Tag: Sports

St. Louis Spirit

Post author By Frank Murtaugh
Post date November 9, 2006

CREDIT: AP

Let’s start this week with a time warp. Think back to when you were 13 years old. Try and pinpoint a moment from your 14th year that you can close your eyes and envision today. The setting, the time of day, the people you may have been with.

I was 13 in 1982 when the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series in seven games over the Milwaukee Brewers (Harvey’s Wall-Bangers, that crew was called). That was the Cardinals’ last world championship until they shocked the sports world two weeks ago by upsetting the Detroit Tigers and winning the 2006 series after the fewest regular-season wins (83) by any champ, ever. I watched Game 7 of that ’82 Series in the living room of my family’s apartment in Northfield, Vermont. It was a Wednesday night, when Bruce Sutter — just this year inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame — struck out Gorman Thomas to clinch the championship. It was the ninth world championship for St. Louis but the first of my lifetime and the franchise’s first in 15 years, what seemed like an eternity at the time for my father.

I remember trying to out-smile my dad as a mob of fans stormed the artificial turf at “old” Busch Stadium. And I remember thinking, surely, this would be the first of many such celebrations.

It was twenty-four years — almost a quarter century — before my heart again pounded the way it did on October 20, 1982. We don’t get all that many 24-year cycles in a lifetime, so I’ll be relishing the Cardinals’ 10th championship for as long as I can share the memory. But how different, this celebration.

What’s happened since 1982 — age 13 for me — besides the hundreds of Cardinal games I’ve seen and listened to? High school happened. College. A wedding. More than 130 issues of Memphis magazine hitting the streets with my name next to “managing editor” on the masthead. Best of all, I’ve welcomed two daughters since 1982. (They’ll remember this World Series, let me assure you.) And worst, my dad isn’t here this time to try and match my smile.

Amid the glow of merely winning, Dad would love the improbability of this championship. St. Louis managed to win the World Series in five games with merely two RBIs from baseball’s “perfect” player, Albert Pujols. (Last week, the Elias Sports Bureau announced that Pujols is only the sixth player since their ranking system was devised in 1981 to score a perfect 100 for a season.) How perfectly appropriate that the Series MVP was a player — 5’7″ shortstop David Eckstein — whom Pujols could eat for lunch. Smallest player on the field; the player with the fewest “tools”; a castoff from a team with which he won a championship, but a team that felt it could improve without him. Nice way to acquire your first new car, Mr. Eckstein. (That yellow beauty, though, needs a coat of red paint.)

This is the second of at least 52 weeks during which the words “St. Louis Cardinals” must be prefaced by “world champion.” The joy I recall from my days as an 8th-grader has lost some context as I’ve gained adulthood and all the rites that come with it. I wonder, with a pounding but heavy heart, just where my dad might be now, knowing how happy this long-awaited victory would make him. This is where I gain a little faith and, with inspiration from a certain Disney movie starring Danny Glover — a Murtaugh, it should be noted, in another of his popular roles — a speculative theory on what happened as the Tigers botched one play after another in the sloppiest Fall Classic we’ll see in years: Perhaps, Cardinal Nation, just perhaps, St. Louis had a little help from its own angel in the outfield. Imagination — no, belief — has a life span much longer than 13 years.

Tags Cardinals, Sports, St. Louis, World Series

Opinion Viewpoint

No Refs, No Coaches

Post author By John Branston
Post date November 9, 2006

BOONE, North Carolina — People look at you funny when you say you’re going out of town to a Frisbee tournament.

You mean that’s a sport? And you’re gonna go watch it? And you’re driving 600 miles to do it? Uh, have a nice time.

We did. Along with 32 teams of men and women from 16 colleges including Duke, North Carolina, Appalachian State, Warren Wilson, and Elon, my wife and I came to this mountain haven 150 miles east of Knoxville to see our daughter, the fall colors, and the booming sport of Ultimate Frisbee — or just “Ultimate,” as it’s called.

Ultimate is the ultimate anti-sport for our sports-crazy times. There are no referees, no coaches, no contact, and certainly no scholarships. The object is for a seven-player team to advance a Frisbee across the opponent’s goal line by tossing it to a team member without dropping it. Players call their own violations — picks and drops, mainly — on an honor system. The player with the Frisbee has to stand still and get rid of it within 10 seconds, and a fair, unhurried count is another part of the honor system. The game lasts 90 minutes or until one team scores 13 points.

Teams substitute freely and dress creatively. The lads from Warren Wilson, a small liberal arts college in Asheville, North Carolina, wore flannel shirts and a lot of facial hair. The women of App State opted for yellow tops, knee socks, and skirts. After four rounds, the freshmen from several teams joined forces to play an extra game. This was called the All-Star game.

Many Ultimate players are non-jocks, while others are refugees from competitive soccer, basketball, softball, or tennis, where screaming parents and no-nonsense coaches are the norm. The best players can run fast and sail the disc accurately for an incredible distance overhand, forehand, upside down, or backhanded — and do it with either hand.

Diving layouts are common, arguments are rare. The Spirit of the Game is the sport’s official rulebook.

To start one game, a diminutive girl from App State paused behind her own goal line, took four quick steps, spun around in a complete circle, and launched one the length of the field, or nearly 100 yards. A Frisbee sailing in slow motion over a green field through a blue sky against the backdrop of the New River and the Blue Ridge Mountains in early November was, in its way, as lovely a sight as watching Jonathan Crompton later that afternoon throw a 50-yard touchdown pass in front of a 105,000 fans in Neyland Stadium in Knoxville. ESPN will probably never capture the moment, but it’s our loss.

Ultimate was supposedly invented by hippies in the 1960s, but who knows? The sport now has its own magazine, national rankings, and is played in organized fashion by more than 500 colleges and universities. The New York Times reported last week that a professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington has found a correlation between Ultimate and college graduation rates and scholastic excellence.

Well, maybe, but this seems contrary to the Zen-like spirit of the game. Give it a rest, doc. If Ohio State beats Harvard, so be it. The point is to be in the moment, to play and enjoy. Another round of rankings and seriousness and justification is the last thing many of us — parents and students alike — want to hear after the tears, stress, and disappointments of competitive sports.

I don’t mean to put down big-time sports. I couldn’t watch a baseball game for three years after my son quit the UT team after pitching only a couple of innings in his freshman year so that he could spend more time fishing and hunting. And after the last Ultimate game, I rushed to a sports bar to watch the Vols play LSU in football on TV.

Each sport is what it is, wonderful in its own way. That’s the Ultimate lesson.

John Branston is a Flyer senior editor

Tags Sports, Ultimate Frisbee

Sports Sports Feature

Summer Sizzlers

Post author By Frank Murtaugh
Post date August 17, 2006

You think Major League Baseball is suffering under a cloud of steroid-tinted scandal? Just hop on a bike anywhere near Paris and shout the name, “Floyd Landis!” The latest doping saga to hit the Tour de France — one that appears will cost Landis his 2006 championship — is beyond the scope of anything baseball fans might imagine. (Consider if baseball players were tested — randomly and regularly — right up through and during the World Series. Then after a game-winning homer is hit in Game 7, the hero tests positive for a steroid the very next week!) How does this sport, so extraordinarily popular in Europe, regain its integrity?

It should start by following the money: sponsors. Entities like Phonak (which sponsored Landis’ team this year), the Discovery Channel, even the U.S. Postal Service (the latter two each sponsored Lance Armstrong during his seven-year reign in France) simply must take the condition of their cyclists as seriously as they do the gains they achieve through their “product placement” in the greatest bike race on earth. When the sponsors incorporate their own methods of testing, or at least establish a one-strike-and-you’re-out policy for cheats, the cyclists will have much more to lose by dancing on the edge of substance abuse. And if the sponsors aren’t willing to step up? Cycling’s powers that be should include those sponsors in the bans they’re so willing to hand out to an athlete when a sample comes up positive.

• I had a chat with University of Memphis football coach Tommy West last month, and the most striking impression I came away with is that he is simply not worried. Not about the loss of DeAngelo Williams, not about the question marks at his quarterback position, not about the loss of some standout defensive players from a year ago. Entering his sixth season in charge of the Tiger program, West seems to have the energy of a first-year coach, his perspective significantly impacted by the bypass surgery he underwent last February. “It made me stop and appreciate more,” said West. “It made me realize how much I really do enjoy doing what I’m doing. I really like being where I am.”

• I also interviewed John McEnroe about his upcoming visit to Memphis (October 4th-8th) for the Stanford Championships at the Racquet Club. When I asked McEnroe who would have won a match in their prime between Pete Sampras and Roger Federer, McEnroe claimed the two greats would have different advantages on different surfaces and that their contrasting styles would leave a series of matches fairly even. When I followed with a hypothetical between McEnroe himself and either Sampras or Federer, the seven-time Grand Slam champ humbly said he might win “two or three out of 10” against the sport’s two most recent titans.

• The Redbirds are having their worst season in nine years in Memphis. But their parent club is in a tight race for the National League Central title. Am I the only reader of our beloved daily paper turned off by the overwhelming coverage of college football? Do we need 1,500 words on UCF coach George O’Leary when it’s 102 degrees outside?

• I saw six rather eloquent speeches in Canton’s Fawcett Stadium on August 5th as the latest class was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Highlights were the sentiments of Troy Aikman (a Hall of Famer before his 40th birthday!), John Madden (he believes the busts talk to each other after the Hall closes each night), and Reggie White’s widow, Sara (who mentioned how happy the Whites’ two years in Memphis were, a time when the couple welcomed their son, Jeremy, into the world). But I think my favorite remark was a simple but heartfelt request from Rayfield Wright (the great Dallas offensive lineman of the Seventies): “Parents, teach your children well. Remember, you are the windows through which your children see this world.”

Tags Redbirds, Sports, Tigers, U of M