THE "GEE" LEAGUE

 

               You’ve probably never heard of Jalen Green or Emoni Bates, but chances are you will sometime soon. Green is a 6-foot-5 wing player out of Napa, California, who was ranked by some observers as the best basketball player to come out of a U.S. high school last year. Bates, from Ypsilanti, Michigan, is a 6-foot-8 forward who was similarly regarded in this year’s senior class.

               As you might expect, both young men were intensively recruited by institutions of higher learning even though neither was expected to stick around in college for more than a year as they turned 19, the current minimum age for a National Basketball Association contract. That would have placed them in the notorious “one and done” category that really is a misnomer because kids thusly dubbed almost always leave school after completing only a semester, or half-year, in academe. Green was said to be leaning toward Kentucky as his landing place, Bates had declared for Michigan State.

               But Green never graced a college classroom with his presence and neither will Bates because both signed up with the G League, the NBA’s minor-league affiliate. That means they will be paid across the table rather than under it as they make their final preparations for their game’s Bigs. They will have played more games than they would have as collegians and, mostly, against better opponents or, at least, older ones, and under NBA rules with coaches schooled in NBA tactics and techniques.

 Green averaged about 18 points a game with the G League’s Ignite team based in Walnut Creek, California, in the just-concluded season that was truncated by the pandemic. The team’s coach was Brian Shaw, the ex-head coach of the big-league Denver Nuggets. Green is a sure-fire first-round choice in the NBA’s July draft, probably a lottery pick. Bates, touted by some as a best-in-10-years prospect, is expected to follow the same path.

 The emergence of the G League has been basketball’s most significant development of the current century, albeit one that’s largely gone unnoticed. In its evolved form it offers to make honest men of kids whose aims in life have little to do with formal education and who take up college space that might otherwise be filled by actual students.

 The G-League option won’t stop the ones-and-dones even after the NBA returns its entry age to 18, as it’s expected to do; that path still will be available to players not willing to try their luck in the pros at such a tender age.  But, importantly, it will smooth the path to college for athletes who, wisely, can look past their noses and see their skills as a passport to the education that will lead to a more fulfilling and prosperous life. Further, having more players willing to stick around for the full four years would be a boon to the college game.

The league was started by the NBA in 2001, mostly as a place to park superfluous players who might someday be worth a call-up. It was called the National Basketball Developmental League then, and had eight teams. In 2005 it shortened the name to the NBA Developmental League and officially added the nickname “D League.”  Reasoning again that shorter is better, in 2017 it renamed it the NBA G League, the “G” standing for the sports drink Gatorade, which had stepped in as a sponsor.

In 2019 it had 29 twelve-man teams playing a 50-game, November-through-March schedule in places like Canton, Ohio, White Plains, New York, and Birmingham, Alabama. Each NBA team save two now has a G League affiliate, the exceptions being the Phoenix Suns and Portland Trailblazers, which can stash some of their fringe players with other clubs. The 2020-21 season was reduced to 18 teams and 15 games by the pandemic and played under the same sort of “bubble” conditions the big teams used.  A 50-game card and full team participation is expected to be resumed next season.  TV coverage will come via the ESPN and NBA channels, either streamed or on cable.

Players fit into a number of categories besides teenaged whizzes. These include ones who were drafted but not signed to big-league contracts, ones recently waived by NBA teams but seeking a way back, foreign prospects, tryout-camp winners and older Americans returning to the U.S. after playing in foreign pro leagues. A few are so-called “two-way” players under contract to both leagues who can be called up or back without a limit on times.

Players sign contracts with the league instead of with individual teams. The base annual salary is $35,000 plus housing, insurance coverage and $100 a month in Lyft tickets. The top salary, which Jalen Green reportedly earned and Emoni Bates reportedly will, has climbed to $125,000, and players are free to corral whatever outside income they can. Players also have free access to on-line college courses at Arizona State University, which they can take during or between seasons. In all, it’s not bad recompense for semi-skilled labor.

The roster of players who have made the NBA after stints in the G League or its predecessors is long. It includes Khris Middleton of the Milwaukee Bucks, Pascal Siakam of the Toronto Raptors and Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz, all of whom have earned NBA All-Star Game selection and the monster salaries that go with such honors. Middleton’s contract this season reportedly is worth $33 million, Siakam’s $29 million and Gobert’s $26.5 million.  There’s nothing minor league about those figures.

 

  

 

 

THE SLUMP BUG

 

               When the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series, ending a 108-year drought, I and, I’m sure, many other fans of the team swore to never again bemoan the unfairness of the baseball gods. We’d got what we’d prayed for and were content to move on after a seventh-game WS win that left us breathless. Besides, our bellyaching had long since turned off any of our friends who didn’t share our allegiance and there was no sense returning there.

               But such pledges come with a statute of limitations of undefined length, and for me it lasted five years. When the 2021 team opened its season with a collective .166 batting average over its first 13 games my eyes crossed, my mouth gaped and I uttered a scream of disbelief. How could a lineup that included the core of the ’16 champs be so ineffective for so long, I wondered.  Could their locker room be invaded by a slump bug more potent than covid 19?

               Being a curious sort I set out to investigate that possibility, and discovered research that indicated that, yes, hitting and, therefore, not hitting both can be contagious. There are, it seems, bodies in our brains called “mirror neurons” that cause us to perform actions related to things we have recently witnessed, for good or ill.  Witness a base hit and you’re more likely to get one yourself, studies show. Ditto for the opposite.

               Details later, but first let me assure you that I wasn’t being alarmist in my concern over the Cubs’ early ineffectualness. People who monitor such things report that their batting average through game 13 was the second worst ever, topped (bottomed?) only by the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who began their season 1-12 in the won-lost column (miraculously, the Cubs went 5-8 during their skein).

 Further, the ’03 Tigers were a rag-tag lot that would go on to post 119 losses (to 43 wins) for the season, tying the 1962 New York Mets for the most in MLB history, while the current Cubs are star-studded with a four-man core of Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez and Willson Contreras that can boast 10 All-Star Game appearances among them.  All four of those worthies are in their athletic primes, aged 28 through 31 years, and three of them (all but Contreras) are in their final seasons before being eligible for free-agency, usually a potent motivator. On April 17, though, only Contreras was within 50 points of his career batting average.

Worse was a recent team history in which group slumps were a feature, ending promising pennant runs. The 2018 team went into the playoffs off a 95-win regular season only to fall to the Milwaukee Brewers by a 3-1 score in a divisional tie-breaker and then lose to the Colorado Rockies, 2-1 in 13 innings, in a play-in round game. The team’s two-game totals were two runs and nine hits in 22 innings. Both contests, by the way, were played in home Wrigley Field.

Pretty much the same thing happened last season after the division-winning Cubs fell to the Miami Marlins by scores of 5-1 and 2-0 in the first playoff round, also at Wrigley. In their last four post-season games the Cubs have totaled only three runs and 18 hits, a slump by any definition.

Streaks are part of all sports, all the time, of course. Certain baseball batters have the reputation for being “streaky,” but, in fact, they all are, with good and bad games sprinkled unevenly through their seasons. Relatedly, any gambler can tell you he does not win or lose on an even basis but has “up” days in which wins seem to come by accident and others in which they do not come at all. At bat or betting window psychology certainly plays a part in this; winning breeds a positive, self-confident mindset while losing causes one to doubt one’s abilities and sabotages the most-sound plans.

A key physical element in learning any sport is “muscle memory,” the groove formed by repetitively performing a motion, such as a golf or tennis swing. That jibes with something called “action induction,” the tendency to imitate an action that has just been observed. A well-known example is seeing someone yawn and then yawning yourself. A good warm up for a golf or tennis game is to spend a few minutes watching a good player hit balls properly. A history of swinging poorly or watching faulty swings can have an opposite effect, and the more ingrained a bad habit becomes the harder it is to change. That’s why it’s best to get a kid some lessons before he or she takes up a sport.

               A web search turned up on several pages the unattributed info that a baseball hitter is more than 50% more likely to get a hit right after he’s just seen two teammates hit safely than after watching the two make outs. In one oft-noted university study a group of college-age baseball players, 12 varsity players and 12 recreational ones, were shown examples of batters getting and not getting hits, and then fed pitching machine deliveries to swing at. Both groups had better success after watching the positive examples than after the negative ones.

The question of whether seasoned players are affected by such things was answered in the affirmative; the varsity group followed the positive examples better than the less-experience one. For both groups, the effects of the filmed examples waned with time, with the more-immediate ones the most potent.

The contagion theory was affirmed by the Cubs after their dismal first-13; in their next six games they scored 13 or more runs three times, raising their team batting average. It’s still poor, though, .213 on Friday. After an off-season in which they just about white-flagged it by trading away their best pitcher, Yu Darvish, for a passel of pallid prospects, they’re bumping around under .500 with no swift turnaround in sight.

 As noted, Bryant, Rizzo and Baez all will be free to move come 2022 and the team can’t/won’t pay them all, so decisions loom. Maybe a thoroughgoing roster change might bring in a less-suggestible crew.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              

JUST WIN, BABY

 

               The NCAA Final Four weekend is about kids playing basketball, of course, but it also serves another function. It’s an annual, though informal, coaches’ convention, where college hoops mentors from around the country gather to network and gossip, the latter talk centering on what might be available where in the game’s always-lively job market.  A colleague once remarked to me that every sportswriter in America was on the lookout for a better job. The same is true of coaches, and then some.

               The celebrities of the conclave are the coaches whose teams are boogying in the “big dance,” or who have otherwise distinguished themselves. Coaches are among the most suggestible of people, always eager to put to use anything that might add a W” or other filip to their resumes. The saw “nothing succeeds like success” is nowhere more applicable than in their profession.

               The lessons of what counts or doesn’t in the scramble up the greasy pole were rarely more evident than at the just-ended get together in Indianapolis. Exhibit A was Kelvin Sampson, whose University of Houston Cougars were a Final Four contestant. If you follow the sport loosely you might have been surprised to learn that Sampson still worked at the collegiate level. He’s a heckuva coach, with a long record of winning seasons, but also left a trail of slime as a result of NCAA rules violations at Oklahoma and Indiana, his previous collegiate employers. He put both those schools on probation before moving on.

               NCAA members don’t trust one another so the organization has a fat rulebook, full of petty crimes. Thus, it’s easy to dismiss some violations as nitpicking. Not so in Sampson’s case. At Oklahoma he was found to have made, um, numerous improper recruiting phone calls over a several-year period ending in 2005, 550 to be exact. That figure impressed the most jaded and earned the school a three-year spanking, which included recruiting restrictions.

               Sampson wanted no part of that so by the next year he’d fled into the waiting arms of Indiana U., a promotion by most standards. In short order there he not only repeated his depredations but also lied about them to university and NCAA investigators. In 2008 Indiana got a three-year rap and Sampson personally was tagged with a rare order that effectively barred any NCAA school from hiring him for a five-year period.  

               That made him unemployable collegiately but he landed on his feet with a number of NBA teams, whose coaches employed him as an assistant. The fraternity takes care of its own that way. His penance completed, he’s thrived at Houston, pulling down a reported $3 m yearly to guide young men there, a shining example of rehabilitation.

               That, maybe, is what the good fathers at Iona College, a Catholic institution in New Rochelle, New York, had in mind went they hired another FF-weekend celeb, Rick Pitino, as their basketball coach last year, and watched him lead the Gaels to this year’s tourney.  A peripatetic type who’s bounced between the pros and the colleges, he got in trouble at his last employer, the University of Louisville, when it was discovered that his team hired stripper/prostitutes to entertain recruits in parties at school dorms.

 A hapless assistant coach took the rap for that one but none was available when Pitino’s name came up in the “pay for play” scandal of 2018 that had the shoe company Adidas funneling money to recruits to play at schools that used their products, so out he went. In between, he’d bravely fought off a shakedown attempt from the wife of an assistant with whom he’d had an adulterous relationship.  His reported Iona salary of $1 million a year is a small fraction of what he’d made at L’ville, but it’s probably enough to get by on.

Also taking bows at the tourney was another “Adidas school” principal, Bill Self, the head basketball coach at the U. of Kansas. His latest distinction was for landing a five-year rollover contract that amounted to a lifetime pact at the school at a $7 million-plus annual salary, something about which his contemporaries can only dream. Self was taped by the FBI yakking with an Adidas functionary about payoffs to one recruit, and about the guy’s continuing help in keeping KU supplied with future NBA lottery picks. Nonetheless, he denies all.

 Sean Miller, the coach at the U. of Arizona and another figure in the long-moldering scandal, just lost his job, but unlike Self’s teams Miller’s didn’t continue to win big in the three years since the thing broke. The point has been taken, I’m sure.

Another figure of veneration for the educators was Roy Williams, who retired after 18 years as head coach at the U. of North Carolina. Williams’ tenure at Chapel Hill included eight years (2003-2011) during which the school maintained an academic shell department, called African and African-American Studies, whose main function over an 18-year period (1993-2011) was to keep UNC athletes eligible by handing out no-work credits and grades. The Drake Group, a faculty-based college-sports watchdog, called it “the mother of academic fraud violations.”

Butch Davis, UNC’s football head coach at the time, was fired when the story surfaced. Not Williams, whose teams were busily winning ACC championships and contending for national honors. He claimed total ignorance of the fraud, and over the years questions about it faded. The New York Times devoted two full columns of its national-edition sports pages to Williams’s career when he called it quits, and only one paragraph mentioned the episode.

 How does that line go: “The evil men do lives after them”?

 Well, sometimes.

 

              

                    

BETTER BASEBALL

 

               There was a Major League baseball season last year, but not much of one. Because of covid they played 60 regular-season games instead of the usual 162, barred spectators from the stadiums and staged the postseason in “bubbles.” The statistical records, the sport’s lifeblood, were reduced to oddities. What could you make of a campaign in which 22 home runs, 60 RBIs and eight mound wins led leagues?  Seeing such numbers, a future fan most likely will just shrug and move on.

               In another sense, though, last year’s stats were important because they confirmed multi-year trends that could only be called troubling for the National Pastime. Strikeouts were up on average and home runs challenged recent highs. Batting averages were down and stolen bases continued to be regarded as relics of bygone eras. The fans, clustered around their TV sets at home, were restive.  Attendance had declined annually in each of the previous four seasons and a 2020 upturn would have surprised, had it been possible.

               The game has taken note and has mulled changes that could lead to more action on the field. Alas, aside from starting extra innings with a runner on second base (a plus!), nothing of importance will go into effect during the new season that begins today.  A number of things are being tried in various minor leagues, most notably a rule that pitchers must step off the rubber before attempting a pickoff throw (to encourage base stealing), but the gap between the Bigs and the Class A league in which this one is being tried is large. Baseball doesn’t change easily and this should be no exception.

               The causes of baseball’s turgidity are well known, but not all can be corrected or even addressed. One, perhaps oddly, is the trend toward bigger and stronger athletes at all positions, but especially pitching. Time was that a 95 mph fastball was remarkable, but today every team can trot out a half dozen pitchers who can hit that mark or higher routinely. Improvements in coaching at every level have enabled hurlers to be more refined as well as stronger, and that isn’t going to change.

               Another is the go-for-broke philosophy that governs many (most?) hitters’ approach to their at-bats. It’s a baseball cliche that chicks dig the long ball, but general managers do, too, especially at contract time. Until those two groups change their minds today’s bigger, stronger, fitter hitters will continue to flail for the fences at every opportunity, strikeouts be damned.

               Lastly, as much as it chafes traditionalists, the statistical focus called “analytics” is here to stay and pitching and defense will continue to be its main beneficiaries. The numbers crunched from every diamond action are behind what is thrown to whom and where fielders are stationed. Hitters can benefit from knowing pitchers’ tendencies, but the game’s central fact—that it’s really, really tough to hit a well-pitched ball— remains unchanged.            

               By me, though, three changes that are less than revolutionary could tilt the game’s balance in favor of more hits and runs, and, therefore, more action. The first is going to happen anyway so it might as well be sooner rather than later: MAKE THE DESIGNATED HITTER UNIVERSAL.

That was done last season to accommodate the increased inter-league play that accompanied regional scheduling groupings, but the change was erased for this one. Whatever argument against the DH that existed when the American League adopted it in 1973 has long been resolved on the ground; every organized baseball league from kids up now uses it. The main reason the National League holds out is because it's a bargaining chip for the owners at contract time. Look for it to be in play in the contract talks that begin after this season.

               The second change might be a bit more controversial: REQUIRE TWO FIELDERS TO BE ON EACH SIDE OF SECOND BASE BEFORE EVERY PITCH, thus eliminating hit-choking overshifts. Yes, the free positioning of players is a baseball tradition, but limits on it exist in other sports; football mandates that there be seven offensive players on the line of scrimmage before every ball snap, and basketball and hockey don’t permit players to lurk around an opponent’s goal when the ball or puck is in the other end. This change could be accomplished with a flick of a pen.

               My third change would require some pick-and-shovel work on the diamonds: LOWER THE PITCHING MOUND. That was what the game did in 1969 to counteract a hits drought in which pitchers like Bob Gibson, Luis Tiant and Sam McDowell were posting sub-2 ERAs. That year mound heights were dropped from  their longtime 15 inches to 10 inches. It worked, with overall averages climbing from .237 in 1968 (they were .245 last year) to .248 in ’69 and .254 in ’70.  This time let’s drop them to, say, six inches.  

               A little basic geometry explains how this would help hitters: lowering the mound would reduce pitchers’ leverage and flatten their deliveries. One reason pitchers are throwing harder these days is that they’re taller on average than they used to be; ones under six-feet tall are rare and those over 6-feet-4 are common. Lowering the mound would cut them down in size.

               Baseball also is casting around for ways to speed games but proposals to do this, such as instituting pitch clocks, only would nibble at the problem. A more-radical reduction would come if all the catch-playing that goes on before and during innings would be eliminated. In no other sport are players permitted to practice in-game the way baseball players do.

Do pitchers really need six warmup throws before an inning or when coming on in relief? Must infielders throw the ball around between outs? Those guys have been playing catch since age six and aren’t likely to forget how.

 

              

TAKE ME OUT WITH THE CROWD?

 

               The reality of the Covid 19 pandemic came home to me a year ago yesterday when I showed up at the Turf Paradise horse track in Phoenix, Arizona, to occupy my usual Saturday carrel in the place’s Players Club, and found it closed. Sure, I’d heard about the disease, but cases in the area in which I live numbered only in the dozens, and had caused little stir. Within a few days baseball would cancel its spring training and the NBA and NHL would suspend their seasons. The spring and summer to come would be a virtual winter in the world of sports.

               Now the physical world has come a full 360 degrees and the Texas Rangers just announced they would open their 2021 home season to full attendance of 40,000-plus on April 5, thus marking the symbolic if not the real end to this unique chapter in American sports history. Whether 40,000 brave (or foolhardy) souls can be mustered to complete that particular circle remains to be seen, but it’s Texas so the answer probably is yes.  Good luck to them and to the rest of us.

               Fact is, to go or not to go to any sort of gathering has been pretty much up to us from the outset of the pandemic, and will remain so until the danger passes. A national vaccination process is in full swing while thousands of people die daily from the affliction. The ideological tug of war over mask wearing continues to muddle rather than clarify our decisions. The fear of dying on the last day of a war is stronger in some than in others.

               Thanks to our elderliness, wife Susie and I have been vaccinated, altering our risk assessments considerably, but the no-no go decision remains. I voted for “go” last Thursday when my also-vaxed friend Harvey Volin came up with tickets to a Chicago Cubs-Colorado Rockies spring training game at Salt River Field in Scottsdale, about 15 minutes from my home. The place seats about 12,000 people but this spring that figure has been reduced by about 80% for covid reasons.

               Aside from an inflated price tag of $57 per, the experience was both enjoyable and edifying. Parking was easy and seating for the 2,200 folks in attendance was comfortable, the ambience being close to that of the annual Fall League games at the park.  People sat in scattered groups of two, three or four, with the other seats made unsittable by plastic ziplocks.

Masks were supposed to be required and just about everyone wore one, no small matter in this famously maverick state. Outside the stands social distancing was suggested by the “stand here” ground stickers at the gates and concession stands, but those were mostly ignored. More effective was the closing of every other urinal in the men’s rest rooms.

Concessions were cashless, peanuts and sunflower seeds verboten. Hots dogs came in plastic containers, drinks in bottles. All very spic and span. Look for the same arrangements for at least a month after most regular-season games commence in the double-and-triple decked stadia of the Bigs. Even vaccinated I wouldn’t feel right sitting shoulder to shoulder with my fellow citizens while the virus still rages and some 90% of the population hasn’t had their shots, but those precautions make sense.

I wasn’t surprised that corporate baseball was up for staging post-quarantine games because they’ve done well generally since resuming play last July. So, too, have our other major professional team leagues. If you follow this space you know that I wasn’t optimistic that our Big Four (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) could handle their returns. That’s partly because protecting their casts under dire circumstances would be a major undertaking, far outside the usual for their narrowly focused enterprises. I further doubted that the rich and entitled men who make up the teams would sit still for the discipline that would be required.

It’s helped that the virus has been relatively kind to the young and healthy; only a handful of the notable jocks who’ve been infected have suffered more than mild symptoms (Freddie Freeman, Jayson Tatum and Von Miller were among the exceptions). It’s also helped that the leagues have the kind of money and clout that allowed them to elbow to the front of lines to obtain the virus-testing and contact-tracking capabilities others could only envy.  

Their response wasn’t perfect, of course. Games were canceled or postponed, schedules were knocked out of whack, teams played shorthanded. Empty stands became the new normal, weird even with the crowd noises the teams skillfully conjured up for the benefit of the television audiences.  

In total, though, the leagues performed admirably, and the entertainment they produced provided a welcome respite from virus-enforced monotony. We waited out the virus without sports from mid-March through June, and with them from then on. With was better.

During World War II President Roosevelt was asked to halt Major League Baseball for the duration, on grounds that the games consumed scarce resources and their crowds presented tempting targets for saboteurs. He refused, citing baseball’s contribution to civilian morale. Much the same thing can be said for our pro leagues today.    

              

JOSE CAN YOU SEE?

 

               Back when I was employed as a columnist people sometimes would ask me how I kept coming up with ideas for pieces.  “No problem,” I’d answer, “God provides.”

               That was a wisecrack, of course, but the universe regularly churns out plenty of grist for a writer’s mill, and if a week’s supply is short there always are a few “evergreen” subjects to which one can turn.

               One such is how our national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, is used or abused in the world of sports.  It’s as predictable as sunrise that, every so often, somebody, somewhere will take offense at how the song is treated, and start a row. Then the research done for previous pieces can be trotted out for reuse, good as new.

               The latest anthem contretemps involves Mark Cuban, the ubiquitous billionaire who owns the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks, among other things. On his instruction, with a nod to recent protests over racial inequities in American society, the team didn’t play the anthem at the start of its first 13 home games this season. The lack went unremarked until a reporter for the website The Athletic noticed and wrote about it. Then the bricks started flying.

               Last summer, while the protests boiled, the NBA told its teams they could do what they wished with the anthem. Not so this season, commissioner Adam Silver decreed-- league policy is to play it. Cuban relented and Mav fans now are oh-saying along with the others.  Thus, it turns out that not playing the song could be as offensive as kneeling, sitting or making other gestures while it’s played.

               I qualify as an expert on the anthem, if only by virtue of having heard it played a couple thousand times in a long life of games-going. More than once it’s occurred to me to ask why it has become more connected with sports than with other public gatherings. One could spend decades at movies, plays, concerts and such without being asked to stand for it.

               As Tevye the dairyman said in another context, the answer is TRADITION, but one not old as most people think. The words to the song were written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key, a lawyer who witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore by the British in the War of 1812, and set to an existing English song. It was no instant hit, though, taking 117 years before Congress in 1931 dubbed it the anthem, the nation having gone without one before that. It didn’t become a sports fixture until Major League Baseball teams began playing it before games during World War II.

               There were dissenting opinions about the song’s worth when it gained official status, and they continue. Its meter is lumpy, its 12-tone range makes it hard to sing properly and its words are hard to get the tongue around, which is why it’s often prerecorded and lipsynched for major public performances. When polled some Americans say they’d pick “America” (my country tis of thee), “America the Beautiful” or “God Bless America” to represent this land. “God Bless the USA,” aka the red-neck anthem, also gets some votes. Before one event I attended, a U.S. Olympics Trial, the Lee Greenwood ditty was played, and everyone took off their hats and stood.

 “God Bless America,” which Irving Berlin wrote in 1918 for a Broadway musical but decided it didn’t fit, gained co-anthem status after 9/11 when MLB began playing it during the seventh inning stretch at games. That’s still done in places. Again, people are asked to stand for it, anthem or not. 

               With all its repetition one would think Americans have anthem protocol down pat, but they don’t. Men pretty much remember to stand and remove their hats when it’s played, but the rules for women are fuzzier; baseball-type caps are supposed to be doffed but women’s “style” hats can remain planted. And while it’s clear what to do when you’re in your seat when the song begins (unless you’ve got a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other), what about when you’re in a stadium concourse, a concessions-stand line or a restroom? I’ve seen some amusing confusion in those places.

               The worst things I’ve seen done to the anthem came from people who performed it, not from disrespectful players or fans. A proper anthem can be sung in about 75 seconds but many singers prolong their spotlight time by stretching it well beyond that. Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated used to put a stopwatch to the song in football press boxes and announce the result. I recall him once getting a reading of two minutes 15 seconds.

               Relatedly, the vocal gymnastics some singers employ can render the song all but unrecognizable. Opera singers and members of the military can be counted on to deliver it straight, but others not so much. The worst anthem I’ve heard “live” came at a Chicago Bulls’ game when the country singer Ferlin Husky sang offkey and then had to quit because he forgot the words. The worst end-to-end rendition, which I heard on video, was by the Olympic sprinter Carl Lewis, before a Houston Rockets’ game. It killed his singing career.

               Some years ago the actress Roseanne Barr capped a screechy rendition of the anthem before a San Diego Padres’ game by clutching her crotch and spitting—in homage to baseball, she said. Botching the anthem—or sitting, kneeling or first-raising during it--isn’t against the law, so nothing happened to her afterward except some boos, but she got some laughs, too. If you’re having a bad day check out her performance online. It’s a classic.

ROOTS

 

               I always knew I’d go to college because my parents (who hadn’t gone) made it clear I would, but like many in my era (I recall) never gave much thought to where. When looming high school graduation (class of ’55) made a choice necessary I sent out two applications—to Northwestern University and the University of Illinois. Northwestern didn’t accept me and Illinois did, so off to Champaign I went. The rest, as they say, is history.

               I can’t say that NU’s rejection was unexpected-- my high-school record wasn’t sterling. Nor can I claim it bothered me much. But being a normal, petty person it didn’t endear me to the leafy campus on Lake Michigan just north of Chicago, and for many years I got even by rooting against the school’s athletic teams.

That posture became a bit harder to maintain beginning in 1975, when an adult I and my family moved into a big old house on Pioneer Road in Evanston, Illinois, an easy, six-block walk from Northwestern’s Dyche Stadium football home. The Mildcats (er, Wildcats) were not a big draw then so tickets were cheap and on many an autumn Saturday afternoon I’d take my kids to a game. I’d watch the action and they’d frolic in the south-end-zone bleachers, which always were nearly empty. Walking home amid the smell of burning leaves is a fond memory of that time.

Some of wife Susie and my friends during our tenure in Evanston were NU faculty people. They included Bruce Corrie, the school’s athletics director for a time, and his lovely wife Jane. We’re still in touch even though we’ve moved apart geographically. By osmosis, my enmity toward NU athletics changed to benevolent neutrality, and so it remains.

That lengthy intro is meant to explain what is to follow, a “good news” take on a subject I’m rarely not down on. That would be big-time college sports and the swamp that surrounds it. A few weeks ago Northwestern announced that it had signed a 10-year contract extension with football head coach Pat Fitzgerald. Such pacts usually elicit shrugs because successful college coaches rarely let a few pieces of paper keep them from bounding upward, but based on Fitzgerald’s biography I’m betting on this one to stick. 

Fitzgerald got to be NU’s headman in 2006 by accident—the sudden death in July of that year of his predecessor, Randy Walker. The appointment surprised many people, probably including him; he was the team’s linebackers coach at the time and, at age 31, five years younger than any other top-division collegiate head football coach.

 Before he took the job the Wildcats mostly had been joke-level bad, with just five winning seasons in the previous 40. From 1976 through 1981 their win-loss-tie record was 3-62-1. A high-toned private institution with just 8,000 or so undergrads in a conference of state-school behemoths, their Big Ten status often was questioned, the mid-major Mid-American Conference seemingly a more-appropriate roost.

Fitzgerald, though, knew what he was getting into. Chicago born and raised, and an ex-NU linebacker and grad, he’d been a three-year assistant coach at the school and its recruiting chief. After an obligatory first-year losing record he’s been plus-.500 nine times, is 106-81 overall and has taken teams to 10 bowl games. That wouldn’t cut it at Ohio State but it’s dreamy good at NU.

About here sportswriters usually opine that Northwestern’s high academic standards mean it can’t recruit with the big fellas, but I won’t say that. Stanford and Duke have standards at least as high and regularly field first-rate football or basketball teams. The collegiate big-timers all recruit from the same talent pool and it was my observation that the biggest difference between the Stanfords and the Ohio States is that the gap between the jocks and the rest of the student body is wider at the formers than at the latters.  Still, people who grade such things say Fitzgerald’s teams outperform their recruiting rankings, so the guy must be a good judge of talent and know his X’s and O’s.

What is unquestioned is his loyalty to his school and the example it creates.  He’s called his position his “dream job” and one can only believe him. He’s reportedly turned down offers from other colleges and the pros, and while his annual salary of $3.3 million ain’t hay it’s less than he could get elsewhere. His roots to Sweet Home Evanston are thick and deep.

Northwestern’s example well might be followed by the U. of Illinois, my school. It has floundered in football’s slough of despond throughout this still-young century and now is on its sixth head coach in that span. Each of that number had good credentials but none had much connection to the institution going in. No matter what they may have said, for them the UI job was a gig, another step in a typically winding career.

In college football them that has gets, so breaking into the title-contending group of any “Power Five” conference requires extraordinary oomph.  Roots seem to be one engine for that. Wisconsin has escaped the mire via a coaching tree started by Barry Alvarez (1990-05). At Iowa the key has been Kirk Ferentz, a nine-year assistant at the school before he got the top job in 1999. Indiana had one of the Big Ten’s saddest football histories before Tom Allen turned things around in 2019. He’s an Indiana native, former state high-school coach and an ex-assistant at the school.

Tom Lasorda, the longtime L.A. Dodgers’ coach, manager and executive, used to talk about “bleeding Dodger blue.” Blood also comes in collegiate colors.