, it seems.

And if there was a certain symmetry to that, it wasn't like van Gisbergen was new to all this. We might not have heard of him, but that doesn't mean anything. It just means Americans are provincial creatures who don't spent a lot of time thinking about racing in New Zealand.

Where van Gisbergen -- aka, "SVG" -- is THE guy, as it happens.

To begin with, he's 34 years old, not 18 or 19, and he's been wheeling cars similar to Cup cars for 17 years in New Zealand's road-course Supercar Championship series. In that time, van Gisbergen has won three titles, 79 races and 46 poles, and made 174 podiums in 499 starts. And he's won the Bathurst 1000, the Supercar's Daytona 500.

All of that makes him the fourth most successful driver in the series 27-year history.

His ride at Chicago came via Trackhouse Racing's Project 91, whose goal is to give international drivers entree into NASCAR. And if you're looking for international drivers with experience in Cup-type cars, you weren't going to look very long before you found van Gisbergen.

So, yeah, a day for firsts. But not necessarily a day for surprises.

Real life

 They'll be doing something pretty silly today up in Chicago, weather permitting. Bunch of wild boys will climb in muscled-up Toyotas and Chevies and Fords, and then they'll go blaring along Lakeshore Drive and Columbus Drive and Michigan Avenue like they don't have a lick of sense.

They'll bellow past Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park.  Turn Lake Michigan into a blue-green blur (dotted with sailboats if the weather's right). Hang a few squalling lefts and rights like commuters in the express lanes on the Dan Ryan, only crazier.

The Grant Park 220, NASCAR will call this.

Jimmie Johnson, who wanted badly to run this first Chicago street race in his semi-retirement, will not be there.

Something a lot more serious happened to his family this week, see, which is why what happens in Chicago today will feel so ... pointless. It's bread and circus for the masses, is all it is. What happened to Jimmie Johnson's family, on the other hand, is real life at its worst.

What happened was his mother-in-law picked up a gun and shot her husband, and then her 11-year-old grandson, and finally herself.

And so while the masses will gather to see just how fast a man can drive on Lakeshore Drive when there are no cops looking, Chandra Johnson will struggle to find sense in the senseless. In one awful swoop, her mother, her father and a beloved nephew are gone. And by her mother's own hand.

In the days since, speculation has blossomed like summer weeds, because in these matters human beings need a "why". The most plausible explanation is it was delayed-reaction blowback from another family tragedy, the skydiving death of Chandra's brother nine years ago. Mom reportedly had been struggling with depression since.

People will call what happened this week unimaginable, because that's the word everyone hangs on tragedies like this. It's not really. Depression is rampant in 2023 America, for reasons both understood and not so. And Americans die by the gun every day in our national shooting gallery.

Two  more victims were found in a strip-mall hair salon last night in Indianapolis, where there's a shooting in the wee hours almost every night. Thirty more people were shot, and two died, at a Baltimore block party on the same night.

Depression and violent death are our new normal, sad to say. Or at least they are too damn often. That they have touched a celebrity athlete's family, therefore, is not unimaginable at all.

It's just life, real as real. And no fairy tale even for the blessed among us.

Timeout for nerdery

 

I am miles away to the east this hazy morning, in my head. I am in the land of ghost tours and Mr. G's ice cream and the Fourscore Beer Co., and also rocky fields and naked hilltops and topographical features whose names now ring down the years. 

I'm in Gettysburg, Pa., in other words. That's because 160 years ago this morning, just about this time, Harry Heth collided with John Buford's cavalry just west of town, where the hills roll gently and mundane features with names like Willoughby Run and McPherson's farm were about to become notorious.

Day 1 at G'burg, 1863. And what is there to say about that except for the next three days American would slaughter American in unimagined numbers -- giving birth, in the inevitable American way, to both hallowed ground and one of our great tourist traps?

People come to Gettysburg notionless, because it's something you just do if you're an American even if you don't know why. And so a good many who come here know almost nothing about the Civil War. Among other things, this makes Gettysburg park rangers among the most patient men and women in the world.

The Civil War?

 Visitors to Gettysburg know Yankee fought Confederate here, and then some other stuff happened, and then Lee surrendered to Grant at Appendix. Or something like that.

Yet I go back as often as I can, despite the ghost tours and the gift shops where toy muskets and plastic swords and cheesy paper kepis, blue and gray, are prominently displayed. I go back because I'm a confirmed Civil War nerd, and also because Gettysburg speaks to me in a different voice every time I do.

And the wondrous thing about that?

I never know what voice I'm going to hear until I hear it.

One visit I may be drawn to the Wheatfield, thinking about Colonel Cross of New Hampshire and Samuel Zook, Union commanders whose lives ended there on July 2. Once I tramped through the fields and marshes around the Trostle Farm and Plum Run, where a Mississippi politician named William Barksdale led a charge on the same day that nearly broke the Union line until he went down with five bullets in him just ahead of dusk.

I've smoked a cigar at the Indiana monument on Culp's Hill, where a Harvard man named Charles Mudge led a hopeless charge that left him lifeless somewhere in the fields around me. I've spent time alone at the remote spot where a gallant young cavalry officer, Elon Farnsworth, was killed late on July 3 in a senseless charge ordered by his commanding officer, the supremely boneheaded Judson Kilpatrick.

Mudge was just 23 when he died. Farnsworth, too. A Union artillery officer named Alonzo Cushing was 22 when, somewhere inside the wall on Cemetery Ridge where Pickett's charge was gasping its last, a bullet hit him in the mouth and killed him.

And at the other end of the battlefield, on a peaceful knoll where wildflowers blazed red and yellow the last time I was there, a 19-year-old lieutenant named Bayard Wilkeson was mortally wounded and a 29-year-old brigadier general named Francis Barlow grievously so as Confederates swarmed them from three sides.

So much youth. So much gone promise. So many bright lives still drawing breath on this morning 160 years ago, and turning black and horrible in the summer sun by the end of this day or the two days following.

Gettysburg spoke to me in that voice, that day on what's now known as Barlow's Knoll. It was late May and the sun was warm and I sat down next to a silent cannon, watching the breeze blow the wildflowers around and trying to imagine what it must have been like on this hilltop late on the afternoon of July 1, 1863.

I couldn't do it. There was simply too much peace and solitude here now, and so much sound and fury and singing menace in the air then.

It is that impossible leap, I suppose, that makes the Knoll one of my favorite spots on the battlefield. I come here whenever Gettysburg speaks to me in the voice of lost youth and sacrifice, which is often. I wish I were there now.

It's right about 9:30 in the morning, as I write this. Off to the south and west, Buford is hanging tough as Harry Heth piles in more and more troops and artillery. In a little while, John Reynolds and the First Corps will show up, and a Confederate sniper will draw a bead on Reynolds and kill him. A while after that, the fabled Union Iron Brigade -- boys from Michigan and Indiana and Wisconsin -- will plow ahead into the woods, and the Confederates will close in on three sides, and the Midwestern boys will sacrifice themselves to buy their army time.

Me, I'm back here in Indiana, drinking coffee. 

From an Iron Brigade mug, natch.