This week's Sports at Large script

Here's the script from this week's Sports @ Large, which airs each Monday at 5:30 Eastern time on WYPR in Baltimore, with a re-air Tuesday morning during Maryland Morning. Please do enjoy!

The calendar says that we’ve officially turned the page from summer to autumn, and no one in the American sports culture should be happier to witness the passing of one season into another than Josh Howard. 

Chances are, unless you’re a big fan of Atlantic Coast Conference basketball that you really don’t know Josh Howard, and right about now, that’s not such a bad thing…for Howard. In college, Howard was a first team All-America at Wake Forest. In 2003, he led the Demon Deacons to their first regular season title in 41 years, and Howard became the first player in nearly 30 years to be selected unanimously as Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year. 

The 6-foot-5 forward was drafted by the Dallas Mavericks and by his second season, had moved into the starting lineup. Howard has become one of the most versatile players in the NBA. Last year, his fifth in the league, Howard posted career highs in scoring and rebounding and seemed on the short track to superstardom, or at least widespread adoration. 

Then came this summer, when Howard couldn’t seem to get out of the way of his own two feet. That is, when he wasn’t planting one of them in his mouth. First, Howard had the temerity to decline an invitation to tryout for the United States Olympic team, saying he had other things to do this summer. In hindsight, Howard really should have gone to China. 

If he had, Howard might not have been around to get arrested for drag racing and driving 94 miles an hour in a 55 miles an hour zone. That round of allegedly juvenile and potentially fatal behavior followed Howard’s decision to throw himself a birthday party in April. The problem with the timing of the party was that the Mavericks were in the middle of a playoff series, and had just lost the critical fourth game of said series. 

Of course, Howard’s timing might have been explained by a comment he made earlier in the series, when he told a radio interviewer that he occasionally smokes marijuana, and that pot consumption among NBA players was, shall we say, high. If you want to tell tales on yourself, go ahead, but Howard had no business throwing his fellow players under the bus, even if there were munchies behind the tires. 

Howard’s summer of self-destruction was capped last week, when a video of him slurring the Star Spangled Banner during a charity flag-football game surfaced on You Tube. Apparently unsolicited, Howard turned to a camera during the Allen Iverson sponsored event and proclaimed that he didn’t celebrate the National Anthem because quote I’m black unquote, as well as working in an insult of Barack Obama.

As a black man myself, I’m not sure precisely what to make of Josh Howard’s observations, except this: That anthem that he sneered at is the musical representation of the freedoms this country affords to its citizens. Among them are the rights to make millions of dollars playing a game, to behave boorishly to teammates and the public and to take a swipe at a song that salutes the free and the brave. Josh Howard may be one of those, but he certainly isn’t the other.

Inappropriate personnel moves

One of my wife’s guilty television pleasures is a show called “Bridezillas” which airs on the WE channel. It’s a reality show that shines a light on one or more prospective brides in the days leading up to their wedding.

I happen to despise this show, not out of some misogynistic hatred of women or out of disrespect for the tension that many women feel as their wedding approaches, but more out of a profound dislike of shows that appear to reward anti-social behavior. The point is, that if WE ever looked for someone to host a “Bridezillas” marathon, I would be the wrong person because I don’t like the show.

As I was watching the end of the WNBA playoff game between Detroit and Indiana Tuesday night on ESPN2, I heard the play-by-play announcer toss back to the studio to Nancy Lieberman and to a man named Erik Kuselias. For those who haven’t had the misfortune of hearing Kuselias work, he has hosted a NASCAR show on ESPN television, but is best known for hosting a radio show called “The Sports Bash,” which aired in the afternoon on ESPN radio.

During the course of that show, Kuselias, who reportedly is an attorney, appealed to the lowest common denominator by pushing every emotional button he could, insulting teams, players and fans at every turn. On more than one occasion I heard Kuselias spew invective about the legitimacy of both the WNBA and women’s basketball in general. He didn’t quite go for the standard male talk show putdown of women’s basketball, the one that insinuates that the sport isn’t worth watching because all the players are lesbians, but he came damned close.

You can imagine, then, my shock and bewilderment, then, to see Kuselias sitting at a desk hosting a women’s basketball telecast. Now, it may be possible that Kuselias has had some kind of transformation and has either become a fan of the sport, or at least tolerant, but I doubt it. More likely, this was just a chance to sharpen his hosting skills and before a prime time audience.

Look, I don’t expect most men to like or even appreciate women’s basketball, and that’s fine; different strokes and all that. But I sure as shootin’ don’t expect ESPN to put a man who has publicly expressed a disdain for the sport on the air hosting it. It’s as incongruous as having someone who dislikes the NFL host a Sunday football pregame show, or me hosting a “Bridezillas” marathon. 

Of fiancés and baby daddies

I don’t know Oakland Tribune columnist Tammerlin Drummond and, frankly, had never heard of her before stumbling onto her writing on the Romenesko site at Poynter Online.
However, her piece in last Wednesday’s paper is one of the most cogent and spot-on pieces on the gulf between how blacks and whites are seen in this country, and why the election of the first black president will only further discussion about racism and discrimination, not end it.
There’s nothing to be gained from beating up on Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston. They deserve to live their lives and raise their baby outside the prying eyes of the public. But their story shines an important light on the attitudes of many Americans on the smaller issue of teen pregnancies and the broader concept of how people of different ethnicities live.

The troubled Vince Young

Here's the script for the latest Sports @ Large essay, which aired in the customary Monday at 5:30 p.m. on WYPR-FM in Baltimore.

In the American sports culture, there are few crimes as heinous as being sensitive to criticism. And for football players, who are masculinity personified in the American ethos, the inability to brush off boos and brickbats is, in the minds of many, grounds for turning in their guy membership card, the one that ascribes honor and machismo and valor to the holder.

Until the last offseason, Tennessee Titans quarterback Vince Young was fully vested in the Man’s Man Society. In college, he marched the Texas Longhorns down the field twice in the final minutes of the 2006 Rose Bowl against defending BCS champion Southern California.

Young scrambled into the end zone on each drive to give Texas what passes for a national title. He was propelled into the No.3 slot of the 2006 draft, to the Titans. In his rookie season, Young went to the Pro Bowl all-star game and was named Rookie of the Year. Last year, Young became only the 11th quarterback taken in one of the first two rounds over the past 25 seasons to lead his team to the playoffs.

However, Young has been anything but smooth in Nashville, throwing erratically at times, and proving to be occasionally injury-prone. Those are hardly crimes, but the resulting criticism from fans and the media threw Young for a loop. The quarterback reportedly considered retirement in the offseason, but ultimately decided to return.

Move ahead to last Sunday, in the Titans season opener against Jacksonville. Young threw two interceptions and was roundly booed by the home crowd, which apparently bothered him so that he initially declined to go back into the game. He eventually did, but sprained a ligament in his left knee which will keep him out of action for 2 to 4 weeks.

The next day, Young missed a scheduled MRI test on his knee, this after his mother, Felicia, was quoted in the local paper saying that her son was tired of the negativity and that he was quote hurting inside and out, end quote. The team apparently dispatched a psychologist to Young’s house.

Later that day, Titans coach Jeff Fisher, told that Young was in an emotional state and had left home without his cell phone, but with an unarmed gun, called authorities. The police sent an unmarked SWAT unit out and put crisis negotiators on call, only to find that Young had gone to a friend’s house to watch Monday Night Football.

By Thursday, Young had declared that he just needed a day and a half to get through a rough patch and to learn how to deal with adversity, saying, quote, When it happens again, I’ll know how to handle it. I just want everyone in the world to know I am fine, unquote.

Does Vince Young need to do a little growing up? Sure, but then, so do we who are sports fans. We need to advance past hero worship of people in uniforms and start seeing athletes as mere flesh and blood humans. Humans, who laugh in triumph, but occasionally mourn, and, yes, cry in failure. After all, the measure of a person is not how they expend their feelings, but what they do once the emotion of the moment clears.

Tribute to the Bear

Here's the script for this week's Sports@Large, which, as always, can be heard live each Monday at 5:30 Eastern on WYPR-FM in Baltimore, or through the station's website.

A few months ago, Barack Obama gave a campaign speech at a rally to nearly 20,000 students at the University of Maryland’s Comcast Center. On that winter day, Obama paid tribute to the history made by the school’s former national championship women’s basketball team.

Meanwhile, most of the attendees at the rally likely had little sense of the real history made by Obama in becoming the first black man to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party.

But 42 years before, long before any of those students were even born, history of another sort was made across campus in another basketball arena, Cole Field House. There, in the 1966 NCAA men’s basketball championship game, a team of five African American starters was fielded and won the title against a team of all white players, as Texas Western beat mighty Kentucky.

The architect of that piece of sports sociology, Texas Western coach Don Haskins, died Sunday at the age of 78. Haskins’ accomplishment was noted in a book and subsequent film, Glory Road, but even so, his deed, and that of his players, hasn’t been feted in the way perhaps its should.

Before that championship run, segregation, even in gyms and athletic fields on campuses of institutions of higher learning, was still sanctioned. For years, schools, mostly in the South, declined to recruit black athletes. Alabama football coach Paul Bear Bryant and Kentucky men’s basketball coach Adolph Rupp each kept their teams devoid of African Americans, and Rupp did so proudly.

Even after Haskins guided the Miners past the team known as Rupp’s runts, the barriers of discrimination stayed in place at many schools. The Atlantic Coast Conference, where Maryland plays, would not have black men playing basketball in the league for a few years after that, and the conference would not even get an African-American coach until the mid 1980’s, when Baltimore’s Bob Wade coached Maryland.

For his part, Haskins claimed at the time of the 1966 game and for decades afterwards, that he was not trying to make history with his lineup, but, rather, was starting the five players that he believed gave him the best chance to win. In a perfect world, you’d want the best players to receive the opportunities to play and to win, but that’s not always the case.

In all, Haskins would spend 38 seasons at the school, which subsequently would be renamed Texas-El Paso. He would go on to win seven Western Athletic Conference championships, while taking 14 teams to the NCAA tournament and seven clubs to the National Invitational Tournament. Haskins’ career record was 719-353, and he would eventually be enshrined at the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

There are two groups of people who make history. There are those, like Barack Obama, who set out to do so with bold strokes and sweeping deeds. And then there are those, like Don Haskins, who influence the annals of time quietly and effectively, simply by doing the right thing at the right time and in the right place.

The GOP's pregnant pause

Let me preface everything that appears here with the following caveat: I am not a parent, nor have I ever been. I hope to be someday, but until that great day occurs, I don't know what it's like to wake up at 3 a.m. with a fussy baby, or watch that child take his/her first steps or watch them catch the bus that first day for school or score that first goal or struggle over a term paper or march down the aisle at graduation.
All that said, I find it a little surprising that the national media/punditry, in its zeal to get all up into the business of Sarah Palin and her daughter, Bristol, over the 17-year-old girl's pregnancy, has failed to ask what, to me, is a pertinent question:
Namely, why didn't Sarah Palin turn John McCain's invitation to run as his vice president to spare her daughter precisely this kind of scrutiny?
Look, it's not the place of me or anyone else to question how the Palins live their lives. As the uncle of a woman who gave birth to twins while she was in high school, I have some feel for what is happening in that house, and one shouldn't wish that kind of emotional torment on anyone else, regardless of what side of the political aisle you sit on.
But, if you believe, as I do, that a parent's No.1 responsibility is to protect their children from harm, wouldn't it make sense that said parent would do their best to shield their child from the kind of media scrutiny Bristol Palin is going to have to endure in the name of her mother's political ambition?
No one would suggest that Sarah Palin should have to resign as Alaska's governor because her daughter made a mistake that millions of American teenagers make on a regular basis. But Sarah Palin could have limited the attention Bristol Palin will have to suffer to a couple of whispers around Juneau, Anchorage and Fairbanks, rather than compounding that chatter exponentially to the entire nation.
For the protection of her daughter, Sarah Palin should have just said thanks, but no thanks to John McCain.

Back again

Sorry for the long break. Between illness and life, it was tough to find the time to squeeze off a few thoughts here recently. I'll try to do better, including at least another posting today.
Here's my radio essay, which aired yesterday on Baltimore's WYPR-FM.

While a lot of the sports world’s attention zeroed in last week on the trials of a nine-year-old Connecticut boy to be allowed to pitch in a youth baseball league, something far more troubling was going on under the radar guns that measure the speed of little Jericho Scott’s fastball.

A major sports organization, the Ladies Professional Golf Association, has instituted a policy that turns the concept of multi-culturalism and tolerance on its very ear.

Effective next year, the LPGA will require its current players to speak English. Players who have been on the tour for two years will be suspended if they fail an oral evaluation of their English skills, while new players must adhere to the policy immediately.

Libba Galloway, an assistant LPGA commissioner, explained to the Associated Press that the new policy will assist players in their quote professional development unquote, that, quote We want to help our athletes as best we can succeed off the golf course as well as on it, unquote.

That will likely come as news to the 121 international players from 26 countries on the LPGA tour, who essentially were handed the following message: Speak good English or go home. And, you can save the indignant e-mails about my incorrect grammar. The previous sentence was for ironic effect.

And when you get right down to it, what the LPGA is doing is quite ironic. They’re telling a group of athletes, particularly the 45 or so players from South Korea who have come to have an important role on the tour, that their abilities and talents aren’t enough to succeed here.

Here’s the kicker, though. According to Golfweek magazine, which broke the story, the LPGA will not have a standard test, but rather will identify players to be evaluated through staff observations. Supposedly, players who already appear to be proficient in English won’t have to be evaluated.

Say what you want about baseball commissioner Bud Selig (and God knows, it has been said), but even he wouldn’t be so foolish as to take a tiptoe through the kind of garden of xenophobic tulips that the LPGA is planting. The agents of players of Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan and Japanese origins would set Olympic records racing to courthouses to file class action suits if baseball tried the kind of stunt the LPGA is doing.

Frankly, the LPGA’s kind of thinking is antithetical to the way things really work in the good ole US of A these days. Look, all of us in the course of our everyday living encounter a person or persons who have come to this country to make a home and to find their dream. They may serve our food, clean our buildings or our clothes, or provide medical care to our children. Some of them even hit home runs or sink three-pointers.

However it happens, they have become essential pieces of the American mosaic. These LPGA players are part of that patchwork too, and should be evaluated on their abilities to strike holes-in-one, not rhetorical flourishes.

Just give him the damn Emmy now

Hope you caught the Friday night prime-time telecast of the Olympics, particularly the first hour interview of U.S. men's volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon.
McCutcheon, whose mother- and father-in-law were attacked in Beijing just before the Olympics began, sat down for an extended chat with NBC's Bob Costas just after the network showed the fifth set of the U.S. win over Russia in the semifinals.
Costas deftly moved McCutcheon from analyzing how the Americans have reached the gold medal match to discussing the circumstances surrounding the attack. In almost anyone else's hands, the interview would have been maudlin and tear-filled. In the hands of Costas, the most revered sports commentator of our generation, it was pure magic.

Doing the right thing

Three cheers for the Connecticut women's basketball program and for coach Geno Auriemma for granting prized freshman Elena Delle Donne a complete release from the scholarship, per her request.
There was a condition attached that she can only play basketball at Delaware this year, and while she should be able to go and play where ever she wants, the condition seems reasonable since it does place her back at home, where she apparently wanted to go.
She's already been accepted at Newark for this year. It really does seem that on this rare occasion, someone did right by a college athlete.

Signing your life away

Elena Delle Donne's decision to leave Connecticut provides yet another example of how the college recruiting process is heavily weighted against the kids and almost entirely favors the schools.
Delle Donne, a 6-foot-5 forward from Wilmington, Del., was the nation's top girls basketball recruit this past year, and signed a national letter of intent to attend Connecticut for the coming fall. At Storrs, Delle Donne was expected to join Maya Moore and Renee Montgomery and be the final piece to the Huskies' national championship puzzle hopes.
The problem was that Delle Donne, who took a break from basketball while she was at Ursuline Academy, apparently changed her mind about wanting to attend/play at Connecticut. It's shouldn't have been a big deal. Teenagers change their minds all the time, and Delle Donne has every right to attend the school where she'll be the most comfortable.
End of story, right? Well, not so much. You see, because Delle Donne signed a letter of intent, Connecticut still has a hold on her future, or at least her basketball playing future. By NCAA rule, she must sit out a year if she decides to play basketball at another Division I school. It's not the greatest rule in the world, particularly when you consider that coaches can flit from campus to campus without restriction, but it's not the worst.
No, the worst rule is the one that could cost Delle Donne a year of eligibility. You see, Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma has not released her from her scholarship, and unless he does, she'll have to forfeit one of her four years of eligibility. That is, if she wants to transfer to play basketball at a school that honors the letter of intent, which pretty much covers all of Division I and II, where scholarships are offered.
This isn't to portray Auriemma as a bad guy, per se. He's just following the rules, and, more than likely, he wants to make sure that Delle Donne doesn't abscond to a school that he will play in the next four years, where she could come back to hurt him. It's just that the rules, as they're set up, don't give kids the freedom they need at the time of their lives when they need it most, the years when they make decisions that will impact their futures, like where they'll go to school.

The current Sports@Large

Here's the script from my radio essay, which aired yesterday afternoon and again this morning. If you'd like to hear these essays live, be sure to tune into WYPR-FM 88.1 each Monday afternoon at 5:30 p.m. or during Maryland Morning Tuesdays at 9 a.m. If you live outside the Baltimore area, you can listen to WYPR via streaming audio.

If what you hear over the next few minutes offends you or at least your sensibilities as a Baltimoreans, well, I apologize in advance. And if these few hundred words seem like the predictable reaction to the overreaction, then again I’m sorry. But someone in this city, this area, this country, heck, this planet needs to say this, so I might as well be the one. And here it comes:

Michael Phelps is not the greatest Olympian of all time. Not by a long shot.

Don’t get me wrong, folks. The 23-year-old from Rodgers Forge wrote one heck of a narrative over a magical nine days in the pool in Beijing. Add the eight gold medals from the Water Cube, with seven of them coming in world record time, to the six golds and two bronzes he collected in Athens four years ago, and you have a pretty amazing athlete.

And, even more astonishingly, Phelps has gone about the business of wiping Mark Spitz off the first line of the Olympic swimming record books with unfailing good grace and humor. He has never gone diva and has answered every question from all comers. And it’s a testament to the reservoir of goodwill that Phelps has built up that, in these times, when any accomplishment out of the norm, much less of a superhuman nature, there is no hint that what he has done has come in any other way than the right way. No shortcuts whatsoever.

But hero worship, not to mention the desires of a television network, a local station, and a newspaper to bring more customers into the tent, can’t rewrite history, and to call Michael Phelps the greatest Olympian would be doing just that, rewriting history.

Let’s start with the concept that as great as Phelps was in Beijing, his was not a solitary effort, as he was a member of three relay teams, with Jason Lezak literally snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in the 4 by 100 meter freestyle.

Then, there’s this: Perhaps the world’s most accomplished Olympics journalist, Philip Hersh of the Chicago Tribune and formerly of the Baltimore Evening Sun, has said that Phelps is, at best, the sixth best Olympic athlete, behind such icons as Carl Lewis, who won nine gold medals, including four in the 1984 games and four straight in the long jump, and Finnish track star Paavo Nurmi, who also won nine golds in three Olympics at distances from 1,500 to 10,000 meters in the early 20th century. Hersh’s opinion is shared by Olympic historian David Wallechinsky, and I would add the name of Eric Heiden, who won five gold medals in the 1980 Winter Olympics, capturing races at five different lengths, from sprint to distance.

But the best reason not to send Michael Phelps to Mount Olympus quite yet is that he has only been a force in two Olympics, though he was on the 2000 team in Sydney. The waters he churned in Beijing have barely stopped roiling and we’re ready to proclaim god status upon him. It’s understandable to want to do it. The past is no longer prologue, but mere annoyance, words on a page. Let’s let Michael Phelps write a few more pages in the Olympic history book in London in four years before we rename the entire library after him.

Back after a (long) break

Sorry for the gap in posts. Life got in the way. Specifically, my wife and I had visitors, and between the cleaning for the visit and the actual visit itself, not to mention working on another project, well, I got a little way laid. I'll try not to let it happen again.
There's been far too many Olympic goings-on to cover in one omnibus posting, except to say that, as a Baltimore resident, if I hear one more word about a certain swimmer, I will take hostages. (Actually, that certain swimmer and the excruciating hype is the subject of my most recent radio essay, the script of which will be posted tomorrow morning.)
One of the things that I have been paying attention to from Beijing is the United States women's basketball team's play. While the men have labeled themselves "the redeem" team, the women haven't had to carry such a moniker because they've had nothing to redeem themselves for.
The American women are carrying a gaudy 30 game Olympic win streak, dating back to the bronze medal game in Barcelona in 1992. They haven't lost since, from pool play in Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and now in China, as well as the various medal rounds. It's a streak that would certainly draw attention if not for:
(A) Michael Phelps
(B) The men's basketball team
(C) The pixie gymnasts
(D) The bikinied beach volleyballers
(E) Flat out sexism
But I digress. A player who might likely find herself on the 2016 squad, Elena Delle Donne, the nation's most highly sought after freshman recruit, made a momentous decision that, were she a man, would have been all over ESPN and the papers over the weekend. Instead, Delle Donne's choice not to enroll at Connecticut, the consensus preseason No.1 team, has hardly been noticed.
Delle Donne, a 6-5 wing player with remarkable perimeter skill, has apparently had a love-hate relationship with basketball for some time, taking time off from the sport during her high school days, then withdrawing from Connecticut this summer.
Four years under relentless scrutiny and unreal expectations at Storrs might very well have harmed the kid. Instead, she has decided to enroll at Delaware, the closest Division I school to her Wilmington home. You have to hope she finds some peace and regains her love of the sport, even if she doesn't play for a national title.
BTW, quiet as it's kept, Lisa Leslie has been keeping an Olympic diary, the latest entry of which is here.

The public's right to know?

Sixteen years ago, I was took part in a Knight Center seminar on the business of sports at the University of Maryland's campus. One of the seminar's participants was tennis great Arthur Ashe, and he came to speak to us about what he found so appealling about Proposition 48, the controversial piece of NCAA legislation that largely tied admittance to college athletes to their performance on standardized tests.
Let me say parenthetically that I consider Arthur Ashe one of the great and heroic figures in modern athletics, but he and I couldn't have disagreed more on the topic, and I let him know both things afterwards. We had a spirited debate that would have gone on for longer than the 15 or so minutes it went on, except he had to leave to catch a flight.
In the process of leaving, Arthur dropped a bottle of medication. After he left, he called back to inquire if it had been found. It was, and the bottle was eventually returned. We learned a few months later during a press conference that he was an AIDS sufferer. Ashe was forced to call that press conference because a reporter had discovered his condition and was preparing to go public.
Now, it's possible that the medication Ashe left behind in that Maryland classroom was a part of the cocktail of drugs that many AIDS patients take each day, and to think, he left it in a room populated with journalists. I felt at the time of the press conference and still believe now that Arthur Ashe's medical condition was no one's business and if I had found the bottle, I would have returned it with no questions asked.
I say all that to wonder about the ethicacy of the quiet smear campaign that is going on about the possibility of former vice presidential candidate and two-time presidential aspirant John Edwards being the father of the baby of one of his campaign aides.
While I have some interest in the topic, strictly for its gossip value, I just don't see where this is anyone's concern, outside the people involved. Edwards is no longer a presidential candidate, and, as far as we know, is not under consideration to be Barack Obama's running mate.
Sorry, but having "former United States senator, former presidential candidate and former vice presidential candidate" serves as the welcome mat to protrude into a man's life, not to mention prying into the life of the mother, the life of the child and those of Edwards' wife, Elizabeth and their children.
But what do I know?

So long, Hiram

I am an inveterate reader of album liner notes (which is another reason to decry the demise of the CD and its packaging. But I digress.). I love discovering the names of keyboard players and guitarists and singers on the music I love. Reading the credits to Stevie's "Fulfillingness First Finale' is how I knew that Michael Sembello was a talented guitarist before he became a "Maniac.' Seeing Patti Austin's name all over Quincy Jones' "The Dude" made me go back and discover the career of one of the purest voices I've ever heard.
All of this serves as prelude as an elegy to one of the greatest guitarists I've ever heard, Hiram Bullock, who died July 31 in New York at the age of 52. The cause of Hiram's death is still unknown, but he was battling cancer of the mouth.
Though part of my affinity for Hiram was the fact that he was a Baltimore guy, having grown up here and having attended the prestigious Peabody Conservatory, I was also drawn to his virtuosity on the lead guitar. He worked with such luminaries as Billy Joel, Al Jarreau, Paul Simon, Barbra Streisand, Sting and Steely Dan, though I was initially introduced to his work when he was the original guitarist in "The World's Most Dangerous Band" on "Late Night with David Letterman" from 1982-84. He left the band amid reports of drug usage and struck out on his own.
His solo albums, especially, "From All Sides,' "Give It What U Got,' and "Way Kool" are masterpieces, and his collaborations with saxophonist David Sanborn on his own albums and on David's pieces are nothing short of brilliant. We'll miss his musicianship and showmanship, but mostly we'll miss his enthusiasm.
Rest in piece, Hiram

A change in our way of life

If you're of a certain age, say 30-50, shopping malls and the big department stores that anchor them have always been a part of your life. Having lived in Southern Maryland for the first 20-some years of my life, I distinctly recall when Landover Mall, which sits hard on the Capital Beltway, opened in the early 1970's. For a kid my age and with my curiosity, Landover Mall was a wonderland, with big stores, like Sears, Hecht's, Garfinkles and Woodward and Lothrop, on each end, and seemingly a million little stores in between.
Eventually, Garfinkles and Woodies (as Woodward and Lothrop was affectionately known in the Washington area) folded, Hecht's eventually became part of the Macy's chain, leaving Sears as the only major tenant. The rest of the mall, which is a really long walk from FedEx Field, closed, and the Redskins supposedly wanted to buy the property to raze it for parking. Remarkably, Sears stayed open, and still operates to this day, alone in a mall that no longer exists.
Landover Mall, like a ton of malls across the country, has become a victim to radical changes in our culture. The indoor shopping mall, once a staple of suburban American life, has morphed into the "town center" concept, where shops and stores are arranged to look like a little village of commerce.
I say all that to mourn the imminent departure of Boscov's from the Baltimore area. The Pennsylvania-based, family owned chain came here a couple of years ago, ironically, to fill the holes left when Macy's took over Hecht's. Boscov's, where you can get terrific fudge, among other things, will close locally within the next month, save for one store in the far western suburbs. The closing will put 400 people out of work, and may put another nail in the coffin of at least two local malls.
Ah, commerce.

ENOUGH, ALREADY

In one of the earlier posts, I told you about my antipathy about what the NFL has become in this culture, namely a black hole that sucks light and gravity and anything else into its maw.
Well, nothing encapsulates that feeling more than the unbelievable coverage afforded to Brett Favre's retirement/unretirement. The proverbial visitor from another planet would wonder just what circus world he/she had landed on having watched the ridiculous level of attention paid to whether a 38-year-old man who appears to have commitment issues is going to play football.
(Here's my two cents on this: Having gone through this "will he/won't he" nonsense for a few years now, and even more so in the last five months according to Fox's Jay Glazer, the Packers are entirely correct to want to cut their ties with Favre. They have Aaron Rodgers, whom they drafted a few years ago, and have no idea what he can do. At some point, they have to take him out for a test drive before he leaves, Favre is gone and they have nothing to show for it all.)
But, my sweet Lord, is anyone, ANYONE really worth this kind of attention? And the joke of it all is that you have media types decrying the ridiculousness of the situation? Hello? Who asked for moment to moment updates on the status of his flight from Mississippi to Wisconsin, not to mention live shots from the landing and a minute by minute rundown of what Favre ate on the plane as well as a full recap of how he disposed of it?
OK, the last part is a little facetious, but you get the point. For the media to be talking about how silly the Favre Farce is is a little like a kid offing his parents, then throwing himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan. This kind of breathless, no sense of perspective coverage has got to stop or at least slow, or else the media will be seen as a collection of Chicken Littles all too willing to proclaim that the sky is falling, when what you're getting is a little drizzle.
BTW, a very big shoutout of thanks to the folks over at the Women's Hoops Blog for noting my departure. If you love women's basketball, there's no better clearinghouse to get the news you need with spot-on commentary than their site. Give it a look, if you haven't already.

Artificial sweetening

ESPN's penchant for wretched excess has become far too easy a target for sports fans, and to be fair and honest, a number of the sins that are laid at the feet of the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports would be the province of any media outlet in a similar situation.
But ESPN's breathless coverage of the so-called July 31 baseball trading deadline revealed a bit of an agenda that doesn't serve anyone well.
Let me let you in on a little secret: There is no such thing as a trading deadline in baseball. I know, because I've looked it up. Trades go on all the time in baseball, though the ease or difficulty of making deals changes depending on dates. But you never, or should I say, hardly heard that piece of nuance from Bristol last week.
That's because it's easier to make up an artificial deadline, and do breathless minute-to-minute commentary than to explain a subtlety, which really isn't so subtle. Until July 31, teams can trade players without complications. After that date, a player has to clear waivers in order to be dealt, which makes trades trickier, but certainly possible.
As of Friday, all 30 Major League clubs placed, or tried to place, their entire rosters on waivers to make trades if they need to. If, for instance, Joba Chamberlain is unable to go the rest of the year, you can be sure that the Yankees will make a trade for a starter, no matter what it takes. Of course, in that scenario, one could and should expect the Red Sox or Rays to try to block said trade by putting in a waiver claim on the player being traded to New York. Usually, the team trying to deal with the Yankees would have to pull that player back or deal him to the team that made the claim.
Sounds complicated? Well, it kind of is, but it still makes the point that last Thursday might have been a plateau period, not a hard deadline. The next supposed deadline comes at the end of August, when players have to be on a team's roster to be eligible to play for that team in the postseason. Even with that said, a player can be traded in September. It's happened. I've seen it happen.
This whole thing may seem like nitpicking, but those of us who write and report on sports owe it to the public to deliver the goods with as little subterfuge and agenda as possible. ESPN missed badly on that last Thursday.

This week's Sports@Large

As I mentioned, I do a radio essay that airs each Monday afternoon at 5:30 p.m. on WYPR-FM, 88.1 in Baltimore, with a re-air in the 9 a.m. hour on Tuesdays. Here's the script from the current Sports@Large:

The road to a college education rarely runs smooth, and for some goes a bit bumpier than for most. What is supposed to be a four-year journey through the halls of higher learning sometimes goes as far a ground as that three hour tour that Gilligan and the Skipper led the castaways on, and with a lot less comedy.

Take Christian Abate, for instance. When he graduated from St. John Neumann High in South Philadelphia in 1997, Abate had dreams, dreams that he would teach kids. In order to make those dreams a reality, Abate had to get a college degree, so he enrolled at Temple, a fine university in his hometown.

Alas, dreams need funding, and Abate’s funds ran short, so he had to drop out of Temple, though he continued to work as a busboy at Saloon, an Italian restaurant on South Seventh Street in the city. Every so often, though, a dream gets a boost from the most unlikely of places. In Christian Abate’s case, he got an assist from a fairy godfather, albeit one who is 6-foot-5 and weighs around 300 pounds.

One of Saloon’s regular customers is NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, and in the course of his visits, Barkley struck up a relationship with Abate. During a meal last summer, Barkley asked Abate if the teaching world was treating him well, only to find that Abate had not gone back to Temple because he couldn’t get the proper level of financial aid. So, Barkley arranged to leave Abate a rather sizable tip, namely, to pay his tuition, but only gave him until the end of the meal to make up his mind over whether to accept the offer or not. It didn’t take that long for Abate to say yes.

Few athletes, current or former, inspire the kind of reaction that Barkley does. In his playing days, the man known as the Round Mound of Rebound used his gifts to the max to make himself an updated version of former Baltimore Bullet Wes Unseld, only Barkley could jump and score. There aren’t many players for whom it can accurately be said that he or she left every single ounce of effort of themselves on the field or court every time. Charles Barkley is one of them.

But for all his wonderful basketball abilities, Barkley can be crude, rude and boorish. There’s the spitting on a spectator, the throwing of a bar patron through a glass door, the punching in the chest of an Angolan opponent during the 1992 Olympics, the proclivity to say whatever comes to his mind with little, if any filter, not to mention little if any concern for whom those words might hurt. And there’s the indiscriminate gambling, which only recently stopped.

Yes, the rap sheet on Sir Charles is long, but it should also be noted that Barkley has given separate million dollar gifts to his high school in Leeds, Alabama, to a poor high school in Birmingham and to Auburn University, the school he attended before he was drafted by the 76ers in 1984. It should also be noted that Barkley didn’t finish Auburn, leaving school a year early for the NBA. It seems that Charles Barkley has made the biggest assist of his life, and Christian Abate is the recipient.

Rules of the road

This is the last of the introductory postings, and it deals with how and what you'll see in this space.
You should know first that I am a huge basketball fan, a big baseball fan and am mildly interested in football (for reasons that will be delved into a little later on).
Now, included in that love of basketball is a deep appreciation for women's basketball. I've covered 14 women's Final Fours, a ton of ACC tournaments and hundreds of college and girls games. Besides the fact that I met my sweet wife at a game five years ago, I enjoy the game and the people who play it. If you can't respect that fact with your posts, then don't bother.
I love popular culture, and I can assure you that there will be regular posts about television shows I'm watching, music I'm listening to or movies I've seen. And I am quite political. I vote left of center. If those things are a problem for you, then move on to the next blog.
Oh, about football. As a kid, I loved football. On most fall afternoons, I would go out in my front yard and run around, pretending to be Sonny Jurgensen or Billy Kilmer or Larry Brown or Johnny Unitas (remember where I grew up). I would collect team and player stamps from the local Sunoco station and fill a book with players I knew and players I had never heard of. I distinctly remember watching the Miami Dolphins beat the Kansas City Chiefs in overtime on Christmas Day 1971 in a playoff game. Football was great.
But at some point, football became all-encompassing, as in unavoidable. Once the season starts, between the colleges and the NFL, there are games every night, and when the season is over, football talk continues to overshadow everything in its path. It's like, how can I miss it when it just won't go away?
Worse yet, the NFL has grown increasingly arrogant, running roughshod over everything in its path, from players to fans. The league's ole to the side when the Colts left Baltimore in 1984, while throwing its corporate body in the way of the Eagles when Leonard Tose wanted to move to Phoenix was galling enough. The owners' attempt to try to pass off Gus the lovable mechanic down the street and his like as replacement players in 1987 was the next step.
The final straw was former commissioner Paul Tagliabue's comment in 1995 to Baltimore television reporter Scott Garceau after Baltimore's expansion effort was rebuffed. When Garceau asked Tagliabue what the people of Maryland should do with the money that had been set aside for a stadium for a new stadium, the smug, self-righteous prig said Marylanders could build a museum. Three years later, they did, named Ravens Stadium, for the team that moved here from Cleveland, leaving Tags to wipe the smirk and the egg off his face.
All of this is not to say that there won't be some football posts; there will be. But I do take pride in being one of the few straight male Americans who doesn't automatically kneel at the altar of the great god football.

How we got here.

OK, so if you're reading this, and especially if you've read my profile, you're no doubt wondering why isn't a guy with my credentials working? I wish I knew.
Actually, I do know why, and while I don't necessarily want to dwell on it publicly, suffice it to say that the fact that I walked away from a 23-year reporting career and a 27-year association with a newspaper has a lot to do with the actions of bad men, some of whom do business at a tower at a great Midwestern city and others in a six-story building in a mid-Atlantic city.
Listen, the newspaper business is changing fundamentally and daily, and those who practice the craft have to adapt to get ahead of those changes. I get that, and I fully well understand that the newspaper that lands on many front lawns today may be a thing of the past in the not-too-distant future.
But what is happening at many of these newspapers, my former one included, is much less about change and more about greed and ambition. My career at my former newspaper ended in equal parts because of the greed of people who run the parent company and the naked, unbridled ambition of those who run the newspaper.
Don't worry. As I said before, I have little interest in publicly flogging people that I worked for. It serves no real purpose, and it's a lot like trying to dress a pig in a tuxedo. It only gets everyone messy and it pisses the pig off.
I had a great run, and while I think I still have things to say, I could move on to the next working phase of my life with just one regret: that I never got to cover the Olympics. But in the grand scheme, leaving a career with one regret is not a bad way to go, eh?

A quick introduction

So, welcome to this brand new venture, an opportunity to share thoughts and feelings that won't always be conventional, but hopefully will always be interesting.
There'll be more about me in future postings, but, for now, I'll tell you that until yesterday, I was a writer for the Baltimore Sun. I spent the first four years of my career bouncing between the Metro and features departments, before I landed in sports in October of 1989, until I took a buyout yesterday.
I did a blog for the newspaper on local high school sports, and while I'll touch on some big picture events related to high schools, I'll be posting here as regularly as possible on just about everything in sports and the world at large, hence the title.
By the way, the blog title is a variation on a weekly radio essay show that I host on WYPR, Baltimore's NPR affiliate. As best I can, I will try to post the audio of each week's essay, or, barring that, the script of that week's show.
That's it for now. Look for more later, and thanks for dropping by!

Saving the space

Check back here in about three weeks for the first entry. See you soon!