BADGER ENVY

               As a fan of Chicago’s sports teams, the notion that life is unfair came to me early. How could some (say, New York Yankees’ fans) have so much while we have so little? I frequently asked myself.

               Then I grew up a bit and went away to college, at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, my state’s flagship U. There the lesson was repeated, only with supporters of Ohio State University and the University of Michigan in the roles of the fortunate. Sixty-plus years later those two institutions still ride high in what is called the Big 10 Conference even though it has 14 members. Even Yankees have had bad stretches in that span, for heaven’s sake.

Worse, though, is that the teams of the university of the state just north of my homeland have prospered for all of this century and more, while my Illini continue to founder (and flounder). I’m talking about Wisconsin, which lately has been the foremost challenger to the Big Ten’s Big Two. In basketball as well as football, the Badgers sup with the mighty while the Illini scrounge the dumpsters for scraps. Oooo, that hurts.

The injustice of this situation is easily seen. Illinois’s population of about 12.7 million is more than twice Wisconsin’s 5.8 M, and Illinois contains the vast Chicago area, long a prep-sports hotbed. Wisconsin is a bucolic place known mostly for cheese, lakes and brandy consumption. If we Ilinoisians think of it at all it’s as a vacation spot, somewhere convenient where we can catch a few fish and hurry home before boredom sets in.

               UW used to be pretty much a sports patsy, with bad teams far outnumbering the good. Then Barry Alvarez came along. Sinister looking (he favors dark glasses) and someone with no Wisconsin ties (he’s from Pennsylvania, his college was Nebraska and he was an assistant coach at Iowa and Notre Dame), he took over Badger football in 1990, and after three losing seasons put them on a track that, now, has led to annual bowl games and conference-title contention. In basketball, the initial magic man was Dick Bennett, whose tenure was short (1995-2001) but whose influence was long, extending to this day.

 Both men succeeded by building on the state’s native strengths.  Alvarez quickly learned that Wisconsin produced an abundance of heifer-sized linemen but few swift “skilled” players, so he fashioned a tough defense and ground-based offense and opened a recruiting pipeline that brought in swifties from the East, mainly New Jersey and New York. Bennett’s plan centered on defense and a disciplined, pass-first offense that could succeed without recruiting classes studded with the McDonald All Americans the state rarely produces. Derided as “white ball,” and leading to low-scoring games, his system not only produced victories but also was more easily replicable than schemes based on individual talents. 

                The Wisconsin plan in both sports emphasizes continuity of style and local loyalties. Alvarez, now the school’s athletics director, might have been an outlander but he planted a coaching tree that produced his immediate successor Bret Bieleman (2006-12), who’d been one of his assistants, and, since 2015, Paul Chryst, who also was promoted from the Badger ranks. Wisconsin football teams look pretty much the same every season, grinding out 300-yard rushing games while squelching the opposition. The school hasn’t had a losing football season since 2001. It’s 2-0 so far this year and ranked 14th nationally.

               The home-grown angle has been even stronger on the basketball side. Before coming to Madison Bennett was a Wisconsin high-school coach who’d moved to the college ranks through UW branches in Stevens Point and Green Bay. His successor, Bo Ryan, followed the same career path, putting in 20-plus years coaching in places like Dominican College in Racine and UW Platteville and Milwaukee before ascending to Madison in 2001 at the advanced age of 53. He also followed Bennett’s defense-first game schemes. When Ryan stepped down in 2015, after compiling a 364-130 won-lost record, winning four Big !0 championships and taking two teams to the NCAA Final Four, the school picked Greg Gard, his assistant for 23 years, to replace him.

               By contrast, Illinois has the attention span of a mosquito, flitting from coach to coach and style to style and having to start anew with each new regime. Nice-guy Lou Henson ran the hoops program from 1975 to 1996, with much success, but since he left it’s had five head basketball coaches, none with previous ties to the state or university. A couple of those, Lon Kruger (1997-2000) and Bill Self (2001-03), were certified aces whose teams fared well, but both were mercenaries who fled Champaign as soon as jobs they wanted more beckoned. Bruce Weber (2004-12) did well at first, taking a Self-recruited team to the 2005 NCAA championship game, but was fired after losing too many recruiting battles. Ohioan John Groce (2013-17) took his teams nowhere and under the incumbent, Kansan Brad Underwood, Illinois has had two straight losing seasons, something that hadn’t happened since 1974 and ’75.  Underwood says things will improve once his fast-paced style is established, but we’ve heard that before.

               The chronology in football is no better. The program also has had five head coaches since 2000, one (Ron Zook) a big-school retread (he previously coached at Florida), two smaller-school types (Tim Beckman and Bill Cubit), and two refugees from the NFL, Ron Turner and the present guy, Lovie Smith. None had previous ties to the Illini, and none could or can boast a winning record there.

Smith had been a winner with the Chicago Bears but was long out of the college game. The Illini needed a Pied Piper to resuscitate recruiting after the deplorable Beckham and interim-coach Cubit, but while Lovie might know his X’s and O’s he has the personality of a turnip.  Illinois went 3-9, 2-10 and 4-8 in his first three seasons. It’s 2-1 so far this time, but lost to Eastern Michigan the last time out, and tougher foes loom.

 If Smith doesn’t show something in conference play the school will again be in the coaching market. If it is it would be well-advised to follow Wisconsin’s example and find someone who bleeds orange and blue. It couldn’t do worse than it’s been doing.

THE WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS

An interesting transaction took place the other day in the National Basketball Association. The Brooklyn Nets were purchased by Joseph Tsai, a Chinese who co-founded the internet-commerce giant Alibaba. He bought the team from Mikhail Prokhorov, a Russian who owns nickel mines.

The deal for the Nets, No.2 in New York’s basketball market, was worth an announced $2.35 billion, a record turnover for any U.S. sports franchise. Prokhorov bought the Nets for $223 million in 2009, meaning that his profit ought to keep him and his family in blini for many generations to come.

What the deal mostly did was illustrate the extent to which American sports have become internationalized, as has just about every other important area of commerce. It’s sure to stay that way. Wishing won’t make it otherwise.

At the management level, at which the Nets swap took place, the movement has barely begun in the U.S.; it’ll be a while before it goes as far as in England, where in the soccer Premier League 14 of the 20 teams are non-English owned. Still, Nintendo, the Japanese gaming company, has owned the baseball Seattle Mariners since 1992, and two other big-league outfits, the hockey New York Islanders and football Jacksonville Jaguars, are owned by foreign-born individuals who made their financial piles on these shores (the Islanders by Chinese-born Charles Wang and the Jags by Shahid Khan, born in Pakistan).

 The NBA Phoenix Suns broke the league’s foreign-coaching barrier last season when it hired Igor Kokoskov, a Serbian national, as its head coach. Major League Baseball has had a number of managers born abroad (e.g., Preston Gomez, Cookie Rojas, Felipe Alou, Ozzie Guillen), but all had played in the Bigs and were well known before they became skippers.

The playing fields, however, have become a true melting pot, the sole exception being football, which no other country has embraced. In baseball, almost 30% of the players have been foreign-born in recent seasons, mostly from Latin America but with an occasional Australian or Dutchman thrown it. The Dominican Republic and Venezuela lead among foreign nations of origin; only two states in the U.S. (California and Florida) produced more major leaguers than the DR’s 102 this season.

The NBA had a foreign player in 1946, the year it began. He was Henry Biasatti, born in Italy and raised in Canada. He played a few games for the Toronto Huskies of the new league before deciding that his sport was baseball, and he would have a short stay with the Philadephia Athletics. The invasion commenced in earnest beginning in the 1980s, and last year 108 players from a mind-boggling 41 different countries made up almost a quarter of the league’s rosters. Gianni Antetokoumpo, from Greece, was the NBA’s Most Valuable Player last season, and Luca Doncic, from Slovenia, was Rookie of the Year. Last year’s top draft choice in the league was Deandre Ayton, from the Bahamas.

In hockey it’s mostly the U.S. that’s been doing the invading. From its founding in 1917 into the 1970s the National Hockey League’s ice was almost exclusively a province of Canadian blades, but the expansion to 12 teams from six in 1967 created more jobs and dictated a wider talent pool. From 90- percent-plus dominance the share of Canadian players in the league fell below 50% a few seasons ago. Last year it stood at 47%, with 25% of the players American-born and those from a dozen or so other lands (mostly Sweden and Russia) making up the rest. One web site I visited said that if present trends continue U.S.-born players will outnumber Canadians by 2050.

Sport is a product of prosperity and leisure, and through the first half of the 20^th century the U.S. and Great Britain had a corner on those things. World War II pretty much wrecked Europe and Asia, leaving the games to Americans while those continents dug themselves out. The extent to which they’ve succeeded is best seen in the country club sports of tennis and golf. If not for a man named Woods and two women named Williams, the U.S. has been absent from the upper reaches of those activities in century 21.

               Men’s golf’s foremost international bauble is the Ryder Cup, begun in 1927, pitting teams of professionals from the U.S. against those from, first, Great Britain, and, since 1979, Europe. Americans won 22 of the first 25 of those, but since 1985 the Euros have racked up a commanding 12-5 edge. The Davis Cup, a wider-ranging tournament involving many nations, long has been men’s tennis’s biggest world go-round. The U.S. used to win it frequently but has done so only once since 1995.

               No American man has won a singles title in a tennis “grand slam” (the Australian, French and U.S. Opens and England’s Wimbledon) since Andy Roddick won at Flushing Meadow in 2003. Just one American woman besides Serena or Venus Williams (Sloane Stephens in 2017) has won at a “slam” since 2002.  The only American man among the 32 seeds at the current U.S. Open was John Isner, at 14. Just five of the 32 women’s seeds were Yanks.

               Women’s pro golf has become largely an Asian domain, with eight Koreans among the LPGA Tour’s current top 20 (to five Americans) and Japanese, Chinese and Thais in the mix. The top player, by far, has been J.Y. Ko, whose last-name-first Korean name is Ko Jin-Young.

I used to know quite a bit about women golfers when Babe Zaharias, Carole Mann or Nancy Lopez played, but not much now, so I googled Ms. Ko. Not much personal there: she’s 24 years old, turned pro at 18, isn’t married and isn’t a lesbian (as one site noted), and her zodiac sign is Cancer. Apropos romance, she has confessed to having a crush on husky Brooks Koepka, from the men’s tour. “I like big guy,” she said.

 Hey, she’s learning. How much Korean do you speak?