Writer's block

They say you learn something every day, and this week I've learned  a lot. I mean, a lot.

I've learned what was in Indianapolis Star  sports columnist Gregg Doyel's head the other day, for starters.

I've learned how a sports columnist should and shouldn't go about columnizing, and what his or her role should be, and some of it I've learned from people you'd never imagine had so much knowledge on the subject.

I've learned,  mostly, that Gregg Doyel should be fired immediately for what was in his head the other day, and for what it led to him doing. Which was gross and ridiculous and conduct unbecoming a professional sports columnist, and did we mention gross and ridiculous?

What he did was make the heart shape with his hands when it was his turn to ask Caitlin Clark a question. Same heart shape Clark makes toward her family after every game.

Then he said, "I'm glad you're here."

And then Clark said ,"Hey, I do that toward my family after every game."

And then Doyel said ,"Do it to me and we'll get along fine," or words to that effect.

And, yeah, again, just so you don't misunderstand (though you probably will), it was gross and skeevy and "ewww", and disrespectful  to Ms. Clark, and unprofessional in a "What the hell were you thinking?" sort of way.

There's no defending it. There's no defending him, at least in this instance. And I'm not doing that here no matter how you choose to interpret it.

What I am going to do is say it sure is amazing how much everyone seems to know about things they don't really know about.

For instance: I don't know Doyel well, but I have interacted with him several times in various pressboxes, and he seems like a decent guy. I also enjoy his work, generally -- though if I may presume to say so as not nearly so accomplished  a columnist, I think he leads too much with his emotions sometimes, and thus occasionally strays into the dreaded Maudlin Zone.

That said, having actually met the guy, I don't think he was trying to hit on Caitlin Clark the other day. I think it's absurd even to suggest such a thing, though that's never stopped people before.

I  think what he was doing was looking for an angle in his signature (and often inadvisable) personal way, and it backfired on him big time. Instead of an angle, he came off looking like some lovesick middle-aged man making a play for a woman young enough to be his daughter.

And, yeah, that's as "ewww" as "ewww" gets for sure.

But you know what?

I think Doyel probably knew it almost immediately, which he is why he came back with a damage-control column the next day that some people interpreted as insincere and self-serving but didn't strike me that way.  I also don't think, as some people did, it was another example of his GIANT EGO (as if everyone in the biz doesn't have an ego) trying to make it all about him -- for the excellent reason that this time it was about him, even if he made it so to begin with.

I don't think the guy's a pervert, as Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports labeled him. (Which is hilarious considering Portnoy is pretty skeevy himself, and his website is a notoriously toxic den of misogyny).  I also don't think what he did was some sweeping indictment of  the lack of respect the predominantly male sportswriting biz has for women athletes, because Doyel has the clips to prove he's a poor example of that.

And, no, I don't think he should be fired, as some of my former colleagues have demanded. I think his editor should call him into the office, close the door and say "What the hell were you thinking?", and then give him a two-week sitdown to come up with an answer.

(He might also suggest Doyel contact Clark and personally apologize to her, not just in print. Although he may have already reached out to her. I'm guessing he has.)

Look. I get it. In the flying circus that is America these days, the nuclear option is the only option for a lot of folks.  Overreaction and over-extrapolation are its meat and drink. There may certainly be times when overreaction is not overreaction and over-extrapolation not over-extrapolation, but not, you know, all the damn time.

I think this is one of those All The Damn Time times. Sorry not sorry.

Woody on the rebound

 Hey, look at this, will ya. Perhaps Mike Woodson isn't soiling Indiana University's grand basketball tradition, assuming anyone out there is old enough to remember Indiana's grand basketball tradition.

Yes, the Hoosiers failed to make the NCAA Tournament this year, and couldn't hit water if they fell off a cruise ship sometimes, and tracked mud all over hallowed Assembly Hall on more than a few occasions. Even got grated like parmesan by Purdue twice, losing by 21 in the Hall and 20 in Mackey Arena. 

All of this made the less rational  precincts of Candy Stripe Nation somewhat disgruntled. OK, so they thought Woody was the WORST COACH EVER and wanted to TAKE HIM TO CAPE CANAVERAL AND LAUNCH HIM INTO SPACE.

(Sorry for the all-caps. Just trying to convey the general mood of the Less Rational Precincts.)

Anyway, Woodson's Hoosiers were a deeply flawed team, and they missed Da Tournament, and hardly anyone remembered that Woodson's first two teams made the Da Tournament, which is something his predecessor (Archie Miller) never did. His one prize recruit de-committed, and some folks were saying this was because Mike Woodson was lazy, with the unfortunate racial subtext that goes with that.

That was March in Bloomington.

And now that April is past halftime?

Well, let's take stock, shall we?

Trey Galloway and Anthony Leal have decided to stick around for another season when they didn't have to.

Ditto Malik Reneau and Co-Big Ten Freshman of the Year Mackenzie Mgbako.

Woodson landed another five-star recruit (Bryson Tucker) to replace the five-star recruit who bailed (Liam McNeeley).

Via the transfer portal, he's also locked up the Pac-12 Freshman of the Year (Washington State point guard Myles Rice) and the nation's No. 1 portal target, 7-foot Arizona center Oumar Ballo -- a two-time all-Pac-12 selection and a player who averaged a double-double this season for the Wildcats.

I don't know about you. But it sounds to me like Woodson hasn't exactly been sitting around eating bonbons since the season ended.

Sounds to me like he's winning the offseason, and, yeah, he's done that before. But he's got a lot of nice pieces, and the portal and recruiting season has barely started, and maybe by this fall he'll have a roster even he can't screw up. 

Or so the Less Rational Precincts no doubt would put it.

Me?

I say he's already proved the usual doom-criers half wrong.  Whether or not he'll prove them all the way wrong is yet to be seen.

A Boy for all seasons

(My longtime former employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, ran this today in its Thursday editions. You can subscribe to the print or online versions here. Please do so. Do it because local journalism is important, and it's being gutted these days by hedge-fund jackals. So do your bit in telling them to bleep off.)

Outside our bedroom window the lilacs are blooming again, a splash of lavender and  whiff of perfume. The forsythia is going from yellow to green and the flowering trees from white to green. Their shedding petals dance on the April breeze like benevolent snowflakes.

Spring is at flood tide, in other words. And that means summer waits just offstage.

Which is why it was the right time, maybe, for Carl Erskine to take his leave of us.

He laid down his burden yesterday in the full measure of 97 years, and rarely has a man lived 97 years with more grace and distinction. If he was one of the Boys of Summer made famous by Roger Kahn in his book about the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, he was also the living embodiment of a Hoosier gentleman, a man who went off to find fame in the big city and then came back to his hometown of Anderson to find something more enduring.

He grew to a giant's status there not because he had a curveball that made baseball's best hitters fan air when it was right, but because of his lifelong dedication to his son Jimmy, who was born with Down's syndrome. Jimmy got involved in Special Olympics -- the son of an athlete following the family legacy -- and that got Carl involved in Special Olympics, his compulsion to serve influencing both that cause and, of course, baseball.

The man was cursed, and we were blessed, by an almost pathological inability to say no. His phone would ring and off he would go to work some baseball camp or speak at some baseball function, or talk to some reporter about some aspect of his game.

Every so often -- more times than I recall, actually -- that reporter was me. I got to know Carl during my own Anderson days, and I've always counted it one of the more fortunate occurrences of my fortunate life.

You can start with the fact that Carl was one of the finer human beings who ever breathed air, which is why I never hesitated to lean on him for his unmatched perspective on some baseball current event . It wasn't just that the man pitched a dozen years for the Dodgers, or threw two no-hitters, or once struck out 14 Yankees in a World Series game, including Mickey Mantle four times.  It was that he was a ground-floor witness to a seismic period of American history, and remembered it with such clarity.

One example: Erskine was Jackie Robinson's teammate in the early, sometimes ugly, days of baseball's integration, and years later he could remember the room-service carts sitting in the hallway of the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. This was in 1954, and the carts were sitting outside the rooms of Erskine's six black teammates, who were barred from going places Erskine and Duke Snider and the rest of the white Dodgers could simply because of their pigmentation.

They were the days of Whites Only restrooms and drinking fountains and dining establishments and schools; the days of bus boycotts and Emmett Till and President Ike calling out the National Guard to protect the right of a handful of black kids to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.  And of course they were so much more.

Television forever altered both baseball and America while Erskine was confounding batters in musty old Ebbetts Field. He witnessed the expansion of the game first-hand when Walter O'Malley uprooted the Dodgers and took them west to L.A. And he served as the Dodgers player rep years before Curt Flood and free agency and baseball strikes.

Shoot. Even mass transit underwent a transformation during Erskine's time; he began his career riding the trains, and ended it flying the friendly skies. 

"I played in a specific era in the  game," is how Carl put it once. "There were a lot of historic changes that happened in that era -- and baseball always reflects those changes in society."

This was during a time when his phone would ring and it would be a reporter calling or his alma mater Anderson University (nee Anderson College) or another fantasy camp. Or the Dodgers wanting him to come down to Vero Beach for spring training. Or a local high school wanting him to attend the dedication of their new baseball facility. Or ...

Or Dale McMillen inviting him to Mr. Mac Day in the early 1960s, when Wildcat baseball was just getting off the ground in Fort Wayne.

There's a photo from that day hanging in the suite area of Parkview Field now. Mr. Mac is in it. So are Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Bob Feller -- and Carl Erskine.

"I'm cheap and I'm available," Erskine once joked about all the requests he got.

No, Carl. No, that's not it at all.

It's because you were more than just a Boy of Summer. You were, and will always remain, a Boy for all seasons.

Caitlin mania

 She didn't ask for any of this. Let's understand that straightaway.

Caitlin Clark is a basketball player with impeccable skills and a shooting range that invites comparison to Steph Curry, but she didn't ask for what came with that.

She didn't ask for the Iowa women to become the hottest ticket in town everywhere they went this season because of her. She didn't ask for the TV numbers for the women's March Madness to zoom past the men's numbers largely because of her, or for more viewers to tune into the women's championship game that tuned in for any game of the World Series last fall or of the NBA Finals last June.

And now it really gets crazy.

Now the Indiana Fever has done what was expected of it and made her the No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft, and already the teevees have slotted in 36 Fever games for the coming season. Tickets for Fever games in other WNBA cities are going for 10 times face value. In some WNBA markets, games involving the Fever are even being moved to larger venues.

And the company marketing WNBA jerseys (Fanatics)?

In an hour last night, it sold out of every size but small in Clark's No. 22 Fever jersey.

Caitlin Clark didn't ask for any of that. And she didn't ask for what some people are inferring from it, which is that she's some sort of savior for the WNBA.

She herself has never said that, and never would presume to. But some of the women who built the WNBA brand, and who continue to build it, are rightly torqued about it.  

Diana Taurasi, for one, all but warned Clark she's a marked woman now. And you just know, given the competitiveness and skill level of the current WNBA stars, that they're lining up to welcome the rook to the league in the most unwelcome way possible.

Everyone's gonna take her shot, in other words. Everyone wants to be the first one to swat one of her logo threes to Saturn, or to knock her into next week when she slaloms to the iron, or to turn the "savior" into just an ordinary underpaid WNBA grunt.

With heightened expectation comes heightened motivation for the opposition. And if it's true Clark herself created those expectations by turning herself into something of a basketball savant,  she didn't ask for them to reach the absurd levels they have reached.

But they have, and now Clark faces the impossible task of living up to it all. If she doesn't do superhuman things -- if she doesn't dunk over Brittney Griner or splash every three-ball or  dish 20 dimes a game to Fever teammate and 2023 WNBA Rookie of the Year Aliyah Boston  -- she'll get the dreaded All Hype tag. It's virtually inevitable.

Best example of this off the top of my head would be Pete Maravich, who surfed into the NBA on a Caitlin Clark level of  hype. The Pistol was a dazzling NBA player with a skill set years ahead of its time, but he never averaged 44 points per game the way he did in college, never jumped over the moon, never, I don't know, made himself disappear and then reappear in the middle of a fastbreak. And he'd have had to do all of that live up to the ridiculous expectations with which he was burdened.

Undoubtedly, Clark already knows this. She's weathered that particular storm pretty much flawlessly so far, and even had some fun with it. It's going to get harder to do that now, but she's a savvy young woman in more ways than one. A single-minded focus on basketball is what got her here;  that same focus, the Blob suspects, will keep her from trying to be Wonder Woman instead of just Caitlin Clark.

Which will be more than enough, it says here. And ought to be.

Drama killer

 Tiger Woods was only around for a couple of rounds at Augusta this week, before returning to what he is now, which is an old man with an old man's infirmities. Shooting 14 over par across the last 36 holes of the Masters will do that to a guy.

He blew to a 10-over 82 on Saturday, then added a 4-over 76 yesterday to render his signature Sunday Red little more than a nostalgic echo of days gone by.  He shot 16-over for the tournament, his worst score ever in  professional event and one that placed him last among the 60 golfers who made the 36-hole cut. Among those he finished behind: 61-year-old Vijay Singh and 58-year-old Jose Maria Olazabal.

Tiger's right there with them now, someone for whom the galleries still cheer not because of what he might yet do, but because of what he once did.

But you know something?

In a bodily-transference sort of way, somehow he still won the green jacket.

Long after Woods departed the premises, see, Scottie Scheffler did a thing, and if it wasn't Tiger breaking everyone's will on Masters Sunday, it was something very like it. Squeezed all the juice out of the last round, is what he did. Unplugged the dramatic oil pan and let the drama run right out of it, to use a particularly tortured metaphor.

He started the day with a one-stroke lead over Collin Morikawa, and there were half-a-dozen others within striking distance. It shaped up to be yet another encore of glorious Masters chaos, with Amen Corner miracles sharing the stage with car crashes and dumpster fires and wheels coming off and someone finally dropping a road-map putt to stagger off with the win.

Instead ... we get Scottie Scheffler pulling a Tiger.

Which is to say, he crushed the life out of everyone, shot by shot and without pity. Made seven birdies on the day, the most in a final round by a Masters winner since Nick Faldo did it 35 years ago. Made two of those birds back-to-back on the back nine, when the leader's knees are traditionally supposed to turn to jelly.

Not Scheffler. He never got rattled, never presented an opening, simply left the field choking on his dust with a final-round 68 and a four-stroke win over Ludvig Aberg, a Swede playing in his first Masters.

Aberg and Tommy Fleetwood carded 69s. Just about everyone else came down with the final-round flu;  only Tom Kim, deep in the field, shot a lower round on the day with a 66.

This is not to say Scheffler is the next Tiger, because there isn't one and likely will never be. But his grip on the game right now at least approaches the psychological dominance Tiger once held. If there was a Tiger cringe mode back in the day, there was a Scottie Scheffler cringe mode this weekend, with virtually everyone expecting him to win and Scheffler obliging.

Sunday's green jacket was his second in three years, and he's now won eight times on the PGA Tour in the last 26 months. The first man ever to win back-to-back Players Championships, he has, at 27,  played in five Masters and won two of them.

The only player to do better -- two wins in three starts -- was named Horton Smith. And he did it 88 years ago.

 This is historic ground Scheffler is trampling, in other words. His win Sunday, for instance, made him the fourth-youngest player to win at least two green jackets.

The only ones who were younger?

Their names are Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Seve Ballesteros. Perhaps you've heard of them.

Still Masterful

 They played the second round of the Masters in a wind tunnel yesterday, and it was something to see. Clothing rippled. The Cathedral of Pines waved to and fro. Water features practically grew whitecaps, and there were reported sightings of Dorothy and Toto aloft in some of the drunker precincts. 

The predictable result of all this was that some of the world's best golfers sprayed Titleists around like your average Weekend Walter. 

Bryson DeChambeau, who opened Thursday with a 65 , staggered home with a one-over 73 on Friday. Scottie Scheffler's first-roud 66 became a second-round 72. Of the top 14 players on the leaderboard, only five made it through their rounds under par. And the lowest score among those five was Ludvig Aberg's 69.

"Enough about Ludvig Aberg," you're saying now. "What did Tiger do? I bet Dorothy and Toto strapped an 85 on him, right?"

Um, no.

Tiger shot 72, even par. This despite the fact he played 23 holes yesterday, because he was still five holes light of the required 18 when play was suspended in the first round. At 1-over for the tournament, he made the Masters cut for a record 24th straight time -- and by five strokes.

I don't know if, after all this time, you can classify anything the greatest golfer of his generation does as remarkable. But this was remarkable.

He is, after all, damn near 50 years old now, and his body is probably 75 or so. For 23 holes Friday, he was out there swinging the club and stumping around Augusta National on the ruined leg he gave himself in a foolish episode of reckless driving a few years back.  And Augusta is not exactly the Bonneville salt flats; it's much more hilly than it looks on TV, with a lot of up-hill-and-down-dale hiking between shots.

And yet, wind and all, he followed a 73 with a 72. He's still Tiger Woods, if only sporadically these days. And he's only eight strokes back at the tournament's turn.

"Surely you're not saying ..." you're saying now.

No. No, he's not going to win the thing, barring divine intervention. The Blob makes it 50-50 he even finishes, given the leg and the Augusta hillocks and what would be 59 holes of golf in 72 hours. 

But with the weekend still ahead of him, he's already astonished us. He's already done  Tiger Woods things . At 48, with a body that's a walking surgical procedure, he made the Masters cut while younger, fitter men did not.

He made the cut, and Jordan Spieth did not.

He made the cut, and Dustin Johnson did not.

He made the cut ... and Bubba Watson did not, Justin Thomas did not, Viktor Hovland did not, Justin Rose and Charl Schwartzel did not.

Give the man a hand. Again.

All in the family

 Jay Wright didn't want the job. Billy Donovan said "Nah, I'm good." Dan Hurley wondered why he'd leave UConn after winning back-to-back titles there; Baylor's Scott Drew said thanks, but no thanks; and Nate Oats said on the whole, he'd rather be at Alabama.

It was starting to look like no one wanted the Kentucky job, which must have left the Big Blue faithful slack-jawed in disbelief.  Baylor over Kentucky? Alabama over the Wildcats? What, did Bear Bryant coach basketball? And if he had, would he have beaten that crusty old racist Adolph Rupp?

I don't think so, BUD!

It was the ultimate snub, the basketball coach at a football school turning down one of the nation's legendary basketball schools.  And so UK did what a lot of folks do when they've been done wrong by strangers.

They turned to family.

In this case, "family" is Mark Pope, a captain on the 1996 Kentucky juggernaut and now the coach at BYU. Everyone thinks the world of the guy, apparently. And he's pure bluegrass from his head to his toes, unlike all those other dirtbags who clearly didn't appreciate the opportunity they were being offered.

Hey, come to Kentucky! Look at those banners! Have yourself a nice soak in all our history! And if you win us a national title every other year, we promise not to run you out like we did that Calipari fella!

Now, I don't know if that's what Oats and Drew and all the others heard when Kentucky came calling. But job security is no small thing in these uncertain times. And that's especially true now that college buckets are the Wild West and kids are changing schools every year the way they change their socks.

Which is to say, it ain't easy being dynastic these days, and dynastic is what the UK fan base expects. So you can halfway understand why marquee names who've built solid programs elsewhere would be reluctant to leave the solid ground those programs provide.

Enter Mark Pope, who at least knows what UK expects and (presumably) thus knows better how to cope with those expectations. Even if his resume isn't the sort of resume a Kentucky coach generally brings to the table.

In five seasons at BYU he's gone 110-52 and taken the Cougars to two NCAA Tournaments, and his season put up 23 wins in BYU's first season in the Big 12. But he's a less-than-overwhelming 187-108 in eight years as a head coach at Utah Valley and BYU, and he's never won a game in the Madness. In 2021 6-seed BYU was knocked out by 11-seed UCLA in the first round, and this year was deja vu all over again: The Cougars were once more a 6-seed, and once more an 11-seed -- Duquesne this time -- upset them.

Calipari's last Kentucky team, meanwhile, lost to 14-seed Oakland in the first round this year. So at least UK fans are used to getting taken down by a lower seed.

Which is most assuredly not why the school is hiring Mark Pope, as Calipari could attest. But you know what?

At least the hometown guy knows that.