By Bob Markus
In the eternal debate of God vs. science, I vote for neither. If there really is global warming, why is the general population of the entire upper half of the United States freezing to death? If there really is a God, why isn't Ron Santo in the Baseball Hall of Fame? Just asking. I've always known that I wouldn't live long enough to see the frozen tundra transformed into a tropical rain forest. It is now becoming clear that I won't live long enough to see Santo enter baseball's Valhalla, either. Neither will poor Ronnie.
I really thought there was hope for Santo, the Chicago Cubs slugging third baseman of the '60s and 70s, who played the game with the joyful exuberance of a small boy while hiding from the world the fact that he was a diabetic, requiring daily injections of insulin. His was a two-front war, the first against one of the finest array of pitchers the baseball world has yet seen, the likes of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry, Hall of Famers all; the second against an insidious disease that can eat a man alive if he's not careful and sometimes prevails even if he is. Since retiring from baseball, Santo has lost both legs to the hunger of the disease, but he has never lost his enthusiasm for the game or his love for the Cubs.
Although I'll argue that he was one of the best third basemen ever to play the game, I won't quibble with those who insist he's also one of the worst baseball announcers ever to do color commentary on a game. That, of course, is irrelevant to the subject at hand. And, in fact, Santo is so blatently in love with the Cubs that it is possible to forgive his shouts of "No!!!" when a Cub commits an error in a crucial spot. Perhaps that anguished "No!!!" is as honest commentary as you're going to find in a broadcast booth.
If you were to ask Santo whether he'd rather go into the Hall of Fame or see the Cubs win the world series, I think he'd be hard pressed to answer. It appears to be a moot point at the moment, because I don't think he's going to see either. This has not been the best of years for most people, but imagine what Santo has gone through in the last couple of months, first watching his beloved Cubs implode in the first round of the playoffs, then seeing his hopes of getting into the Hall of Fame dashed--perhaps forever--when the Veterans committee, comprising all living Hall of Famers, failed to give any player the 75 per cent vote required for admittance. Santo received the most votes of any player, but was not even close to getting the required number.
"It's not going to change my life," said a disappointed Santo upon hearing the news, "but I feel I deserve (to be elected). I put up Hall of Fame numbers during the greatest era of baseball for pitchers and I played with diabetes. Only diabetics can know what I went through." About those numbers: Santo played 15 full seasons, the first 14 with the Cubs and compiled a .277 lifetime batting average, with 342 home runs and 1,331 runs batted in. If those numbers don't impress you, consider these numbers: A .267 batting average, 268 homers and 1,357 r.b.i.s in 23 seasons. That was Brooks Robinson's ticket to the Hall of Fame.
Of course, to judge a player strictly by his numbers can be misleading. Robinson is in the Hall of Fame because he not only was a good hitter, but probably the best defensive third baseman in history (Clete Boyer fans may not concur). But Santo was no slouch in the field, either. I saw both of them play, Santo more often than Robinson, of course, and there wasn't that much difference. Santo, who earned five gold gloves as a third baseman, was as good as it gets in diving to backhand a smash down the line and rising to throw out the batter. One thing that has held Santo back was the fact he never got to display his skills on the national stage, unless you consider his nine All-Star game appearances. Robinson, on the other hand, hit .348 in 18 playoff appearances and .263 in 21 World Series games--and of course fielded superbly.
Many of Santo's friends had assured him that this was his year, that the Veterans committee was certain to endorse him. Three of his teammates: Billy Williams, Ernie Banks and Ferguson Jenkins were among the electors and one of the first things former Cub Ryne Sandberg said upon his induction last year was: "Ron Santo has another vote." I was hopeful, too, but I knew something that Santo, as far as I know, didn't. One of the things holding him back previously, when the Veterans committee was a mix of players and writers, was that one Chicago writer not only voted against him, but campaigned against him every year. That writer has since passed away and, in any event, would not have had a vote this time.
It never should have gone this far, in my view. Santo should have been elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America during his 15 years of eligibility. I know I voted for him every time. I know, too, that being a Hall of Fame voter is not easy if you care at all for the game. There are other players who perhaps are deserving of admittance. I'm going to throw out a name that I doubt you'll see in any other discussion on this subject. Bill Madlock. No? How about four National League batting titles, a .305 lifetime average, and an internal combustion machine that earned him the nickname "Mad Dog?" After his first 10 years in the majors, the length of service that is required for Hall of Fame consideration, Madlock had hit better than .300 eight times and had a lifetime average of .317. Had he retired at that point, he might have had a better chance of inclusion. As it was, he received very few votes--other than mine--and quickly dropped off the ballot.
This year's regular election is, in one sense, a no brainer. Rickey Henderson, baseball's alltime stolen base leader, is eligible for the first time. I can't imagine who wouldn't vote for him unless it be one of those hard liners who insist nobody should get in during his first year of eligility. Beyond Henderson, however, it gets more difficult. Should Mark McGuire get in, despite his alleged steroid use? How about Jim Rice or Andre Dawson, the top two vote getters who failed to get 75 per cent last year when Goose Gossage was the only player admitted?
I voted for the two of them, although I'll admit with not too much conviction. I also voted for pitcher Bert Blyleven, reliever Lee Smith and pitcher Tommy John, who not only was an outstanding pitcher, but has a surgical procedure named for him. That has to count for something. After all, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance (well, maybe not Chance) got in only because someone wrote a poem about them.
My last vote went for Harold Baines and, again, I'm not totally sure he deserves it. But with only 5.2 per cent of the voters picking him last year, he is in grave danger of going off the ballot. I was covering the White Sox when Bill Veeck first brought him to the big leagues and I'm aware that his quiet manner might have hid his light under a bushel. Perhaps if he gets another chance, his light will begin to shine.
Note to my faithful readers (and you know who you are even if I don't): I won't be blogging next week, but hope to be at the keyboard again Tuesday Jan. 6. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
By Bob Markus
The Heisman Trophy Statue is about as highly regarded in the world of art as Madonna is in the world of opera. But in the world of artifact it ranks supreme. Challenged only, perhaps, by the fictional Maltese Falcon, like Dashiell Hammett's famous black bird it is "the stuff dreams are made of." Nightmares, too. I know, because for a few years back in the late '80s and early 90s, I had a Heisman vote. Each time, I took it seriously and agonized over my choice. More times than not, my choice did not win. Sometimes that was O.K. But I'm still incensed over the way some of the elections turned out.
If I still had a Heisman ballot this year, I would have voted for Colt McCoy. But I wouldn't have been upset if either Sam Bradford, who won it, or Tim Tebow, who didn't, came out on top. All three had outstanding years and who you voted for depended a lot on your own vision of what the Heisman is all about. But for at least some of the voters, it depended a lot on regional bias. I live in Florida now, in the only region out of six that gave Tebow the plurality of first place votes. In fact, the voting throughout the south was so skewed in favor of the Florida quarterback that he ended up with more first place votes than either Bradford or McCoy.
The main reason that Tebow, who won the trophy last year and was hoping to become only the second player to win it twice, did not win again was that voters in the Southwest were equally as biased. Many of them were among the 154 who left Tebow completely off their ballots. Tebow was the first player to fail to win the Heisman despite garnering the most first place votes since Tommy McDonald, star running back for 1956 national champion Oklahoma, finished third behind Notre Dame's Paul Hornung and Tennessee's Johnny Majors. Perhaps more outrageous than the fact that Hornung, who quarterbacked the Irish to a 2-8 record, won the trophy was the fact that Jim Brown of Syracuse finished fifth.
Hornung became a friend of mine and I like to think that my campaigning for his election to the pro football Hall of Fame had at least a little to do with his belated election. Keeping him out, I argued, when his Packer backfield mate, Jim Taylor, was already in, made no more sense than it would to vote Dodger pitcher Don Drysdale into the Baseball Hall of Fame while excluding Sandy Koufax. One of Hornung's biggest critics was a Baltimore writer who consistently not only voted against Hornung but campaigned against him, saying he never saw Hornung have a good game against the Colts. I pointed out to him that, on the same day Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears scored six touchdowns against the San Francisco 49ers in Wrigley Field, Hornung was romping for five against the Colts in Memorial Stadium. Nevertheless, no quarterback with a 2-8 record deserves the Heisman Trophy.
Notre Dame has had seven Heisman winners, which ties it with Southern Cal for the most of any school. I'd argue that more of them than not were due more to the aura of the Golden Dome than the aptitude of the player. The last Notre Dame Heisman winner was Tim Brown in 1987. That was the first year I can remember voting and I thought, and still think, the honor should have gone to Syracuse quarterback Don McPherson. McPherson was the nation's leading passer that year while leading the Orangemen to a perfect 11-0 regular season. I had covered the 48-21 victory over Penn State, a team which had whipped Syracuse 16 years in a row and only the previous season had laid a 42-3 whipping on the boys from Syracuse. To me, McPherson was the obvious choice.
But I wasn't as upset with his second place finish to Brown as I was at Jeff Blake's seventh place finish in 1991. I was one of only seven voters who picked Blake to win, despite the fact that the dynamic quarterback ran and passed East Carolina to an 11-1 record, winning the last 11 in a row after an opening game 38-31 loss at Illinois. Along the way Blake was an almost weekly highlight show on Saturday night sportscasts as he engineered improbable last second comebacks. The Pirates won five games after trailing in the fourth quarter, including a Peach bowl win over North Carolina State, when Blake's 22-yard scoring pass with 1:32 left capped a comeback from a 34-17 fourth quarter deficit. East Carolina finished ninth in the final AP poll that year, its highest ranking ever. If Blake wasn't everything a Heisman trophy winner should be, I don't know who is.
Unless its Gordie Lockbaum. I didn't vote for Lockbaum to win the Heisman trophy, but I did give him a third place vote in 1986. Lockbaum, a two-way player for Holy Cross, finished fifth in the 1986 voting and third behind Brown and McPherson the next year when he actually got 108 first place votes. He probably had a better year in '86 when his 32 first place votes were second only to runaway Heisman winner Vinny Testaverde's 678. The remarkable thing about Lockbaum is that he did not even play for a Division 1A team, yet was a viable Heisman candidate after leading Holy Cross to a 10-1 record in 1986.
College sports was my fulltime beat at the time and I went to Worcester, Mass. before the 1987 season to do a story on him. Here, in part, is what I wrote: "In Arthurian legend, only the pure of heart could hope to find the Holy Grail. Not so with the Heisman Trophy, college football's most precious bauble. The pursuit of the Heisman is open to all, rogues and rascals, saints and sinners. But now comes a Galahad of the gridiron whose leading virtue is virtue. Heisman electors are being asked to consider Gordie Lockbaum not only because he is a great player, but because he is a great person. In a nation weary of stories about athletes who do drugs and other unsavory things, it is a campaign that has a chance to succeed."
It might have had an even better chance if Lockbaum had managed to duplicate his performance of his breakout season in 1986. That would have been close to impossible to do. Lockbaum had been recruited by a few Division 1A including Syracuse, Rutgers and Navy. "I'd be a free safety at Syracuse if I'd gone there," he told me. "I think my situation here is unique. You can't just recruit somebody and say he's going to play both ways. The circumstances aren't always there."
The circumstances that made Lockbaum a two-way player and Heisman trophy contender were these. Lockbaum had played only defense his first two years, but in spring practice in 1986 then head coach Mark Duffner suggested Lockbaum play tailback as "a buffer against disaster." That fostered an internal tug of war within the coaching ranks that came near to breaking out in to open hostility.
On one side was defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle, who would have to start a freshman in his place if Lockbaum went to offense. On the other side was a new offensive coordinator, Tom Rossley, who had never heard of Lockbaum, but knew all he needed to know after watching him play tailback just one day in spring practice. "We have to have him," said Rossly. "As soon as he went in there we started moving the ball. We didn't even know why we were moving it. Was it because they diddn't have him on defense. We'd move the ball right down to the goal line, then they'd flip him over to defense and we'd never get it in.
"We started making bold statements. Give us Gordie and we'll score 28 points a game. If we don't have him maybe we can kick a field goal and win 3-0. The defense was saying they had to have him, at least early on in the year. It got very close to being ugly in some meetings." Duffner agonized over the decision all summer and finally came up with the Solomon-like decision to cut the baby in half, a decision that horrified both sides.
As that season progressed Lockbaum became a situational player on defense, while dominating more and more on offense. He gained 827 yards rushing and another 860 on 57 pass receptions. But in a 17-14 upset oveer Army he played the entire game on defense and made 22 tackles, 19 of them unassisted. That was probably the game that propelled him into the limelight. "I certainly didn't expect all this," he told me. "My friends and I almost laugh about it." B ut he didn't consider himself a joke as a Heisman candidate. "It depends on how the voters look at the award," he said. "A lot of them won't consider me because they don't believe the level of football is up to par." But enough did consider him enough to name him No.1 on their ballots. I couldn't find it in my heart to argue against that.
The Heisman Trophy Statue is about as highly regarded in the world of art as Madonna is in the world of opera. But in the world of artifact it ranks supreme. Challenged only, perhaps, by the fictional Maltese Falcon, like Dashiell Hammett's famous black bird it is "the stuff dreams are made of." Nightmares, too. I know, because for a few years back in the late '80s and early 90s, I had a Heisman vote. Each time, I took it seriously and agonized over my choice. More times than not, my choice did not win. Sometimes that was O.K. But I'm still incensed over the way some of the elections turned out.
If I still had a Heisman ballot this year, I would have voted for Colt McCoy. But I wouldn't have been upset if either Sam Bradford, who won it, or Tim Tebow, who didn't, came out on top. All three had outstanding years and who you voted for depended a lot on your own vision of what the Heisman is all about. But for at least some of the voters, it depended a lot on regional bias. I live in Florida now, in the only region out of six that gave Tebow the plurality of first place votes. In fact, the voting throughout the south was so skewed in favor of the Florida quarterback that he ended up with more first place votes than either Bradford or McCoy.
The main reason that Tebow, who won the trophy last year and was hoping to become only the second player to win it twice, did not win again was that voters in the Southwest were equally as biased. Many of them were among the 154 who left Tebow completely off their ballots. Tebow was the first player to fail to win the Heisman despite garnering the most first place votes since Tommy McDonald, star running back for 1956 national champion Oklahoma, finished third behind Notre Dame's Paul Hornung and Tennessee's Johnny Majors. Perhaps more outrageous than the fact that Hornung, who quarterbacked the Irish to a 2-8 record, won the trophy was the fact that Jim Brown of Syracuse finished fifth.
Hornung became a friend of mine and I like to think that my campaigning for his election to the pro football Hall of Fame had at least a little to do with his belated election. Keeping him out, I argued, when his Packer backfield mate, Jim Taylor, was already in, made no more sense than it would to vote Dodger pitcher Don Drysdale into the Baseball Hall of Fame while excluding Sandy Koufax. One of Hornung's biggest critics was a Baltimore writer who consistently not only voted against Hornung but campaigned against him, saying he never saw Hornung have a good game against the Colts. I pointed out to him that, on the same day Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears scored six touchdowns against the San Francisco 49ers in Wrigley Field, Hornung was romping for five against the Colts in Memorial Stadium. Nevertheless, no quarterback with a 2-8 record deserves the Heisman Trophy.
Notre Dame has had seven Heisman winners, which ties it with Southern Cal for the most of any school. I'd argue that more of them than not were due more to the aura of the Golden Dome than the aptitude of the player. The last Notre Dame Heisman winner was Tim Brown in 1987. That was the first year I can remember voting and I thought, and still think, the honor should have gone to Syracuse quarterback Don McPherson. McPherson was the nation's leading passer that year while leading the Orangemen to a perfect 11-0 regular season. I had covered the 48-21 victory over Penn State, a team which had whipped Syracuse 16 years in a row and only the previous season had laid a 42-3 whipping on the boys from Syracuse. To me, McPherson was the obvious choice.
But I wasn't as upset with his second place finish to Brown as I was at Jeff Blake's seventh place finish in 1991. I was one of only seven voters who picked Blake to win, despite the fact that the dynamic quarterback ran and passed East Carolina to an 11-1 record, winning the last 11 in a row after an opening game 38-31 loss at Illinois. Along the way Blake was an almost weekly highlight show on Saturday night sportscasts as he engineered improbable last second comebacks. The Pirates won five games after trailing in the fourth quarter, including a Peach bowl win over North Carolina State, when Blake's 22-yard scoring pass with 1:32 left capped a comeback from a 34-17 fourth quarter deficit. East Carolina finished ninth in the final AP poll that year, its highest ranking ever. If Blake wasn't everything a Heisman trophy winner should be, I don't know who is.
Unless its Gordie Lockbaum. I didn't vote for Lockbaum to win the Heisman trophy, but I did give him a third place vote in 1986. Lockbaum, a two-way player for Holy Cross, finished fifth in the 1986 voting and third behind Brown and McPherson the next year when he actually got 108 first place votes. He probably had a better year in '86 when his 32 first place votes were second only to runaway Heisman winner Vinny Testaverde's 678. The remarkable thing about Lockbaum is that he did not even play for a Division 1A team, yet was a viable Heisman candidate after leading Holy Cross to a 10-1 record in 1986.
College sports was my fulltime beat at the time and I went to Worcester, Mass. before the 1987 season to do a story on him. Here, in part, is what I wrote: "In Arthurian legend, only the pure of heart could hope to find the Holy Grail. Not so with the Heisman Trophy, college football's most precious bauble. The pursuit of the Heisman is open to all, rogues and rascals, saints and sinners. But now comes a Galahad of the gridiron whose leading virtue is virtue. Heisman electors are being asked to consider Gordie Lockbaum not only because he is a great player, but because he is a great person. In a nation weary of stories about athletes who do drugs and other unsavory things, it is a campaign that has a chance to succeed."
It might have had an even better chance if Lockbaum had managed to duplicate his performance of his breakout season in 1986. That would have been close to impossible to do. Lockbaum had been recruited by a few Division 1A including Syracuse, Rutgers and Navy. "I'd be a free safety at Syracuse if I'd gone there," he told me. "I think my situation here is unique. You can't just recruit somebody and say he's going to play both ways. The circumstances aren't always there."
The circumstances that made Lockbaum a two-way player and Heisman trophy contender were these. Lockbaum had played only defense his first two years, but in spring practice in 1986 then head coach Mark Duffner suggested Lockbaum play tailback as "a buffer against disaster." That fostered an internal tug of war within the coaching ranks that came near to breaking out in to open hostility.
On one side was defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle, who would have to start a freshman in his place if Lockbaum went to offense. On the other side was a new offensive coordinator, Tom Rossley, who had never heard of Lockbaum, but knew all he needed to know after watching him play tailback just one day in spring practice. "We have to have him," said Rossly. "As soon as he went in there we started moving the ball. We didn't even know why we were moving it. Was it because they diddn't have him on defense. We'd move the ball right down to the goal line, then they'd flip him over to defense and we'd never get it in.
"We started making bold statements. Give us Gordie and we'll score 28 points a game. If we don't have him maybe we can kick a field goal and win 3-0. The defense was saying they had to have him, at least early on in the year. It got very close to being ugly in some meetings." Duffner agonized over the decision all summer and finally came up with the Solomon-like decision to cut the baby in half, a decision that horrified both sides.
As that season progressed Lockbaum became a situational player on defense, while dominating more and more on offense. He gained 827 yards rushing and another 860 on 57 pass receptions. But in a 17-14 upset oveer Army he played the entire game on defense and made 22 tackles, 19 of them unassisted. That was probably the game that propelled him into the limelight. "I certainly didn't expect all this," he told me. "My friends and I almost laugh about it." B ut he didn't consider himself a joke as a Heisman candidate. "It depends on how the voters look at the award," he said. "A lot of them won't consider me because they don't believe the level of football is up to par." But enough did consider him enough to name him No.1 on their ballots. I couldn't find it in my heart to argue against that.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
By Bob Markus
Once they were kings. Once the whole world watched when Army and Navy lined up to play football on a late autumn Saturday. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur famously wired, "We have stopped the war to celebrate your magnificant success." That was in 1944, when the greatest of Army teams, ranked No. 1, had just defeated No.2 Navy, 23-7, to begin a three-year reign as national collegiate football champions. That was in a time when the Army-Navy game was a happening, when 100,000 fans would cram into Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium to see the annual collision of the two service academies. The Army-Navy game, no matter what the teams' records, was to college football in its day what the Super Bowl is to pro football today.
Its day is long past, buried in the mist of memory. Sure, Army-Navy can still fill a stadium today and may do so tomorrow, but it no longer has any relevance to modern football fans. Last Saturday's 34-0 romp by Navy, its unprecedented seventh in a row over Army, was buried, perhaps mercifully, near the used car ads in the back of most sports sections. Chances are, that most football fans, caught up in the delicious dilemma of which Big 12 team was going to play Florida for the national championship, didn't even notice.
I noticed. I've always noticed. I was 10 years old and a Notre Dame fan in 1944 and there was only radio and the Sunday papers with which to follow college football. Did you know that Notre Dame actually was No. 1 through the first four weeks and 5-0 and ranked No. 2 going into week six? Then came successive losses to Navy, 32-13, and Army, 59-0. That caught my attention, all right.
Those were different times, of course. War times. The service teams were loaded with talented players, many of whom had played for other schools before the war and would return to those schools afterward. Among others, Navy had Arkansas' Clyde (Smackover) Scott and Penn's Skippy Minisi. Army had Barney Poole from Ole Miss and Texas A & M's Hank Foldberg. But the two brightest stars of the era entered West Point as true freshmen. Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard both would win Heisman trophies and Davis would twice be runner-up in Heisman voting. Many of the top players who didn't get into the service academies would star for other service teams, like Iowa Preflight, Randolph Field, and Great Lakes Naval training Station, coached by Paul Brown. In the final AP poll in 1944, 12 of the top 20 were service teams, including Randolph Field (10-0), which finished third, behind only Army and Ohio State, both 9-0. Navy (6-3) was fourth.
When the war ended, Navy's talent pipeline shut down as if someone had turned off a faucet, but Army, like its caissons, kept rolling along. This produced three of the most memorable games in Army-Navy history. The 1946 Army team, a perfect season marred only by the famous 0-0 tie with Notre Dame, was a 19 point favorite over 1-7 Navy. But with 92 seconds remaining, Navy trailed only 21-18 and was on the Army 2-yard line. The frenzied crowd stormed onto the field and lined both sidelines as Navy called an illegal timeout and was penalized back to the 7. The Middies then sent halfback Pete Williams around right end, where he attempted to go out of bounds. Engulfed as he was by the crowd, it was difficult to tell if he was out of bounds when Barney Poole tackled him at the 3. The officials said he wasn't and time ran out before Navy could run another play.
Two years later an 0-8 Navy team managed a 21-21 tie with an 8-0 Army team that was more like kissing Lana Turner than anybody's sister. And two years after that 2 and 6 Navy scored a 14-2 victory over unbeaten Army to knock the Cadets out of a national championship.
That was the last truly memorable Army-Navy game--except for 1963.
I was working on the copy desk of The Chicago Tribune's sports department and teaching a course in sports writing at Columbia college in downtown Chicago. I was walking from the school to Tribune Tower down Michigan avenue when I came upon a crowd gathered outside a television sales store. I asked a man watching the screen what was going on and he said, "The President's been shot." I assumed the President had merely been wounded and wondered what affect it might have on the next year's election when my candidate, Barry Goldwater, would likely be running against him. Would it gain Jack Kennedy some sympathy votes? Unaware of the President's itinerary, I asked the man, "Where?" expecting him to answer New York or Washington or some other city. Instead he responded, "in the haid."
Among the many consequences of that fateful day was that I got to cover my first Army-Navy game. Like many other events, the game had been postponed by the tragic occurence in Dallas. The writer originally assigned to cover the game had another commitment and I was given the assignment. At the time I was still pretty much anchored to the copy desk. I had covered four or five college games that fall and, earlier in the year, was the sidebar writer on Loyola's NCAA basketball championship. But this was, for me, a plum assignment. It also turned out to be a helluva story.
Although Army had a 7-2 record, it was unranked and a big underdog to No. 2 Navy (8-1), which was led byRoger Staubach, who would win the Heisman that year. The game turned out to be almost a mirror image of the 1946 game, although this time it was Army desperately trying to beat the clock. Navy led 21-7 on three scoring runs by Pat Donnelly until unheralded Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh scored his second touchdown of the game and ran for a two-point conversion to make it 21-15. Army then recovered an onside kick and had the ball at the Navy 48 with 6:18 to go. These days that would be enough time to score four or five touchdowns and even back then it seemed ample. But Stichweh wasn't much of a passer and Army had no timeouts left. Add to that the fact that the noise of the capacity crowd drowned out Stichweh's attempt to call signals down near the goal line and the result was that time ran out with Army on the Navy 2 and Stichweh desperately trying to get his team lined up.
I was to cover one more Army-Navy game, in 1991, a game memorable only for the fact that Navy, 0-10 going in, beat 4-6 Army, 24-3, for its only victory of the year. The only reason The Tribune even covered that game was that it was played on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. I'm not sure if The Tribune has covered an Army-Navy game since. I doubt it. The Army-Navy game, after all, is not the same and probably never will be. The same, judging by today's headlines in the financial section , might be said of The Tribune.
Once they were kings. Once the whole world watched when Army and Navy lined up to play football on a late autumn Saturday. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur famously wired, "We have stopped the war to celebrate your magnificant success." That was in 1944, when the greatest of Army teams, ranked No. 1, had just defeated No.2 Navy, 23-7, to begin a three-year reign as national collegiate football champions. That was in a time when the Army-Navy game was a happening, when 100,000 fans would cram into Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium to see the annual collision of the two service academies. The Army-Navy game, no matter what the teams' records, was to college football in its day what the Super Bowl is to pro football today.
Its day is long past, buried in the mist of memory. Sure, Army-Navy can still fill a stadium today and may do so tomorrow, but it no longer has any relevance to modern football fans. Last Saturday's 34-0 romp by Navy, its unprecedented seventh in a row over Army, was buried, perhaps mercifully, near the used car ads in the back of most sports sections. Chances are, that most football fans, caught up in the delicious dilemma of which Big 12 team was going to play Florida for the national championship, didn't even notice.
I noticed. I've always noticed. I was 10 years old and a Notre Dame fan in 1944 and there was only radio and the Sunday papers with which to follow college football. Did you know that Notre Dame actually was No. 1 through the first four weeks and 5-0 and ranked No. 2 going into week six? Then came successive losses to Navy, 32-13, and Army, 59-0. That caught my attention, all right.
Those were different times, of course. War times. The service teams were loaded with talented players, many of whom had played for other schools before the war and would return to those schools afterward. Among others, Navy had Arkansas' Clyde (Smackover) Scott and Penn's Skippy Minisi. Army had Barney Poole from Ole Miss and Texas A & M's Hank Foldberg. But the two brightest stars of the era entered West Point as true freshmen. Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard both would win Heisman trophies and Davis would twice be runner-up in Heisman voting. Many of the top players who didn't get into the service academies would star for other service teams, like Iowa Preflight, Randolph Field, and Great Lakes Naval training Station, coached by Paul Brown. In the final AP poll in 1944, 12 of the top 20 were service teams, including Randolph Field (10-0), which finished third, behind only Army and Ohio State, both 9-0. Navy (6-3) was fourth.
When the war ended, Navy's talent pipeline shut down as if someone had turned off a faucet, but Army, like its caissons, kept rolling along. This produced three of the most memorable games in Army-Navy history. The 1946 Army team, a perfect season marred only by the famous 0-0 tie with Notre Dame, was a 19 point favorite over 1-7 Navy. But with 92 seconds remaining, Navy trailed only 21-18 and was on the Army 2-yard line. The frenzied crowd stormed onto the field and lined both sidelines as Navy called an illegal timeout and was penalized back to the 7. The Middies then sent halfback Pete Williams around right end, where he attempted to go out of bounds. Engulfed as he was by the crowd, it was difficult to tell if he was out of bounds when Barney Poole tackled him at the 3. The officials said he wasn't and time ran out before Navy could run another play.
Two years later an 0-8 Navy team managed a 21-21 tie with an 8-0 Army team that was more like kissing Lana Turner than anybody's sister. And two years after that 2 and 6 Navy scored a 14-2 victory over unbeaten Army to knock the Cadets out of a national championship.
That was the last truly memorable Army-Navy game--except for 1963.
I was working on the copy desk of The Chicago Tribune's sports department and teaching a course in sports writing at Columbia college in downtown Chicago. I was walking from the school to Tribune Tower down Michigan avenue when I came upon a crowd gathered outside a television sales store. I asked a man watching the screen what was going on and he said, "The President's been shot." I assumed the President had merely been wounded and wondered what affect it might have on the next year's election when my candidate, Barry Goldwater, would likely be running against him. Would it gain Jack Kennedy some sympathy votes? Unaware of the President's itinerary, I asked the man, "Where?" expecting him to answer New York or Washington or some other city. Instead he responded, "in the haid."
Among the many consequences of that fateful day was that I got to cover my first Army-Navy game. Like many other events, the game had been postponed by the tragic occurence in Dallas. The writer originally assigned to cover the game had another commitment and I was given the assignment. At the time I was still pretty much anchored to the copy desk. I had covered four or five college games that fall and, earlier in the year, was the sidebar writer on Loyola's NCAA basketball championship. But this was, for me, a plum assignment. It also turned out to be a helluva story.
Although Army had a 7-2 record, it was unranked and a big underdog to No. 2 Navy (8-1), which was led byRoger Staubach, who would win the Heisman that year. The game turned out to be almost a mirror image of the 1946 game, although this time it was Army desperately trying to beat the clock. Navy led 21-7 on three scoring runs by Pat Donnelly until unheralded Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh scored his second touchdown of the game and ran for a two-point conversion to make it 21-15. Army then recovered an onside kick and had the ball at the Navy 48 with 6:18 to go. These days that would be enough time to score four or five touchdowns and even back then it seemed ample. But Stichweh wasn't much of a passer and Army had no timeouts left. Add to that the fact that the noise of the capacity crowd drowned out Stichweh's attempt to call signals down near the goal line and the result was that time ran out with Army on the Navy 2 and Stichweh desperately trying to get his team lined up.
I was to cover one more Army-Navy game, in 1991, a game memorable only for the fact that Navy, 0-10 going in, beat 4-6 Army, 24-3, for its only victory of the year. The only reason The Tribune even covered that game was that it was played on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. I'm not sure if The Tribune has covered an Army-Navy game since. I doubt it. The Army-Navy game, after all, is not the same and probably never will be. The same, judging by today's headlines in the financial section , might be said of The Tribune.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
By Bob Markus
Notre Dame football fans are about to run off another football coach--perhaps justifiably so--and there's nothing unusual about that. Happens all the time (see Alabama, UCLA, Texas A & M, et al). But this is Notre Dame, America's school, whose subway alumni stretch from the A train in Manhattan to the remotest part of Alaska where the natives think a subway comes on a footlong bun with lots of mayo. This is Notre Dame, the school of Rockne and The Gipper, Lujack and Lattner, Ara and Montana (Joe, not the state). Did I mention the Four Horsemen?
I suppose there are schools that could come up with a roster of football immortals that would rival those in Notre Dame's Pantheon. But no other school has Notre Dame's mystique. What other school has a religious icon with the whimsical name Touchdown Jesus? What other school could get away with a nickname that is, if you examine it, an ethnic slur? Sure, and don't the Irish love their boozing and their brawling? In short, Notre Dame is supposed to be different.
Perhaps it is unfair to hold the Irish to a different, higher, standard. Charlie Weis, whose job hangs in the balance after losing 15 games the last two years, still has a winning (28-23) record at Notre Dame. So did the last three other coaches who were axed--Gerry Faust, Bob Davie, and Tyrone Willingham. But merely winning is not good enough at Notre Dame. You have to win big--like Rockne did, like Leahy did, like Parseghian and Devine and Holtz did.
I'm not defending Weis, who has done nothing to indicate he is the right man for the job; I'm just pointing out that, since Lou Holtz left, more or less on his own terms, after the 1996 season, Notre Dame has gone through three coaches. The program now appears to be nearly back to the mess that Parseghian pulled out of a quagmire when he took over in 1964. The Irish had not had a winning season since 1958, when Terry Brennan's last team went 6-4. Brennan had a winning record in four of his five seasons and his 1957 team ended Oklahoma's 47-game winning streak in one of college football's biggest upsets.
Brennan's firing shocked many fans. Hardly older than his players, Brennan's only previous head coaching experience had been at Mt. Carmel High school in Chicago. He had been an assistant at Notre Dame for only a year when he was elevated to the head job, replacing the iconic Leahy, just five years after his own graduation from the school. Many saw Leahy's finger prints all over Brennan's letter of dismissal, but Brennan, who never coached another football game, did not express any bitterness in public. However, in 1969, after I had written a column ripping Leahy's performance as a TV football analyst I received the following letter from him:
Dear Bob:
I read your article this morning about Frank Leahy. I thought you used great restraint because the list of people he has hurt to suit his own special purposes is a long one. I am delighted to see a fine reporter of your caliber call a spade a spade and let people know what kind of person Leahy really is. Good luck.
Sincerely
Terence P. Brennan
In any event, Brennan's dismissal was prelude to the darkest period in Notre Dame football. Parseghian wasted no time in leading the Irish back into the sunlight, guiding the Irish to a 9-1 season and nearly to a national championship in his first season. The Irish won their first nine games and led Southern Cal 17-0 at halftime, before the Trojans came back for a 20-17 victory. Two years later Parseghian got his national title despite the controversial 10-10 tie with also unbeaten Michigan State.
I was part of the Chicago Tribune coverage of that game in Spartan stadium, but I was assigned to the Michigan State locker room. I didn't think I'd written a particularly good story, but when I returned to work the following Monday I was called into Sports Editor George Strickler's office and told The Tribune was breaking its long-standing tradition of having only one sports column and that I was going to write the second one.
That gave me the opportunity to address the real story of that year's "Game of the Century," Parseghian's decision to run out the final 84 seconds and take the tie when the Irish got the ball at their own 30. Like many others, I criticized that decision, but Parseghian told me that with starting quarterback Terry Hanratty hurt and with his backup, Coley O'Brien, a diabetic who needed to take insulin daily, he was not going to take any "foolish chances." When Notre Dame routed USC 51-0 on the final Saturday of the season, Ara was vindicated as the Irish were crowned national champions.
My relationship with Parseghian rather mirrored--in reverse--my feelings about Notre Dame itself. As a small boy I was a huge Notre Dame fan and the worst day of my young life was the Saturday when I sat in a dentist's chair having a tooth extracted while listening to Army pounding Notre Dame 59-0, with the cadet core screaming in the background: "More yet, more yet."
I don't know when my feelings started to change. Perhaps the first time I saw a game at Notre Dame and saw how obnoxious their fans were. When the crowd applauded an injury to a rival player, that was enough to turn me off. Ironically, while I came to dislike the idea of Notre Dame football, the reality was that every time I had to deal with a Notre Dame athlete I was impressed with how courteous and articulate the players were. And their public relations staff was always incomparable, from Charlie Callahan to Roger Valdiserri to John Heisler. The first time I can recall going to Notre Dame was for a scene setter before the 1965 Michigan State game, which was almost as highly hyped as the following year's. Michigan State, destined to win the national title in one wire service poll, was unbeaten while Notre Dame had lost one game early in the year.
Callahan was the sports information director at the time and couldn't have been more helpful. In those days you could take a train from Chicago to South Bend and, when I came back on Friday night before the game, Callahan was at the station waiting for me. He dropped me at my hotel and said, "I'll pick you up for dinner in 45 minutes." I said, "but Charlie, I've got to write my advance." "Write fast," he said.
I sensed, even going back to his Northwestern days, that Parseghian didn't like me. I'm not sure if it was the questions I asked or the way I asked them and he never said anything overtly hostile, but that feeling was there. Later, he became more cordial and this last summer when I saw him at John Pont's funeral he was quite friendly.
The day that Parseghian resigned at Notre Dame after 11 seasons and a 95-17-4 record, I received a call at home from Sports Editor Cooper Rollow. "Get up to Green Bay," he said, "and talk to Dan Devine. There's been a report that Ara Parseghian is resigning and Devine's going to take his place."
My relationship with Devine went all the way back to his years of coaching at Arizona State in the 1950s. I was in the Army at the time, stationed in Yuma, Az, and one of my duties was to be a disc jockey on a local radio station every Saturday afternoon. There I became friendly with Chuck Benedict, the play-by-play announcer for Sun Devils games, and he took me along as a spotter.
So, when Devine became head coach at Missouri, my alma mater, I was very aware of who he was. I didn't get to know him, however, until he became head coach of the Packers. Covering the Packers on the road one week-end I got into a long conversation with Bart Starr, who was then coaching the Packers' quarterbacks, and Bart had some quite disparaging things to say about Devine. But at the end of our talk, Starr said, "Please don't print any of that."
I honored his request, but inserted the phrase, "Bart Starr, who has little reason to love Dan Devine," near the end of my column. I was astonished when, just a few days later, I got a letter from Devine, who was both general manager and head coach of a team in the middle of the season. Devine asked me who had given me the idea that Bart was not enamored of him and I wrote back, rather cravenly, that I couldn't remember how I'd gotten the notion, but that I was a Missouri grad and hence aDan Devine admirer.
Devine had a strange way of answering questions. He would talk for minutes at a time and you would write down the salient points but when he was through and you looked at your notebook you would find he really hadn't said anything. Rather like the candidates on those Presidential debates.
Now, I was sitting in his outer office, along with the Packers' beat men and columnists, just waiting for Devine to emerge from his inner sanctum. When he did, he confirmed that he was leaving the Packers to take the Notre Dame job. He thanked the local writers for their support, such as it had been, and then, after a final farewell, said to me, "Bob, come into my office." When I got there he said, "I just want you to know that whoever gets this job will find it in better shape than I did when I got here." What a master stroke! In one sentence he had absolved himself of any responsibility for his lacklustre record at Green Bay and burdened his successor with unrealistic expectations. That successor just happened to be Bart Starr.
Whatever his failings at Green Bay, Devine was a good college coach and he won a national championship in his six seasons at Notre Dame. After a five year interlude when it again tried to win with a high school coach, Gerry Faust, Notre Dame snatched Lou Holtz away from Minnesota. Once again I was in on the story, hurrying down to South Bend for Holtz's first press conference. I had interviewed Holtz for a magazine length story when he was coaching at Arkansas and, as an interview subject, he was the antithesis of Devine. A glib speaker, who supplemented his income by giving inspirational speeches, he also was a magician so gifted he probably could have earned a living on the stage.
By the time Holtz left Notre Dame after a successful 11-year run, I had retired. So I never got to meet Davie or Willingham, or Weis. Now, when I see Davie on television and watch Willingham's professional life fall apart in Washington I feel a little guilty about any feelings of satisfaction I might have harbored when they were struggling at Notre Dame. As for Charlie Weis, I hope he's given one more chance to prove himself. Does that mean I want him to succeed or fail? I wish I knew the answer.
Notre Dame football fans are about to run off another football coach--perhaps justifiably so--and there's nothing unusual about that. Happens all the time (see Alabama, UCLA, Texas A & M, et al). But this is Notre Dame, America's school, whose subway alumni stretch from the A train in Manhattan to the remotest part of Alaska where the natives think a subway comes on a footlong bun with lots of mayo. This is Notre Dame, the school of Rockne and The Gipper, Lujack and Lattner, Ara and Montana (Joe, not the state). Did I mention the Four Horsemen?
I suppose there are schools that could come up with a roster of football immortals that would rival those in Notre Dame's Pantheon. But no other school has Notre Dame's mystique. What other school has a religious icon with the whimsical name Touchdown Jesus? What other school could get away with a nickname that is, if you examine it, an ethnic slur? Sure, and don't the Irish love their boozing and their brawling? In short, Notre Dame is supposed to be different.
Perhaps it is unfair to hold the Irish to a different, higher, standard. Charlie Weis, whose job hangs in the balance after losing 15 games the last two years, still has a winning (28-23) record at Notre Dame. So did the last three other coaches who were axed--Gerry Faust, Bob Davie, and Tyrone Willingham. But merely winning is not good enough at Notre Dame. You have to win big--like Rockne did, like Leahy did, like Parseghian and Devine and Holtz did.
I'm not defending Weis, who has done nothing to indicate he is the right man for the job; I'm just pointing out that, since Lou Holtz left, more or less on his own terms, after the 1996 season, Notre Dame has gone through three coaches. The program now appears to be nearly back to the mess that Parseghian pulled out of a quagmire when he took over in 1964. The Irish had not had a winning season since 1958, when Terry Brennan's last team went 6-4. Brennan had a winning record in four of his five seasons and his 1957 team ended Oklahoma's 47-game winning streak in one of college football's biggest upsets.
Brennan's firing shocked many fans. Hardly older than his players, Brennan's only previous head coaching experience had been at Mt. Carmel High school in Chicago. He had been an assistant at Notre Dame for only a year when he was elevated to the head job, replacing the iconic Leahy, just five years after his own graduation from the school. Many saw Leahy's finger prints all over Brennan's letter of dismissal, but Brennan, who never coached another football game, did not express any bitterness in public. However, in 1969, after I had written a column ripping Leahy's performance as a TV football analyst I received the following letter from him:
Dear Bob:
I read your article this morning about Frank Leahy. I thought you used great restraint because the list of people he has hurt to suit his own special purposes is a long one. I am delighted to see a fine reporter of your caliber call a spade a spade and let people know what kind of person Leahy really is. Good luck.
Sincerely
Terence P. Brennan
In any event, Brennan's dismissal was prelude to the darkest period in Notre Dame football. Parseghian wasted no time in leading the Irish back into the sunlight, guiding the Irish to a 9-1 season and nearly to a national championship in his first season. The Irish won their first nine games and led Southern Cal 17-0 at halftime, before the Trojans came back for a 20-17 victory. Two years later Parseghian got his national title despite the controversial 10-10 tie with also unbeaten Michigan State.
I was part of the Chicago Tribune coverage of that game in Spartan stadium, but I was assigned to the Michigan State locker room. I didn't think I'd written a particularly good story, but when I returned to work the following Monday I was called into Sports Editor George Strickler's office and told The Tribune was breaking its long-standing tradition of having only one sports column and that I was going to write the second one.
That gave me the opportunity to address the real story of that year's "Game of the Century," Parseghian's decision to run out the final 84 seconds and take the tie when the Irish got the ball at their own 30. Like many others, I criticized that decision, but Parseghian told me that with starting quarterback Terry Hanratty hurt and with his backup, Coley O'Brien, a diabetic who needed to take insulin daily, he was not going to take any "foolish chances." When Notre Dame routed USC 51-0 on the final Saturday of the season, Ara was vindicated as the Irish were crowned national champions.
My relationship with Parseghian rather mirrored--in reverse--my feelings about Notre Dame itself. As a small boy I was a huge Notre Dame fan and the worst day of my young life was the Saturday when I sat in a dentist's chair having a tooth extracted while listening to Army pounding Notre Dame 59-0, with the cadet core screaming in the background: "More yet, more yet."
I don't know when my feelings started to change. Perhaps the first time I saw a game at Notre Dame and saw how obnoxious their fans were. When the crowd applauded an injury to a rival player, that was enough to turn me off. Ironically, while I came to dislike the idea of Notre Dame football, the reality was that every time I had to deal with a Notre Dame athlete I was impressed with how courteous and articulate the players were. And their public relations staff was always incomparable, from Charlie Callahan to Roger Valdiserri to John Heisler. The first time I can recall going to Notre Dame was for a scene setter before the 1965 Michigan State game, which was almost as highly hyped as the following year's. Michigan State, destined to win the national title in one wire service poll, was unbeaten while Notre Dame had lost one game early in the year.
Callahan was the sports information director at the time and couldn't have been more helpful. In those days you could take a train from Chicago to South Bend and, when I came back on Friday night before the game, Callahan was at the station waiting for me. He dropped me at my hotel and said, "I'll pick you up for dinner in 45 minutes." I said, "but Charlie, I've got to write my advance." "Write fast," he said.
I sensed, even going back to his Northwestern days, that Parseghian didn't like me. I'm not sure if it was the questions I asked or the way I asked them and he never said anything overtly hostile, but that feeling was there. Later, he became more cordial and this last summer when I saw him at John Pont's funeral he was quite friendly.
The day that Parseghian resigned at Notre Dame after 11 seasons and a 95-17-4 record, I received a call at home from Sports Editor Cooper Rollow. "Get up to Green Bay," he said, "and talk to Dan Devine. There's been a report that Ara Parseghian is resigning and Devine's going to take his place."
My relationship with Devine went all the way back to his years of coaching at Arizona State in the 1950s. I was in the Army at the time, stationed in Yuma, Az, and one of my duties was to be a disc jockey on a local radio station every Saturday afternoon. There I became friendly with Chuck Benedict, the play-by-play announcer for Sun Devils games, and he took me along as a spotter.
So, when Devine became head coach at Missouri, my alma mater, I was very aware of who he was. I didn't get to know him, however, until he became head coach of the Packers. Covering the Packers on the road one week-end I got into a long conversation with Bart Starr, who was then coaching the Packers' quarterbacks, and Bart had some quite disparaging things to say about Devine. But at the end of our talk, Starr said, "Please don't print any of that."
I honored his request, but inserted the phrase, "Bart Starr, who has little reason to love Dan Devine," near the end of my column. I was astonished when, just a few days later, I got a letter from Devine, who was both general manager and head coach of a team in the middle of the season. Devine asked me who had given me the idea that Bart was not enamored of him and I wrote back, rather cravenly, that I couldn't remember how I'd gotten the notion, but that I was a Missouri grad and hence aDan Devine admirer.
Devine had a strange way of answering questions. He would talk for minutes at a time and you would write down the salient points but when he was through and you looked at your notebook you would find he really hadn't said anything. Rather like the candidates on those Presidential debates.
Now, I was sitting in his outer office, along with the Packers' beat men and columnists, just waiting for Devine to emerge from his inner sanctum. When he did, he confirmed that he was leaving the Packers to take the Notre Dame job. He thanked the local writers for their support, such as it had been, and then, after a final farewell, said to me, "Bob, come into my office." When I got there he said, "I just want you to know that whoever gets this job will find it in better shape than I did when I got here." What a master stroke! In one sentence he had absolved himself of any responsibility for his lacklustre record at Green Bay and burdened his successor with unrealistic expectations. That successor just happened to be Bart Starr.
Whatever his failings at Green Bay, Devine was a good college coach and he won a national championship in his six seasons at Notre Dame. After a five year interlude when it again tried to win with a high school coach, Gerry Faust, Notre Dame snatched Lou Holtz away from Minnesota. Once again I was in on the story, hurrying down to South Bend for Holtz's first press conference. I had interviewed Holtz for a magazine length story when he was coaching at Arkansas and, as an interview subject, he was the antithesis of Devine. A glib speaker, who supplemented his income by giving inspirational speeches, he also was a magician so gifted he probably could have earned a living on the stage.
By the time Holtz left Notre Dame after a successful 11-year run, I had retired. So I never got to meet Davie or Willingham, or Weis. Now, when I see Davie on television and watch Willingham's professional life fall apart in Washington I feel a little guilty about any feelings of satisfaction I might have harbored when they were struggling at Notre Dame. As for Charlie Weis, I hope he's given one more chance to prove himself. Does that mean I want him to succeed or fail? I wish I knew the answer.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
By Bob Markus
If Oklahoma hopes to add an eighth national championship to its already over-stuffed trophy case, it is going to have to find a way to leapfrog Texas in the BCS standings. Oklahoma diehards, overcome by the euphoria of the biggest Saturday night massacre since the Richard Nixon Watergate scandal, will tell you: The Sooner's the better. In view of the Sooners' 65-21 unfrocking of then unbeaten and second ranked Texas Tech in Lubbock, who can blame them?
Well, how about Texas fans for starters? Didn't Texas defeat Oklahoma in their annual Red River Shootout earlier in the season? Yes it did.
Thus are the pollsters, both human and robotic, caught on the Longhorns of a dilemma. Texas beat Oklahoma, which brutalized Texas Tech, which beat Texas, albeit by one point on a touchdown in the final second. All three have lost just that one game and are locked in a three-way tie for the lead in the Big 12 South division. Three coins in the fountain. Which one will the fountain bless? The merry-go-round has one final turn this week, but that may not prove decisive.
Of the three, Oklahoma has by far the toughest assignment, a visit to arch rival Oklahoma State, which has been known to put up a fight against the Sooners even in years when it isn't 9 and 2 going into the intrastate showdown. Should the Cowboys unhorse the Sooners and the other two win, as they should, Texas Tech would go to the conference championship game because of its victory over Texas. Therefore, the Longhorns have to root for an Oklahoma victory--but not too impressive an Oklahoma victory--which would put the decision in the hands of the voters.
No telling what that decision will be. Only sure thing is that Texas Tech can fuggedaboudit. In the event of a three-way tie the decision comes down to this: Does Texas' head-to-head victory over Oklahoma in October trump Oklahoma's November stomping of Texas Tech and over-all stronger schedule (The Sooners have victories over Cincinnati and Texas Christian, both ranked teams, on their resume)? I think not.
So Oklahoma will play the Southeast Conference champion (Florida or Alabama) for the national championship? As Lee Corso would say, "not so fast." Overlooked in all these speculations is the BCS's worst case scenario--A Missouri upset in the Big 12 title game. That seems as unlikely as a Texas A & M victory over Texas, but the Big 12 championship game has a history of producing eye popping upsets. In 1996, the first year the merger of the Big Eight and four teams from the defunct Southwest conference mandated a playoff, Texas, unranked with four losses, upended 10-1 and third-ranked Nebraska 37-27. In 2003, a 9 and 3 Kansas State team shocked unbeaten and No.1 ranked Oklahoma 35-7 to win the Big 12 championship. In the true spirit of BCS lunacy, however, Oklahoma was still picked to play in the national championship game, despite not winning its own conference title.
That wasn't the biggest BCS fiasco, however. That would have to be the 2001 decision to match Nebraska against Miami in the championship game when the Cornhuskers didn't even get to the Big 12 title game. They were, in fact, humiliated, 62-36, by Colorado in their final regular season game and didn't fare much better against Miami in the Rose bowl, losing 37-14 to the unbeaten Hurricanes.
A Missouri upset appears highly doubtful, however. The Tigers lost twice to Oklahoma last year and this year looked dreadful in a blowout loss to Texas. Their best hope is that somehow Texas Tech gets into the showdown game. With their Chase Daniel-led circus offense, the Tigers might--but probably won't--match the equally glitzy Red Raiders offense touchdown for touchdown. It might take longer to decide such a game than the 2000 Presidential election. However, Missouri's defense has been so woeful much of the season, even in games it won, I don't see much hope even against Texas Tech.
It hurts me to say that because I am a Missouri graduate and my association with Missouri football goes all the way back to 1954 when, as a student, I covered the Tigers for the Columbia Missourian. I was not nearly as sure of myself then as I am now and I can remember my father assuring me, as I timorously prepared to meet Coach Don Faurot for the first time: "remember, he pulls his pants on one leg at a time." He would have done better to warn me that Faurot was missing a finger on his right hand and liked jabbing the stump into the palm of your hand on first meeting you. That was disconcerting, to say the least, but I came to revere Faurot, as most people who knew him did. That was a different time, but Faurot managed to win his share of games while recruiting almost exclusively within the state of Missouri. In fact, that season there was only one squad member from outside the state and he was from East St. Louis, Illinois, just across the river.
I pretty much gave up predicting how Missouri would do after that first season. The Tigers opened at Purdue and we all thought it would be a sure win. That, however, just happened to be the day that Len Dawson and Lamar Lundy both made their college debuts. Dawson, of whom we had never heard, threw four touchdown passes in the 31-0 Purdue runaway. Lundy was an outstanding two-way player in football and a basketball force, as well, the only player in Purdue history to be most valuable player in both sports. I later came to know Dawson pretty well when he was quarterbacking the Kansas City Chiefs to a Super bowl victory and I was columnizing for The Chicago Tribune.
But that's a story for another day. I'll end this one by fast forwarding from the season opener to the season closer agasinst Maryland. It was the only game I didn't cover. The paper, which is run by journalism students, with faculty editors, didn't have much of a travel budget. Most away games I stayed in student dorms and once had to share a bed with sports editor Joe Pollack. The game was played on Thanksgiving day and Maryland was a heavy favorite. On Wednesday of that week, as he was dismissing the class, my favorite history professor called me to the front of the room and asked me if the Tigers had any chance against the powerful Terrapins. I assured him they had an excellent chance. The final score was 74-13. Fortunately, I knew more about Spanish history than I did about football and still got an A in the class.
If Oklahoma hopes to add an eighth national championship to its already over-stuffed trophy case, it is going to have to find a way to leapfrog Texas in the BCS standings. Oklahoma diehards, overcome by the euphoria of the biggest Saturday night massacre since the Richard Nixon Watergate scandal, will tell you: The Sooner's the better. In view of the Sooners' 65-21 unfrocking of then unbeaten and second ranked Texas Tech in Lubbock, who can blame them?
Well, how about Texas fans for starters? Didn't Texas defeat Oklahoma in their annual Red River Shootout earlier in the season? Yes it did.
Thus are the pollsters, both human and robotic, caught on the Longhorns of a dilemma. Texas beat Oklahoma, which brutalized Texas Tech, which beat Texas, albeit by one point on a touchdown in the final second. All three have lost just that one game and are locked in a three-way tie for the lead in the Big 12 South division. Three coins in the fountain. Which one will the fountain bless? The merry-go-round has one final turn this week, but that may not prove decisive.
Of the three, Oklahoma has by far the toughest assignment, a visit to arch rival Oklahoma State, which has been known to put up a fight against the Sooners even in years when it isn't 9 and 2 going into the intrastate showdown. Should the Cowboys unhorse the Sooners and the other two win, as they should, Texas Tech would go to the conference championship game because of its victory over Texas. Therefore, the Longhorns have to root for an Oklahoma victory--but not too impressive an Oklahoma victory--which would put the decision in the hands of the voters.
No telling what that decision will be. Only sure thing is that Texas Tech can fuggedaboudit. In the event of a three-way tie the decision comes down to this: Does Texas' head-to-head victory over Oklahoma in October trump Oklahoma's November stomping of Texas Tech and over-all stronger schedule (The Sooners have victories over Cincinnati and Texas Christian, both ranked teams, on their resume)? I think not.
So Oklahoma will play the Southeast Conference champion (Florida or Alabama) for the national championship? As Lee Corso would say, "not so fast." Overlooked in all these speculations is the BCS's worst case scenario--A Missouri upset in the Big 12 title game. That seems as unlikely as a Texas A & M victory over Texas, but the Big 12 championship game has a history of producing eye popping upsets. In 1996, the first year the merger of the Big Eight and four teams from the defunct Southwest conference mandated a playoff, Texas, unranked with four losses, upended 10-1 and third-ranked Nebraska 37-27. In 2003, a 9 and 3 Kansas State team shocked unbeaten and No.1 ranked Oklahoma 35-7 to win the Big 12 championship. In the true spirit of BCS lunacy, however, Oklahoma was still picked to play in the national championship game, despite not winning its own conference title.
That wasn't the biggest BCS fiasco, however. That would have to be the 2001 decision to match Nebraska against Miami in the championship game when the Cornhuskers didn't even get to the Big 12 title game. They were, in fact, humiliated, 62-36, by Colorado in their final regular season game and didn't fare much better against Miami in the Rose bowl, losing 37-14 to the unbeaten Hurricanes.
A Missouri upset appears highly doubtful, however. The Tigers lost twice to Oklahoma last year and this year looked dreadful in a blowout loss to Texas. Their best hope is that somehow Texas Tech gets into the showdown game. With their Chase Daniel-led circus offense, the Tigers might--but probably won't--match the equally glitzy Red Raiders offense touchdown for touchdown. It might take longer to decide such a game than the 2000 Presidential election. However, Missouri's defense has been so woeful much of the season, even in games it won, I don't see much hope even against Texas Tech.
It hurts me to say that because I am a Missouri graduate and my association with Missouri football goes all the way back to 1954 when, as a student, I covered the Tigers for the Columbia Missourian. I was not nearly as sure of myself then as I am now and I can remember my father assuring me, as I timorously prepared to meet Coach Don Faurot for the first time: "remember, he pulls his pants on one leg at a time." He would have done better to warn me that Faurot was missing a finger on his right hand and liked jabbing the stump into the palm of your hand on first meeting you. That was disconcerting, to say the least, but I came to revere Faurot, as most people who knew him did. That was a different time, but Faurot managed to win his share of games while recruiting almost exclusively within the state of Missouri. In fact, that season there was only one squad member from outside the state and he was from East St. Louis, Illinois, just across the river.
I pretty much gave up predicting how Missouri would do after that first season. The Tigers opened at Purdue and we all thought it would be a sure win. That, however, just happened to be the day that Len Dawson and Lamar Lundy both made their college debuts. Dawson, of whom we had never heard, threw four touchdown passes in the 31-0 Purdue runaway. Lundy was an outstanding two-way player in football and a basketball force, as well, the only player in Purdue history to be most valuable player in both sports. I later came to know Dawson pretty well when he was quarterbacking the Kansas City Chiefs to a Super bowl victory and I was columnizing for The Chicago Tribune.
But that's a story for another day. I'll end this one by fast forwarding from the season opener to the season closer agasinst Maryland. It was the only game I didn't cover. The paper, which is run by journalism students, with faculty editors, didn't have much of a travel budget. Most away games I stayed in student dorms and once had to share a bed with sports editor Joe Pollack. The game was played on Thanksgiving day and Maryland was a heavy favorite. On Wednesday of that week, as he was dismissing the class, my favorite history professor called me to the front of the room and asked me if the Tigers had any chance against the powerful Terrapins. I assured him they had an excellent chance. The final score was 74-13. Fortunately, I knew more about Spanish history than I did about football and still got an A in the class.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
By Bob Markus
Somewhere Ernie Accorsi must be smiling. The retired New York Giants general manager doesn't even have a job in football anymore, but his fingerprints are all over the NFL landscape. Two of the most intriguing matchups of the year will be played on Sunday and, of the four quarterbacks involved, three of them have connections with Accorsi.
Looking stronger by the week, the Giants, who were upset winners over New England in the 2008 Super Bowl, are now the favorites to repeat. Their quarterback: Eli Manning, acquired in a draft day trade by Accorsi, in one of his most daring--and successful moves. The Giants are headed for the desert this week to play the surprising Arizona Cardinals, whose 7-3 record gives them a four-game lead in the NFC West with six games to play. The Cardinals' quarterback: the born-again gunslinger Kurt Warner, who immediately preceded Manning as the Giants' signal caller.
The other signifcant matchup Sunday features the New York Jets against the unbeaten Tennessee Titans in Nashville. The 10-0 Titans, having rallied in the second half in Jacksonville Sunday, now must be conceded at least an outside chance to do what the New England Patriots couldn't do--go undefeated through the regular season and playoffs. It may not be time for the 1972 Dolphins, who so jealously guard their immaculate 17-0 season, to panic, but the fact is that after playing the Jets Sunday, Tennessee's next three games are against Detroit, Cleveland and Houston, losers all. Quarterbacking the Titans: Kerry Collins, whose career Accorsi saved when he signed him in 1999. Collins led the Giants to the Super Bowl in 2000, a watershed year in a career that has had more ups and downs than a cirque d' soleil performer.
The Jets are clinging to a one-game lead in the AFC East over the Patriots and Dolphins, who will meet Sunday in what, in an ordinary week, might well have been the top-billed game. The Jets' quarterback, Brett Favre, has no connection to Ernie Accorsi, but he just happens to be, arguably, the best quarterback in NFL history.
Of the four quarterbacks involved, only Manning is in the prime of his career. There is nothing gaudy about Manning's statistics. He has been labelled by the New York press as "a care taker quarterback." The term is not meant to be pejorative. Manning is in command of a stable of runners who make 300-yard passing games unnecessary. He proved in the Super bowl he can complete passes when he needs to.
Favre, although he had a magical season in 2007 until a fatal interception against the Giants in the NFC title game made it all go up in smoke, no longer seems capable of almost single handedly willing his team into the win column. But, considering where the Jets have been, his bottom line, a 7-3 record and a reasonable shot at the playoffs, does nothing to diminish his legacy.
While Favre and Manning, the two New York quarterbacks are doing what is expected them, Collins and Warner are the twin surprises of the season. Both of them have been to the mountain top and both have plunged to the icy depths of irrelevance. Their dual resurrections are the stuff dreams are made of. Opposites in many ways, they are brothers under the skin.
Collins was a star at Penn State, leading the Nittany Lions to their last unbeaten season in 1994.
He was a first round draft pick of the Carolina Panthers, the fifth player chosen. Warner didn't even break into the starting lineup at Northern Iowa until his senior year. He spent three seasons in the Arena league and one in NFL Europe, before finally getting into one game for the St. Louis Rams in 1998.
By then, Collins had already led the Panthers as far as the NFC title game in 1996 and quickly worn out his welcome. By the time Warner got his first start in 1999, Collins had already been waived by two teams and his career was in tatters. Then came Ernie Accorsi to his rescue. Most of the football cognoscenti were shocked when the Giants' GM gave Collins a $5 million signing bonus as part of a $16.9 million package.
But Accorsi, who early in his career had been an assistant sports information director at Penn State, called on his old contacts and received "a good report on him as a person," Accorsi said at the time. "Once I met with Kerry I immediately trusted him and liked him." One thing Accorsi trusted was Collins' pledge to get help for his admitted alcoholism. In a Super Bowl week interview the following year, Collins bared his soul. "One of the things I had to do in life was to get humble," he said. "I had to admit I can't control alcohol. I got to the point where I knew that alcohol would eventually kill me or I would end up in jail."
He already had ended up in the doghouse with Carolina coach Dom Capers. Collins revealed that, at a party celebrating the end of training camp in 1997, he had gotten roaringly drunk, called teammate Muhshin Muhammad the "N" word, made an ethnic remark to another teammate, Norberto Garrido, and received a punch in the eye for a reward. "I was trying to be a funny guy," he said. After signing with the Giants, Collins went to a rehab facility in Kansas and straightened out his life.
That same year, Kurt Warner was torching the NFL When Trent Green got hurt in an exhibition game, Warner became the starter. He started out by becoming the only passer in NFL history to throw for three touchdowns in each of his first three games. He followed that up with a five touchdown day against the San Francisco 49ers, at the time a perennial NFL power. By the time it was all over, he had thrown 41 touchown passes and been named MVP of both the regular season and Super bowl, which the Rams won. Two years later he won his second MVP award, leading the Rams back to the Super bowl. This time they lost, although Warner threw two touchdown passes to bring them back from a 17-3 deficit. Adam Vinatieri won it for the Patriots on a field goal at the final whistle.
From there, the two quarterbacks ran a parallel course, neither able to recapture the rapture of their Super Bowl seasons. The Giants finally released Collins in 2004 and replaced him with--Kurt Warner. Warner started only nine games for the Giants before Manning, who had been signed that season, was rushed into the breach.
Collins bounced around from the Giants to the Oakland Raiders to the Titans. In Tennessee he was supposed to be the caretaker for Vince Young, but the former University of Texas star was injured in the opener this year and, unless Collins gets hurt, likely will not see action again. Warner meanwhile was signed by Arizona where he was supposed to tutor Heisman trophy winner Matt Leinart. A game against San Francisco in 2007 perhaps best illustrates Warner's performance over the next three years. He threw for a career high 484 yards, then fumbled into the end zone in overtime to lose the game.
The Titans, like the Giants, are a run-oriented team, so Collins is, like Manning, more the director of the show than its star. But, also like Manning, he's proved that he can take over the spotlight when it is necessary. He threw three touchdown passes in the second half Sunday to rally the Titans past Jacksonville.
Warner, on the other hand, still loves to sling the ball around. He is the NFL's top-rated passer and his 395 yard performance in Sunday's victory over Seattle was his franchise-record fourth straight 300-yard game. If MVP voting were held today, Warner would be the favorite to win his third. That would tie him with the only man to win it three times--Brett Favre.
Somewhere Ernie Accorsi must be smiling. The retired New York Giants general manager doesn't even have a job in football anymore, but his fingerprints are all over the NFL landscape. Two of the most intriguing matchups of the year will be played on Sunday and, of the four quarterbacks involved, three of them have connections with Accorsi.
Looking stronger by the week, the Giants, who were upset winners over New England in the 2008 Super Bowl, are now the favorites to repeat. Their quarterback: Eli Manning, acquired in a draft day trade by Accorsi, in one of his most daring--and successful moves. The Giants are headed for the desert this week to play the surprising Arizona Cardinals, whose 7-3 record gives them a four-game lead in the NFC West with six games to play. The Cardinals' quarterback: the born-again gunslinger Kurt Warner, who immediately preceded Manning as the Giants' signal caller.
The other signifcant matchup Sunday features the New York Jets against the unbeaten Tennessee Titans in Nashville. The 10-0 Titans, having rallied in the second half in Jacksonville Sunday, now must be conceded at least an outside chance to do what the New England Patriots couldn't do--go undefeated through the regular season and playoffs. It may not be time for the 1972 Dolphins, who so jealously guard their immaculate 17-0 season, to panic, but the fact is that after playing the Jets Sunday, Tennessee's next three games are against Detroit, Cleveland and Houston, losers all. Quarterbacking the Titans: Kerry Collins, whose career Accorsi saved when he signed him in 1999. Collins led the Giants to the Super Bowl in 2000, a watershed year in a career that has had more ups and downs than a cirque d' soleil performer.
The Jets are clinging to a one-game lead in the AFC East over the Patriots and Dolphins, who will meet Sunday in what, in an ordinary week, might well have been the top-billed game. The Jets' quarterback, Brett Favre, has no connection to Ernie Accorsi, but he just happens to be, arguably, the best quarterback in NFL history.
Of the four quarterbacks involved, only Manning is in the prime of his career. There is nothing gaudy about Manning's statistics. He has been labelled by the New York press as "a care taker quarterback." The term is not meant to be pejorative. Manning is in command of a stable of runners who make 300-yard passing games unnecessary. He proved in the Super bowl he can complete passes when he needs to.
Favre, although he had a magical season in 2007 until a fatal interception against the Giants in the NFC title game made it all go up in smoke, no longer seems capable of almost single handedly willing his team into the win column. But, considering where the Jets have been, his bottom line, a 7-3 record and a reasonable shot at the playoffs, does nothing to diminish his legacy.
While Favre and Manning, the two New York quarterbacks are doing what is expected them, Collins and Warner are the twin surprises of the season. Both of them have been to the mountain top and both have plunged to the icy depths of irrelevance. Their dual resurrections are the stuff dreams are made of. Opposites in many ways, they are brothers under the skin.
Collins was a star at Penn State, leading the Nittany Lions to their last unbeaten season in 1994.
He was a first round draft pick of the Carolina Panthers, the fifth player chosen. Warner didn't even break into the starting lineup at Northern Iowa until his senior year. He spent three seasons in the Arena league and one in NFL Europe, before finally getting into one game for the St. Louis Rams in 1998.
By then, Collins had already led the Panthers as far as the NFC title game in 1996 and quickly worn out his welcome. By the time Warner got his first start in 1999, Collins had already been waived by two teams and his career was in tatters. Then came Ernie Accorsi to his rescue. Most of the football cognoscenti were shocked when the Giants' GM gave Collins a $5 million signing bonus as part of a $16.9 million package.
But Accorsi, who early in his career had been an assistant sports information director at Penn State, called on his old contacts and received "a good report on him as a person," Accorsi said at the time. "Once I met with Kerry I immediately trusted him and liked him." One thing Accorsi trusted was Collins' pledge to get help for his admitted alcoholism. In a Super Bowl week interview the following year, Collins bared his soul. "One of the things I had to do in life was to get humble," he said. "I had to admit I can't control alcohol. I got to the point where I knew that alcohol would eventually kill me or I would end up in jail."
He already had ended up in the doghouse with Carolina coach Dom Capers. Collins revealed that, at a party celebrating the end of training camp in 1997, he had gotten roaringly drunk, called teammate Muhshin Muhammad the "N" word, made an ethnic remark to another teammate, Norberto Garrido, and received a punch in the eye for a reward. "I was trying to be a funny guy," he said. After signing with the Giants, Collins went to a rehab facility in Kansas and straightened out his life.
That same year, Kurt Warner was torching the NFL When Trent Green got hurt in an exhibition game, Warner became the starter. He started out by becoming the only passer in NFL history to throw for three touchdowns in each of his first three games. He followed that up with a five touchdown day against the San Francisco 49ers, at the time a perennial NFL power. By the time it was all over, he had thrown 41 touchown passes and been named MVP of both the regular season and Super bowl, which the Rams won. Two years later he won his second MVP award, leading the Rams back to the Super bowl. This time they lost, although Warner threw two touchdown passes to bring them back from a 17-3 deficit. Adam Vinatieri won it for the Patriots on a field goal at the final whistle.
From there, the two quarterbacks ran a parallel course, neither able to recapture the rapture of their Super Bowl seasons. The Giants finally released Collins in 2004 and replaced him with--Kurt Warner. Warner started only nine games for the Giants before Manning, who had been signed that season, was rushed into the breach.
Collins bounced around from the Giants to the Oakland Raiders to the Titans. In Tennessee he was supposed to be the caretaker for Vince Young, but the former University of Texas star was injured in the opener this year and, unless Collins gets hurt, likely will not see action again. Warner meanwhile was signed by Arizona where he was supposed to tutor Heisman trophy winner Matt Leinart. A game against San Francisco in 2007 perhaps best illustrates Warner's performance over the next three years. He threw for a career high 484 yards, then fumbled into the end zone in overtime to lose the game.
The Titans, like the Giants, are a run-oriented team, so Collins is, like Manning, more the director of the show than its star. But, also like Manning, he's proved that he can take over the spotlight when it is necessary. He threw three touchdown passes in the second half Sunday to rally the Titans past Jacksonville.
Warner, on the other hand, still loves to sling the ball around. He is the NFL's top-rated passer and his 395 yard performance in Sunday's victory over Seattle was his franchise-record fourth straight 300-yard game. If MVP voting were held today, Warner would be the favorite to win his third. That would tie him with the only man to win it three times--Brett Favre.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
By Bob Markus
A playoff or no playoff. That is today's question. Whether 'tis easier on the mind to suffer the doubts and chaos of the outrageous BCS system or, by opposing, end them. With sincere apologies to The Bard, Hamlet's problems seem trivial compared with the concerns of angst-ridden college football fans who long for a definitive answer to the apparently unsolvable puzzle: Who's number one?
The BCS (Bowl Championship Series) was supposed to give the definitive answer after years of relying on the wire service polls to determine the national champion. The BCS concept is to pit the No.1 and No.2 ranked teams in a national championship game after the major bowl games have been played. The trouble is, who decides which two teams should play for the title? As currently constituted the system relies on six computer polls and two human polls in a formula so complicated it would take a nuclear physicist, aided by a roomful of chimpanzees, six weeks to figure out.
Even then, the likelihood is that the BCS will get it wrong. Just ask Southern California. In 2003 The Trojans were ranked No. 1 in both human polls but were passed over for the championship game and Louisiana State, which had finished the regular season ranked No. 3, won the BCS version of the national championship by beating No. 2 Oklahoma. The Sooners had gotten into the title game despite not winning its conference championship, having suffered a 35-7 thrashing by Kansas State. Strength of schedule? Three of LSU's regular season victories were over Louisiana-Monroe, Louisiana Tech, and Western Illinois. Although the LSU-Oklahoma game in the Sugar bowl had been designated by the BCS as the national championship game, the AP refused to go along and, rightly so, rewarded the Trojans for their 28-14 victory over No. 4 Michigan, by keeping them at No.1.
The following year there were three undefeated teams at year's end and it was Auburn that was the odd man out. Fittingly, USC, given the chance it had been denied the year before, wiped out Oklahoma in the national championship game.
At least, the BCS has tweaked its formula in recent years so it is no longer so dependent on strength of schedule in making its final rankings. Certainly, strength of schedule should be considered, but the BCS was relying on computers which already had taken scheduling into consideration and then applying the double whammy of a separate strength of schedule category.
Strength of schedule is no longer a separate component of the formula. However, some of the computers still ignore margin of victory as a criterion, thus judging a 56-20 Texas Tech whipping of seventh-ranked Oklahoma State of no greater value than Alabama's overtime squeeker over a 15th-ranked LSU playing with a quarterback who couldn't hit a barn door with a bazooka from three yards away.
It probably doesn't matter much if Texas Tech is ranked No.1 or No.2, since getting into the championship game is all that really counts. But don't count on the unbeaten Red Raiders to get there, anyway. They still have to play at Oklahoma, where they will be an underdog. A Sooner victory in that game would create a three-way tie atop the Big 12 South division, unarguably the strongest division in the country. If that should happen, the title game berth would go to the highest ranked of the three teams. Unless, of course, and this is the BCS's worst nightmare, a two-loss Missouri or, worse yet, a three-loss Kansas wins the Big 12 North and knocks off the Southern division champion in the Big 12 title game.
A little more certain is the probability that The Southeast Conference champion will play for the national title. But it's not all that certain that Alabama will be that team. Right now, most SEC observors feel that once-beaten Florida will take the measure of the unbeaten Crimson Tide. Florida still has what could be a tough game against South Carolina, led by former Gators coach Steve Spurrier. Even a second loss for Florida would not necessarily end their national title hopes, given the wide-spread notion that SEC football is the best in the country. And, of course, there is plenty of precedence that would give Alabama entre to the No.1 vs. No.2 game even if it loses its conference championship game.
As for other one-loss teams, Penn State has no shot after suffering its lone defeat Saturday on a last second field goal at Iowa. The Nittany Lions will have to pay the price for fellow Big Ten school Ohio State's blowout losses in the last two championship games. Southern Cal's chances are a little better, although the Trojans carry the stigma of playing in a Pacific Coast conference that is having a down year. There is also the fact that if Oregon State wins out, the Beavers, who handed USC its lone loss, will be the Pac 10 champion.
And so it is that the ground swell for an eight team playoff continues to grow. But that begs the question: Who's going to chose the eight teams? My own suggestion would be to take the champions of the six conferences currently associated with the BCS plus the two highest ranked teams not automatically chosen. Otherwise you are certain to hear from fans of several teams that barely fail to make the tournament, the pitiable cry: "We're No. eight"
A playoff or no playoff. That is today's question. Whether 'tis easier on the mind to suffer the doubts and chaos of the outrageous BCS system or, by opposing, end them. With sincere apologies to The Bard, Hamlet's problems seem trivial compared with the concerns of angst-ridden college football fans who long for a definitive answer to the apparently unsolvable puzzle: Who's number one?
The BCS (Bowl Championship Series) was supposed to give the definitive answer after years of relying on the wire service polls to determine the national champion. The BCS concept is to pit the No.1 and No.2 ranked teams in a national championship game after the major bowl games have been played. The trouble is, who decides which two teams should play for the title? As currently constituted the system relies on six computer polls and two human polls in a formula so complicated it would take a nuclear physicist, aided by a roomful of chimpanzees, six weeks to figure out.
Even then, the likelihood is that the BCS will get it wrong. Just ask Southern California. In 2003 The Trojans were ranked No. 1 in both human polls but were passed over for the championship game and Louisiana State, which had finished the regular season ranked No. 3, won the BCS version of the national championship by beating No. 2 Oklahoma. The Sooners had gotten into the title game despite not winning its conference championship, having suffered a 35-7 thrashing by Kansas State. Strength of schedule? Three of LSU's regular season victories were over Louisiana-Monroe, Louisiana Tech, and Western Illinois. Although the LSU-Oklahoma game in the Sugar bowl had been designated by the BCS as the national championship game, the AP refused to go along and, rightly so, rewarded the Trojans for their 28-14 victory over No. 4 Michigan, by keeping them at No.1.
The following year there were three undefeated teams at year's end and it was Auburn that was the odd man out. Fittingly, USC, given the chance it had been denied the year before, wiped out Oklahoma in the national championship game.
At least, the BCS has tweaked its formula in recent years so it is no longer so dependent on strength of schedule in making its final rankings. Certainly, strength of schedule should be considered, but the BCS was relying on computers which already had taken scheduling into consideration and then applying the double whammy of a separate strength of schedule category.
Strength of schedule is no longer a separate component of the formula. However, some of the computers still ignore margin of victory as a criterion, thus judging a 56-20 Texas Tech whipping of seventh-ranked Oklahoma State of no greater value than Alabama's overtime squeeker over a 15th-ranked LSU playing with a quarterback who couldn't hit a barn door with a bazooka from three yards away.
It probably doesn't matter much if Texas Tech is ranked No.1 or No.2, since getting into the championship game is all that really counts. But don't count on the unbeaten Red Raiders to get there, anyway. They still have to play at Oklahoma, where they will be an underdog. A Sooner victory in that game would create a three-way tie atop the Big 12 South division, unarguably the strongest division in the country. If that should happen, the title game berth would go to the highest ranked of the three teams. Unless, of course, and this is the BCS's worst nightmare, a two-loss Missouri or, worse yet, a three-loss Kansas wins the Big 12 North and knocks off the Southern division champion in the Big 12 title game.
A little more certain is the probability that The Southeast Conference champion will play for the national title. But it's not all that certain that Alabama will be that team. Right now, most SEC observors feel that once-beaten Florida will take the measure of the unbeaten Crimson Tide. Florida still has what could be a tough game against South Carolina, led by former Gators coach Steve Spurrier. Even a second loss for Florida would not necessarily end their national title hopes, given the wide-spread notion that SEC football is the best in the country. And, of course, there is plenty of precedence that would give Alabama entre to the No.1 vs. No.2 game even if it loses its conference championship game.
As for other one-loss teams, Penn State has no shot after suffering its lone defeat Saturday on a last second field goal at Iowa. The Nittany Lions will have to pay the price for fellow Big Ten school Ohio State's blowout losses in the last two championship games. Southern Cal's chances are a little better, although the Trojans carry the stigma of playing in a Pacific Coast conference that is having a down year. There is also the fact that if Oregon State wins out, the Beavers, who handed USC its lone loss, will be the Pac 10 champion.
And so it is that the ground swell for an eight team playoff continues to grow. But that begs the question: Who's going to chose the eight teams? My own suggestion would be to take the champions of the six conferences currently associated with the BCS plus the two highest ranked teams not automatically chosen. Otherwise you are certain to hear from fans of several teams that barely fail to make the tournament, the pitiable cry: "We're No. eight"
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
By Bob Markus
It is one of the most famous sports photographs of all-time, right up there with the rear view image of a dying Babe Ruth, wearing his No.3 Yankee pinstripes and leaning on his bat as if it were a cane, in his farewell appearance at Yankee Stadium; right up there with the shot of New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle, battered and bleeding, on his knees after a Giants' defeat in his final NFL season. It shows a foggy-eyed Gene Tunney, his gloved left hand grasping the lower strand of rope, trying to get up while, immediately behind him, referee Dave Barry is trying to get Jack Dempsey to go to a neutral corner. It is, of course, the quintessential image of the famous "long count" fight in Chicago's Soldier Field and I used to look at it every day on a wall in the sports department of the ChicagoTribune.
What brings it to mind is an almost serendipitous congruence of events over the last week. On Monday of last week, after playing golf, I stopped at the local library to pick up a book my wife had reserved. As it happens, the book wasn't there, but I took a few minutes to browse through the stacks and discovered a book Called "Tunney" with the subtitle "Boxing's Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey." Being a boxing fan, but knowing little about Tunney other than that he was a great boxer who actually read books, I checked it out.
I started reading it almost immediately, but somehow by Saturday had not gotten even halfway through it. I sometimes say, only half in jest, that since my retirement a dozen years ago I often wonder how I ever found time to work. When I was writing sports for The Tribune I usually read at least one book a week and once read two complete novels in one day (I admit that neither was "War and Peace" or even "Rabbit Run.") Now I sometimes go for days without reading anything but newspapers and magazines. Don't ask me where the time goes because I don't know, although I suspect the time spent on the computer may have something to do with it.
Any way, by Saturday night I had just gotten to the part where Tunney is about to get his clock cleaned by Harry Greb while Dempsey is still in damage control mode over his failure to go into military service in World War I. Although I like to keep autumn Saturdays free for college football, I had allowed myself to be coerced into playing bridge in the couples group my wife founded. That took care of all but the first half of the early games and the late afternoon games were a total washout. We did get home in time for me to watch Missouri, my alma mater, blow out Colorado and after that I switched back and forth between Penn State-Ohio State and the World Series. When the Series game ended, somewhere around midnight, I discovered there was a boxing match on Showtime.
I hadn't a clue as to who the fighters were but I could see that I had gotten in on the start of a 12-round fight. After watching the first two rounds I asked myself if I really wanted to stay up past 1 a.m. to watch the conclusion and decided in the negative. So I went to bed, but a strange thing happened. Well, maybe not so strange. Somewhere around 3 a.m. I woke up for the reason that men of a certain age often do, but unlike most nights, I couldn't get back to sleep. So I slipped out of bed and went to the living room and turned on the TV. There on the screen was the same fight I had been watching three hours before, but now it was in the 11th round (obviously, it was a taped second screening of the original live bout).
The announcers quickly caught me up on the fact that I was watching the end of an IBF super middleweight championship bout from Montreal and that the champion, French Canadian Lucian Bute, had won all 11 rounds thus far over his American challenger, Librado Andrade. Bute, who had entered the bout with a 22-0 professional record, seemed certain of remaining unbeaten--until Andrade finally started to find the range. Before long, Bute was in real trouble. With less than a minute to go in the fight, he was despertely holding on. Twice he reeled backwards from one corner to the opposite corner without being hit. Finally, Andrade caught up to him and hit him with everything but the ring post. With 3 seconds to go, Bute hit the canvas. By rule, he could not be saved by the bell. So one thing was clear--he would have to regain his feet within 10 seconds.
But that was the only thing that was clear. Because referee Marion Wright, after reaching the count of five, stopped counting and ordered Andrade to a neutral corner. He might have taken an additional five or six seconds before picking up the count at six. Bute, by this time, was standing, although he didn't appear in any shape to continue fighting. But, since the bell, presumably, had sounded, he didn't need to be able to continue. All he needed to do was stand up and he actually appeared to have accomplished that in seven or eight seconds. Bute was awarded the unanimous decision amid a great deal of tumult. Both ring announcers began screaming about a long count and both Andrade's manager and the fighter himself said the fight had been stolen from them. Even referee Wright seemed a bit confused. He said that Andrade had "cost himself the fight" by not going to a neutral corner. "If he'd gone to a neutral corner he'd have won the fight," Wright said. But the referee had turned away from Bute in order to remonstrate with Andrade and thus did not see the champion pop to his feet well inside the limit.
The similarities between the two "long count" fights are evident. The winners in both lost only one round, the one in which they were knocked down. In both fights the losers cried "We wuz robbed." In both fights no one knew for sure if the champion could have survived without the extra time. Tunney always claimed he could have gotten up at any time after the count reached two, but stayed down to rest. Bute said he was more tired than hurt. There is one huge difference, however. The Dempsey-Tunney fight was seen by 104,000 people in Soldier field and heard by 50 million fight fans worldwide. It dominated the newspapers for days afterward. It is still talked about today, more than 80 years later.
The Bute-Andrade fight? I'll bet this is the first you've heard about it.
Blogger's note: Next Tuesday I'll be an election worker. No time for bloggin'. See you Nov. 11
It is one of the most famous sports photographs of all-time, right up there with the rear view image of a dying Babe Ruth, wearing his No.3 Yankee pinstripes and leaning on his bat as if it were a cane, in his farewell appearance at Yankee Stadium; right up there with the shot of New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle, battered and bleeding, on his knees after a Giants' defeat in his final NFL season. It shows a foggy-eyed Gene Tunney, his gloved left hand grasping the lower strand of rope, trying to get up while, immediately behind him, referee Dave Barry is trying to get Jack Dempsey to go to a neutral corner. It is, of course, the quintessential image of the famous "long count" fight in Chicago's Soldier Field and I used to look at it every day on a wall in the sports department of the ChicagoTribune.
What brings it to mind is an almost serendipitous congruence of events over the last week. On Monday of last week, after playing golf, I stopped at the local library to pick up a book my wife had reserved. As it happens, the book wasn't there, but I took a few minutes to browse through the stacks and discovered a book Called "Tunney" with the subtitle "Boxing's Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey." Being a boxing fan, but knowing little about Tunney other than that he was a great boxer who actually read books, I checked it out.
I started reading it almost immediately, but somehow by Saturday had not gotten even halfway through it. I sometimes say, only half in jest, that since my retirement a dozen years ago I often wonder how I ever found time to work. When I was writing sports for The Tribune I usually read at least one book a week and once read two complete novels in one day (I admit that neither was "War and Peace" or even "Rabbit Run.") Now I sometimes go for days without reading anything but newspapers and magazines. Don't ask me where the time goes because I don't know, although I suspect the time spent on the computer may have something to do with it.
Any way, by Saturday night I had just gotten to the part where Tunney is about to get his clock cleaned by Harry Greb while Dempsey is still in damage control mode over his failure to go into military service in World War I. Although I like to keep autumn Saturdays free for college football, I had allowed myself to be coerced into playing bridge in the couples group my wife founded. That took care of all but the first half of the early games and the late afternoon games were a total washout. We did get home in time for me to watch Missouri, my alma mater, blow out Colorado and after that I switched back and forth between Penn State-Ohio State and the World Series. When the Series game ended, somewhere around midnight, I discovered there was a boxing match on Showtime.
I hadn't a clue as to who the fighters were but I could see that I had gotten in on the start of a 12-round fight. After watching the first two rounds I asked myself if I really wanted to stay up past 1 a.m. to watch the conclusion and decided in the negative. So I went to bed, but a strange thing happened. Well, maybe not so strange. Somewhere around 3 a.m. I woke up for the reason that men of a certain age often do, but unlike most nights, I couldn't get back to sleep. So I slipped out of bed and went to the living room and turned on the TV. There on the screen was the same fight I had been watching three hours before, but now it was in the 11th round (obviously, it was a taped second screening of the original live bout).
The announcers quickly caught me up on the fact that I was watching the end of an IBF super middleweight championship bout from Montreal and that the champion, French Canadian Lucian Bute, had won all 11 rounds thus far over his American challenger, Librado Andrade. Bute, who had entered the bout with a 22-0 professional record, seemed certain of remaining unbeaten--until Andrade finally started to find the range. Before long, Bute was in real trouble. With less than a minute to go in the fight, he was despertely holding on. Twice he reeled backwards from one corner to the opposite corner without being hit. Finally, Andrade caught up to him and hit him with everything but the ring post. With 3 seconds to go, Bute hit the canvas. By rule, he could not be saved by the bell. So one thing was clear--he would have to regain his feet within 10 seconds.
But that was the only thing that was clear. Because referee Marion Wright, after reaching the count of five, stopped counting and ordered Andrade to a neutral corner. He might have taken an additional five or six seconds before picking up the count at six. Bute, by this time, was standing, although he didn't appear in any shape to continue fighting. But, since the bell, presumably, had sounded, he didn't need to be able to continue. All he needed to do was stand up and he actually appeared to have accomplished that in seven or eight seconds. Bute was awarded the unanimous decision amid a great deal of tumult. Both ring announcers began screaming about a long count and both Andrade's manager and the fighter himself said the fight had been stolen from them. Even referee Wright seemed a bit confused. He said that Andrade had "cost himself the fight" by not going to a neutral corner. "If he'd gone to a neutral corner he'd have won the fight," Wright said. But the referee had turned away from Bute in order to remonstrate with Andrade and thus did not see the champion pop to his feet well inside the limit.
The similarities between the two "long count" fights are evident. The winners in both lost only one round, the one in which they were knocked down. In both fights the losers cried "We wuz robbed." In both fights no one knew for sure if the champion could have survived without the extra time. Tunney always claimed he could have gotten up at any time after the count reached two, but stayed down to rest. Bute said he was more tired than hurt. There is one huge difference, however. The Dempsey-Tunney fight was seen by 104,000 people in Soldier field and heard by 50 million fight fans worldwide. It dominated the newspapers for days afterward. It is still talked about today, more than 80 years later.
The Bute-Andrade fight? I'll bet this is the first you've heard about it.
Blogger's note: Next Tuesday I'll be an election worker. No time for bloggin'. See you Nov. 11
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
By Bob Markus
The Price was right for the Tampa Bay Rays. Rookie pitcher David Price was the right man at the right time and that's why the incredible saga of the last-to-first Rays goes on. Of course, Rays' manager Joe Maddon had little choice but to employ the 6-foot, 6 inch lefty under the circumstances. The circumstances were these: The Rays were about to gag up a three games to one lead over the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series in spite of having a 7-0 late inning lead in Game five.
The Price was right for the Tampa Bay Rays. Rookie pitcher David Price was the right man at the right time and that's why the incredible saga of the last-to-first Rays goes on. Of course, Rays' manager Joe Maddon had little choice but to employ the 6-foot, 6 inch lefty under the circumstances. The circumstances were these: The Rays were about to gag up a three games to one lead over the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series in spite of having a 7-0 late inning lead in Game five.
Maddon had made one of his few blunders in the seventh inning of Game five when he allowed right hander Grant Balfour to face David Ortiz with two men on and a run already in. Still leading 7-1, the only way the Rays were going to lose this game was if Big Papi broke out of his home run slump. Maddon should have brought in a left hander at this point, but he stuck with Balfour and Ortiz, almost predictably, crushed a three-run homer.
Even though they still trailed 7-4, the Red Sox now had the momentum and a good bit of history on their side. Twice before in this decade the Red Sox had overcome three games to one deficits to reach the World Series. Against the New York Yankees in 2004 they became the only major league team ever to crawl out of a 3-0 hole. Only last year they spotted the Cleveland Indians a 3-1 lead and roared back to reach--and win--the World Series. It now seemed inevitable that they were on their way to doing it again. That feeling grew stronger when, after completing their jaw-dropping comeback in game five, they won game six in St.Petersburg to square the series.
Now here they were, trailing 3-1 in the eighth but with the bases loaded and lefty swinging J.D. Drew at the plate. As the late announcer Harry Caray used to love to say, "there's danger here, cherie." Indeed. It was Drew, after all, whose two-run homer off right hander Dan Wheeler in the eighth inning of game five had drawn the Sox within a run and it was Drew whose line drive over the head of right fielder Gabe Gross had driven in the winner.
Maddon was not about to make the same mistake twice in the same series. Having already used lefty J.P. Howell earlier in the inning, he called on Price, who had been a major leaguer for all of a month and had never saved a game in the big leagues--had never won one, for that matter, before this series. "We'll call him The Ice Man now," gushed Howell, after Price not only blew away Drew to end the threat, but notched two more strikeouts in the ninth while nailing down the victory.
The World Series, which starts tomorrow night in St. Petersburg, could be anti-climactic. In recent years one or both of the league championship series have produced more compelling baseball than the World Series. Three of the last four Fall Classics have been four-game sweeps and the other took the St. Louis Cardinals just five games to dispatch the Detroit Tigers. Love them or hate them the New York Yankees could always be counted on to give the Series cache. In the last 11 years, 10 different teams have represented the National League in the Series. Oddly enough, the only N.L. team to make it to the big dance twice is the Florida Marlins, the only team in the league that has never lost a playoff series--nor has it ever won a division championship.
Major League Baseball likely was hoping for a different outcome in both of this year's league championship series. A Manny Ramirez-led Dodgers team against the Red Sox would have made a great story line once it became obvious that the Chicago Cubs were not going to end their 100-year swoon any time soon.
But the Tampa Bay Rays make a pretty good story themselves. Now, in their 11th season, the Rays never won more than 70 games in a 162-game season. A year ago they had the worst record in baseball. Known as the Devil Rays since their inception, the Rays exorcised the Devil part of their nickname this year, a fact that probably had nothing to do with their amazing turn around. On the other hand, what other explanation is there? Sure, there is that talented young pitching rotation, but with closer Troy Percival out with an injury their bullpen by committee is only sometimes effective. They have some good young players like rookie third baseman Evan Longoria and center fielder B.J. Upton, but aside from Carl Crawford and Rocco Baldelli, both of whom have battled injuries, there are few Rays players who would be recognized outside Pinellas County.
But now The Ice Man cometh and could be the deciding factor in the upcoming series. The Philadelphia Phillies resemble the Boston Red Sox in many ways. Like the Red Sox, the Phils have an All-Star second baseman in Chase Utley. Like the Red Sox, the Phils have a big bopper in Ryan Howard. Like the Red Sox, the Phils have a dominant closer in Brad Lidge. Lidge, in fact, failed to save only one game all year, but that was the All-Star game. Because of that lone failure the home field advantage goes to Tampa Bay. Playing in quirky Tropicana Field, the Rays had the best home record in baseball. I like Tampa Bay in six games.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
By Bob Markus
I love sports and I love movies, therefore I must love sports movies. If you agree witjh that statement you've just flunked Logic 101. Indeed, I find many sports movies insipid, inaccurate and incredibly formulaic. The good guys always win, unless it's a boxing movie, in which case the good guy, if there is one, will often lose (Raging Bull, Cinderella Man, The Harder They Fall, Requiem for a Heavyweight)--or even die (Champion, Million Dollar Baby.) David always beats Goliath, without even resorting to a slingshot, and always on the last play of the game or the final stride of the race. Usually there are some incredible obstacles to overcome, most often posed by a cheating, treacherous opponent. Or else there's the tough-as-nails coach with a soft spot in his heart who relentlessly spurs the protagonist to an improbable victory.
So, it was with little enthusiasm that I went to see The Express over the week-end. My wife and I try to see a movie once a week, usually on Sunday afternoon. Our tastes are fairly similar, although she tends to like what I consider "weepers" more than I do and I like Westerns more than she does. We both like foreign films and ensemble movies, which usually feature several good acting performances. We pretty much like the same actors (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Tim Robbins and Ed Harris to name a few) and will usually go to their films no matter what the critics say about them. Although she can take sports--up to a point--or leave them alone, it ironically is she who usually suggests seeing a sports-themed movie.
Since we'd seen most of the movies playing at our nearby theaters, or at least all of them we cared to see, The Express seemed about the best we were going to do. I personally would have preferred to stay home and watch the Dolphins find a new way to blow a football game, but that would not have been prudent. In these tough economic times, divorce is not an option.
I liked the movie. Really liked it. The story of Ernie Davis of Syracuse, the first black Heisman Trophy winner, was not unfamiliar to me. I knew he had followed Jim Brown to Syracuse, had played brilliantly, and had died of leukemia before he could play pro ball. I did not know, although I probably should have, that in 1959 racial hatred was still so rampant on the playing fields of America.
Two of the more memorable scenes in the movie involve racist abuse--shouted epithets, thrown bottles, death threats--from fans at a game in West Virginia and again in the Cotton bowl in Dallas. The conduct by Texas Longhorn players and fans when Syracuse played for the national championship in the 1960 Cotton bowl seemed so outrageous I thought it was probably exaggerated. There were scenes of Texas players piling on Davis, throwing punches and inciting a half time brawl. "That was a little over the top," I told my wife afterwards. But when I got home I Googled it on my computer and found that even the headlines in the next day's Dallas paper mentioned "punches thrown."
The Express is not only Ernie Davis' story, but that of Syracuse Coach Ben Schwartzwalder, played superbly by Dennis Quaid. Schwartzwalder is portrayed as an old school coach who is trying to cope with a changing world. "You're not here to play games," he tells his team. "You're here to win games." While not overtly racist--after all he has recruited two black super stars and will afterwards recruit many more--Schwartzwalder seems to not want to challenge the status quo. When Davis runs the ball down to the West Virginia 5-yard line, the coach wants to pull him out of the game to let a white teammate get the touchdown. His rationale is that if Davis dented the end zone, the crowd might segue from hostile to murderous.
While his relationship with Jim Brown, who probably should have been the first black Heisman winner, seemed a little strained--Brown after all was, in the Jackie Robinson mold, a man who did not hide his feelings--Quaid's Schwartzwalder seemed to develop a close bond with Davis, portrayed by Rob Brown.
The football scenes are not entirely realistic, with Davis often leaping over several defenders and alternately knocking them down or spinning away from them two at a time. His 87-yard touchdown gallop in the Cotton bowl seems to be twice that long. But most of the incidents shown in the movie did occur.
For Syracuse football the 1959 National championship was a lofty perch that would not even be approached again for nearly 30 years. Schwartzwalder continued to recruit great running backs like Floyd Little, Jim Nance and Larry Csonka. He had some measure of success, but eventually was fired in the wake of a revolt of black players at a time when similar uprisings were occurring across the country.
In 1987 the Orangemen, under Dick MacPherson, made a national championship run. They went 11-0 in the regular season, including a 48-21 dismantling of Penn State. Unranked in the preseason polls, it took the Orangemen half the season to get noticed and they never got higher than No.4, which is where they finished. The season ended in a bittersweet Sugar bowl when, eschewing a chance to win or lose the game on the final play from the Syracuse 13, Auburn coach Pat Dye sent kicker Win (or tie) Lyle onto the field for a 30-yard field goal that produced a 16-16 tie.
There was a bittersweet ending, too, for quarterback Don McPherson, who should have become the second Syracuse Heisman winner. I had seen him destroy Penn State, followed him closely for the rest of the season, and named him No.1 on my Heisman ballot. But Notre Dame receiver Tim Brown won the trophy by a comfortable margin over McPherson. So Ernie Davis still stands alone and, now, his memory may stand forever.
I love sports and I love movies, therefore I must love sports movies. If you agree witjh that statement you've just flunked Logic 101. Indeed, I find many sports movies insipid, inaccurate and incredibly formulaic. The good guys always win, unless it's a boxing movie, in which case the good guy, if there is one, will often lose (Raging Bull, Cinderella Man, The Harder They Fall, Requiem for a Heavyweight)--or even die (Champion, Million Dollar Baby.) David always beats Goliath, without even resorting to a slingshot, and always on the last play of the game or the final stride of the race. Usually there are some incredible obstacles to overcome, most often posed by a cheating, treacherous opponent. Or else there's the tough-as-nails coach with a soft spot in his heart who relentlessly spurs the protagonist to an improbable victory.
So, it was with little enthusiasm that I went to see The Express over the week-end. My wife and I try to see a movie once a week, usually on Sunday afternoon. Our tastes are fairly similar, although she tends to like what I consider "weepers" more than I do and I like Westerns more than she does. We both like foreign films and ensemble movies, which usually feature several good acting performances. We pretty much like the same actors (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Tim Robbins and Ed Harris to name a few) and will usually go to their films no matter what the critics say about them. Although she can take sports--up to a point--or leave them alone, it ironically is she who usually suggests seeing a sports-themed movie.
Since we'd seen most of the movies playing at our nearby theaters, or at least all of them we cared to see, The Express seemed about the best we were going to do. I personally would have preferred to stay home and watch the Dolphins find a new way to blow a football game, but that would not have been prudent. In these tough economic times, divorce is not an option.
I liked the movie. Really liked it. The story of Ernie Davis of Syracuse, the first black Heisman Trophy winner, was not unfamiliar to me. I knew he had followed Jim Brown to Syracuse, had played brilliantly, and had died of leukemia before he could play pro ball. I did not know, although I probably should have, that in 1959 racial hatred was still so rampant on the playing fields of America.
Two of the more memorable scenes in the movie involve racist abuse--shouted epithets, thrown bottles, death threats--from fans at a game in West Virginia and again in the Cotton bowl in Dallas. The conduct by Texas Longhorn players and fans when Syracuse played for the national championship in the 1960 Cotton bowl seemed so outrageous I thought it was probably exaggerated. There were scenes of Texas players piling on Davis, throwing punches and inciting a half time brawl. "That was a little over the top," I told my wife afterwards. But when I got home I Googled it on my computer and found that even the headlines in the next day's Dallas paper mentioned "punches thrown."
The Express is not only Ernie Davis' story, but that of Syracuse Coach Ben Schwartzwalder, played superbly by Dennis Quaid. Schwartzwalder is portrayed as an old school coach who is trying to cope with a changing world. "You're not here to play games," he tells his team. "You're here to win games." While not overtly racist--after all he has recruited two black super stars and will afterwards recruit many more--Schwartzwalder seems to not want to challenge the status quo. When Davis runs the ball down to the West Virginia 5-yard line, the coach wants to pull him out of the game to let a white teammate get the touchdown. His rationale is that if Davis dented the end zone, the crowd might segue from hostile to murderous.
While his relationship with Jim Brown, who probably should have been the first black Heisman winner, seemed a little strained--Brown after all was, in the Jackie Robinson mold, a man who did not hide his feelings--Quaid's Schwartzwalder seemed to develop a close bond with Davis, portrayed by Rob Brown.
The football scenes are not entirely realistic, with Davis often leaping over several defenders and alternately knocking them down or spinning away from them two at a time. His 87-yard touchdown gallop in the Cotton bowl seems to be twice that long. But most of the incidents shown in the movie did occur.
For Syracuse football the 1959 National championship was a lofty perch that would not even be approached again for nearly 30 years. Schwartzwalder continued to recruit great running backs like Floyd Little, Jim Nance and Larry Csonka. He had some measure of success, but eventually was fired in the wake of a revolt of black players at a time when similar uprisings were occurring across the country.
In 1987 the Orangemen, under Dick MacPherson, made a national championship run. They went 11-0 in the regular season, including a 48-21 dismantling of Penn State. Unranked in the preseason polls, it took the Orangemen half the season to get noticed and they never got higher than No.4, which is where they finished. The season ended in a bittersweet Sugar bowl when, eschewing a chance to win or lose the game on the final play from the Syracuse 13, Auburn coach Pat Dye sent kicker Win (or tie) Lyle onto the field for a 30-yard field goal that produced a 16-16 tie.
There was a bittersweet ending, too, for quarterback Don McPherson, who should have become the second Syracuse Heisman winner. I had seen him destroy Penn State, followed him closely for the rest of the season, and named him No.1 on my Heisman ballot. But Notre Dame receiver Tim Brown won the trophy by a comfortable margin over McPherson. So Ernie Davis still stands alone and, now, his memory may stand forever.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
By Bob Markus
No mas. I surrender. I've finally found the antidote for my seemingly incurable case of Cubs' fever. Thank you, Alfonso Soriano. Thank you, Ryan Dempster. Thank you, Aramis Ramirez. I always thought that to be a Cubs fan was to be shackled forever to a dream--a bad dream. A Cubs fan is born, not made. A Cubs fan can no more stop being a Cubs fan than he can stop the rotation of the earth around the sun. To a Cubs fan, the boys in blue ARE the sun. His credo is: The sun will come out tomorrow.
No it won't.
There is no tomorrow for this wretched tease of a franchise. All their tomorrows were used up in the hideous three-game meltdown last week that finally freed me from a lifetime of enslavement. I've lived 1,000 dreams with the Chicago Cubs and died 1,000 deaths. But, no mas. Never again.
The Cubs did not just lose a National league division playoff to the Los Angeles Dodgers, they lost their self-respect. They lost their dignity. And at long, long last, they lost me. What a relief! I no longer will have to awaken at 1 in the morning and rush to my computer to find out how the Cubs did on the west coast. I no longer will have to worry about whether Soriano will break his slump or Kerry Woods will break a toe or Carlos Zambrano will break a bat over his knee.
I'll always have my Cubs' memories. I'll have my yesterdays, But I won't have my tomorrows. Nor, I'm now convinced, will the Cubs themselves. No matter how well they perform during the regular season, no matter how many games they win, how many baseballs they send over the ivy walls of Wrigley and onto Sheffield Avenue, when playoff time rolls around they'll choke.
That is perhaps too harsh a word. I can remember sitting in the Yankees dugout one day in 1979 and talking with Tommy John, whom I'd known since his days as a White Sox rookie. Michigan State had just beaten Indiana State for the NCAA championship a few weeks earlier, and I said that Larry Bird, who had been practically a one-man team for the previously unbeaten Sycamores, had choked down the stretch. John was more than incensed. He was outraged. "Never say that," he rasped. "Never say an athlete choked."
I'm sorry, Tommy, but what am I supposed to say when a Soriano, one of baseball's highest paid performers, constantly swings--and misses--at balls two feet off the plate? What am I to say when Ramirez, the Cubs' leading r.b.i. man, known for his clutch hitting, pounds the ball futility into the dirt on at bat after at bat with runners on base? What am I to say when Dempster, with his gaudy 14-3 record at Wrigley Field, walks seven men and, almost inevitably, gives up a grand slam homer, to set the tone for the entire three-game fiasco? What am I supposed to say when a sure-handed second baseman and a Gold Glove first baseman kick successive double play balls that lead to four unearned runs?
All right, I'll take it back. The Cubs didn't choke. They just succumbed to the pressure of their 100 years of World Series futilty and the corresponding expectations of their fans. Oh, well, as Jack Brickhouse used to say: "Anyone can have a bad century." But, then, as Al Jolson used to say: "You ain't seen nothing yet."
I've seen enough. I've been a Cubs' fan for nearly 70 years. I was 7-years-old when I got my first glimpse of Wrigley Field. It was a double header on the Fourth of July in 1941 against the St. Louis Cardinals and I'll never forget the sight of the Cardinals' outfielders--Johnny Hopp, Terry Moore, and Country Slaughter--chasing down fly balls as gracefully as gazelles during fielding practice. During the war years, when my father was in the army, serving in Attu in the Aleutian islands, my mother would take me to the ball park on ladies day, when she got in free and I think I paid 25 cents. I remember seeing the New York Giants with player-manager Mel Ott, whose odd batting style--he used to raise his right leg two feet off the ground before exploding into the pitch--belied his 511 career home runs.
It was while watching a game at Wrigley that I discovered I needed glasses;I couldn't read the numbers on the players' backs, as my uncle dutifully reported to my mother when we got home. I was in the center field bleachers for the famous "home run inside the glove" play when Andy Pafko insisted he had caught a sinking liner by the Cardinals' Glenn Nelson and held the ball in the air for the umpires to see while Nelson circled the bases. I had an unobstructed view and I was wearing my glasses and I can tell Andy with certitude that he trapped the ball.
I was in the upper grandstand when Don Cardwell pitched his no-hitter in his first start for the Cubs and I was in the press box when Kenny Holtzman pitched his first no-hitter. That was in 1969 and we were all certain it was an omen, that next year was here. It wasn't, of course, even though the Cubs had three future Hall-of-Famers--Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins--on the roster and, a fourth, Ron Santo, who should be in the Hall.
The Cubs had a better team than the New York Mets, who won the World Series that year, just as they had a better team than the Dodgers this year. If there is anyone I feel sorry for it is Santo, who wears his broken Cubbie heart on his sleeve every day. I'm sure that Santo, as down as he must be after this latest heartbreak, will recover in time and next spring, when the players report to spring training in February, he will hear the crack of the bat and the crackle of a fastball smacking the catcher's mitt and his spirit will bloom again. He will believe again.
Not me. I've finally given up on the notion that the Cubs will even reach the World Series, let alone win it, in my lifetime. I'll probably still watch some of their games. But not as many. In my heart, I suppose, I'll still care. But not as deeply. I've been in love with the Cubs my whole life, but now I've lost my respect for them. I want a divorce.
No mas. I surrender. I've finally found the antidote for my seemingly incurable case of Cubs' fever. Thank you, Alfonso Soriano. Thank you, Ryan Dempster. Thank you, Aramis Ramirez. I always thought that to be a Cubs fan was to be shackled forever to a dream--a bad dream. A Cubs fan is born, not made. A Cubs fan can no more stop being a Cubs fan than he can stop the rotation of the earth around the sun. To a Cubs fan, the boys in blue ARE the sun. His credo is: The sun will come out tomorrow.
No it won't.
There is no tomorrow for this wretched tease of a franchise. All their tomorrows were used up in the hideous three-game meltdown last week that finally freed me from a lifetime of enslavement. I've lived 1,000 dreams with the Chicago Cubs and died 1,000 deaths. But, no mas. Never again.
The Cubs did not just lose a National league division playoff to the Los Angeles Dodgers, they lost their self-respect. They lost their dignity. And at long, long last, they lost me. What a relief! I no longer will have to awaken at 1 in the morning and rush to my computer to find out how the Cubs did on the west coast. I no longer will have to worry about whether Soriano will break his slump or Kerry Woods will break a toe or Carlos Zambrano will break a bat over his knee.
I'll always have my Cubs' memories. I'll have my yesterdays, But I won't have my tomorrows. Nor, I'm now convinced, will the Cubs themselves. No matter how well they perform during the regular season, no matter how many games they win, how many baseballs they send over the ivy walls of Wrigley and onto Sheffield Avenue, when playoff time rolls around they'll choke.
That is perhaps too harsh a word. I can remember sitting in the Yankees dugout one day in 1979 and talking with Tommy John, whom I'd known since his days as a White Sox rookie. Michigan State had just beaten Indiana State for the NCAA championship a few weeks earlier, and I said that Larry Bird, who had been practically a one-man team for the previously unbeaten Sycamores, had choked down the stretch. John was more than incensed. He was outraged. "Never say that," he rasped. "Never say an athlete choked."
I'm sorry, Tommy, but what am I supposed to say when a Soriano, one of baseball's highest paid performers, constantly swings--and misses--at balls two feet off the plate? What am I to say when Ramirez, the Cubs' leading r.b.i. man, known for his clutch hitting, pounds the ball futility into the dirt on at bat after at bat with runners on base? What am I to say when Dempster, with his gaudy 14-3 record at Wrigley Field, walks seven men and, almost inevitably, gives up a grand slam homer, to set the tone for the entire three-game fiasco? What am I supposed to say when a sure-handed second baseman and a Gold Glove first baseman kick successive double play balls that lead to four unearned runs?
All right, I'll take it back. The Cubs didn't choke. They just succumbed to the pressure of their 100 years of World Series futilty and the corresponding expectations of their fans. Oh, well, as Jack Brickhouse used to say: "Anyone can have a bad century." But, then, as Al Jolson used to say: "You ain't seen nothing yet."
I've seen enough. I've been a Cubs' fan for nearly 70 years. I was 7-years-old when I got my first glimpse of Wrigley Field. It was a double header on the Fourth of July in 1941 against the St. Louis Cardinals and I'll never forget the sight of the Cardinals' outfielders--Johnny Hopp, Terry Moore, and Country Slaughter--chasing down fly balls as gracefully as gazelles during fielding practice. During the war years, when my father was in the army, serving in Attu in the Aleutian islands, my mother would take me to the ball park on ladies day, when she got in free and I think I paid 25 cents. I remember seeing the New York Giants with player-manager Mel Ott, whose odd batting style--he used to raise his right leg two feet off the ground before exploding into the pitch--belied his 511 career home runs.
It was while watching a game at Wrigley that I discovered I needed glasses;I couldn't read the numbers on the players' backs, as my uncle dutifully reported to my mother when we got home. I was in the center field bleachers for the famous "home run inside the glove" play when Andy Pafko insisted he had caught a sinking liner by the Cardinals' Glenn Nelson and held the ball in the air for the umpires to see while Nelson circled the bases. I had an unobstructed view and I was wearing my glasses and I can tell Andy with certitude that he trapped the ball.
I was in the upper grandstand when Don Cardwell pitched his no-hitter in his first start for the Cubs and I was in the press box when Kenny Holtzman pitched his first no-hitter. That was in 1969 and we were all certain it was an omen, that next year was here. It wasn't, of course, even though the Cubs had three future Hall-of-Famers--Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins--on the roster and, a fourth, Ron Santo, who should be in the Hall.
The Cubs had a better team than the New York Mets, who won the World Series that year, just as they had a better team than the Dodgers this year. If there is anyone I feel sorry for it is Santo, who wears his broken Cubbie heart on his sleeve every day. I'm sure that Santo, as down as he must be after this latest heartbreak, will recover in time and next spring, when the players report to spring training in February, he will hear the crack of the bat and the crackle of a fastball smacking the catcher's mitt and his spirit will bloom again. He will believe again.
Not me. I've finally given up on the notion that the Cubs will even reach the World Series, let alone win it, in my lifetime. I'll probably still watch some of their games. But not as many. In my heart, I suppose, I'll still care. But not as deeply. I've been in love with the Cubs my whole life, but now I've lost my respect for them. I want a divorce.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
By Bob Markus
It wasn't always this way. Frank Maloney can remember the days when he would go onto the nearby Addison Street "L" platform and virtually beg waiting passengers to visit Wrigley
field to see a Cubs game. That was during the period when Cubs' manager Lee Elia famously ranted: "Eighty-five per cent of the people have jobs; the other 15 per cent come out here and boo the Cubs."
Now, as the Cubs prepare to open the National league playoffs Wednesday against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Maloney, the Cubs' longtime ticket manager, just has to worry how he's going to accommodate everybody clammoring for tickets to the greatest show on earth--the Cubs' quest to end a century of failure by, at long last, winning the World Series. The players may have the easier job. "When we got in the playoffs in'84," Maloney recalls, "I could help practically everybody. But now everybody wants to go to these games."
Maloney came to the Cubs in 1981, a pivotal year in Cubs' history. In a strike-shortened season, the Cubs averaged a little better than 10,000 fans a game and by the time play was resumed following the lengthy walkout, the team had been sold to Chicago Tribune Company. Now, with new Tribune owner Sam Zell apparently intent on selling the team, every game is a sellout of more than 40,000 and, beginning in 2004, the yearly attendance has exceeded three million--even in 2006, when the team lost 96 games.
"In those early days," recalled Maloney, "the upper deck was not open. We had 4,000 season ticket holders. Today we have 28,000 and there is a waiting list of 90,000. " The Cubs could, of course, probably sell out the entire ball park for the season, but to do so might have a negative impact on future fans. The team used to advertise that 10,000 seats would go on sale the day of every game. "That's just not good business practice," says Maloney. "You can't be holding back 10,000 seats for day of game sale." Today there are no game day sales at the box office. Every available seat was gone within a week of being put on sale last February. "People were camping out overnight," Maloney recalls.
Maloney lists several factors in transforming Wrigley Field from a neighborhood park to a national shrine. "When I first came here," he offers, "the neighborhood was kind of questionable as to whether it was going to become slummy. Then early in the 1980s the Yuppies started coming in and along with them came restaurants and bars. Second was Harry Caray. He was enormously important. He really sold this place. The third thing was cable TV. When cable came the Sox decided to try it; they left WGN-TV and that left it wide open for us."
Even Maloney admits to being amazed that so many people can afford to visit the north side temple of baseball, given the high cost of tickets. The Cubs have some seats called dugout boxes that go for $200 each and the rest of the field level boxes go for $80. For the division series the prices will range from $100 to $25, with world series seats, should the Cubs get that far, much higher.
"It's really difficult for the average guy to bring his kids out to the ball park," acknowledges Maloney. "I don't know if I could go out and do that. The other side of the coin is that no matter how high we raise the prices, there's a frenzy to buy them. But we aren't the priciest team in baseball. In the new Yankee Stadium some of the seats will go for $2,500."
By rights, Maloney should probably be working for the White Sox. A south sider, he was a center and line backer at Mt.Carmel High school back in the days when the Caravan was dominating the area prep scene. After playing for Bump Elliott at Michigan, where he was "mediocre at best," he enrolled in law school at Northwestern. But he also served as a volunteer coach at his old high school and when the head coach left, Maloney, at 21, was offered the head coaching job.
Several years earlier another young Mt. Carmel coach, Terry Brennan, had gone back to his alma mater, Notre Dame, where he replaced a legend, Frank Leahy. Maloney followed a somewhat similar career path. He coached Mt. Carmel for six years and, after winning the city championship game over Dunbar before 65,000 fans in Soldier Field, went back to Michigan as offensive line coach for Elliott. That was in 1968 and, despite going 8-2, Elliott was fired after that season for the egregious sin of being blown out by Ohio State, 50-14, in the final game. "Bo (Schembechler) came in and kept two of us assistants," remembers Maloney. "I became defensive line coach and was with Bo for five years."
Obviously, Maloney was not going to replace Schembechler at his alma mater, but he did replace a legendary coach, Ben Schwartzwalder, at Syracuse. In a quarter of a century at Syracuse, Schwartzwalder produced one national championship and two of the greatest running backs in the history of football, Jim Brown and Ernie Davis. But he went 2-9 in his final season and Maloney was brought in to get the Orangemen back on track.
He never really did. In his best season he went 7-5, including a victory in the Independance bowl, Syracuse's first postseason appearance in 13 years. He turned out some outstanding players, including NFL Hall of Famer Art Monk, who years later invited Maloney to his induction ceremony. He surrounded himself with some outstanding young assistants--Tom Coughlin, Nick Saban, George O'Leary, Jerry Angelo, all of whom became well-known head coaches or, in Angelo's case, an NFL general manager. "We had a good go," he says. But after seven years he was fired and "I made the decision not to coach any more. I was from the old school--hard-nosed--and that doesn't fly now. I had some chances. I could have gone here; I could have gone there. After I'd been with the Cubs one year I had a chance to go to Green Bay as an assistant. "
He's never regretted his decision to stay with the Cubs. "I'm the luckiet guy in the world," he says, "just being in this ball park and seeing people. The other day a kid who played for me at Mt. Carmel called. I hadn't seen him for 30 years."
I imagine that, in the coming few weeks, Maloney will be hearing from a lot of people he hasn't seen in 30 years.
It wasn't always this way. Frank Maloney can remember the days when he would go onto the nearby Addison Street "L" platform and virtually beg waiting passengers to visit Wrigley
field to see a Cubs game. That was during the period when Cubs' manager Lee Elia famously ranted: "Eighty-five per cent of the people have jobs; the other 15 per cent come out here and boo the Cubs."
Now, as the Cubs prepare to open the National league playoffs Wednesday against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Maloney, the Cubs' longtime ticket manager, just has to worry how he's going to accommodate everybody clammoring for tickets to the greatest show on earth--the Cubs' quest to end a century of failure by, at long last, winning the World Series. The players may have the easier job. "When we got in the playoffs in'84," Maloney recalls, "I could help practically everybody. But now everybody wants to go to these games."
Maloney came to the Cubs in 1981, a pivotal year in Cubs' history. In a strike-shortened season, the Cubs averaged a little better than 10,000 fans a game and by the time play was resumed following the lengthy walkout, the team had been sold to Chicago Tribune Company. Now, with new Tribune owner Sam Zell apparently intent on selling the team, every game is a sellout of more than 40,000 and, beginning in 2004, the yearly attendance has exceeded three million--even in 2006, when the team lost 96 games.
"In those early days," recalled Maloney, "the upper deck was not open. We had 4,000 season ticket holders. Today we have 28,000 and there is a waiting list of 90,000. " The Cubs could, of course, probably sell out the entire ball park for the season, but to do so might have a negative impact on future fans. The team used to advertise that 10,000 seats would go on sale the day of every game. "That's just not good business practice," says Maloney. "You can't be holding back 10,000 seats for day of game sale." Today there are no game day sales at the box office. Every available seat was gone within a week of being put on sale last February. "People were camping out overnight," Maloney recalls.
Maloney lists several factors in transforming Wrigley Field from a neighborhood park to a national shrine. "When I first came here," he offers, "the neighborhood was kind of questionable as to whether it was going to become slummy. Then early in the 1980s the Yuppies started coming in and along with them came restaurants and bars. Second was Harry Caray. He was enormously important. He really sold this place. The third thing was cable TV. When cable came the Sox decided to try it; they left WGN-TV and that left it wide open for us."
Even Maloney admits to being amazed that so many people can afford to visit the north side temple of baseball, given the high cost of tickets. The Cubs have some seats called dugout boxes that go for $200 each and the rest of the field level boxes go for $80. For the division series the prices will range from $100 to $25, with world series seats, should the Cubs get that far, much higher.
"It's really difficult for the average guy to bring his kids out to the ball park," acknowledges Maloney. "I don't know if I could go out and do that. The other side of the coin is that no matter how high we raise the prices, there's a frenzy to buy them. But we aren't the priciest team in baseball. In the new Yankee Stadium some of the seats will go for $2,500."
By rights, Maloney should probably be working for the White Sox. A south sider, he was a center and line backer at Mt.Carmel High school back in the days when the Caravan was dominating the area prep scene. After playing for Bump Elliott at Michigan, where he was "mediocre at best," he enrolled in law school at Northwestern. But he also served as a volunteer coach at his old high school and when the head coach left, Maloney, at 21, was offered the head coaching job.
Several years earlier another young Mt. Carmel coach, Terry Brennan, had gone back to his alma mater, Notre Dame, where he replaced a legend, Frank Leahy. Maloney followed a somewhat similar career path. He coached Mt. Carmel for six years and, after winning the city championship game over Dunbar before 65,000 fans in Soldier Field, went back to Michigan as offensive line coach for Elliott. That was in 1968 and, despite going 8-2, Elliott was fired after that season for the egregious sin of being blown out by Ohio State, 50-14, in the final game. "Bo (Schembechler) came in and kept two of us assistants," remembers Maloney. "I became defensive line coach and was with Bo for five years."
Obviously, Maloney was not going to replace Schembechler at his alma mater, but he did replace a legendary coach, Ben Schwartzwalder, at Syracuse. In a quarter of a century at Syracuse, Schwartzwalder produced one national championship and two of the greatest running backs in the history of football, Jim Brown and Ernie Davis. But he went 2-9 in his final season and Maloney was brought in to get the Orangemen back on track.
He never really did. In his best season he went 7-5, including a victory in the Independance bowl, Syracuse's first postseason appearance in 13 years. He turned out some outstanding players, including NFL Hall of Famer Art Monk, who years later invited Maloney to his induction ceremony. He surrounded himself with some outstanding young assistants--Tom Coughlin, Nick Saban, George O'Leary, Jerry Angelo, all of whom became well-known head coaches or, in Angelo's case, an NFL general manager. "We had a good go," he says. But after seven years he was fired and "I made the decision not to coach any more. I was from the old school--hard-nosed--and that doesn't fly now. I had some chances. I could have gone here; I could have gone there. After I'd been with the Cubs one year I had a chance to go to Green Bay as an assistant. "
He's never regretted his decision to stay with the Cubs. "I'm the luckiet guy in the world," he says, "just being in this ball park and seeing people. The other day a kid who played for me at Mt. Carmel called. I hadn't seen him for 30 years."
I imagine that, in the coming few weeks, Maloney will be hearing from a lot of people he hasn't seen in 30 years.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
By Bob Markus
"What Babe Ruth joined together, George Brett tore asunder Friday night. In The House That Ruth Built, Brett wrecked the New York Yankees with a mamoth three-run home run in the seventh inning that sent the Kansas City Royals to a stunning 4-2 victory and into the World Series."
That was the lead of my story for the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 10, 1980, and the memory of that moment is the one I'll hold on to when metaphor gives way to reality later this year and the wrecking ball brings down Yankee Stadium, that great gray lady in the Bronx.
The situation was this: The Royals had taken a two games to none lead in the best of five American League Championship Series by winning the first two at home. But the Yankees, behind lefty Tommy John, were leading 2-1 in the seventh inning of Game Three and if John should falter there was always that ace in the hole--reliever Goose Gossage.
This was Gossage in his prime, the flame-throwing intimidator who had led the American League in saves. The call to the Goose came with two out and a man on base and after an infield hit by U.L. Washington, Brett stepped up to the plate. The Royals third baseman had just completed a season for the ages. His .390 batting average still remains the highest in the majors since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. This was drama of the highest order, the fastest gun on the hill versus the fastest bat on the planet and the game and perhaps the season on the line.
Upstairs in his private box, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner watched nervously and murmered: "This is what it's all about; Gossage vs. Brett. Brett is 0-for-7 right now? Don't tell me that; it doesn't mean a thing." And, of course, it didn't. Brett jumped on Gossage's first pitch and sent it screaming into the third deck in right field. There may have been longer homers hit in Yankee Stadium, but not many. There may have been more dramatic homers in baseball's most famous venue. But there can't have been any with more wrenching impact.
There are only a handfull of ball parks that enjoy the iconic status of Yankee Stadium. Fenway Park in Boston. Wrigley Field in Chicago. The rest of the historic hitting grounds have long given way to what is called progress, but actually is fiscal pragmatism. I'm not now nor have I ever been a Yankee fan. But love them or hate them, the Yankees still are the standard by which all other teams are measured. And Yankee Stadium, with its center field monuments and multiple championship banners, is still baseball's Valhalla. So I couldn't help but feel a twinge of regret while watching the closing ceremonies Sunday night.
This was the ball park where I saw Frank Gifford make one of the greatest football catches ever, laying out, parallel to the ground, to snare a Y.A. Tittle pass in a 1963 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers that put the Giants in the NFL championship game.
This was the park, too, where I saw rival catchers Johnny Bench and Thurman Munson engage in a mano a mano World Series batting duel to turn a four-game Cincinnati sweep into a compelling story--with a little help from Reds' manager Sparky Anderson. If you ever wondered what would happen if Superman fought Captain Marvel you should have been in Yankee Stadium that night. Munson had four straight hits, running his streak to six in a row, while Bench answered with two homers and five r.b.i.s in the 7-2 Cincinnati victory.
When it was over, the Yankees were dead, Munson's ego lay in tatters at his feet, and Anderson had elevated Bench to the realm of the immortals. "Don't ever compare anyone to Johnny Bench," said Anderson, when asked to do just that. "You don't want to embarrass anybody. When Johnny Bench was born I believe God came down and touched his mother on the forehead and said, 'I'm going to give you a son who will be one of the greatest ball players ever seen.'"
Munson was standing next to Anderson at the time and was livid. "Nobody likes to lose," he said, "but when I stand and hear the crock of shit I just heard, that's the most embarrassing thing I've heard tonight. To be belittled after the season I had and the game I had tonight--well, it's sad enough to lose without having your face rubbed in it."
"I wasn't talking about Munson," claimed Anderson, although, neither Bill Dickey nor Yogi Berra being anywhere in the vicinity, it's difficult to understand which Yankee immortal was being trashed. "They've tried to compare him to a lot catchers," insisted Anderson. "They tried to compare him to Carlton Fisk last year. You can't do that. He is in a class totally his own. He is not in the National League or the American League. He is in another league, the league up in the sky."
Unlike his ebullient manager, Bench seemed to have his spikes planted firmly on the ground. "I don't think we have to be that vain to worry about whether someone is greater than we are," he said. "Someone is always greater than we are and someone is always going to come along who's greater still."
For me, this postgame trialogue was like manna from heaven. (I'm not sure what manna is and I probably wouldn't like it, but, oh, well, one cliche's as good as another.) When I had entered Yankee Stadium that night I was handed a message to call my office. When I did, sports editor George Langford told me that my wife was in the hospital, having collapsed from a bleeding ulcer, that she was in no immediate danger, but I needed to get home.
I booked a flight for early the next morning and, although I have never violated the "no cheering in the press box" rule, I was silently praying for a Cincinnati sweep. I would be going home regardless, but I had been assigned to cover the World Series and I didn't want to leave the job unfinished. My prayers were answered--and then some.
"What Babe Ruth joined together, George Brett tore asunder Friday night. In The House That Ruth Built, Brett wrecked the New York Yankees with a mamoth three-run home run in the seventh inning that sent the Kansas City Royals to a stunning 4-2 victory and into the World Series."
That was the lead of my story for the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 10, 1980, and the memory of that moment is the one I'll hold on to when metaphor gives way to reality later this year and the wrecking ball brings down Yankee Stadium, that great gray lady in the Bronx.
The situation was this: The Royals had taken a two games to none lead in the best of five American League Championship Series by winning the first two at home. But the Yankees, behind lefty Tommy John, were leading 2-1 in the seventh inning of Game Three and if John should falter there was always that ace in the hole--reliever Goose Gossage.
This was Gossage in his prime, the flame-throwing intimidator who had led the American League in saves. The call to the Goose came with two out and a man on base and after an infield hit by U.L. Washington, Brett stepped up to the plate. The Royals third baseman had just completed a season for the ages. His .390 batting average still remains the highest in the majors since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. This was drama of the highest order, the fastest gun on the hill versus the fastest bat on the planet and the game and perhaps the season on the line.
Upstairs in his private box, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner watched nervously and murmered: "This is what it's all about; Gossage vs. Brett. Brett is 0-for-7 right now? Don't tell me that; it doesn't mean a thing." And, of course, it didn't. Brett jumped on Gossage's first pitch and sent it screaming into the third deck in right field. There may have been longer homers hit in Yankee Stadium, but not many. There may have been more dramatic homers in baseball's most famous venue. But there can't have been any with more wrenching impact.
There are only a handfull of ball parks that enjoy the iconic status of Yankee Stadium. Fenway Park in Boston. Wrigley Field in Chicago. The rest of the historic hitting grounds have long given way to what is called progress, but actually is fiscal pragmatism. I'm not now nor have I ever been a Yankee fan. But love them or hate them, the Yankees still are the standard by which all other teams are measured. And Yankee Stadium, with its center field monuments and multiple championship banners, is still baseball's Valhalla. So I couldn't help but feel a twinge of regret while watching the closing ceremonies Sunday night.
This was the ball park where I saw Frank Gifford make one of the greatest football catches ever, laying out, parallel to the ground, to snare a Y.A. Tittle pass in a 1963 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers that put the Giants in the NFL championship game.
This was the park, too, where I saw rival catchers Johnny Bench and Thurman Munson engage in a mano a mano World Series batting duel to turn a four-game Cincinnati sweep into a compelling story--with a little help from Reds' manager Sparky Anderson. If you ever wondered what would happen if Superman fought Captain Marvel you should have been in Yankee Stadium that night. Munson had four straight hits, running his streak to six in a row, while Bench answered with two homers and five r.b.i.s in the 7-2 Cincinnati victory.
When it was over, the Yankees were dead, Munson's ego lay in tatters at his feet, and Anderson had elevated Bench to the realm of the immortals. "Don't ever compare anyone to Johnny Bench," said Anderson, when asked to do just that. "You don't want to embarrass anybody. When Johnny Bench was born I believe God came down and touched his mother on the forehead and said, 'I'm going to give you a son who will be one of the greatest ball players ever seen.'"
Munson was standing next to Anderson at the time and was livid. "Nobody likes to lose," he said, "but when I stand and hear the crock of shit I just heard, that's the most embarrassing thing I've heard tonight. To be belittled after the season I had and the game I had tonight--well, it's sad enough to lose without having your face rubbed in it."
"I wasn't talking about Munson," claimed Anderson, although, neither Bill Dickey nor Yogi Berra being anywhere in the vicinity, it's difficult to understand which Yankee immortal was being trashed. "They've tried to compare him to a lot catchers," insisted Anderson. "They tried to compare him to Carlton Fisk last year. You can't do that. He is in a class totally his own. He is not in the National League or the American League. He is in another league, the league up in the sky."
Unlike his ebullient manager, Bench seemed to have his spikes planted firmly on the ground. "I don't think we have to be that vain to worry about whether someone is greater than we are," he said. "Someone is always greater than we are and someone is always going to come along who's greater still."
For me, this postgame trialogue was like manna from heaven. (I'm not sure what manna is and I probably wouldn't like it, but, oh, well, one cliche's as good as another.) When I had entered Yankee Stadium that night I was handed a message to call my office. When I did, sports editor George Langford told me that my wife was in the hospital, having collapsed from a bleeding ulcer, that she was in no immediate danger, but I needed to get home.
I booked a flight for early the next morning and, although I have never violated the "no cheering in the press box" rule, I was silently praying for a Cincinnati sweep. I would be going home regardless, but I had been assigned to cover the World Series and I didn't want to leave the job unfinished. My prayers were answered--and then some.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
By Bob Markus
Every time I tune in a newscast I'm told that there has been a shift in the polls. "A new poll shows that John McCain and Barack Obama are now dead even," one pundit tells me. "The latest poll shows that Senator McCain has pulled ahead of his opponent in the critical Panhandle of Oklahoma," shouts another. "This just in," intones another voice. "A poll of left handed oral surgeons shows Barack Obama is biting into John McCain's lead. Heh-heh."
I don't want to hear it. I want a poll I can trust. I want a meaningful poll. I want the AP college football poll. Now, the AP poll is not without its flaws, its little quirks. It tends to be a little too static sometimes, too slow to change. Once a team is anointed No. 1, it takes an earthquake to dislodge it. But at least it never told us: Dewey Defeats Truman.
And there are signs the college football writers who vote in the AP poll are becoming a little less unbending. They dropped Georgia out of their preseason No.1 spot despite an opening week victory and dropped the Bulldogs down again following last Saturday's lackluster 14-7 victory at South Carolina. I can't remember when that happened before. I was an AP voter for a few years back in the '80s and I always tried to vote on the basis of what a team had done rather than where I had ranked it the previous week.
Many of my fellow voters, however, seemed to feel that if they had ranked a team No.1 in the preseason poll they were honor-bound to keep it No.1 until it lost a game. Even then they would automatically elevate the No.2 team regardless of how that team had performed, as long as it kept on winning. That's why I've always thought there should be no preseason poll, which is a reflection of how the voters THINK a team will play.
Another guide line I tried to follow was to consider not only how a team played, but who it played. Today, strength of schedule is emphasized in making the pairing for the Bowl Championship Series title game. In fact, it's overemphasized. The formula utilizes both computer rankings and strength of schedule components. But, presumably, the computer rankings already have factored in strength of schedule.
To me, it appears the AP voters have gotten it right so far this year. They properly recognized East Carolina, a team that nobody had in his top 25, for its two upsets of ranked teams, and voted the Pirates into the top 15. They rewarded Southern Cal for its opening blowout of Virginia, moving the Trojans into the top spot, a move USC validated with its romp over Ohio State Saturday night.
Of course, five SEC teams in the top 10 seems a bit much, but that will sort itself out when those five teams--Florida, LSU, Auburn, Alabama, and Georgia start playing one another. First up: No. 6 LSU plays at Auburn Saturday night, and the host Tigers will need more than the three points that were enough to beat Mississippi State last Saturday. If the SEC is the conference of choice for the pollsters, then Tigers is the nickname of choice. In addition to Auburn and LSU, Missouri's Tigers are in the top ten, ranked No. 5.
There's still a long way to go, but Southern Cal seems secure in the No.1 spot. The Pac 10, which in my view was the best conference in the country the last few seasons, is way down this year and only Oregon seems a likely challenger to the powerful Trojans. And the Ducks, for the second year in a row, have lost their starting quarterback. Arizona State appeared to be a top 20 team until losing at home to UNLV Saturday night and California was bounced out of the top 25 by Maryland..
Southern Cal's blowout of Ohio State was pretty predictable. The Buckeyes looked terrible in their win over Ohio the previous week, when they trailed into the fourth quarter, and there's no need to recount their miserable failures in the last two BCS championship games. This simply is not that good a team. So if this is Southern Cal's signature victory of the season there is a chance that somebody--Oklahoma? Missouri? An unbeaten SEC champion?--could leapfrog the Trojans into the No.1 spot. But I can't see USC falling any farther than No.2, which still puts them into the title game.
SECOND THOUGHTS--Brigham Young may have another Heisman Trophy quarterback on its hands in Max Hall, who threw seven touchdown passes in the 59-0 torching of UCLA last week-end. Despite their long history of outstanding passers, which includes Steve Young and Virgil Carter, their only Heisman winner so far has been Ty Detmer. Missouri's Chase Daniel still looks like the front runner. . . .BYU, by the way, could run the table, at least until its final game when the Cougars play Utah in what looks like the Mountain West Conference championship game. The winner could go on to a BCS bowl game. Utah has a win over Michigan under its belt and both teams are ranked in the top 20. . . .Ohio State thought it had seen the last of the Trojans, but its next game will find them once more facing the men of Troy. This time it's Troy University and don't be totally shocked if the Buckeyes lose again. Troy is the only unbeaten team in the Sun Belt conference, which is lightly regarded, but has two victories over BCS teams this year. Arkansas State knocked off Texas A & M in the season opener and Middle Tennessee State upended Maryland a week later. Troy opened its season with a 31-17 win over Middle Tennessee. Regardless of the outcome Saturday, the Buckeyes might not be Troy's toughest opponent this season. The mini-Trojans still have to play at LSU in a game that was postponed by Hurricane Ike. . . .Don't put too much stock in Notre Dame's victory over Michigan. The Irish, who in most previous years would have been highly ranked after opening a season 2-0, received only 4 votes in the AP poll and rightly so. They struggled to beat San Diego State in the season opener and then beat the worst Michigan team I've seen since the late 1960s. That's when Bo Schembechler stepped in and returned the Wolverines to the glory days of Fritz Crisler. I had an early insight into Schembechler's fiery nature when I was paired with him in a golf outing the summer before his first season. I played my usual pathetic golf and Bo wasn't much better. At the end of the first nine he thrust his golf bag at the caddy and sputtered:"I gotta go and recruit."
Every time I tune in a newscast I'm told that there has been a shift in the polls. "A new poll shows that John McCain and Barack Obama are now dead even," one pundit tells me. "The latest poll shows that Senator McCain has pulled ahead of his opponent in the critical Panhandle of Oklahoma," shouts another. "This just in," intones another voice. "A poll of left handed oral surgeons shows Barack Obama is biting into John McCain's lead. Heh-heh."
I don't want to hear it. I want a poll I can trust. I want a meaningful poll. I want the AP college football poll. Now, the AP poll is not without its flaws, its little quirks. It tends to be a little too static sometimes, too slow to change. Once a team is anointed No. 1, it takes an earthquake to dislodge it. But at least it never told us: Dewey Defeats Truman.
And there are signs the college football writers who vote in the AP poll are becoming a little less unbending. They dropped Georgia out of their preseason No.1 spot despite an opening week victory and dropped the Bulldogs down again following last Saturday's lackluster 14-7 victory at South Carolina. I can't remember when that happened before. I was an AP voter for a few years back in the '80s and I always tried to vote on the basis of what a team had done rather than where I had ranked it the previous week.
Many of my fellow voters, however, seemed to feel that if they had ranked a team No.1 in the preseason poll they were honor-bound to keep it No.1 until it lost a game. Even then they would automatically elevate the No.2 team regardless of how that team had performed, as long as it kept on winning. That's why I've always thought there should be no preseason poll, which is a reflection of how the voters THINK a team will play.
Another guide line I tried to follow was to consider not only how a team played, but who it played. Today, strength of schedule is emphasized in making the pairing for the Bowl Championship Series title game. In fact, it's overemphasized. The formula utilizes both computer rankings and strength of schedule components. But, presumably, the computer rankings already have factored in strength of schedule.
To me, it appears the AP voters have gotten it right so far this year. They properly recognized East Carolina, a team that nobody had in his top 25, for its two upsets of ranked teams, and voted the Pirates into the top 15. They rewarded Southern Cal for its opening blowout of Virginia, moving the Trojans into the top spot, a move USC validated with its romp over Ohio State Saturday night.
Of course, five SEC teams in the top 10 seems a bit much, but that will sort itself out when those five teams--Florida, LSU, Auburn, Alabama, and Georgia start playing one another. First up: No. 6 LSU plays at Auburn Saturday night, and the host Tigers will need more than the three points that were enough to beat Mississippi State last Saturday. If the SEC is the conference of choice for the pollsters, then Tigers is the nickname of choice. In addition to Auburn and LSU, Missouri's Tigers are in the top ten, ranked No. 5.
There's still a long way to go, but Southern Cal seems secure in the No.1 spot. The Pac 10, which in my view was the best conference in the country the last few seasons, is way down this year and only Oregon seems a likely challenger to the powerful Trojans. And the Ducks, for the second year in a row, have lost their starting quarterback. Arizona State appeared to be a top 20 team until losing at home to UNLV Saturday night and California was bounced out of the top 25 by Maryland..
Southern Cal's blowout of Ohio State was pretty predictable. The Buckeyes looked terrible in their win over Ohio the previous week, when they trailed into the fourth quarter, and there's no need to recount their miserable failures in the last two BCS championship games. This simply is not that good a team. So if this is Southern Cal's signature victory of the season there is a chance that somebody--Oklahoma? Missouri? An unbeaten SEC champion?--could leapfrog the Trojans into the No.1 spot. But I can't see USC falling any farther than No.2, which still puts them into the title game.
SECOND THOUGHTS--Brigham Young may have another Heisman Trophy quarterback on its hands in Max Hall, who threw seven touchdown passes in the 59-0 torching of UCLA last week-end. Despite their long history of outstanding passers, which includes Steve Young and Virgil Carter, their only Heisman winner so far has been Ty Detmer. Missouri's Chase Daniel still looks like the front runner. . . .BYU, by the way, could run the table, at least until its final game when the Cougars play Utah in what looks like the Mountain West Conference championship game. The winner could go on to a BCS bowl game. Utah has a win over Michigan under its belt and both teams are ranked in the top 20. . . .Ohio State thought it had seen the last of the Trojans, but its next game will find them once more facing the men of Troy. This time it's Troy University and don't be totally shocked if the Buckeyes lose again. Troy is the only unbeaten team in the Sun Belt conference, which is lightly regarded, but has two victories over BCS teams this year. Arkansas State knocked off Texas A & M in the season opener and Middle Tennessee State upended Maryland a week later. Troy opened its season with a 31-17 win over Middle Tennessee. Regardless of the outcome Saturday, the Buckeyes might not be Troy's toughest opponent this season. The mini-Trojans still have to play at LSU in a game that was postponed by Hurricane Ike. . . .Don't put too much stock in Notre Dame's victory over Michigan. The Irish, who in most previous years would have been highly ranked after opening a season 2-0, received only 4 votes in the AP poll and rightly so. They struggled to beat San Diego State in the season opener and then beat the worst Michigan team I've seen since the late 1960s. That's when Bo Schembechler stepped in and returned the Wolverines to the glory days of Fritz Crisler. I had an early insight into Schembechler's fiery nature when I was paired with him in a golf outing the summer before his first season. I played my usual pathetic golf and Bo wasn't much better. At the end of the first nine he thrust his golf bag at the caddy and sputtered:"I gotta go and recruit."
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
By Bob Markus
A few days ago I received in the mail an offer from the Neptune Society to register me for a drawing for a free cremation. Since cremation is my choice for the disposal of my mortal remains, any way, I thought about it for quite awhile before depositing the invitation in the trash basket along with the remains of the other dozen or so solicitations that arrive daily.
I may be committed to the concept of cremation, but I'm not ready for the reality of the ash heap just yet. Besides, I didn't want anybody at the Neptune Society to be burdened with the guilt of a former New York Times obit writer who once famously admitted that he'd written some advance obits that were so good he could hardly wait for the subject to die so he could see his master work in print.
I've written some advance obits myself, but usually they involved people I knew so I really never had any desire to hasten their demise. Among the sports notables whose obits I wrote premortem were Jack Dempsey, Al Lopez, Harry Caray and Leo Durocher. Although I once met Dempsey in his New York restaurant, I can't claim to have really known him. But I was well acquainted with the last three, whose obituaries I wrote in the same day somewhere in the mid 1980s. All are gone now, but I was in my ninth year of retirement before Lopez, who lived to be 97, died in August of 2005. So I have no idea whether my 2o-year-old obit of El Senor, as the former catcher and White Sox manager was known, was used.
Only this morning did I learn of the passing of Don Gutteridge, the quiet--some would say, too quiet--man who succeeded Lopez as White Sox manager in 1970. Gutteridge was almost spectacularly unsuccesssful in his one year at the helm of the Sox, but he had earlier distinguished himself as a longtime coach for Lopez.
Two other deaths in the past week or so have been of more than passing interest to me. One was golfer Tommy Bolt, whom I never met, but nonetheless feel as if he were an intimate friend. My only personal contact with Bolt, the 1958 U.S. Open champion, came--where else?--on a golf course. The Tam O'Shanter Golf club in suburban Chicago to be precise.
Tam O'Shanter was the site of a yearly tournament backed by a local businessman, George S. May, and for a time it offered by far the highest payout of any tournament in the world. Think of it as the Dubai Desert Classic of its day. As a teenager, along with my best friend, Lawry Johnson, I'd go out to the tournament in the early morning and stay until the last shot was fired.
In those days, your daily pass entitled you to almost complete access to the players. You could pick out your favorite and walk right along with him down the fairway, unless your favorite was Ben Hogan, and then the size of his gallery mandated certain restraints. To be sure, I was a Ben Hogan fan, but it didn't take all day for him to play 18 holes. So one morning, Lawrey and I started following a young, good looking golfer named Tommy Bolt.
Bolt, it turned out, was not only a pretty good golfer, but a highly entertaining golfer, as well. As he strode down the fairway he'd make comments to the fans following in his wake. Over all these years I can still remember his screaming at a fan who had the temerity to talk while Tommy was lining up a shot, "put a nickel in your nose if you want to be a juke box." In addition, Bolt was prone to displaying his temper, alternately cursing and throwing his clubs whenever the gods of golf turned against him. But he was a beautiful shot maker and lots of fun being around.
The other recent death that caught my eye was that of Todd Cruz, a former utlity player for several teams, who died at the age of 52 while swimming in the pool of his Arizona apartment complex. Most of the obits focused on the fact that Cruz was the regular third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles in the 1983 World Series, won by the Orioles. I remember him for a far different reason.
I was covering the White Sox for The Chicago Tribune in 1981 while Cruz was rehabilitating an injury in Edmonton, site of the club's Triple A farm team. The Sox were playing a night game somewhere in the East--might have been Detroit or Cleveland; I can't recall. What I do recall is that after filing my story on that night's game, I called the copy desk and was told the opposition paper had a story that Cruz had been arrested in Edmonton for breaking into a department store after hours and stealing some watches.
When you are a beat reporter and hear news like that you have two immediate reactions. The first is, Damn, I've messed up. The second is, what can I do to retaliate? So I picked up the phone and called Cruz in his hotel room. To my amazement, he answered the phone and my questions with equal alacrity. As I remember it, he said he'd had too much to drink, had broken into the Hudson's Bay store, and fallen asleep. He was snoozing away when the police came and found him. He had just been released and gotten back to his room when I called.
As it happened, the White Sox were scheduled to play an exhibition game in Edmonton the next night. I'd planned to skip the exhibition game and go straight to California, site of the next regularly scheduled game, but, obviously, those plans changed. When I arrived at the hotel in Edmonton, along with the team, there was Todd Cruz in the lobby, three or four watches adorning his left wrist and forearm, asking: "Anybody wanna buy a watch?" You couldn't help admiring his sense of humor even while wondering where he'd obtained the watches. Ultimately Cruz was sentenced to nine months probation and, to my knowledge, never had any further trouble with the law.
Most major newspapers have their own obituary writers, the most famous having been Alden Whitman, the New York Timesman who pioneered the concept of interviewing living people for their own future obituaries. This takes a modicum of Chutzpah as I found out when I rather uncomfortably interviewed Harry Caray for what I described to him as "a feature story."
The majority of sports related obits, however, are handled in the sports department. The master of the genre at The Tribune was David Condon, conductor of the In The Wake of The News column, which for years was the only sports column in the paper. Condon was a gifted writer who sent his subjects into the great beyond with loving care and beautiful prose. I always said that when I died I wanted Dave Condon to write my obit. In one of life's ironies I ended up writing his.
When I wrote a column, I found the obit page a useful source of column ideas. One I recall was of Don McCafferty, who succeeded Don Shula as head coach of the Baltimore Colts and led them to the Super Bowl title in his first year. Less than four years later he was dead. Although I had covered that Super bowl victory over the Dallas Cowboys, I didn't get to know McCafferty until training camp the next year.
One of my assignments during this period was to cover the pro champions' training camp as they prepared to play the College All-Stars in the annual exhibition game, sponsored by The Tribune, that kicked off the new season. The Colts' training camp at the time was at Western Maryland university in Westminster, Md. I had only been in camp a few hours when Ernie Accorsi, then the Colts' public relations director and later, as New York Giants general manager, the man who traded for Eli Manning, proposed we go out to Os & Ginnys, the local gin joint, for beer and pizza.
The saloon served as post-practice meeting hall for both players and coaches, an unusual arrangement necessitated by the fact it was the only joint in town. Players had use of the facility until the 11 o'clock curfew, when the coaches, having had their fill of film study and game plan adjustments, would take over.
On this night McCafferty had engaged in a shuffle board contest with a local hotshot. I don't recall who won but I'll never forget the reaction to the column I wrote about the evening. That Sunday night I was having dinner with Accorsi and his wife when the phone rang and Ernie went to pick it up. I could hear him say, "Yes, he's here," and a short time later Accorsi returned to the table and said, "That was Freddie Schubach (the Colts' longtime equipment manager.) He asked if you were here and I said you were. Then he said, 'keep him there because Os is sitting on the steps of the dormitory with a shotgun and says he's going to kill him.'"
It wasn't until much later that I discovered it was Don McCafferty who talked Os into going home. Os had stormed into McCafferty's room, gun in hand, demanding to know where that s.o.b. columnist from Chicago was hiding, because he, by God, was going to kill him if he ever found him. He showed McCafferty the offending column and at that point there are some coaches in the NFL who would have said, "Wait a minute. I'll get my gun and we'll shoot the s.o.b. together."
Not McCafferty. Instead, Big Mac spent two hours of his evening off talking the irate saloon keeper out of his mission of mayhem. McCafferty never said anything to me about the incident. Except at breakfast the next morning he called me over and scolded: "You'll get along better around here if you remember what the coaching staff does outside of coaching hours is its own business." Seeing I was properly chastized, he added: "Now sit down and have some breakfast."
I think the best obit I ever wrote was about Bill Stern, a long forgotten radio sports announcer who was a giant in his day. Younger readers probably never heard of him but to kids of my generation he was our window to the sports world. We didn't have television back then so we'd sit in front of the big floor model radio on a Saturday afternoon and listen to Bill Stern's description of a football game.
He was our eyes and it's no secret to report that he often gave us a distorted view. He ws famous for calling the wrong ball carrier on a long touchdown run and attempting to correct his error by inventing a lateral at the 5-yard line that put the ball back in the hands of the guy who had it all the time. A football game described by Bill Stern was often much more exciting than the one people were watching from the stands.
Once, when Stern was about to call a big horse race, a colleague reminded him: "Remember, Bill, you can't lateral a horse." When television came, Bill Stern was finished, of course. Not only can't you lateral a horse, you can't get away with distorted or sloppy reporting of an event the viewer can see with his own eyes. A 3-yard plunge into the line is only that, not a meeting of the gods at Valhalla.
But Bill Stern was more than a play-by-play announcer. He had a sports show every night right after supper--which is what we called it at our house--and I would no more have missed that than a modern kid would miss the Saturday morning cartoons. Stern's show consisted of stories about famous people, all of them relating to sports and all of them complete fabrications. We didn't know that then of course. It was a long time before I found out that Thomas Edison's deafness was not caused by his being hit by a fastball thrown by--Jesse James!
The Bill Stern story that has stuck with me all these years is about the little boy in the southern state of Georgia who loved to play football. I couldn't recount for you a single detail of the story, which had something to do with the kid eventually going into politics, but I'll never forget Stern's kicker: . ...." for this was not the Georgia in the southern part of the United States, but the Georgia in the southern part of Russia, and the boy's name was (pause for emphasis)--Josef Stalin. "
So long, Bill, and if you happen to run into Abe Lincoln up there, ask him about the time he won the state wrestling championship.
A few days ago I received in the mail an offer from the Neptune Society to register me for a drawing for a free cremation. Since cremation is my choice for the disposal of my mortal remains, any way, I thought about it for quite awhile before depositing the invitation in the trash basket along with the remains of the other dozen or so solicitations that arrive daily.
I may be committed to the concept of cremation, but I'm not ready for the reality of the ash heap just yet. Besides, I didn't want anybody at the Neptune Society to be burdened with the guilt of a former New York Times obit writer who once famously admitted that he'd written some advance obits that were so good he could hardly wait for the subject to die so he could see his master work in print.
I've written some advance obits myself, but usually they involved people I knew so I really never had any desire to hasten their demise. Among the sports notables whose obits I wrote premortem were Jack Dempsey, Al Lopez, Harry Caray and Leo Durocher. Although I once met Dempsey in his New York restaurant, I can't claim to have really known him. But I was well acquainted with the last three, whose obituaries I wrote in the same day somewhere in the mid 1980s. All are gone now, but I was in my ninth year of retirement before Lopez, who lived to be 97, died in August of 2005. So I have no idea whether my 2o-year-old obit of El Senor, as the former catcher and White Sox manager was known, was used.
Only this morning did I learn of the passing of Don Gutteridge, the quiet--some would say, too quiet--man who succeeded Lopez as White Sox manager in 1970. Gutteridge was almost spectacularly unsuccesssful in his one year at the helm of the Sox, but he had earlier distinguished himself as a longtime coach for Lopez.
Two other deaths in the past week or so have been of more than passing interest to me. One was golfer Tommy Bolt, whom I never met, but nonetheless feel as if he were an intimate friend. My only personal contact with Bolt, the 1958 U.S. Open champion, came--where else?--on a golf course. The Tam O'Shanter Golf club in suburban Chicago to be precise.
Tam O'Shanter was the site of a yearly tournament backed by a local businessman, George S. May, and for a time it offered by far the highest payout of any tournament in the world. Think of it as the Dubai Desert Classic of its day. As a teenager, along with my best friend, Lawry Johnson, I'd go out to the tournament in the early morning and stay until the last shot was fired.
In those days, your daily pass entitled you to almost complete access to the players. You could pick out your favorite and walk right along with him down the fairway, unless your favorite was Ben Hogan, and then the size of his gallery mandated certain restraints. To be sure, I was a Ben Hogan fan, but it didn't take all day for him to play 18 holes. So one morning, Lawrey and I started following a young, good looking golfer named Tommy Bolt.
Bolt, it turned out, was not only a pretty good golfer, but a highly entertaining golfer, as well. As he strode down the fairway he'd make comments to the fans following in his wake. Over all these years I can still remember his screaming at a fan who had the temerity to talk while Tommy was lining up a shot, "put a nickel in your nose if you want to be a juke box." In addition, Bolt was prone to displaying his temper, alternately cursing and throwing his clubs whenever the gods of golf turned against him. But he was a beautiful shot maker and lots of fun being around.
The other recent death that caught my eye was that of Todd Cruz, a former utlity player for several teams, who died at the age of 52 while swimming in the pool of his Arizona apartment complex. Most of the obits focused on the fact that Cruz was the regular third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles in the 1983 World Series, won by the Orioles. I remember him for a far different reason.
I was covering the White Sox for The Chicago Tribune in 1981 while Cruz was rehabilitating an injury in Edmonton, site of the club's Triple A farm team. The Sox were playing a night game somewhere in the East--might have been Detroit or Cleveland; I can't recall. What I do recall is that after filing my story on that night's game, I called the copy desk and was told the opposition paper had a story that Cruz had been arrested in Edmonton for breaking into a department store after hours and stealing some watches.
When you are a beat reporter and hear news like that you have two immediate reactions. The first is, Damn, I've messed up. The second is, what can I do to retaliate? So I picked up the phone and called Cruz in his hotel room. To my amazement, he answered the phone and my questions with equal alacrity. As I remember it, he said he'd had too much to drink, had broken into the Hudson's Bay store, and fallen asleep. He was snoozing away when the police came and found him. He had just been released and gotten back to his room when I called.
As it happened, the White Sox were scheduled to play an exhibition game in Edmonton the next night. I'd planned to skip the exhibition game and go straight to California, site of the next regularly scheduled game, but, obviously, those plans changed. When I arrived at the hotel in Edmonton, along with the team, there was Todd Cruz in the lobby, three or four watches adorning his left wrist and forearm, asking: "Anybody wanna buy a watch?" You couldn't help admiring his sense of humor even while wondering where he'd obtained the watches. Ultimately Cruz was sentenced to nine months probation and, to my knowledge, never had any further trouble with the law.
Most major newspapers have their own obituary writers, the most famous having been Alden Whitman, the New York Timesman who pioneered the concept of interviewing living people for their own future obituaries. This takes a modicum of Chutzpah as I found out when I rather uncomfortably interviewed Harry Caray for what I described to him as "a feature story."
The majority of sports related obits, however, are handled in the sports department. The master of the genre at The Tribune was David Condon, conductor of the In The Wake of The News column, which for years was the only sports column in the paper. Condon was a gifted writer who sent his subjects into the great beyond with loving care and beautiful prose. I always said that when I died I wanted Dave Condon to write my obit. In one of life's ironies I ended up writing his.
When I wrote a column, I found the obit page a useful source of column ideas. One I recall was of Don McCafferty, who succeeded Don Shula as head coach of the Baltimore Colts and led them to the Super Bowl title in his first year. Less than four years later he was dead. Although I had covered that Super bowl victory over the Dallas Cowboys, I didn't get to know McCafferty until training camp the next year.
One of my assignments during this period was to cover the pro champions' training camp as they prepared to play the College All-Stars in the annual exhibition game, sponsored by The Tribune, that kicked off the new season. The Colts' training camp at the time was at Western Maryland university in Westminster, Md. I had only been in camp a few hours when Ernie Accorsi, then the Colts' public relations director and later, as New York Giants general manager, the man who traded for Eli Manning, proposed we go out to Os & Ginnys, the local gin joint, for beer and pizza.
The saloon served as post-practice meeting hall for both players and coaches, an unusual arrangement necessitated by the fact it was the only joint in town. Players had use of the facility until the 11 o'clock curfew, when the coaches, having had their fill of film study and game plan adjustments, would take over.
On this night McCafferty had engaged in a shuffle board contest with a local hotshot. I don't recall who won but I'll never forget the reaction to the column I wrote about the evening. That Sunday night I was having dinner with Accorsi and his wife when the phone rang and Ernie went to pick it up. I could hear him say, "Yes, he's here," and a short time later Accorsi returned to the table and said, "That was Freddie Schubach (the Colts' longtime equipment manager.) He asked if you were here and I said you were. Then he said, 'keep him there because Os is sitting on the steps of the dormitory with a shotgun and says he's going to kill him.'"
It wasn't until much later that I discovered it was Don McCafferty who talked Os into going home. Os had stormed into McCafferty's room, gun in hand, demanding to know where that s.o.b. columnist from Chicago was hiding, because he, by God, was going to kill him if he ever found him. He showed McCafferty the offending column and at that point there are some coaches in the NFL who would have said, "Wait a minute. I'll get my gun and we'll shoot the s.o.b. together."
Not McCafferty. Instead, Big Mac spent two hours of his evening off talking the irate saloon keeper out of his mission of mayhem. McCafferty never said anything to me about the incident. Except at breakfast the next morning he called me over and scolded: "You'll get along better around here if you remember what the coaching staff does outside of coaching hours is its own business." Seeing I was properly chastized, he added: "Now sit down and have some breakfast."
I think the best obit I ever wrote was about Bill Stern, a long forgotten radio sports announcer who was a giant in his day. Younger readers probably never heard of him but to kids of my generation he was our window to the sports world. We didn't have television back then so we'd sit in front of the big floor model radio on a Saturday afternoon and listen to Bill Stern's description of a football game.
He was our eyes and it's no secret to report that he often gave us a distorted view. He ws famous for calling the wrong ball carrier on a long touchdown run and attempting to correct his error by inventing a lateral at the 5-yard line that put the ball back in the hands of the guy who had it all the time. A football game described by Bill Stern was often much more exciting than the one people were watching from the stands.
Once, when Stern was about to call a big horse race, a colleague reminded him: "Remember, Bill, you can't lateral a horse." When television came, Bill Stern was finished, of course. Not only can't you lateral a horse, you can't get away with distorted or sloppy reporting of an event the viewer can see with his own eyes. A 3-yard plunge into the line is only that, not a meeting of the gods at Valhalla.
But Bill Stern was more than a play-by-play announcer. He had a sports show every night right after supper--which is what we called it at our house--and I would no more have missed that than a modern kid would miss the Saturday morning cartoons. Stern's show consisted of stories about famous people, all of them relating to sports and all of them complete fabrications. We didn't know that then of course. It was a long time before I found out that Thomas Edison's deafness was not caused by his being hit by a fastball thrown by--Jesse James!
The Bill Stern story that has stuck with me all these years is about the little boy in the southern state of Georgia who loved to play football. I couldn't recount for you a single detail of the story, which had something to do with the kid eventually going into politics, but I'll never forget Stern's kicker: . ...." for this was not the Georgia in the southern part of the United States, but the Georgia in the southern part of Russia, and the boy's name was (pause for emphasis)--Josef Stalin. "
So long, Bill, and if you happen to run into Abe Lincoln up there, ask him about the time he won the state wrestling championship.
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