Dying young

 Perhaps his gift was just too dazzling. There's a thought for this winter's morn, among many.

There's a thought, because NFL wide receiver Rondale Moore is dead by his own hand at 25, and as always we are compelled to wonder why. He shot himself in the garage of his New Albany home three days ago, and we want answers, because we are human. We crave resolution -- and never mores so than when a fellow human takes his own life with so much of it still spread out before him.

In the meantime, English poet A.E. Houseman enters stage left again, because how could he not? One-hundred thirty years ago he penned "To An Athlete Dying Young", an ode to youth and vitality and the mirror images of triumph and tragedy, and now here is another athlete dying young.

Thus, we think of Housman. And of the twin edges of dazzling gifts. And of what happens, maybe, when fate or circumstance or plain old bad luck shows a young man the mean edge of those gifts.

The key word there being "maybe."

Because, listen, it's all maybes right now with Rondale Moore, all could-be's and here's-a-theory's and perhapses. And so, yes, maybe Rondale Moore's gift was too dazzling. And maybe it had nothing whatever to do with why he picked up that gun the other day.

 Know what's not a maybe, though?

That Moore had a gift. And that, piece by piece, hit by hit, it seemed to be dimming.

The Rondale Moore who came to Purdue University in 2018 was, after all, a blinding talent who lit up football fields all over the Big Ten from the moment he showed up. In his first game as a true freshman -- his first game -- he broke the school record for yards in a single game with 313 against Northwestern. Not only that. but he put up 192 of those yards in the first quarter of that first game.

Hell of an entrance, in other words. And it only got better after that.

 In October, against No. 2 Ohio State, Moore caught 12 balls for 170 yards and two touchdowns as the Purdues delivered a shocking 49-20 upset for then-coach Jeff Brohm. He went on to lead the nation in receiving with 114 catches for 1,258 yards and 12 touchdowns; averaged 10 yards per carry and scored two more touchdowns rushing; and averaged 20.8 yards on 33 kickoff returns.

For all of that, the diminutive Moore (he topped out at just 5-7) was named an All-American and the Big Ten Receiver of the Year. And he won the Paul Hornung Award as the most versatile player in the nation.

That was the best it ever got for him, however.

Across the next two seasons, Moore played just seven games thanks to injury and the COVID-19 pandemic. Arizona took him with the 49th pick in the 2021 NFL draft, and he caught a 77-yard touchdown pass in his second pro game. In three seasons with the Cardinals, he caught 135 passes for 1,201 yards and three touchdowns, and ran for 249 more yards and another score.

And then ...

Ah, yes. And then.

And then, the Cardinals traded him to Atlanta, where he dislocated his right knee in training camp and never played a down. After that came the Minnesota Vikings, where he again never made it to the season, suffering another knee injury while returning a punt in the first exhibition game. For the second year in a row, he spent the season on injured reserve.

Who knows what went through his mind, sitting out one season and then another, two precious years of his career slipping through his fingers? Who knows what goes through anyone's mind when extraordinary athletic gifts are betrayed by an ordinary, too-mortal body?

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was everything. I don't know, and neither do you. 

But here is one more thing we do know.

Rondale Moore is dead. At 25. And the athlete dying young has another sad, sad verse.

Karma

 Forty-six years to the day, Mike Eruzione was up in the booth, telling America it was Our Boys' time again. 

Forty-six years to the day, it was again George Washington's birthday, his 294th, and who wants to disappoint George on his big day?

Forty-six years to the day, and Our Boys even had a lucky talisman: The No. 13 jersey of the fallen Johnny Gaudreau, who likely would have been one of the Boys had a drunken fool in New Jersey not run down him and his brother Matthew 18 months ago.

So, 46 years to the day from the Miracle on Ice ... Eruzione in the house ... George Washington's birthday ... the Team USA jersey of a martyred American hockey star. As someone in "Star Wars" kinda-sorta almost said at some point: The karma was strong in this one.

"This one," of course, being Connor Hellebuyck and Matt Boldy and bloody-toothed Jack Hughes, and, oh, heck, all of them, really. Raise a glass, or several, to every old-time board-crashin' one of them, because they brought USA hockey Olympic gold for just the third time in history -- and, yes, 46 years to the day since the last time it happened.

This one was no Miracle, of course, because this wasn't a bunch of college kids and minor-league sloggers against the unbeatable Soviet juggernaut. It was one crew of NHL stars against another, with the boys in the red, white and blue beating the team dressed in red again.

Oh, there were echoes, of course. As Hellebuyck made one Houdini save after another -- the Canadians put 42 shots on net, 33 across the last two periods, Hellebuyck turned away all but one -- couldn't you see Jim Craig kicking out shot after shot almost half-a-century ago? Wasn't Jack Hughes staying out there after getting a tooth knocked out just another way of saying "Jack O'Callahan", who also played hurt in the Miracle game?

And that nifty flip-the-puck-over-the-D-man's-stick-and-regaining-control move Boldy put on the Canadians for the first American goal ...

Come on, now. Who didn't at least momentarily think of Mark Johnson, Team USA's slickest skate-and-stick man  back in 1980?

The difference this time was the Canadians didn't panic the way the Soviets did when they got down, because they were all seasoned NHL heads who'd been down before. Their first line -- Nathan McKinnon, Connor McDavid and 18-year-old phenom Macklin Celebrini -- was the best in the world. And if Hellebuyck was standing on his head at one end, his Canadian counterpart Jordan Binnington was pulling rabbits out of hats at the other end, too.

Now, I have no idea how you measure such things. But if there's ever been better goaltending in an Olympic gold medal game, I've never seen  it.

And so on it went into overtime, and finally here was Jack Hughes, gory Chiclets and all, taking a laser cross-ice pass from Zach Werensky and hammering the puck past Binnington, and then everyone in red, white and blue was throwing his gloves and stick down and forming a happy scrum that went on and on, same as 46 years ago. 

American flags materialized, seemingly from nowhere, and the boys put them on like Superman capes. They brought out Johnny Gaudreau's No. 13 and skated around with it. Then they scooped up Gaudreau's two young children and posed them with their father's jersey in the team photo.

If there was a dry eye in the house by that point -- or in sports bars or living rooms all over America, truth be told -- whoever it belonged to was missing a soul. 

(Also missing a soul: Anyone who didn't yelp "What the HELL?" upon seeing FBI director/jock-sniffing dweeb Kash Patel slamming beers with Our Boys like he belonged there. And on the taxpayers' dime, no less.)

Anyway ...

Karma 1, World 0, by God. Bless those Boys.

Take that

 Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call your "payback."

Purdue 93, Indiana 64.

Thirty rebounds for the Boilers; 15 for the Hoosiers.

Sixty-five percent shooting for the Purdues, including 10-of-18 from the 3-point arc.

Fletcher Loyer couldn't miss, hitting all five of his shots including all four from Threeville. Braden Smith did Braden Smith things, bottoming half his 10 shots and dishing eight assists. Down low, meanwhile, Trey Kaufman-Renn and Oscar Cluff combined for 26 points, 14 boards and eight assists, with TKR collecting 20, six and five of those.

After Smith and Loyer opened the game with matching threes, and Tucker DeVries flushed a triple of his own, Indiana never got closer than four points again. Down 17 at halftime, the Hoosiers never trailed by fewer than 16 points  the rest of the way, and were down by as many as 34 in the late going.

"So, in other words, Purdue did what the No. 7 team in the nation is supposed to do against an unranked opponent," you're saying now. "How was this payback, exactly?"

Well, because it's Indiana, silly. And Purdue, silly.

Never the bonhomie will meet with these two, and that was especially true last night, with the Hoosiers coming to Mackey and the Boilermakers ... well, just laying for them. A month ago, see, they walked into Assembly Hall as the better team, and the Hoosiers rolled out Curt Cignetti and the CFP national championship trophy for the paying customers. As you might imagine, that blew the roof off the joint, and the basketball Hoosiers, properly stoked, took down the Boilers 72-67.

Doubtful that left a mark, and especially so for Smith, Loyer, TKR and the rest of the seniors, who were 3-4 in their careers vs. the Hoosiers after that one. Acknowledged as perhaps the greatest class in the school's history, you think they wanted to exit with a losing record against, omigod, Indiana?

Of course they didn't. And of course they, well, didn't.

By 29 points, they didn't, and if it was some major Take That, you could also see it coming from several light years away. The question, of course, is just how much carryover there'll be for Matt Painter's crew.

Four nights ago they played well against the best team in the nation, but ultimately fell by 11 to the Michigan Wolverines. The win last night was their fifth in the six games since the loss in Assembly Hall, and four winnable games remain against 15th-ranked Michigan State and unranked Ohio State, Northwestern and Wisconsin. 

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, they've been maddeningly inconsistent at times this season, losing games they shouldn't have lost and struggling to survive against opponents they should have launched into orbit. They were 10-of-18 from the arc last night, but next time out they might just as easily be 3-of-18. So it goes with this bunch.

On the further other hand (yes, the Blob has three, deal with it), they're playing their best basketball of the season precisely when a basketball team wants to be doing that. So that goes, too.

At any rate, onward. Where else?

A day for the USA

 Raise a glass this a.m. to U-S-A!, U-S-A!, which had itself a day yesterday over in Italy.

There was the women's Olympic hockey team, which beat Canada for the gold medal  but not as easily as it beat Canada a week ago in the group phase. That final was a resounding 5-0 keister-tanning; this time it was like pulling teeth, which is what it's usually like when the Americans and Canadians have at it.

Final score was 2-1, and it took overtime to decide it. Megan Keller scored the winner after Hilary Knight, playing in her last Olympics, saved the day on a deflection with 2:04 to play in regulation to force OT. The Americans, down 1-0 since the second period, had pulled their goalie in a desperate attempt to get even.

So hooray for them, and also, whew. And hooray, also, for America's latest golden girl, the irrepressible Alysa Liu, who came to Milan/Cortina just hoping to skate well but wound up skating the, um, well-est of them all.

Her flawless long program, full of triple axels and toe loops and what-not, overhauled the two Japanese skaters in front of her for the gold medal. She's the first American gold medalist in women's figure skating since Sarah Hughes -- remember her? -- 24 years ago.

And also the least likely.

Liu, you see, dropped out of the sport after the Beijing Games four years ago, citing burnout. She was 16 years old at the time, and for the next couple of years did what teenage girls do who don't know a toe loop from a Froot Loop. A year or so ago she took it up again, and came to these Games with no expectations of a medal. Maybe a bronze, if she was lucky.

It's better left to the psychologists to determine if that open-ended, I'm-just-here-to-express-myself approach is what won her gold. Certainly it would seem to have lifted any pressure she might have felt; when you come at something with no expectations, the expectations can't weigh you down or make you turn a blade wrong. 

"We never actually had a goal of winning," said one Liu's two coaches, Phillip DiGuglielmo, noting that the goal for this season was simply to make the Olympic team. "That was the really big deal for her."

And Liu?

"I don't need this (medal)," she told D'arcy Maine of ESPN. "But what I needed was the stage and I got that, so I was all good."

Which may be why she got the medal, too.

A death in the late afternoon

 Twenty-five years on, I can still hear it in Darrell Waltrip's voice. It was the first clue, the initial inkling, that something had gone terribly wrong down there at the end of Daytona International Speedway's long backstretch, and that an awful vacancy had just swallowed an entire sport.

Hope Dale's OK ...

Darrell Waltrip, suddenly saying that as he gabbled on and on in the wake of his brother winning the Daytona 500.

Darrell Waltrip, who'd seen death in the afternoon before -- who'd cheated it on at least one shrieking, metal-shredding occasion himself, and never fully recovered -- belatedly sensing what had happened behind brother Mikey as the checkers flew.

Hope Dale's OK ...

Dale, as in Dale Earnhardt, who'd been blocking for Michael Waltrip entering turn three when he got bumped from behind, slewed up toward the wall, and then got turned directly into it a millisecond before impact.

It didn't look like much. A gentle nudge, as these things go at Daytona. But the angle was all wrong, and the black No. 3 slid back down the banking into the infield, and Waltrip up in the broadcast booth must have belatedly noticed nothing was moving inside the car when he looked in that direction ...

Hope Dale's OK ...

Well, Dale wasn't OK, of course. Dale was dead. Twenty-five years ago yesterday.

Physics turned that gentle nudge into a killer there in the late afternoon, and as I watched the sports shows commemorating the 25th anniversary, it all came back to me. Waltrip's odd, troubling segue. The conspicuous silence on the race broadcast about the crash. And then an aerial shot of an ambulance leaving the sprawling facility, slowly, with no lights flashing.

Final confirmation, that was. Final confirmation for those of us who've been at a million racetracks and know what it looks and sounds and feels like when it's really bad. 

Dale Earnhardt was dead, of a basilar skull fracture, which is what happens when a sudden, catastrophic stop whips the head violently forward. Earnhardt was the fourth NASCAR driver in nine months to be killed by one, and by far the most notable. The man was an icon -- hell, he was NASCAR to a significant portion of the fan base -- and his absence would dominate every NASCAR Cup race for the rest of the season.

Fans all over the country holding up three fingers on the third lap of every race. Broadcasters going silent on every third lap. That sort of thing.

Along the way, that absence would also change the sport, and for the better. The HANS device that holds the head rigid would become mandatory. Soft-wall technology originally introduced by IndyCar would come to the stock-car circuits. And the consequence?

No driver in NASCAR's top three series has died in a racing accident since.

An ironic legacy, perhaps, for a man who never gave safety issues a second thought when he climbed into that black No. 3. But the best legacy, surely, for the death of an icon in he late afternoon, 25 years on.

An outbreak of grumpiness

 Look, I don't blame Mick Cronin. It's that time of year, isn't it?

February is the month when rodents predict the future, America observes the birthdays of two presidents on neither date, and men are compelled to defy their natural state and act all gooshy and romantic. Plus, your awesome cherry-red ride turns white with salt, and winter loses whatever charm it might have had.

It's a grumpy month.

And so no surprise, really, that Cronin, the basketball coach at UCLA, did what he did last night in East Lansing. 

First, he ejected his own player for cheap-shotting Michigan State's Carson with 4:26 to play and Sparty up 27. Then, in the postgame, he got into with a reporter who asked about the Michigan State student section taunting the Bruins' Xavier Booker, an MSU transfer.

Cronin replied that he didn't give "a rat's ass" about another school's student section. Then he snidely gave the reporter his flowers for "the worst question I've ever been asked." And then he accused said reporter for "raising your voice at me."

Of the latter, my admittedly biased former-sportswriter response is to suggest Mick pull up his big-boy pants.

Of the former ... well, I'll give Coach his flowers for sending Steven Jamerson II off. The game officials ticketed Jamerson with a Flagrant 1 foul for shoving Cooper from behind, but Cronin decided the punishment didn't fit the crime. As Michigan State coach Tom Izzo joked afterward, Mick arbitrarily elevated it to a Flagrant 2.

To that, my response is, "Good on you, Coach." And to acknowledge that his Oscar the Grouch impersonation last night was, yes, the byproduct of February, and also a nightmare trip to Michigan in which UCLA lost by 30 to the top-ranked Wolverines and by 23 to Sparty.

That'll put any coach out of sorts.  And it's not like Cronin is the only one suffering from the Februaries.

Last week, for example, Kansas State coach Jerome Tang got himself fired fo cause not only because the Wildcats are dead last in the Big 12, but because, after a blowout loss at home to Arkansas, he basically called his players a bunch of losers. Said they didn't deserve to wear the uniform, and that several of them wouldn't be wearing it next season.

A few days later K-State put him on the street, with athletic director Gene Taylor lamenting that he found Tang's comments about the "student-athletes" very "concerning."

Me, I think the term "student-athletes" went out with Victorolas and horse-drawn carriages. Get with the times, Mr. AD. The correct term these days is "paid professionals" -- which means Tang's outburst, while a violation of accepted etiquette, was not as out of bounds as it sounded.

I mean, if you're drawing a paycheck to play basketball, you need to make an effort to earn it. Otherwise, no, you shouldn't be wearing the uniform. Players in professional leagues that (unlike D-I buckets) aren't pretending to be something else get waived for less.

Tang's mistake was forgetting college basketball doesn't have a waiver wire. Or that it's still, at least nominally, college basketball.

Also, again, it's February. 'Nuff said.

That silly car race

 The Great American Race was won yesterday by a guy who'd never won it, by a team owner you might have heard of who'd never won it, and by a team that was last seen slapping an antitrust suit on the family that's run NASCAR like pashas for about 100 years.

In other words, the Daytona 500 once again did Daytona 500 things.

The aforementioned winner Tyler Reddick, led all of one lap but, as they say, the right lap. His team owner, Michael Jordan, got yet another ring to add to his collection. And his team -- 23XI, co-owned by MJ and Denny Hamlin -- is the same team that sued the France family and NASCAR last year and forced it to settle.

"Just true Daytona madness," an ecstatic Reddick observed, when it was done.

What he failed to add was why anyone would expect anything less.

Madness, after all, has been the Daytona 500 's bete noir since Day 1, a completely random deal that has blessed princes and paupers alike. The King, Richard Petty, won it seven times; seven-time Cup champion Dale Earnhardt, on the other hand, won it only once. That's the same number of times Derrike Cope won it, and also Pete Hamilton and Trevor Bayne. 

Combined career wins otherwise, for that trio? Three for Hamilton, one for Cope.

That's Daytona for you.

It's had a year when Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough crashed each other out on the last lap, then traded punches on the backstretch as Petty swept past to the win. It's had a year when Petty and David Pearson crashed each other out on the last turn, except Pearson kept the clutch in and limped to the checkers.

Sterling Marlin won Daytona twice in a row, then finished 40th the next year -- just ahead of Derrike Cope. Marvin Panch won in a year-old car in 1961, and was 44th the next year.

Yesterday?

Some old script.

As always with restrictor plate races, it was like watching the Burlington and Northern pass for 190 laps, and then for 10 laps it was utter insanity. Look, Michael McDowell's in front, going for his second Daytona 500 win!  Wait, now it's William Byron, going for the three-peat! Oops, now it's (who?) Carson Hocevar ... and now Chase Elliott and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. are drag-racing as the white flag drops and Hocevar crashes ... and now ...

Hey, where the heck did Tyler Reddick come from?

From nowhere, or so it seemed. But here he came to the front on the outside -- no, wait, the inside -- on the last lap, getting a helpful shove from teammate Riley Herbst as Elliott and Zane Smith ran nose to tail toward the finish.

Reddick squeezed between Elliott and Smith, got by Elliott as they touched, then took the checkers as Elliott and a pile of others crashed behind him.

Reddick was out front for only the last lap, and probably for less than half of that. Four or five drivers -- hell, who could tell? -- led at some point in the final four laps. All told, a record 25 drivers led at least a lap.

It was like "Wheel of Fortune," only faster and louder. And when the wheel stopped spinning, Reddick and Team Jordan were your grand prize winners.

That silly car race, the Blob's better half always calls Daytona.

Silly's a bit harsh, I always say. But after yesterday?

Not by much.