Reverse Cruds Alert!*

 (*Because the Rockheads, the Mange-els and the rest of the Cruds are old news now that the baseball season has reached August, its black hole of months)

Checked out the MLB standings this a.m. just to see if it was really August and if my Pittsburgh Not-As-Cruddy-As-They-Used-To-Be's were still playing .500 baseball (They are! 56-56, baby!).Aand guess what?

The Los Angeles Dodgers are not the best team in baseball right now. 

They've actually lost two in a row and are 69-42, half-a-game back of the numbingly efficient Milwaukee Brewers. And, OK, so they're still 10 games up in the NL West, but, listen, it's not like they couldn't use some help. So all you people griping about the rich getting richer and what a joke baseball is now need to dummy up.

Because they needed Tarik Skubal. Yes, they did.

For those of you who don't know who Tarik Skubal is, well, he was the prize of prizes during this trade deadline period, a two-time Cy Young winner who's arguably been the best pitcher in the American League the last two years. And now he's a Trolley Dodger!

News broke last night that the Dodgers and Skubal's former team, the Detroit Tigers, were finalizing a deal that would send Tarik west in exchange for a handful of magic beans, er, prospects. That's what's so annoying about the Dodgers, see: Not only do they have all the money these days, they also have lots of trade bait to dangle from their first-rate farm system. 

"All the money AND a farm system?" you're saying now. "How's THAT fair?"

To which the Dodgers would no doubt reply, quoting a former teammate in our company basketball league: Fair? (Bleep) fair!

Fair's not what's made Dem Bums back-to-back World Series champs, with a likely three-peat waiting in the wings come October. And if you think that's a joke, well, the joke's on you, sorehead. 

Dynasties are good for baseball, see. Grotesquely over-doggy overdogs are the life's blood of the game. I mean, you didn't hear people complaining about Casey Stengel's Yankees when they were winning the Series every crummy year in the 1950s, did you?

(Brief interlude while every other team from the '50s shouts, "Hell, yes, we were complaining! Screw Mantle and Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra and Elston Howard and the rest of those high-hatted bastards! We like World Series rings, too, ya know!")

Anyway ...

Now the Dodgers have Skubal, and just in time, too. After all, it wasn't like they were going to get by with Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamato, Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki and those guys. And where was the run support gonna come from when the only sticks you had were Ohtani and Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts and Kyle Tucker and Will Smith, and also Max Muncy?

So, yeah, good for them. They've got the best pitcher in the AL now, or one of the best. Which means they'll probably win a pile more games and beat the Brewers or Braves in the NL and then beat, I don't know, maybe the Rays in the World Series.

Or how about this: Maybe the Series comes down to the Dodgers vs. the White Sox.

The Pale Hose, after all, are leading the AL Central by three games right now, two seasons after fielding the worst team in the modern era. How great a narrative would that be, the former schlubbiest of schlubs against baseball's reigning Reverse Cruds?

The White Sox, stealing a Virgil Tibbs' line from "In The Heat Of The Night": "I can pull that fat cat down off his mountain!"

The Trolley Dodgers, stealing King Arthur's line from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail": "Bloody peasant!"

Ah, yes. I can see it now. 

Birthdate of fear

(In which the Blob again says "Later for you, sporty-sports," and sets off into the wider world for awhile. The usual protocols apply to those who don't wish to join me on the journey.)

First of August now, and another summer in the books, or at least it seems so these accelerated days.  The local baseball diamonds are empty. The band kids are in the high school parking lots, sweating under the hammering sun. In 12 days, they'll back in school again, the yellow buses will be running again, and wasn't it just yesterday that they spilled everyone out into what seemed an endless stretch of freedom?

Perhaps. But summer's end is not the end I think about when I think about August 1, and this August 1 in particular.

The end I think about is the end of a certain kind of American innocence, and the assumptions that formed its foundation.

This August 1, you see, is 60 years to the day since a sick man in a high place went hunting human beings.

His name was Charles Whitman, and on Aug. 1, 1966 he hauled an M1 carbine, two Remington rifles, a semi-automatic shotgun and three handguns up to the observation deck of the University of Texas tower -- which still stands, and which they still light up Texas burnt orange after every Longhorns football triumph -- and turned downtown Austin into a kill zone.

He was up there for 90 minutes until a couple of police officers took him down, and in that time, from his high place, he killed 15 people and wounded 31 more. This was after he'd stabbed his wife and mother to death, and after he'd left two victims inside who had the misfortune to encounter him on his way to the observation deck.

For most of his 25 years, he'd been a normal American male, a loving husband and dutiful son who'd whisked his mother away from his abusive father. Then a tumor bloomed inside his brain, and, in 90 terrifying minutes, Charles Whitman became something else entirely: The godfather of the American mass shooter, and the bringer of nightmares we could scarcely imagine in 1966.

Because who could conceive, back then, of an America where you could be shot dead just walking down the street? Where some random human (Even a neighbor, maybe!) could take it in his head to find someplace where other random humans congregate, and just start killing people he didn't even know?

We feared the Russkies and nuclear missiles aimed our way and the damn Commies taking over the world, in those days. We didn't fear one of our own using his Second Amendment rights to stockpile an arsenal of weapons (Two Remmies, an M-1, a shotgun and three handguns? Who needs all that?) and make war on his fellow Americans.

So now we had something else to fear, in a fearful time. And on it went from there -- from Charles Whitman to James Oliver Huberty in a McDonald's down by Mexico; to Patrick Sherrill in a post office in Edmonds, Okla.; to George Hennard in a cafeteria in Texas; to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School; to Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech; to Stephen Paddock on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Hotel in Las Vegas, another hunter of humans in a high place.

Paddock killed 60 people and shot almost 500 when he did his deal nine years ago. Five years before that, Adam Lanza murdered 27 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. Another elementary school in Uvalde, Tex.; a synagogue in Pittsburgh; a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.; a supermarket in El Paso, Tex., and another in Buffalo, N.Y. ...

The blood trail of Charles Whitman, the madness and the butchery, continues apace. As does the fear that, after so many butcheries, we're either numb to or have trained ourselves not to think about anymore.

But Aug. 1, 1966 was the birthdate of that fear. And then it was very real.

I was 11 at the time, see, and we were on vacation, and that night we went to dinner somewhere. I remember, hazily, seeing a newspaper there, and the Texas tower shooting was splashed all over the front page. And when we finished dinner and walked out to the car, I remember walking very fast, because somewhere in the dark I just knew there was a man with a rifle, and that he was going to start shooting.

Like I said, I was 11 years old at the time, with an 11-year-old's overheated imagination. But I suspect I wasn't the only one who, after that day, felt a chill the next time they walked out into their quiet American lives in their quiet American town. 

And I suspect they weren't all 11, either.

The toll, continued

 Last night I watched "Concussion" again, the flick in which Will Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, a pathologist who's largely credited with discovering CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. I did it because Billy Ray Smith Jr. and Ahman Green were in the news this week.

Billy Ray Smith Jr. -- whose father, Billy Ray Sr., played on the same Baltimore Colts defensive line with Bubba Smith -- was in the news because he's dead. A former Pro Bowl linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, he was 64 years old and died from what his family says was CTE  dementia.

And Ahman Green?

The leading rusher in Green Bay Packers history was in the news because he announced on a podcast he had early-onset Parkinson's, a neurological disorder that's frequently accompanied by Lewy-Body dementia. I know this because my dad died of it, slipping slowly away from us until he simply wasn't there anymore.

My dad was 91. Ahman Green is just 49. But sure enough, he says his short-term memory is "trash" now.

Green played 12 seasons in the NFL, after high school ball and college ball at Nebraska. Billy Ray Smith Jr. played 10 seasons in the NFL, after high school ball and college ball at Arkansas, where his daddy also played. 

Now, it's far too presumptuous to say Billy Ray Jr. would be alive today, and Ahman Green's short-term memory would be just fine, had they not played what has become our great American game. But it's not presumptuous at all to say banging heads at cartoon speeds for 18, 19, 20-some years is hardly the secret to a long and healthy life.

Football ain't good for you. Which is not exactly a revelation handed down from above.

On the other hand, it's also a multi-billion dollar industry and a cultural touchstone, which means it's not going anywhere soon. The trick is to alleviate the toll without destroying what created that industry and that touchstone.

The Blob is of the opinion it can't be done. Not to everyone's satisfaction, anyway.

The codgers and knuckle-draggers already are shaking their bony/hairy fists at their TV screens on fall afternoons, saying the colleges and the NFL have let pantywaists and sissies take over the game. Can't touch a quarterback anymore. Can't clock a receiver going over the middle. And what the hell is "targeting," anyway?

Why, son, targeting's just sorting through the pile until you find the schlub with the ball, and then knocking the goo out of him. It's what Dick Butkus or Ray Nitschke or Night Train Lane did on every blessed snap.

And the guys who wind up like Billy Ray Jr. or Ahman Green because of it?

Well, they knew the risks. Didn't they?

The problem with that is they didn't know the risks, or at least the worst of them. And the reason they didn't know, at least on the professional level, is the NFL -- the very pinnacle of the American game -- didn't want them to know. It's why the league spent better than a quarter century telling the world concussions were just a bump on the head, and didn't affect brain function at all. Heck, that's what the helmets were designed to prevent, wasn't it?

So the league just kept stacking cash, while at the same time trying to wreck the careers of the Dr. Omalus of the world. It wasn't just irresponsible; it was flat-out criminal.

And meanwhile, CTE kept showing up in more and more deceased NFL players.

In Junior Seau and Andre Waters and Justin Strzelczyk and Dave Duerson, gone before their time.

In old timers like Frank Gifford and Paul Hornung and Ken Stabler; Jim Kiick and John Mackey and, yes, Bubba Smith.

The toll, continued.

The toll, which is unavoidable without pissing off the fan base -- or at least the codger/knuckle-dragger constituency, most of whom have likely never stood on a modern major college or NFL sideline and heard the sound it makes when two 220-pound 4.5-forty cyborgs come together at warp speed.

I have heard it, and it makes a sound like a car crash. Unless you've also heard it, you simply can't imagine.

Look. Football is not going to go away. We've established that. So what is its future?

Its future is maybe abolishing tackle football until, I don't know, middle school or so.

Its future is a game the codgers and knuckle-draggers hate, but that in time will simply be the football succeeding generations grew up with.

Its future is what I saw on TV the other day.

It was a bunch of kids in shorts and T-shirts playing in the National Flag Football Championships, and it was a blast to watch. There was a girls division and a boys division. The football was fat and white and reminded me of the ball they use in Australian Rules Football. There was running and passing and terrific catches and, on one play, a leaping one-handed interception that turned into an amazing pick six.

It's everything athletic we love about football, without brains getting knocked to squash inside skulls. I don't think it'll ever replace the tackle version, but no one who plays flag is going to die not knowing his or her own name.

He or she won't be Billy Ray Smith Jr., or even Ahman Green. Which is how I wound up watching a certain movie last night, and thinking about all this.

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 Stadium. 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, as quoted in The Journal Gazette. "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.