Of family ties, hats and corn pudding

It's been a tradition in my family for more years than I can remember to gather at the home of my Aunt Henrietta and Uncle Preston for a Memorial Day weekend picnic following Family Day services at their church. Uncle Preston would stroll around the grounds making sure the tables and chairs were placed properly, while Aunt 'Rette,' as we called her, supervised the kitchen.

The food would usually be served around 3 or so; that is, after grace was said, sometimes by three people. We'd quickly line up for food, not because it was going to go quickly; to the contrary, it was always in plentiful supply. Rather, we got there fast because the food was so good. The highlight of every picnic was Aunt Rette's crab balls, rationed out one or two to a customer, and her corn pudding, which was exactly what it sounds like, kernels of corn in a sweet sauce. It was pointless to ask her for a recipe, as the formula, much like the one for my mom's rice pudding, was in Aunt Rette's head and it wasn't going to be pried out.

Aunt Rette was always stylish. Her dresses were immaculate and tasteful, but, most importantly, her hats (and she was never seen in church without a hat) were impeccable. If she didn't know, there would be a moment where she would size you up, but once she did, she always had a warm smile. I always made a point to plant a kiss on her cheek when I saw her.

My aunt Henrietta, who had been in poor health in recent years, passed away yesterday in Annapolis at a care facility, six days past her 85^th birthday. The family will gather again near Memorial Day, but it won't be the same. You can bet that the picnics in heaven just got the best corn pudding they've ever had.

Rest in peace, Aunt Rette.

True ‘American Idols’

While my wife and I were driving home last night, the Spinners' "Mighty Love" came up on our XM radio (on the "Soul Town" or classic soul channel, to be precise) and for five minutes, we were in heaven.

For those who don't know the Spinners, a primer is in order: They are an amazing R&B group from just outside Detroit that has been together in one form or another for 59 years. They are one of the few groups or artists to have achieved greater stardom after leaving Motown, having split following a top 15 hit, "It's A Shame,' produced and co-written by a young Stevie Wonder.

From 1972 to 1977, the Spinners' body of work ("I'll Be Around," "How Could I Let You Get Away," "Could It Be I'm Falling In Love," "One of A Kind (Love Affair)," "Ghetto Child," "Mighty Love," "I'm Coming Home," "Love Don't Love Nobody," Then Came You," "Games People Play," and "The Rubberband Man," is as strong as any groups during that era, and ought to land them a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The point to this is that the Spinners were singers, real singers, guys who knew what to do with a lyric. Yes, Phillippe Wynne, who did most of the leads during the 70's, could go off on fabulous improvised tangents on a lot of songs, but he never had to resort to histrionics. Their music, under the direction of producer Thom Bell, was honest and subtle and brilliant.

Now, as another season of American Idol comes to a merciful end, ask yourself this: Who is the "singer" who has come through that process over the years that you can say is on a path to being enshrined in Cleveland?

And here's a follow-up: Thirty years from now, what song from an American Idol "singer" will be playing on "Soul Town," or a classic rock or "Lite 102" station of that era?

I humbly submit that while American Idol has made celebrities out of a blowsy washed-up former cheerleader, a bass player of little renown and a boorish Brit, it hasn't given us much music to remember.

NBA Eastern Conference preview

Last night's first game of the NBA's Western Conference championships only confirmed for me the merit of playing and coaching the game with your head. The Nuggets appeared to have a collective brain freeze late in the game, symbolized by a bad inbounds play with about 30 seconds left.

Trevor Ariza stole Anthony Carter's pass and set up Kobe Bryant's free throws with 10 seconds left, allowing the Lakers to erase a seven-point deficit, come back and win.

(BTW, someone should tell Chauncey Billups that it's OK in that circumstance to set up in the backcourt to give Carter a better passing angle. Yeah, Carter's pass was bad, but Billups didn't help.)

The Eastern Conference championships, which open tonight in Cleveland, may come down to a strategic decision that besieged Orlando head coach Stan Van Gundy has to make.

The Cavaliers-Magic series has a chance to go six or seven games, in my view, if Van Gundy decides to have Rashard Lewis guard Cleveland center Zydrunas Ilgauskas rather than putting Defensive Player of the Year Dwight Howard on the Mighty Z.

What's the diff? OK, given Ilgauskas' predilection to shooting the longer range jumper, placing Howard on him will pull the Orlando man-child out of the middle, thereby freeing the center of the floor for LeBron James to drive to the basket virtually at will. In that way, James not only scores in the paint, but goes to the free throw line when he's fouled more often.

With Lewis, a shooting guard in a big man's body, on Big Z, Howard can stay in the paint and slough off Anderson Varejao to provide help and clog the lane, while giving James something to think about.

In the end, it may not matter much. Behind James, whom Shaquille O'Neal said the other day is playing like a cheat code on a video game, the Cavaliers are playing inspired ball and probably won't be stopped between now and the title.

The only question probably left is how long Orlando can extend the Cavaliers. Make it Cleveland in six.

And while we're speaking of Shaq, you gotta love the Big Aristotle showing up at Syracuse to learn how to be a broadcaster. Everyone knows that on the day he retires, O'Neal would become the most sought after former player in broadcasting circles, no questions asked. He would need nothing more than to show up for a perfunctory production meeting now and then, and do the games.

But the fact that he would take this course to learn the business, albeit in a week, speaks volumes.

Western Conference preview

It occurs to me that the NBA's Western Conference championship series has the potential to be one of the most cerebral of postseason matchups in recent memory, but not for the reasons you might think.

The use of the word "cerebral," in this case, has little or nothing to do with the ability of the respective coaches, Denver's George Karl, or Phil Jackson of the Lakers, to draw up X's and O's. Frankly, I've never thought of either of them as possessing particularly sharp basketball minds.

(Indeed, in the case of Jackson, the most inexplicably celebrated coach perhaps in all of sports, I defer to Boston coach Doc Rivers, who wondered aloud once just how smart Jackson would have been if he had had to coach the then Vancouver Grizzlies, rather than four likely future Hall of Famers (Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant).

But as the Nuggets and Lakers prepare to party down, the mind games that will be played during this series may be as fascinating as what gets played on the floor.

The Nuggets will almost certainly try to get into the heads of the Lakers, especially their emotionally fragile frontcourt of Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum. Don't think for a moment that Denver's Kenyon Martin, who is as physical a big man as there is in the league, won't test Gasol and/or Bynum right off the bat with some well –placed forearms, pushes and whatever else he can get away with. And Martin will spread the gospel of physicality to his disciples, Nene and reserve Chris Andersen, and urge them to baptize Bynum and Gasol as early and as often as possible.

Look, then, for Jackson, as early as the pre-game press conference before tonight's Game 1, to try to get the message across to anyone who will listen, but mainly the game officials, that the Nuggets are bad and always foul. Then, Karl will have to take up the banner for his players and on it will go, back and forth, back and forth.

And speaking of the mental game, here's something else to watch in this series: Kobe Bryant has four technical fouls during the playoffs, the most recent picked up in Game Six of the conference semifinals against Houston. Bryant is three away from a one-game suspension, and while you shouldn't expect him to get those three, you should expect the Nuggets to try to push his buttons.

All that said, the game should be decided on the floor, and right now, Denver is playing better basketball. Chauncey Billups, who should have been second in league MVP voting behind LeBron James rather than sixth, has given the Nuggets a quarterback the likes of which the Mile High City hasn't seen since John Elway retired. He settles down a collection of knuckleheads and makes Carmelo Anthony better. Meanwhile, the Lakers have looked largely disinterested, save for Games 5 and 7 in the Houston series, and have played as if a return to the Finals is a fait accompli.

The Nuggets have the offense, and most importantly, the defense to make that a fairy tale. Look for Denver to wrap up its first NBA Championship Series appearance in six games.

We'll have Eastern Conference thoughts tomorrow.

 

This week’s Sports @ Large

With the resumption of the blog, we resume the custom of posting the script to this week's Sports @ Large. If you live in the Baltimore area, you can hear Sports @ Large each Monday at 5:30 p.m. or during "Maryland Morning" each Tuesday during the 9 a.m. hour on WYPR 88.1 FM. If you don't live in Baltimore (and why don't you?), check out the streaming audio at www.wypr.org

It didn't take long for social network users and newspaper copy editors to grasp the significance of Rachel Alexandra's win at Pimlico Saturday.

Before you knew it, there were Facebook messages posted about how the Preakness winner ran like a girl. Meanwhile, headlines in the Sunday paper made great reference to girl power.

Saturday was a remarkable day at Old Hilltop, and, by extension, in the world of horse racing, which saw a filly win the second leg of the sport's most important series, the Triple Crown, for the first time in 85 years.

But the events of Saturday offered only a one day pass from the dire problems that confront the sport of kings, and not even a full pass.

Perhaps you noticed the crowd of just under 78,000, the smallest Preakness crowd in 26 years, and more than 35,000 fewer people than the 2008 announced attendance.

You better believe that people in and around racing noticed. You could try to explain away Saturday's numbers behind the decision to bar outside alcohol from what has been an annual day of decadence and depravity.

Even so, you also have to note that the relatively sparse gathering wasn't the greatest advertisement for an industry that needs all the kind words it can get.

In many ways, horse racing, like newspapers, is a victim of the times.

People aren't reading papers the way they used to, and they aren't going to the track the way they did in the days when Ernest Hemingway and Rudyard Kipling waxed rhapsodic about the majestic beasts who ran and the lively jockeys who rode them.

And going 31 years now without a Triple Crown winner that the public can rally around has also helped to render racing irrelevant for many casual fans, which means most of us.

But the industry isn't doing a lot to help itself.

Take for instance, the decision of the New York Racing Association to pull the Belmont out of the television contract that had bound the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont to one network, NBC.

New York officials took the Belmont to ABC last year, and experience tells us that when you force viewers to search for something that they aren't usually interested in, they won't.

That is, unless, a horse is going for the Triple Crown, which, thanks to Rachel Alexandra's win over Kentucky Derby winner, Mine That Bird, won't happen this year.

Of course, there could be a decent curiosity factor if the two Triple Crown winners were to meet in next month's Belmont, but Rachel Alexandra's owners may very well follow logic and keep her out.

The theory there is that she lost steam near the end Saturday on the shortest of the Triple Crown tracks and might not have the stamina to complete the mile and a half in New York, the longest of the three races.

And let's not even talk about the specific problems with racing here, which will require nothing short of a miracle to resolve.

For now, let's put all that on the back burner and let the girl have her fun. She surely earned it.

Correcting a big mistake

In another life, I was once a sports media critic for a once great metropolitan daily newspaper. Mind you, my criticisms didn't make the paper great, though I'd like to think they helped.

Oh, heck, the bottom line here is that I once used to write about sports television on a daily basis, and had a story like the one that came up today, that former Tampa Bay Bucs coach Jon Gruden is joining ESPN's Monday Night Football booth to replace Tony Kornheiser, come up when I was on the beat, I would have written at least one word about it.

And that word would have been "Hallelujah."

The words that would have followed would have been about how woefully miscast Kornheiser was on MNF. You can certainly understand what ESPN executives were trying to do in bringing a supposed "regular guy" into the mix along with a football expert and a play-by-play man. The trouble is that Kornheiser has never been a regular guy, nor has he wanted to be in any of his platforms.

Frankly, the lure of the former Washington Post sports/humor columnist has always been lost on me, in print and on television. His humor fell flat, and he never has displayed any sort of intellectual curiosity about the people he supposedly covered, assuming that he ever deigned to show up at events.

Here's where a little personal disclosure is in order: When he hosted a radio show in Washington in the 90's, Kornheiser took a vicious shot at me on the air after I criticized him in print for something he had done on the air. And to make matters worse, he called some of my former colleagues to gather personal information on me to use on the air in the attack.

So, am I saddened by today's developments? Not entirely. But I still think ESPN's move was made for the right reasons.

The happy warrior of jazz and hoops

Those who look down at the genre of smooth jazz often deride it as "happy jazz" as if to say that it doesn't challenge the listener.

You can be sure that Wayman Tisdale, who died today at the age of 44, didn't take such an appellation as an insult. Tisdale, an accomplished bassist, did everything happy, from playing smooth jazz to playing power forward at Oklahoma and in the NBA.

Tisdale, the all-time leading scorer and rebounder in Sooner history and a three-time All-American, was a gifted offensive player, though he had the misfortune of playing professionally during the same era as Charles Barkley and Karl Malone, two more celebrated players at his position.

Still, in a 12-year NBA career, Tisdale averaged 15.3 points a game for his career that included stints in Indiana, Sacramento and Phoenix. He won a gold medal in 1984 as a member of the American Olympic team and selected to the College Basketball Hall of Fame last month.

Off the court, Tisdale released eight albums and hit No.1 on the contemporary jazz charts three years ago with his "Way Up!" After he was diagnosed with a cancerous cyst two years ago, Tisdale released "Rebound," to mark his battle with illness.

Tisdale was the definition of a happy warrior and his presence and genial nature will be supremely missed.

Quick rant: While it was completely consistent with his nature for Tisdale to give Blake Griffin permission to wear his previously retired No.23 jersey, someone at Oklahoma should have told Griffin the number was unavailable. Now that Tisdale is gone, that number should go back in the rafters in his honor never to be worn again.

Cautionary tale

President Obama's reversal of an administration position regarding the release of photos of abused detainees ought to provide concrete proof to Americans on both sides of the aisle that it's folly to project either their fondest hopes or their worst nightmares onto this man or any elected official for that matter.

Perhaps because of the historic nature of Obama's election and because of the abject failure of the previous administration, people on the left of the political spectrum have ascribed all manner of miraculous talents and abilities to the new president. Meanwhile, conservatives have demonized Obama to a fare-thee-well, seeing him as the Antichrist come to life.

Neither is true, obviously, and Obama's flip-flop on allowing these photos to be seen is proof that he is a politician, no more and no less. His inclination is to do that which will cast his administration in the most favorable light for the largest bloc of the electorate.

To be sure, as someone who is left of center, I tend to agree with the overwhelming majority of Obama's agenda, and I wish those on the right would give him at least a minute to succeed or fail on his own merit. But, unlike a lot of my fellow liberals, I don't operate under any illusions about who Barack Obama is or what he's about.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday

 

So, anything happen while I was gone?

Yeah, I know; taking a seven month sabbatical from a blog isn't the smartest idea, especially when you're attempting to build a regular readership. My bad, and I'll address what I've been doing, for those who care, in a subsequent posting.

However, there's no better reason to pick up "Sports and the World @ Large" than to mark the 58^th birthday of an American icon, Steveland Hardaway Judkins or Steveland Hardaway Morris.

Regardless the name on his birth certificate, the name of the man he became, Stevie Wonder, is synonymous with the best traditions of service and principles, not to mention being the best damn popular musician this country has ever produced.

Listing Stevie's humanitarian accomplishments would take all day, and listing his contributions to the musical culture would go on for a week or more. The combination of the two makes him the most potent force for good in American popular culture.

And he's still musically relevant. My wife and I saw him last year on tour in Washington, and I was amazed not only at his staying power ( 2 ½ hours without an intermission) but also at how rich and full his voice is more than 45 years after he first burst on the scene as "Little Stevie Wonder."

Though I said listing his songs would take a lot of time, I do want to suggest that if you must own one of his tunes, and one only, it should be "As" (third song, fourth side of "Songs In The Key of Life"). It is a seven minute ode to the power of pure love, with a dazzling Herbie Hancock keyboard solo in the middle.

Brilliant.

Just like Stevie.