Al Michaels qualified for the TV-broadcaster hall of fame when, at the end of the stirring victory of the U.S. national hockey team over the one from the Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics, he cried “Do you believe in miracles?!”
In fact, of course, the outcome of the game involved no overturning of physical laws and so, strictly speaking, wasn’t miraculous. Rather, it was the unlikely triumph of a group of collegians over a seasoned and skilled unit that was professional by any definition save its own, the sort of reversal of form that happens every now and then in sports.
Still, the standards of the arena differ from those of the Vatican, and I’m sure that a poll of Michael’s audience would have revealed the belief that the victory was, indeed, supernatural. And thus it has remained.
So I am invoking Michael’s definition by declaring that at least two miracles have occurred during the Major League baseball season now winding down, one positive and one negative. The positive one involves the Arizona Diamondbacks, who represent my new home town of Phoenix. Last season they finished a distant last in the National League West with a 65-97 won-lost record. In this one they are romping to victory in the same alignment, on pace for 95 regular-season wins and with a playoff spot all but assured.
Worst-to-first reversals aren’t all that unusual in today’s professional leagues, where abrupt changes in team spending can combine with player free agency to quickly alter standings. These D’Backs, though, are the same cheapskate bunch they were last year, with an opening-day payroll (of $53.6 million) that ranked 25th among the 30 Big League teams, and they made no big-name additions to their largely anonymous cast of players. Further, their current rankings in such key statistical categories as team batting and earned-run averages (.250 and 3.86, respectively) both place them in a mid-pack 9th in their league, indicating a .500 team rather than a pennant contender
As miracles go this D’Back team’s showing has to take a back seat to that of a previous Phoenix unit, the 2007 one that won a divisional title despite a league-worst batting average that led it to be outscored by its foes overall. How that gang won 90 regular-season games and advanced to the playoff semis still mystifies. But this one’s run isn’t completed yet, and could wind up being stranger.
The turnaround can be traced in part to the team’s hiring of Kevin Towers as its general manager. A straightforward sort quite unlike some of the Secret Squirrels who typically man that post, Tower is no magician, but he does know talent and how to improve it, albeit marginally. His best move, I think, was the trade of Mark Reynolds, a scruffy slugger whose world-record strikeout habit and “What, me worry?” attitude typified D’Back teams of the recent past, for David Hernandez, a useful relief pitcher.
With Hernandez and the reclamation-project closer J.J. Putz as a base, Towers changed a terrible bullpen into a good one, anchoring the revival. The fortuitous success of Ian Kennedy and Daniel Hudson, young starters who have risen from prospect status to joint winners of 35 games so far this year, also has helped
Towers has lucked out similarly in the performances of such as Willie Bloomquist, Aaron Hill and Geoff Blum, journeymen infielders picked up for a wing and a prayer. On-field leadership has come from old-footballer Kirk Gibson, the team’s manager. I think that physical intimidation is underrated as a managerial asset in the male society of sports, and Gibson and his muscular coaches Matt Williams and Don Baylor look as though they could put erring players over their knees if they chose to.
Lately, every reserve Gibson fields contributes a key play and every pinch hitter a hit, just like such fellas did for manager Bob Melvin in ’07. The D’Backs look to go into the playoffs with the Phillies, Brewers and Braves as the NL’s lowest-rated team, but as I used to tell my kids, the best teams don’t win, the teams that play best do, and AZ could be one of those. Stranger things have happened.
Miracle No. 2 is a downer, the performance of Adam Dunn of the White Sox from my ex hometown of Chicago. The left-hander showed up in the Windy City this spring as one baseball’s best and steadiest power hitters, having averaged 40 home runs, 100 runs batted in and 100 walks in his previous seven seasons with Cincinnati, Arizona and Washington. At age 31, prime time for sluggers, he seemed to fully justify the four-year, $56 million contract the Sox laid on him to DH. He and resident muscleman Paul Konerko were supposed to make the team a pennant threat.
Alas, Dunn has plunged to depths yet unfathomed in his game’s statistical sea, and the Sox’s fortunes sunk with him. His batting average (.162) is down almost 90 points from his previous norms. His power numbers (10 HRs and 40 RBIs) have been similarly dismal.
It’s rare that any baseball regular hits below .200; Figure Filberts had to go back to the 1909 Brooklyn Superbas (no kidding) to find a full-season mark-- catcher Bill Bergen’s .139-- lower than Dunn’s present one, and Bergen is said to have made his living as a gloveman. Also, he earned much closer to $1,400 a year than to Dunn’s $14 million.
Some of Dunn’s breakdown stats are even more mind-boggling. He’s batted just .159 in home games this season, .036 (3 for 83) against left-handed pitchers and .127 (13 for 102) with base runners in scoring position. His strikeout total is so high (160) that Sox fans took to cheering when he merely hit the ball.
Various reasons have been advanced for Dunn’s sudden ineptitude. His move to the American League is one and his switch to DH from full-time position player (at first base) is another. Some say he took too little off-season batting practice, some say too much. Maybe he needs a shrink.
My observation is simpler--at 6-foot-6 and, apparently, more than 300 pounds he’s too fat, and seems to have reached an age when he can no longer handle such suet.
The Sox should sign him up with the Jenny Craig folks. I’m told they can work miracles.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Thursday, September 1, 2011
"PAY FOR PLAY"?
Whenever someone takes big-time college sports to task for their failings—as I do frequently— some are ready with a cure-all answer. Just pay the players, they say, and all will be well.
It’s the remedy du jour, every jour. You hear it not only from casual fans but also from the “experts” who hold forth endlessly on the subject on sportsblab radio and TV. On any college-football Saturday, these folks note, everybody in the stadium—coaches, ushers, ticket-takers, vendors, cops and the kids who sell programs—is getting paid, so why shouldn’t the stars of the show? It’s only FAIR! they cry.
To that I say “teeesh.” Founded on the dubious premise that the poor are more easily corrupted than the rich, paying the players would cause more problems than it would solve while opening up a vast new area for potential abuse. Worse, it would increase the subservient status of college athletes that’s at the root of the real problems of the present, deplorable system.
Let’s look at what’s wrong with the proposal, starting with the easy stuff. Pay the players, you say? Okay, who do you pay? Footballers and basketballers for sure, I guess, but how about baseballers, lacrossers, wrestlers, swimmers and fencers? Just the men, or the women jocks, too? They all put in their time.
What would you pay them-- $100 a month, $500, $1,000? In season or year-round? Should starters receive more than reserves, or stars more than mere starters? Should the athletes themselves have a say in setting pay scales (can you spell U-N-I-O-N?)? Would injured players be eligible to receive workmen’s compensation payments, which could continue long past their college careers?
And how about the tax-exempt status of contributions to university athletics departments, without which big-time programs couldn’t be maintained at near present levels? If the players are salaried how would, say, Ohio State football legally differ from that of the NFL? If you think no one would be so bold as to raise that question, think again because it’s already surfaced.
Further, college athletes already are being paid, and terrifically well for teenagers or young adults whose marketable skills still are being developed. The cash value of the full-ride scholarships (tuition, room and board) they receive ranges from $20,000-to-$25,000 a year at state-supported institutions to as much as $55,000 per at such posh private schools as Duke or Northwestern. If you’re scoring, that works out to between $100,000 and $200,000 over the normal, four-year academic run.
Beyond that, even in these parlous times holders of bona fide college degrees can look forward to a lifetime of higher earnings than their degreeless counterparts. Even positing a difference of just $10,000 a year over a 40-year work life, that works out to $400,000. Not bad recompense for a few years of game-playing on some leafy campus, I’d say.
The rub, of course, is that the time and energy demands of big-time-college revenue sports can preclude the young men who play them from taking advantage of the promises they’ve been made. Often coming from poor homes, and lacking basic academic skills, they’re funneled into Mickey Mouse courses designed to preserve their eligibility, then cast adrift when their use to their institution ends. Many of them buy into the system because they believe it serves their desire to get a lucrative professional contract after college. For all but a few hundred out of many thousand, that’s a vain hope.
Turning the athletes into employees would exacerbate this situation by making them more chattel-like than they already are. Right now a strong-minded jock (I’m sure there are some) can opt for a serious course of academic study that might conflict with his coaches’ victory goals, involving, say, a lab course that interferes with his team’s practice schedule, but putting the lad on the payroll only could complicate such a stance.
The answer, then, is to make the system better serve the long-term interests of the young people involved in it, which is what college is supposed to be about. The optimum solution would be to tear down the stadiums, disband the conferences and turn the games into vehicles for healthful student recreation, which is what the rest of the world does. That ain’t gonna happen, so I propose the following steps, none of which would spoil the public fun:
ELIMINATE FRESHMAN ELIGIBILITY— Mandating that a student complete one-fourth of his degree requirements before beginning varsity competition would establish the primacy of education in the student-athlete equation. Future eligibility should hinge on the student’s continuing academic progress. An athlete still could compete for four years, but the fourth would come as a reward for achieving grad-student status. This would mark a sea change in a process that now allows a freshman football player to complete a full season of competition before earning a single academic credit. Incidentally, it also would eliminate the “one-and-done” phenomenon that now pollutes college basketball.
RESTRICT TEAM PRACTICES TO A SPORT’S SEASON— Such sessions should last no more than two hours a day and be conducted no more than five times a week, beginning two weeks before a team’s first intercollegiate game and ending with the last. No more spring football. Summers should be free, allowing athletes to take the sort of jobs other students use to finance their incidental (and sometimes other) campus expenses. Hey, they may even learn something in the process.
NO MORE ATHLETES’ DORMS, TRAINING TABLES OR EXCLUSIVE TRAINING FACILITIES--- In college, like at every other level of formal education, kids learn at least as much from the other kids as they do from what goes on in the classrooms, and ghettoizing jocks cuts them off from much of this good stuff. There’s a big world out there and it’s not all about sweat. Re the training tables, don’t worry, they won’t starve.
By the way, I’m available to any university that would like to take me on as a consultant to implement the above measures. My rates will be reasonable. Whatever I make will be more than I’m making now.
It’s the remedy du jour, every jour. You hear it not only from casual fans but also from the “experts” who hold forth endlessly on the subject on sportsblab radio and TV. On any college-football Saturday, these folks note, everybody in the stadium—coaches, ushers, ticket-takers, vendors, cops and the kids who sell programs—is getting paid, so why shouldn’t the stars of the show? It’s only FAIR! they cry.
To that I say “teeesh.” Founded on the dubious premise that the poor are more easily corrupted than the rich, paying the players would cause more problems than it would solve while opening up a vast new area for potential abuse. Worse, it would increase the subservient status of college athletes that’s at the root of the real problems of the present, deplorable system.
Let’s look at what’s wrong with the proposal, starting with the easy stuff. Pay the players, you say? Okay, who do you pay? Footballers and basketballers for sure, I guess, but how about baseballers, lacrossers, wrestlers, swimmers and fencers? Just the men, or the women jocks, too? They all put in their time.
What would you pay them-- $100 a month, $500, $1,000? In season or year-round? Should starters receive more than reserves, or stars more than mere starters? Should the athletes themselves have a say in setting pay scales (can you spell U-N-I-O-N?)? Would injured players be eligible to receive workmen’s compensation payments, which could continue long past their college careers?
And how about the tax-exempt status of contributions to university athletics departments, without which big-time programs couldn’t be maintained at near present levels? If the players are salaried how would, say, Ohio State football legally differ from that of the NFL? If you think no one would be so bold as to raise that question, think again because it’s already surfaced.
Further, college athletes already are being paid, and terrifically well for teenagers or young adults whose marketable skills still are being developed. The cash value of the full-ride scholarships (tuition, room and board) they receive ranges from $20,000-to-$25,000 a year at state-supported institutions to as much as $55,000 per at such posh private schools as Duke or Northwestern. If you’re scoring, that works out to between $100,000 and $200,000 over the normal, four-year academic run.
Beyond that, even in these parlous times holders of bona fide college degrees can look forward to a lifetime of higher earnings than their degreeless counterparts. Even positing a difference of just $10,000 a year over a 40-year work life, that works out to $400,000. Not bad recompense for a few years of game-playing on some leafy campus, I’d say.
The rub, of course, is that the time and energy demands of big-time-college revenue sports can preclude the young men who play them from taking advantage of the promises they’ve been made. Often coming from poor homes, and lacking basic academic skills, they’re funneled into Mickey Mouse courses designed to preserve their eligibility, then cast adrift when their use to their institution ends. Many of them buy into the system because they believe it serves their desire to get a lucrative professional contract after college. For all but a few hundred out of many thousand, that’s a vain hope.
Turning the athletes into employees would exacerbate this situation by making them more chattel-like than they already are. Right now a strong-minded jock (I’m sure there are some) can opt for a serious course of academic study that might conflict with his coaches’ victory goals, involving, say, a lab course that interferes with his team’s practice schedule, but putting the lad on the payroll only could complicate such a stance.
The answer, then, is to make the system better serve the long-term interests of the young people involved in it, which is what college is supposed to be about. The optimum solution would be to tear down the stadiums, disband the conferences and turn the games into vehicles for healthful student recreation, which is what the rest of the world does. That ain’t gonna happen, so I propose the following steps, none of which would spoil the public fun:
ELIMINATE FRESHMAN ELIGIBILITY— Mandating that a student complete one-fourth of his degree requirements before beginning varsity competition would establish the primacy of education in the student-athlete equation. Future eligibility should hinge on the student’s continuing academic progress. An athlete still could compete for four years, but the fourth would come as a reward for achieving grad-student status. This would mark a sea change in a process that now allows a freshman football player to complete a full season of competition before earning a single academic credit. Incidentally, it also would eliminate the “one-and-done” phenomenon that now pollutes college basketball.
RESTRICT TEAM PRACTICES TO A SPORT’S SEASON— Such sessions should last no more than two hours a day and be conducted no more than five times a week, beginning two weeks before a team’s first intercollegiate game and ending with the last. No more spring football. Summers should be free, allowing athletes to take the sort of jobs other students use to finance their incidental (and sometimes other) campus expenses. Hey, they may even learn something in the process.
NO MORE ATHLETES’ DORMS, TRAINING TABLES OR EXCLUSIVE TRAINING FACILITIES--- In college, like at every other level of formal education, kids learn at least as much from the other kids as they do from what goes on in the classrooms, and ghettoizing jocks cuts them off from much of this good stuff. There’s a big world out there and it’s not all about sweat. Re the training tables, don’t worry, they won’t starve.
By the way, I’m available to any university that would like to take me on as a consultant to implement the above measures. My rates will be reasonable. Whatever I make will be more than I’m making now.
Monday, August 15, 2011
ESP (no N)
I’ve never held much with what’s called extrasensory perception, the notion that some people have the ability to see, or otherwise sense, things that aren’t apparent to the rest of us. Certainly, some are better observers than others, but that stems from the application of the senses we all have, not the possession of additional ones. I regard claims to the contrary as hokum.
Nonetheless, as autumn approaches I often sniff a whiff of sulfur in the air, and I’m not sure everyone else does. It coincides with the beginning of preparations for the college football season, annually the grandest of the entertainment offerings of our institutions of higher education. It ain’t the football (or its co-“major” basketball) I’m smelling but the hypocrisy that surrounds it.
This year the odor is especially strong. In months past the list of universities that have been fingered as athletic wrongdoers is long, and includes some of the major brands on the national scene. Ohio State is on it, along with Southern California, Tennessee, Oklahoma, UConn, Auburn, North Carolina and—yes—even Duke. I could go on but I think the point has been made.
If your alma mater isn’t mentioned above, or isn’t on any similar current list, I’m sure you’re smiling, if not smirking. Unfortunately, the claim that “my school does things right” stems from ignorance, not virtue. All the college sports big-timers are in the same stew, recruiting and exploiting the same kids with about the same methods. There are no good guys or bad guys in this play, only ones that have or haven’t been caught off. Every president of an NCAA Division I school goes to bed praying that the next sports scandal won’t be his to deal with.
I wrote about this state of affairs frequently in my professional sports-writing career—proportionally more than most of my peers, I’d wager—but my experience with the subject dates back farther. As an undergrad at the U. of Illinois (1955-59) I covered football for the student newspaper The Daily Illini, and helped out around the university’s press boxes as a fledgling pro. I knew some of the players and other actors in the shows, both there and at the U. of Michigan, where I was a grad student (1961-62).
Even then, in times that now seem rosily innocent, stuff happened. I knew about the $20 handshakes between players and alums after games and could tell you which courses enlisted jocks in search of eligibility-ensuring A’s or B’s. I knew that, say, Bobby Mitchell didn’t wind up playing football at Illinois because he innocently wandered astray from his native Arkansas.
Filling in as a reporter on the police beats in both Champaign, Ill., and Ann Arbor, Mich., furthered my education. Arrests of jocks for off-campus fighting and DUI weren’t infrequent, but by gentlemen’s agreements (which I accepted) they weren’t reported. The notion of “no harm (i.e., no one killed or maimed) no foul” obtained in such matters. Boys will be boys, you know.
Now, of course, the stakes are higher, the spotlight is brighter and the phone-book-sized NCAA rule book ever fatter, the last because schools don’t trust one another to follow simple regulations. Indeed, the very number of rules, and their intricacy, has created a widespread myopia about violations, allowing many to be shrugged off as technicalities while ignoring other, more serious transgressions.
The recent Ohio State football scandal provides a perfect case in point. To the ostensible cause of it-- football players swapping their memorabilia (jackets, game jerseys, championship rings) for tattoos (?!) — one’s immediate reaction is “So what?” The gear, after all, belonged to the players, and they could have sold or traded it without penalty the day after their football service to their university had ceased. Still, cashing in the way they did violated the NCAA rule about athletes receiving benefits not available to the student body at large, so the offending Buckeyes had to pay with suspensions.
According to a piece in Sports Illustrated magazine, though, darker forces were involved. The tattoo parlor in question was owned by one Edward Rife, a drug dealer and money launderer, and the place doubled as a players’ social center, somewhere they could “order in chicken” and “play tunes” under pleasant auspices, the article noted.
Any professional athlete accepting the hospitality of a lowlife like Rife would at least have some ‘splainin’ to do, but the NCAA rulebook doesn’t prohibit this sort of thing so it wasn’t on the bill of particulars the players or university had to answer for. Meanwhile, do you think Tattoo Daddy might have placed an occasional bet on an OSU game based on the info gleaned from his guests?
Huh?
But the real crime of big-time college sports isn’t what’s done for the so-called student athletes, but what’s done to them. Often ill-prepared for college to begin with, they’re saddled with full-time jobs and then some, then hustled through “gut” courses designed to protect their eligiblity, not prepare them for the 21st Century economy. While the handful who land pro contracts are—or ought to be—okay, many of the rest are up the creek without a paddle when their playing days are done. Keep that in mind while you’re rooting for Old Siwash in the months ahead.
Nonetheless, as autumn approaches I often sniff a whiff of sulfur in the air, and I’m not sure everyone else does. It coincides with the beginning of preparations for the college football season, annually the grandest of the entertainment offerings of our institutions of higher education. It ain’t the football (or its co-“major” basketball) I’m smelling but the hypocrisy that surrounds it.
This year the odor is especially strong. In months past the list of universities that have been fingered as athletic wrongdoers is long, and includes some of the major brands on the national scene. Ohio State is on it, along with Southern California, Tennessee, Oklahoma, UConn, Auburn, North Carolina and—yes—even Duke. I could go on but I think the point has been made.
If your alma mater isn’t mentioned above, or isn’t on any similar current list, I’m sure you’re smiling, if not smirking. Unfortunately, the claim that “my school does things right” stems from ignorance, not virtue. All the college sports big-timers are in the same stew, recruiting and exploiting the same kids with about the same methods. There are no good guys or bad guys in this play, only ones that have or haven’t been caught off. Every president of an NCAA Division I school goes to bed praying that the next sports scandal won’t be his to deal with.
I wrote about this state of affairs frequently in my professional sports-writing career—proportionally more than most of my peers, I’d wager—but my experience with the subject dates back farther. As an undergrad at the U. of Illinois (1955-59) I covered football for the student newspaper The Daily Illini, and helped out around the university’s press boxes as a fledgling pro. I knew some of the players and other actors in the shows, both there and at the U. of Michigan, where I was a grad student (1961-62).
Even then, in times that now seem rosily innocent, stuff happened. I knew about the $20 handshakes between players and alums after games and could tell you which courses enlisted jocks in search of eligibility-ensuring A’s or B’s. I knew that, say, Bobby Mitchell didn’t wind up playing football at Illinois because he innocently wandered astray from his native Arkansas.
Filling in as a reporter on the police beats in both Champaign, Ill., and Ann Arbor, Mich., furthered my education. Arrests of jocks for off-campus fighting and DUI weren’t infrequent, but by gentlemen’s agreements (which I accepted) they weren’t reported. The notion of “no harm (i.e., no one killed or maimed) no foul” obtained in such matters. Boys will be boys, you know.
Now, of course, the stakes are higher, the spotlight is brighter and the phone-book-sized NCAA rule book ever fatter, the last because schools don’t trust one another to follow simple regulations. Indeed, the very number of rules, and their intricacy, has created a widespread myopia about violations, allowing many to be shrugged off as technicalities while ignoring other, more serious transgressions.
The recent Ohio State football scandal provides a perfect case in point. To the ostensible cause of it-- football players swapping their memorabilia (jackets, game jerseys, championship rings) for tattoos (?!) — one’s immediate reaction is “So what?” The gear, after all, belonged to the players, and they could have sold or traded it without penalty the day after their football service to their university had ceased. Still, cashing in the way they did violated the NCAA rule about athletes receiving benefits not available to the student body at large, so the offending Buckeyes had to pay with suspensions.
According to a piece in Sports Illustrated magazine, though, darker forces were involved. The tattoo parlor in question was owned by one Edward Rife, a drug dealer and money launderer, and the place doubled as a players’ social center, somewhere they could “order in chicken” and “play tunes” under pleasant auspices, the article noted.
Any professional athlete accepting the hospitality of a lowlife like Rife would at least have some ‘splainin’ to do, but the NCAA rulebook doesn’t prohibit this sort of thing so it wasn’t on the bill of particulars the players or university had to answer for. Meanwhile, do you think Tattoo Daddy might have placed an occasional bet on an OSU game based on the info gleaned from his guests?
Huh?
But the real crime of big-time college sports isn’t what’s done for the so-called student athletes, but what’s done to them. Often ill-prepared for college to begin with, they’re saddled with full-time jobs and then some, then hustled through “gut” courses designed to protect their eligiblity, not prepare them for the 21st Century economy. While the handful who land pro contracts are—or ought to be—okay, many of the rest are up the creek without a paddle when their playing days are done. Keep that in mind while you’re rooting for Old Siwash in the months ahead.
Monday, August 1, 2011
LOCKS AND BAGELS
Back in the 1970s the Chicago Bears were noising about the possibility that they might move to a new stadium in the suburb of Arlington Heights, Ill. That disturbed Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s mayor at the time.
Fine, let ‘em go, Daley said, in effect. But he added that if the team moved there he’d see to it that it would have to call itself the Arlington Heights Bears.
Everyone had a good laugh at Da Mayor’s declaration, because neither he nor any other municipal authority owned a copyright on a city’s name, and it was available to any rock band, pizzeria or dry cleaner that wished to use it. Perhaps inadvertently, though, he did raise a worthwhile question: What do professional sports entities owe to the cities and fans that sustain them?
Alas, while the question is interesting the clear and self-evident answer ain’t. It’s nothing, nada, zilch. You may think that the Bears, or Cardinals (baseball or football), or Lakers are “our” teams, but they aren’t. They belong to the people who own them, and to no one else.
That is—or should have be-- the clear message of the lockouts that have dominated the sports pages these last several months. When our national professional football and basketball leagues failed to get the give-backs they demanded from their players’ unions (a broader trend, in case you haven’t noticed), they closed their doors and suspended doing business. I didn’t get to vote on it, and neither did you.
Last week the footballers bridged their differences and went back to work in time for their games to proceed, as everyone figured they would. Their enterprise, with annual revenues of about $9 billion, is just too profitable to stay closed when money is to be made. The owners started by asking for an additional $1 billion off the top of the league’s revenue pie before it’s divided. They wound up increasing their slice to 53% from 50%, a more-modest gain, while also agreeing to institute annual team-salary floors as well as ceilings.
The part of the contract that most interested fans—the owners’ bid to increase the regular season to 18 games from 16—was put off until at least 2013. Players balked, partly on ground that the move would increase injury risks, but their union historically has sacrificed health issues for more do-re-mi, so look for it to cave eventually in return for some kind of sweetener.
The lockout in the National Basketball Association is regarded as more likely to draw real blood. The NBA has about half the total revenues of the NFL (reportedly about $4.3 billion yearly) and team owners claim their combined bottom line showed a $300 million loss last season, with more than half their 30 clubs in the red individually.
The players pooh-pooh that, and we should, too. Few sports teams are publicly owned so they don’t have the auditing or reporting requirements public companies do. Further, basketball is a second (or third or fourth) business for most NBA team owners, so they can shift expenses (such as their own salaries) between or among these to suit themselves. For bargaining purposes it suits them to claim poverty, and they are demanding things like a “hard” team-salary cap and limits on contract lengths and guarantees that, theoretically, would hit players in their wallets.
But the thing to remember about today’s sports-money conflicts is that most of them aren’t owner-player but owner-owner. Team owners may be partners for some purposes, but they’re big-ego competitors for others, and bitter ones at that. The rules they seek are intended to restrain their own competitive instincts, with the players little more than interested observers. Yeah, the average NBA player salary is an eye-popping $5.15 million a year (the median is much lower), but the adage that nobody who works for somebody else is overpaid fully applies.
The NBA already has a team-salary cap, but it has so many exceptions and exemptions (all owner-approved) that it resembles a target on a police pistol range. Last season’s cap was about $58 million, and teams were taxed for exceeding $70 million, but actual payrolls ranged from the L.A. Lakers’ $95.3 million to the Minnesota T-Wolves’ $37.6 million, a Grand Canyon-like gap. Posture as the owners might, it’s unlikely that anything they’ll agree to will seriously alter the drives that account for the upper end of that imbalance.
But posture they will, and the players are taking it seriously. Several hoops stars are dickering with European teams for fallback employment and one—Kevin Love—says he might play professional beach volleyball.
You also might make plans to seek alternate entertainment come basketball time. It may be their game, but it’s your money.
Fine, let ‘em go, Daley said, in effect. But he added that if the team moved there he’d see to it that it would have to call itself the Arlington Heights Bears.
Everyone had a good laugh at Da Mayor’s declaration, because neither he nor any other municipal authority owned a copyright on a city’s name, and it was available to any rock band, pizzeria or dry cleaner that wished to use it. Perhaps inadvertently, though, he did raise a worthwhile question: What do professional sports entities owe to the cities and fans that sustain them?
Alas, while the question is interesting the clear and self-evident answer ain’t. It’s nothing, nada, zilch. You may think that the Bears, or Cardinals (baseball or football), or Lakers are “our” teams, but they aren’t. They belong to the people who own them, and to no one else.
That is—or should have be-- the clear message of the lockouts that have dominated the sports pages these last several months. When our national professional football and basketball leagues failed to get the give-backs they demanded from their players’ unions (a broader trend, in case you haven’t noticed), they closed their doors and suspended doing business. I didn’t get to vote on it, and neither did you.
Last week the footballers bridged their differences and went back to work in time for their games to proceed, as everyone figured they would. Their enterprise, with annual revenues of about $9 billion, is just too profitable to stay closed when money is to be made. The owners started by asking for an additional $1 billion off the top of the league’s revenue pie before it’s divided. They wound up increasing their slice to 53% from 50%, a more-modest gain, while also agreeing to institute annual team-salary floors as well as ceilings.
The part of the contract that most interested fans—the owners’ bid to increase the regular season to 18 games from 16—was put off until at least 2013. Players balked, partly on ground that the move would increase injury risks, but their union historically has sacrificed health issues for more do-re-mi, so look for it to cave eventually in return for some kind of sweetener.
The lockout in the National Basketball Association is regarded as more likely to draw real blood. The NBA has about half the total revenues of the NFL (reportedly about $4.3 billion yearly) and team owners claim their combined bottom line showed a $300 million loss last season, with more than half their 30 clubs in the red individually.
The players pooh-pooh that, and we should, too. Few sports teams are publicly owned so they don’t have the auditing or reporting requirements public companies do. Further, basketball is a second (or third or fourth) business for most NBA team owners, so they can shift expenses (such as their own salaries) between or among these to suit themselves. For bargaining purposes it suits them to claim poverty, and they are demanding things like a “hard” team-salary cap and limits on contract lengths and guarantees that, theoretically, would hit players in their wallets.
But the thing to remember about today’s sports-money conflicts is that most of them aren’t owner-player but owner-owner. Team owners may be partners for some purposes, but they’re big-ego competitors for others, and bitter ones at that. The rules they seek are intended to restrain their own competitive instincts, with the players little more than interested observers. Yeah, the average NBA player salary is an eye-popping $5.15 million a year (the median is much lower), but the adage that nobody who works for somebody else is overpaid fully applies.
The NBA already has a team-salary cap, but it has so many exceptions and exemptions (all owner-approved) that it resembles a target on a police pistol range. Last season’s cap was about $58 million, and teams were taxed for exceeding $70 million, but actual payrolls ranged from the L.A. Lakers’ $95.3 million to the Minnesota T-Wolves’ $37.6 million, a Grand Canyon-like gap. Posture as the owners might, it’s unlikely that anything they’ll agree to will seriously alter the drives that account for the upper end of that imbalance.
But posture they will, and the players are taking it seriously. Several hoops stars are dickering with European teams for fallback employment and one—Kevin Love—says he might play professional beach volleyball.
You also might make plans to seek alternate entertainment come basketball time. It may be their game, but it’s your money.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
LIVING LEGENDS
Wife Susie and I visited New York in early June, sopping up the sights and sounds of the big city for a week and then heading west to Buffalo for a few days with son Andrew, who lives there. The trip reminded me that, despite its many pleasures, few places are more uncomfortable than Gotham when the temperatures top 90. I also learned that Buffalo is a lot more interesting than I suspect most people suspect.
Along the way, Andrew in tow, we stopped in Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It was my third time there, the first coming as a 12-year-old with my parents in 1950 and the second, with my own children, in 1980. If the progression continues my next visit will come around 2040, but I’m not taking bets I’ll make it.
They say—correctly-- that you visit the Hall to relive baseball’s past but wind up reliving your own. It’s a wonderful place, full of the relics of the sport whose roots run deepest into American soil and soul. It’s in out-of-the-way Cooperstown—30 miles from any major road—because baseball is said to have been invented there, in 1839, by Abner Doubleday. That all three of those claims have been debunked takes nothing away from the red-brick shrine or its bucolic setting.
The place I toured last month was quite different from the one I’d seen 30 (and 60) years before. I recall the old Hall as a messy sort of place, its mountains of memorabilia unartfully arrayed in store-window-type enclosures along dim corridors. Now its displays are much-better lighted, labeled and framed—more “user-friendly” in the current phrase.
That’s good in a way, but in a way not. Unlike the updated Hall, which telegraphs its punches, the old place had the capacity to surprise and, in doing so, delight. I remember coming across, unaware, things like Ty Cobb’s cracked little glove or Shoeless Joe’s battered bat, and thinking how their haphazard display added to their allure. When something is too neat the “Wow!” factor dissipates.
The visit also clarified something I’ve been telling hardheaded Pete Rose fans for years-- that while their hero does not have a plaque in the Hall (baseball bars him from the sportswriters’ ballot for his crimes against the game) he is amply represented in photo and film, and his records are celebrated. No amount of grousing can obscure the fact that bad-boy Pete is getting his due immortalitywise, maybe and then some.
As one strolls the Hall, the current game naturally comes to mind, as does the question of which active players someday will be honored in its galleries. It’s fashionable to declare that today’s players lack the grittiness of those of days past, and that the game’s talent level generally ain’t what it used to be, but once it comes to list making many names present themselves.
A half-dozen of the current performers, I think, qualify as first-ballot shoo-ins when their playing days are done, if they can keep their noses clean. By my order of distinction they are Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Omar Visquel, Albert Pujols. Ichiro Suzuki and Pudge Rodriguez. That, of course, assumes that Visquel and Rodriguez eventually will retire as active players, which they may not.
After that comes some present and recent-day stars that might be called the asterisk group because of their links with revelations of steroid use, which is to say cheating. ARod is on it, along with the recent retirees Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez and Roger Clemens. There’s nothing keeping them off the Hall ballot when they are five years removed from the fields, but there’s also nothing to require that the writer-electors vote for them.
To date (and happily), juicers haven’t fared well with the scribes, with the bloated slugger Mark McGwire never topping 24% of the vote in his four years of eligibility (75% is needed to elect) and Rafael Palmeiro, a 500-homer, 3,000-hit guy who normally would have been an easy “yes,” getting just 11% in 2010, his first year. Some of the above-named fellas might fare better than those two; one could argue that Bonds was a Hall-caliber player before he turned to the needle. Chances are, though, that they’ll all have to sweat to get in no matter what their accomplishments were.
Finally, there’s a larger category of players who are still cooking, showing Hall potential but having borderline stats or lacking the large body of excellent work usually required for admission. Vlad Guerrero is on it, along with Jim Thome, Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Joe Mauer, Ryan Braun, Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee and Tim Lincecum.
Before some of them get in—mainly the pitchers—standards might have to change. Halladay is the best current-day starting pitcher but checks in with 180 wins over an already-long career of 14 seasons. Lee, the second best, has just 111 in 10. Five-man rotations and managers’ quick hooks have changed the parameters for pitching greatness. Still, it makes you wonder how Greg Maddox and Randy Johnson won 300 plus, doesn’t it?
Along the way, Andrew in tow, we stopped in Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It was my third time there, the first coming as a 12-year-old with my parents in 1950 and the second, with my own children, in 1980. If the progression continues my next visit will come around 2040, but I’m not taking bets I’ll make it.
They say—correctly-- that you visit the Hall to relive baseball’s past but wind up reliving your own. It’s a wonderful place, full of the relics of the sport whose roots run deepest into American soil and soul. It’s in out-of-the-way Cooperstown—30 miles from any major road—because baseball is said to have been invented there, in 1839, by Abner Doubleday. That all three of those claims have been debunked takes nothing away from the red-brick shrine or its bucolic setting.
The place I toured last month was quite different from the one I’d seen 30 (and 60) years before. I recall the old Hall as a messy sort of place, its mountains of memorabilia unartfully arrayed in store-window-type enclosures along dim corridors. Now its displays are much-better lighted, labeled and framed—more “user-friendly” in the current phrase.
That’s good in a way, but in a way not. Unlike the updated Hall, which telegraphs its punches, the old place had the capacity to surprise and, in doing so, delight. I remember coming across, unaware, things like Ty Cobb’s cracked little glove or Shoeless Joe’s battered bat, and thinking how their haphazard display added to their allure. When something is too neat the “Wow!” factor dissipates.
The visit also clarified something I’ve been telling hardheaded Pete Rose fans for years-- that while their hero does not have a plaque in the Hall (baseball bars him from the sportswriters’ ballot for his crimes against the game) he is amply represented in photo and film, and his records are celebrated. No amount of grousing can obscure the fact that bad-boy Pete is getting his due immortalitywise, maybe and then some.
As one strolls the Hall, the current game naturally comes to mind, as does the question of which active players someday will be honored in its galleries. It’s fashionable to declare that today’s players lack the grittiness of those of days past, and that the game’s talent level generally ain’t what it used to be, but once it comes to list making many names present themselves.
A half-dozen of the current performers, I think, qualify as first-ballot shoo-ins when their playing days are done, if they can keep their noses clean. By my order of distinction they are Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Omar Visquel, Albert Pujols. Ichiro Suzuki and Pudge Rodriguez. That, of course, assumes that Visquel and Rodriguez eventually will retire as active players, which they may not.
After that comes some present and recent-day stars that might be called the asterisk group because of their links with revelations of steroid use, which is to say cheating. ARod is on it, along with the recent retirees Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez and Roger Clemens. There’s nothing keeping them off the Hall ballot when they are five years removed from the fields, but there’s also nothing to require that the writer-electors vote for them.
To date (and happily), juicers haven’t fared well with the scribes, with the bloated slugger Mark McGwire never topping 24% of the vote in his four years of eligibility (75% is needed to elect) and Rafael Palmeiro, a 500-homer, 3,000-hit guy who normally would have been an easy “yes,” getting just 11% in 2010, his first year. Some of the above-named fellas might fare better than those two; one could argue that Bonds was a Hall-caliber player before he turned to the needle. Chances are, though, that they’ll all have to sweat to get in no matter what their accomplishments were.
Finally, there’s a larger category of players who are still cooking, showing Hall potential but having borderline stats or lacking the large body of excellent work usually required for admission. Vlad Guerrero is on it, along with Jim Thome, Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Joe Mauer, Ryan Braun, Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee and Tim Lincecum.
Before some of them get in—mainly the pitchers—standards might have to change. Halladay is the best current-day starting pitcher but checks in with 180 wins over an already-long career of 14 seasons. Lee, the second best, has just 111 in 10. Five-man rotations and managers’ quick hooks have changed the parameters for pitching greatness. Still, it makes you wonder how Greg Maddox and Randy Johnson won 300 plus, doesn’t it?
Friday, July 1, 2011
CUBSANON
It’s no news that the 162-game baseball regular season is too long by any reasonable standard. It’s also no news that it never will get shorter, no matter how many new layers of playoffs are added. That’s because the schedule is guided by the dictates of commerce, not competition, and reducing it would violate the first rule of business, which is that you can’t make any money if the store isn’t open.
For the followers of some teams, though, the schedule can be too short. One of those usually is my Chicago Cubs, who again this season are out of it even though the campaign is only about half completed. Yogi said (or is said to have said; Joe Garagiola invented many of the so-called Yogiisms) “It’s never over ‘til it’s over,” but he was mistaken.
Fact is, the Cubs have been OOI from the outset this year, and I could have written this piece any time since opening day. I’ve attended their spring training games in Mesa, Arizona, for, maybe, 25 years now, and I’ve never seen Cubdom as dispirited as it was this March, or for better reason. No amount of the innate optimism that is a requisite for being a Cubs’ fan could survive the sloppy play and dead-ass decorum the team displayed during its vernal exercises. To think that would change with the start of serious hostilities would have been delusional.
Expectations were low to begin with coming off last year’s 75-87 won-lost record, and weren’t helped by the team’s naming Mike Quade to succeed Lou Piniella as manager. With an inflated and unproductive payroll leaving little room for roster maneuver, a new manager with some pizzazz might have helped rouse the faithful, but Quade had gathered so little celebrity in his 35-plus years in the game that many couldn’t pronounce his name (it’s kwa-dee). At the rate he’s going he’ll be gone before they can.
General Manager Jim Hendry’s bad personnel decisions brought about the current mess. Alas, they didn’t end with the Major League club. That was apparent as soon as the team needed to fill early-season openings created by the sort of injuries every team has. The best Hendry could do to fill a starting-pitching hole was to dredge up the veteran punching bag Doug Davis, and his first outfield call-up was Luis Montanez, a 29-year-old minor-league lifer whose upside was negligible. If Montanez is the best the farm system can offer, our epic title drought only will continue.
I’m sure that by now you’re thinking “enough, already.” Cubs’ fans’ laments are old stuff and I can’t pretend that mine adds much to the genre. This time, however, I offer a solution as well as a complaint. It comes by way of Eddie Cohen, a pal from our long-ago days at Roosevelt High School.
As those who know him can attest, Eddie is a Cubs’ fan without peer. He is venerable, with his allegiance dating from the 1940s. He is knowledgeable, able to call your Ransom Jackson and raise you a Peter LaCock. His good nature and cheerfulness are legendary, despite the blows regularly delivered by the objects of his baseball affections.
But along the way Eddie also acquired some wisdom, and put it to use. His epiphany came in 1997 when the Cubbies, despite a lineup that included Ryne Sandberg, Sammy Sosa and Mark Grace, opened the season with a 14-game losing streak that killed hope aborning. “I was miserable,” Eddie recalls. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat.”
He adds” OK, I ate, but I didn’t enjoy it much.”
From this depth of despair Eddie founded Cubs Anonymous, a 12-step program to cure Cubs addiction. He opened a website and, for a relative pittance, offered t-shirts, membership cards and bumper stickers to those in need. He even convened a meeting in which CA members confessed their failures and professed their determination to overcome them, although an excess of laughter discouraged repeats of such sessions.
Eddie laughed along because—of course—CA was meant to be fun, but he says the venture helped put his misery into perspective and allowed him to better roll with the punches. You, too, can share his improvement by going to cubsanonymous.com and clicking on “join.” There you can peruse and contemplate the 12 steps and learn how following them will improve your life.
The website often is balky, so if you can’t make it work you can send $14 to Eddie at Apparel Resources, 1125 Lake Cook Rd. #208, Northbrook, Ill., 60062, and he’ll mail you a handsome CA t-shirt.
It’ll turn heads when you wear it at Wrigley Field.
For the followers of some teams, though, the schedule can be too short. One of those usually is my Chicago Cubs, who again this season are out of it even though the campaign is only about half completed. Yogi said (or is said to have said; Joe Garagiola invented many of the so-called Yogiisms) “It’s never over ‘til it’s over,” but he was mistaken.
Fact is, the Cubs have been OOI from the outset this year, and I could have written this piece any time since opening day. I’ve attended their spring training games in Mesa, Arizona, for, maybe, 25 years now, and I’ve never seen Cubdom as dispirited as it was this March, or for better reason. No amount of the innate optimism that is a requisite for being a Cubs’ fan could survive the sloppy play and dead-ass decorum the team displayed during its vernal exercises. To think that would change with the start of serious hostilities would have been delusional.
Expectations were low to begin with coming off last year’s 75-87 won-lost record, and weren’t helped by the team’s naming Mike Quade to succeed Lou Piniella as manager. With an inflated and unproductive payroll leaving little room for roster maneuver, a new manager with some pizzazz might have helped rouse the faithful, but Quade had gathered so little celebrity in his 35-plus years in the game that many couldn’t pronounce his name (it’s kwa-dee). At the rate he’s going he’ll be gone before they can.
General Manager Jim Hendry’s bad personnel decisions brought about the current mess. Alas, they didn’t end with the Major League club. That was apparent as soon as the team needed to fill early-season openings created by the sort of injuries every team has. The best Hendry could do to fill a starting-pitching hole was to dredge up the veteran punching bag Doug Davis, and his first outfield call-up was Luis Montanez, a 29-year-old minor-league lifer whose upside was negligible. If Montanez is the best the farm system can offer, our epic title drought only will continue.
I’m sure that by now you’re thinking “enough, already.” Cubs’ fans’ laments are old stuff and I can’t pretend that mine adds much to the genre. This time, however, I offer a solution as well as a complaint. It comes by way of Eddie Cohen, a pal from our long-ago days at Roosevelt High School.
As those who know him can attest, Eddie is a Cubs’ fan without peer. He is venerable, with his allegiance dating from the 1940s. He is knowledgeable, able to call your Ransom Jackson and raise you a Peter LaCock. His good nature and cheerfulness are legendary, despite the blows regularly delivered by the objects of his baseball affections.
But along the way Eddie also acquired some wisdom, and put it to use. His epiphany came in 1997 when the Cubbies, despite a lineup that included Ryne Sandberg, Sammy Sosa and Mark Grace, opened the season with a 14-game losing streak that killed hope aborning. “I was miserable,” Eddie recalls. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat.”
He adds” OK, I ate, but I didn’t enjoy it much.”
From this depth of despair Eddie founded Cubs Anonymous, a 12-step program to cure Cubs addiction. He opened a website and, for a relative pittance, offered t-shirts, membership cards and bumper stickers to those in need. He even convened a meeting in which CA members confessed their failures and professed their determination to overcome them, although an excess of laughter discouraged repeats of such sessions.
Eddie laughed along because—of course—CA was meant to be fun, but he says the venture helped put his misery into perspective and allowed him to better roll with the punches. You, too, can share his improvement by going to cubsanonymous.com and clicking on “join.” There you can peruse and contemplate the 12 steps and learn how following them will improve your life.
The website often is balky, so if you can’t make it work you can send $14 to Eddie at Apparel Resources, 1125 Lake Cook Rd. #208, Northbrook, Ill., 60062, and he’ll mail you a handsome CA t-shirt.
It’ll turn heads when you wear it at Wrigley Field.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
HEROES
Newspaper reporters don’t have heroes among the people they write about, or, at least, aren’t likely to admit it if they do. That would break the objectivity rule that governs most American news organizations, one that’s honored far more strictly than most believe.
Also, we newsies aren‘t worshipful types, a trait that sometimes gets us into trouble around the house.
However (my favorite word), in my travels in the world of sports I did encounter people I thought were worthy not only of praise but also of emulation. Mostly, these were not the big-time athletes who attained fame by capitalizing on inborn, genius-level physical attributes but never would admit as much, or the control freaks who directed their movements. I preferred sports folks who’d thought about their places in the Great Scheme of Things and concluded that the sun didn’t rise to see them get out of bed. Here are three of them, and you have to be a real fan to recognize their names.
-- The winningest college-football coach ever isn’t Joe Paterno, Bobbie Bowden or some other CEO of a football “program” at one or another Enormous State U. It’s JOHN GAGLIARDI, who, at age 84, still coaches the sport at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., where he’s been since 1953. His teams have won 478 games—77 more than Joe Pa’s-- and four national small-college championships. He’s done it by breaking just about every rule in the coaches’ handbook.
Gagliardi got his first coaching job—and framed his philosophy—as a 16-year-old high schooler in his native Trinidad, Colorado, where, in 1943, he was elected by his teammates to replace the coach who’d suddenly been drafted into the military. With teenage chutzpah he decided he’d run the show by jettisoning everything the previous coach did that he didn’t like. That included contact scrimmages, heavy calisthenics and long drills of any kind. His judgment was confirmed with a league title.
Gagliardi added to his “no” list when coaching became his adult occupation. He eschews compulsory running and weightlifting, informing players that it’s up to them to get in shape. He limits players’ film viewing to game-before successful plays that affix a positive image. He spurns the title of “coach,” preferring that his players call him “John” (“when one calls me ‘coach’ I want to call him ‘player,’” he says). His players, none of whom are on athletic scholarship (NCAA Division III doesn’t permit them), run through their plays 90 minutes a day four days a week in season, period. When appropriate, some of those minutes are spent in his “nice-day drill,” where they lay on their backs admiring the sunny sky.
He’s had offers to leave St. John’s, including one from the Minnesota Vikings, but turned them down. “I doubt if I’d find better kids elsewhere, so why move?” he reasons.
Why,indeed.
-- DOT RICHARDSON was an athletic genius, so good at softball that at age 10 she was playing on women’s teams. The shortstop was even better when she grew up, becoming the best softballer of her era and starring on two gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic teams. The photo of her rounding bases after hitting the home run that won the 1996 O Games final, arms raised and face alight, remains a glowing image of that fest.
When she wasn’t playing games, though, Dot was doing things that she came to believe were more important. She got through college (at UCLA) and medical school, eventually becoming an orthopedic surgeon. She became a full-time doc after her 2000 athletic retirement and now, in addition to a private practice, is medical director at the U.S. Triathlon Training Center in Florida and a member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. In her spare time she gives motivational talks to adults and kids.
I spent the best part of a day with her in 2000, and sports talk occupied, maybe, an hour of it. She said she probably was lucky that she played a sport that offered few financial opportunities, because otherwise she might not have developed her other talents. “My parents raised me to believe that gifts should be shared, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have two,” she said. And who knows? she added-- maybe as time goes by she’d discover others.
--- DICK BAVETTA wasn’t much of a basketball player, but he loved the game so much that, in full adulthood, he quit a good-paying stockbrokers’ job to referee in the Eastern League, a circuit that was so tough he had to bring along his brother, a New York cop, for post-game protection. When Dick’s wife complained about his travel he decided he liked basketball better than her, and the pair split. This might not have been admirable, but it was honest.
For nine years he was rejected as an NBA ref, partly because of his scrawny physique. He finally made it in 1975, at age 36, when the base pay for new refs was $200 a game (it’s about $130,000 a year now, but vets make a lot more). His first 30 years in the league, he never missed a game while moving from the bottom of the efficiency chart to the top. He’s still at it at 71, staying in shape by running eight miles on his off days and in the summers, in addition to the four or five miles a contest he logs over the eight-month season. He takes a day off after each campaign “just so nobody can say I never take a vacation.”
Unlike many sports figures, Bavetta has a sense of fun. That was on display during the 2007 NBA All-Star Game weekend, when he and Charles Barkley, 25 years younger but many pounds heavier, engaged in a foot race on court, for a charity purse. Barkley won—he always has been quicker than he looked—and afterward kissed the top of Bavetta’s bald head. Bavetta stood still for that, too, enshrining himself forever in the Good Sport’s Hall of Fame.
Also, we newsies aren‘t worshipful types, a trait that sometimes gets us into trouble around the house.
However (my favorite word), in my travels in the world of sports I did encounter people I thought were worthy not only of praise but also of emulation. Mostly, these were not the big-time athletes who attained fame by capitalizing on inborn, genius-level physical attributes but never would admit as much, or the control freaks who directed their movements. I preferred sports folks who’d thought about their places in the Great Scheme of Things and concluded that the sun didn’t rise to see them get out of bed. Here are three of them, and you have to be a real fan to recognize their names.
-- The winningest college-football coach ever isn’t Joe Paterno, Bobbie Bowden or some other CEO of a football “program” at one or another Enormous State U. It’s JOHN GAGLIARDI, who, at age 84, still coaches the sport at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., where he’s been since 1953. His teams have won 478 games—77 more than Joe Pa’s-- and four national small-college championships. He’s done it by breaking just about every rule in the coaches’ handbook.
Gagliardi got his first coaching job—and framed his philosophy—as a 16-year-old high schooler in his native Trinidad, Colorado, where, in 1943, he was elected by his teammates to replace the coach who’d suddenly been drafted into the military. With teenage chutzpah he decided he’d run the show by jettisoning everything the previous coach did that he didn’t like. That included contact scrimmages, heavy calisthenics and long drills of any kind. His judgment was confirmed with a league title.
Gagliardi added to his “no” list when coaching became his adult occupation. He eschews compulsory running and weightlifting, informing players that it’s up to them to get in shape. He limits players’ film viewing to game-before successful plays that affix a positive image. He spurns the title of “coach,” preferring that his players call him “John” (“when one calls me ‘coach’ I want to call him ‘player,’” he says). His players, none of whom are on athletic scholarship (NCAA Division III doesn’t permit them), run through their plays 90 minutes a day four days a week in season, period. When appropriate, some of those minutes are spent in his “nice-day drill,” where they lay on their backs admiring the sunny sky.
He’s had offers to leave St. John’s, including one from the Minnesota Vikings, but turned them down. “I doubt if I’d find better kids elsewhere, so why move?” he reasons.
Why,indeed.
-- DOT RICHARDSON was an athletic genius, so good at softball that at age 10 she was playing on women’s teams. The shortstop was even better when she grew up, becoming the best softballer of her era and starring on two gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic teams. The photo of her rounding bases after hitting the home run that won the 1996 O Games final, arms raised and face alight, remains a glowing image of that fest.
When she wasn’t playing games, though, Dot was doing things that she came to believe were more important. She got through college (at UCLA) and medical school, eventually becoming an orthopedic surgeon. She became a full-time doc after her 2000 athletic retirement and now, in addition to a private practice, is medical director at the U.S. Triathlon Training Center in Florida and a member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. In her spare time she gives motivational talks to adults and kids.
I spent the best part of a day with her in 2000, and sports talk occupied, maybe, an hour of it. She said she probably was lucky that she played a sport that offered few financial opportunities, because otherwise she might not have developed her other talents. “My parents raised me to believe that gifts should be shared, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have two,” she said. And who knows? she added-- maybe as time goes by she’d discover others.
--- DICK BAVETTA wasn’t much of a basketball player, but he loved the game so much that, in full adulthood, he quit a good-paying stockbrokers’ job to referee in the Eastern League, a circuit that was so tough he had to bring along his brother, a New York cop, for post-game protection. When Dick’s wife complained about his travel he decided he liked basketball better than her, and the pair split. This might not have been admirable, but it was honest.
For nine years he was rejected as an NBA ref, partly because of his scrawny physique. He finally made it in 1975, at age 36, when the base pay for new refs was $200 a game (it’s about $130,000 a year now, but vets make a lot more). His first 30 years in the league, he never missed a game while moving from the bottom of the efficiency chart to the top. He’s still at it at 71, staying in shape by running eight miles on his off days and in the summers, in addition to the four or five miles a contest he logs over the eight-month season. He takes a day off after each campaign “just so nobody can say I never take a vacation.”
Unlike many sports figures, Bavetta has a sense of fun. That was on display during the 2007 NBA All-Star Game weekend, when he and Charles Barkley, 25 years younger but many pounds heavier, engaged in a foot race on court, for a charity purse. Barkley won—he always has been quicker than he looked—and afterward kissed the top of Bavetta’s bald head. Bavetta stood still for that, too, enshrining himself forever in the Good Sport’s Hall of Fame.
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