Little big man

 So Braden Smith is an Indiana Pacer now, and go ahead, tell him he's got no chance. He's 5-10 and 166 pounds and his quicks are decent, but he's not exactly a streak of fire. Why, the NBA will chew him up and spit him out to the G-League, where he'll play for whatever they're calling the late, great Mad Ants these days.

Or so some people undoubtedly will say.

They'll say he's an undersized guard who's not, say, Allen Iverson or Jalen Brunson, or even Nate Archibald. Whom everyone called "Tiny" even though he was a full three inches taller than Braden Smith.

So what will they call Smith?

How about "survivor"?

Because, listen, he's been too small and not quick enough to make up for it his entire life, and all he's done is stick out that stubborn Hoosier chin and say "Oh, yeah, smart guy?" He was Indiana's Mr. Basketball as a senior at Westfield High School, and the only major college coach who offered him was Matt Painter. Know who else offered him?

Appalachian State. Belmont. North Texas. Montana. Toledo. Not exactly Duke or UConn.

So he headed up the road to Purdue, grew a funky Amish beard and became ... well, you know what he became: The best point guard in America. He started all four years for Painter, and when he was done he, Fletcher Loyer and Trey Kaufman-Renn had won more games than any trio in Purdue's decorated basketball history. Oh, and Braden Smith also wound up as college basketball's all-time career assists leader.

Knocked Bobby Hurley off that mountaintop, God bless him.

Yesterday the Chicago Bulls took Smith with the 38th overall pick in the NBA Draft, the eighth in the second round. Then they traded him to the Pacers, who really, really wanted the hometown kid. And now we'll sit back and see what happens.

He'll back up T.J. McConnell at the point, or so the gurus say. And, yes, opposing will begin drooling uncontrollably when they bring the ball up against him. And, yes, he could -- could -- wind up spending time in Noblesville with the Pacers' G-League team.

Me?

I think Braden Smith is going to read that and say, "Oh, yeah, smart guy?"

And then prove us all wrong again.

Because, yeah, he may be a little man, as these things go. But he's the biggest little man you'll ever see.

One pooch, screwed

 At some point you hurt for the kid, if you're at all human. A little, anyway. A ... smidge.

You do this because Brendan Sorsby is 22 years old and has a gambling jones that wrecked his college career, which doesn't even take into account he's 22 years old and prone to doing the dumb stuff 22-year-olds do. Like, for instance, listening to the wrong people. 

Surely he did that. Sued the NCAA when it told him he couldn't play college football anymore, because he gambled on college football like ... well, like a hooked-through-the-gills addict. Won an injunction to play for Texas Tech from some local Go Red Raiders judge. Decided, nah, never mind, when the NCAA's lawyers came after him again.

He'd enter the NFL's supplemental draft instead. Yeah, sure. Perfect. Why, that's just what he'd d--

Oops.

Turns out he won't be entering the NFL's supplemental draft, because the other day the NFL said, "No, you won't be entering our supplemental draft." That's on account of the NFL announced it wouldn't be conducting a supplemental draft this year.

Sooo ...

So, Brendan Sorsby is a football player without a football, so to speak.

He can't go back to college. No NFL team will be rolling the dice (pun, well intended) on him for the 2026 season. He can't even head north to hook up with a Canadian Football League team, because it's June and the CFL already is well into its season.

So he sits until next April's draft, where there's no guarantee any team will risk a pick on a chronic gambler. In fact it would be an upset of any team did, given how hinky NFL front offices are about players with baggage, and especially quarterbacks with baggage.

That means Brendan Sorsby would come to training camp as a free agent, if he comes to an NFL training camp at all. Likely he will, because he's a quarterback with skills, and if you're a quarterback with skills someone will give you a look. Heck, someone would have given Pablo Escobar a look if he could throw the deep out, on the off chance he was the next Kurt Warner.

This does not mean Brendan Sorsby isn't the latest 22-year-old who's screwed the proverbial pooch. He is. At least for now.

Youth is wasted on the young. Home truth.

American History 1, England 0

 Underdog Ghana beat the mighty Three Lions of England 0-0 yesterday (because a draw is a win, in this case), and it happened in Foxborough, Mass., which prompted a fellow Civil War/history nerd friend to make an especially witty observation on Facebook.

He said the British not being able to handle a big underdog in Massachusetts seemed vaguely familiar.

Absolutely.

In fact, if you watched Ghana repeatedly blunt one scoring chance after another from Harry Kane and the Brits, you wondered (or at least I did) if Thomas Gage was looking on from the great infinite. 

Gage, for the history-challenged in the audience, was the commander of the British occupation forces in Boston. He's also the guy who lost Boston thanks to his disastrous search for weapons on Lexington and Concord Day, and to Henry Knox hauling Fort Ticonderoga's artillery over the Berkshires to George Washington, who placed them on the Dorchester Heights and put Gage literally under the gun.

"Gee, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "That's a lot of history. Now my head hurts."

Well, TOO BAD. 'Cause the Blob's famously twisted imagination has been working overtime again, and it's conjured up a juicy scenario: Gage, King George and a bunch of ordinary British soccer fans sitting in a working-class pub watching the last ten minutes or so of England-Ghana, when Kane and Co. should have scored multiple times but did what England always does in the World Cup, which is ... well, choke, not to put too fine a point on it.

Hit the crossbar and post a time or two. Booted the ricochet off one of those high, from point-blank range. Got robbed by Ghana's keeper a couple times, then robbed again when a Ghana defender, at the very last split second, headed clear a ball bound for the top corner.

In the end, England outshot Ghana 19-2 in the match. And couldn't find the back of the net with a single one of those 19 shots.

And so to that imaginary pub we go ...

George III: "Nineteen shots! For God's sake, I could have scored if you'd given me 19 shots. This is all your fault, Gage."

Gage: "MY fault? How can it be MY fault, your Majesty? I've been dead for 200 years!"

George III: "Because if you hadn't screwed up and lost us Boston, America would still be ours, which means Christian Pulisic, Alex Freeman, Folarin Balogun and that lot would be playing for us. And maybe THEN that choking dog Kane could have scored."

Ordinary British Soccer Fan (dressed in a Kane jersey and wearing a St. George's flag like a cape): "'Ey, 'ey, 'ey now, your Majesty. 'Arry's our man. He just had a spot of bad luck today, like all the boys."

George III: "And I had a spot of bad luck when I sent Gage to Boston to quell Adams and Hancock and that rabble."

Gage: "I'm SORRY, OK? How many times do I have to say I'm sorry?"

George III: "As many times as we hit the bloody crossbar today. For the love of the resurrected Christ, it's as if Ghana had two extra players manning the pitch for it. I could almost see Adams and Hancock sitting on top of the Ghana goal swatting away our shots."

Ordinary British Soccer Fan: "Yeah! Up those colonials!"

George III: "And that's another thing. Not only did we lose -- OK, drew, but still -- we drew with another bunch of colonials. And Ghana wasn't even OUR colony. It was a French colony. Which I suppose means those idiots will think of this as payback for the Seven Years' War or some such thing."

Gage (hopefully): "So this is FRANCE'S fault now? Does this mean I'm off the hook?"

George III: "Nah, this is still on you. I shoulda sent Johnny Burgoyne to Boston instead."

Gage: "But ... but your Majesty, didn't Burgoyne lose his entire army at Sarato-"

George III: "Ah, crap. You're right. What a lame-ass empire. Why couldn't I have been king of Ghana? At least they can play this bloody game."

Pros to pros

 You know how it used to be, back in the Before Time. Some NBA team threw a wad of cash at some big-deal college coach, and the big-deal college coach went off to wrangle the paid professionals, and, ah, geez, how did THAT work out?

Not well, usually.

Usually Rick Pitino would fail with the Knicks. Or John Calipari would fail with the Nets. Or a Billy Donovan or P.J. Carlesimo would do well enough to stick around, but would never be confused with, say, Phil Jackson or Pat Riley.

That's because coaching kids in college and pros in the NBA were two utterly different dynamics, requiring two different mind and skill sets. Authoritarianism worked in one world; it rarely did in the other.

Now?

Now comes the news that Dusty May is headed to the Dallas Mavericks from the University of Michigan, where in two seasons he took the Wolverines from 8-24 to 37-3 and a national title. Went 64-13 in those two seasons overall.

No wonder the Mavericks wanted him.

And no wonder, by the way, it's not nearly so much a leap of faith as it used to be.

This is because Dusty May has one huge advantage over those who followed this path before him:

He's not going from college to the pros. He's going from the pros to the pros.

That's because the virtually unregulated Name, Image and Likeness money and wide-open transfer portal has transformed the college game into the NBA without guardrails. Kids chase the money now as avidly as the grownups do, and with fewer restraints. So the dynamic between the college game and the pro game, in terms of how a coach manages both the Xs-and-Os and the human beings charged with executing them, isn't much different.

Oh, you can still be a my-way-or-the-highway hardass, in college buckets. But with few exceptions -- Matt Painter's Purdue springs to mind, and Tom Izzo's Michigan State -- your players more than likely will choose the highway.

Because the highway's wide open these days. Plus it pays more.

That's why, in more and more places, rosters turn over almost entirely every year now. Even May, after winning a national title, was going to be bringing in a whole raft of newbies he would have had to integrate with the holdovers. But with the Mavericks?

He'll still have Cooper Flagg, the NBA Rookie of the Year. He'll still have, barring any trades, Kyrie Irving and Khris Middleton and Klay Thompson. None of them will be entering the transfer portal.

In that sense, then, the NBA actually offers less chaos and more control now for a head coach.  That's the polar opposite of  the Before Time, which is why so many prominent college coaches (Paging Mike Krzyzewski ... Paging Bob Knight ...) chose to stay at Western Northeastern Tech State rather than take the NBA's money and run.

Or as a longtime friend and former sportswriting colleague texted me when the news came down: "Who could have guessed five years ago that in 2026 the NBA would provide coaches with a more predictable, stable and desirable work environment than college basketball?"

Indeed.

Stinkin' decorum

 Wyndham Clark wrestled Shinnecock Hills to the ground and pried the U.S. Open from its grasp yesterday, hanging on to beat Sam Burns by a skinny stroke after leading by a fat six going into the final round.

Futzed around and put up a 3-over 73 Sunday, Wyndham did. Burns shot a 67 to leapfrog Scottie Scheffler and a pile of others. The win was Clark's second Open title, and he led this one wire-to-wire.

And the gallery hated it.

Maybe it's just a New York thing, although the Blob is loathe to stereotype. But this was not the genteel golf-clap crowd at which those outside the golfsphere like to poke gentle fun. These were the knuckleheads from "Caddyshack", pooping in the club pool and shouting "Noonan!" and "Miss it!" as poor Danny lined up his winning putt in the Bushwood caddies tournament. 

They clapped and cheered, but only when Wyndham flubbed a shot. They shouted "Don't choke, Wyndham!" in the middle of his backswing. Security escorted a few of the worst offenders from the premises, so at least some measure of decorum was maintained.

The fans -- or at least a vocal chunk of them -- decided they didn't need no stinkin' decorum, of course. But then, as a friend of mine occasionally reminds, fans are (bleep)holes.

These (bleep)holes in particular apparently were cut from the same cloth as the (bleep)holes who heckled Rory McIlroy and some of the other Europeans last year during the Ryder Cup, which was also played at a New York track (Bethpage Black). Again, not to stereotype New Yorkers in general as (bleep)holes or anything. I'm sure some of them actually were not raised by wolves and know how to behave in public at least half the time.

Which, you know, is the company golf used to keep.

Not any more, apparently. Now it's just the upper deck on an NFL Sunday in Philly, only better dressed.

Not that the players are a lot more civilized, these days.

As some guardians of the game have observed, there's a serious outbreak of f-bombs among the golfers when they "over-pure" or simply hack a shot these days. Also a thrown club here and there. Which, according to the guardians, never happened when Jack and Arnie and Tom Watson went around collecting majors like boxtops.

They have a point. Maybe even more than a point.

Part of all the ungentlemanly rooting against Wyndham Clark yesterday, for instance, is because Wyndham Clark has not always been a gentleman himself. He's kind of arrogant, although most of his pampered lot are to one extent or other. And in last year's U.S. Open at historic old Oakmont, he threw a toddler's fit after missing the cut and destroyed three lockers in the players' dressing room.

An orange slice and juicebox calmed him right down, however. OK, so I made that part up.

In any case, not always the most likable guy, our Wyndham. Which doesn't excuse the (bleep)holes who taunted him, of course. And it's another point for the guardians when they bemoan the erosion of standards in professional golf, both on the course and behind the ropes.

It used to be a gentleman's game, or so the lore tells us.

Now, apparently, it's just a game. Like, I don't know, demolition derby or something.

OK. So not that.

Yet.

Of fathers and sons

 Father's Day again, and again a reminder that time is a relentless taskmaster, forever demanding a receding present. It has been almost eight years now since my dad laid down his burden, and every day, in small ways and big, it strikes me how quickly the years fly by, and yet how much so many of their echoes linger.

Just the other day, for instance, I found cornmeal mush at the local Amish market.

Bought some. Took it home. Fried up a mess of it, and remembered how my dad, a Depression kid who grew up eating mush, taught his kids to grow up eating it, too.

"Well, I'll be, Jackie, he DOES know what's good!" I imagine him telling Mom in the great holy forever, because he so often told my sister and me the opposite.

Usually when he was devouring liver and onions. Ewww.

Anyway, this morning I came across something I wrote in 2018, on the occasion of our last Father's Day with Dad. He died five months later, 11 days after his 91st birthday. But by Father's Day the Lewy-Body dementia that took him had already stolen much of the man we knew from us, cruel bastard affliction that it is.

And so, on another Father's Day, here's what I wrote on that one. I can't express what fathers mean to us, and the legacies they pass on, any better than this:

We'll go see Dad on this Father's Day, and maybe he'll be with us and maybe he won't. He is 90 years old now and lives in a memory-care unit, his life force at twilight and dimming. Dementia and accompanying Parkinson's have reduced him to a shell of the Dad we once knew, a shrunken figure scrunched down in his comfy recliner, the TV endlessly tuned to old black-and-white movies that go mostly unseen and unacknowledged.

And yet.

And yet, perhaps this will be a day like the day not long ago, when his eyes briefly focused and he pointed at the TV and said, "Humphrey Bogart." And then pointed again and said "Sidney."

Which would be "Sidney Greenstreet," the old character actor. Dad was right on both counts. It was an old Bogart flick, and Sidney Greenstreet was in it.

You live for those moments, as your father recedes toward what Abraham Lincoln called the dark indefinite shore. Most days, when he's awake, he is far away from us, his mumbled words describing things and people who lived and moved 60 or 70 years ago. One day he told me he'd been visited by an old high school basketball teammate who'd been dead for decades. Another day he might greet me with the news that he'd sold his Model T, which he kept in a barn I presumed had been gone for decades -- and, oh, by the way, did he tell me they'd cut off one of his legs?

You learn to roll with all of that. You learn even to roll with it when he asks how Mom's doing, and if she's coming to visit him anytime soon.

Mom has been gone since 2013.

Still, he is Dad, and sometimes even now you see glimpses of it. You'll catch a crooked grin or a dusty chuckle, and remember how easily he smiled, and that booming, audible-three-states-away guffaw of his. And you'll remember that this was the man who taught you a reverence for history and old things, and to do a job right or don't do it at all, and to honor your commitments.

I am not half the man my father was, but some of it took. My wife frequently notes that I go at everything -- work, exercise, sports --"like a dog killing chickens," and that is Dad's doing. Do it right or don't do it at all.

And so there came a time, not long ago, when I was walking out the door after a visit, and Dad called after me. Hollered after me, truth be told. Startled, I turned around and walked back into his room.

"What is it, Dad?"

He looked at me -- really looked at me, which doesn't happen often anymore.

"Get me out of this chair," he said.

"Dad," I said, "we've been over this. Your legs don't work anymore. You can't stand up anymore."

He kept looking at me.

"Get me out of this chair," he said again.

And then his eyes softened.

"Help me," he whispered.

Well, that did it. I should have called for the aides, who knew how to move him. But those two words -- "Help me" -- erased my common sense.

So I lifted him up. He weighs only 140 or so now, but he was dead weight and 140 pounds of dead weight is pretty much a bridge too far for a 63-year-old man who never had any upper body strength to begin with.

But somehow, the dog killed the chickens again. I managed to get him from his chair into his wheelchair. And when he was settled, and I was trying to catch my breath, he looked at me and said two words that seemed to reverse time.

"Thank you."

Whoa. Hold on there, Dad.

That's my line. 

An American story

 The U.S. men's soccer team put on another fine show yesterday in the World Cup, smothering Australia 2-0 and winning its group after Panama clipped Turkey 1-0 later in the day.

Know what that makes our guys?

It makes them the first USMNT in history ever to clinch a spot in the knockout rounds with a group match still to play.

It also makes them about as American as America gets, for anyone who might have forgotten what America is and always should be.

This iscbecause the player who headed in the Americans' second goal in the waning minutes of the first was a 21-year-old named Alex Freeman, and you may have heard of his dad. His name is Antonio Freeman, and he has a Super Bowl ring. Won it as a stickout wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers in 1996, with whom he spent most of a career in which he caught 477 passes for 7,251 yards and 61 touchdowns.

His best season came two years later, when he was Brett Favre's go-to guy, snagging 84 balls for a league-leading 1,424 yards and 14 sixes.

In other words, his kid gets his athleticism honest.

He's fast, he's got quicks, he has a gymnast's ability to control his body in the air: Sound familiar?

So here, on America's team, you've got a young man who grew up around American football but took its DNA to the soccer pitch. And another young man (Weston McKennie) who was an Air Force brat who started playing soccer in Kaiserslautem, Germany, while his dad was stationed at Ramstein Air Force base. And yet another young man (Folarin Balogun) who grew up in London the son of Nigerian parents, but who chose to play for the U.S. because he happened to be born in Brooklyn.

Balogun scored two goals in the USMNT's 4-1 win over Paraguay in its World Cup opener. Which, as a friend of the Blob pointed out, is the best argument for birthright citizenship in a nation whose leaders want to get rid of this very American fundamental right.

On this American team, there are players who hail from 11 states, everywhere from Massachusetts to Texas and California to Delaware. There are players whose hometowns are London, Nuremberg and Almere-Stad in the Netherlands. It is, in other words, as remarkably polygot a team as America itself.

Sometimes, especially in these fractured days, we forget that. We forget that America is and always has been a patchwork of cultures, belief systems and backgrounds whose best self is our common striving -- and whose worst self is embodied by those who use fear and loathing to divide us into two camps: Americans, and some treacherous Other. 

Well, guess what, boys and girls?

In this country, we are all Others.  It's the American story right down to the ground.

As a certain soccer team keeps reminding us these days.