I love my hometown.
I say this as someone who, as a journalist there for 28 years, gave it the back of my hand more than once when it had it coming. Who poked fun at it when it had it coming. Who recognizes that, if it is insular and backward and Hooterville on steroids at times, it also can be generous and visionary and a pretty damn good place to live -- even with streets that occasionally change names mid-stream for no apparent reason.
Part of the Fort's charm, I always figured.
It's why I moved back here after a decade somewhere else and never left, even though I could have. It's my city. It has a good heart in spite of its sporadic outbreaks of bull-you-know-what. And so it dismays me to see what happened downtown last night, when a peaceful protest over the police lynching of a black man in Minneapolis was hijacked by idiots.
I wasn't there, but from the accounts of those I trust who were and from watching the live feed, there seems to have been two separate things going on. There was the protest, and then there was a riot. And one seems to have had very little to do with the other.
The protest was about the murder of yet another person of color.
The riot was about a bunch of mostly white punks who came downtown not to express outrage at a nation that still can't come to terms with race, but for the express purpose of smashing things on a pleasant late-spring evening.
And so they did. They smashed windows (Who the hell smashes the windows of a JimmyJohn's? Their food isn't that bad) and overturned planters and climbed on top of police cars and got tear-gassed, which is what their objective seems to have been. If that weren't the case, why did so many of them show up with cartons of milk to lessen the sting?
Car keys, cellphone, wallet, carton of milk. Yep, that's how I always leave the house.
The police, mind you, bear some responsibility for what happened, too. They showed up in full riot gear and gassed a crowd that included children because they were blocking traffic on Clinton, which quickly escalated the situation. The more prudent course would have been simply to re-route traffic around the area until people started drifting away. Eventually they would have, because that's what people do.
Instead, they played right into the hands of the idiots.
The worst thing about all this, and about the similar unrest that's happening in cities all over America now, is we're no longer talking about what happened to George Floyd and the continued erosion of trust between the authorities and Americans of color.
We're talking about windows being smashed. And cities burning. And the President of the United States encouraging the summary execution, without due process, of Americans for stealing microwave ovens and big-screen TVs.
Swipe that Blu-Ray and you'll get the needle in Donny John's America, sonny. Or a bullet.
But I digress.
Which of course is the point, isn't it?
To digress. To get off-topic. To make mayhem the lead story, and thereby discredit the real story.
I don't think the idiots smashing things up downtown last night were trying to do the latter consciously, although some may have been. Certainly there's a growing body of evidence now that there's an organized element out there whose goal is to discredit and obscure and smear by showing up to burn and smash and destroy.
For that element, that's what this is all about. It's about muddying legitimate outrage with faux outrage. It's about trivializing the conversation we need to have because that element considers the conversation a threat.
Which is why the rest of us, in my hometown and elsewhere, need to keep having it.
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Friday, May 29, 2020
A chorus of voices
I am not the person who should be pretending to expertise on the murder of George Floyd. Let's begin there this morning.
I am not the person who should be pretending to expertise on the murder of George Floyd, because I am a white 65-year-old male who grew up in an almost exclusively white neighborhood and went to an overwhelmingly white school system. And so what happened to George Floyd and Christian Cooper and Ahmaud Arbery and Philando Castile and all the many, many others is never going to happen to me.
I am never going to be executed by vigilantes while jogging.
I am never going to have the cops called on me while birdwatching.
I never had to have The Talk with my father, never had to be careful what toy I picked up to avoid getting shot in Walmart, never had to worry about being choked to death in police custody for kiting a check or selling cigarettes on a street corner.
All of that is completely outside my realm of experience. Inside my realm of experience, however, is the knowledge that, as a white man, I can stage an armed occupation of my statehouse and not have to worry about law enforcement doing any of the aforementioned. Hell, they'll hold the door for me.
What a lucky boy am I.
As such, I can watch Minneapolis burn and only pretend I understand it is the boiling over of years of rage at the countless slings and arrows of outrageous indifference. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, riots do not happen in a vacuum. They are a by-product.
And so I can get that rage. But I can't get that rage, if you know what I mean.
What I can do is what Carson Wentz and Zach Ertz have done.
They spoke out, as white Americans and white professional athletes. And that is important, because the murder of George Floyd cannot just be an African-American issue. It needs to be an American issue -- especially in an America whose current president's words and deeds, past and present, have led racists and white supremacists to regard him as a fellow traveler.
And so more than just Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James and other principled men and women of color need to kneel, figuratively and otherwise. We all need to.
One segment of America should not have to carry this tune alone. The entire chorus should.
"Can't even fathom what the black community has to endure on a daily basis," Wentz wrote on social media. "Being from North Dakota, I've spent a large part of my life surrounded by people of similar color, so I'm never gonna act like I know what the black community goes through or even has gone through already. I'll never know the feeling of having to worry about my kids going outside because of their skin color."
Ertz and his wife, Julie Johnston Ertz, a member of the U.S. women's national soccer team, chimed in with this: "Even the thought of trying to come up with the 'perfect' saying is so damn selfish. What I do know is I am so unbelievably sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt the African-American community has endured by another human, and more than anything I am sorry that you feel you are alone in this situation."
And, yeah, sure, those are just pretty words. And words are just words. But you've gotta start someplace.
The key, this time, is not stopping there.
I am not the person who should be pretending to expertise on the murder of George Floyd, because I am a white 65-year-old male who grew up in an almost exclusively white neighborhood and went to an overwhelmingly white school system. And so what happened to George Floyd and Christian Cooper and Ahmaud Arbery and Philando Castile and all the many, many others is never going to happen to me.
I am never going to be executed by vigilantes while jogging.
I am never going to have the cops called on me while birdwatching.
I never had to have The Talk with my father, never had to be careful what toy I picked up to avoid getting shot in Walmart, never had to worry about being choked to death in police custody for kiting a check or selling cigarettes on a street corner.
All of that is completely outside my realm of experience. Inside my realm of experience, however, is the knowledge that, as a white man, I can stage an armed occupation of my statehouse and not have to worry about law enforcement doing any of the aforementioned. Hell, they'll hold the door for me.
What a lucky boy am I.
As such, I can watch Minneapolis burn and only pretend I understand it is the boiling over of years of rage at the countless slings and arrows of outrageous indifference. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, riots do not happen in a vacuum. They are a by-product.
And so I can get that rage. But I can't get that rage, if you know what I mean.
What I can do is what Carson Wentz and Zach Ertz have done.
They spoke out, as white Americans and white professional athletes. And that is important, because the murder of George Floyd cannot just be an African-American issue. It needs to be an American issue -- especially in an America whose current president's words and deeds, past and present, have led racists and white supremacists to regard him as a fellow traveler.
And so more than just Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James and other principled men and women of color need to kneel, figuratively and otherwise. We all need to.
One segment of America should not have to carry this tune alone. The entire chorus should.
"Can't even fathom what the black community has to endure on a daily basis," Wentz wrote on social media. "Being from North Dakota, I've spent a large part of my life surrounded by people of similar color, so I'm never gonna act like I know what the black community goes through or even has gone through already. I'll never know the feeling of having to worry about my kids going outside because of their skin color."
Ertz and his wife, Julie Johnston Ertz, a member of the U.S. women's national soccer team, chimed in with this: "Even the thought of trying to come up with the 'perfect' saying is so damn selfish. What I do know is I am so unbelievably sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt the African-American community has endured by another human, and more than anything I am sorry that you feel you are alone in this situation."
And, yeah, sure, those are just pretty words. And words are just words. But you've gotta start someplace.
The key, this time, is not stopping there.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Great decisions in programming history. Not.
Sometimes you'd just like to be in the room.
Sometimes you'd like to be sitting at that shiny table with the panoramic view of the great metropolis on the other side of the windows, and hear how the Big People make Big Decisions. How they get granular. How they circle back around. How they run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.
And so here is how I imagine it went when ESPN's Big People decided to give America another splendid documentary to lift its spirits in the time of the Bastard Plague, following up the critically acclaimed "Last Dance":
BIG PERSON NO. 1: Well, boys, what do we do for an encore? America still needs to be uplifted in this time of plague and madness, and we're just the ones to do it! Thoughts?
BIG PERSON NO. 2: How about Tom Brady?
NO, 1: Already in the pipeline.
NO. 2: Oh, yeah. Forgot.
BRATTY JUNIOR BIG PERSON: Tom Brady? Borrrr-ing.
NO. 1 (ignoring the Brat): Other thoughts?
(A cascade of voices, all talking over one another. "Tiger Woods!" "Peyton Manning!" "Brett Farv-ra!" "Big'un Darly!")
NO. 1: Who the hell is Big'un Darly?
UNIDENTIFIED BIG PERSON: Sorry. I forgot. He was just a character in a Dan Jenkins novel.
NO. 2: How about Lance Armstrong?
NO. 1 (rolling his eyes): Gee, I don't know. How about Al Capone?
NO. 2: I'm serious! Hey, the man's a straight-up sociopath! America loves sociopaths! We put one in the White House didn't we?
NO. 1: Yeah, but we're supposed to be uplifting America, not reminding it of how it got taken for a ride by a cheating, lying, wanna-be mafia don. Forget Capone. Why don't we do a 30-for-30 on Luca Brasi?
UNIDENTIFIED BIG PERSON: You know, he was just a charac-
NO. 1: Shut up.
(Brief silence around the table)
NO. 1: Although ...
And here we will leave the Big People to their ruminating, because, really? Lance Armstrong?
Look, I suppose America will watch anything now, because they watched hillbillies with tigers. And I suppose Lance Armstrong is interesting in a slowing-down-to-look-at-car-wrecks sort of way. He's fascinating. He's disturbed. He's fascinating because he is disturbed.
But this is not exactly what America has an appetite for right now, because it gets its recommended daily requirement of disturbed from the White House every day. And so no surprise that the two-part Lance-umentary sank like a stone, at least compared to "The Last Dance." The latter drew ten times the viewers nightly.
Me, I didn't watch. I had my fill of Lance Armstrong back in the days when I was getting bashed by the cycling community for merely suggesting it wasn't unreasonable to wonder how he was doing what he was doing. It was as if I'd pushed down the Pope and taken his lunch money.
Any thinking individual should have looked at Armstrong's narrative and had questions, if not doubts. But even having questions was heresy in those days. And so I heard about it.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
In any event, here's to ya, Big People. Nice call there.
Shoulda gone with Big'un Darly.
Sometimes you'd like to be sitting at that shiny table with the panoramic view of the great metropolis on the other side of the windows, and hear how the Big People make Big Decisions. How they get granular. How they circle back around. How they run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.
And so here is how I imagine it went when ESPN's Big People decided to give America another splendid documentary to lift its spirits in the time of the Bastard Plague, following up the critically acclaimed "Last Dance":
BIG PERSON NO. 1: Well, boys, what do we do for an encore? America still needs to be uplifted in this time of plague and madness, and we're just the ones to do it! Thoughts?
BIG PERSON NO. 2: How about Tom Brady?
NO, 1: Already in the pipeline.
NO. 2: Oh, yeah. Forgot.
BRATTY JUNIOR BIG PERSON: Tom Brady? Borrrr-ing.
NO. 1 (ignoring the Brat): Other thoughts?
(A cascade of voices, all talking over one another. "Tiger Woods!" "Peyton Manning!" "Brett Farv-ra!" "Big'un Darly!")
NO. 1: Who the hell is Big'un Darly?
UNIDENTIFIED BIG PERSON: Sorry. I forgot. He was just a character in a Dan Jenkins novel.
NO. 2: How about Lance Armstrong?
NO. 1 (rolling his eyes): Gee, I don't know. How about Al Capone?
NO. 2: I'm serious! Hey, the man's a straight-up sociopath! America loves sociopaths! We put one in the White House didn't we?
NO. 1: Yeah, but we're supposed to be uplifting America, not reminding it of how it got taken for a ride by a cheating, lying, wanna-be mafia don. Forget Capone. Why don't we do a 30-for-30 on Luca Brasi?
UNIDENTIFIED BIG PERSON: You know, he was just a charac-
NO. 1: Shut up.
(Brief silence around the table)
NO. 1: Although ...
And here we will leave the Big People to their ruminating, because, really? Lance Armstrong?
Look, I suppose America will watch anything now, because they watched hillbillies with tigers. And I suppose Lance Armstrong is interesting in a slowing-down-to-look-at-car-wrecks sort of way. He's fascinating. He's disturbed. He's fascinating because he is disturbed.
But this is not exactly what America has an appetite for right now, because it gets its recommended daily requirement of disturbed from the White House every day. And so no surprise that the two-part Lance-umentary sank like a stone, at least compared to "The Last Dance." The latter drew ten times the viewers nightly.
Me, I didn't watch. I had my fill of Lance Armstrong back in the days when I was getting bashed by the cycling community for merely suggesting it wasn't unreasonable to wonder how he was doing what he was doing. It was as if I'd pushed down the Pope and taken his lunch money.
Any thinking individual should have looked at Armstrong's narrative and had questions, if not doubts. But even having questions was heresy in those days. And so I heard about it.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
In any event, here's to ya, Big People. Nice call there.
Shoulda gone with Big'un Darly.
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Legendary crazy
You know what I miss most about baseball, as the calendar leans in toward June and summer?
I miss whining about my relentlessly crummy Pittsburgh Pirates, and then hearing my faithful reader(s) scream "Enough about the (bleep-bleep) Pirates! Nobody cares!"
Well ... I do. And this is my Blob. So nyah.
Besides, how could I pass up wonderful stuff like Matt Zylbert of the reconstituted Deadspin reminiscing about the signature awfulness/weirdness of the Aught Pirates?
Hey, I knew my Pirates were epically pathetic in the '90s and Aughts (Twenty straight losing seasons, y'all! Nobody's EVER done that!). But I didn't know they were also epically strange. I mean, seriously, bows and arrows? Lloyd McClendon? Randall Simon and Nyjer Morgan?
These were some legends, man. These were giants among ginormous losers.
Remember when McClendon, the nutso manager who averaged 96.8 losses per season between 2001 and 2005? Remember when he got thrown out of a game and stole first base?
No, really. He stole first base.
Or how about Simon? Remember that guy? First player in MLB history, probably, to beat up a guy dressed as a sausage with this bat. Interrupted the hell out of the sausage race in Milwaukee that day, it goes without saying.
And then there was Morgan, who adopted an alias named Tony Plush. Seven flavors of crazy. Hit a walkoff home run and didn't realize it was a walkoff home run. Used to take dumps in Gatorade bottles.
I'd almost forgotten about all that. And I never knew about the bow-and-arrow thing, bored players in the dregs of another crap season showing up with their hunting bows and shooting arrows around PNC Park before games. One guy even got pissed at the clubhouse TV one day and took it out with an arrow.
You go an entire decade without finishing within ten games of .500 in any season, stuff will happen.
And the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune will fly.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Pick-and-roll ... out
So I'm reading this piece by Ramona Shelburne of ESPN, and she's quoting the executive director of the NBA players' union, Michele Roberts, saying it's time to get the NBA season started again, and now I'm looking at the calendar and thinking heretical thoughts.
Mostly these involve one word: "Why?"
Because, see, in the same story, I read that the likely re-start date is sometime in late July at the Disney/ESPN Wide World of Sports in Orlando, and that they'll have to have some sort of training camp first. And now I'm looking at the calendar again, and I'm thinking more heretical thoughts.
Mostly these involve some version of "What's the point?"
I mean, if you're not going to re-start the season until late July, and you're going to either finish the regular season or jump right into playoff basketball even though the players have been idle since March, and those playoffs are going to be some sort of hurry-up deal because you don't want to rear-end the start of next season ...
Well. It's like the Blob said the other day about the NHL: Half-assery is full assery. And if you're going to have to engage in half-assery just to finish a season every reasonable person understands is lost, it's not worth it. It's time to scrub the mission and move on.
Or, hey. How about this?
Send everyone to Orlando as planned, and go ahead and conduct your training camps as planned. But reset the clock. Instead of re-starting a season that's already dead for all practical purposes, begin the 2020-21 season in, say, early to mid-August. Given that the NBA season lasts longer than the Punic Wars, this would mean it wraps in April instead of the middle of June.
Which is when every self-respecting basketball season should wrap up. And when the NBA season itself used to back when things made sense.
And the plague-ruined 2019-2020 season?
If awarding the championship trophy means that much, haul it out in Orlando and let Adam Silver parade it around for the troops. And let the players all touch it.
But only if they sanitize, of course.
Mostly these involve one word: "Why?"
Because, see, in the same story, I read that the likely re-start date is sometime in late July at the Disney/ESPN Wide World of Sports in Orlando, and that they'll have to have some sort of training camp first. And now I'm looking at the calendar again, and I'm thinking more heretical thoughts.
Mostly these involve some version of "What's the point?"
I mean, if you're not going to re-start the season until late July, and you're going to either finish the regular season or jump right into playoff basketball even though the players have been idle since March, and those playoffs are going to be some sort of hurry-up deal because you don't want to rear-end the start of next season ...
Well. It's like the Blob said the other day about the NHL: Half-assery is full assery. And if you're going to have to engage in half-assery just to finish a season every reasonable person understands is lost, it's not worth it. It's time to scrub the mission and move on.
Or, hey. How about this?
Send everyone to Orlando as planned, and go ahead and conduct your training camps as planned. But reset the clock. Instead of re-starting a season that's already dead for all practical purposes, begin the 2020-21 season in, say, early to mid-August. Given that the NBA season lasts longer than the Punic Wars, this would mean it wraps in April instead of the middle of June.
Which is when every self-respecting basketball season should wrap up. And when the NBA season itself used to back when things made sense.
And the plague-ruined 2019-2020 season?
If awarding the championship trophy means that much, haul it out in Orlando and let Adam Silver parade it around for the troops. And let the players all touch it.
But only if they sanitize, of course.
Monday, May 25, 2020
Starved for content
Memorial Day weekend, and let's raise a glass to a Memorial Day weekend Sunday that almost felt like a regular sports Sunday. It wasn't, but you could kinda pretend it was.
There was no Indianapolis 500, but there was a Coca-Cola 600, which used to be called the World 600, which is kind of funny because no one in the world was allowed to be there in person.
There was no baseball or playoff basketball or the Greater Velveeta Open live from Froghair Crick Country Club and Horseshoe Emporium, but there was The Match 2, which was almost the same.
We got to watch it rain on Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson and Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. We got to watch Brady mis-hit golf balls and not be, you know, so damn perfect, except when he holed out that wedge on No. 7.
And we got to listen to Peyton Manning explain why he was wearing a pink shirt instead of being twinsies with teammate Tiger, who was wearing his requisite Sunday red and black.
Basically, it was because Peyton's a Tennessee guy, and red and black are Georgia's colors, and hell no he wasn't gonna wear the school colors of THOSE country sonsabitches.
Or something like that.
Anyway, people loved it. And I suspect part of why they loved it, aside from it being pretty entertaining, was because people were sitting on their couches watching live almost-sports on a holiday Sunday afternoon. And so for a few hours it almost felt as if human beings were masters of their own fate again, instead of being at the mercy of a microscopic red-and-gray virus that looks sort of like an Ohio State Koosh ball.
As athletic directors and ESPN commentators and pro sports czars like to say these days, we are Starved For Content. Which of course also means we're starved for something else.
Normal, I think it's called.
There was no Indianapolis 500, but there was a Coca-Cola 600, which used to be called the World 600, which is kind of funny because no one in the world was allowed to be there in person.
There was no baseball or playoff basketball or the Greater Velveeta Open live from Froghair Crick Country Club and Horseshoe Emporium, but there was The Match 2, which was almost the same.
We got to watch it rain on Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson and Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. We got to watch Brady mis-hit golf balls and not be, you know, so damn perfect, except when he holed out that wedge on No. 7.
And we got to listen to Peyton Manning explain why he was wearing a pink shirt instead of being twinsies with teammate Tiger, who was wearing his requisite Sunday red and black.
Basically, it was because Peyton's a Tennessee guy, and red and black are Georgia's colors, and hell no he wasn't gonna wear the school colors of THOSE country sonsabitches.
Or something like that.
Anyway, people loved it. And I suspect part of why they loved it, aside from it being pretty entertaining, was because people were sitting on their couches watching live almost-sports on a holiday Sunday afternoon. And so for a few hours it almost felt as if human beings were masters of their own fate again, instead of being at the mercy of a microscopic red-and-gray virus that looks sort of like an Ohio State Koosh ball.
As athletic directors and ESPN commentators and pro sports czars like to say these days, we are Starved For Content. Which of course also means we're starved for something else.
Normal, I think it's called.
What they gave
I'll wear this cap today, just because. It reminds me of some things.
It reminds me of a cigar shop in, yes, Gettysburg, Pa., and of a warm spring morning, and of everything that lies a stone's throw away up a gentle rise. There are trees and grass and shadowed walkways and graceful monuments there, and concentric circles of granite set flush with the earth. They radiate out from one of those monuments, a geometry of names from Vermont and Pennsylvania and New York and Ohio and Michigan, and, yes, Indiana.
This is the Gettysburg National Cemetery, just up the street from the cigar shop on East Cemetery Hill. There are 6,000 sons and husbands and fathers buried here, sleeping their eternal sleep. Some of them died in the Spanish-American War and World War I and World War II and many other wars, because that's what happens when human beings get it in their minds to kill, and other human beings are called upon to stop them.
Three-thousand, five-hundred twelve of them died in the Civil War, many of them meeting the last of their days on the slanting fields and rocky outcroppings that surround this place. Interspersed among the granite circles are small square stones bearing only numbers. These are the unknown dead, and there are almost 1,000 of them.
Known or unknown, buried here or elsewhere, they came here from 18 states, from Maine to Minnesota. And they died far from home. Their names were Strong Vincent and Patrick O'Rorke and Elon Farnsworth. Their names were Charles Hazlett and Stephen Weed and Alonzo Cushing, who was just 22 years old when a Confederate bullet hit him in the mouth and killed him in the last mad minutes before Pickett's Charge spent itself on Cemetery Ridge.
Today is about them, and all the others. Today is about the boys who never came back, about Cushing and Vincent and O'Rorke and Pvt. Charles Baker of the 1st Minnesota -- a farmer from Barnesville, Mn., who died as twilight came down on July 2, and the 1st Minnesota was sent on a suicide mission to buy time against an irresistible Confederate assault.
We talk a lot about sacrifice, on Memorial Day. It is the central theme of a day given over to cookouts and relaxing and welcoming the summer to come. And it is perhaps never more central than it is now, when the contrast between what sacrifice is and what it isn't has never been more glaring.
What it is, we can find up that gentle rise in Gettysburg. What it isn't is what we're being asked to do now in the face of the Bastard Plague.
We are being asked to wear a mask when we go to the grocery store.
We are being asked to forego for a time, some of the pleasures of American life.
We are being asked to help stem the tide of a vicious illness that, in less than three months, has already claimed 14 times more lives than were lost on those fields and outcroppings in the first days of July 1863.
And how have some of us reacted to that?
By yowling like spoiled children who've been denied a cookie.
By missing the splendid irony of hollering about "tyranny" and "freedom" while freely staging armed occupations of statehouses.
By harassing, and at times physically attacking, beleaguered store employees who've requested they help out simply by wearing masks on the premises.
The freedom to act like idiots, as with all others, is an American right. But I hope Pvt. Charles Baker is doing triple Axels in his grave, seeing all this. I hope Alonzo Cushing and Elon Farnsworth are themselves yowling in the Great Beyond, wondering why the hell they took a bullet for these dumb SOBs.
Or in Farnsworth's case, five bullets.
Let me tell you about Farnsworth.
He was a 25-year-old cavalry captain from Michigan when, late on the afternoon of July 3, he was ordered to lead an entirely unnecessary charge by his commanding officer, Judson Kilpatrick. The battle was over, the order made no sense, but Farnsworth obeyed it.
His troop promptly rode into a thicket of Confederate riflemen who hadn't yet withdrawn from their position on the extreme left of the Union line. The boys in gray could hardly miss. Farnsworth was shot five times in the chest and died.
There's a modest monument there now, marking the spot. The last time I was in Gettysburg, I tracked it down. Its very remoteness from the rest of the battlefield speaks to how ridiculous was Kilpatrick's order. There wasn't another soul in sight as I stood in the middle of the clearing where Farnsworth died, and looked around, and thought about how this was last thing in his earthly life he saw.
I think about that now, as I wear this cap. I think about how and why he and all the others died on that day, and on the two previous.
And then I wonder if we deserve it.
Sunday, May 24, 2020
The month of May. Part the fourth.
I wrote this today for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It's the last in a series of four columns that will run through the month of May. Because there will be no month of May as we know it, it's my recollections, from 40 years of covering the Indianapolis 500, of four of the more memorable ones. It's also my chance to throw in a plea for all good Blobophiles to subscribe to the JG, on account of local journalism is a vital public service.
Here's the link. Sign up today.
Here's the link. Sign up today.
He couldn’t do this. Understand that right from the jump.
Memorial Day weekend in 2006, and Sam Hornish Jr. had lost the scent. He
was too far adrift in young Marco Andretti’s wake. He was simply too far back,
and that was the bare truth of it.
And so when we all drifted to the glass fronting the media center to
watch Marco come to the checkers that afternoon, the ledes to our stories were
already tumbling inside our heads like dryer lint. The Andretti curse,
reversed. The new generation, straight out of the gate, kicking Indy in its soft
parts. Marco’s dad, Michael, back there cheering into his radio, his own shot
having faded in the final laps; Grandpa Mario puffing up like a peacock down in
the pits.
And then, here came Hornish.
Here he came, a red-and-white blur, a 220-mph optical illusion because,
no, he couldn’t do this. He was half a straightaway behind coming to the white
flag. He was still out of contact as Marco winged into the north short chute, less than a mile
from the checkers.
I can’t say for sure what happened next. All I can tell you is, in the
14 years since that afternoon, I’ve watched the finish of the 2006 Indianapolis
500 a dozen times. And to this day I can’t explain it.
One second Hornish was out of it. Then you blinked, and somehow he was
RIGHT THERE.
There was a sense of motion up in
the north chute and into turn four, the red-and-white car abruptly gobbling up
the distance to Marco with cartoon speed. Suddenly Hornish was parked on
Marco’s tailpipes, and then – directly in front of us, less than 200 yards from
the finish – he was even with him.
Then he was beyond him, and the checkers dipped over his nosecone.
I’ve seen a lot of jaw-dropping finishes in my years at the 500. I’ve
seen Al Unser Jr. beat Scott Goodyear at the line and J.R. Hildebrand crash on
the 800th and final left turn and Helio Castroneves and Ryan Hunter-Reay go
down on the grass to pass one another in a fight to the finish. I’ve seen
Gordon Johncock hold off an onrushing Rick Mears, and Juan Pablo Montoya win a
clash of titans with Scott Dixon and Will Power.
But I’ve never seen anything like ’06. Never seen anything that pulled
so many disparate threads together into such a dense mosaic.
There was, to begin with, the sheer ridiculousness of how another
Andretti was bitten by a curse none of them has ever admitted exists, except on
those occasions when it does. Surely this was the curse at its cruelest and
most absurd, stealing the race when it was simply impossible for it to happen
this time.
And that it was Hornish who was the benefactor, Hornish who himself
never had any luck but the devil’s at this place …
Six times prior he’d started the 500. Six times he’d failed to finish
all 200 laps. And when he’d taken his shot at Marco down in turn three with a
couple of laps left and failed, falling out of contact, it was a mortal lock
that his luck at Indy was going to remain out.
And then the worst of all his chances abruptly became the one that paid.
I wound up that day writing about the magnificent absurdity of it all,
and how that absurdity made it the greatest finish in 500 history. I wrote
about Michael Andretti sitting back there in third thinking his boy had it won,
and about how he knew from the silence on his radio that Hornish had somehow
caught him. I wrote about him walking into the post-race news conference –
Michael, after all, was leading himself with four laps left – and seeing 19-year-old
Marco already sitting there.
Dad looked at Marco. Marco looked at Dad. And then, softly, he began to
pound his fist on the podium, a wordless gesture which everyone in the room
could translate: Damn. Damn. Damn.
On a day when there was nothing left to say, that said it all.
And speaking of the 500 ...
I woke up this morning hating today.
I woke up this morning hating today because I'm not walking out of the hotel with dawn a rose-colored splinter in the eastern sky, cardboard cup of cardboard hotel coffee in hand.
I woke up hating today because I wasn't climbing in the car and driving to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and humping my gear through the infield expanse in the brightening morning, my eyes still grainy with sleep.
I woke up hating today because I wasn't setting my gear down in the IMS media center, retrieving a marginally better cup of coffee, watching the F1 boys race through the streets of Monaco on the hundred or so TV monitors. I wasn't thumbing through the paper, rapping out a blog, making desultory chatter with a few other early arrivals.
I woke up hating today because it's not the day. It's not Race Day.
For the first time since 1945, 33 leadfoots will not come screaming to the green today in the last days of May, while 300,000 humans send down a sound like hurricane surf. We have the Bastard Plague to thank for this -- and for me in particular, it's never been more of a Bastard than it is today.
That's because, for me in particular, it's never left a more vacant space, as if a thief had broken into the Louvre and stolen a priceless work of art. Nothing remains now but the sterile outline of it, the outline of other Race Days in other years.
Within that outline are those moments early in the day, when the morning sun bathes in gold that immense cliff of grandstand across the track, and the shadows are deep and cool. You can walk downstairs and stroll through the pits in the scrubbed morning air, see the drivers' names and numbers freshly painted on the pit wall, feel the whole stuffed day begin to stir around you.
Down the way in Gasoline Alley, nosecones and rear wings lie scattered about as the crews turn the wrenches one last time. The early risers in the overlooking suites lean on the balcony railings and watch, 7 a.m. cocktails already down a quart.
None of that will happen today. I won't stroll through the pits or the garage area or while away the hours with the rest of the deadline grunts. I won't hang out on the tiny porch outside the media center, turn to watch the balloons drift aloft in the late-spring breeze, watch the 33 come to the green -- a moment that will jump your heart right up into your throat if you are a breathing human at all.
I also won't be sitting in the side yard in a cardboard-box fort, the way I did as a kid. I won't be hunched over listening to the radio boys as they run down the starting lineup (And on the outside of Row 7, from Tucson, Arizona, Roger McCluskey in car No. 8, the G.C. Murphy Special ...), and go to Mike Ahern and Jim Carroll and Howdy Bell on the backstretch, and tell me to Stay Tuned For The Greatest Spectacle In Racing.
All of that is part of this day, at least for me. But not today.
Today it will just be that vacant space on the wall. And I'll hate every minute.
I woke up this morning hating today because I'm not walking out of the hotel with dawn a rose-colored splinter in the eastern sky, cardboard cup of cardboard hotel coffee in hand.
I woke up hating today because I wasn't climbing in the car and driving to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and humping my gear through the infield expanse in the brightening morning, my eyes still grainy with sleep.
I woke up hating today because I wasn't setting my gear down in the IMS media center, retrieving a marginally better cup of coffee, watching the F1 boys race through the streets of Monaco on the hundred or so TV monitors. I wasn't thumbing through the paper, rapping out a blog, making desultory chatter with a few other early arrivals.
I woke up hating today because it's not the day. It's not Race Day.
For the first time since 1945, 33 leadfoots will not come screaming to the green today in the last days of May, while 300,000 humans send down a sound like hurricane surf. We have the Bastard Plague to thank for this -- and for me in particular, it's never been more of a Bastard than it is today.
That's because, for me in particular, it's never left a more vacant space, as if a thief had broken into the Louvre and stolen a priceless work of art. Nothing remains now but the sterile outline of it, the outline of other Race Days in other years.
Within that outline are those moments early in the day, when the morning sun bathes in gold that immense cliff of grandstand across the track, and the shadows are deep and cool. You can walk downstairs and stroll through the pits in the scrubbed morning air, see the drivers' names and numbers freshly painted on the pit wall, feel the whole stuffed day begin to stir around you.
Down the way in Gasoline Alley, nosecones and rear wings lie scattered about as the crews turn the wrenches one last time. The early risers in the overlooking suites lean on the balcony railings and watch, 7 a.m. cocktails already down a quart.
None of that will happen today. I won't stroll through the pits or the garage area or while away the hours with the rest of the deadline grunts. I won't hang out on the tiny porch outside the media center, turn to watch the balloons drift aloft in the late-spring breeze, watch the 33 come to the green -- a moment that will jump your heart right up into your throat if you are a breathing human at all.
I also won't be sitting in the side yard in a cardboard-box fort, the way I did as a kid. I won't be hunched over listening to the radio boys as they run down the starting lineup (And on the outside of Row 7, from Tucson, Arizona, Roger McCluskey in car No. 8, the G.C. Murphy Special ...), and go to Mike Ahern and Jim Carroll and Howdy Bell on the backstretch, and tell me to Stay Tuned For The Greatest Spectacle In Racing.
All of that is part of this day, at least for me. But not today.
Today it will just be that vacant space on the wall. And I'll hate every minute.
Saturday, May 23, 2020
A passing connection
And now Jerry Sloan.
As if Al Kaline weren't enough. As if Don Shula weren't enough. As if Mike "Mad Dog" Curtis and Glenn Beckert and almost 100,000 dead from the Bastard Plague in three months weren't enough.
This year, man. This benighted, ax-murdering, gaping jackhole of a year.
Now it's taken Jerry Sloan, who was Mister Chicago Bull, and don't give me any of your Michael Jordan guff. Jerry Sloan was one of the Original Bulls, and he both played for and coached them, and his name is all over their record books. He played with Chet Walker and Bob Love and Norm Van Lier and Clifford Ray, and his number (4) was the first the Bulls ever retired. And after he coached the Bulls, he went on to coach the Utah Jazz for 23 years -- which means he's Mister Utah Jazz, too.
He's one of the great coaches in NBA history. And now he is gone, at 78. And I know far more about that than anyone should.
Jerry Sloan, you see, died of complications from Parkinson's disease with attendant Lewy body dementia. Same as my dad.
And so I feel for his wife, Tammy, and his family, because I know what it's like to watch a loved one slip away from you by slow increments. I know what it's like to watch a bright, loving, meticulous man retreat to the shadows until there's nothing left but the shadows, nothing left but an empty, mumbling shell staring off into space and occasionally chuckling or pointing at things only he could see.
Sometimes my dad would see imaginary children standing in the corner or traipsing down the hall in Kingston Memory Care, where he spent his last years. He would say he was going to work every day at a place he called The Peninsula, and it had something to do with a play and someone he called the Commander. He would tell me he'd finally sold the Model T, or that a high school classmate long dead had come to visit him.
A lot of days, toward the end, he'd say nothing.
I can't imagine how it must have been to watch something very like that happen to Jerry Sloan. I'm guessing it was like watching him slowly disappear before your eyes, because that's the way it was with my dad.
One week he's there. The next he's a little less there. And so on, and so on, and so on, until he's vanished entirely.
Damn you, 2020. Damn you.
As if Al Kaline weren't enough. As if Don Shula weren't enough. As if Mike "Mad Dog" Curtis and Glenn Beckert and almost 100,000 dead from the Bastard Plague in three months weren't enough.
This year, man. This benighted, ax-murdering, gaping jackhole of a year.
Now it's taken Jerry Sloan, who was Mister Chicago Bull, and don't give me any of your Michael Jordan guff. Jerry Sloan was one of the Original Bulls, and he both played for and coached them, and his name is all over their record books. He played with Chet Walker and Bob Love and Norm Van Lier and Clifford Ray, and his number (4) was the first the Bulls ever retired. And after he coached the Bulls, he went on to coach the Utah Jazz for 23 years -- which means he's Mister Utah Jazz, too.
He's one of the great coaches in NBA history. And now he is gone, at 78. And I know far more about that than anyone should.
Jerry Sloan, you see, died of complications from Parkinson's disease with attendant Lewy body dementia. Same as my dad.
And so I feel for his wife, Tammy, and his family, because I know what it's like to watch a loved one slip away from you by slow increments. I know what it's like to watch a bright, loving, meticulous man retreat to the shadows until there's nothing left but the shadows, nothing left but an empty, mumbling shell staring off into space and occasionally chuckling or pointing at things only he could see.
Sometimes my dad would see imaginary children standing in the corner or traipsing down the hall in Kingston Memory Care, where he spent his last years. He would say he was going to work every day at a place he called The Peninsula, and it had something to do with a play and someone he called the Commander. He would tell me he'd finally sold the Model T, or that a high school classmate long dead had come to visit him.
A lot of days, toward the end, he'd say nothing.
I can't imagine how it must have been to watch something very like that happen to Jerry Sloan. I'm guessing it was like watching him slowly disappear before your eyes, because that's the way it was with my dad.
One week he's there. The next he's a little less there. And so on, and so on, and so on, until he's vanished entirely.
Damn you, 2020. Damn you.
Friday, May 22, 2020
The Last Zzzzzz
By now everyone in America except your Aunt Tillie's cat has seen at least parts of "The Last Dance," the 10-part Michael Jordan/Bulls doc that is less a Dance than a Dance Marathon, and less a doc than a 10-hour infomercial for the Michael Jordan Institute of I Am The GOAT And Don't You Forget It.
Well. If you think that was great (and, OK, it was), wait until you hear what ESPN's got in the pipeline next.
Can I get a big huzzah for nine hours of Tom Brady?
Yes, that's right, America. Coming soon from The Worldwide Leader (and from Brady and his production company): "The Man in the Arena," a nine-part chronicle of Brady's career with the New England Patriots.
Hoo, boy. I cannot wait for this.
Nine hours of Bill Belichick glowering and mumbling into microphones. Nine hours of Patriotspeak from Brady and various teammates. Nine hours of spinning Spygate and Deflategate and discoursing on the intricacies of the Tuck Rule. Gimme.
OK, OK. So I could be wrong about this.
In the course of nine parts, Brady might actually reveal he has a personality. Belichick might actually smile (he did, after all, dress up as a pirate one year for Halloween.) They could devote an inordinate amount of time to Randy Moss and Rob Gronkowski, the only Patriots in the Brady/Belichick era who didn't seem like they were answering a casting call for the role of Data in "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
I suppose -- suppose -- this could be kinda-sorta interesting. It's possible.
Nah.
The problem with Brady and the Patriots, see, is they're the most boring GOAT and most boring sports dynasty ever. A major part of their success, after all, was their stoic adherence to the Patriot Way. With the obvious exception of Gronk, they didn't long tolerate characters (or, in the case of Aaron Hernandez, murderous sociopaths.) Their very singlemindedness made them colorless and largely uninteresting.
(Case in point: How many times have we heard that Brady's maniacal drive to succeed was fueled by being picked in the sixth round of the draft? It's because it's the only really intriguing part of his narrative.)
In any event, I now eagerly await future collaborations between ESPN and various athletes' marketing departments:
* A 10-part series on Danny Ongais, famously reticent race driver.
* A 10-part series on Steve Carlton, famously reticent baseball player.
* A 10-part series on Earl Anthony, famously crewcut bowler.
And last but not least:
* A 10-part series on Vernon "Slim" "Whitey" Carmichael, the legendary storefront checkers player who the boys down at the Hooterville Mercantile claim "wouldn't say (bleep) if he had a mouthful."
Sounds like the perfect subject.
Well. If you think that was great (and, OK, it was), wait until you hear what ESPN's got in the pipeline next.
Can I get a big huzzah for nine hours of Tom Brady?
Yes, that's right, America. Coming soon from The Worldwide Leader (and from Brady and his production company): "The Man in the Arena," a nine-part chronicle of Brady's career with the New England Patriots.
Hoo, boy. I cannot wait for this.
Nine hours of Bill Belichick glowering and mumbling into microphones. Nine hours of Patriotspeak from Brady and various teammates. Nine hours of spinning Spygate and Deflategate and discoursing on the intricacies of the Tuck Rule. Gimme.
OK, OK. So I could be wrong about this.
In the course of nine parts, Brady might actually reveal he has a personality. Belichick might actually smile (he did, after all, dress up as a pirate one year for Halloween.) They could devote an inordinate amount of time to Randy Moss and Rob Gronkowski, the only Patriots in the Brady/Belichick era who didn't seem like they were answering a casting call for the role of Data in "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
I suppose -- suppose -- this could be kinda-sorta interesting. It's possible.
Nah.
The problem with Brady and the Patriots, see, is they're the most boring GOAT and most boring sports dynasty ever. A major part of their success, after all, was their stoic adherence to the Patriot Way. With the obvious exception of Gronk, they didn't long tolerate characters (or, in the case of Aaron Hernandez, murderous sociopaths.) Their very singlemindedness made them colorless and largely uninteresting.
(Case in point: How many times have we heard that Brady's maniacal drive to succeed was fueled by being picked in the sixth round of the draft? It's because it's the only really intriguing part of his narrative.)
In any event, I now eagerly await future collaborations between ESPN and various athletes' marketing departments:
* A 10-part series on Danny Ongais, famously reticent race driver.
* A 10-part series on Steve Carlton, famously reticent baseball player.
* A 10-part series on Earl Anthony, famously crewcut bowler.
And last but not least:
* A 10-part series on Vernon "Slim" "Whitey" Carmichael, the legendary storefront checkers player who the boys down at the Hooterville Mercantile claim "wouldn't say (bleep) if he had a mouthful."
Sounds like the perfect subject.
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Shake down the echoes
And, yes, before I am bludgeoned with Domer ridicule: I know that's not how it goes.
It's wake up the echoes. It's shake down the thunder. And all that raise a volley cheer on high business.
I mixed it up because in the coming fall, there's a good chance, at Notre Dame and elsewhere, that echoes will be the only thing shakin' down. And there won't be any Volley Cheers being raised, on high or otherwise.
College football may return, but College Football may not return with it. Which is to say, teams will figure out a safe way to conduct their Saturday business, but there won't be anyone in the stadiums to watch. And half of why college football is college football will therefore be missing.
The topic came up yesterday on one of ESPN's radio platforms, and Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh came down on it this way: Hell, yes, play the games in an empty Big House. This was hardly a surprise; there isn't a football coach in America who wouldn't opt to play games in empty stadiums or vacant lots or on the rings of Saturn if the alternative was not playing. So Harbaugh was simply obeying his DNA with his answer.
And yet ...
And yet, I hear all this, and it's not 2020 anymore. It's 1995 or 2000 or 2010 or some other year in the Before Time.
It's a gameday morning in the parking lots outside Notre Dame Stadium, and I am annoyed. I'm annoyed because the designated media parking has been plunked down in the middle of the tailgating area, and there are people and stuff everywhere.
There are tables laden with food right where I'm trying to reach my space. There are people playing cornhole, too. And there are dozens -- dozens -- of other people who are simply ambling along right in front of my car, as if they haven't considered the possibility that the person driving it might be, you know, a homicidal maniac.
Awful joke among those of us who had to negotiate all that on game days: If we accidentally ran over some Domer's foot, could we paint a tiny leprechaun on our car the way fighter pilots in World War II used to paint swastikas or rising suns on their fuselages?
And, yeah, OK, that's sick. But then sportswriter humor has never been known for its good taste.
The point is, without all those tailgaters and amblers, a lot of what makes a college football game day special would be gone. Half of my ritual at N.D., once I parked, was to drop off my gear in the pressbox and then go for a stroll around campus. Because there's simply nothing in sports like a game-day morning there or in any number of other places.
College football is about the football, yes, but it's also about the tailgating, and old alums reminiscing, and the bands and the student sections and the pageantry. Would football Saturdays at Ole Miss be the same without the ritual party scene in the Grove? Would they be the same at Notre Dame without the players' game-day walk through the fans to the stadium?
.
I don't know. Maybe Harbaugh's right, and it would be better to play in a vacuum than not to play at all. But you know what one of my fondest memories is of many epic Michigan-Notre Dame clashes?
No, not Rocket Ismail or Desmond Howard or Reggie Ho or anyone else's on-field heroics.
It's the unearthly roar in the Big House when someone in a yellowjacket-striped helmet does something wondrous. It's the Notre Dame student section singing along with "Hail to the Victors" -- only with a few, um, changes to the lyrics.
College football without all that will just be football. It'll be shakin' down echoes and hitting mute on the thunder. It'll be the sounds of silence, instead of a volley cheer.
The rings of Saturn sound positively hospitable, suddenly.
It's wake up the echoes. It's shake down the thunder. And all that raise a volley cheer on high business.
I mixed it up because in the coming fall, there's a good chance, at Notre Dame and elsewhere, that echoes will be the only thing shakin' down. And there won't be any Volley Cheers being raised, on high or otherwise.
College football may return, but College Football may not return with it. Which is to say, teams will figure out a safe way to conduct their Saturday business, but there won't be anyone in the stadiums to watch. And half of why college football is college football will therefore be missing.
The topic came up yesterday on one of ESPN's radio platforms, and Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh came down on it this way: Hell, yes, play the games in an empty Big House. This was hardly a surprise; there isn't a football coach in America who wouldn't opt to play games in empty stadiums or vacant lots or on the rings of Saturn if the alternative was not playing. So Harbaugh was simply obeying his DNA with his answer.
And yet ...
And yet, I hear all this, and it's not 2020 anymore. It's 1995 or 2000 or 2010 or some other year in the Before Time.
It's a gameday morning in the parking lots outside Notre Dame Stadium, and I am annoyed. I'm annoyed because the designated media parking has been plunked down in the middle of the tailgating area, and there are people and stuff everywhere.
There are tables laden with food right where I'm trying to reach my space. There are people playing cornhole, too. And there are dozens -- dozens -- of other people who are simply ambling along right in front of my car, as if they haven't considered the possibility that the person driving it might be, you know, a homicidal maniac.
Awful joke among those of us who had to negotiate all that on game days: If we accidentally ran over some Domer's foot, could we paint a tiny leprechaun on our car the way fighter pilots in World War II used to paint swastikas or rising suns on their fuselages?
And, yeah, OK, that's sick. But then sportswriter humor has never been known for its good taste.
The point is, without all those tailgaters and amblers, a lot of what makes a college football game day special would be gone. Half of my ritual at N.D., once I parked, was to drop off my gear in the pressbox and then go for a stroll around campus. Because there's simply nothing in sports like a game-day morning there or in any number of other places.
College football is about the football, yes, but it's also about the tailgating, and old alums reminiscing, and the bands and the student sections and the pageantry. Would football Saturdays at Ole Miss be the same without the ritual party scene in the Grove? Would they be the same at Notre Dame without the players' game-day walk through the fans to the stadium?
.
I don't know. Maybe Harbaugh's right, and it would be better to play in a vacuum than not to play at all. But you know what one of my fondest memories is of many epic Michigan-Notre Dame clashes?
No, not Rocket Ismail or Desmond Howard or Reggie Ho or anyone else's on-field heroics.
It's the unearthly roar in the Big House when someone in a yellowjacket-striped helmet does something wondrous. It's the Notre Dame student section singing along with "Hail to the Victors" -- only with a few, um, changes to the lyrics.
College football without all that will just be football. It'll be shakin' down echoes and hitting mute on the thunder. It'll be the sounds of silence, instead of a volley cheer.
The rings of Saturn sound positively hospitable, suddenly.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Shelving Stanley
Had an FB exchange with a friend and fellow hockey fan the other day, and it got me thinking how much the NHL is channeling Bluto from "Animal House" these days. At least that's whose voice I hear when some league suit starts talking about restarting the season in North Dakota or Uzbekistan or wherever the hell it is they're talking about restarting it.
Over? Over? Nothing's over until WE say it's over!
You know the scene.
And, yeah, it wasn't over when the Germans (Germans?) bombed Pearl Harbor, but forget it, they're rolling. Let the season start up again in July, after using a good chunk of June letting the players get in playing shape again. Start the Stanley Cup playoffs in August. And because they can't run for two months the way they usually do (because that would jam you right up against next season) let's make 'em a round robin or single elimination or like the old high school football Jamborees, with different teams playing each other for one period of a standard game.
Tonight, it's the Blues vs. Winnipeg in the first period, Edmonton vs. Calgary in period two and the Bruins vs. the Leafs in period three. Three, three, three mints in one!
The Blob has a better suggestion: Yank the plug.
Give it up, boys. You may say the season's not over, but that doesn't mean it's not over.
That's because the alternative at this late date is an utter farce that pushes players who've lost their ice legs during these idle months into high-stakes games before they're ready. Which is fairly begging for guys to get hurt. And which doesn't even take into consideration the logistics of shielding them from the Bastard Plague.
Nope. Sorry. Lord Stanley doesn't -- or shouldn't -- do half-assed. And whatever cobbled-together summer-league mess the suits come up with at this point is going to be half-assed squared.
And, yeah, I get it, there are TV contracts and lost revenue and blah-blah-blah. But sometimes you have to be practical. And it wouldn't be the first time no one hoisted Stanley; in 1919, Bastard Plague 1.0 ended the season in the middle of the playoffs, and in 2005 the lockout killed the season.
So there's precedent.
Time to let it proceed.
Over? Over? Nothing's over until WE say it's over!
You know the scene.
And, yeah, it wasn't over when the Germans (Germans?) bombed Pearl Harbor, but forget it, they're rolling. Let the season start up again in July, after using a good chunk of June letting the players get in playing shape again. Start the Stanley Cup playoffs in August. And because they can't run for two months the way they usually do (because that would jam you right up against next season) let's make 'em a round robin or single elimination or like the old high school football Jamborees, with different teams playing each other for one period of a standard game.
Tonight, it's the Blues vs. Winnipeg in the first period, Edmonton vs. Calgary in period two and the Bruins vs. the Leafs in period three. Three, three, three mints in one!
The Blob has a better suggestion: Yank the plug.
Give it up, boys. You may say the season's not over, but that doesn't mean it's not over.
That's because the alternative at this late date is an utter farce that pushes players who've lost their ice legs during these idle months into high-stakes games before they're ready. Which is fairly begging for guys to get hurt. And which doesn't even take into consideration the logistics of shielding them from the Bastard Plague.
Nope. Sorry. Lord Stanley doesn't -- or shouldn't -- do half-assed. And whatever cobbled-together summer-league mess the suits come up with at this point is going to be half-assed squared.
And, yeah, I get it, there are TV contracts and lost revenue and blah-blah-blah. But sometimes you have to be practical. And it wouldn't be the first time no one hoisted Stanley; in 1919, Bastard Plague 1.0 ended the season in the middle of the playoffs, and in 2005 the lockout killed the season.
So there's precedent.
Time to let it proceed.
A two-bit(s) scandal
OK, so I was wrong.
("See? Was that so hard?" you're saying.)
More than once over the years, the Blob has gotten itself in trouble with a couple constituencies by, well, making fun of some of their cherished notions. One is that the marching band halftime show is why people show up at football games. The other is that cheerleading is a sport.
Apparently on the latter count I misspoke, or misremembered, or some other weasel-y politician's word for "I was as wrong as ham on an ice cream sundae."
Turns out competitive collegiate cheerleading at the highest level is a sport. Because it's just as corrupt as any of 'em.
This upon the news the University of Kentucky has fired its entire cheerleading coaching staff after an internal investigation found evidence of alcohol use, hazing and public nudity at off-campus events. The probe also found lax oversight and poor judgment on the part of the retired program advisor.
So, to review: Booze, hazing, public nudity, lax oversight.
Sounds like Tuesday during the Rick Pitino Era at Louisville.
And, listen, the Blob is not trying to make light of all this. The hazing part is especially concerning. because people end up dead when it gets out of hand. Young people. People whose lives are just getting started.
Those lives never should be cut short the way those of frat kids were at San Diego State, Penn State, Washington State and Cornell just in the last year. They never should meet the fate of Robert Champion, who was beaten to death in a marching band hazing ritual at Florida A&M.
So, good for UK for showing the road to all four of its cheerleading coaches.
(Brief aside: A cheerleading program needs four coaches? You mean like head coach, tumbling coordinator, splits coordinator, makeup coordinator?)
(Also brief aside: Please don't yell at me. I honestly want to know.)
In any event, this is scandalous news for the Kentucky program, which is sort of the Kentucky basketball of cheerleading. The Wildcats have won 24 national titles in 35 years. And they don't employ one-and-dones the way John Calipari does.
Of course, it should be noted that what constitutes competitive cheerleading at a place like Kentucky is not two-bits-four-bits-six-bits-a-dollar. If you've ever watched it, it's not really cheerleading per se. It's more like team gymnastics.
But as what just went down in Lexington shows, it's as susceptible to moral rot as basketball or football or any other high-dollar collegiate sport.
Although I'm not sure that's how you want to win this debate.
("See? Was that so hard?" you're saying.)
More than once over the years, the Blob has gotten itself in trouble with a couple constituencies by, well, making fun of some of their cherished notions. One is that the marching band halftime show is why people show up at football games. The other is that cheerleading is a sport.
Apparently on the latter count I misspoke, or misremembered, or some other weasel-y politician's word for "I was as wrong as ham on an ice cream sundae."
Turns out competitive collegiate cheerleading at the highest level is a sport. Because it's just as corrupt as any of 'em.
This upon the news the University of Kentucky has fired its entire cheerleading coaching staff after an internal investigation found evidence of alcohol use, hazing and public nudity at off-campus events. The probe also found lax oversight and poor judgment on the part of the retired program advisor.
So, to review: Booze, hazing, public nudity, lax oversight.
Sounds like Tuesday during the Rick Pitino Era at Louisville.
And, listen, the Blob is not trying to make light of all this. The hazing part is especially concerning. because people end up dead when it gets out of hand. Young people. People whose lives are just getting started.
Those lives never should be cut short the way those of frat kids were at San Diego State, Penn State, Washington State and Cornell just in the last year. They never should meet the fate of Robert Champion, who was beaten to death in a marching band hazing ritual at Florida A&M.
So, good for UK for showing the road to all four of its cheerleading coaches.
(Brief aside: A cheerleading program needs four coaches? You mean like head coach, tumbling coordinator, splits coordinator, makeup coordinator?)
(Also brief aside: Please don't yell at me. I honestly want to know.)
In any event, this is scandalous news for the Kentucky program, which is sort of the Kentucky basketball of cheerleading. The Wildcats have won 24 national titles in 35 years. And they don't employ one-and-dones the way John Calipari does.
Of course, it should be noted that what constitutes competitive cheerleading at a place like Kentucky is not two-bits-four-bits-six-bits-a-dollar. If you've ever watched it, it's not really cheerleading per se. It's more like team gymnastics.
But as what just went down in Lexington shows, it's as susceptible to moral rot as basketball or football or any other high-dollar collegiate sport.
Although I'm not sure that's how you want to win this debate.
Monday, May 18, 2020
The unfinished line
Well. That was ... something.
NASCAR gave us real live humans Sunday in real live racin' cars racin' around the Lady in Black -- aka, Darlington Raceway -- and, well, it was refreshing to see, if a trifle cockeyed. Guys ran that weird line you only see at egg-shaped Darlington, rubbing up against the wall and earning what old-timers call the Darlington Stripe. A real live Kevin Harvick held off a real live Alex Bowman to take a real live checkered flag.
It almost looked like Normal Times again. Except ...
"I didn't think it was going to be that different, then we won and it's dead silent out there," Harvick said.
That's because there were no fans. No tailgaters, no Confederate flags, no guys in Harvick or Chase Elliott or Brad Keselowski T-shirts wearing headphones and making pyramids out of Budweiser empties. No kids in plastic racing helmets. No tents, campers, Winnebagos or burning couches (a featured attraction in the Coke lot one Brickyard 400 weekend).
Not a single living soul occupied a single inch of empty bleacher. And it gave the place the unavoidable ambience of what passes for the Brickyard these days, or a western ghost town.
Welcome to the Thirsty Gulch 400, folks. If you listen real close, you can hear a saloon door banging in the mournful wind.
No, this was not Normal Times. But give NASCAR its due. If you're going to re-launch your product in these days of plague, this is how you do it.
Teams were limited to 16 members per car, and their names were put on a list at a checkpoint. Everyone who passed through had his temperature checked and was logged in before he could enter. And everyone on the premises was masked up.
You can't make folks completely safe from the Bastard Plague. But if all possible precautions has a look, this was it.
We can debate forever whether or not all possible precautions are precaution enough at this point, but what you can't debate is that COVID-19 is not going away anytime soon. And if you wait until it does, what you're waiting on will no longer be there.
NASCAR starting up now was a gamble, but the alternative was for the entire sport to go under. And it did what it could to minimize the risk. It's what we're all doing these days, except of course for the Crazy People playing GI Joe and entertaining the dark fantasies so eagerly being fed them by America's lunatic fringe.
If there is indeed a right way in these trackless times, NASCAR did it the right way Sunday. It's all you can do when the finish line remains so profoundly unfinished.
NASCAR gave us real live humans Sunday in real live racin' cars racin' around the Lady in Black -- aka, Darlington Raceway -- and, well, it was refreshing to see, if a trifle cockeyed. Guys ran that weird line you only see at egg-shaped Darlington, rubbing up against the wall and earning what old-timers call the Darlington Stripe. A real live Kevin Harvick held off a real live Alex Bowman to take a real live checkered flag.
It almost looked like Normal Times again. Except ...
"I didn't think it was going to be that different, then we won and it's dead silent out there," Harvick said.
That's because there were no fans. No tailgaters, no Confederate flags, no guys in Harvick or Chase Elliott or Brad Keselowski T-shirts wearing headphones and making pyramids out of Budweiser empties. No kids in plastic racing helmets. No tents, campers, Winnebagos or burning couches (a featured attraction in the Coke lot one Brickyard 400 weekend).
Not a single living soul occupied a single inch of empty bleacher. And it gave the place the unavoidable ambience of what passes for the Brickyard these days, or a western ghost town.
Welcome to the Thirsty Gulch 400, folks. If you listen real close, you can hear a saloon door banging in the mournful wind.
No, this was not Normal Times. But give NASCAR its due. If you're going to re-launch your product in these days of plague, this is how you do it.
Teams were limited to 16 members per car, and their names were put on a list at a checkpoint. Everyone who passed through had his temperature checked and was logged in before he could enter. And everyone on the premises was masked up.
You can't make folks completely safe from the Bastard Plague. But if all possible precautions has a look, this was it.
We can debate forever whether or not all possible precautions are precaution enough at this point, but what you can't debate is that COVID-19 is not going away anytime soon. And if you wait until it does, what you're waiting on will no longer be there.
NASCAR starting up now was a gamble, but the alternative was for the entire sport to go under. And it did what it could to minimize the risk. It's what we're all doing these days, except of course for the Crazy People playing GI Joe and entertaining the dark fantasies so eagerly being fed them by America's lunatic fringe.
If there is indeed a right way in these trackless times, NASCAR did it the right way Sunday. It's all you can do when the finish line remains so profoundly unfinished.
The month of May. Part the third.
I wrote this today for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It's the third in a series of four columns that will run through the month of May. Because there will be no month of May as we know it, it's my recollections, from 40 years of covering the Indianapolis 500, of four of the more memorable ones. It's also my chance to throw in a plea for all good Blobophiles to subscribe to the JG, on account of local journalism is a vital public service.
Here's the link. Sign up today.
And now the days of the well-thumbed media guide, of Dr. Jack Miller the Racing Dentist, of seeing your puzzled reflection in a pair of mirrored sunglasses as you tried to suss out who on earth was behind them.
Here's the link. Sign up today.
And now the days of the well-thumbed media guide, of Dr. Jack Miller the Racing Dentist, of seeing your puzzled reflection in a pair of mirrored sunglasses as you tried to suss out who on earth was behind them.
That was me one May afternoon in 1996, outside the garages
of something called Blueprint Racing. The man behind the glasses was not Emerson
Fittipaldi or Al Unser Jr. or Michael Andretti. His name was Jim Guthrie, of
Gadsen, Ala., and he was the new face, or one of them, of the New Indy.
Or so I called him.
Probably I was pushing the envelope on that one, but, well
… it WAS 1996. It probably gets weirder at Indy, because at least Steven Tyler wasn’t
there to draw and quarter the National Anthem. But it was still pretty weird.
It was the year of Jim Guthrie and the Racing Dentist and Brad
Murphey the Racing Cowboy, and of a guy (Racin Gardner) with Racin’ actually in
his name. It was the year of Blueprint Racing and Loophole Racing and half a
dozen other Racings unheard of before or since.
It was the year when a dead man spoke to me from the tape
recorder in my hand. And it was the year of The Split -- the year when Speedway
president Tony George’s pet project, the Indy Racing League, cleaved the sport
in two and left us with dueling 500s 225 miles apart.
Which left us with no 500s, essentially. As we shall see.
In any case, booming NASCAR was the happy beneficiary of
this grudge match between George and the ruling body of IndyCar, Championship
Auto Racing Teams, whose stars bailed on Indy to run their own 500 at Michigan
International Speedway. That left the Greatest Spectacle In Racing with
something less than a spectacle – and with one supremely dark tragedy.
Which brings us to the dead man speaking from the palm of
my hand.
Scott Brayton hailed from just up the road in Coldwater,
Mich., the son of a renowned engine builder and a man with a ready smile and
joy in his heart. And he never smiled broader nor felt more joy than he did
that May, when John Menard put him in a guided missile and Brayton put it on
the pole.
Six days later he was dead.
Six days later he was running laps when a tire went down
and his car swapped ends and slapped the wall beneath the suites in turn two.
Brayton’s head hit the concrete, and he was gone.
I was in Fort Wayne
the day it happened, but not long thereafter I was back at the Speedway. Menard
was still so shaken he could barely speak. An American flag fluttered lazily at
half-staff outside the Menard garages; a few feet away, piles of flowers wilted
in the warm May sun.
We all wilted a little, in the days after Brayton’s death. If
there was any joy to be found that month, it was gone. And one day, skimming
through a mini-cassette, a snippet from Scott Brayton’s news conference the day
he won the pole popped up.
Suddenly there was his voice, giddy and joyous and alive,
so alive. Try that sometime if you’re looking to feel a chill.
The chill lasted the rest of the month, regrettably. If the
Racing Dentist and the Racing Cowboy and Jim Guthrie of Gadsen, Ala., all had
their stories – mostly they were a bunch of dreamers scuffling around in sprint
cars or support series – a lot of them had no business within fifty nautical
miles of the Indianapolis 500. Combine that with the hand-me-down gear everyone
was running, and the whole thing had a bush-league feel even Tony George’s good
intentions couldn’t obscure.
Come Race Day, off the dreamers went. And some
three-and-a-half hours later, a grand total of three of them actually completed
500 miles.
One was your winner, Buddy Lazier, a 29-year-old from Vail,
Colo., who’d qualified for only three 500s in seven previous tries and had
never before finished higher than 14th. Someone named Davy Jones was
second. Someone else named Richie Hearn was third.
Beyond that, it was a demolition derby. The fourth, fifth
and sixth-place finishers all crashed on Lazier’s last lap. Arie Luyendyk
crashed. Scott Harrington crashed. There were five engine failures and an
engine fire and a coil pack fire, and assorted issues with suspensions and gear
boxes and transmissions. Only nine of 33 starters were still running at the
end.
Up north, meanwhile, the Other 500 had its own problems.
As all those used cars crashed or blew up or just flat died
at Indy, in Michigan the alleged stars of the sport didn’t even make it through
the pace lap without bending up the merchandise. Adrian Fernandez ran into
polesitter Jimmy Vasser as they came to the green, triggering an accident that
took out 10 cars.
There were more than a few snickers – and some outright
guffaws -- when the news hit the media center at Indianapolis. It was, however,
only a brief moment of levity.
May 1996 simply wasn’t built for laughs. It just wasn’t.
Saturday, May 16, 2020
One man's freedom ...
... is only freedom when it's my freedom. Or, you know, something like that.
And so we have armed mobs behaving like 3-year-olds, demanding to go where they want, when they want, however they want in the midst of a public health crisis. Because, freedom.
We have a western-states governor threatening the Native Americans of that state because they've taken independent measures to protect themselves. Because freedom.
And we have college basketball coaches who leave at the drop of a hat for better offers complaining about their players doing the same.
Because freedom. For the coaches, that is.
Look. I have met Purdue basketball coach Matt Painter a time or two. I like the guy. He's a good man and a terrific coach who does things the right way. But sometimes -- and I mean this in the most respectful way possible -- he just needs to shut the hell up.
For his own good, understand.
Maybe you heard about his rant on an Indianapolis radio show the other day, in the wake of Nojel Eastern opting to enter the transfer portal enroute to Michigan. This happened in the wake of 7-3 center Matt Haarms going to BYU as a graduate transfer. Painter isn't pleased about either development.
"You might have gotten a degree from Purdue, but you're not a Boilermaker if you walk out the door at the end ..." he carped to Dan Dakich.
And also: "Embrace problems and embrace adversity and fight it. Don't run from it."
And also: "They're looking at it in the perspective of an individual standpoint when in reality how about coming back and helping Purdue win the Big Ten?"
The Blob takes this last to mean Painter has already forgotten about the Boilers' Big Ten title from a year ago, which Haarms and Eastern helped them win. Which means perhaps we need to have a conversation about Coach's short-term memory.
I'm being facetious, of course. But this is not a good look for Painter.
In truth it makes him look small and petty and -- let's face it -- whiny. It also makes him look willfully oblivious, because everything he's saying about players exercising their freedom to explore other options also could be said about coaches who do the same thing.
"Don't run" from problems and adversity? Isn't that what Coach does when he breaks his contract with Limited Resources U. to go to Really Big U.?
"Looking at it in the perspective of an individual standpoint?" Again, isn't that what Coach does as he moves up the ladder?
And, oh, by the way ... Matt Haarms has a degree from Purdue. That makes him the very definition of a Boilermaker.
That he's moving on to another school to do his grad work makes him no different from, oh, I don't know, hundreds upon hundreds of other college students. You can walk into businessmen's or lawyers' or doctors' offices all over the country and see diplomas from two different schools hanging on the wall.
And yet I doubt anyone who got his or her bachelor's from Purdue and his or her masters from somewhere else ever gets accused of not being a Boilermaker. So why should Haarms?
Because he's a basketball player who thinks playing a season at BYU might enhance his NBA draft status?
Probably it won't. But, just like coaches, he's earned the freedom to find out without having his loyalty and character questioned. Same with Eastern. 'Nuff said.
Or at least, 'nuff should be said.
And so we have armed mobs behaving like 3-year-olds, demanding to go where they want, when they want, however they want in the midst of a public health crisis. Because, freedom.
We have a western-states governor threatening the Native Americans of that state because they've taken independent measures to protect themselves. Because freedom.
And we have college basketball coaches who leave at the drop of a hat for better offers complaining about their players doing the same.
Because freedom. For the coaches, that is.
Look. I have met Purdue basketball coach Matt Painter a time or two. I like the guy. He's a good man and a terrific coach who does things the right way. But sometimes -- and I mean this in the most respectful way possible -- he just needs to shut the hell up.
For his own good, understand.
Maybe you heard about his rant on an Indianapolis radio show the other day, in the wake of Nojel Eastern opting to enter the transfer portal enroute to Michigan. This happened in the wake of 7-3 center Matt Haarms going to BYU as a graduate transfer. Painter isn't pleased about either development.
"You might have gotten a degree from Purdue, but you're not a Boilermaker if you walk out the door at the end ..." he carped to Dan Dakich.
And also: "Embrace problems and embrace adversity and fight it. Don't run from it."
And also: "They're looking at it in the perspective of an individual standpoint when in reality how about coming back and helping Purdue win the Big Ten?"
The Blob takes this last to mean Painter has already forgotten about the Boilers' Big Ten title from a year ago, which Haarms and Eastern helped them win. Which means perhaps we need to have a conversation about Coach's short-term memory.
I'm being facetious, of course. But this is not a good look for Painter.
In truth it makes him look small and petty and -- let's face it -- whiny. It also makes him look willfully oblivious, because everything he's saying about players exercising their freedom to explore other options also could be said about coaches who do the same thing.
"Don't run" from problems and adversity? Isn't that what Coach does when he breaks his contract with Limited Resources U. to go to Really Big U.?
"Looking at it in the perspective of an individual standpoint?" Again, isn't that what Coach does as he moves up the ladder?
And, oh, by the way ... Matt Haarms has a degree from Purdue. That makes him the very definition of a Boilermaker.
That he's moving on to another school to do his grad work makes him no different from, oh, I don't know, hundreds upon hundreds of other college students. You can walk into businessmen's or lawyers' or doctors' offices all over the country and see diplomas from two different schools hanging on the wall.
And yet I doubt anyone who got his or her bachelor's from Purdue and his or her masters from somewhere else ever gets accused of not being a Boilermaker. So why should Haarms?
Because he's a basketball player who thinks playing a season at BYU might enhance his NBA draft status?
Probably it won't. But, just like coaches, he's earned the freedom to find out without having his loyalty and character questioned. Same with Eastern. 'Nuff said.
Or at least, 'nuff should be said.
Friday, May 15, 2020
The vanished breed. Or, not.
Take a good look at the photo that accompanies this not-so-veiled eulogy for a craft. Now let me tell you what's ironic about it.
No, not that four of the sportswriters ganging up on Ted Williams are wearing jackets and ties, and one debonair chap has even gone Full Madison Avenue in a three-piece suit. I'm surprised they're not wearing fedoras, too, tipped rakishly over one eyebrow. With a "Press" card stuck in the band.
Ah, but I digress.
("You do that a lot," you're saying.)
Anyway, what's ironic is that it's Williams upon whose revealed wisdom they're all breathlessly hanging. Teddy Ballgame, see, hated sportswriters (especially the Boston sportswriters) with a multi-hued passion. Called them, sarcastically, "Knights of the Keyboard." Thought they knew nuttin' about nuttin', which didn't exactly make him unique among coaches and athletes.
"You never played the game," after all, has always been the go-to evasion of every chump who was ever asked to explain his 0-for-4 day. Or of every coach who was ever asked if he got his clock management skills from his English bulldog, Slobberknocker.
Oh, how Teddy Ballgame and the rest of 'em would loved to have seen what's happening to
the sportswriting biz.
Bad enough that hedge-fund vandals have decided the Fourth Estate serves no vital purpose in American society, except as a handy ATM for the indolent executive class. That's an old story. American journalism, and not just sportswriting, has been a Honda Civic getting stripped for parts for a good decade. Nothing to see there.
But then along came the Bastard Plague, and Sportsball World went dark. And suddenly the sportswriter became the dinosaur voted Most Likely To Disappear First Into The Tar Pit.
With no games to cover, my fellow scribes became (or seemed to become) as superfluous as tailfins on an oxcart. And already their profession was being emptied out. The bigger the name, it seemed, the more he or she sold the paper or the book or the brand in the Before Time, the more expendable he or she became. Why pay top dollar for talent when you could outsource your coverage to the sources themselves?
Nothing like getting major insight and critical analysis about a team from the team itself. Yes, sir.
But as the piece above indicates, that seems to be the direction we're heading. Because even when the pandemic subsides, and sports returns, news outlets have discovered what life looks like without independent coverage of them. And if it's cheaper just to let the teams cover themselves (the thinking will no doubt go), will that be so bad? Sports will still move papers or web traffic either way, right?
Real journalism, after all, costs money. And those vandals aren't going to pay themselves.
However. How. Ever.
In a catty-cornered sort of way, the Bastard Plague also has revealed just how valuable, and versatile, my former clan really can be. Biased though I am, it's indisputably true that sportswriters always have been among the most skilled storytellers in any newsroom. (They've also been among the most excruciatingly awful writers, too, in some cases. You take the good with the bad.)
And so one of my former colleagues, now the editor of a small paper in Ohio, has moved some of his sportswriters into features for the time being, on the theory that good storytellers can tell any sort of story. And the sports staff of my former employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. has done an exemplary job of finding relevant, compelling stories to tell in the absence of live sports to cover.
(Full disclosure: This month I've been contributing to the JG memories of my 40 years covering the Indianapolis 500. That's not really what I'm talking about here, though.)
What this says to me is maybe there still is value in them-there dinosaurs. And maybe stuff like versatility and storytelling ability and plain old expertise might be worth the investment after all.
I don't expect the vandals to see this, of course. But I'm a crazy optimist, and so I hold out hope that all of this has loosened a few scales from a few eyes.
Just a few, please. All I ask.
No, not that four of the sportswriters ganging up on Ted Williams are wearing jackets and ties, and one debonair chap has even gone Full Madison Avenue in a three-piece suit. I'm surprised they're not wearing fedoras, too, tipped rakishly over one eyebrow. With a "Press" card stuck in the band.
Ah, but I digress.
("You do that a lot," you're saying.)
Anyway, what's ironic is that it's Williams upon whose revealed wisdom they're all breathlessly hanging. Teddy Ballgame, see, hated sportswriters (especially the Boston sportswriters) with a multi-hued passion. Called them, sarcastically, "Knights of the Keyboard." Thought they knew nuttin' about nuttin', which didn't exactly make him unique among coaches and athletes.
"You never played the game," after all, has always been the go-to evasion of every chump who was ever asked to explain his 0-for-4 day. Or of every coach who was ever asked if he got his clock management skills from his English bulldog, Slobberknocker.
Oh, how Teddy Ballgame and the rest of 'em would loved to have seen what's happening to
the sportswriting biz.
Bad enough that hedge-fund vandals have decided the Fourth Estate serves no vital purpose in American society, except as a handy ATM for the indolent executive class. That's an old story. American journalism, and not just sportswriting, has been a Honda Civic getting stripped for parts for a good decade. Nothing to see there.
But then along came the Bastard Plague, and Sportsball World went dark. And suddenly the sportswriter became the dinosaur voted Most Likely To Disappear First Into The Tar Pit.
With no games to cover, my fellow scribes became (or seemed to become) as superfluous as tailfins on an oxcart. And already their profession was being emptied out. The bigger the name, it seemed, the more he or she sold the paper or the book or the brand in the Before Time, the more expendable he or she became. Why pay top dollar for talent when you could outsource your coverage to the sources themselves?
Nothing like getting major insight and critical analysis about a team from the team itself. Yes, sir.
But as the piece above indicates, that seems to be the direction we're heading. Because even when the pandemic subsides, and sports returns, news outlets have discovered what life looks like without independent coverage of them. And if it's cheaper just to let the teams cover themselves (the thinking will no doubt go), will that be so bad? Sports will still move papers or web traffic either way, right?
Real journalism, after all, costs money. And those vandals aren't going to pay themselves.
However. How. Ever.
In a catty-cornered sort of way, the Bastard Plague also has revealed just how valuable, and versatile, my former clan really can be. Biased though I am, it's indisputably true that sportswriters always have been among the most skilled storytellers in any newsroom. (They've also been among the most excruciatingly awful writers, too, in some cases. You take the good with the bad.)
And so one of my former colleagues, now the editor of a small paper in Ohio, has moved some of his sportswriters into features for the time being, on the theory that good storytellers can tell any sort of story. And the sports staff of my former employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. has done an exemplary job of finding relevant, compelling stories to tell in the absence of live sports to cover.
(Full disclosure: This month I've been contributing to the JG memories of my 40 years covering the Indianapolis 500. That's not really what I'm talking about here, though.)
What this says to me is maybe there still is value in them-there dinosaurs. And maybe stuff like versatility and storytelling ability and plain old expertise might be worth the investment after all.
I don't expect the vandals to see this, of course. But I'm a crazy optimist, and so I hold out hope that all of this has loosened a few scales from a few eyes.
Just a few, please. All I ask.
Thursday, May 14, 2020
The Dog Days, May edition
And now the latest episode of that smash hit, Olive And Mabel In The Time Of The Bastard Plague, in which Scottish sportscaster Andrew Cotter tries to engage the two peerless athletes in a Zoom confab.
(And Mabel reveals herself to be the incorrigible diva wide receiver of canines.)
Enjoy.
(And Mabel reveals herself to be the incorrigible diva wide receiver of canines.)
Enjoy.
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
The imperatives of bread and circus
NASCAR starts up again Sunday at Darlington, albeit Weird NASCAR. There will be no fans, no qualifying, no practice, just get in and go. And all possible precautions will be observed.
Meanwhile, Major League Baseball has floated plans for an 82-game season to begin on the Fourth of July. There will be no fans, and all possible precautions will be observed.
And the NBA?
Well, confidence is now high that the season will resume in "bubbles" in Las Vegas and at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando. There will be no fans, and all possible precautions, etc., etc.
And so it begins, as COVID-19 cases continue to spike, as the nation's leading experts in contagious diseases warn that a second wave of the virus is a virtual certainty, as the state of California mandates its universities will continue with online instruction in the fall -- a course which inevitably will be followed by other states as summer wears on, jeopardizing college athletic schedules everywhere.
Five'll get you ten the powers-that-be in collegiate athletics will find a way to work it all out. Because, bidness.
It's an old hobby horse, but so much of what we're seeing in America right now evokes the imagery of crumbling Rome. Mad Nero in the White House wallows in old grudges and imaginary conspiracies while the nation burns with fever. The barbarians are not just at the gate but within it, armed insurgents who believe it's their constitutional right to break any law with which they don't agree standing guard over the like-minded.
And as the nation goes to hell in a handcar, the games in the Colosseum must go on. Because we are a society that doesn't just need our bread and circus, we're addicted to it. Our diversions have become so pervasive they are not really diversions anymore. They're our identity.
We are no longer the nation of the Founders, it seems. We are the nation of the Tiger King.
As a big chunk of that, sports have become as sprawling an industry as General Motors and U.S. Steel used to be. So they push to reopen not simply because the nation "needs" its Sportsball; they push to reopen because those who have gotten unfathomably rich off sports have decided they must continue to get unfathomably rich.
Understand, none of them are really hurting, at least in the way most of us understand it. They're pretty much immune to that. So that's not really the point of putting their high-priced employees at risk -- nor is it really a concern for either them or a nation that wants what it wants when it wants it.
Thus, all possible precautions, yada-yada. Thus, the NBA weighing whether or not a player testing positive for COVID-19, once play resumes, should be enough to shut everything down again.
The prevailing opinion, as expressed by NBA commish Adam Silver?
That if a positive test would shut everything down, "we probably shouldn't go down this path."
In which case it's fair to ask how many positive tests it would take to shut everything down again. Two? Three? Ten? Twenty?
It's a question that says everything about both our times and the nation in which we now live. And nothing good about any of it.
Meanwhile, Major League Baseball has floated plans for an 82-game season to begin on the Fourth of July. There will be no fans, and all possible precautions will be observed.
And the NBA?
Well, confidence is now high that the season will resume in "bubbles" in Las Vegas and at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando. There will be no fans, and all possible precautions, etc., etc.
And so it begins, as COVID-19 cases continue to spike, as the nation's leading experts in contagious diseases warn that a second wave of the virus is a virtual certainty, as the state of California mandates its universities will continue with online instruction in the fall -- a course which inevitably will be followed by other states as summer wears on, jeopardizing college athletic schedules everywhere.
Five'll get you ten the powers-that-be in collegiate athletics will find a way to work it all out. Because, bidness.
It's an old hobby horse, but so much of what we're seeing in America right now evokes the imagery of crumbling Rome. Mad Nero in the White House wallows in old grudges and imaginary conspiracies while the nation burns with fever. The barbarians are not just at the gate but within it, armed insurgents who believe it's their constitutional right to break any law with which they don't agree standing guard over the like-minded.
And as the nation goes to hell in a handcar, the games in the Colosseum must go on. Because we are a society that doesn't just need our bread and circus, we're addicted to it. Our diversions have become so pervasive they are not really diversions anymore. They're our identity.
We are no longer the nation of the Founders, it seems. We are the nation of the Tiger King.
As a big chunk of that, sports have become as sprawling an industry as General Motors and U.S. Steel used to be. So they push to reopen not simply because the nation "needs" its Sportsball; they push to reopen because those who have gotten unfathomably rich off sports have decided they must continue to get unfathomably rich.
Understand, none of them are really hurting, at least in the way most of us understand it. They're pretty much immune to that. So that's not really the point of putting their high-priced employees at risk -- nor is it really a concern for either them or a nation that wants what it wants when it wants it.
Thus, all possible precautions, yada-yada. Thus, the NBA weighing whether or not a player testing positive for COVID-19, once play resumes, should be enough to shut everything down again.
The prevailing opinion, as expressed by NBA commish Adam Silver?
That if a positive test would shut everything down, "we probably shouldn't go down this path."
In which case it's fair to ask how many positive tests it would take to shut everything down again. Two? Three? Ten? Twenty?
It's a question that says everything about both our times and the nation in which we now live. And nothing good about any of it.
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Baseball on mute
And they'll walk off to the bleachers and sit in their shirt sleeves on a perfect afternoon ... And they'll watch the game, and it'll be as if they'd dipped themselves in magic waters ... Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.
-- Terrance Mann
"Field of Dreams"
Except they can't now, Ray.
Except now the Bastard Plague has walked out of the corn with Shoeless Joe Jackson and the boys, and even if every person coming to Iowa without even knowing why he's doing it dips himself in Magic Hand Sanitizer, the risk will be too great. No one will be sitting in the bleachers in their shirt sleeves on a perfect afternoon, Ray. They'll be sitting in their backyards drinking a beer and looking like Old Testament prophets because they haven't had a haircut since February.
And therein lies the problem, as Major League Baseball rolls out its vision of a season in the time of COVID-19.
The problem is, sitting in the ballpark on a perfect afternoon is more than just cinematic cotton candy; it's an intrinsic part of the baseball experience. If the game is balls and strikes and outfield shifts and the sacrifice bunt, it's also cold beer on the tongue and the popcorn smell that seems to seep into the very concrete and steel of the place itself.
It's the sound a good piece of wood makes when it strikes a round ball square. It's the pop of leather and the sweat of a hinges-of-hell July scorcher.
The ballpark hotdog never happens without the ballpark. Just sayin'.
And so baseball can carry on with its plan for an 82-game season starting around the Fourth of July, if government and health officials give the OK. But the plan is to play the games where allowed in empty ballparks. Which begs the question: If you play baseball in an empty ballpark, does it make a sound?
Or to put it another way: If you play baseball in an empty ballpark, is it really baseball?
After more than a century and a half the game and its environs are woven so tightly together it's impossible to pick at one thread without unraveling the whole. Unlike any other sport in America, so much of what baseball became in this country is because of where it became.
Are the Cubs the Cubs without a cold Old Style in the Wrigley Field bleachers on a blazer of an afternoon? Are the Yankees the Yankees without the monuments in Yankee Stadium? Are the Red Sox the Red Sox without Fenway stuffed to the gills with Sullys, and Yaz playing the carom off the Green Monster like a Stradivarius?
With but a few exceptions no one goes to a football stadium or a basketball arena just to see the football stadium or the basketball arena. But one gray March day in Boston, when I was in town to cover Purdue in the NCAA East Regional, I bought a Charlie card and took the T to Fenway Park just to see Fenway Park. And it was March and I couldn't even go inside.
Baseball is baseball because, across the decades, it's also been Fenway and Wrigley and Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds. But none of that would have been true if Fenway and Wrigley and Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds had been filled with nothing but echoes.
Steve Bartman never becomes Steve Bartman, because he's not there to reach out for that baseball in the left-field corner. Red Smith never writes the most famous baseball lede of all time, describing a drunk getting on the field and eluding pursuit in the wake of Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round The World. On and on.
So, yeah, baseball can resume in July, and we can all watch the games on TV. But let's face it. It'll be like watching a movie with the sound off.
It'll be like another day in Boston -- Fourth of July, actually -- when the fam and I were on vacation and we took the T into the city to walk around Fenway. For some reason, I thought the Red Sox were out of town that day, but they weren't. They had an afternoon home game, and so Yawkey Way was swarming with people.
Eventually, we ducked into a restaurant that ran underneath the park along the third-baseline. From there, we watched the game on TV, while the sound of the crowd in the ballpark filtered distantly down to us. It was as if we were there, but not there.
It was as if it were baseball -- but not, you know, baseball.
-- Terrance Mann
"Field of Dreams"
Except they can't now, Ray.
Except now the Bastard Plague has walked out of the corn with Shoeless Joe Jackson and the boys, and even if every person coming to Iowa without even knowing why he's doing it dips himself in Magic Hand Sanitizer, the risk will be too great. No one will be sitting in the bleachers in their shirt sleeves on a perfect afternoon, Ray. They'll be sitting in their backyards drinking a beer and looking like Old Testament prophets because they haven't had a haircut since February.
And therein lies the problem, as Major League Baseball rolls out its vision of a season in the time of COVID-19.
The problem is, sitting in the ballpark on a perfect afternoon is more than just cinematic cotton candy; it's an intrinsic part of the baseball experience. If the game is balls and strikes and outfield shifts and the sacrifice bunt, it's also cold beer on the tongue and the popcorn smell that seems to seep into the very concrete and steel of the place itself.
It's the sound a good piece of wood makes when it strikes a round ball square. It's the pop of leather and the sweat of a hinges-of-hell July scorcher.
The ballpark hotdog never happens without the ballpark. Just sayin'.
And so baseball can carry on with its plan for an 82-game season starting around the Fourth of July, if government and health officials give the OK. But the plan is to play the games where allowed in empty ballparks. Which begs the question: If you play baseball in an empty ballpark, does it make a sound?
Or to put it another way: If you play baseball in an empty ballpark, is it really baseball?
After more than a century and a half the game and its environs are woven so tightly together it's impossible to pick at one thread without unraveling the whole. Unlike any other sport in America, so much of what baseball became in this country is because of where it became.
Are the Cubs the Cubs without a cold Old Style in the Wrigley Field bleachers on a blazer of an afternoon? Are the Yankees the Yankees without the monuments in Yankee Stadium? Are the Red Sox the Red Sox without Fenway stuffed to the gills with Sullys, and Yaz playing the carom off the Green Monster like a Stradivarius?
With but a few exceptions no one goes to a football stadium or a basketball arena just to see the football stadium or the basketball arena. But one gray March day in Boston, when I was in town to cover Purdue in the NCAA East Regional, I bought a Charlie card and took the T to Fenway Park just to see Fenway Park. And it was March and I couldn't even go inside.
Baseball is baseball because, across the decades, it's also been Fenway and Wrigley and Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds. But none of that would have been true if Fenway and Wrigley and Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds had been filled with nothing but echoes.
Steve Bartman never becomes Steve Bartman, because he's not there to reach out for that baseball in the left-field corner. Red Smith never writes the most famous baseball lede of all time, describing a drunk getting on the field and eluding pursuit in the wake of Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round The World. On and on.
So, yeah, baseball can resume in July, and we can all watch the games on TV. But let's face it. It'll be like watching a movie with the sound off.
It'll be like another day in Boston -- Fourth of July, actually -- when the fam and I were on vacation and we took the T into the city to walk around Fenway. For some reason, I thought the Red Sox were out of town that day, but they weren't. They had an afternoon home game, and so Yawkey Way was swarming with people.
Eventually, we ducked into a restaurant that ran underneath the park along the third-baseline. From there, we watched the game on TV, while the sound of the crowd in the ballpark filtered distantly down to us. It was as if we were there, but not there.
It was as if it were baseball -- but not, you know, baseball.
Monday, May 11, 2020
Your hoop sleaze update for today
First came Louisville, compelling Iona College to begin sweating and tugging at its collar because it closed its eyes and hired the overseer of Lullville's infamy, Al Capone (played in the movie by Rick Pitino.)
Then it was Kansas, whose basketball program the NCAA last week said was "even dirtier than Capone's operation" and "a bleeping bleep-bleep criminal enterprise," although those are not direct quotes as far as you know.
Now?
Oh, lordy. Oh, saints preserve us.
Now St. K and the supplicants at the altar of Do It Right and Pure In Word And Deed are on the griddle.
This upon the news that attorneys for Zion Williamson's former marketing firm have asked Zion to air his dirty laundry -- i.e., admit his mother and stepfather demanded and received a pile of graft from Adidas and Nike (and also people linked to Duke) to sign with the Blue Devils and pimp Nike or Adidas.
If this in fact happened, Do It Right and Pure In Word And Deed stand convicted of being just another bunch of hoopster Capones engaged in the bidness of doing bidness.
Now, this could all just be part of the legal whizzing match between Williamson and the marketing firm he's trying to dump -- kind of a corporate version of "If you leave me, I'll tell everyone how you used to wear sexy lingerie under your uniform like Ebby Calvin 'Nuke' LaLoosh." But is anyone at this point naïve enough to believe Duke was immune to these shenanigans just because it was Duke?
First off, this is actually old news, because the FBI probe into college basketball included some rather loud rumblings about Zion and Duke. And second, the incestuous triangulation among blue-chip prospects, the apparel companies that underwrite their AAU teams and the nation's top college programs is old news itself.
It's been going on to one degree or another for more than 30 years, and thus long since passed from the realm of scandal to just, well, the bidness of doing bidness. That it's sleaze of a high order is undeniable to those of us not disposed to lawlessness. But for college buckets, it's just how the sausage gets made.
After all, who's gonna carp about what's appropriate or inappropriate if it ends with the alma mater starring in "One Shining Moment" on the first Monday in April?
So, yeah, nothing to see here, in a sense. Just more bidness in the boardrooms of Duke Inc., Kansas Inc., Everybody Inc.
Then it was Kansas, whose basketball program the NCAA last week said was "even dirtier than Capone's operation" and "a bleeping bleep-bleep criminal enterprise," although those are not direct quotes as far as you know.
Now?
Oh, lordy. Oh, saints preserve us.
Now St. K and the supplicants at the altar of Do It Right and Pure In Word And Deed are on the griddle.
This upon the news that attorneys for Zion Williamson's former marketing firm have asked Zion to air his dirty laundry -- i.e., admit his mother and stepfather demanded and received a pile of graft from Adidas and Nike (and also people linked to Duke) to sign with the Blue Devils and pimp Nike or Adidas.
If this in fact happened, Do It Right and Pure In Word And Deed stand convicted of being just another bunch of hoopster Capones engaged in the bidness of doing bidness.
Now, this could all just be part of the legal whizzing match between Williamson and the marketing firm he's trying to dump -- kind of a corporate version of "If you leave me, I'll tell everyone how you used to wear sexy lingerie under your uniform like Ebby Calvin 'Nuke' LaLoosh." But is anyone at this point naïve enough to believe Duke was immune to these shenanigans just because it was Duke?
First off, this is actually old news, because the FBI probe into college basketball included some rather loud rumblings about Zion and Duke. And second, the incestuous triangulation among blue-chip prospects, the apparel companies that underwrite their AAU teams and the nation's top college programs is old news itself.
It's been going on to one degree or another for more than 30 years, and thus long since passed from the realm of scandal to just, well, the bidness of doing bidness. That it's sleaze of a high order is undeniable to those of us not disposed to lawlessness. But for college buckets, it's just how the sausage gets made.
After all, who's gonna carp about what's appropriate or inappropriate if it ends with the alma mater starring in "One Shining Moment" on the first Monday in April?
So, yeah, nothing to see here, in a sense. Just more bidness in the boardrooms of Duke Inc., Kansas Inc., Everybody Inc.
Sunday, May 10, 2020
The month of May. Part the second.
I wrote this today for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It's the first in a series of columns that will run through the month of May. Because there will be no month of May as we know it, it's my recollections, from 40 years of covering the Indianapolis 500, of four of the more memorable ones. It's also my chance to throw in a plea for all good Blobophiles to subscribe to the JG, on account of local journalism is a vital public service.
Here's the link. Sign up today.
Here's the link. Sign up today.
Greatest
Spectacle In Racing, my left clavicle. This was something else entirely.
This was
1992, the Greatest Spectacle In I Can’t Feel My Feet. The Greatest Spectacle In
Who Let November In Here? The Greatest Spectacle In Used Spare Parts … or
Hey, Let’s Torture The Andrettis Some More … or, down there at the end, No Soup
For You, Scott Goodyear.
What you can
say about the ’92 Indianapolis 500 is it was cold, it was gray, it was long and
it was ugly. Aside from that, it was a lovely day.
Start with
the weather.
Through four
decades of Race Days, I never saw the like of it. There’d been smothering heat
and torrential rain and, yes, even a tornado one year, but there was never
anything like this.
The
temperature when Race Day dawned was 48 degrees, with a windchill of 29. It
warmed up all the way to 52 with a windchill of 39, by the halfway point of the
race. And it created unshirted chaos; nearly half the race (85 laps) was run
under caution as cold tires spun and people went sailing off into the wall on every
restart.
Rick Mears
crashed. Mario Andretti crashed. His son, Jeff, crashed. Tom Sneva crashed,
Emerson Fittipaldi crashed, Jimmy Vasser crashed, Arie Luyendyk crashed.
Between lap
6 and lap 143, a dozen drivers turned their cars into lasagna against Indy’s
unforgiving concrete. Of the first 122 laps, 68 were run under caution.
Finally,
Michael Andretti’s fuel pump let go after he’d led 160 of the first 190 laps, the
capper on a hideous day for one of Indy’s first families. And, after almost
four hours, Al Unser Jr. outdragged Scott Goodyear to win by 0.043 seconds, the
closest finish in Indy history.
It was as if
the racing gods decided we all deserved a cookie after such a miserable day.
But 0.043 is
not the relevant number here. Neither is 29 or 39 or 85.
The relevant
number is 11:14.
Eleven-fourteen
gave me the opening sentence of my column that day, as a clump of us media
types huddled miserably outside Roberto Guerrero’s garage that morning. A side
door opened and then closed. And in the brief moment it was open, we could see
the Quaker State clock on the wall.
It read
11:14 a.m. And I had my starting point.
It’s
11:14 in the morning, and already we are waiting on Roberto Guerrero …
What
happened was this: Guerrero, the polesitter, crashed out of the thing on the
parade lap. Not on the pace lap, mind you. The PARADE LAP. Squeezed the
throttle a skosh too hard over in turn two, cold tires spun on cold pavement,
and, bang.
Game over,
before it had even begun.
There are
days at Indy when it’s not about the checkered flag or Victory Lane or the cold
milk the winner invariably spills down his cheeks, as if winning has made him incapable
of feeding himself. This was one of those days.
Here’s the
thing about the 500: It’s a counter-intuitive event. Because of its
geographically sprawling nature, you quickly learn the best way to see the big
picture is not from the middle of it, but sequestered behind an acre of glass
or in a tiny unadorned room in a tiny cinderblock building. It’s one of the few
sporting events I know that’s best kept track of on a TV monitor, even if
you’re there.
Sometimes,
though, you need the little picture to illuminate the bigger one. And so you
have to get out in the middle of it -- which is why, at 11:14 in the morning,
there we were waiting on Roberto Guerrero. Because so much of what would shape
the day began with him.
Oh, yeah. And
in case you were wondering: No, I couldn’t feel my feet.
Friday, May 8, 2020
Rest for the wicked
These are not the palmy days for the transgressors among our nation's educators. This will happen when the marketplace of ideas gets caught out behaving like, well, just a marketplace.
And so Iona College is running for cover after hiring a basketball coach whose previous regime is now doing the NCAA perp walk. Meanwhile, the Association has landed on Kansas' basketball program with army boots, declaring Bill Self's Jayhawks dirtier than mud volleyball on a rainy day.
"Egregious," is one of the words the NCAA threw out there. "Severe" made an appearance. So did "significantly undermine and threaten the NCAA Collegiate Model" -- although that Model isn't really what the NCAA likes to imagine it is.
In any case, the bad guys are on the run. But as the mob lawyer said to his client, "Don't sweat it, Bugsy. I got this."
And so here comes the Secretary of Ed-you-cay-shun, the spectacularly unqualified Betsy DeVos, riding in to save the day.
You might have missed it while Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates and Elvis were shooting at JFK from the grassy knoll, but DeVos this week took a hammer to Obama-era expansion of Title IX regs that gave victims of sexual abuse on campus greater protection to come forward. The supposed logic behind this is of course financial -- the Trump administration says the rollback would save schools beaucoup bucks if they were required to investigate fewer sexual misconduct cases -- and also that it will streamline the process and make it fairer and more transparent for both accused and accuser.
This all sounds lovely until you start looking at how this sausage was made.
A for-instance: The new Title IX regs will allow the accused to cross-examine the accuser through a third party in live hearings. They also no longer require coaches, athletic directors or other university employees to report allegations to the Title IX office -- presumably part of the streamlining process.
This doesn't mean coaches, ADs and other university employees still can't report allegations. They can. And they may be compelled to by other organizations.
But absent that ... well, you can imagine a football or basketball coach at some high-dollar program deciding it wasn't his problem to report an allegation against one of his star players, because, you know, the marketplace. Why risk missing out on a chunky bowl payday, or Da Tournament, if you don't have to?
The upshot is by streamlining the process, forcing survivors to be interrogated by their assailants' proxies in open court and narrowly defining what constitutes sexual harassment, you make it even more unlikely survivors will come forward. And they were mightily reluctant to do so anyway -- particularly if their alleged attacker was a major cog in the university's mighty athletic money machine.
See: Art Briles' football program at Baylor. See: Jameis Winston at Florida State, who dodged the bullet because his accuser couldn't get anyone to take her seriously in Seminole Nation. See: Jerry Sandusky at Penn State, who got away with abusing young boys for years because Joe Paterno had football games to win.
Maybe DeVos sincerely believes what she says about taking sexual harassment on campus seriously, and maybe it's just the usual boilerplate word salad. Either way, unintended consequences are pesky things. And it's not hard to imagine they at some point will raise their heads with a vengeance.
It's not hard to imagine, in the end, that all DeVos really has done here is clear the runway for more Winstons, Sanduskies and Larry Nassars to skate. A "W" for the bad guys, in other words.
And so Iona College is running for cover after hiring a basketball coach whose previous regime is now doing the NCAA perp walk. Meanwhile, the Association has landed on Kansas' basketball program with army boots, declaring Bill Self's Jayhawks dirtier than mud volleyball on a rainy day.
"Egregious," is one of the words the NCAA threw out there. "Severe" made an appearance. So did "significantly undermine and threaten the NCAA Collegiate Model" -- although that Model isn't really what the NCAA likes to imagine it is.
In any case, the bad guys are on the run. But as the mob lawyer said to his client, "Don't sweat it, Bugsy. I got this."
And so here comes the Secretary of Ed-you-cay-shun, the spectacularly unqualified Betsy DeVos, riding in to save the day.
You might have missed it while Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates and Elvis were shooting at JFK from the grassy knoll, but DeVos this week took a hammer to Obama-era expansion of Title IX regs that gave victims of sexual abuse on campus greater protection to come forward. The supposed logic behind this is of course financial -- the Trump administration says the rollback would save schools beaucoup bucks if they were required to investigate fewer sexual misconduct cases -- and also that it will streamline the process and make it fairer and more transparent for both accused and accuser.
This all sounds lovely until you start looking at how this sausage was made.
A for-instance: The new Title IX regs will allow the accused to cross-examine the accuser through a third party in live hearings. They also no longer require coaches, athletic directors or other university employees to report allegations to the Title IX office -- presumably part of the streamlining process.
This doesn't mean coaches, ADs and other university employees still can't report allegations. They can. And they may be compelled to by other organizations.
But absent that ... well, you can imagine a football or basketball coach at some high-dollar program deciding it wasn't his problem to report an allegation against one of his star players, because, you know, the marketplace. Why risk missing out on a chunky bowl payday, or Da Tournament, if you don't have to?
The upshot is by streamlining the process, forcing survivors to be interrogated by their assailants' proxies in open court and narrowly defining what constitutes sexual harassment, you make it even more unlikely survivors will come forward. And they were mightily reluctant to do so anyway -- particularly if their alleged attacker was a major cog in the university's mighty athletic money machine.
See: Art Briles' football program at Baylor. See: Jameis Winston at Florida State, who dodged the bullet because his accuser couldn't get anyone to take her seriously in Seminole Nation. See: Jerry Sandusky at Penn State, who got away with abusing young boys for years because Joe Paterno had football games to win.
Maybe DeVos sincerely believes what she says about taking sexual harassment on campus seriously, and maybe it's just the usual boilerplate word salad. Either way, unintended consequences are pesky things. And it's not hard to imagine they at some point will raise their heads with a vengeance.
It's not hard to imagine, in the end, that all DeVos really has done here is clear the runway for more Winstons, Sanduskies and Larry Nassars to skate. A "W" for the bad guys, in other words.
Time's telescope
And now we pause, once more, to stare at another mile marker. There is always one at which to stare, it seems, as the years clatter along like autumn leaves skirling across a sidewalk. Some just require longer pauses than others.
And so to May 8, 2020. And so to V-E Day, plus 75.
Seventy-five years since the Nazis came out with their hands up, trailing the cover story of all history's villains: That they were just following orders, or that they didn't know nuttin' about those camps, or that they'd never been Nazis at all and had sworn no allegiance to their demented Fuhrer and the rest of the gangsters.
In any case, the thing was done, 75 years ago today. The Third Reich was dead. Hitler was a pile of ash in the shadow of the Reichstag. The gangsters had either joined him or were in desperate flight.
And if it all seems so distant now -- like looking through the wrong end of a telescope -- it's only because it is.
Seventy-five years on, the boys who went to Europe and left their buddies on Omaha Beach or in the hedgerows or in the forests of the Ardennes are themselves either gone or going. The institutional memory of the war in Europe is down to a handful of 90-somethings and 100-somethings. With our World War II vets, we're now where we were two decades ago with our World War I vets.
Which means a guy named Charlie Pearson may or may not still be with us.
Charlie Pearson spent his World War II not in Europe, but in the Pacific. And one afternoon I sat in the living room of his modest home just south of Georgetown Plaza and listened to him tell me about Tarawa and Okinawa and other things that were, by then, 50 years behind him.
He told me how, at Tarawa in '43, the landing craft dumped him out 1,000 yards off a tiny pile of coral called Betio, and how the water was over the boys' heads in a lot of places, and how at some point in the long, long slog toward the narrow beach a burst of Japanese fire ripped out a bunch of Charlie Pearson's teeth. And he told me how, on Okinawa one pitch-black night in '45, he shot a Japanese officer who'd wandered into the American lines, and how he found a letter to the officer's wife on the body, and how he held onto it for years with the intention of tracking down her down and returning her husband's effects.
He never did, of course. Couldn't really bring himself to.
In any event, 50 years has become 75 now, which means it's been 25 years since Charlie Pearson told me those things. As much time has passed since I sat in his living room as had passed between then and the Vietnam War. And as much time has passed since V-E Day as had passed between that day in 1945 and the days when Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant were still living.
In other words, Reconstruction and the aftermath of the Civil War were as distant to the boys of Omaha Beach and the Ardennes as those boys are to us now. And some of the leaders of their war were born before the Wright Brothers or radio or telephones or incandescent electric lights.
A few more mile markers to contemplate, on a day suited to it.
And so to May 8, 2020. And so to V-E Day, plus 75.
Seventy-five years since the Nazis came out with their hands up, trailing the cover story of all history's villains: That they were just following orders, or that they didn't know nuttin' about those camps, or that they'd never been Nazis at all and had sworn no allegiance to their demented Fuhrer and the rest of the gangsters.
In any case, the thing was done, 75 years ago today. The Third Reich was dead. Hitler was a pile of ash in the shadow of the Reichstag. The gangsters had either joined him or were in desperate flight.
And if it all seems so distant now -- like looking through the wrong end of a telescope -- it's only because it is.
Seventy-five years on, the boys who went to Europe and left their buddies on Omaha Beach or in the hedgerows or in the forests of the Ardennes are themselves either gone or going. The institutional memory of the war in Europe is down to a handful of 90-somethings and 100-somethings. With our World War II vets, we're now where we were two decades ago with our World War I vets.
Which means a guy named Charlie Pearson may or may not still be with us.
Charlie Pearson spent his World War II not in Europe, but in the Pacific. And one afternoon I sat in the living room of his modest home just south of Georgetown Plaza and listened to him tell me about Tarawa and Okinawa and other things that were, by then, 50 years behind him.
He told me how, at Tarawa in '43, the landing craft dumped him out 1,000 yards off a tiny pile of coral called Betio, and how the water was over the boys' heads in a lot of places, and how at some point in the long, long slog toward the narrow beach a burst of Japanese fire ripped out a bunch of Charlie Pearson's teeth. And he told me how, on Okinawa one pitch-black night in '45, he shot a Japanese officer who'd wandered into the American lines, and how he found a letter to the officer's wife on the body, and how he held onto it for years with the intention of tracking down her down and returning her husband's effects.
He never did, of course. Couldn't really bring himself to.
In any event, 50 years has become 75 now, which means it's been 25 years since Charlie Pearson told me those things. As much time has passed since I sat in his living room as had passed between then and the Vietnam War. And as much time has passed since V-E Day as had passed between that day in 1945 and the days when Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant were still living.
In other words, Reconstruction and the aftermath of the Civil War were as distant to the boys of Omaha Beach and the Ardennes as those boys are to us now. And some of the leaders of their war were born before the Wright Brothers or radio or telephones or incandescent electric lights.
A few more mile markers to contemplate, on a day suited to it.
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Getting Ricked
There actually are second acts in American life, no matter what F. Scott Fitzgerald said to the contrary. It's just that a lot of times there shouldn't be.
Which is another way of saying I wouldn't want to be an Iona alum today. Smoting oneself in the forehead kinda hurts.
This upon the news that the NCAA handed down another batch of charges tied to Rick Pitino's lawless regime at Louisville, including a Level I violation -- the first-degree murder of NCAA infractions -- and three Level II violations that explicitly single out Pitino for, basically, being a crook. And that's not good news for Iona, which just threw five-plus million American dollars at him to do for Iona what he did for Louisville.
Minus, you know, that bit about running a brothel out of the basketball center and using shoe companies as a middle man to pay recruits to come to the 'Ville. And also this latest stuff.
A million a year or thereabouts would seem like a foolish investment for a coach with Pitino's immediate resume, but Pitino, dirty as he is, also wins. And winning is everything in college buckets, because winning generates revenue and revenue is what keeps the wheel spinning in college athletics just like it does in any other high-dollar corporate enterprise.
And so Iona averted its gaze, held its nose and hired itself a notoriously corrupt fixer for a basketball program that went 12-17 in 2019-2020 and hasgotten past the first round of the NCAA Tournament once in this century. And now it looks as if it's going to get Ricked for its troubles.
"We have no reason to believe that would happen," Iona athletic director Matt Glovaski said when asked if its new head coach would be punished by the NCAA for the latest infractions.
You could almost see the beads of flop sweat popping out on his forehead as he said this.
And see all those Iona alums smiting their foreheads and saying "Why on earth did we hire THIS guy?"
Although maybe their eyes are fogged, too, by the stacks of money a dirty program could bring in. You never know these days.
Which is another way of saying I wouldn't want to be an Iona alum today. Smoting oneself in the forehead kinda hurts.
This upon the news that the NCAA handed down another batch of charges tied to Rick Pitino's lawless regime at Louisville, including a Level I violation -- the first-degree murder of NCAA infractions -- and three Level II violations that explicitly single out Pitino for, basically, being a crook. And that's not good news for Iona, which just threw five-plus million American dollars at him to do for Iona what he did for Louisville.
Minus, you know, that bit about running a brothel out of the basketball center and using shoe companies as a middle man to pay recruits to come to the 'Ville. And also this latest stuff.
A million a year or thereabouts would seem like a foolish investment for a coach with Pitino's immediate resume, but Pitino, dirty as he is, also wins. And winning is everything in college buckets, because winning generates revenue and revenue is what keeps the wheel spinning in college athletics just like it does in any other high-dollar corporate enterprise.
And so Iona averted its gaze, held its nose and hired itself a notoriously corrupt fixer for a basketball program that went 12-17 in 2019-2020 and hasgotten past the first round of the NCAA Tournament once in this century. And now it looks as if it's going to get Ricked for its troubles.
"We have no reason to believe that would happen," Iona athletic director Matt Glovaski said when asked if its new head coach would be punished by the NCAA for the latest infractions.
You could almost see the beads of flop sweat popping out on his forehead as he said this.
And see all those Iona alums smiting their foreheads and saying "Why on earth did we hire THIS guy?"
Although maybe their eyes are fogged, too, by the stacks of money a dirty program could bring in. You never know these days.
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