An educator's reward

 Drove past the place that will bear Russ Isaacs' name from this fall on, and it's a fine-looking joint. Immaculate emerald turf, grandstands gleaming in the sun on either side, big modern scoreboard looming above the south end zone. There's even a pressbox (Thanks, guys!) done up in the school colors of black and gold.

It's been years and a couple of state championships coming, but Snider High School will have a home field come late August. Should have -- could have -- been done a long time ago, but high school football fields don't come cheap these days, and the money always seemed to be needed elsewhere.

But now the thing is done at a price tag of $30 million, and if the usual codgers will gripe about that ("In our day we didn't need $30 million for a football field, we just used Farmer Brown's cow pasture!"), no one within earshot is griping about calling the place Russ Isaacs Field. This is because Snider could hardly have named it for anyone else.

Calling someone an institution is far too easy in these devalued days, but if Russ Isaacs isn't one at Snider High School, they should retire the word. He spent 50 years walking the halls there, for one thing, and during that time he did everything but sell popcorn -- and who knows, he might have done that, too.

Most of us knew him as Snider's head football coach for 18 years, during which time his teams won the school's first state title and were runnersup a couple of other times. But that was just one hat he wore.

He also coached wrestling and taught business and served as dean of students and athletic director at various times, a career arc that virtually made him Mr. Snider. And something more, above all else: An educator.

You could miss that on Friday nights, when Russ prowled the Snider sideline wearing the football coach's trademark glower above his signature Fu Manchu. One of the local teevees once aired footage of one of his fiery locker room speeches, and my wife saw the Fu and that intense gaze and said, "He looks mean."

All I could do was chuckle.

"You couldn't be more wrong," I said.

Because when you got to know Russ you quickly discovered there was more to him than Triple Flood X-Curl On Two. Underneath the glower and the intensity was a man who saw football its proper context -- not as an end in itself, but as part of the educational whole. It's why he always wanted his football players to wrestle or run track or play baseball or whatever, because he realized they'd be better football players and more wholly rounded young adults because of it.

Recently, one of his former students addressed that very thing in a letter to the Fort Wayne Community Schools board, which announced last week Snider's new field would be named for Isaacs, and honored him for his induction earlier this summer into the National High School Athletic Coaches Hall of Fame.

"He had a unique gift for seeing potential where others saw limits," wrote Terry McKinney, a 1989 Snider grad. "He pushed me tirelessly to maximize whatever ability I had. And, more importantly, he demanded and encouraged me to become the best man I could possibly be."

In other words, Russ Isaacs did what an educator is supposed to do, if he or she is at all devoted to the calling.

He educated.

The money game

We begin today with this, from ESPN yesterday:

Notre Dame has reached a multiyear deal with SoFi Technologies that will place the financial service company's brand on the Fighting Irish's jerseys in every sport starting this season, the university announced Tuesday.

The six-year deal is worth about $18 million to $20 million per year, according to industry sources, and is believed to be the richest in college athletics history ...

And so it goes, and so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut was so fond of saying.

So it goes, as our congress critters put their shaggy heads together to figure out what to do about college athletics, now that college athletics has gone full professional. As usual with the politicians, they're about 30 years too late.

See, the road to athletes-for-hire and unrestricted transfer portal warfare didn't begin yesterday, when Notre Dame signed on with a financial services company and Ohio State finalized a $17 mill deal to plaster its student-athletes with (speaking of financials) JP Morgan Chase logos. No, indeedy.

It began the first time a school cut some chunky deal with an apparel company, and turned its student-athletes into billboards for its corporate partners by outfitting them in Nike swooshes and the like. It began when schools started selling some rocket-launcher quarterback's jersey in the school bookstore, and Rocket Launcher didn't see a dime.

It began when the college pashas decided it was OK for video game companies to use images of student-athletes without the student-athletes' permission, and again without any compensation for them. And it began the first time a Nick Saban or Dabo Sweeney signed an eight-digit deal to coach football, or the Big Ten or SEC or Notre Dame inked their own eight-to-ten-digit agreements with ESPN or NBC or Fox or CBS.

So, yeah, it's a money game now for the sis-boom-bah set, and what else is new? Other than the worker bees getting to negotiate their own fat arrangements these days.

Which, let's face it, is why the politicians are suddenly in a dither about Saving College Athletics. Don't recall any of them palavering about College Athletics needing Saving when the universities started paying the Sabans and Dabos like CEOs.

Look. There's no denying the current system is unsustainable, if for no other reason than it's not really a system. Thanks to the NCAA's benign neglect, it's Judge Roy Bean and the Law West of the Pecos now. Which of course is no law at all.

But that's hardly the fault of the "student-athletes," who are only following the example set for them over the years by their colleges and universities. You reap what you sow, and the reaping has scorched the earth. So at least some structure would be, you know, nice.

Letting Congress pokes its nose in, however, is hardly a solution. Especially under the current Regime, which rivals Larry, Curley and Moe in its ability to make a bad situation worse.

You want to "fix" college athletics?

Great. Turn the clock back.

Let the SoFis and Morgan-Chases contribute to a school's scholarship and career development programs without using the student-athletes to promote their businesses. Make the coaches part of the university again by paying them like any other member of the faculty and requiring them to teach academic courses, the way they used to. And tell the ESPNs, CBSes   and NBCs they're welcome to televise the games, but the schools reserve the right to decide where and when.

"Oh, come on, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "That's totally unrealistic. You might as well  try to bring back the Model T."

Maybe so. But you know what?

At least the Model T was reliable.

An ancient lament

 Some guys re-invent the wheel. Others just re-invent complaining about how boring the wheel can be when you put it in the wrong place.

And so here I am today, cruising the tangled undergrowth of the interwhatsis per usual. And here are all these folks saying what a shame it was NASCAR couldn't put on a better show at motorsports' holiest of holies ... and, gee whiz, what a snooze-fest that was ... and, boy howdy, how embarrassing was it when the cameras went wide-angle and it looked like you could hit most of the grandstands with a grenade launcher and not harmed a soul?

One wiseass even compared the Brickyard 400 to the Tournament of Roses parade, and said if he squinted just right he could see Goofy running fifth on the City of Pasadena float.

Oh, wait. That was me who wrote that.

Fifteen years ago.

In a column I wrote about the president of Fox saying the problem with NASCAR was its races were just too darn long.

In other words, all this chatter about the Brickyard -- even about the length of races, which Kyle Larson brought up on Sunday -- is as old as the sands of antiquity. So as I hacked through the aforementioned undergrowth, all I could do was smile and shake my head and mutter, "You guys been living in a cave somewhere?" 

Because the Brickyard's been a lousy venue for the stock car boys since practically forever, and you can credit Dale Jarrett and Robert Yates for exposing that. Back when the world was young -- OK, so when the Brickyard 400 was, anyway -- Yates brought all those muscle-y Fords to Indy, and in 1999 Jarrett just drove away from everyone in one, rendering comatose the six-figure crowd broiling in the early August sun.

Jarrett led 117 laps that day, as everyone else hopelessly gave chase. And there, perhaps, you had the birth of the ancient lament: Gee, this is a really special place and all, but, man, the racing is BORRR-ing.

And then along came 2008, which killed the vibe for good. Two calamities showed up at once that year: One, the economy crashed, hitting the working class that has always been NASCAR's base hardest of all; two, Goodyear brought a marshmallow to Indy instead of a racing tire, turning the Brickyard into a series of half-hour episodes punctuated by mandatory yellows to switch out the Stay-Pufts.

That was the end of the mega-crowds, and the beginning of advertising and American flags covering vast swatches of the Speedway's miles of seating. The race still draws 70,000 or so every year -- other venues would kill for that sort of turnout -- but 70,000 in the vastness of IMS looks like empty. Horrible visuals, in other words.

Anyway, 18 years have passed since 2008 stuck a fork in the Brickyard 400. Which of course makes the internet chatter the last couple of days very old news to those of us with long memories.

"What a boring race!" they cry, or words to that effect.

Well, yes, and what else is new?

"What a terrible venue for NASCAR!" they cry.

Yes, and water is wet.

"Not a single green-flag pass for the lead!" "These races are too long, especially this one!" "It's all the fault of this terrible Next Gen car!"

Replies, in order: Been there, done that ... What, you're just noticing? ... No, it's not exclusively the fault of the Next Gen car. Because the Brickyard was an afternoon nap when the Original Gen car was was tooling around the place.

So what to do about it?

Nothing, because no one's going to tear down IMS and start over again. Although I suppose what might help, at least for the race-length part of it, is getting rid of the idiotic stage system -- a wholly artificial construct which brings everything to a screeching halt twice a race for made-for-TV restarts, and which everyone ignores except the talking heads who are paid not to.

Quick: Who won Stage 1 and Stage 2 on Sunday?

That would be Ty Gibbs and Ross Chastain. But you'd never have known that if I hadn't told you just now.

So, yeah, offload it. As for the rest ... it is what it is. 

Which is a phrase I hate like Brussels sprouts. But it seems to fit here.

Heim time

 I wouldn't know  a genuine phee-nom these days if he went upside my head with his phee-nomness, this being an era of supercharged hype. But I think I saw one yesterday, tooling around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in a stock car.

His name is Corey Heim, he turned 24 just three weeks ago, and if he's not the next big star in NASCAR Cup racing, he sure played one on TV yesterday. Driving the 67 car for Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin's team, 23XI Racing, he qualified seventh for the Brickyard 400, passed his boss (Hamlin) for the lead on the last restart, and led 58 laps -- including the last 35, when Christopher Bell and an onrushing Joey Logano were filling his mirrors and every nerve in his body must have been singing arias.

But the kid stayed cool, the kid stayed chilly. Despite his ride getting looser with every lap -- and despite the veteran Bell hanging within half-a-second of him all the way -- he just kept getting into and off of Indy's notoriously quirky corners, never giving Bell enough of an opening to get a run on him.

It was a masterful piece of wheel work from a young driver who A) isn't even a full-time Cupper yet, and B) had never so much as seen IMS until this weekend.

And yet there Corey Heim was at the end, kissing the bricks, kissing his girlfriend and kissing the trophy as if Indy were, I don't know, South Hog Wallow Speedway or somewhere. He'll run all of 12 Cup races this season, and already in his first eight starts he's  won two of them -- including, yesterday, one of the series' crown jewels.

Last guy to win twice in his first eight Cup starts?

Some dude named A.J. Foyt. Perhaps you've heard of him.

So who is Corey Heim?

Well, he hails from Marietta, Ga., and last season he won NASCAR's Craftsman Truck series in a blowout. Won a series-record 12 races, and led at least a lap in every race on the schedule. 

Everyone knew the kid was special, in other words. But this special, this fast?

Hoo boy. 

Now, it must be said here that Heim's win was only the culmination of a weekend in which youth was well-served. Carson Hocevar, who started on the pole and finished ninth, is just 23. Tyler Gibbs, also just 23, started fourth and led 46 laps. So there's that.

There's also this: At 24, Heim is the youngest Brickyard winner since ... well, since a dude named Jeff Gordon, who was just 23 when he won the first Brickyard 400 in 1994.

Perhaps you've heard of him, too.

A too-close encounter

 (In which the Blob departs Sportsball World for a brief excursion to Wackadoodle World, or something like that. The standard hall pass/library procedures apply to all those who don't want to make the trip.)

I've always wondered what a certified loon of the MAGA variety would sound like in person, not being one who runs in those circles. Thanks to a trip to the supermarket to replenish my ice-cream bar stash, I wonder no longer.

 See, I bumped into this guy walking out. And out of nowhere he turned around and asked if I knew how long it would take to count to a trillion. 

"A while?" I guessed.

"THIRTY-TWO THOUSAND YEARS!" he bellowed.

He was a raggedy sort who looked to be about my age (71), with gray aging-hippie hair and a gleam in his eye that was genial with a touch of ... well, crazy. And as we stood there, he launched into a tirade about the trillions the government spends, and how we needed to "cut the head off the snake" because the Deep State and the New World Order were coming for us, and also the damn Muslims.

"They ARE the New World Order!" he cried, or words to that effect. "And, boy, if you don't believe the way they believe they'll cut your head off! That's gonna happen here if we don't do something about it! You know what I'm sayin'?"

I said, sure, absolutely (or words to that effect). and we parted ways in the parking lot.  After which I said to myself, "Well, THAT was interesting" and headed home before the ice cream bars melted.

Later still I surmised that my too-close encounter of the nutso kind was with a man who was likely mentally ill and off his meds, if in fact he'd ever been on them. I also suspected (entirely without evidence, mind you) that he spent an inordinate amount of time watching Fox News or Newsmax or one of the other hard-right propaganda outlets, which daily stoke the sort of paranoia and nutso-ness my friend displayed in all its glory.

Can a steady diet of Laura Loomer or Laura Ingraham or Dan Bongino literally drive you insane? An interesting hypothesis.

In any case, now I know what a certified MAGA loon sounds like. As they say, you learn something every day.

A narrative derailed

 Team Spoon beat Team Coop 129-122 last night in the WNBA All-Star game, and, hey, look, none of those mean black girls (or mean white girls) punched out Caitlin Clark. Why, there's even a picture here of All-Star game MVP Jonquel Jones holding the trophy in one arm and hugging Caitlin with the other.

And when Caitlin dropped back-to-back logo threes on her way to 17 points?

Paige Bueckers from Team Coop -- one Clark's "rivals" who allegedly are just eaten up with jealousy of her -- didn't sneer or make a snippy comment or turn green with envy.

Nah. She just laughed and said "You goin' for MVP? Damn!"

This was bad news for the yapping sports talk poodles and other media poop-stirrers who've been working overtime to sell the narrative that poor Caitlin's being roughed up and persecuted by (choose one or all) hate-filled lesbians; hate-filled black lesbians; or  hate-filled established stars who can't stand that this relative newcomer is stealing their starlight with fame she doesn't deserve.

So they're playing rough with her because it's a jealousy thing or a black-white thing or a gay-straight thing, and not because, well, it's a rough league and has been for a long time -- mainly because the officiating stinks like Christmas leftovers in March.

It's a narrative that ignores the fact CC sometimes brings it on herself, because she's a platinum-grade chirper and an enthusiastic seller of fouls. And then chirps at the officials when they don't buy, which is why she's one tech away from a game's suspension.

None of this is criticism, mind you, at least explicitly. After all, Clark's hardly the first player, nor will she be the last, to bring a certain combativeness to her work. You could even argue it's part of why she's so good.

But when the media and grandstanding politicians choose to refract that through a black-white, gay-straight lens, they're using Clark to push an agenda, not reality. And that rightly ticks her off.

"I think there's just like a false characterization of who I am sometimes," she said in an ESPN interview Friday. "And I get it, like as a reporter or blogger, you can write an opinion piece and that's your job and whatever, but at the same time, you don't know me. We've never had a conversation.

"I get people have a job to do, but at the same time, like don't make accusations about my character and who I am when you don't know me."

Absolutely. And the villains in this manufactured narrative could say exactly the same thing.

Perhaps last night they did.

Brickyard memories

It's either a measure of my own squishy mind, or the continuing diminishment of one of NASCAR's crown jewels, that the Brickyard 400 just flat snuck up on me this week.

It was Thursday before I realized the stock cars were at Indy again this weekend, and that's a hell of a note for someone who spent the first 20 Brickyards sweating through his shirts in the midsummer IMS heat. Covered Jeff Gordon's first win at Indy in the first Brickyard, and covered his last win there in the 20th. Not that I was going for symmetry or anything.

In any event, they're runnin' the big track again today, and it's not Gordon or Dale Earnhardt or Jimmie Johnson bringing them to the green. It's some kid named Carson Hocevar, who hails from Portage, Mich., just south of Kalamazoo. Carson Hocevar is 23 years old, which is the same age Gordon was when he won the first Brickyard in 1994.

Not that I was going for symmetry or anything.

Anyway, I know next to nothing about Carson Hocevar, except that if you'd asked me I'd have guessed he centered the second line for the Montreal Canadiens. I also know next to nothing about the team he drives for -- Spire Motorsports -- except that it's not Hendrick or Gibbs or Penske or Michael Jordan's team.

What I do know is I'll probably watch the Brickyard anyway, on account of those 20 years I covered it and the memories they stir. Which I suppose means this is as good a time as any to resurrect what I wrote two years ago on the 30th anniversary of the first Brickyard ...

Thirty years on now, and ye gods, time is a mighty river. It rolls and rolls and now it's 2024, and 1994 seems as far away sometimes as Model Ts and bathtub gin.

It  is not, of course. I know this even though Rick Mast is 67 years old now and owns an environmental cleanup service down in  Rockbridge Baths, Va., and he hasn't strapped into a stock car in 22 years.

Rick Mast, you see, brought the field to the green as the polesitter in the first Brickyard 400 on the first Saturday in August in 1994. This weekend the Brickyard turns 30, but Rick Mast is where this all starts for me, because I was there for the first one and somewhere I have a photo of Mast in his black-and-white No. 1 diving into the first turn on the first lap. 

If I dug that photo out of whatever box it's in now, it would all come back to me: The 250,000 Mass O' Humanity; the newness; the blare of Detroit iron rocketing off those cliffs of grandstand running the length of the most famous main straightaway in motorsport. 

I close my eyes now, and I see a forest of Confederate stars-and-bars fluttering above the campers along 25th Street, because NASCAR gonna NASCAR. I see the thin smoke rising from the morning campfires. And I see the men and women in their Dale Earnhardt Goodwrench shirts and Ricky Rudd Tide shirts and Terry Labonte Kellogg's Corn Flakes shirts watching the morning bacon sizzle, and cracking open the first cold one of the day. 

Oh, it was some show, that first Brickyard. The Journal Gazette sent four (or was it five?) of us down to cover the thing, and all four (five?) of us crammed into one tiny hotel room clear across town from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was just about the only lodging left in the whole blessed town.

Out at the track, meanwhile, there was this prevailing sense of wonder ("Holy gee, Martha! Stock cars at Indy!") to everything, and not a little out-of-body weirdness. It wasn't just looking up and seeing Rudd or Earnhardt or Rusty Wallace rumble out of the garage area in their Fords or Chevies or Pontiacs. It was looking up and seeing Indy 500 veterans Danny Sullivan and Gary Bettenhausen and Stan Fox wheeling stock cars around, and A.J. Foyt trying to stick a Barney-the-Dinosaur-purple car in the show.

Eighty-six entries showed up looking to get in the field, and some of them were driven by  ancients. Fifty-two-year-old Morgan Shepherd was there. Fifty-seven-year-old H.B. Bailey.  And then there was 66-year-old Hershel McGriff, who'd started racing when he came back from the war in 1945.

Everyone wanted in on this, in other words. Everyone was acutely aware history was riding shotgun with them in a way it perhaps never would again -- and that included me with my little cheapo camera, and all the other media who crammed into the tiny cinderblock building  that served (inadequately) as the media center then.

What we all got from that first Brickyard was not only history but a decent race besides, and none of us then understood how rare a thing the latter would become. The stock-car boys barreled down those long, long straightaways and through the squared-off, one-groove turns, and there were some fascinating storylines. 

Who could forget the Battlin' Bodines, Geoff and Brett, who wrecked one another and then went public with their brotherly feud? And who could forget the finish, when it got down to Ernie Irvan, Rusty Wallace and young Jeff Gordon?

Irvan was leading when he had a tire go down, opening the door for Gordon, who grew up eight miles down the road in Pittsboro. The kid blazed home to the checkers, and it was as if the narrative was ordained by the racing gods: (Almost) hometown boy wins the first Brickyard 400.

Now it's 30 years later, and Jeff Gordon is a 53-year-old racing exec and elder statesman. And I haven't been to a Brickyard 400 since 2015, long after the shine wore off and the multitudes stopped coming because the racing frankly stinks, becoming a really loud parade of sponsor billboards more often than not ...

But 30 years ago?

Well, I've got this photo here to remind me how different it was. And hanging in my closet I've got an inaugural Brickyard 400 polo I bought that weekend, with a gold-and-purple crest that forever reminds me of the date: Aug. 6, 1994 ... 

Time like a mighty river, carving its path.