Wednesday, September 24, 2008

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.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

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. 

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

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.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

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.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

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.