Category: From My Seat

Thank the stars for the NCAA basketball tournament. Because after this month’s baseball news, a nice, overhyped sports distraction is more than a little welcome. At least till Opening Day, April 3rd.

First there was the death March 6th of Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett, a modern sports teddy-bear if ever there was one during his playing days with the Minnesota Twins. The sad epilogue to Puckett’s life, of course, included the glaucoma that ended his playing career, legal troubles that revealed a personal life that was hardly angelic, then finally the extraordinary weight gain which, one must presume, contributed to the stroke that ended his life at age 45.

The contrast couldn’t be greater: a player who seemed most alive whenever we saw him in uniform, cut down so soon, his charms already having faded in the public eye. A dramatic reminder — once again — that the heroes we cheer on our playing fields remain very human.

Then came March 7th, and the revelation that an upcoming book will chronicle — in great detail — the steroid usage of one Barry Lamar Bonds. “Game of Shadows,” written by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams will serve as the most thorough, well-nigh definitive case against a baseball player who has repeatedly claimed he’s been steroid-free as he nears the hallowed career homer record of Hank Aaron. With the news breaking while the baseball world collectively mourned Kirby Puckett, the first World Baseball Classic was left as so much sideline distraction for lovers of our national pastime. Commissioner Bud Selig — the mind behind the marketing gizmo that is the WBC — has officially crossed Bonds off his Christmas list. (Bonds actually did Selig a favor by withdrawing from consideration for Team USA in the WBC. Had he been in uniform for the stars and stripes, baseball would have had a perfect storm.) If Selig had the brass, he’d ban Bonds, and immediately. Legal issues be damned. The commissioner’s office exists, after all, to protect the integrity of the game.

Where do baseball fans go now? How do we cheer? And for whom? Can a home-run record be broken if no one acknowledges it? All these questions remain to be answered as the six-month marathon that is a major-league baseball season opens next month. And as distasteful as it may be, Bonds will be at the center of discussion for each and every deliberation in ballparks coast to coast.

I, for one, can’t see how Bonds can play in any stadium outside San Francisco. He has been considered a cheat by many for years . . . without an entire book devoted to exposing his super-sizing methods. Even before he allegedly began doping, in 1998, Bonds was a menacing boor, and a player incapable of harmony with the media or, worse, his fans. As brash, as overtly arrogant as Bonds is, he’s ironically exactly the kind of personality who might thrive under the thunderous boos he’ll hear. “Sure enough,” one can imagine him thinking, “the world’s in my way. Only one thing to do . . . knock it down.”

Is Bonds a Hall of Famer? Not as long as Pete Rose remains a pariah. I’ve heard it argued by several pundits that, since Bonds had Hall-worthy numbers before he turned to steroids, his place in Cooperstown is still reserved. Such an argument is as blind as poor Kirby Puckett’s bad eye. If a player can be judged “before cheating” and “after cheating,” then Pete Rose — he of more hits than any other player in the game’s history, remember — should be inducted tomorrow. Every one of those hits came before he was caught betting on the game that made him a legend.

The saddest part of the Bonds legacy? Every home run hit this year (every year?) will bring with it a question: Is he or isn’t he? Unless your name is David Eckstein, when you go deep, fans are going to wonder what’s in your medicine cabinet. Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and the newly exposed Barry Bonds. ’Roid Royalty we might brand them. One of the few sports stories you’ll ever read where there is absolutely no winner.

Now, back to my bracket. George Mason?!

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What a difference
a year makes. There stood University of Memphis guard Darius Washington Saturday
afternoon, under the same basket where — on this very weekend a year earlier,
in the same event — his missed free throws broke the heart of anyone with even
a casual interest in Tiger basketball. The difference this year? Washington was
standing on a ladder . . . and he was cutting that net down.

The 5th-ranked U
of M Tigers beat the 25th-ranked UAB Blazers, 57-46, in a low-scoring,
late-morning affair at FedExForum, to win the 2006 Conference USA tournament
championship. And pardon Tiger Nation for considering the win historic. This was
the program’s first conference tourney title since 1987 (the year before Elliot
Perry arrived, folks) and the first time in 21 years Memphis claimed both a
regular season and tournament championship (that 1985 Tiger squad reached, ahem,
the Final Four). In front of 16,607 fans who found their cheering voices a
little early, John Calipari’s sixth Memphis team became only the second in
school history to win 30 games in a season.

Having lost to UAB
in Birmingham merely nine days earlier, the Tigers took their home floor with
something all too rare this season: something to prove. And sometimes the proof
of a team’s worth comes wrapped in irony.

The Tigers’ two
all-conference stars — Washington and senior Rodney Carney — scored a total of
five points in the first half. But three of the team’s five precocious freshmen
— Shawne Williams, Antonio Anderson, and Robert Dozier — poured in 21. The U
of M shot merely 32 percent from the field over the game’s first 20 minutes. But
six of their 11 field goals were three-pointers. Score at halftime? Memphis 32,
UAB 22.

With Joey Dorsey
— called by Calipari the team’s “fourth star” after the game — grabbing 12
rebounds and the Tigers holding UAB to 27-percent shooting for the game, the
outcome after halftime was hardly ever in doubt. Williams led all scorers with
18 points and was named the tournament’s most valuable player. (Dorsey and
Carney joined Williams on the all-tourney team.)

“Our freshmen play
like upperclassmen,” said Carney after the game, his white championship-cap
pulled low on his brow. “This is the greatest senior year anyone could possibly
have.” Looking for a promising sign as the Tigers enter the NCAA tournament?
Consider the Tigers’ C-USA Player of the Year shot 3 of 14 Saturday, and Memphis
still beat a top-25 team by nine points. Having played his last college game in
Memphis, Carney still received the ultimate praise from his coach. “Rodney is
playing for his teammates,” said Calipari, “and that makes me very proud.”

Will the Tigers
enter the Big Dance as a number-one seed? If they do, it’ll be yet another first
in the program’s history (the 1985 squad was a two-seed). “Without a doubt,”
said UAB coach Mike Anderson, responding to this very question. “They almost
went undefeated in the conference, and played a tough schedule outside the
conference.”

“We want to make
every game hard for our opponent,” said Calipari. “And we’re trying to make it
very, very hard for that committee [not to seed us first],” he stressed. Look
for the Tigers to get the top seed in the Oakland region, their first game to be
played either Thursday or Friday.

“My job now is to
be the best communicator I’ve ever been in my life,” said Calipari. “I’m telling
these guys [the NCAA tournament] is not a six-game tournament. Each trip we take
is a two-game tournament. Win that, and you get to play another.”

By the way,
Darius Washington scored the 1,000th point of his superb two-year career midway
through the second half Saturday. It came on a free throw.

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It was the greatest birthday present I’ve ever received. Considering this gift has multiplied itself more than 1,200 times over the last quarter century, it’s likely the greatest birthday present I’ll ever receive. And by a distance that would make Secretariat proud. For my 12th birthday, you see, in March 1981, my maternal grandmother got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

On the cover of that first issue, dated March 2, was a spring-training shot of Houston Astros pitcher J.R. Richard (“The Comeback Begins”). The flame-throwing righty was starting an ill-fated climb back to the big leagues, having suffered a massive stroke during the 1980 season. It was a rather typical late-winter issue of a weekly magazine, but the start of a relationship that has shaped me in ways few other friends can claim.

I was reading SI cover to cover by, oh, 1982. What I’d discovered was the magical merger of two passions my preteen mind had, to that point, kept in separate compartments: reading and sports. I learned, through the writing of Paul Zimmerman, Pat Putnam, William Nack, and the incomparable Frank Deford, that the games we play and cheer are each stories, and that a story is without legs until it’s shared with a reader. But once shared? That story becomes a tiny slice of history and, if blessed with the right blend of luck and language, it becomes legend.

My favorite SI story? You may as well ask me to recall my favorite sunset, my favorite ice cream cone, my favorite kiss. The weekly dose of national perspective was — and remains — a tipping point for each week lived. I find myself remembering random vacations and hotel stays by the issue of SI I was reading at the time. (Tom Watson’s British Open trophy on the cover? That was at the beach in South Carolina, 1983.)

Whether by nature or nurture (I’m convinced it’s the latter, Mom and Dad), literature has been my lighthouse. From reading Huckleberry Finn in second grade to reading Intruder in the Dust just this month, I have become, I suppose, a large part of what I read. Or vice versa. And SI has been the sweetener.

A weekly sweetener . . . for 25 years. I hope to live another quarter century. Why not 50? But I’ll never live 25 years filled with the kind of change I’ve seen since 1981. Junior high in California, high school in Vermont, college in Boston. A job — with a magazine! — in Memphis. A marriage. The birth of two daughters. The passing of my dad. (He was an Esquire man.) It’s safe to say that about the only thing in my life that has remained utterly consistent over the last 25 years, and somehow blessedly fresh, is SI.<

These days it’s Rick Reilly, Jack McCallum, Albert Chen, Tom Verducci, andGary Smith who show me the standard I’m to aim for as a sportswriter (can I call myself that?). I still get juiced when a team I support lands the precious cover (jinx be damned!). And with the ubiquity of sportsentertainment on cable television and the Internet, SI has become, somewhat ironically, a calming device for me, a pause button, if you will, in the stream of information speeding along the as-yet-unnamed superhighway.

My grandmother died in 1983. I can’t recall how I thanked her for my giftsubscription back in March 1981, though I know she recognized a good match,
this magazine and her only grandson. It seems so long since I got to visit her, to share a story or two that I enjoyed from the pages of Sports Illustrated. But you know, it’s funny. It seems like Grandmom has beenvisiting me all these years, one week of sports news after another.

With
Presidents’ Day upon us, I found myself wondering: If some of our First Fans
could be brought back for a day (or season), which team’s colors might they
wear? For whom would they wave a pennant? Where would our country’s biggest
political winners direct their sporting gaze?

 

George Washington —
DALLAS
COWBOYS. Our nation’s foremost revolutionary general requires a star on his
helmet. And “America’s Team,” however misplaced the moniker may be, would be
Washington’s team of choice. (Redskin fans must be cringing at the thought.
President Washington, now, would cringe at a team named so crassly.) President
Washington commanded every room he entered, just as you might imagine Bob Lilly
dominating the locker room as Tom Landry’s franchise rose to greatness. And
leadership? No game was ever over, believed Cowboy fans young and old, as long
as Roger Staubach was at quarterback.

 

Thomas Jefferson —

PHILADELPHIA 76ERS. But of course. The man who penned the Declaration of
Independence would surely delight in the homage paid that special year by one of
the oldest and most successful teams in NBA history. And just as
Jefferson
must defer somewhat to Washington among our founding fathers (he served as the
first president’s Secretary of State remember), the Sixers for decades have
bowed to the Boston Celtics (more on them later). Were he able to see the
otherworldly talents of Philly stars like Wilt Chamberlain, Julius Erving, and
Allen Iverson,
Jefferson
just might find himself wondering how equal all men are created.

 

Abraham Lincoln —
CHICAGO
CUBS. Before you scoff, consider the adversity, conflict, and crises suffered
here. And then consider our 16th president.
Lincoln’s
humble beginnings and gradual rise to political stardom (in Illinois, remember),
fall right in line with the long-held role of the adored Cubbies. Ernie Banks,
Ron Santo, Billy Williams, even the overhyped Ryne Sandberg . . . all players
more comfortable with their feet on the soil of Wrigley Field than in the bright
lights and critical eye of mass media. Lincoln understood patience. He
understood forgiveness. And yes, he understood loss. How much would you pay to
hear Honest Abe interviewed by Harry Caray?

 

Theodore Roosevelt — GREEN BAY PACKERS. If ever
an NFL player carried a metaphorical “big stick,” it has to be the Pack’s Hall
of Fame linebacker, Ray Nitschke. And when looking for a franchise that
epitomizes toughness, square-jawed determination, and the kind of grit that can
withstand a playing field often called “the frozen tundra,” the Green Bay
Packers are head and broad shoulders above the crowd. Whether it was busting
monopolies or digging the
Panama
Canal, there was a directness of purpose in the way Teddy conducted his
presidential affairs. And no football historian will ever call Vince Lombardi a
“flip-flopper.”

 

Franklin Roosevelt —
NEW YORK
YANKEES. One word: power. No other president has ever held it on such a global
and complete scale. No other American team has wielded it with such consistent
and dramatic might. There will never again be a president of the United States
elected to four terms in office, just as there will never again be a baseball
team with 26 World Series championships. The former governor of New York (during
Babe Ruth’s prime, of course) held our country together during some of the
hardest, saddest points in the nation’s history. And the
Bronx Bombers? Sure, they’re easy to
loathe, for all the greatness, all the Hall of Famers canonized beyond Yankee
Stadium’s outfield wall. But they are baseball, and baseball is
America.

 

John
Kennedy —
BOSTON
CELTICS. Maybe the easiest of these picks. Who else for a native son of Beantown,
a man who knew nothing else but winning, save for the family tragedies that too
often interrupted his meteoric rise to the presidency? (Think the Celtics
haven’t known tragedy along with their 16 championships? Look up the names Len
Bias and Reggie Lewis.) Kennedy’s first love in sports was football, and he’d
appreciate the recent success of
New England’s
Patriots. But he, perhaps as much as any president before or sense, appreciated
the greatness around him. He would see a parallel between himself and Red
Auerbach, the coach who handpicked Cousy, Russell, Havlicek, and Bird for his
hoops Camelot at Boston Garden. The best and the brightest, indeed.

 

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