Month: January 2003

WAXING MY WINGS

I think that I was born with somewhat of an Icarus syndrome.

Ever since I was a tiny Jenn I’ve always loved to fly, and the fascination remains with me today. Of course, I prefer wings that are welded and made of steel as opposed to those feathered and adhered with wax, but I think you know what I mean.

There’s something about glimpsing the world from a vantage point where the people disappear, where scale shifts and geography widens, that stills me. From thousands of feet in the air the will of any one being falls away and towns, cities even, begin to show personalities in and of themselves.

Over the past several weeks I had occasion to fly from Philadelphia to Dallas to Chicago to Memphis. Such is the whirlwind of the thrifty vacationer who’ll make connections in favor of reduced airfares. The synopsis of my journey: NJ/Philly, 24 hours (after 17 hours in the car, yippee); Dallas, 2 hours; LA, 96 hours; Chicago, 5 hours; airtime, roughly 10.

While the trip was fun, and I had the perfect holiday with my family on my brief day spent in New Jersey, one of the best parts of the entire trip was looking at our city from overhead at night.

Having my first pedicure, writing a wedding ceremony, running around barefoot in a Chinese bridesmaid’s dress that didn’t quite fit me, drinking too many White Russians and spending too much money on myself in the spirit of vacation weren’t too bad either.

The grandeur of my return was probably heightened in significance due to the gut-shattering proliferation of turbulence from O’Hare to Memphis.

Even post-September 11th, I still love to fly, though I apparently represent something of a security threat in my appearance and am ALWAYS the person whose bags are randomly screened. But a small plane jostling through thunderstorms does not a happy traveler make. Even for a travel-happy Jenn.

That being said, the sight of Memphis lit up like a Lite-Brite below me was gorgeous. I saw tiny model houses with their tinier model cars in the driveway, all without conflict or trouble perceptible from such a height. Just barely could I make out the vaguest hint of some holiday lights, most likely from the more ostentatious holiday cheer types.

I haven’t yet decided whether it was this holiday display or that along the highway to the Jersey shore, cast in the glare of sleet and snow, that was more impressive. To be sure, I saw neither from my normal vantage pointÑthat of the last minute shopper who might or might not notice them on the way to Target or some such last-minute shopping Mecca.

But back to Memphis from the sky…

The lights of the bridge twinkled in the Mississippi’s eyes, and the Pyramid looked less like a debated social eyesore and more majestic, like a pyramid should be.

Trailer hitches awaiting trucks or railway assignment were piled high like so many Legos.

And our airport being the distribution capital for all airports, there were of course many other planes all around in their own holding patterns. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many planes awaiting landing in my life, with the possible exception of Newark airport.

It’s funny, what looks like a swarm of red fireflies is really millions of other things–

people, mail, cargo.

To put this all in perspective, I spent about 13 of the hours preceding my descent either in the air or languishing in various airports, but I don’t think the overhead view of the city at night would have diminished any were it only one.

Like I said, perception is a funny thing from the sky.

The Memphis City Schools Administration has finally hit on a way to save money. Unfortunately, the returns are fairly modest.

When the administration released a long-awaited consultant’s report on school system operations and spending practices, reporters found out they would have to pay $39.42 for a copy of the thick report. News outlets generally are not charged for public documents and reports other than copies of lawsuits because that is how the information is conveyed to the public.

With approximately 25 print and broadcast news outlets of various descriptions in Memphis, the administration could be looking at a $1,000 windfall. In fact, however, only two newspapers and four television stations regularly cover the board of education, so returns could be somewhat lower.

Dolores Bell, spokeswoman for the Memphis City Schools, said the media are being charged for the report because of cost concerns in making copies of the report, which is over 1000 pages in length. She said it had apparently not occurred to the school administration or the consultant to make it available via the Internet, as most government offices and corporations routinely do.

Cost concerns, however, apparently don=B9t trouble the “thrifty” administration when it comes to multimillion-dollar contracts and central-office employees who make six-figure salaries. The report itemizes scores of examples of wasteful spending and unnecessary expenditures by MCS.

It says the system could save over $100 million by not building unnecessary new schools and consolidating underused ones instead. And it says MCS incurs budget overruns of, on average, 38 percent on new schools and 25 percent on renovations and additions.

The old southern river town had finally had enough.

Enough of the squabbling between city and county governments. Enough of seeing rival cities get the goodies. Enough of being the butt of jokes in the national media. Enough of being spurned by professional sports teams. Enough of the fading glory of yesterday’s stars and celebrities and the low profile of Conference USA. Enough of being displaced by its neighbor to the east as the largest city in the state.

So on Monday the city of Louisville officially consolidated with Jefferson County, Kentucky, to become Metro Louisville, going from the 67th largest city in the country to the 16th largest and overtaking, among others, Lexington, Ky., and Memphis.

In his inauguration speech, Mayor Jerry Abramson said, “Our city has been fractured too long along racial and economic lines, along the lines of suburban and urban.” He talked about the importance of Louisville having one vision and one voice. It looks as if Abramson will be that voice for quite a while. He was mayor of Louisville for 12 years until term limits sidelined him four years ago.

The similarities with Memphis are striking, to a point.

Louisville has UPS. Memphis has FedEx.

The Louisville Cardinals have Rick Pitino. The Memphis Tigers have John Calipari.

Louisville has Churchill Downs, business legend Colonel Harlan Sanders, and larger-than-life Muhammad Ali. Memphis has Graceland, business legend Fred Smith, and larger-than-life legend Elvis.

Sportswriter Jim Murray once called Louisville “the nation’s bar rag.” Author Shelby Foote once wrote that “If God wanted to give the world an enema, Memphis is where He would insert the nozzle.”

The Louisville Chamber of Commerce likes to boast about its river, rail, roads, and runways. The Memphis Chamber of Commerce does, too.

Louisville pursued Michael Heisley and the Vancouver Grizzlies before they came to Memphis.

Jerry Abramson, a Democrat with appeal to Republicans, is sometimes called “mayor for life.” Ditto Willie Herenton.

Consolidation opponents in Louisville twice voted it down and some municipalities threatened to secede before a referendum passed in 2000. Consolidation votes have failed twice in Memphis and Shelby County and opponents threatened to secede the last time the issue came up five years ago.

So much for the similarities. Now the differences.

Memphis has grown by annexation to encompass over 650,000 residents and 300 square miles. It has more than double the population of the rest of Shelby County. Louisville, before consolidation, was a city of 250,000 people surrounded by 83 municipalities. Louisville had barely half the population of surrounding Jefferson County.

Jefferson County is 77 percent white and 19 percent black. Shelby County is 49 percent black and 47 percent white.

The Louisville and Jefferson County school systems merged back in 1975.

The new Louisville City Council has 26 members, including six blacks and 20 whites. The combined Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission have 13 blacks and 13 whites.

In other words, our fracture is bigger than their fracture, and the line goes right down the middle.

So don’t hold your breath waiting for Memphis to follow Louisville’s example in a surge of “so can we” spirit. Mayor Herenton, a proponent of consolidation, says only one thing will bring it about.

“The economics of funding government is going to drive us to a metropolitan form of government,” he said this week.

If so, it will probably be a hybrid with separate school system boundaries. Herenton has twice proposed such an arrangement, and this week he unveiled a plan to nudge it along via an appointed city school board. If he is reelected later this year, as seems all but certain, he can nudge some more in his fourth term, or play a wild card such as proposing to surrender the office for the sake of consolidation.

One thing he won’t accept is what he sees as a “piecemeal” solution to the schools funding issue.

“The best way to get this job done,” he said, “is to do it comprehensively.”

(John Branston is special projects director for Contemporary Media, Inc., parent company of the Flyer.)

During a recent city-to-city tour of the United States, Niels Annen, youth chairman of Germany’s currently reigning Social Democratic Party, mainly concerned himself with “fact-facting” or laying down Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder’s party line to this or that American group. But he took time off, as conditions permitted, to catch an NBA game if one was going in the city he happened to be visiting. He discoursed on his interest – and European interest generally — the morning after watching the Memphis Grizzles dust off the Denver Nuggets 96-93, a mid-December game in which forward Pau Gasol, a Spanish transplant and last year’s NBA rookie-of-the-year, dominated play with 18 points and 10 rebounds.

“There’s a lot of interest in the NBA in Germany. We get summaries of all the game on television, and some of them are carried live and get watched by a lot of German fans if the time element is right. There’s a huge fuss over [Dirk] Nowitzki, so people make sure they keep up with him. We’re proud of him.”

Nowitzski, of course, is the star forward of the Dallas Mavericks and a genuine All-Star by anybody’s standards, foreign or domestic. But he is not unique; the number of professional European players in basketball, a bona fide made-in-America sport, is a-bounding these days, both on the Grizzlies and Mavericks and on virtually every other team in the National Basketball Association, a moniker that increasingly seems anachronicstic – especially when at a given moment either team in an NBA game could be fielding two or three players from the other side of the Atlantic, both from Europe and from African. Not to mention the Houston Rockets’ Yao Ming, the universally coveted treetop-tall phenom from China, across the other water.

“There are many German players in the NBA now – there is Detlef Schrempf [of the Portland TrailBlazers], for example, and many, many more are coming,” says Annen.

Annen dates his own enthusiasm for NBA-style basketball from 1992, when Olympic rules were relaxed to the point of permitting the USA to field a Michael Jordan-led “dream team” of star players from the NBA. “We followed all the games,” Annen said. “For the first time basketball was getting the same kind of attention in Germany that football [soccer] always got.” Indeed, said Annen of his native land, where soccer is, as elsewhere in the non-American world, virtually a religion, “those cities that don’t have a distinguished team or a soccer tradition are now trying to sponsor basketball teams to have a professional team of quality.” There is a national professional league in Germany, whose ever-increasing quality is indicated by the Nowitzskis and Schremps and their lesser-known brethren.

Part of the charm of basketball for a European seems to be in the ease with which indoor facilities can be found or created for it, said Annen. It is a fact that third on his list of popoular national sports — as on those, it turned out, of Gasol’s and Croatian teammate Gordon Giricek — is handball, another spectacle of close confines and quick movement.

“One thing about basketball: It is never boring,” Annen points out.

NOR, FROM THE POINT OF VIEW of the players themselves, is it exactly a rose garden. A few days after the game Annen saw, Gasol relaxed in the Grizzlies’ locker room at Memphis’ 10-year-old Pyramid facility (soon to be replaced by a newer, gussier arena a few blocks further south) and talked about a game in which, once again, he had dominated as the Grizzles beat the Orlando Magic 99-86. “The whole first half I wasn’t in my rhythm,” recalled the soft-spoken Gasol. “But in the second half I played much better, with intensity, and I started getting rebounds.” He would end with 10 rebounds and, though the 7-foot-plus Gasol was double- or triple-teamed for much of the game, with 12 points. And his play-making passes to teammates were exceptional.

The progression of that one day’s play was something of a synecdoche for the way in which the diffident 22-year-old Spaniard developed as a player in the NBA. Though he was raised on NBA telecasts in Spain and can’t remember a time when they weren’t freely available, the first NBA game he ever saw was the first one he played in, the exhibition-season opener of 2001 in Memphis against the Portland TrailBlazers. To many, the gangly, frail-looking Gasol looked tentative. “I was,” confesses Gasol, who has gone on to toughen up (and to put on some appreciable muscle).

Gasol notes an irony: In Europe, where games are played straight through (a contrast to the NBA tradition of hoopla, which sees frequent interruptions for cheerleaders, acrobats, costumed mascots chunking souvenirs at fans, and even on-court hypnotists), the crowds are, as with soccer, intense from the first minute of play and inclined to be rowdy, even violent. “American crowds are sometimes very passive until the game gets very close and exciting,” concludes the Spaniard. But the contrast is otherwise on court, where European play is considerably less rugged, says Gasol, who took many an untoward elbow during his first month of play.

“I noticed how rough it was in the first regular-season game, against the [Detroit] Pistons,,” remembers Gasol. “I reaized I had to play harder and get stronger. So I did.” He reckons that his coming of age took place in the fourth game of the 2001-02 season, against Phoenix, when he scored 27 points and gave as good as he got. “Now I can ‘mix it up’with the best of them,” he says, with unmistakeable pride.

Now that his idiom includes (both verbally and physically) the concept of “mixing it up,” Gasol is an illustration perhaps of why it is that European players are doing so well against American-born players in the NBA. “In Europe, the big guys are maybe more versatile, playing outside and inside, doing the jumpers.”

The interest in basketball and level of play in Spain have “always been good,” he says. His own parents were both amateur players of note, and, though soccer is the dominant sport in Spain, “I never was interested in playing that. I always wanted basketball.” With only a seven-hour time differential between the U.S. East Coast and his native Barcelona, and with a trusty VCR to record games that happened in the middle of the night by his time, Gasol was able to study the American game closely. Like other Europeans, his interest was intensified by the “dream team” of 1992, and MJ, Magic, and Larry Bird became as familiar to him as to any American fan.

It didn’t hurt Gasol’s prospects, of course, that he sprouted so tall. He developed a national reputation as a schoolboy player of 17 and turned pro at 19, doing so well in Spanish and European competition that he attracted a covey of NBA scouts to watch him during his final year of European play. He intends to return home eventually but hopes to play at least 10 years in America. A huge favorite in Memphis, he owns up that, on visits back to Spain, he is treated like a national idol. “Even in the [public] bathroom, when I go to pee,” he says, grinning and ducking his head bashfully and thereby shedding an inch or two of his commanding height.

Gasol is anything but bashful about the future, as he sees it, of Europeans playing basketball in the United States. “There are going to be a lot of us,” he prophesies. “We’re proving to people that we can play here, and we’re getting more confident.”

DEAR DENNIS

You’ve been on my mind a lot since January 6, 2002. My mind wrapped around the world of sports more than any adult could rationalize, I’ve often wondered what Dennis Freeland would think about this, what Dennis Freeland would say about that. On occasion, I’ve realized we’d disagree and have a mild-mannered debate on the matter. Without fail, though, I’ve realized the discussion would end with smiles.

You were on my mind last March, when John Calipari’s Tigers made their run (again) to Madison Square Garden and the NIT’s version of the “final four.” I heard you wondering, as I did, Are we supposed to cheer? The home team competing with 31 others for the right to claim they are the 66th finest program in the country . . . hmmm. Like any decent (and honest) sportswriter, I found the answer as I hopped around my living room, palms sweaty as the Tigers fought tooth and nail with Temple in the semis. When they pulled off the win, then whipped South Carolina for the championship, Memphis had itself a hoops Catch 22 like none other. “We are the champions . . . here’s hoping we don’t defend!” The kind of irrational celebration that would have brought out that ironic chuckle you delivered on countless topics. And it’s funny, Dennis, but I think you would have agreed: this beats the heck out of a first-round loss in

the NCAAs. (And no, I still haven’t determined if he’s smooth or slick. I’ll keep you posted.)

The day after the NIT final, the St. Louis Cardinals came to town for an exhibition with our Redbirds. You used to tease me with Cardinal stories from just before I was old enough to relish my beloved nine. (Loved the one about the Cards-Mets doubleheader you saw at Busch when the four starting pitchers were Gibson, Carlton, Seaver, and Koosman!) I’m convinced you placed that Red Schoendienst-autographed baseball directly between us as a mouth-watering conversation opener during our visits . . . one I could gaze upon, but not touch. I know you were with me in the pressbox that night when, after a short rain delay, none other than Schoendienst himself sat down to my right. I managed the nerve to introduce myself to the ol’ redhead, talked a little baseball even. (Alas, Red thought Luis Saturria would come around.) We would have shared a belly-laugh, Dennis, if you had heard Red’s response when I asked him which World Series ring he was wearing. “Well,” said the Hall of Famer, “I don’t always wear one, only for special occasions. You know . . . I’ve got nine of ‘em.”

To this day, I haven’t conducted a basketball interview without wondering if my questions would meet your standard. After sitting down with Jerry West last August, I came away thinking of your take on Mr. Logo: class, superstar, honest, gentleman, winner. And the descriptions would have had nothing to do with the man’s achievements on the court. The kind of guy who made you feel lucky to be in his presence, win or lose.

When I spoke to Gene Bartow last month, I was sure to remind him of the autographed picture of you and the coach that hung on your wall as long as we knew each other. In a happy mood as he recollected the 1973 Final Four, Bartow spoke as if he was the lucky one in that picture. He had it right.

That same week, I managed to get John Wooden on the phone (had to get a take on the ‘73 championship from the other bench). Knees shaking under my desk, I asked the Wizard of Westwood if he had time to discuss that fateful game. His answer? “Well, if you’d like to ask me some questions, I’d be happy to respond.” Nothing like taking the ball into one’s own court, right Dennis? Brushes with greatness — however brief — are the fuel in a sportswriter’s engine. You never shied from the great ones, and you loved sharing the experience with those of us who could appreciate the goosebumps. Wooden and Freeland would have made quite a tandem.

It’s cold outside, Dennis. A new year, conference play ready to begin. The time of year you’d be clutching that tam-o’-shanter to your head as you made your way to The Pyramid, your home away from home during the winter months. I have yet to approach our much-maligned arena without feeling like I’m going to a home of sorts, too. One where you’re still at my side. Still on my mind, the way I like it.