The enduring legacy

 This old goalie mask. Let's start there this morning, shall we?

Let's start with innovation that hardly counts as innovation, because it is decades old and as primitive as chain mail and stone knives. It's a chunk of enamel with eyeholes, is all it looks like. The paint on it is chipped and gouged from a thousand encounters with pucks. The signature fireball-K that covers it is faded now, the years having done their work.

"Not a lot of protection there," you say now, to the man next to you.

He chuckles.

"No," he replies. "Not in those days."

Not in those days.

Which are these days now, here at Komet Kon. It's part of the celebration of the Fort Wayne Komets' 75th year of operation, which is a hell of a thing. What lasts 75 years anymore, let alone a minor-league hockey franchise? What holds the weight of all those years -- all those decades -- so close you can almost feel them as a physical presence, as you wonder from one glassed display of memorabilia to another?

Here's that mask, which Robbie Irons wore for all those years he kicked out pucks in the Komets' net. Here is the jersey of Gerry Randall, who kicked 'em out before Robbie. Here are ancient pairs of skates, the jerseys of ancient foes (The Des Moines Oak Leafs! Who remembers THEM?), players in Komet black-and-orange raising one Cup or another in photos years apart but somehow identical.

Seventy-five years. And who was President then, when all this began?

Harry Truman.

And what war were we fighting, because we forever seem to be fighting wars?

Korea.

And where were the Dodgers, the Giants, the Braves, the Pistons?

Ebbets Field. The Polo Grounds. Milwaukee. 

Fort Wayne. 

Where a hockey team first took the ice that winter, in a brand new building -- the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum -- out where one country lane met another, in those days. The Cold War was as cold as Frozen Chosin, back then. There were no cellphones, no internet, no ChatGPT or Grammarly to do your homework for you. Heck, lots of folks didn't even have TVs, and if they did they were black-and-white. Live and in color was a ways off yet.

And now it is all these years later, JFK and MLK and Vietnam and the moon landing and 9/11, all of it, every bit, spinning past in a mad whirl. And still this hockey team endures. Still the orange-and-black and the fireball and the throwback jerseys -- the spaceman jersey, the red-white-and-blue koala jersey from the Welker years, even that god-awful fort jersey -- testify to a history that is not minor at all, in any sense.

In other places, major-league places, there is history, too, and perhaps it feels bigger because they are major-league places. But this is only major-league arrogance, major-league presumption. Here, in this mid-size Midwestern city, there is a history every bit as large and rich, a legacy every bit as enduring.

It's why so many of those who played here -- all those good Canadian kids -- stayed here when their playing days were done, becoming threads in the very fabric of the community. It's why we came to know Eddie Long and George Drysdale and Len Thornson and Lionel Repka and so many, many others as neighbors and friends and even, in the fullness of time, family. It's why so many former players came back this weekend for this 75th extravaganza, because though they live elsewhere now and played other places besides Fort Wayne, hockey here felt different. It just did.

At Komet Kon yesterday you saw them everywhere: Graying men feeling the weight of their own years, signing autographs for fans who, no matter how long it had been, still remembered them. Here was Kevin St. Pierre, a Cup-winning member of the Komets' fabled goaltending lineage. Robbie Laird, who played and coached here. Carey Lucyk and Steve Fletcher and Dale Baldwin and Doug Rigler and Irons, who played here and then stayed here.

Kevin Kaminski. Colin Chin, hometown boy and captain of the '93 Turner Cup team. And Robin Bawa from that same team, gray-haired now but still looking like a member of the old Ice Patrol, who came here all the way from his home in Vancouver.

Because, yes, hockey here was different. Is different. Every player who ever donned the orange-and-black -- from the ancient days to this day -- can feel its history pressing close. Can, whether they realize it or not, feel The Jungle of '93, or the year Merv Dubchak scored 72 goals, or the night John Anderson scored a hat trick on one leg. Or the night Scott Gruhl broke the alltime IHL scoring record or the night Peter Sidorkiewicz made nine million saves, or the night Bob Fitchner invited the entire Flint bench to dance and got only one taker.

And this night here, from years and years ago.

It's a photo of the Komets lined up for the national anthem with their sticks at parade rest, and it has to be from the '50s or early '60s because Eddie Long's one of the players. That's not what catches your eye, however. 

What catches your eye is the crowd, and how different it looks.

Men in jackets and white button-downs and ties. Women in dresses and hats. An image from a time long dead -- and yet a time those hockey players, and that hockey team, link inextricably to this time.

Seventy-five years. Hell of a thing.

Unkillable Hoosiers

The young man's name is Khobie Martin, and up there on the TV screen, you can almost taste the grit in him.

Up there, on the screen, Grant Wilson hands him the football and he plows ahead, head down, legs churning, moving ever forward. He knifes through a glimmer of daylight that closes as quickly as it opens, a welter of men in red USC helmets clinging to him like barnacles to a freighter. And yet still he moves the pile. Still the legs keep churning. You can't see him anymore in that mass of humanity, but you can tell he's not yet finished, because the mass keeps moving closer and closer to the first-down marker.

Metaphor for a football program. Metaphor for an Indiana team that has fully taken on the stubborn imprint of its stubborn, resolute coach, who'll give an inch only when you beat him senseless for it.

This is Curt Cignetti's program, his team, his personality in the full and realized flesh. This is not last year's Indiana team, which went 16-0 and won a national title that still seems like a fever dream at a school whose football history has always been a long gray line of failure.

This is a team that wins because, like Khobie Martin, it refuses to stop moving the pile. Its obstinance is its superpower.

Obstinance took it home last night, when a 7-2 USC team came to town playing its best football of the season, having blitzed Ohio State a couple of weeks prior. Ohio State had previously handed Indiana its only loss of the season by the width of IU receiver Nick Marsh's foot and a Josh Hoover pass that was inches offline.

The Hoosiers then gasped past Michigan and Minnesota before finally, blessedly, reaching the haven of their bye week. And while they were bye-ing, the College Football Playoff pollsters dropped them from fifth to ninth. 

Which apparently meant the CFP boys looked at all those close Ws the Hoosiers had been stacking, and concluded they were more lucky than good.

Which further meant the Hoosiers couldn't afford to lose to USC, or the CFP would drop them like a live grenade.

Fast forward to the fourth quarter last night, six or so minutes to play, IU clinging with white knuckles to a 20-13 lead. Here came USC, hurrying downfield like a man late for work. The Trojans got it inside the 10. A running play got them inside the 5. Then USC quarterback Jayden Maiava dropped back and threw for the end zone, and ...

... and IU linebacker Isaiah Jones read it perfectly, scooted over and picked it off. Threat erased.

After that, Wilson, who threw for 305 yards and two scores in his first Indiana start, kept handing the football to Martin and Lee Beebe Jr., and they kept moving the pile, moving the chains, grinding clock. Finally Wilson stuck the dagger, arcing a perfect throw to -- who else? -- Charlie Becker, who of course made the catch and then flung himself over the goal line.

Indiana 27, USC 13.

Indiana beating a top-20 team by two touchdowns, with its backup quarterback, with its shoulder blades firmly pressed to the wall.

Hard telling what the CFP will make of that. But I'm guessing it will make more of it than No. 9 in its next poll.

I'm also guessing, no matter what happens from here on out, that whoever finally beats this Indiana team -- if anyone -- they'll have to kill it dead to do it.

And even then, they'd better check its pulse.

A travelin' tale

 Whatever snickering gremlins shut down the American airline industry for several hours scrambled some pro and college sports itineraries but good yesterday, on account of it happened on a Friday, a major travel day for NFL and college football teams in particular.

This was especially true on the college side, where, among many others, No. 2 Utah, No. 8 Texas and No. 9 Tennessee were stranded on their way to Arizona, LSU and Texas A&M, respectively. This offered up the intriguing prospect of several Big Deal College Inc.'s weighing the option of chartering buses to get to their games on time, which apparently some did.

Presumably, those who did choose to charter buses only reserved the very best luxury rides. Big Deal College Inc., after all, has a revenue stream that could drown a horse, and thus can afford to travel first class, even when the transportation option is second class.

(Which, come to think of it, might not be any more second-class than most American air travel these days. As someone observed last night while the Clown Car Administration was trying to figure out why airport communications shut down, prompting the FAA to ground all flights nationwide: "Air travel's no different than Greyhound these days.")

At any rate, the Blob (being its perverse self) chose to imagine how opting for charter buses  would look if Big Deal College Inc. did NOT have a revenue stream that could drown a horse. I figure it would go something like this ...

Big Deal College Coach Theodore "Groin Pull" Slobberknocker: OK, men, here's our ride -- good old Bluebird bus No. 29. Everybody in, we're 24 hours from kickoff at Cletus Bodine State, and we're gonna need about 18 of 'em getting there.

Big Deal College Players: A  SCHOOL BUS? Come on, Coach, where's our Gulfstream 5?

Coach: Sorry, boys, it's grounded. Some genius tried to introduce that newfangled AI into a system that dates to 1870 or so. Shut the whole system right down. I swear these dopes could screw up a one-car parade.

Anyway, we're travelin' by bus this week.

Players: Well, fine, but why couldn't we get a dozen or so stretch limos? With snacks? I mean, what happened to all the money the athletic department made from the Gardiance/Skyrizi/Pete's Pride Pork Fritters Bowl last year?

Coach (getting annoyed): It went into your NIL fund, ya spoiled brats. Although why we're payin' some of you spazzos is beyond me. We're 1-8 and haven't crossed midfield in two weeks. And I for one am gettin' sick of watching Johnson over there fall down every time someone breathes on him. 

Johnson: But I look great in the State Farm ad, don't I, Coach?

Coach: For $1.5 million, you oughta look like Tom Cruise. And play like Tom Brady. Instead, what do we get? Tommy Boy.

(Johnson pouts. The other players grumble.)

Coach: Enough! Get on the bus. Here's your peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for the ride. And you guys in the back, don't be actin' up. When he's not pilotin' good old 29 for Dirt Clod High over in Landfill Valley, our driver has a regular route with San Quentin Prep. He'll pull this heap over and throw your asses right off.

(Pause)

Which I might be OK with, actually.

National (College) Football League

 So officially, now, the College Football Playoff Bought And Paid For By ESPN is a 24-team extravaganza, which I guess means SEC Inc. and Big Ten Inc. get what they wanted: A playoff that includes every SEC and Big Ten school with a winning record.

OK. So maybe not.

OK, so maybe a 6-6 Mississippi State doesn't get in, or a 7-5 Arkansas, or the football colossus that is, say, a 5-7 Rutgers. But if the goal of ESPN, which sort of owns SEC Inc., was to get more of "its" schools into the Big Payday, consider it mission accomplished for all parties concerned.

 ESPN gets the expanded CFP, and lame-o SEC or Big Ten schools will get to be the Mercer or Howard or Maryland-Baltimore County of the CFP — only with zero chance to pull off one of those 16-over-1s or 15-over-2s that put the Madness in March Madness.

Football, alas, is not basketball. A .500 Maryland team is not taking out, say, 9-3 Alabama in the first round. You can pencil in the 42-17 final and just move on.

This is not to say a 24-team playoff does not have its upside. Included in the package are nine-game conference schedules for the big boys, which eliminates a lot of the Puffed Rice U.'s and Lemon Meringue Techs on Indiana's, er, Power 4 teams' schedules. That's because in a 24-team field, a Power 4 can risk an early loss or two by scheduling other Power 4s and still get in -- whether it deserves to or not.

Some folks think this will force Notre Dame, finally, to join a conference, because if everyone's playing nine conference games there won't be a lot of dates left for independents like ND. But this presumes ND is still a football independent, which it isn't, really. Half its games already are against ACC opponents, of which the Irish are official members in everything but football; if they lose dates because of expanded conference skeddys, they can always fill in with a North Carolina State or Virginia or some other ACC school it doesn't already play.

No, the schools that really get rogered in all this are the Group of Six schools, which in the expanded structure get tossed a crumb or two from the Power 4 tables. There's a reason your Woffords and Ball States and Kenesaw States volunteer to get ball-peened by Georgia or Ohio State or Indiana every year; it's because they need the cash and those games are a a healthy payout. A couple million in guarantee dough plumps up cash-strapped small school athletic budgets in fine style.

Now, the big shooters don't need to schedule cupcake guarantee games anymore -- and with expanded conference slates and a mandated number of Power 4 games, they don't have room for them in any case. So buh-bye, money train.

(Also, buh-bye conference title games. No loss. They were never anything more than cash grabs for the conferences anyway. Same goes for conference tournaments in basketball, for that matter. As John Wooden once told me.)

What else?

Well, with another round or two added to the CFP festivities -- and with all the extra revenue those rounds will bring in -- what happens to the presumption that the kids upon whose backs that extra revenue will be made are, you know, actual college students?

Well, sorry, folks, but that went out with raccoon coats, sis-boom-bah and the groves of academe. It was gone the first time some stud transferred from Whatsamatta U. to Whatsittoya U. for a million-dollar bump in NIL green. And the first time the same stud transferred from Whatsittoya U. to Getthefuggouttahere U., and then to Whatareyoulookinat U.

Now?

Now, in exchange for their NIL paychecks, the scholars who play for the two teams that wind up in the CFP title game will be playing a schedule as long as the NFL grind. Indiana, for instance, went 16-0 last season to win the national championship. Now you're adding another game or two? For, in many cases, not grown men but 19, 20-year-old kids?

The season, for the two best teams, will now run from Labor Day weekend to the middle of January with scarcely a break. And, yeah, the players get paid now, and, yeah, that essentially makes them professionals, but where does the "college" in college football come in anymore?

Might as well call it what it is now: The National (College) Football League. A wholly owned subsidiary of ESPN, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS.

Shame. I kinda liked my raccoon coat.

Pod people

Aaaand the beat goes on, despite America beating it briskly about the head and neck in the mid-terms a week ago.

Down in Mississippi, where the state just elected a black United States Senator for first time in 145 years, a couple of dopey white sorority girls got caught on a ring camera making monkey noises outside the apartment of three black women,  and now the usual suspects are raising thousands in defense of their inalienable right to be racist nitwits.

Meanwhile, in Indiana …

Some podcaster dude podcasting for a podcast covering Center Grove High School athletics (but which has no affiliation with the school) thought it would be cute to indulge tired racist tropes about black people ahead of this week’s regional football game between predominantly white Center Grove and predominantly black Warren Central.

Joked that a lot of the Warren Central kids were ignorant sumbitches who couldn’t read, the Pod People did. Said some of the football players were actually 20 or 21 years old.  Said there are young kids in the school system who aren’t as young as they should be for the grade they’re in.

Yeesh. You’d think these people could come up with some new material after all this time. But, nah.

Now, those sorority girls down at Ole Miss, that’s just a case of kids not being raised right. Ditto whoever’s defending them — seriously, the Magic Intertoobz are crawling with their defenders right now — and whoever’s giving them Go Fund Me money because, doggone it, the little darlings are being persecuted for their beliefs.

Or some such thing.

But those podcasters in Indiana?

The main guy broadcast a public apology/non-apology that somehow made things worse, saying, aw, shucks, fellas, we were just trash-talking a little.

Holy schnikies. And they were questioning the Warren Central kids’ intelligence? 

‘Cause it takes a special kind of stupid to spew not only racist garbage, but painfully unoriginal racist garbage. And then semi-defend it. It’s as if the Pod People portaled back to 1866 or ‘67, listened to some sheet-wearing unreconstructed Confederates, and said “Boy, this is great stuff! Can’t wait to use it on the podcast!”

And, OK, so maybe that’s being a trifle overreactive, and thus plays into America’s current fondness for overreaction. But you know something?

The kicker to all this is Warren Central already beat Center Grove in the regular season. And the Warriors are unbeaten and ranked No. 2 in Class 6A. And Friday’s game is at Warren Central.

All of which means it takes a REALLY special kind of stupid to hand an unbeaten team that’s already beaten you bulletin board material a couple of days before you play them again.

Makes you want to give the Pod People a reading comprehension test, doesn’t it?

Also makes you wish Center Grove’s coach, who cannot be happy about this, would haul them out to the practice field and make him run gassers until his tongue’s painting the turf.

Oh, yeah.

Sacrifice and honor

I wrote the following several years back, and now I re-post it every other Veteran's Day or so. I do it for the same reason I pull Joseph E. Persico's "11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour" off the shelf and re-read chunks of it, because before today was Veteran's Day it was Armistice Day, and for me I suppose it always will be in some sense. The Great War, after all, lit the fuse for all the fun and frivolity that came after, from World War II to Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and right on up to Fearless Leader's military hijinks in Iran. 

Besides, it expresses everything I feel about the men and women who have borne the burden for all of the above, so you and I wouldn't have to.  So I offer it again.

And if you see a vet today, thank him or her for their service. It's the least you can do.

 Every year on Veteran's Day I go back there, in my mind. It's been 21 years now since my wife and I toured the American sector of the Western Front, but on this day it always feels like I can reach out and touch it. It feels as near as my next breath.

It's why November 11, the day the guns fell silent, will always be Armistice Day as much as Veteran's Day to me. It ended a war that is mostly forgotten to us now, even though some 54,000 Americans died in six months there, and countless others brought nightmares home from it that would last a lifetime. 

These days, in that place where American boys fought and died in the summer and autumn of 1918, there are neat green cemeteries from the Argonne to Thiaucourt, row upon row of white crosses arrayed in the geometry of remembrance. And, amid fields of wheat and the crumbling remains of ancient pillboxes, there is an immense dome of gleaming white marble.

Built in 1931 atop an escarpment called Montsec, it commands what was the old St. Mihiel salient, and now is just quiet French farmland. But though it commemorates the first major American operation of the Great War, hardly any Americans ever visit, or perhaps even know it exists.

I always wonder why that is so, when I think of that place on Veteran's Day. And I always will. 

It's an old bromide that we can never thank our veterans enough for their service, and yet somehow we always fall short. If we remember what they did for us in Normandy or Fallujah or on Iwo Jima or Okinawa, we just as readily forget sometimes what they did in Belleau Wood or Frozen Chosin or the killing fields of the Ia Drang Valley. And, more shamefully, we especially forget when they return home.

I met my share of war veterans, in my four decades as a journalist. I met Korean veterans and Vietnam veterans and, once, almost 30 years ago now, a vet who survived both Tarawa and Okinawa in World War II. And I met a man who, when he was 23 years old, was shooting down Nazi jets over Europe in a P-51 Mustang.

That particular gentleman's name was Chuck Yeager. Perhaps you've heard about what he did later on, something involving the sound barrier.

In all cases, they were men who'd seen and done things no human being should ever see or do, and they will talk about those things only with the most extreme reluctance. It is not that they don't remember. It's that they are unfailingly polite, and don't wish to burden us with old fantastical tales. It feels too much like bragging about things no one should ever brag about.

Everyone who has ever experienced war in closeup knows that last. They leave the bragging to fools and charlatans who, when it was their turn to serve, hid under their beds. One of them, a vile gasbag of no particular merit, once mocked a decorated Vietnam War POW for being captured. But of course now Fearless Leader has only the greatest of respect for our veterans.

I won't think about him today. I'll think instead about the no-big-deal humility of Chuck Yeager, and the quiet dignity of the Korean War vets I met almost 30 years ago, and of so many other men and women of so much more quality and consequence.

Thanks, all of you. Thank you for you service, and your example.

Worst. Fan. Ever.

 Comes now news out of the hoity-toity section of Detroit, and, listen, if this isn't the all-time king of the intermittent Blob feature Fans Behaving Badly, there will never be an all-time king.

It seems a visiting Bedford High School fan, apparently distressed that the boys were getting ball-peened 42-0 by Grosse Pointe South in a football game, walked into the Grosse Pointe school building and ... well, and ...

Pooped in the hallway.

"He did WHAT??" you're saying now.

Pooped. Defecated. Left a calling card. Choose your description.

Now, I have to admit, the Blob has been sitting on this (OK, bad choice of words) for several days, because I was extremely suspicious of its provenance. This is generally the Blob's standard social media policy in the age of artificial intelligence and political hack sites both right and left, and it's served me well. Otherwise I really might have believed Lauren Boebert had landed a job as a server at Hooter's (check out the meme!), or that Bill and Hillary Clinton had a marriage unblemished by cheating or scandal.

Anyway, I held off until I saw numerous legit news organizations in the Detroit metro area had picked up the story. So, yeah, I guess it's true, and now come the one-liners, which don't exactly  write themselves but don't require a lot of outside assistance, either. 

Why did the Beford High football fan poop in a Grosse Pointe South hallway?

Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

He just wanted to put the "gross" in Grosse Pointe.

He could only find the girls restroom and he didn't want to be accused of being one of those transgenders.

And last but not least:

Those three chili cheese dogs he ate before coming to the game were exacting their natural revenge.

Me?

As a former journo, I wanted someone to follow Jimmy Breslin's lead, sort of, when he interviewed the guy who dug John F. Kennedy's grave. 

I wanted to see an interview with the janitor who had to clean up the mess. Yikes.