The Victory March

For The Victory

2006-08-12T15:18:00.000-05:00

It never ceases to amaze me how arbitrary, cruel, and unfair life can be sometimes. It's also amazing how indomitable the human spirit can be in the face of that unfairness and cruelty.

Here's a remarkable story of a father and his son. The son had the misfortune of being born with his unbilical cord wrapped around his neck. It cut off the oxygen to his brain for a few critical minutes and he has spent the rest of his life with living with the massive pysical damage it left.

That's the cruel part. The rest is inspirational and wonderful. The son said, "he just didn’t feel handicapped when we were competing." Look what this father has given to his son. Look how often he has "freed" his son from his handicap.

Here's their story. Read the story below then click on the "For The Victory" title above to see the video.

Racing Towards Inclusion
by David Tereshchuk

Article courtesy of multi'merica.com

Dick and Rick Hoyt are a father-and-son team from Massachusetts who together compete just about continuously in marathon races. And if they’re not in a marathon they are in a triathlon — that daunting, almost superhuman, combination of 26.2 miles of running, 112 miles of bicycling, and 2.4 miles of swimming. Together they have climbed mountains, and once trekked 3,735 miles across America.

It’s a remarkable record of exertion — all the more so when you consider that Rick can't walk or talk.

For the past twenty five years or more Dick, who is 65, has pushed and pulled his son across the country and over hundreds of finish lines. When Dick runs, Rick is in a wheelchair that Dick is pushing. When Dick cycles, Rick is in the seat-pod from his wheelchair, attached to the front of the bike. When Dick swims, Rick is in a small but heavy, firmly stabilized boat being pulled by Dick.

At Rick’s birth in 1962 the umbilical cord coiled around his neck and cut off oxygen to his brain. Dick and his wife, Judy, were told that there would be no hope for their child’s development.

"It’s been a story of exclusion ever since he was born," Dick told me. "When he was eight months old the doctors told us we should just put him away — he’d be a vegetable all his life, that sort of thing. Well those doctors are not alive any more, but I would like them to be able to see Rick now."

The couple brought their son home determined to raise him as "normally" as possible. Within five years, Rick had two younger brothers, and the Hoyts were convinced Rick was just as intelligent as his siblings. Dick remembers the struggle to get the local school authorities to agree: "Because he couldn’t talk they thought he wouldn’t be able to understand, but that wasn’t true." The dedicated parents taught Rick the alphabet. "We always wanted Rick included in everything," Dick said. "That’s why we wanted to get him into public school."

A group of Tufts University engineers came to the rescue, once they had seen some clear, empirical evidence of Rick’s comprehension skills. "They told him a joke," said Dick. "Rick just cracked up. They knew then that he could communicate!" The engineers went on to build — using $5,000 the family managed to raise in 1972 - an interactive computer that would allow Rick to write out his thoughts using the slight head-movements that he could manage. Rick came to call it "my communicator." A cursor would move across a screen filled with rows of letters, and when the cursor highlighted a letter that Rick wanted, he would click a switch with the side of his head.

When the computer was originally brought home, Rick surprised his family with his first "spoken" words. They had expected perhaps "Hi, Mom" or "Hi, Dad." But on the screen Rick wrote "Go Bruins." The Boston Bruins were in the Stanley Cup finals that season, and his family realized he had been following the hockey games along with everyone else. "So we learned then that Rick loved sports," said Dick.

In 1975, Rick was finally admitted into a public school. Two years later, he told his father he wanted to participate in a five-mile benefit run for a local lacrosse player who had been paralyzed in an accident. Dick, far from being a long-distance runner, agreed to push Rick in his wheelchair. They finished next to last, but they felt they had achieved a triumph. That night, Dick remembers, "Rick told us he just didn’t feel handicapped when we were competing."

Rick’s realization turned into a whole new set of horizons that opened up for him and his family, as "Team Hoyt" began to compete in more and more events. Rick reflected on the transformation process for me, using his now-familiar but ever-painstaking technique of picking out letters of the alphabet:
" What I mean when I say I feel like I am not handicapped when competing is that I am just like the other athletes, and I think most of the athletes feel the same way. In the beginning nobody would come up to me. However, after a few races some athletes came around and they began to talk to me. During the early days one runner, Pete Wisnewski had a bet with me at every race on who would beat who. The loser had to hang the winner’s number in his bedroom until the next race. Now many athletes will come up to me before the race or triathlon to wish me luck."

It is hard to imagine now the resistance which the Hoyts encountered early on, but attitudes did begin to change when they entered the Boston Marathon in 1981, and finished in the top quarter of the field. Dick recalls the earlier, less tolerant days with more sadness than anger:

"Nobody wanted Rick in a road race. Everybody looked at us, nobody talked to us, nobody wanted to have anything to do with us. But you can’t really blame them - people often are not educated, and they’d never seen anyone like us. As time went on, though, they could see he was a person — he has a great sense of humor, for instance. That made a big difference."

After 4 years of marathons, Team Hoyt attempted their first triathlon — and for this Dick had to learn to swim. "I sank like a stone at first" Dick recalled with a laugh "and I hadn’t been on a bike since I was six years old."

With a newly-built bike (adapted to carry Rick in front) and a boat tied to Dick’s waist as he swam, the Hoyts came in second-to-last in the competition held on Father’s Day 1985.

"We chuckle to think about that as my Father’s Day present from Rick, " said Dick.

They have been competing ever since, at home and increasingly abroad. Generally they manage to improve their finishing times. "Rick is the one who inspires and motivates me, the way he just loves sports and competing," Dick said.

And the business of inspiring evidently works as a two-way street. Rick typed out this testimony:
"Dad is one of my role models. Once he sets out to do something, Dad sticks to it whatever it is, until it is done. For example once we decided to really get into triathlons, dad worked out, up to five hours a day, five times a week, even when he was working."

The Hoyts’ mutual inspiration for each other seems to embrace others too — many spectators and fellow-competitors have adopted Team Hoyt as a powerful example of determination. "It’s been funny," said Dick "Some people have turned out, some in good shape, some really out of shape, and they say ‘we want to thank you, because we’re here because of you’."

Rick too has taken full note of their effect on fellow-competitors while racing:
"Whenever we are passed (usually on the bike) the athlete will say "Go for it!" or "Rick, help your Dad!" When we pass people (usually on the run) they’ll say "Go Team Hoyt!" or "If not for you, we would not be out here doing this."

Most of all, perhaps, the Hoyts can see an impact from their efforts in the area of the handicapped, and on public attitudes toward the physically and mentally challenged.

"That’s the big thing," said Dick. "People just need to be educated. Rick is helping many other families coping with disabilities in their struggle to be included."

That is not to say that all obstacles are now overcome for the Hoyts. Dick is "still bothered," he says, by people who are discomforted because Rick cannot fully control his tongue while eating. "In restaurants - and it’s only older people mostly - they’ll see Rick’s food being pushed out of his mouth and they’ll leave, or change their table. But I have to say that kind of intolerance is gradually being defeated."

Rick’s own accomplishments, quite apart from the duo’s continuing athletic success, have included his moving on from high school to Boston University, where he graduated in 1993 with a degree in special education. That was followed a few weeks later by another entry in the Boston Marathon. As he fondly pictured it: "On the day of the marathon from Hopkinton to Boston people all over the course were wishing me luck, and they had signs up which read `congratulations on your graduation!’"

Rick now works at Boston College’s computer laboratory helping to develop a system codenamed "Eagle Eyes," through which mechanical aids (like for instance a powered wheelchair) could be controlled by a paralyzed person’s eye-movements, when linked-up to a computer.

Together the Hoyts don’t only compete athletically; they also go on motivational speaking tours, spreading the Hoyt brand of inspiration to all kinds of audiences, sporting and non-sporting, across the country.

Rick himself is confident that his visibility — and his father’s dedication — perform a forceful, valuable purpose in a world that is too often divisive and exclusionary. He typed a simple parting thought:
"The message of Team Hoyt is that everybody should be included in everyday life."

David Tereshchuk is a documentary television producer. He currently works for the United Nations.

It Is What It Is

2006-08-10T19:31:00.000-05:00

I used one of Davie's famous lines in this instance because it conjures up similar disgust. As I sit her stuck in LaGuardia airport, delayed because of the recent terrorist plots uncovered in London meant to blow up to ten airlines in mid flight, I read about the whole thing on an internet news report.

So I come across this line, "Bush said the plot was a "stark reminder" the United States was "at war with Islamic fascists," while tighter security at airports caused chaos as passengers were forced to throw out seemingly innocuous items like bottles of water."

As I read it I thought, "I'm glad he used the term "Islamic fascists" to describe the nature of the terrorist threat, because that is EXACTLY what we are dealing with here. These people are Islamic nuts at war with the west. End of story, and I was getting sick of everyone dancing around the obvious.

So I'm continuing the story expecting it to be more about the uncovered plot and I come across this, "U.S. Muslim groups criticized Bush for using the words "Islamic fascists." "The problem with the phrase is it attaches the religion of Islam to tyranny and fascism, rather than isolating the threat to a specific group of individuals," said Edina Lekovic, spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles."

Well, Edina, I hear you, but tough toe-nails. I invite her to come up with a better term to call a group of extremists fully settled in,identified with, and fueled by their take on the Islamic religion who would gladly detonate a nucular bomb in the middle of New York if they could because Islamic + Terrorist pretty much gets the job done.

Tie goes to the Winner?

2006-07-12T10:51:00.000-05:00

Interesting bit on Tie's from BlueGraySky. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I admit that I'm leaning in that direction. I certainly don't see anything wrong with having split national championships and I don't see the problem with Ties either.

Bring Back the Tie | by Jay

The World Cup reminded me of something I've been meaning to post for a while. No, it's not that football is better than soccer; this is something much more controversial. We need to bring the Tie back to college football.

Hear me out. I know it's tough to get over that mental hurdle that says that in any contest there must be a winner and a loser. It's not really part of the American mindset to accept the brutal reality of a stalemate. There's got to be a winner eventually, right? But ties are good, in that they are truthful. They say something about the balanced quality of the opponents; sometimes teams are so evenly matched that neither deserves to win, and neither deserves to lose.

Some of the best games in college football history were Ties, and a goofy overtime with bastardized ground rules would have spoiled the pristine, elemental reality of those classic deadlocks. 10-10. 0-0. Important, almost mythical game scores in the history of ND football. The terrible beauty of the ND-Michigan State Game of the Century is the image of two teams, the best in the country, slugging it out until time expires, a battered and bloody and ultimately honorable standoff. As Ara implored in the locker room after the game, "We did not win, but by God, we did not lose." A cheap contest of "who can score from the 25" would have rendered the significance of that game moot.

Along with negating the possibility of a monumental tie, overtime also warps the endgame of a football match, in that last-second decisions to "go for it" have all but disappeared. Take the '84 Orange Bowl. Undefeated #1 Nebraska scored a TD with :24 seconds left to bring them within a point of Miami, 31-30. A one-point PAT would have iced a tie, and Nebraska may have gone on to win the championship in a vote. But to his credit, Huskers coach Tom Osborne elected to go for two. Turner Gill's pass was tipped and fell short, and Miami won the title. Despite losing the ring, Osborne's legacy was actually enhanced by his decision to go for it -- a decision that he wouldn't have made with the possibility of an "overtime" period.

In any case, before 1996, ties weren't all that frequent:

Prior to the OT rules in 1996, about 2% of the games ended in a tie. In 1996, that immediately doubled to nearly 4% of games going to overtime. It's easy to see why this happened. Per this USA Today article, one-point PAT kicks are successful 92% of the time, while two-point conversions are only 46% successful. With the game on the line, why not hit the extra point and take your chances in overtime? Before, kicking that PAT and accepting a tie was a momentous decision fraught with consequence, but now it's the safe choice, and really, the only choice. But are we really better off with double the number of overtime games (some of them simply absurd) just because our fragile sports psyches presumably can't handle a tie? I think not.

Those gut-clenching moments -- does Jimmah have the balls to go for it, or will he take the tie? -- are now forever impossible. Bring back the Tie.

It's Called Capitalism.....

2006-06-24T08:32:00.000-05:00

This little gem from the Atlanta J-C is an interesting look into the business behind college football. The Rick Telanders and Murry Sperbers of the world will choke over this kind of thing because - horrors - this "proves" it's all about "greed and money" and all that kind of "dirty" stuff, but, I don't know, sounds like good old American Capitalism to me.

But fans are getting off a lot cheaper than Tech is. The contract for the Tech-Notre Dame game, signed in 1997 for one game in Atlanta and two in South Bend, Ind., includes a rare clause calling for extra revenue generated by a ticket increase to be split 50-50 by both schools. Typically, the home team gets to keep it all.

The average Tech football ticket goes for $38. The average Tech-Notre Dame ticket is $50.

Radakovich said "it might be another $250,000" paid by Tech to Notre Dame in addition to a $200,000 flat fee called for in the contract.

Why the ticket increase? Same reason the Fighting Irish got away with that clause. Interest in Notre Dame is always high, whether the Irish are playing at home or on the road. This year, it could be higher than usual, with Heisman Trophy candidate Brady Quinn back at quarterback for a team that was picked No. 1 in the preseason by Sporting News.

"I think Notre Dame understood their value," Radakovich said. "They understood that as they come into an area, because of who they were, there's a great likelihood that ticket sales would spike.

"They decided somewhere along the line that they would put this clause into the contract so that they can share some of that benefit."

Tech also has benefited nicely from the contract. When Notre Dame was in a rush to schedule a historic opening opponent in a renovated stadium in 1997, Tech filled in, drawing an unusually large paycheck of $800,000. The norm now might be $200,000 to $300,000.

"That $800,000, that was pretty darned good, especially back then," said Radakovich, whose program will receive $200,000 from Notre Dame after a visit to South Bend next season.

Why The "New Name?"

2006-06-23T22:47:00.000-05:00

It's not really a new name. The very first version of this blog was called The Victory March. The link was victorymarch.blogspot.com. The problem was that I started messing with the formatting and screwed the whole thing up. Surprise. So I just left it alone.

I started the new blog and every name I put in there for a site address was taken. I came up with Stonefreerocket.blogspot.com but it's too much of a mouthful. People kept saying they couldn't remember it.

So I figured I'd reclaim the original name. Turns out some guy in India has it now. For some reason I'm not surprised.

GoldVictory is pretty good. Hopefully it will stick.

My New Favorite Person In The World

2006-06-22T21:05:00.000-05:00

Ozzie Guillen.

Why Ozzie? Well, how about bringing a championship to my White Sox when I was certain that I would never see a World Series during my lifetime. That's reason enough right there.

But now he's even better. Why? Because he has called out Jay Mariotti for the ass that he is. He also called him a fag, which is only going to confuse the issue. The real issue is that this guy Jay Mariotti is a total scumbag jerk. He's all that is wrong with sports media today. He's a wind sock, forever going in the direction of a winner once it's clear that the person or team is a winner. Gee, what a remarkable grasp of the obvious. The rest of the time the guy injects poison and venom into the situation.

Finally, someone, other than us peon sportsfans, is calling this jackass out.

Here's Mariotti's response in today's paper. What a bunch of self serving crap. Talk about a guy in total denial. This article has all that is wrong with the guy. He attacks the Chicago fans. He whines about things. He makes excuses for himself. Totally pathetic.

Here's to you Ozzie - and a big F-you to Jay Mariotti, the man you so aptly call "A total piece of shit."

Sensitivity the issue, Guillen the problem

June 22, 2006

BY JAY MARIOTTI SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Try as I do, it's hard to view sports as some sort of guiding light for humankind. You want to believe in this stuff after sitting in a Dallas arena and watching Dwyane Wade, a credit to his hometown and as humble as he is spectacular, become the closest thing we've seen to Michael Jordan. But then you return to Chicago and are dragged into the gutter drain by Ozzie Guillen's homophobic circus.

I'm told the Blizzard of Oz, in one of his tiresome rants, referred to me as a "fag'' Tuesday night, among other niceties. Personally, I can shrug it off as an occupational hazard, knowing I'm called meaner things at the coffee stand every morning. I also know it places me on an extraordinarily long list of people the Blizzard has dissed or launched into, including Magglio ("Venezuelan [bleep]'') Ordonez, Buck Showalter, Phil Garner, Sean Tracey, the Los Angeles Angels, every American League umpire, the reporter he threatened to rub out last winter and, by not showing up at the White House for a ceremony, the President of the United States.

Ozzie? He makes Mark Cuban seem like Virginia McCaskey.

But I am not the story here in the latest chapter of OzFest, a farce that is averaging two new targets a week and will have another co-star as soon as tonight. The story is Guillen's mouth and the warped diatribes of a man who thinks slurs are an acceptable means of retaliation in American life, like one of his dugout-ordered purpose pitches. Twice in less than a year, Guillen has dropped derogatory homosexual terms in his public dealings as White Sox manager. Last year at Yankee Stadium, he claimed to be greeting a friend warmly when he said, "Hey, everybody, this guy's a homosexual! He's a child molester!'' Two New York-area columnists took offense, as they should have, and so did I -- the only writer in Chicago who did, which is often how it works in a town softer and more politically driven by the sports franchises than a genuinely tough, independent sports media town such as Boston.

Obviously, Guillen hasn't learned his lesson about using such ugly language. He hasn't because his boss, Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, is an enabler who is letting Ozzie run amok, whether it's offending homosexual groups that want Guillen punished or saying someone should "shoot the [bleep]'' after Jason Grimsley served as a steroids informant in a federal investigation. Reinsdorf, as I pointed out last year, is co-chairman of Major League Baseball's Equal Opportunity Committee. Years ago, he and Bud Selig led the charge to oust Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott after she made racial and ethnic slurs. Sports and America are better off for that deed, yet where is Reinsdorf when his own manager has slurred the gay community not once but twice? Isn't Reinsdorf hypocritical when he refers to Guillen as "the Hispanic Jackie Mason'' and asks us to take everything he says in a humorous light?

Two-week suspension needed

The time has come for a two-week suspension, long enough for human sensibility and decency to kick in. It's more important the Sox send a message about what they stand for than what Guillen's absence might mean in a pennant race. Let Ozzie think about life a little. Send him out for some professional sensitivity training, not what is being attempted by unskilled shrinks in the public-relations office. Tell him why it's fine to admonish a media person all he wants -- a critic should accept criticism, naturally -- as long as Guillen doesn't step over the line and slur gay groups. Most importantly, explain what happened to Schott, Al Campanis and Jimmy "The Greek'' Snyder when they made insensitive comments.

They were fired, run out of their professions.

I am hardly alone in thinking Guillen, if he doesn't wise up, is headed toward a bad ending in Chicago. As somebody who lobbied hard in print for Ozzie to get the job, I knew he would be a politically incorrect load at times. But little did I know he would become a national embarrassment to a city, a franchise and a sport. The incidents are coming a little too frequently for comfort, and anyone who thinks he's just deflecting attention from his team isn't living on a sane planet. The shame of it is, his antics are taking away from the enjoyment of a rare World Series championship in this town, a title he made happen. As long as the Sox are winning, I suppose there will be enough Neanderthal fans who would defend a manager for an ax murdering. But when a lightning rod starts struggling and losing -- see Bob Knight, Indiana -- even the big bosses lose patience with the nonstop stunts.

Guillen's beef with me involves his belief that if I criticize him, I should rush down to the ballpark immediately and let him litter me with insults. If that sounds like high-school macho nonsense, realize it's the general mentality of baseball clubhouses. Imagine a critic panning a movie, then being required to take a tongue-lashing the next day from an angry Vince Vaughn. Imagine a restaurant critic not liking an Italian joint, then having to show up so the chef can throw meatballs at him. Sorry, guy, I'm not a beat writer who covers the team every day. Tuesday night, I was at Game 6 of the NBA Finals, where I should have been. Next week, I'll be at the NBA draft. Next month, I'll be at the British Open.

If Ozzie has a problem with my schedule, he should behave better so I don't have to write about him.

I might cede to Guillen's wishes, by the way, if Sox management through time had been more professional in controlling numerous incidents in which I was threatened physically in their clubhouse. This, in turn, led to published stories about the episodes and turned me into what no journalist wants to be -- the news -- which led to a Sox-generated perception that I am some evil being who roots for the Cubs. Tribune Co. will confirm that as thoroughly absurd.

Finally, last season, there were death threats and an incident at U.S. Cellular Field involving Carl Everett. Again, the Sox don't even address volatile issues when they involve me and other writers. Until they do, these are the rules they'll have to live by. Consider the latest Guillen flareups to be Exhibit A of why this situation exists.

Self-destruction looming

I treat all Chicago franchises with the same brush. When a team wins, I tell you why, which might explain the scads of recent columns commending Guillen for his baseball leadership, general manager Ken Williams for his aggressive trades and Reinsdorf for his $100 million payroll. When a team doesn't win, I might write why Dusty Baker should be fired, why Jerry Angelo is a hit-and-miss football executive and why the Blackhawks have fallen farther than any franchise in sports. That's what a columnist does.

But no media person walking into the locker rooms of the Bears, Cubs, Bulls or Hawks has been subjected to regular slurs and threats. Isolated incidents, perhaps, but not a running war. Those clubs run professional shops, and when a player, manager or coach has an issue, things are handled with a certain dignity.

In Ozzie's world, you are called a "fag.''

He is the story. He is the problem. And someone better save him from himself before he self-destructs.

Jay Mariotti is a regular on ''Around the Horn'' at 4 p.m. on ESPN. Send e-mail to inbox@suntimes.com with name, hometown and daytime phone number (letters run Sunday).

ND's Worst Enemy? Itself.

2006-06-22T20:55:00.000-05:00

Good Edition of The Rock on the NDNation message board but it is important to mention that this administration bears watching. The Greg Couch article from the Sun-Times about ND being what it once was agianst (a bogus point if there ever was one), is the kind of thing that sent Monk into hiding. God forbid someone said we were being aggressive in any fashion.

An article like that, and the ones that will inevitably come as ND wins and more and more critics take their usual stance of claiming we "sold our souls for football glory," have damanged ND in the past. Why? Because ND has proven over the years to be extremely sensitive to the charge that we were "selling ourselves out," or "being like everyone else."

The Rock edition got it right: big time spectacle and big time winning is what Notre Dame has traditionally been about. However, there are people in the admin that are forever tying to undermine the whole thing either consciously or unconsciouly.

As the ND machine begins to roll and the wins and corresponding national attention piles up, it will be a test of the ND administration to let it roll and not hobble it.

For in the end, when it comes to ND football, ND has always been it's own worst enemy.

(For a copy of the Greg Couch article, see the Blog entry before this one).

THE ROCK - NDNATION

There are two truths in this world. The first is you're either pitching or catching in life. The second is that it's much better to be throwing the heat than have an incoming fastball bounce off the plate and clock you under your chin guard.

Just like Charlie believes in dictating the the flow on the field, he's been doing it on the recruiting trail and in the media by keeping a constant slate of stories in the pipeline that make recruits notice Notre Dame. Peruse the message boards of other teams and they're daily complaining about the press Weis gets, that their QB recruit didn't end up on ESPN or that Notre Dame players like Shark, Quinn and Zibby are receiving national publicity that other schools players wouldn't.

You know what? They're right. Name four players at other schools combined that have received as much pub as Clausen, Quinn, Zibby and Shark. I can't either. That's because no other school generates such national interest. Okay, maybe Bush, Jarrett, Wright and Sanchez, but they're in the news for completely different reasons.

But part of the reason you come to Notre Dame is to play in the spotlight.

Just as important though Charlie's been making the rounds, squeezing hands and kissing babies. Consider at the Big 33 game (matching Ohio's best vs. Pennsylvania's best) Charlie was the only big time head coach to show up and give interviews. That's taking it to the competition in their backyard. This is from the PennLive site:
Weis steals the show -ND coach adds glitter to Big 33 event
Saturday, June 17, 2006
BY ROXANNE B. MOSES
With Pennsylvania's big-time college football coaches absent from yesterday's Big 33 press conference, Charlie Weis became the featured attraction. Weis stole the Pennsylvania spotlight, big glittery Super Bowl ring and all.

Or consider the head coach at Hoboken High School on Weis, Notre Dame and New Jersey:

"It was frustrating because we sent a lot of kids to colleges all over the country, and Notre Dame was rarely around," said Taglieri, now entering his second season as head coach at Hoboken High School. "We were saying to ourselves, 'What are we doing wrong? Why aren't our kids getting there?' It seemed like they were elite and we couldn't get our kids there.

"It's changed. He comes in and he's basically taken over New Jersey."

As we all learned it's impossible to take over New Jersey or any other state from the bunker the previous staff recruited from.
But it's more than just being out there and working hard, though that's an enourmous advantage. It's making the tough decisions. Watching the pace of the early offers it's clear that many top teams taking the lead from Notre Dame and not the other way around. For most of Notre Dame's top targets, ND was in the door as early as academically transcribably possible and USC, Florida and State U. were soon to follow with offers. That means doing your homework, indentifying the prospects and making the tough decision on where the offers should go.

While Willingham fiddled with his sand wedge, other schools were raking in top recruits. Not any more. ND coaches are omnipresent across the country and the staff churns out texts, letters and phone calls like an 80's boiler room.

And the opposition is being forced to respond. Carroll is making offers to the same recruits Notre Dame does after ND offers. Sure they're going to win the local battles, but Charlie's got them reacting. Charlie and Notre Dame are the first things out of his mouth when Carroll speaks in public. He's got Charlie on the brain.

Consider the Urban myth in Florida who screwed up one of the most talented offenses in the country.... dropping UF all the way down to 61st. He can''t make the NCAA basketball tournament from that position. Meyer's never run a high level offense before and never had success against top level defensive teams, despite his Utah numbers. Note what Meyer did to fix his urban blight: halfway through the year he changed his rinky dink offense to look like Notre Dame's. That's just part of his Notre Dame fixation: he also met with Belichick for a few hours after the season and then touted it to the papers as if he'd learned mystery of the Sphinx, he instituted a Florida student salute (which he stole from Notre Dame) and offered Notre Dame vebal commitment Kerry Neal (after claiming it was unethical to do so.) Meyer's acting like a Charlie mini-me without the ring.

"sometimes I dream, he is me... can't you see that's how I dream to be..."

No Urban, a few hours with Belichick is not equal to three Superbowls and a decade of experience under the best coaches in the NFL. Of course he can 'try' to sell that to recruits like Florida sells the fact that it pays for more National Merit Scholars than other schools (comparing themselves to Harvard - no joke,) but recruits aren't that dumb. Any school can pay for National Merit Scholars (Oklahoma once had the most,) but real schools choose to build their academic reputations rather than try to buy them.

In both cases Charlie's dictating the action.

But understand what else Notre Dame is doing: Making it fun to play at Notre Dame again, and, cue Austin... ssssexy, yeah baby.

We've got one player pocketing 25-grand for 49 seconds of heavyweight work, another signing a seven figure baseball contract while becoming a two man sport sensation, a recruit making the weak fret because he showed up in a Hummer and amade an announcement at the Hall of Fame and of course the Heisman frontrunner in Brady Quinn

And you know what that looks like to recruits? Fun. Cool. Hip. Relevant.

See Weis knows what most sport dorks don't and get in a huff over: that "the show" has always been a part of Notre Dame. In fact, Notre Dame wouldn't exist as we know it without the fantastic showmanship and PR sense of Knute Rockne.
From starting the first intersectional rivalry to "win one for the Gipper" to The Four Horsemen, Notre Dame's lofty reputation was built on excellence, but also on the ability to get people to want to be a part of that excellence.

Weis gets that in a big way.

Now understand this is not show just for show's sake. Clausen's announcement, though not how some wanted it, sent an unmistakable message: that the best want to be at Notre Dame.

Note what Clausen's announcement didn't have: no stupid hat trick, no dissing of other teams, no talk of Heismans.

Note what it did it did have: great respect for the program he turned down, the goal of a championship, high praise for all, a commitment to excellence.

I read criticism of Clausen from Notre Dame fans and I want to punch a wall. This kid has grades, he displays respect and deference and he wants to win and get to the highest level. With all the crappy, underhanded usery acts, paid for cars and female escorts in college football recruiting, I can't believe anyone's upset about a Hummer limo. It doesn't represent some evil influence, it was fun. A limo's fun. A limo Hummer's even more fun, especially to a High School kid. The Hall of Fame is a dream place to announce for a school. Was it too much? Who the @#$@#$ cares? Here's a kid who talked about championships, not Heismans.

Clausen's announcement was an enormous boost for Notre Dame and the way he did it garnered Notre Dame unparralleled press (and a few recruits.) Michigan is now trying desperately to generate an nth of that press for its quarterback recruit. Not happening because no one cares and they don't develop their quarterbacks anyway. Of course, they don't graduate their minority recruits either receiving a disqualification rating from the Boston Globe for minority graduation, but that's a different story.

Four years ago several Notre Dame fans decided they didn't want the likes of Brady Quinn and Tommy Zbikowski because of the way the acted during recruiting. Inferences about their characters were made from quotes and the idea that they were somehow jerking ND around.

Today, they're captains.

Last year there were some fans who didn't want Demetrius Jones because he talked about his posse, as if this somehow were a sign of bad character. He's now one of the most loved recruits on the board.

Show can be a huge positive and Notre Dame is finally using its stage to generate positive messages. From pass right, to the USC game, to the Navy salute, to Zbikowski, to Clausen, to Samardjia, to Quinn's Heisman chances, Notre Dame has been the story of the college football.

That doesn't happen by accident. Creating positive media opportunities and "filling the void" is essential to keep negative publicity at bay. It's also essential in sending a message that Notre Dame isn't just going to be good, but it's the place become known. And that matters. Becoming known doesn't mean you don't care about anyone else, but it does mean you'll have the opportunity to affect people in a way that most will never be able to.

No school has the ability to generate interest like Notre Dame. There are maybe five teams in all of sport around the world that have Notre Dame's notoriety here and abroad... maybe five, but the problem is that if you don't continually create stories, negative stories will be created against you. Weis is more than a student of the game, he's a student of history and is the first coach since Lou to utilize Notre Dame's superior platform as it should be used.

Remember this PR axiom: "if they're not for us they're agin' us." The last ten years have shown us this all too well: If you sit back, you get hammered. (Note: I predicted all of this positive coverage back when whiners were wetting themselves about the Willingham fallout.)

Show doesn't mean Notre Dame has to compromise its standards or that individual players are above the team. Notre Dame is a far more unified a team now than in was under Willingham who fostered petty divisiveness. Its team cumulative GPA was the highest in team history. Notre Dame ranks at the very top in every academic graduation category. Its kids are not in constant trouble. We're winning and, oh yeah, having some fun too.

Fun, show and ideals are not mutually exclusive. They, in fact, work better together.

Is the show going to be to everyone's taste all the time?

No.

But then I've seen how many of you dress at football games... y'all are hardly barometers of good taste.

And So It Begins - The Attempt to Drag ND back to Mediocrity

2006-06-18T23:53:00.000-05:00

Subject: Uh oh: We\'re back! You know how you know?
Body of Message:

BECAUSE OUR CRITICS ARE TELLING US WE\'VE SOLD OUR SOULS!

Whenever ND gets back in the game big time the critics come out and claim we\'ve sold our souls for football glory.

It\'s important to know what this is. It is nothing more than to get ND to stop being aggressive. The critics absolutely loved Monk because they knew they could throw a criticism out there and it would hobble ND.

I can only hope, after watching my school for decades, and from a deep knowledge of our collective history, that this administration will not be cowed by this type of empty criticsm.

Now, to specifically answer some of his points. I saw absolutely nothing wrong with the Zibby boxing adventure. Rockne, without doubt, would have LOVED it. Knute was all about publicity, spectacle, New York, etc. If Rockne were behind this, I guarantee that the pub would have been louder and more sustained. He would have been at the fight as well. As for boxing in general, Rockne started the Bengal Bouts for crying out loud!

There was nothing wrong with the amatuerism either. An empty bogus point. The whole thing was extensively vetted by the NCAA. They had ZERO problem with it.

The Clausen thing was over the top. There was nothing wrong with it, but it was cheesy. We probably deserve a little crap for that.

This is a nothing point. However, the thing we have to watch when articles like this is not what others think; it\'s how the ND admin reacts. In the past this was all it took to for them to go into shell. If there is to be a return to championship form, that can not be the response as Charlie wins and, inevitably, provokes the ire of those that certainly do not have ND\'s best interests at heart.

Frankly, I hate this Couch guy. I identified him as a NDHater during the whole Willingham thing. He was consistenly critical of ND and was consistently biased.

ND becoming all it once was against

June 18, 2006

BY GREG COUCH SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

That Tom Zbikowski fight at Madison Square Garden was quite a show. Well, not the fight. But the buildup! He entered the ring through a gauntlet of his teammates in their Notre Dame jerseys. His warmup read, "Fight Like a Champion Today,'' playing off the famed Irish football sign "Play Like a Champion Today.'' And gospel singer BeBe Winans sang the Notre Dame fight song.

This is certainly something new, Notre Dame football cross-promoting with the world of professional boxing. That's Irish football, the tasteful example of U.S. amateur football, in the same world with Don King. Or, in this case, Bob Arum.

Something is changing at Notre Dame, and nothing happens there without the stamp of coach Charlie Weis, who sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game'' on Tuesday at Wrigley Field. Notre Dame used to put itself above self-promotion and manufactured hype, above what everyone else does. Now, it is becoming one of the gang.

You can look at that one of two ways: Either Weis has moved Notre Dame into the modern era, or he has become a carnival barker just like everyone else. This certainly will help Notre Dame with recruiting, but it's also a little sad. It was nice having someone, especially the face of the sport, holding itself to a higher standard. But the Irish were a little out of touch.

Still, in the last few months, they have crossed over the line into bad taste at times. At other times, they stepped right up to the line and danced around it.

What have we seen? A high school recruit, Jimmy Clausen, held a news conference at the College Football Hall of Fame, arriving in a stretch white Hummer with an entourage and a police escort, to announce that he would play at Notre Dame.

We saw athletic-department officials send letters to several national football writers inviting them to sit down with quarterback Brady Quinn. And while it was done without gimmick, it was clearly a way of kicking off a Heisman Trophy campaign. Everyone runs Heisman campaigns of some sort. Notre Dame used to think that was tasteless.

We saw Weis singing at Wrigley, which was fine. And what did you make of the hype surrounding Zbikowski's fight, a quick knockout victory?

In all, it's nothing gaudy, other than the stretch Hummer. But Notre Dame used to sniff at anyone who did things like this. And while that always looked to be a little arrogant, it also was classy.

But it had to be clear to Weis that the Notre Dame mystique thing wasn't working the way it used to. It's still there, but 16-year-old recruits today can't be expected to know much about Notre Dame's grand history. And while having its own TV network, NBC, is a big sales pitch, Notre Dame had fallen behind Florida, Florida State and maybe even Miami, not to mention USC and Texas, in the eyes of recruits. These guys make big fusses, big shows about everything.

Meanwhile, Notre Dame has obvious advantages, from national TV games to movies made about its heroes, and Weis apparently decided to put Rudy back to work. Well, that's not quite right. That would be a way of playing on the old name. Weis moved up with modern stuff, including flashy news conferences for high school kids.

The problem is that when you decide to mud-wrestle with your opponents, you have to be careful not to get dirty.

The Zbikowski fight pushed the line. It's hard not to like his wholesome story, about a suburban Chicago kid who is growing up to be a football star at Notre Dame. He passed the firefighting test recently. And here he was, a proven amateur fighter, in his pro debut. He got Weis' approval before agreeing to the fight.

This was within NCAA rules, but it still pushed the principles of amateurism. I know that Zbikowski is allowed, under NCAA rules, to be a professional in one sport and an amateur in another. His pro boxing career, though, should be conducted separately from his amateur football career at Notre Dame.

But how many people get a top flight promoter, Arum, and have their pro debut at Madison Square Garden? Come on, Zbikowski was there because he is a Notre Dame football star. Sure, he had a good amateur boxing career. But all that hype and a first fight that happens to be at the most storied fight venue in America?

Now, Zbikowski apparently is looking to be on a championship card for his next pro fight, in February in Las Vegas.

Look, I don't begrudge this guy a chance to get his career started. But be realistic about what he was there: a Notre Dame football player. But, hey, he was cleared, and he took advantage of it.

Nothing happens at Notre Dame without Weis. He is, after all, the ringmaster.

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They Still Get Me Fired Up - The NDHaters

2006-05-31T01:13:00.000-05:00

The NDHaters always go for the same stuff: When ND is losing it's because the "academic standards" are too high. When they are winning it's because the head coach has somehow gotten the admissions department to "Sell its soul for football glory."

Totall bullshit. ND does not raise or lower standards based on who the coach is.

Also, more the weather crap. Like the weather is any better in Ann Arbor or Columbus. Give me a break.

Of course he throws in the usual jab at our playing the service academies.

The Haters love the line "ND can't sell itself anymore." Let's see, ND has needed to get out there and recruit like hell for about, hmmmm, I don't know, 50, 60 years now. Maybe more. Somehow it's ALL DIFFERENT TODAY. Right.

I hate these pricks. Don't they ever give up?!

Charlie Weis: Gridiron God or Mere Mortal?
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Athlon Sports
Published: May 30, 2006 - 5:00am
The Next Notre Dame Legend

He’s Not There Yet

By Mark Schlabach

In only one season as his alma mater’s football coach, Charlie Weis has awakened the echoes at Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish were ranked among the top 10 teams in the country last season, came within a bad spot and impromptu quarterback sneak of upsetting two-time defending national champion USC and played in a Bowl Championship Series game. In a little over four months, Weis put college football’s most storied program back in the national consciousness, where it belongs.

But don’t put that buzz cut on Touchdown Jesus just yet.

Yes, what Weis did at Notre Dame last season can only be described as remarkable. He took over a program that had floundered under former coach Tyrone Willingham — the Fighting Irish were 6–6 in 2004 — and turned it into one of the most feared offenses in the country. Last season’s team, which featured the passing of Brady Quinn, running of Darius Walker and pass catching of Anthony Fasano, Maurice Stovall and Jeff Samardzija, scored more points than any other team in Notre Dame history.

And with Quinn coming back for what could be a Heisman Trophy-winning senior season in 2006, and blue-chip quarterback prospect Jimmy Clausen committing to come on board in 2007, the Fighting Irish won’t slip much offensively in the immediate future. In fact, they figure to have a sizable advantage every time they step on the field because of the man calling plays on the sideline.

So why not put Weis among the ranks of Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian and Lou Holtz the great Fighting Irish coaches of the past? As the 34–20 loss to Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl proved, Notre Dame still has a long way to go, especially on defense.

Notre Dame had problems stopping opponents last season — how else to explain a three-point loss to a Michigan State team coached by John L. Smith? If Notre Dame’s defense had figured out how to stop USC quarterback Matt Leinart just once in the final seconds, the Irish might have been talking about Roses instead of Tostitos.

Weis succeeds on offense because of his coaching pedigree. He plugs players into his system, which has proved to be nearly fool-proof. Quarterbacks will sign with Notre Dame because Weis coached Tom Brady, who went from a late-round pick to a two-time Super Bowl MVP. Running backs and wide receivers will sign with the Fighting Irish because they will want to play in those record-setting offenses. And offensive linemen will go to South Bend because former Notre Dame linemen still litter the NFL.

But Weis’ real challenge, along with continuing to loosen the high standards of Notre Dame’s admissions office, is finding superior athletes who want to play defense. Not since defensive lineman Renaldo Wynn was chosen by the Jacksonville Jaguars in 1997 has Notre Dame had a defensive player drafted in the first round (only two Fighting Irish players — offensive tackle Luke Petitgout in 1999 and center Jeff Faine in 2003, it should be noted, were first-rounders since Wynn).

Finding big linemen, menacing linebackers and super-athletic cornerbacks should be Notre Dame’s biggest priority. Because as prolific as Weis’ offense was in New England, the Patriots won three Super Bowls with defense. And Notre Dame will struggle to stop most teams, except when it plays the military academies.

Weis has two outstanding recruiters on his staff: Mike Haywood and Rob Ianello, who were the recruiting coordinators at Texas and Wisconsin, respectively. They have already left their mark and understand Notre Dame isn’t the football program that it once was. Notre Dame has to work as hard as everyone else, or even harder, in recruiting, something Willingham and his staff weren’t willing to do.

Despite Notre Dame’s storied tradition, the school doesn’t recruit itself anymore. The weather stinks. The school has a stricter conduct code than places like Miami, Oklahoma, USC and Texas. And that lucrative contract with NBC doesn’t mean as much anymore because everybody plays on TV.

Notre Dame will be good enough to return to the Bowl Championship Series this season, perhaps even play in the Fiesta Bowl for the national title. Who knows? Maybe the Fighting Irish will even win a bowl game this season, something they haven’t done in more than a decade. But before Weis can be mentioned in the same breath with Notre Dame’s five Hall of Fame coaches, he has to win consistently, like the Irish did under Leahy, Parseghian and Holtz.

Notre Dame doesn’t need another one-hit wonder. Even the non-descript Bob Davie won nine games twice. And don’t forget that in his very first season at Notre Dame, Willingham won 10.

Kevin McDougal - All The Did Was Win

2006-05-30T15:27:00.000-05:00

I never really bought into the whole Ron Powlus hype. Yeah, I wanted it to be true (much like the Jimmy Clausen hype), but a pessimist is an optimist with experience. It didn't take long to figure out it wasn't happening with Powlus. What was worse was looking at four years of him. You knew once he was in there that he was one of those players, good but not great, that freezes you into inaction. You just can't seem to get him out of there because he's good; it's just that you KNOW you need more. Argh!!! That knot of frustration, that was Ron Powlus at Notre Dame.

This sounds strange, but we were lucky Powlus got hurt in 1993. His injury paved the way for one of the best single season performances I've ever seen. Kevin McDougal was obviously not a stud athlete but the guy had "IT." All he did was win. It was beautiful to watch.

As I sat in the endzone seats, 1993, ND vs Boston College, 4th down, ND down by 6, I saw McDougal come into the huddle and call the play. I remember saying to myself, "I wonder if he can do it." Thirty seconds later, under a heavy rush, he did it. He threw a laser right to a very well covered Lake Dawson. Only a perfect throw could get there. It was there. It was very typical of him. The resulting heartbreak a few minutes later came on the shoulders of the defense (Remember Pete Bercich dropping a sure interception?), not his arm.

You usually don't win without a QB and while McDougal may have never seen the field had not another player been injured, he sure as hell made the most of his moment in the sun. For that alone, not even counting all the victories he engineered on the field, he will forever be a success in my eyes.

So what's he doing now? I saw this -

Kevin McDougal, Notre Dame quarterback
Name: Kevin McDougal
Age: 33
Residence: Pompano Beach, Fla.

Claim to fame: Quarterbacked the 1993 Notre Dame team that finished the year second to Florida State in both major polls. Earned the starting job only after a broken collarbone knocked the more-heralded Ron Powlus out for the season. Engineered a memorable 31-24 victory over top-ranked Florida State. Led Notre Dame back from a 21-point, fourth-quarter deficit against Boston College the following week before David Gordon's 41-yard field goal as time expired gave the Eagles a 41-39 triumph. Owns school records for career passing efficiency (154.4) and career completion percentage (.622).

How often he's reminded of the 1993 season: "I still hear about it, maybe because I'm actually from here. Probably if I was living in another state, I wouldn't get it as much. When you come back to where you grew up, you get people who remember the hard times I had at Notre Dame, that I wasn't supposed to start and that Ron Powlus was supposed to be the big guy, and then to finally get that chance. People remember it a lot because of the success we had that year. To think that year, I almost didn't play, I wasn't supposed to play. That's what's intriguing to everyone."

Memories of the 1993 season: "Obviously I felt I had talent and could have been playing a lot earlier, but Rick Mirer was there. Of all the games I went in after Rick Mirer, we didn't score maybe twice in three years, so I'd had a lot of success. It was shocking to me (when Powlus won the job) and just a situation where I thought I was going to start and didn't get the chance. I still felt I should have been starting regardless of what happened. Coach (Lou) Holtz had his reasons why he thought Powlus should have started. I don't know what he saw, but he made that choice. I would have to live with it.

"It's a whole different story now because everyone got to see what I can do in an entire season. The whole story's intriguing because we had so much success and we beat supposedly the No. 1 team of all time – that Florida State team. When I left the field, we were in the lead against Boston College. We set all these records for points and stuff at Notre Dame. It's just amazing that I wasn't going to play that year.

"(Holtz) really didn't say anything (after Powlus got injured). I think he was kind of hurt that Ron Powlus had gotten hurt. Obviously I knew he was upset and hurt because he'd already chosen (Powlus) to be the starter. He really didn't say anything. Everything happened so fast. It was like the last scrimmage or next-to-last scrimmage. It was time to play. It happened so close to the season.

"I don't know about everybody else, but I realized (Notre Dame could contend for a national title) my freshman year. People don't realize we had the No. 1 recruiting class my freshman year. When I came in and saw all the talent with Jeff Burris, Tommy Carter, Bryant Young, Jerome Bettis (who turned pro after the 1992 season and wasn't a part of the 1993 team), those were all guys who made that recruiting class. When we were playing (as reserves before the 1993 season), our second team would go in and still score on teams. Coach Holtz would have to take the second team out in order to stop the scoring. I always thought a national championship was definitely in our reach. Once (Powlus) got hurt and I got my chance to start, I thought in my eyes there was no doubt we'd win the national title. I think we should have. Even with the loss, we should have shared it.

"The atmosphere on campus was exciting (before the Florida State game). Everybody was excited because everyone felt we could win. … Coach Holtz was a coach who really didn't like to blow people out. We were one team that never ran up the score to like 80 points, which we could have done on a couple of teams. We'd always put our second- and third-stringers in and not blow teams out. In that (Florida State) game … I think we pretty much dominated the game. I think we could have played even better. We were the ones that laid off to let them back in the game. We stopped throwing the ball and doing some of the things they couldn't stop us on.

"There was a lot of excitement. I was especially proud of our team because no one really gave us a shot early because Ron Powlus got hurt and stuff like that. For our team not to give up and keep believing in me, for me it was the best feeling in the world. Obviously that translated to winning. We were on the brink of another national championship. It was a feeling that we felt we should have won maybe (three) years before in the Orange Bowl, but it didn't happen. We were back to almost winning one. Everyone was very excited.

"(The Boston College game) was a situation where we had some key players hurt who still tried to play. (Star cornerback) Bobby Taylor was hurt and could barely run and still played, so the receivers got some catches they normally wouldn't catch. Give credit to Boston College. They played a great game. They might have played the best game of their lives. I remember their tight end (Pete Mitchell) caught (13) passes, and about 10 of them were for first downs. (Boston College quarterback) Glenn Foley was having a tremendous game. He made some throws where our defensive backs were all over the receiver, and he put it in a place where only the receiver could have gotten it. It's tough when a team like that is on its game. All of that had an effect on why it was a tough game and why it turned into a loss.

"The one thing about Coach Holtz is he never, ever, ever lets you believe you're going to lose. He doesn't care how much you're down. It's something I can't even explain to you. I don't know the feeling around there now, but when (Holtz) was there, all the top recruits came because he was such a motivator. We kept great athletes who stayed around and were in third-string roles. You have to be a good motivator to get people to see your vision in order to do that. We never felt we would lose a game.

"(The loss to Boston College) didn't hurt as bad as you would have thought because still in the back of our mind, we thought we'd play Florida State. We'd knocked them back down to No. 2. We felt (the pollsters) would knock us back to No. 2 simply because we'd beaten Florida State. They had to have known we were the top two teams in the country. We still felt we'd play them (in a bowl), but it didn't happen. To tell you the truth, even after the Cotton Bowl (a 24-21 victory over Texas A&M), we went to bed knowing we'd share the national title with them. We really felt that. The shock came the next morning when we were all flying back home and heard on the radio that we'd finished second. It hurt. You just wanted to play Boston College again, play Florida State again to show people.

"After working that hard throughout the year and losing that game, it was hard. We felt if we played (Boston College) 10 more times, we would have won. The stars were aligned for them. They played a great game to beat us.''

Pro career: McDougal signed as a free agent with the Los Angeles Rams in 1994, but he didn't make the team. He played for the London Monarchs of the World League of American Football in 1995, then spent two seasons with the Canadian Football League's Winnipeg Blue Bombers. He played Arena Football with the Milwaukee Mustangs from 1998-2000 and joined the XFL's Chicago Enforcers in 2001.

What he's doing now: "I'm doing real estate in the South Florida area – investing. I've been doing that for about 10 years now. My degree is in business. I (majored) in business management, so naturally I just came back and saved my money and started buying up property. Over the years, I started seeing how much money you were making in it, and I got heavily into it then. Florida was a hot spot.

"I'm a big golfer, so Florida's the perfect place for me. I play a lot of golf, so I'm in the perfect area. I played (golf) in high school. Right now I'm about a 3-handicap.''

Finally

2006-05-16T15:53:00.000-05:00

I agre with all of this - and it's so nice to see it finally happen at ND. Someone finally pulled their head out of their ass.

I love the idea of a nuetral site game. I totally agree that it is a welcomed return to the more barnstorming early ND games.

I also agree that our schedule is "tough enough." Enough with poorly laid out schedules, and enough with playing too many top programs. That doesn't mean make a joke schedule (which the critics will claim no matter what once ND starts winning big again); it means make a balance, well thought out schedule.

Notre Dame returning to Rockne barnstorming era
By TOM COYNE, AP Sports Writer
May 16, 2006

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) -- Notre Dame's decision to schedule a game each season at neutral sites starting in 2009 is an attempt to return the school to its independent roots.

Athletic director Kevin White said Tuesday the goal is to travel to different parts of the country and ensure that the only school with a national television contract remains a nationwide school. He said it would help recruiting and give more Fighting Irish fans a chance to see the team.

Division I football will go to a 12-game schedule for all schools beginning this season.

"I think over time we've really begun to behave like a wannabe conference member," White said. "I think it was real important for us to go back to our roots and behave more like an independent -- go back to the coach Rockne barnstorming era if you will."

The game is a sign that Notre Dame is moving further away from possibly affiliating with a conference, White said.

He said the games aren't truly neutral-site games, but home contests played away from South Bend. They will not be against what White described as "heavyweights."

"We have enough heavyweights on the schedule," he said. "We need to have a schedule that's conducive to success."

He said the university is negotiating to play in Jacksonville and Orlando, Fla., New Orleans and Dallas. The school is looking at existing bowl-game organizations to help stage the contests.

"It's really not a bad idea for Notre Dame to have relationships with lots of different entities," White said.

Some Notre Dame fans contend the team's upcoming schedules are not as tough as previous ones. White said he is not trying to put together the nation's most difficult schedule.

"We need to schedule in a way it puts us in a position to win national championships," he said. "We could have a great football team and schedule ourselves out of a championship. You can schedule yourself in, you can schedule yourself out. The last time I checked, the most important thing here is to try to win national championships."

Another One Bites The Dust

2006-05-16T14:27:00.000-05:00

Another old guy gets the boot. Tony Roberts is great. I've always loved his broadcasting of ND games. He's one of the best they've had. But, he has been "losing it" the last few years. He's had trouble with names and has had other slip ups. Tom Pagna had the same thing a few years ago. It's sad when it happens, but it does. Lord knows you don't want to end up the way Harry Carey did, almost unintelligable and half slobbering.

There's never a good time, but maybe now is as good as any for Mr. Roberts.

Of course, on top of it was money. Radio broadcasting has taken a hit lately as the internet and satellite radio have changed things. Budgets have been cut. He should have known he was in trouble the very second they asked him to take a bite out of his severence package.

Whenever this happens t0 an older guy, a legend that gets bumped out, you always feel for the old guy and hate the corporation. But you can't really blame the corporation. It's always been about money.

The real sad thing is that you lose a great voice, but moreover, things change, and sometimes things change for no other reason than the passage of time. So in that regard no longer having Tony Roberts on the air means that he's been there for 26 years and I remember ever one of them, but nothing lasts forever - including you. Yet another reminder.

Roberts dialed out
Distinctive radio voice of Notre Dame off the air after 26 years
By Teddy Greenstein
Tribune staff reporter

May 16, 2006

Tony Roberts searched through his briefcase Monday to find the handwritten note that had been sent to him in December by his boss at Westwood One Radio, David Halberstam.

"Tony, thank you for your continued work on Notre Dame," it read. "Irish fans love it. It's inimitable and immediately identifiable. You're synonymous with the Irish and it helps us in the trenches (with sales). To a great '06. -- David."

The kind words, though, rang hollow Monday when Halberstam informed Roberts he was being replaced after 26 years as Notre Dame's play-by-play man.

"They fired me," Roberts said, "for no cause."

Roberts will be replaced by Don Criqui, a TV veteran and Notre Dame alumnus who called Irish games for Westwood One from 1974-76. Criqui will work with analyst Allen Pinkett, the former Irish tailback who will enter his sixth season in the radio booth.

The Westwood One release hails Criqui as a "Hall of Fame" broadcaster.

Yet in 2005 alone, Roberts was enshrined in the Indiana Broadcasters Hall of Fame, the Holiday Bowl Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame after earning the 2005 Chris Schenkel Award.

But, as Roberts said: "None of that made a difference."

What mattered most was a desire by Halberstam, the executive vice president of Westwood One Sports, to make a change.

"Change is not easy," Halberstam said Monday. "But if we don't change, we don't grow.

"This was a very difficult decision. Tony has tons of fans, and we wish him a lot of success. But we have a [Pro Football] Hall of Fame broadcaster coming in, someone who is riveting with his calls and can capture the excitement of the game as well as anyone."

Westwood One officials did not agree with Roberts' statement that he was fired, calling his exit the result of a failed negotiation. But Roberts, who had also served as an update anchor for Westwood One, was miffed by the terms offered him.

"They said I could take my severance, cut it in two, and then they'd pay me with that for two more years," Roberts said. "So they'd be paying me with money I rightfully earned under my contract. I said no and made a counteroffer a month or so ago. When I didn't hear anything back, I knew the jig was up."

Roberts, who called his first Notre Dame football game for Westwood One in 1980, learned his fate via teleconference.

A company official tried to make nice by asking Roberts to attend an annual Notre Dame/Westwood One luncheon next month in Chicago where he would be honored. But Roberts said the last thing he would do is threaten to upstage Criqui. And besides, the sting is still too great.

"I always wanted to walk away from it under my terms," he said. "People asked me: How much longer did I want to work? As long as [coach] Charlie Weis was there."

Roberts said he informed Weis' wife, Maura, of his possible departure in the spring but never heard back from the coach.

Roberts said he understands that Notre Dame officials have no official say in selecting Westwood One's broadcast team.

"But they could have launched a protest and said: `Look, we're not happy about this,'" Roberts said. "I told Notre Dame they should protect themselves the next time they do a contract so they have some control over who does the games. They let this one slip through the cracks."

As a result, Notre Dame has lost a distinctive voice in the booth, a broadcaster lauded for refusing to be a "homer."

"When Notre Dame stunk, he said they stunk," said Darin Pritchett, who co-hosts an afternoon radio show on WSBT-AM 960 in South Bend. "Tony Roberts is a class act and this makes me sick."

Said legendary Irish coach Ara Parseghian: "We all get used to certain voices, and he has been the voice of Notre Dame for a long time and a personal friend.

"On the other side, there was a lot of trauma last year after Tyrone [Willingham] was dismissed. Everyone was up in arms until Charlie [Weis] came in. So you never know what's around the corner. But it's important to recognize Tony and give credit to his 26 years in the Irish family."

Because of Roberts' refusal to sugarcoat, many will contend that Notre Dame played at least a minor role in his dismissal.

A Notre Dame official insisted that was not the case.

So did Halberstam, who said: "This was a Westwood One decision. We support Notre Dame and they support us. That's generally how a good partnership works, and we're in our 39th year together."

So what's left for Roberts, who was reared on Chicago's South Side?

Roberts, declining to give his age, said he would seek other broadcasting assignments.

"I'm old enough--and young enough to continue working as long as the blood is coursing through my veins," he said.

"It was a great run, and I'm sorry it's over. But it happened to [Tigers broadcaster Ernie] Harwell and a lot of guys. I'm one of many. But no matter how much you expect it, when it finally does become a reality, it hurts."

Hot Sounds Out of ..........Wilmette?

2006-05-11T13:57:00.000-05:00

I get a giant smile on my face whenever I think about a rock band coming out of Wilmette, Il. I mean, give me a break. IMPOSSIBLE!

Well, no, dig Fall Out Boy. They're not bad. I simply can't believe it! I mean, they met at the Borders at Edens Plaza! I love it!

Hey, whatever, they rock. "Sugar, We're Going Down." was probably the best song of last year. Seriously.

Give it up for the W-ville homies.

My Fair Lady

2006-05-09T13:25:00.000-05:00

In case you have never seen the movie My Fair Lady or heard the song I'm an Ordinary Man, it's classic. The song was sung in the movie by Rex Harrison. In real life he was married six times -

My Fair Lady Lyrics

I'm an Ordinary Man Lyrics

Well after all, Pickering, I'm an ordinary man,
Who desires nothing more than an ordinary chance,
to live exactly as he likes, and do precisely what he wants...
An average man am I, of no eccentric whim,
Who likes to live his life, free of strife,
doing whatever he thinks is best, for him,
Well... just an ordinary man...
BUT, Let a woman in your life and your serenity is through,
she'll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome,
and then go on to the enthralling fun of overhauling you...
Let a woman in your life, and you're up against a wall,
make a plan and you will find,
that she has something else in mind,
and so rather than do either you do something else
that neither likes at all You want to talk of Keats and Milton,
she only wants to talk of love,
You go to see a play or ballet, and spend it searching
for her glove, Let a woman in your life
and you invite eternal strife,
Let them buy their wedding bands for those anxious little hands...
I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling
than to ever let a woman in my life, I'm a very gentle man,
even tempered and good natured
who you never hear complain,
Who has the milk of human kindness
by the quart in every vein,
A patient man am I, down to my fingertips,
the sort who never could, ever would,
let an insulting remark escape his lips
Very gentle man...
But, Let a woman in your life,
and patience hasn't got a chance,
she will beg you for advice, your reply will be concise,
and she will listen very nicely, and then go out
and do exactly what she wants!!!
You are a man of grace and polish,
who never spoke above a hush,
all at once you're using language that would make
a sailor blush, Let a woman in your life,
and you're plunging in a knife,
Let the others of my sex, tie the knot around their necks,
I prefer a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition
than to ever let a woman in my life I'm a quiet living man,
who prefers to spend the evening in the silence of his room,
who likes an atmosphere as restful as
an undiscovered tomb,
A pensive man am I, of philosophical joys,
who likes to meditate, contemplate,
far for humanities mad inhuman noise,
Quiet living man....
But, let a woman in your life, and your sabbatical is through,
in a line that never ends comes an army of her friends,
come to jabber and to chatter
and to tell her what the matter is with YOU!,
she'll have a booming boisterous family,
who will descend on you en mass,
she'll have a large wagnarian mother,
with a voice that shatters glass,
Let a woman in your life,
Let a woman in your life,
Let a woman in your life I shall never let a woman in my life.

Charlie vs. Pete

2006-04-28T11:02:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting article on what was behind the Clausen announcement. I thought it was stupid and I was turned off by Clausen, but what I do like about the whole thing is how Weis has set his sights clearly on Carrol and USC. While the rest of college football seems to have let SC pull rank, old ND grad and head coach Charlie Wies knows that SC can pull rank on whomever they want - but not Notre Dame.

Is this recruiting crap out of line? Yes, but it's been out of line for a long, long time now and in the grand scheme of things I'm not sure it's that big of a deal.

Weis outmaneuvers Carroll to land QB Clausen

April 28, 2006

BY TAYLOR BELL

Recruiting is all about getting better ... and better ... and better.

Notre Dame's recruitment of quarterback Jimmy Clausen, the nation's top-rated prospect in the class of 2007, is a textbook case.

When Charlie Weis was hired as Notre Dame's head coach two years ago, he had one tested quarterback on his roster, Brady Quinn. With a reputation for developing Tom Brady into an All-Pro quarterback and three-time Super Bowl winner, Weis turned Quinn into a Heisman Trophy candidate.

But college programs are only as good as their next quarterback. So Weis recruited two of the nation's leading signal-callers, Demetrius Jones of Morgan Park and Zach Fraser of Mechanicsburg, Pa., to succeed Quinn after the 2006 season.

Then Weis began planning for the future. He targeted Clausen, a 6-3, 207-pounder from Westlake Village, Calif., who is touted as the best quarterback to be produced in California since John Elway.

Last week, Weis won a recruiting battle with USC coach Pete Carroll, who has signed the No. 1 freshman classes in the nation for the last three years. Clausen picked Notre Dame over USC.

It was, according to recruiting analyst Tom Lemming of CSTV, "the most bizarre and most widely watched event in recruiting, the biggest announcement in the history of college football recruiting.''

It was speculated that Clausen's family hired a public-relations agency to orchestrate the announcement at a news conference at the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind.

"It was a brilliant move by Notre Dame,'' Lemming said. "Recruiting is all show business. No one knows it better than Pete Carroll. Weis doesn't miss a thing. He saw what Carroll did at USC at their Pro Day a month ago.''

In a televised event, Carroll invited all of USC's past great players, including Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart, and all of the top prospects in the West. All of the 30 NFL teams were represented.

"It was a stroke of genius for recruiting,'' Lemming said. "Weis wasn't going to miss a chance last week. He suggested that Clausen make his announcement before the Blue-Gold spring game, the day when Notre Dame had 16 All-Americans on campus. ESPN worked hand in hand with Notre Dame to get the maximum amount of publicity for the event.

"Notre Dame is one of few schools that could pull off something like that. Remember, it wasn't a signing, just an oral commitment. Signing is next February.

"Parents worry about academics when their kids are making a college decision. But kids worry about good-looking girls, the quickest way to the NFL, the best facilities and the show-business aspect, the superficial stuff, the trimmings, and no one can generate more of it than Notre Dame when they're on a roll.''

Bob Chmiel, who once recruited at Northern Illinois, Michigan and Notre Dame and currently hosts a sports talk show in South Bend, said he had no problem with the way the announcement was handled.

"If it's OK with Weis, it's OK with me,'' Chmiel said. "There will be another one. Who knows what's next? That wasn't the case 15-20 years ago. In those days, a kid would pick up a phone between his biology and math classes, call the coach, say he was coming, and that was it.''

Those were the days.

Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Good Riddance

2006-04-27T09:07:00.000-05:00

Jackson calls a decent game, but I, for one, will certainly not miss this guy's anti-ND bias and his pro Big10/Pac10 stance. He was a USC homer for sure.

That's one down. Now we've got to get rid of Brent Musburger, a schlock-miester, and Sean McDonough, another virulet ND hater. Then we go after Chis Collinsworth and Michael Irvin.

By the way, the best college football announcer out there is Vern Lundquist. The guy is great and it would be a dream if NBC could get him off the SEC college football package on CBS.

April 27, 2006

NEW YORK (Ticker) - Keith Jackson apparently has signed off for the last time.

The legendary voice of college football over the last 40 years, Jackson announced that he is retiring from broadcasting, according to a story published in Thursday's edition of The New York Times.

"I'm finished with play-by-play forever," Jackson told the newspaper. "I'm going out to learn to be a senior citizen and find a president I can vote for and believe in. ... I'm not angry, I'm just going off like an old man and sitting by the creek."

In addition to serving as the primary voice of college football since 1967, the 77-year-old Jackson also was the voice of "Monday Night Football" in its inaugural season of 1970 and has called NBA and Major League Baseball games as well.

Jackson originally planned to retire after the 1998 college football season but decided to return to the broadcast booth, focusing his announcing duties on West Coast games. Still, Jackson insists this retirement is for real.

"This is different," he said. "I'm 77."

"When he expressed to us that he was considering retirement, we repeatedly tried to convince him otherwise, but completely respect his decision," said executive vice president of ABC Sports and ESPN Norby Williamson.

This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun.......

2006-04-26T00:26:00.000-05:00

"You Smell That? Napalm, son....."

2006-04-25T21:09:00.000-05:00

Even if I'm not overly impressed with the hype surrounding uber-recruit JC, aka, Jimmy Clausen, I love the wide eyed look of the so-called experts that are looking at the stirrings of the Notre Dame sleeping giant. "Scratching their heads at what Ty Willingham and Bob Davie were doing" indeed.

I'm reminded of a line from the classic movie, "Great Santini." "STAND BY FOR A FIGHTER PILOT, RUSS PICKERS!"

"A look at how Notre Dame is being viewed around the country, from places where love has been rare.

Dennis Dodd, CBS Sportsline

Notre Dame is back in terms of success on, off and around the field. This was the biggest "get" of the Charlie Weis era. In less than 1?years on the job, Weis has won nine games, coached up Heisman frontrunner Brady Quinn and won over the hearts of Domers everywhere.

As Clausen himself put it, Weis is why the quarterback came to Notre Dame.

Tom Beaver of GoBlue:

Notre Dame's Junior Day this past winter had at least a dozen top 100 type kids from around the country, whereas U-M's Junior Day had 3-4, all from the Midwest. U-M's Spring Game -- 2-3 top kids, all Midwesterners again ... Notre Dame will again have 12+ (maybe as many as 20), again from all over the country. My worry: if U-M loses all three top road games this season, which it very well could -- at ND, at PSU, at OSU ... recruiting will really get tougher. If any of you, like me, are starting to hear a low-grade sucking sound all the time -- that could be the sound of ND sucking up top Midwest recruits ... ND beats USC for the Nation's #1 HS QB, who is from Southern Cal ... think about that one a second.

David Lassen, VenturaCountyStar.com

It's one more affirmation Weis is going to be a big-time success in South Bend. It's one more indication the Irish are back at the top of the heap in the recruiting wars ?not by themselves, certainly, but in that small group of the most elite.

And it would certainly seem to indicate the USC-Notre Dame series just got a little bit hotter. USC, after all, rebuilt with a coach with an NFL background who came in, recruited like mad and started turning out exceptional quarterbacks (among other talents).

Notre Dame has upped the ante with a coach who had a more successful NFL background, appears to be recruiting like mad (even in USC's backyard) and certainly seems to be heading in the direction of turning out exceptional quarterbacks (among other talents).

Even better, for Irish fans and more depressing, for the USC faithful is that Weis and Notre Dame plucked this quarterback out of USC's back yard, after Clausen at one time apparently favored the Trojans.

Mike Farrell, Eagle Action (Fredo)

How big is quarterback Jimmy Clausen's recent commitment to Notre Dame? It's A-Rod to the Yankees, T.O. to the Cowboys and Shaq to the Heat. It's the Great One to the L.A. Kings, Tiger winning the Masters and Hagler-Hearns. In the college football recruiting world, this is as big as it gets.

When's the last time the nation's most hyped quarterback in years committed to the nation's biggest and most recognizable football program? When was the last time a high school football player committed, and it was mentioned on SportsCenter as a big deal? Who else has had numerous national television features done on him before he even threw a pass his senior year? The LeBron James of high school football, that's who.

What Clausen's commitment does for Notre Dame is obvious. It puts the marquee football program back on center stage and numerous blue-chip recruits will eventually follow Clausen to South Bend. It improves Notre Dame's chances of winning a national title even if Clausen never throws another pass. Clausen's commitment enhances Charlie Weis' reputation as a great recruiter and coach, and it leaves many scratching their heads at what Ty Willingham and Bob Davie were doing. Basically, it puts Notre Dame football where it expects to be -- on the lips of every college football fan.

In the meantime, the echoes are waking in South Bend. Notre Dame is back amongst the elite in college football recruiting -- the way it should be.

Allen Wallace, Superprep

Whether Clausen is a great quarterback in college or not, they are once again competing with truly elite programs for truly elite players. The bottom line is that Notre Dame is back.

Colin Cowherd, ESPN Radio

You have to be blind or in severe, irreversible denial to not see ND recruiting is back in a big way.

Tom Luginbill, ESPN.com

Even after a top-five 2006 recruiting class, Jimmy Clausen's commitment is the biggest piece of the puzzle as to the future success of Charlie Weis at Notre Dame.

Michigan Live

The pied piper of the Fighting Irish football program continues to reunite and reignite all of Notre Dame nation. He isn't afraid to talk about capturing national championships and producing Heisman Trophy winners.

One thing's for sure.

The infectious attitude from Weis is spreading far and wide.

LA Daily News

Clausen's decision, along with the possibility of Tyler following him to South Bend, could make Notre Dame the front-runner to secure the nation's top recruiting class in 2007.

I love the smell of fear in spring. Smells like.....Victory!

Be Careful What You Wish For

2006-04-24T00:21:00.002-05:00

Well, I went to the Blue & Gold game this weekend. I'm not positive - I might have missed one in there - but I think this was the 25th spring game I've attended.

And I'm grouchy.

First of all, parking is a mess down there. This has been going on for sometime now in regards to the games, but you could always pull right near the stadium no problem for the spring game. Now, forget it. They've made all kinds of road changes, changes in and of themselves that look pretty good, but as far as parking near the stadium, fughedaboutit.

I'm also grouchy because it was crowded! Jeez, the reasons I've always gone to the spring game were a) it marked then end of the long winter, and b) you could breeze right into South Bend, walk up get a ticket, sit whereever you want in the stadium and relax. Most of the time it's sunny and nice (not like last year when it snowed, or a few years before that when there was a biblical downpour - a bad omen it turned out for Willingham as it was his first game).

I walked into the stadium in the second quarter because after never changing their clocks, South Bend is now always on eastern time, which means that they will always be an hour ahead all year round. I, of course, was out of the loop on that one.

So, I'm an hour late and I walk in and.....can you believe it? I can't find a seat! I end up hiking it up to the 45th row in the end zone! There were 45,000 people there!

The game ended (who knows what to make of the game. I thought they looked okay) and the kids were asking me if they could go on the field. I thought back to my youth and remembered walking onto the field after the spring game and getting Joe Montana's autograph. Now? They roped it off and blocked everyone. Nobody signed autographs, the kids didn't mix with the players, nothing.

(Joe Montana - Picture we took at the 1978 Spring Game)

I explained to the kids that they weren't letting anyone on the field. They said, "Why not, daddy?"

And so times change.

Oh, by the way we got "the LeBron James of high school football," or so he's being billed.

That would be, ta da, Jimmy Clausen

This is the last of the Clausen brothers. His two older brothers went to Tennesse and didn't exactly light the college football world on fire. This one is supposedly the "good one." Yeah, we'll see. Meanwhile his dad, a Marv Marinovich type, according to the Chicago Tribune, mouthed the words of the kid's announcement while his son said them at the podium. Is it me, or is that pathetic?

I'm so sick of this hype crap. I sure hope he works out, but this has all the earmarks of a big old bust. He made mention of his coming to ND being a "business decision." I already don't like the kid. Glory boy pain in the ass.

That's him holding his three "high school championship rings" at the press conference when he announced he's coming to ND.

Hey kid, word of advice, leave your stupid rings at home next time you come to ND.

When You Hit Rock Bottom

2006-04-19T13:28:00.000-05:00

What's with this latest trend of having people stand on the side of the road holding up a sign for some business nearby? They always have the person dressed up as a superhero or a gorilla, or cartoon character with a big head, whatever. The point is that the whole thing is pathetic. Can you imagine doing this to another person, let alone having to do it yourself? Yeah, I know people need to make money, and businesses need to advertise, but there's something so.....wrong about this. It's annoying as you drive by because it's so ridiculous and you wonder what kind of boss thinks this is the best way to represent his business, but you also have this odd mixture of feeling sorry for the person having to do it and being annoyed by them at the same time. They are somehow like the old squeegee guys. It's as if the squeegee guy finally got a job, but, you know, this it.

Whah, Whah, Too Bad, Bye!!

2006-04-19T09:05:00.001-05:00

Hurrican "Great" and head douche bag, Michael Irvin

God it took forever for The Miami Hurricanes to get stuck with a crappy coach, but they finally have one. I hope he's like Davie and wins just enough to keep himself employed for a long as possible. (I wish I could have found a picture of Irvin doing his taunting routine at Miami but I couldn't find any using a quick net search. Bummer. This guy almost single handedly made Miami, and Dallas for that matter, into the the absurd, taunting, drug gobbling, beat yo bitches, self-glorification machines that eventually led to more than a few drug arrests, a few rapes, and a whole slew of anti-taunting rules in both college and the pros. And he's gainfully employed by ESPN? My god, they should be ashamed. The guy should be in prison!)

Miami Spring Game Report

It's typical for a team's defense to be ahead of its offense in the spring -- particularly when the defense is as dominant as Miami's. However, the degree of offensive ineptitude during the Hurricanes' spring game Saturday was downright troubling, particularly in light of last season's struggles. QBs Kyle Wright and Kirby Freeman combined for just 77 passing yards, and the running backs netted about three yards a carry. There were 11 three-and-outs, and no pass play went for longer than nine yards.

When I talked with 'Canes coach Larry Coker last week about the impact of his six new assistants -- including offensive coordinator Rich Olson -- he must have said about 10 times, "We want to do a better job of getting the ball in the hands of our playmakers." One has to wonder at this point, however: Who are those playmakers?

Memo to the Miami fans: It took awhile, but welcome back. IT'S OVER!

You Can't Handle The Truth!

2006-04-19T08:57:00.000-05:00

Is Anyone Worried About This Guy?

2006-04-14T12:03:00.000-05:00

AP
Iran Leader: Israel Will Be Annihilated
AP - 25 minutes ago

TEHRAN, Iran - The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was "heading toward annihilation," just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "permanent threat" to the Middle East that will "soon" be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.

"Allah Is The Greatest"

2006-04-13T13:33:00.000-05:00

Can you imagine your life ending at the hands of these jerks, these absolute morons? They are pathetic.

Sometimes in circumstances like this humor helps. This is from The Onion:

'We Expected Eternal Paradise For This,' Say Suicide Bombers

September 26, 2001 | Issue 37•34
JAHANNEM, OUTER DARKNESS—The hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon expressed confusion and surprise Monday to find themselves in the lowest plane of Na'ar, Islam's Hell.

"I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?"

Well, humor or not, we can only hope that their fate was something similar to that.

The Crash Site

COCKPIT VOICE RECORDER OF FLIGHT 93
The following is a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder aboard United Airlines Flight 93. All times are in EDT on Sept. 11, 2001. Text in parentheses was translated from Arabic. ''Unintelligible'' indicates that the tape couldn't be transcribed.

09:31:57 -- Ladies and gentlemen: Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit.
09:32:09 -- Er, uh ... Calling Cleveland center ... You're unreadable. Say again slowly.
09:32:10 -- Don't move. Shut up.
09:32:13 -- Come on, come.
09:32:16 -- Shut up.
09:32:17 -- Don't move.
09:32:18 -- Stop.
09:32:34 -- Sit, sit, sit down.
09:32:39 -- Sit down.
09:32:41 -- Unintelligible ... (the brother.)
09:32:54 -- Stop.
09:33:09 -- No more. Sit down.
09:33:10 -- (That's it, that's it, that's it), down, down.
09:33:14 -- Shut up.
09:33:20 -- Unintelligible
09:33:20 -- We just, we didn't get it clear ... Is that United 93 calling?
09:33:30 -- (Jassim.)
09:33:34 -- (In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate.)
09:33:41 -- Unintelligible.
09:33:43 -- Finish, no more. No more.
09:33:49 -- No. No, no, no, no.
09:33:53 -- No, no, no, no.
09:34:00 -- Go ahead, lie down. Lie down. Down, down, down.
09:34:06 -- (There is someone ... Huh?)
09:34:12 -- Down, down, down. Sit down. Come on, sit down. No, no, no, no, no. No.
09:34:16 -- Down, down, down.
09:34:21 -- Down.
09:34:25 -- No more.
09:34:26 -- No more. Down.
09:34:27 -- Please, please, please ...
09:34:28 -- Down.
09:34:29 -- Please, please, don't hurt me ...
09:34:30 -- Down. No more.
09:34:31 -- Oh God.
09:34:32 -- Down, down, down.
09:34:33 -- Sit down.
09:34:34 -- Shut up.
09:34:42 -- No more.
09:34:46 -- (This?)
09:34:47 -- Yes.
09:34:47 -- Unintelligible.
09:34:57 -- (One moment, one moment.)
09:34:59 -- Unintelligible.
09:35:03 -- No more.
09:35:06 -- Down, down, down, down.
09:35:09 -- No, no, no, no, no, no...
09:35:10 -- Unintelligible.
09:35:15 -- Sit down, sit down, sit down.
09:35:17 -- Down.
09:35:18 -- (What's this?)
09:35:19 -- Sit down. Sit down. You know, sit down.
09:35:24 -- No, no, no.
09:35:30 -- Down, down, down, down.
09:35:32 -- Are you talking to me?
09:35:33 -- No, no, no. Unintelligible.
09:35:35 -- Down in the airport.
09:35:39 -- Down, down.
09:35:40 -- I don't want to die.
09:35:41 -- No, no. Down, down.
09:35:42 -- I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
09:35:44 -- No, no. Down, down, down, down, down, down.
09:35:47 -- No, no, please.
09:35:57 -- No.
09:37:06 -- (That's it. Go back.)
09:37:06 -- (That's it.) Sit down.
09:37:36 --(Everthing is fine. I finished.)
09:38:36 -- (Yes.)
09:39:11 -- Ah. Here's the captain. I would like to tell you all to remain seated. We have a bomb aboard, and we are going back to the airport, and we have our demands. So, please remain quiet.
09:39:21 -- OK. That's 93 calling?
09:39:24 -- (One moment.)
09:39:34 -- United 93. I understand you have a bomb on board. Go ahead.
09:39:42 -- And center exec jet nine fifty-six. That was the transmission.
09:39:47 -- OK. Ah. Who called Cleveland?
09:39:52 -- Executive jet nine fifty-six, did you understand that transmission?
09:39:56 -- Affirmative. He said that there was a bomb on board.
09:39:58 -- That was all you got out of it also?
09:40:01 -- Affirmative.
09:40:03 -- Roger.
09:40:03 -- United 93. Go ahead.
09:40:14 -- United 93. Go ahead.
09:40:17 -- Ahhh.
09:40:52 -- (This green knob?)
09:40:54 -- (Yes, that's the one.)
09:41:05 -- United 93, do you hear the Cleveland center?
09:41:14 -- (One moment. One moment.)
09:41:15 -- Unintelligible.
09:41:56 -- Oh man.
09:44:18 -- (This does not work now.)
09:45:13 -- Turn it off.
09:45:16 -- (... Seven thousand ...)
09:45:19 -- (How about we let them in? We let the guys in now.)
09:45:23 -- (OK.)
09:45:24 -- (Should we let the guys in?)
09:45:25 -- (Inform them, and tell him to talk to the pilot. Bring the pilot back.)
09:45:57 -- (In the name of Allah. In the name of Allah. I bear witness that there is no other God, but Allah.)
09:47:31 -- Unintelligible.
09:47:40 -- (Allah knows.)
09:48:15 -- Unintelligible.
09:48:38 -- Set course.
09:49:37 -- Unintelligible.
09:51:27 -- Unintelligible.
09:51:35 -- Unintelligible.
09:52:02 -- Unintelligible.
09:52:31 -- Unintelligible.
09:53:20 -- (The best thing: The guys will go in, lift up the) ... Unintelligible ... (and they put the axe into it. So, everyone will be scared.)
09:53:27 -- (Yes.)
09:53:28 -- (The axe.)
09:53:28 -- Unintelligible.
09:53:29 -- (No, not the.)
09:53:35 -- (Let him look through the window. Let him look through the window.)
09:53:52 -- Unintelligible.
09:54:09 -- (Open.)
09:54:11 -- Unintelligible.
09:55:06 -- You are ... One ...
09:56:15 -- Unintelligible.
09:57:55 -- (Is there something?)
09:57:57 -- (A fight?)
09:57:59 -- (Yeah?)
09:58:33 -- Unintelligible. (Let's go guys. Allah is greatest. Allah is greatest. Oh guys. Allah is greatest.)
09:58:41 -- Ugh.
09:58:43 -- Ugh.
09:58:44 -- (Oh Allah. Oh Allah. Oh the most gracious.)
09:58:47 -- Ugh. Ugh.
09:58:52 -- Stay back.
09:58:55 -- In the cockpit.
09:58:57 -- In the cockpit.
09:58:57 -- (They want to get in here. Hold, hold from the inside. Hold from the inside. Hold).
09:59:04 -- Hold the door.
09:59:09 -- Stop him.
09:59:11 -- Sit down.
09:59:13 -- Sit down.
09:59:15 -- Sit down.
09:59:16 -- Unintelligible.
09:59:17 -- (What?)
09:59:18 -- (There are some guys. All those guys.)
09:59:20 -- Lets get them.
09:59:25 -- Sit down.
09:59:29 -- (What?)
09:59:30 -- (What.)
09:59:31 -- (What?)
09:59:36 -- Unintelligible.
09:59:37 -- (What?)
09:59:39 -- Unintelligible.
09:59:41 -- Unintelligible.
09:59:42 -- (Trust in Allah, and in him.)
09:59:45 -- Sit down.
09:59:47 -- Unintelligible.
09:59:53 -- Ahh.
09:59:55 -- Unintelligible.
09:59:58 -- Ahh.
10:00:06 -- (There is nothing.)
10:00:07 -- (Is that it? Shall we finish it off?)
10:00:08 -- (No. Not yet.)
10:00:09 -- (When they all come, we finish it off.)
10:00:11 -- (There is nothing.)
10:00:13 -- Unintelligible.
10:00:14 -- Ahh.
10:00:15 -- I'm injured.
10:00:16 -- Unintelligible.
10:00:21 -- Ahh.
10:00:22 -- (Oh Allah. Oh Allah. Oh gracious.)
10:00:25 -- In the cockpit. If we don't, we'll die.
10:00:29 -- (Up, down. Up, down, in the) cockpit.
10:00:33 -- (The) cockpit.
10:00:37 -- (Up, down. Saeed, up, down.)
10:00:42 -- Roll it.
10:00:55 -- Unintelligible.
10:00:59 -- (Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest.)
10:01:01 -- Unintelligible.
10:01:08 -- (Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?)
10:01:09 -- (Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.)
10:01:10 -- Unintelligible.
10:01:11 -- (Saeed.)
10:01:12 -- ... engine ...
10:01:13 -- Unintelligible.
10:01:16 -- (Cut off the oxygen.)
10:01:18 -- (Cut off the oxygen. Cut off the oxygen. Cut off the oxygen.)
10:01:34 -- Unintelligible.
10:01:37 -- Unintelligible.
10:01:41 -- (Up, down. Up, down.)
10:01:41 -- (What?)
10:01:42 -- (Up, down.)
10:01:42 -- Ahh.
10:01:53 -- Ahh.
10:01:54 -- Unintelligible.
10:01:55 -- Ahh.
10:01:59 -- Shut them off.
10:02:03 -- Shut them off.
10:02:14 -- Go.
10:02:14 -- Go.
10:02:15 -- Move.
10:02:16 -- Move.
10:02:17 -- Turn it up.
10:02:18 -- (Down, down.)
10:02:23 -- (Pull it down. Pull it down.)
10:02:25 -- Down. Push, push, push, push, push.
10:02:33 -- (Hey. Hey. Give it to me. Give it to me.)
10:02:35 -- (Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me.)
10:02:37 -- (Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me.)
10:02:40 -- Unintelligible.
10:03:02 -- (Allah is the greatest.)
10:03:03 -- (Allah is the greatest.)
10:03:04 -- (Allah is the greatest.)
10:03:06 -- (Allah is the greatest.)
10:03:06 -- (Allah is the greatest.)
10:03:07 -- No.
10:03:09 -- (Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest.)
10:03:09 -- (Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest.)

Case Closed

2006-04-09T10:26:00.000-05:00

Two interesting items from Malcolm Gladwell, author and writer for the New Yorker. On his blog he comments about his reading of "Game of Shadows" the new book on Barry Bond's steroid use. I haven't read it yet but plan on checking it out.

I also think Jose Canseco's book is probably worth a read as well. When the book came out there was the feeling that Canseco was doing it for the money and that he's a scumbag. Well, that's true, but while others may have felt that lessened the credibility of his accusations, I felt it was the opposite. In this case, you just knew it was all the truth. Imagine that, Jose Canseco was actually the "good guy" here. Funny how the profit motive which usually compromises so many people into doing the wrong thing or lying or cheating, in Canseco's case actually worked the other way around - that is when it came to ratting his friends out, not from refraining to take them in the first place.

I've also attached a link to Gladwell's recent New Yorker article, this one on why people give reasons for their behaviour or thinking. It's worth a read.

You can either click on the "Case Closed" heading above, or if that doesn't work here's the link to the article - http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/060410crbo_books

M. Gladwell: "I’ve been reading (like everyone else) “Game of Shadows,” the book about Barry Bonds and steroids and the BALCO scandal. It’s quite a remarkable feat of reporting. What striking about it is something that you might not notice unless you’ve journalist—which is the absence of obvious lawyering. If you ever write something even remotely critical of someone, the lawyers invariably go through it, and before you know it your prose is strewn with “apparently” and “allegedly,” and “according to” and so-so “denies. . .” There’s almost none of that in “Game of Shadows,” which is amazing considering the book accuses, in devastating detail, several of the biggest names in sports—Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones, among others—of being serious steroid users. The two writers—Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams—must have had really impeccable sourcing. When the book first came out, and several baseball writers predicted that Bonds’ reputation was destroyed and his chances are getting in the Hall of Fame seriously damaged, I thought they were overstating things. Now I’m not so sure. “Game of Shadows” is a death sentence for Bonds. More to the point, it’s impossible to read the book and accept that Bonds has a right either to the single season home-run record or, assuming he keeps playing, the career home run mark."

A Redneck is a Redneck

2006-04-01T23:53:00.000-06:00

Bill Cosby has sparked a lot of debate within the African-American community because he has made several comments over the years that blacks need to address certain behavior within their own culture. This is his most recent comment:

Bill Cosby tells New Orleans blacks to reject crime

By Russell McCulleySat Apr 1, 9:16 PM ET

Entertainer Bill Cosby urged New Orleans' black population on Saturday to cleanse itself of a culture of crime as it rebuilds from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina last year.

Cosby, whose criticism of some aspects of modern African-American culture has stirred controversy in recent years, told a rally headed by black leaders that the city needed to look at the "wound" it had before Katrina struck.

"It's painful, but we can't cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound," Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people in front of the city's convention center.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children," he said.

"What kind of a village is that?"

Cosby sparked heated debate in 2004, when he criticized blacks whom he said were putting a higher priority on music and fashion than on education and morality.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

So where does the "redneck" term come in? African-American writer Thomas Sowell recently wrote a book called "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" in which he attempts to address the historical antecedents on how certain behaviors were absorbed by both blacks and whites.

The book has been out for several months now and it hasn't really created that much controversey, certainly a lot less than when Bill Cosby comes out and levels a criticism or a critique.

Either way, it's interesting and certainly worth a read.

The following excerpt comes from: http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2005/04/quotthe_redneck.html

"The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it," writes Thomas Sowell in Opinion Journal, drawing on a professional lifetime of fearless research to demolish CW arguments that would blame behavioral differences between our black and white populations on either race or racism:

The people who settled in the South came from different regions of Britain than the people who settled in the North -- and they differed as radically on the other side of the Atlantic as they did here -- that is, before they had ever seen a black slave . . . American writers from both the antebellum South and the North commented on the great differences between the white people in the two regions. So did famed French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville.

Slavery also cannot explain the difference between American blacks and West Indian blacks living in the United States because the ancestors of both were enslaved. When race, racism, and slavery all fail the empirical test, what is left?

Culture is left.

Sowell's new book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals -- wherein he develops the thesis outlined in his Opinion Journal piece --goes on sale today. He continues:

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.

Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks -- not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow. Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style.

Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture -- and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with (How about that for irony!)

Do any of you history buffs out there know exactly which part of Britain gave rise to this "authentic" black culture? 'Guess we'll have to buy the book to find out.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We'll, I'll end the suspense, the "redneck" came from Scotland and Ireland, but mostly from an area between England and Scotland that was the scene of 800 years of almost constant warefare between British and Scottish clans (think of the movie Braveheart). Is it really that surprising that a culture built around almost constant warefare would produce a violence prone, live for the moment, sexulally loose, fiercely independent and an over-sensitive proud people? Not really. Watch Jerry Springer to see the remnants of that culture.

If Only ND Could Get The "Athletes"

2006-03-30T13:02:00.000-06:00

Remember how Bob Davie, and a huge amount of the so-called "experts" around the country kept saying Notre Dame can't compete because they just "don't have the athletes anymore." Of course they said the same thing while Willingham was there as well. What a total load of crap! Jeff Samardzija never caught a single touchdown before Weis showed up. Imagine that! The guy went from a nobody to All-American and possibly a first round draft choice - in one year. Wow, that's not a very long time to get "talented."

Here's the truth: Jeff Samardzija is one of the best "athletes" in the United States. All he, and a whole bunch of Notre Dame players, needed was a coach that could showcase their ability. It's a well known fact that ND players were some of the best bargains in the NFL the last several years. Because they weren't properly developed or showcased, they didn't get the recognition. That meant the NFL could keep the whole thing under thier hats, pay ND guys late round or free agent salaries for the first several years, and not have to pony up until later on down the road. Imagine how much money Boob Davie cost David Givens.

Funny what a little bit of coaching will do.

Having said that, and as impressive as Smardzija's emergence is, Maurice Stovall's "improvement" may have been even more stunning. Here was a guy that did not look very good and was going absolutely nowhere under Willingham and Bill Dietrick. He was inconsistent and he showed very average hands. He was most likely looking at being a free agent - if that. By the end of the year Stovall was destroying teams. Charlie Wies, in one year, made that young man a millionaire. Same with Samardzija, same with Brady Quinn, and same with another phenominal athlete, Tom Zibikowski.

What makes most happy about all this is that Notre Dame is once again becoming a place where these young men can live out their dreams. And that's the way it's supposed to be at Notre Dame.

Wide receiver or pitcher: Samardzija in choice spot

March 30, 2006

SPRING SPORTS BY DARYL VAN SCHOUWEN

Decisions, decisions. Jeff Samardzija is projected as the No. 1 wide receiver in the 2007 NFL Draft by Mel Kiper Jr., and he could be a high draft choice in the Major League Baseball draft in June. Maybe a first-rounder.

‘‘Some [baseball] scouts have said if football wasn't a factor, he would be a for-sure first-round pick in baseball,'' Notre Dame baseball coach Paul Mainieri said of the 6-5 junior right-hander.

Here's the likely scenario for Samardzija, who made 77 catches during an All-American season for the Irish football team last fall: Play minor-league baseball in the summer, play football at ND in the fall and decide in December whether to play pro baseball or join the NFL.

Baseball is a distinct possibility.

''He has the whole package,'' Mainieri said. ''Standing on the mound, he looks like a major leaguer -- perfect pitcher's body, slender, long arms. Then when his arm starts to work, you see something, too.''

Samardzija (2-1, 3.72), who makes his 2006 home debut Friday night when Notre Dame (13-8) plays Pittsburgh, has touched 96 mph in his last three outings. He has dropped the splitter from his repertoire, relying on a fastball, curve and changeup.

''He's consistently at 92, 93, and he fields his position like Greg Maddux,'' Mainieri said. ''He's such a great athlete. I think the sky is the limit for Jeff. He has never totally dedicated his time to baseball.''

Samardzija, 8-1 with a 2.95 ERA as a sophomore after going 5-3, 2.95 as a freshman, came to Notre Dame from Valparaiso, Ind., as an outfielder. With so much on his plate, Mainieri limited him to pitching, but Samardzija recently took 15 batting-practice swings and hit four pitches out of the park.

''The kid is just a natural,'' Mainieri said. ''The great thing about Jeff is he's the least-impressed guy with it. He is so unassuming. His teammates in baseball love him.''

Samardzija, who will pitch in a home night game April 21 against Rutgers before playing in ND's Blue-Gold football game the following Saturday afternoon, says he loves both sports. He has football coach Charlie Weis' blessing to miss nine of the 15 spring football practices going on now.

Woman of The Year

2006-03-30T00:37:00.000-06:00

Some consider Sharon Stone a hack actress. They say she's never really done any great acting job. She was in a very good movie (Casino) but her role in that was to basically be a raving pain in the ass and her critics have wondered how much "acting" actually went into the job.

Jealousy!!

STONE ADVOCATES ORAL SEX
From The Drudge Report
28/03/2006 13:50

Actress SHARON STONE is adamant teenagers should be prepared to engage in oral sex, if it saves from them the dangers of unprotected penetrative sex. The BASIC INSTINCT spends much of her time away from Hollywood working as an activist raising AIDS awareness, and she always carries condoms with her to hand out in a bid to increase safe sex levels. She explains, "I was in the store the other day and I watched a young girl trying on clothes, showing her abdomen. "Her mother was trying to talk to her about not being inappropriately luring. I said, 'Gee that would look much nicer with a camisole under.' "Her mother walked away, and I said to the girl, 'I'd like to give you a two-minute conversation about sex.'

"Young people talk to me about what to do if they're being pressed for sex? I tell them (what I believe): oral sex is a hundred times safer than vaginal or anal sex. "If you're in a situation where you cannot get out of sex, offer a blow job. I'm not embarrassed to tell them."

Weight Watching & The Simpsons

2006-03-27T15:21:00.000-06:00

I like Charlie Weis as our coach. That's saying something considering that I haven't "liked" the ND coach for over a decade.

And so did anyone see the Simpsons last weekend? They were doing a bit where the Simpsons were on one of those reality TV shows where they swap wives. Homer gets some east coast type woman and they are in bed and she says to Homer, "My husband has not satisfied me in years." And Homer says, "I feel the same way about Notre Dame Football."

Wow!!!!!

The ND football decline is now officially part of American pop culture. Obviously someone who writes for the Simpsons is a ND fan, and a frustrated one at that. My friends that like the Simpsons tell me that there have been other ND references as well, but that generally they are positive. This one hits too close to home. Yeah, it's been 18 damn years since we won a national championship. The frustration is understandable!

But now we have Charlie Weis - and we're moving the football again. It's still too early to tell exactly what we have with this guy, or how good he is, but he's off to a very good start.

Which leads me to this curious thing I catch myself doing lately. Now that we have a coach, I'd like him to stick around awhile and yet his struggles with his weight are well documented. In fact, the stomach surgery he had almost killed him, so it's not totally unusual to be concerned about his weight.

But the thing I'm doing is catching myself evaluating whether he's gaining weight or not. We haven't seen him since the bowl game until his spring football press conference last week. The first thing I did when I saw the picture above is go, "Uh oh."

Now, others have told me he looks the same, so I'm not sure, but it would be nice to not have to worry about it.

It's funny how these things go. Bob Davie could have gotten the Ebola virus and I'm not sure I'd have been able to stifle a smile, and with Charlie Weis I get antsy if he gains a pound. Ah, it's good to have a coach again!

Barry Bonds - Scumbag

2006-03-24T13:31:00.000-06:00

Barry Bonds without a doubt has to be one of the biggest jerks in sports history. He's almost as big a jerk as Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti. That is saying something. It's not just that he's pathetic because he became so jealous of steroid monkeys like Mark Maguire and Sammy Sosa that he went on an epic juice rampage; it's that he's so unrepentent about it all. His attitude is always one being persecuted by the press. There's actually something comic about it beyond the obvious sadness of it all. He simply can't understand why he can't bang the juice, bang the home runs, break the records, get all the adulation and be done with it. All these pesky questions about steroids!!!!

His lastest move is pricless. He's suing the writers and the publishers of the book which extensively covers his massive steroid regime during his home run surge over the last several years. His lawyers state: "The reason we filed the lawsuit in the simplest terms possible is to prevent the authors from promoting themselves and profiting from illegal conduct,'' Rains told the Associated Press on Thursday."

Now, if you are like me I bet you are assuming that Bonds is attacking the veracity of the allegations against him. I mean, that's the damaging part of it all, right? Bonds would want to deny that he used the steroids and therefore preserve his "good name" and the integrity of his accomplishments. That's what you'd think.

You'd be wrong.

Barry Bonds is having his attorneys sue the authors because he claims that they "illegally obtained grand jury testimony." Bonds attorney states that, "...laws prohibit people from possessing grand jury materials unless they are unsealed and said authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, both also reporters for the Chronicle, ''have made a complete farce of the criminal justice system.''

Oh, this is rich. This is beyond rich. Only Barry Bonds could come up with this.

This is like a guy who videtapes a murder screaming injustice because someone stole the videotape. Ah, gee, might the relevent issue here be THE MURDER!!!????

You can just see this whole thing going down. Bonds picks up the phone, "Hey, I want to sue those guys." Lawyer: "What for?" Bonds: "I don't like them. They are always persecuting me!" Lawyer: "Well, yes Barry, but you can't sue them because you don't like them. Is what they said untruthful? Did they lie about your massive steroid abuse?" Bonds: Silence. Lawyer: "Hello?" Bonds: "Just sue the bastards!!!" Lawyer: "Okay, let me think about it and I'll get back to you." Bonds: "Yeah, you do that."

And so now you've got Bonds basically admitting that everything in the book is true because the attorney came back and said, "Well, we might be able to get them on a technicality." A very typical weasal lawyer thing to do.

Meanwhile, Bonds sits just a few home runs shy of Babe Ruth, and then Henry Aaron.

Lastly, other obvious users like Mark Maguire, Sammy Sosa, Jason Giambi, Rafael Palmero, Gary Sheffield, and Ivan Rodriguez have been outed, but when are they going to take a look at medical marvel Roger Clemens?

Irish Jokes

2006-03-21T07:56:00.000-06:00

In honor of St. Patricks Day -

Paddy was driving down the street in a sweat because he had an important meeting and couldn't find a parking place. Looking up to heaven he said, "Lord take pity on me. If you find me a parking place I will go to Mass every Sunday for the rest of me life and give up me Irish Whiskey".

Miraculously, a parking place appeared.

Paddy looked up again and said, "Never mind, I found one."

Urban Meyer - Be Careful What You Wish For

2006-03-20T15:08:00.000-06:00

Urban Meyer and Charlie Weis will forever be linked because ND went after Meyer before Weis. The thing is that Meyer was always a risk, especially with an offense that seemed so gimmicky. In the end, Meyer chose Florida and more than few ND fans weren't exactly upset. The idea had to cross more than few minds on exactly what we might have gotten ourselves into had Meyer taken his "dream job" and come to ND.

COMMENTARY
Orlando Sentinel
Urban's tough talk doesn't translate into tough action
Mike Bianchi
SPORTS COMMENTARY

March 18, 2006

Running off at the typewriter. . . .

I wrote in this space a couple of weeks ago that Urban Meyer would soon face his "moment of truth" in living up to his self-professed reputation as a strict disciplinarian. Well, that moment arrived earlier this week, and the truth is this: Meyer is just like all the rest of college football's big-time coaches. When it comes to doling out discipline, he talks big and carries a small stick.

What was Meyer's punishment for his "Gainesville Gunslingers" -- the three current UF football players who recently were implicated for riding around town with loaded guns in their car and firing off an assault weapon into an occupied dwelling? Meyer said Tuesday he has dealt with the three players -- Kenneth Tookes, Andre Caldwell and Reggie Lewis -- internally and now is "moving on."

Here's my three guesses as to what the in-house punishment will be:

1. Monthly allowance from Tank Black trust fund cut in half.

2. One week of PlayStation restriction.

3. Assault rifles confiscated and replaced with semiautomatic Glocks.

What a bummer this must be for UF (University of Firearms) fans, who have been bragging incessantly about their tough-talking coach and his demands that players live up to a certain code of conduct. The first chance Meyer gets to publicly put the hammer down and what does he do? He privately doles out some unknown penalty.

If, in fact, Meyer has meted out significant punishment, as one UF official suggested Friday, then let's hear what it is.

Until then, it seems, the only thing more disappointing than Meyer's spread option is his stand on discipline.

Photos of America 1938-1969

2006-03-20T13:19:00.000-06:00

Circus Performers August 1949

I found this fascinating. A man named Charles Cushman bought a color camera in 1938 and started taking pictures. He was not a professional; he just took pictures during his extensive travels and then meticulously catalogued them.

He died in 1972 and bequethed all the pictures to Indiana University. His entire 15,000 photograph collection is available to see on the net. It's a remarkable slice of life seen through the eyes of a regular person.

Click on the Photos of America title above and it will bring you to the collection. Also, click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Knute Rockne Crash Site - Bazaar, Kansas

2006-03-17T11:06:00.000-06:00

My post on NDNation about my pilgrimage to the site where Knute Rockne died in a plane crash. The crash happened on March 31, 1931. Rockne, as hard is it is to believe in looking at him, was only 42 when he died.

As John Facenda, aka "The Voice of God," said in the great documentary Wake Up the Echoes, "Just when his reign over college football was complete.....he was gone."

Posted 3/17/06
"When you go on to the Rockne crash site, I hope old Easter Heatherman is still around to take you there.

Easter was a boy when he heard the plane struggling overhead. He then heard the crash and was one of the first people to arrive at the crash site.

Last year while visiting my sister in law in Overland, I made the pilgrimage to the crash site. The thing is that it is on private property and only Easter, now in his late 80s, has the key to get on the private property.

This was all explained to me at the Cottonwood Falls Historical society. They were kind enough to call Easter and ask if he could take me out there. Easter said sure.

I drove down and met him in front of his house. He is a kind man and was genuinely happy to take me out there.

As we drove he told me about the day it happened. He told me about the cold mist and fog. He talked about the engines gunning over his house, and he talked about the sickening thud the plane made as it crashed nearby.

He told me that several people were thrown clear of the wreakage. One person was beheaded. The two pilots were stuck under the wreakage. They were all dead by the time they got out there, which Easter estimated was 10 to 15 minutes after the crash.

The plane rolled and actually hit the ground upside down when it crashed. Rockne was one of the people thrown from the plane.

It was April when I was out there and there was still cold in the air. It was sunny but crisp. There isn't a tree out there, only the monument pictured on the front of the web page.

Easter pointed out that there was glass everywhere when the plane crashed. He told me it is still there and if you crouch down you can see the sun glint off some shards. I crouched down like a catcher behind the plate and cocked my head to the side. There they were like little specks of light trapped in the grass. I pulled up a shard. Yep, this happened. This is the place. The greatest coach in the history of college football died right here.

Rockne was 42 when he died. Imagine that.

If It's Broke, Fix It.

2006-03-16T09:38:00.000-06:00

One of the great ills of professional sports today is the lack of continuity. This is a very good article on the matter by Bill Simmons.

NFL cuts cut too deep
By Bill Simmons
Page 2

Editor's note: This article appears in the March 27 issue of ESPN The Magazine.

The best thing about the ESPNews ticker: You never know what to expect. Random hoops scores scroll by … and then you see something like "Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim out two games (kidney stones)." Anything is possible. So last Thursday morning maybe I should have been prepared for the following blurb: "Patriots release LB Willie McGinest."

But I wasn't.

Can you ever be prepared to learn your favorite team just dumped one of its greatest players? Sure, there's a decent chance Willie will return to the Pats with a reduced cap figure, so I'm not going to get carried away. It's the principle that bothers me. I can't figure out how the NFL -- easily the most popular and entertaining sports league around -- can drop the ball on something so simple. It needs to figure out a way to let signature guys stay with their teams.

Now, I knew the NFL's labor agreement would get done. You get strikes and lockouts only in sports with failing economic models. The NFL is not one of those. It's the most lucrative league of all time. As the owners haggled over dividing their riches, they seemed like the heads of mafia families in the 1940s arguing over drug money. Eventually, they figured it all out and kept the current structure in place, but not before wasting everyone's time and antagonizing their fans. The sight of these old rich guys emerging from last week's final meeting acting like they'd been through some sort of war seemed more than a little obscene.

My favorite part: Buffalo's Ralph Wilson voting against the agreement because he wasn't given enough time to figure out the parameters of the proposal. Can't you imagine poor old Ralph sitting at some giant conference table, trying to read a proposal that was written on a cocktail napkin, and yelling, "Hold on, I can't find my glasses" as everyone else groans? Seeing how ancient some of these owners are, it's less surprising that coming to an agreement took so long than it is that a bingo game didn't break out.

But here's what really gets me. These greedy geezers were so busy splitting up their money pie, they once again neglected to address the fact that their highest-profile guys rarely finish their careers with the team and in the town that made them famous in the first place. Jerry Rice should have been able to retire a Niner, Emmitt Smith a Cowboy. Dan Marino should have retired a Dolphin on his own terms, instead of after the team told him, "Keep playing, but not for us. We can't afford you." Brett Favre and the Packers. Isaac Bruce and Marshall Faulk and the Rams. Derrick Brooks and the Bucs. Michael Strahan and the Giants. And so on.

Every team has someone like that, only the NFL can't (or won't) figure out how to keep them where they belong. Sure, the league came up with the franchise tag, but that's for stars in their prime, not older guys. Now, moving on is simply considered part of the game. Fans root for someone, care about him and then he leaves. When New England waived Willie, the sad thing wasn't the move itself, but that we knew he would have to leave. His cap figure had become too swollen from back-loaded deals. Under the current system, your favorite players have a shelf life of eight to 12 years … then they're gone. It's almost like owning a dog.

Shouldn't this be simple to fix? The NBA created the Bird exemption in the mid-1980s, allowing teams to exceed the cap to re-sign their own players. Obviously, a 12-man roster is different from a 53-man roster, but couldn't the NFL steal a version of this rule? Let's say there's a hard cap, but every team receives a $10 million pocket independent of the cap that only can be used for players with nine-plus years of continuous service.

Why nine years? Because that is a significant amount of time to spend with one team. Both team and player should be rewarded for such loyalty. In a league in which veterans switch teams every spring as if someone stuck all 32 rosters on an iPod and pressed shuffle, couldn't we use a little built-in continuity? Even if it concerns only two or three veterans per team?

Adam Vinatieri
Adam Vinatieri just wouldn't look right in another uniform, would he? (AP Photo/Robert E. Klein)
Take the Patriots, who drafted McGinest in 1994 and signed the undrafted Adam Vinatieri in 1996. The two have six Super Bowl rings between them. Other than Tom Brady, McGinest has been the defining Patriot of the Belichick era, a gamer who always rose up when it mattered most. Vinatieri nailed three of the most famous field goals in NFL history (in the Snow Game and in Super Bowl wins against the Rams and Panthers) and probably goes down as the premier clutch kicker of all time. Take either one of them off the Pats and they aren't The Champs. Look, I wouldn't remove Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams from the Yankees, either. Some things just shouldn't happen.

Fast-forward to next September. Willie is playing for Cleveland, Vinatieri for Dallas. What's entertaining about that? What's the fun in dismantling a memorable team for no good reason? Isn't continuity the single most important thing in sports? How does a father explain to his young son that Willie won't be playing for the Pats anymore? If you're a high school sophomore who's been wearing Willie's jersey since you were 4, why would you ever care about sports as much? What about my buddy Bug, a Patriots season ticket-holder since 1992, who adopted Willie as his guy and wore No.55 to every home game?

That's what vexes me. Everyone passively accepts the "hey, it's a business" approach. But it works both ways. Signature guys shouldn't have to abandon their original teams to find market-value deals in their waning years. We want to watch guys like Willie break into the league, emerge into All-Pros, lift us to a higher place, shift into the "grizzled veteran" stage of their careers, hang on for that one final season when they're getting it done on memory and memory alone and then walk away on their own terms. We want the sob-filled press conference, we want emotional hugs with the coach, we want the owner fighting back tears and saying, "He defined what being a (fill in the team) was all about." We want the complete arc.

Right now, caring about NFL stars is like watching a movie at which you're forced to leave the theater with 15 minutes to go. It always ends with a punch to the stomach. Always. I found out about Willie from ESPNews, but poor Bug found out during a vacation in Aruba. After debating how to handle a Willieless future, The Bug decided to retire his No.55 and make another purchase. Richard Seymour is an option. So is Ben Watson. And Vince Wilfork. "Those jerseys are freaking expensive," The Bug says. "I need to find someone who's going to stay with us for a while. I don't want to have to buy another one three years from now."

And that's the worst thing about the NFL: You never know.

The Art of Failure

2006-03-14T16:16:00.000-06:00

Malcolm Gladwell
New Yorker
August 21 & 28, 2000
PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Why some people choke and others panic

There was a moment, in the third and deciding set of the 1993 Wimbledon final, when Jana Novotna seemed invincible. She was leading 4-1 and serving at 40-30, meaning that she was one point from winning the game, and just five points from the most coveted championship in tennis. She had just hit a backhand to her opponent, Steffi Graf, that skimmed the net and landed so abruptly on the far side of the court that Graf could only watch, in flat- footed frustration. The stands at Center Court were packed. The Duke and Duchess of Kent were in their customary place in the royal box. Novotna was in white, poised and confident, her blond hair held back with a headband--and then something happened. She served the ball straight into the net. She stopped and steadied herself for the second serve--the toss, the arch of the back--but this time it was worse. Her swing seemed halfhearted, all arm and no legs and torso. Double fault. On the next point, she was slow to react to a high shot by Graf, and badly missed on a forehand volley. At game point, she hit an overhead straight into the net. Instead of 5-1, it was now 4-2. Graf to serve: an easy victory, 4-3. Novotna to serve. She wasn't tossing the ball high enough. Her head was down. Her movements had slowed markedly. She double-faulted once, twice, three times. Pulled wide by a Graf forehand, Novotna inexplicably hit a low, flat shot directly at Graf, instead of a high crosscourt forehand that would have given her time to get back into position: 4-4. Did she suddenly realize how terrifyingly close she was to victory? Did she remember that she had never won a major tournament before? Did she look across the net and see Steffi Graf--Steffi Graf!--the greatest player of her generation?

On the baseline, awaiting Graf's serve, Novotna was now visibly agitated, rocking back and forth, jumping up and down. She talked to herself under her breath. Her eyes darted around the court. Graf took the game at love; Novotna, moving as if in slow motion, did not win a single point: 5-4, Graf. On the sidelines, Novotna wiped her racquet and her face with a towel, and then each finger individually. It was her turn to serve. She missed a routine volley wide, shook her head, talked to herself. She missed her first serve, made the second, then, in the resulting rally, mis-hit a backhand so badly that it sailed off her racquet as if launched into flight. Novotna was unrecognizable, not an élite tennis player but a beginner again. She was crumbling under pressure, but exactly why was as baffling to her as it was to all those looking on. Isn't pressure supposed to bring out the best in us? We try harder. We concentrate harder. We get a boost of adrenaline. We care more about how well we perform. So what was happening to her?

At championship point, Novotna hit a low, cautious, and shallow lob to Graf. Graf answered with an unreturnable overhead smash, and, mercifully, it was over. Stunned, Novotna moved to the net. Graf kissed her twice. At the awards ceremony, the Duchess of Kent handed Novotna the runner-up's trophy, a small silver plate, and whispered something in her ear, and what Novotna had done finally caught up with her. There she was, sweaty and exhausted, looming over the delicate white-haired Duchess in her pearl necklace. The Duchess reached up and pulled her head down onto her shoulder, and Novotna started to sob.

Human beings sometimes falter under pressure. Pilots crash and divers drown. Under the glare of competition, basketball players cannot find the basket and golfers cannot find the pin. When that happens, we say variously that people have "panicked" or, to use the sports colloquialism, "choked." But what do those words mean? Both are pejoratives. To choke or panic is considered to be as bad as to quit. But are all forms of failure equal? And what do the forms in which we fail say about who we are and how we think?We live in an age obsessed with success, with documenting the myriad ways by which talented people overcome challenges and obstacles. There is as much to be learned, though, from documenting the myriad ways in which talented people sometimes fail.

"Choking" sounds like a vague and all-encompassing term, yet it describes a very specific kind of failure. For example, psychologists often use a primitive video game to test motor skills. They'll sit you in front of a computer with a screen that shows four boxes in a row, and a keyboard that has four corresponding buttons in a row. One at a time, x's start to appear in the boxes on the screen, and you are told that every time this happens you are to push the key corresponding to the box. According to Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, if you're told ahead of time about the pattern in which those x's will appear, your reaction time in hitting the right key will improve dramatically. You'll play the game very carefully for a few rounds, until you've learned the sequence, and then you'll get faster and faster. Willingham calls this "explicit learning." But suppose you're not told that the x's appear in a regular sequence, and even after playing the game for a while you're not aware that there is a pattern. You'll still get faster: you'll learn the sequence unconsciously. Willingham calls that "implicit learning"--learning that takes place outside of awareness. These two learning systems are quite separate, based in different parts of the brain. Willingham says that when you are first taught something--say, how to hit a backhand or an overhead forehand--you think it through in a very deliberate, mechanical manner. But as you get better the implicit system takes over: you start to hit a backhand fluidly, without thinking. The basal ganglia, where implicit learning partially resides, are concerned with force and timing, and when that system kicks in you begin to develop touch and accuracy, the ability to hit a drop shot or place a serve at a hundred miles per hour. "This is something that is going to happen gradually," Willingham says. "You hit several thousand forehands, after a while you may still be attending to it. But not very much. In the end, you don't really notice what your hand is doing at all."

Under conditions of stress, however, the explicit system sometimes takes over. That's what it means to choke. When Jana Novotna faltered at Wimbledon, it was because she began thinking about her shots again. She lost her fluidity, her touch. She double-faulted on her serves and mis-hit her overheads, the shots that demand the greatest sensitivity in force and timing. She seemed like a different person--playing with the slow, cautious deliberation of a beginner--because, in a sense, she was a beginner again: she was relying on a learning system that she hadn't used to hit serves and overhead forehands and volleys since she was first taught tennis, as a child. The same thing has happened to Chuck Knoblauch, the New York Yankees' second baseman, who inexplicably has had trouble throwing the ball to first base. Under the stress of playing in front of forty thousand fans at Yankee Stadium, Knoblauch finds himself reverting to explicit mode, throwing like a Little Leaguer again.

Panic is something else altogether. Consider the following account of a scuba-diving accident, recounted to me by Ephimia Morphew, a human-factors specialist at nasa: "It was an open-water certification dive, Monterey Bay, California, about ten years ago. I was nineteen. I'd been diving for two weeks. This was my first time in the open ocean without the instructor. Just my buddy and I. We had to go about forty feet down, to the bottom of the ocean, and do an exercise where we took our regulators out of our mouth, picked up a spare one that we had on our vest, and practiced breathing out of the spare. My buddy did hers. Then it was my turn. I removed my regulator. I lifted up my secondary regulator. I put it in my mouth, exhaled, to clear the lines, and then I inhaled, and, to my surprise, it was water. I inhaled water. Then the hose that connected that mouthpiece to my tank, my air source, came unlatched and air from the hose came exploding into my face.

"Right away, my hand reached out for my partner's air supply, as if I was going to rip it out. It was without thought. It was a physiological response. My eyes are seeing my hand do something irresponsible. I'm fighting with myself. Don't do it. Then I searched my mind for what I could do. And nothing came to mind. All I could remember was one thing: If you can't take care of yourself, let your buddy take care of you. I let my hand fall back to my side, and I just stood there."

This is a textbook example of panic. In that moment, Morphew stopped thinking. She forgot that she had another source of air, one that worked perfectly well and that, moments before, she had taken out of her mouth. She forgot that her partner had a working air supply as well, which could easily be shared, and she forgot that grabbing her partner's regulator would imperil both of them. All she had was her most basic instinct: get air. Stress wipes out short-term memory. People with lots of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress suppresses their short- term memory they still have some residue of experience to draw on. But what did a novice like Morphew have? I searched my mind for what I could do. And nothing came to mind.

Panic also causes what psychologists call perceptual narrowing. In one study, from the early seventies, a group of subjects were asked to perform a visual acuity task while undergoing what they thought was a sixty-foot dive in a pressure chamber. At the same time, they were asked to push a button whenever they saw a small light flash on and off in their peripheral vision. The subjects in the pressure chamber had much higher heart rates than the control group, indicating that they were under stress. That stress didn't affect their accuracy at the visual-acuity task, but they were only half as good as the control group at picking up the peripheral light. "You tend to focus or obsess on one thing," Morphew says. "There's a famous airplane example, where the landing light went off, and the pilots had no way of knowing if the landing gear was down. The pilots were so focussed on that light that no one noticed the autopilot had been disengaged, and they crashed the plane." Morphew reached for her buddy's air supply because it was the only air supply she could see.

Panic, in this sense, is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.

Why does this distinction matter? In some instances, it doesn't much. If you lose a close tennis match, it's of little moment whether you choked or panicked; either way, you lost. But there are clearly cases when how failure happens is central to understanding why failure happens.

Take the plane crash in which John F. Kennedy, Jr., was killed last summer. The details of the flight are well known. On a Friday evening last July, Kennedy took off with his wife and sister-in-law for Martha's Vineyard. The night was hazy, and Kennedy flew along the Connecticut coastline, using the trail of lights below him as a guide. At Westerly, Rhode Island, he left the shoreline, heading straight out over Rhode Island Sound, and at that point, apparently disoriented by the darkness and haze, he began a series of curious maneuvers: He banked his plane to the right, farther out into the ocean, and then to the left. He climbed and descended. He sped up and slowed down. Just a few miles from his destination, Kennedy lost control of the plane, and it crashed into the ocean.

Kennedy's mistake, in technical terms, was that he failed to keep his wings level. That was critical, because when a plane banks to one side it begins to turn and its wings lose some of their vertical lift. Left unchecked, this process accelerates. The angle of the bank increases, the turn gets sharper and sharper, and the plane starts to dive toward the ground in an ever-narrowing corkscrew. Pilots call this the graveyard spiral. And why didn't Kennedy stop the dive? Because, in times of low visibility and high stress, keeping your wings level--indeed, even knowing whether you are in a graveyard spiral--turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Kennedy failed under pressure.

Had Kennedy been flying during the day or with a clear moon, he would have been fine. If you are the pilot, looking straight ahead from the cockpit, the angle of your wings will be obvious from the straight line of the horizon in front of you. But when it's dark outside the horizon disappears. There is no external measure of the plane's bank. On the ground, we know whether we are level even when it's dark, because of the motion-sensing mechanisms in the inner ear. In a spiral dive, though, the effect of the plane's G-force on the inner ear means that the pilot feels perfectly level even if his plane is not. Similarly, when you are in a jetliner that is banking at thirty degrees after takeoff, the book on your neighbor's lap does not slide into your lap, nor will a pen on the floor roll toward the "down" side of the plane. The physics of flying is such that an airplane in the midst of a turn always feels perfectly level to someone inside the cabin.

This is a difficult notion, and to understand it I went flying with William Langewiesche, the author of a superb book on flying, "Inside the Sky." We met at San Jose Airport, in the jet center where the Silicon Valley billionaires keep their private planes. Langewiesche is a rugged man in his forties, deeply tanned, and handsome in the way that pilots (at least since the movie "The Right Stuff") are supposed to be. We took off at dusk, heading out toward Monterey Bay, until we had left the lights of the coast behind and night had erased the horizon. Langewiesche let the plane bank gently to the left. He took his hands off the stick. The sky told me nothing now, so I concentrated on the instruments. The nose of the plane was dropping. The gyroscope told me that we were banking, first fifteen, then thirty, then forty-five degrees. "We're in a spiral dive," Langewiesche said calmly. Our airspeed was steadily accelerating, from a hundred and eighty to a hundred and ninety to two hundred knots. The needle on the altimeter was moving down. The plane was dropping like a stone, at three thousand feet per minute. I could hear, faintly, a slight increase in the hum of the engine, and the wind noise as we picked up speed. But if Langewiesche and I had been talking I would have caught none of that. Had the cabin been unpressurized, my ears might have popped, particularly as we went into the steep part of the dive. But beyond that? Nothing at all. In a spiral dive, the G-load--the force of inertia--is normal. As Langewiesche puts it, the plane likes to spiral-dive. The total time elapsed since we started diving was no more than six or seven seconds. Suddenly, Langewiesche straightened the wings and pulled back on the stick to get the nose of the plane up, breaking out of the dive. Only now did I feel the full force of the G-load, pushing me back in my seat. "You feel no G-load in a bank," Langewiesche said. "There's nothing more confusing for the uninitiated."

I asked Langewiesche how much longer we could have fallen. "Within five seconds, we would have exceeded the limits of the airplane," he replied, by which he meant that the force of trying to pull out of the dive would have broken the plane into pieces. I looked away from the instruments and asked Langewiesche to spiral-dive again, this time without telling me. I sat and waited. I was about to tell Langewiesche that he could start diving anytime, when, suddenly, I was thrown back in my chair. "We just lost a thousand feet," he said.

This inability to sense, experientially, what your plane is doing is what makes night flying so stressful. And this was the stress that Kennedy must have felt when he turned out across the water at Westerly, leaving the guiding lights of the Connecticut coastline behind him. A pilot who flew into Nantucket that night told the National Transportation Safety Board that when he descended over Martha's Vineyard he looked down and there was "nothing to see. There was no horizon and no light.... I thought the island might [have] suffered a power failure." Kennedy was now blind, in every sense, and he must have known the danger he was in. He had very little experience in flying strictly by instruments. Most of the time when he had flown up to the Vineyard the horizon or lights had still been visible. That strange, final sequence of maneuvers was Kennedy's frantic search for a clearing in the haze. He was trying to pick up the lights of Martha's Vineyard, to restore the lost horizon. Between the lines of the National Transportation Safety Board's report on the crash, you can almost feel his desperation:

About 2138 the target began a right turn in a southerly direction. About 30 seconds later, the target stopped its descent at 2200 feet and began a climb that lasted another 30 seconds. During this period of time, the target stopped the turn, and the airspeed decreased to about 153 KIAS. About 2139, the target leveled off at 2500 feet and flew in a southeasterly direction. About 50 seconds later, the target entered a left turn and climbed to 2600 feet. As the target continued in the left turn, it began a descent that reached a rate of about 900 fpm.

But was he choking or panicking? Here the distinction between those two states is critical. Had he choked, he would have reverted to the mode of explicit learning. His movements in the cockpit would have become markedly slower and less fluid. He would have gone back to the mechanical, self-conscious application of the lessons he had first received as a pilot--and that might have been a good thing. Kennedy needed to think, to concentrate on his instruments, to break away from the instinctive flying that served him when he had a visible horizon.

But instead, from all appearances, he panicked. At the moment when he needed to remember the lessons he had been taught about instrument flying, his mind--like Morphew's when she was underwater--must have gone blank. Instead of reviewing the instruments, he seems to have been focussed on one question: Where are the lights of Martha's Vineyard? His gyroscope and his other instruments may well have become as invisible as the peripheral lights in the underwater-panic experiments. He had fallen back on his instincts--on the way the plane felt--and in the dark, of course, instinct can tell you nothing. The N.T.S.B. report says that the last time the Piper's wings were level was seven seconds past 9:40, and the plane hit the water at about 9:41, so the critical period here was less than sixty seconds. At twenty-five seconds past the minute, the plane was tilted at an angle greater than forty-five degrees. Inside the cockpit it would have felt normal. At some point, Kennedy must have heard the rising wind outside, or the roar of the engine as it picked up speed. Again, relying on instinct, he might have pulled back on the stick, trying to raise the nose of the plane. But pulling back on the stick without first levelling the wings only makes the spiral tighter and the problem worse. It's also possible that Kennedy did nothing at all, and that he was frozen at the controls, still frantically searching for the lights of the Vineyard, when his plane hit the water. Sometimes pilots don't even try to make it out of a spiral dive. Langewiesche calls that "one G all the way down."

What happened to Kennedy that night illustrates a second major difference between panicking and choking. Panicking is conventional failure, of the sort we tacitly understand. Kennedy panicked because he didn't know enough about instrument flying. If he'd had another year in the air, he might not have panicked, and that fits with what we believe--that performance ought to improve with experience, and that pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome. But choking makes little intuitive sense. Novotna's problem wasn't lack of diligence; she was as superbly conditioned and schooled as anyone on the tennis tour. And what did experience do for her? In 1995, in the third round of the French Open, Novotna choked even more spectacularly than she had against Graf, losing to Chanda Rubin after surrendering a 5-0 lead in the third set. There seems little doubt that part of the reason for her collapse against Rubin was her collapse against Graf--that the second failure built on the first, making it possible for her to be up 5-0 in the third set and yet entertain the thought I can still lose. If panicking is conventional failure, choking is paradoxical failure.

Claude Steele, a psychologist at Stanford University, and his colleagues have done a number of experiments in recent years looking at how certain groups perform under pressure, and their findings go to the heart of what is so strange about choking. Steele and Joshua Aronson found that when they gave a group of Stanford undergraduates a standardized test and told them that it was a measure of their intellectual ability, the white students did much better than their black counterparts. But when the same test was presented simply as an abstract laboratory tool, with no relevance to ability, the scores of blacks and whites were virtually identical. Steele and Aronson attribute this disparity to what they call "stereotype threat": when black students are put into a situation where they are directly confronted with a stereotype about their group--in this case, one having to do with intelligence--the resulting pressure causes their performance to suffer.

Steele and others have found stereotype threat at work in any situation where groups are depicted in negative ways. Give a group of qualified women a math test and tell them it will measure their quantitative ability and they'll do much worse than equally skilled men will; present the same test simply as a research tool and they'll do just as well as the men. Or consider a handful of experiments conducted by one of Steele's former graduate students, Julio Garcia, a professor at Tufts University. Garcia gathered together a group of white, athletic students and had a white instructor lead them through a series of physical tests: to jump as high as they could, to do a standing broad jump, and to see how many pushups they could do in twenty seconds. The instructor then asked them to do the tests a second time, and, as you'd expect, Garcia found that the students did a little better on each of the tasks the second time around. Then Garcia ran a second group of students through the tests, this time replacing the instructor between the first and second trials with an African-American. Now the white students ceased to improve on their vertical leaps. He did the experiment again, only this time he replaced the white instructor with a black instructor who was much taller and heavier than the previous black instructor. In this trial, the white students actually jumped less high than they had the first time around. Their performance on the pushups, though, was unchanged in each of the conditions. There is no stereotype, after all, that suggests that whites can't do as many pushups as blacks. The task that was affected was the vertical leap, because of what our culture says: white men can't jump.

It doesn't come as news, of course, that black students aren't as good at test-taking as white students, or that white students aren't as good at jumping as black students. The problem is that we've always assumed that this kind of failure under pressure is panic. What is it we tell underperforming athletes and students? The same thing we tell novice pilots or scuba divers: to work harder, to buckle down, to take the tests of their ability more seriously. But Steele says that when you look at the way black or female students perform under stereotype threat you don't see the wild guessing of a panicked test taker. "What you tend to see is carefulness and second-guessing," he explains. "When you go and interview them, you have the sense that when they are in the stereotype-threat condition they say to themselves, 'Look, I'm going to be careful here. I'm not going to mess things up.' Then, after having decided to take that strategy, they calm down and go through the test. But that's not the way to succeed on a standardized test. The more you do that, the more you will get away from the intuitions that help you, the quick processing. They think they did well, and they are trying to do well. But they are not." This is choking, not panicking. Garcia's athletes and Steele's students are like Novotna, not Kennedy. They failed because they were good at what they did: only those who care about how well they perform ever feel the pressure of stereotype threat. The usual prescription for failure--to work harder and take the test more seriously--would only make their problems worse.

That is a hard lesson to grasp, but harder still is the fact that choking requires us to concern ourselves less with the performer and more with the situation in which the performance occurs. Novotna herself could do nothing to prevent her collapse against Graf. The only thing that could have saved her is if--at that critical moment in the third set--the television cameras had been turned off, the Duke and Duchess had gone home, and the spectators had been told to wait outside. In sports, of course, you can't do that. Choking is a central part of the drama of athletic competition, because the spectators have to be there--and the ability to overcome the pressure of the spectators is part of what it means to be a champion. But the same ruthless inflexibility need not govern the rest of our lives. We have to learn that sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one.

Through the first three rounds of the 1996 Masters golf tournament, Greg Norman held a seemingly insurmountable lead over his nearest rival, the Englishman Nick Faldo. He was the best player in the world. His nickname was the Shark. He didn't saunter down the fairways; he stalked the course, blond and broad-shouldered, his caddy behind him, struggling to keep up. But then came the ninth hole on the tournament's final day. Norman was paired with Faldo, and the two hit their first shots well. They were now facing the green. In front of the pin, there was a steep slope, so that any ball hit short would come rolling back down the hill into oblivion. Faldo shot first, and the ball landed safely long, well past the cup.

Norman was next. He stood over the ball. "The one thing you guard against here is short," the announcer said, stating the obvious. Norman swung and then froze, his club in midair, following the ball in flight. It was short. Norman watched, stone-faced, as the ball rolled thirty yards back down the hill, and with that error something inside of him broke.

At the tenth hole, he hooked the ball to the left, hit his third shot well past the cup, and missed a makable putt. At eleven, Norman had a three-and-a-half-foot putt for par--the kind he had been making all week. He shook out his hands and legs before grasping the club, trying to relax. He missed: his third straight bogey. At twelve, Norman hit the ball straight into the water. At thirteen, he hit it into a patch of pine needles. At sixteen, his movements were so mechanical and out of synch that, when he swung, his hips spun out ahead of his body and the ball sailed into another pond. At that, he took his club and made a frustrated scythelike motion through the grass, because what had been obvious for twenty minutes was now official: he had fumbled away the chance of a lifetime.

Faldo had begun the day six strokes behind Norman. By the time the two started their slow walk to the eighteenth hole, through the throng of spectators, Faldo had a four- stroke lead. But he took those final steps quietly, giving only the smallest of nods, keeping his head low. He understood what had happened on the greens and fairways that day. And he was bound by the particular etiquette of choking, the understanding that what he had earned was something less than a victory and what Norman had suffered was something less than a defeat.

When it was all over, Faldo wrapped his arms around Norman. "I don't know what to say--I just want to give you a hug," he whispered, and then he said the only thing you can say to a choker: "I feel horrible about what happened. I'm so sorry." With that, the two men began to cry.

How "Movements" come together

2006-03-14T16:14:00.000-06:00

I think it's best to probably get some of the Malcolm Gladwell articles out there. They are well worth reading.

The Group Think
December 2, 2002
THE CRITICS

What does 'Saturday Night Live'
have in common with German philosophy?

1.
Lorne Michaels, the creator of "Saturday Night Live," was married to one of the show's writers, Rosie Shuster. One day when the show was still young, an assistant named Paula Davis went to Shuster's apartment in New York and found Dan Aykroyd getting out of her bed--which was puzzling, not just because Shuster was married to Michaels but because Aykroyd was supposedly seeing another member of the original "S.N.L." cast, Laraine Newman. Aykroyd and Gilda Radner had also been an item, back when the two of them worked for the Second City comedy troupe in Toronto, although by the time they got to New York they were just friends, in the way that everyone was friends with Radner. Second City was also where Aykroyd met John Belushi, because Belushi, who was a product of the Second City troupe in Chicago, came to Toronto to recruit for the "National Lampoon Radio Hour," which he starred in along with Radner and Bill Murray (who were also an item for a while). The writer Michael O'Donoghue (who famously voiced his aversion to the appearance of the Muppets on "S.N.L." by saying, "I don't write for felt") also came from The National Lampoon, as did another of the original writers, Anne Beatts (who was, in the impeccably ingrown logic of "S.N.L.," living with O'Donoghue). Chevy Chase came from a National Lampoon spinoff called "Lemmings," which also starred Belushi, doing his legendary Joe Cocker impersonation. Lorne Michaels hired Belushi after Radner, among others, insisted on it, and he hired Newman because he had worked with her on a Lily Tomlin special, and he hired Aykroyd because Michaels was also from Canada and knew him from the comedy scene there. When Aykroyd got the word, he came down from Toronto on his Harley.

In the early days of "S.N.L.," as Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller tell us in "Live from New York" (Little, Brown; $25.95), everyone knew everyone and everyone was always in everyone else's business, and that fact goes a long way toward explaining the extraordinary chemistry among the show's cast. Belushi would stay overnight at people's apartments, and he was notorious for getting hungry in the middle of the night and leaving spaghetti-sauce imprints all over the kitchen, or setting fires by falling asleep with a lit joint. Radner would go to Jane Curtin's house and sit and watch Curtin and her husband, as if they were some strange species of mammal, and say things like "Oh, now you are going to turn the TV on together. How will you decide what to watch?" Newman would hang out at Radner's house, and Radner would be eating a gallon of ice cream and Newman would be snorting heroin. Then Radner would go to the bathroom to make herself vomit, and say, "I'm so full, I can't hear." And they would laugh. "There we were," Newman recalls, "practicing our illnesses together."

The place where they all really lived, though, was the "S.N.L." office, on the seventeenth floor of NBC headquarters, at Rockefeller Center. The staff turned it into a giant dormitory, installing bunk beds and fooling around in the dressing rooms and staying up all night. Monday night was the first meeting, where ideas were pitched. On Tuesday, the writing started after dinner and continued straight through the night. The first read-through took place on Wednesday at three in the afternoon. And then came blocking and rehearsals and revisions. "It was emotional," the writer Alan Zweibel tells Shales and Miller. "We were a colony. I don't mean this in a bad way, but we were Guyana on the seventeenth floor. We didn't go out. We stayed there. It was a stalag of some sort." Rosie Shuster remembers waking up at the office and then going outside with Aykroyd, to "walk each other like dogs around 30 Rock just to get a little fresh air." On Saturdays, after the taping was finished, the cast would head downtown to a storefront that Belushi and Aykroyd had rented and dubbed the Blues Bar. It was a cheerless dive, with rats and crumbling walls and peeling paint and the filthiest toilets in all of New York. But did anyone care? "It was the end of the week and, well, you were psyched," Shuster recalls. "It was like you were buzzing, you'd get turbocharged from the intense effort of it, and then there's like adrenal burnout later. I remember sleeping at the Blues Bar, you know, as the light broke." Sometimes it went even later. "I remember rolling down the armor at the Blues Bar and closing the building at eleven o'clock Sunday morning--you know, when it was at its height--and saying good morning to the cops and firemen,"Aykroyd said. "S.N.L." was a television show, but it was also an adult fraternity house, united by bonds of drugs and sex and long hours and emotion and affection that went back years. "The only entrée to that boys club was basically by fucking somebody in the club," Anne Beatts tells Shales and Miller. "Which wasn't the reason you were fucking them necessarily. I mean, you didn't go "Oh, I want to get into this, I think I'll have to have sex with this person.' It was just that if you were drawn to funny people who were doing interesting things, then the only real way to get to do those things yourself was to make that connection."

2.

We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it works, whether it's television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book "The Sociology of Philosophies," Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves:the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses. Freud may have been the founder of psychoanalysis, but it really began to take shape in 1902, when Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler would gather in Freud's waiting room on Wednesdays, to eat strudel and talk about the unconscious. The neo-Confucian movement of the Sung dynasty in China revolved around the brothers Ch'eng Hao and Ch'eng I, their teacher Chou Tun-i, their father's cousin Chang Tsai, and, of course, their neighbor Shao Yung. Pissarro and Degas enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts at the same time, then Pissarro met Monet and, later, Cézanne at the Académie Suisse, Manet met Degas at the Louvre, Monet befriended Renoir at Charles Gleyre's studio, and Renoir, in turn, met Pissarro and Cézanne and soon enough everyone was hanging out at the Café Guerbois on the Rue des Batignolles. Collins's point is not that innovation attracts groups but that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction--conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity, and the look in your listener's eye that tells you you're onto something. German Idealism, he notes, centered on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Why? Because they all lived together in the same house. "Fichte takes the early lead," Collins writes,

inspiring the others on a visit while they are young students at Tübingen in the 1790s, then turning Jena into a center for the philosophical movement to which a stream of the soon-to-be-eminent congregate; then on to Dresden in the heady years 1799-1800 to live with the Romantic circle of the Schlegel brothers (where August Schlegel's wife, Caroline, has an affair with Schelling, followed later by a scandalous divorce and remarriage). Fichte moves on to Berlin, allying with Schleiermacher (also of the Romantic circle) and with Humboldt to establish the new-style university; here Hegel eventually comes and founds his school, and Schopenhauer lectures fruitlessly in competition.

There is a wonderful illustration of this social dimension of innovation in Jenny Uglow's new book, "The Lunar Men" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), which is the story of a remarkable group of friends in Birmingham in the mid-eighteenth century. Their leader was Erasmus Darwin, a physician, inventor, and scientist, who began thinking about evolution a full fifty years before his grandson Charles. Darwin met, through his medical practice, an industrialist named Mathew Boulton and, later, his partner James Watt, the steam-engine pioneer. They, in turn, got to know Josiah Wedgwood, he of the famous pottery, and Joseph Priestley, the preacher who isolated oxygen and became known as one of history's great chemists, and the industrialist Samuel Galton (whose son married Darwin's daughter and produced the legendary nineteenth-century polymath Francis Galton), and the innovative glass-and-chemicals entrepreneur James Keir, and on and on. They called themselves the Lunar Society because they arranged to meet at each full moon, when they would get together in the early afternoon to eat, piling the table high, Uglow tells us, with wine and "fish and capons, Cheddar and Stilton, pies and syllabubs." Their children played underfoot. Their wives chatted in the other room, and the Lunar men talked well into the night, clearing the table to make room for their models and plans and instruments. "They developed their own cryptic, playful language and Darwin, in particular, liked to phrase things as puzzles--like the charades and poetic word games people used to play," Uglow writes. "Even though they were down-to-earth champions of reason, a part of the delight was to feel they were unlocking esoteric secrets, exploring transmutations like alchemists of old."

When they were not meeting, they were writing to each other with words of encouragement or advice or excitement. This was truly--in a phrase that is invariably and unthinkingly used in the pejorative--a mutual-admiration society. "Their inquiries ranged over the whole spectrum, from astronomy and optics to fossils and ferns," Uglow tells us, and she goes on:

One person's passion--be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks--fired all the others. There was no neat separation of subjects. Letters between [William] Small and Watt were a kaleidoscope of invention and ideas, touching on steam-engines and cylinders; cobalt as a semi-metal; how to boil down copal, the resin of tropical trees, for varnish; lenses and clocks and colours for enamels; alkali and canals; acids and vapours--as well as the boil on Watt's nose.

What were they doing? Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it "philosophical laughing," which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there's more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.

Uglow tells us, for instance, that the Lunar men were active in the campaign against slavery. Wedgwood, Watt, and Darwin pushed for the building of canals, to improve transportation. Priestley came up with soda water and the rubber eraser, and James Keir was the man who figured out how to mass-produce soap, eventually building a twenty-acre soapworks in Tipton that produced a million pounds of soap a year. Here, surely, are all the hallmarks of group distortion. Somebody comes up with an ambitious plan for canals, and someone else tries to top that by building a really big soap factory, and in that feverish atmosphere someone else decides to top them all with the idea that what they should really be doing is fighting slavery.

Uglow's book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two --the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity--you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. You get Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and a revolution in Western philosophy. You get Darwin, Watt, Wedgwood, and Priestley, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. And sometimes, on a more modest level, you get a bunch of people goofing around and bringing a new kind of comedy to network television.

3.

One of "S.N.L."'s forerunners was a comedy troupe based in San Francisco called the Committee. The Committee's heyday was in the nineteen-sixties, and its humor had the distinctive political bite of that period. In one of the group's memorable sketches, the actor Larry Hankin played a condemned prisoner being led to the electric chair by a warden, a priest, and a prison guard. Hankin was strapped in and the switch was thrown--and nothing happened. Hankin started to become abusive, and the three men huddled briefly together. Then, as Tony Hendra recounts, in "Going Too Far," his history of "boomer humor":

They confer and throw the switch again. Still nothing. Hankin starts cackling with glee, doubly abusive. They throw it yet again. Nothing yet again. Hankin then demands to be set free--he can't be executed more than once, they're a bunch of assholes, double jeopardy, nyah-nyah, etc., etc. Totally desperate, the three confer once more, check that they're alone in the cell, and kick Hankin to death.

Is that sketch funny? Some people thought so. When the Committee performed it at a benefit at the Vacaville prison, in California, the inmates laughed so hard they rioted. But others didn't, and even today it's clear that this humor is funny only to those who can appreciate the particular social and political sensibility of the Committee. We call new cultural or intellectual movements "circles" for a reason: the circle is a closed loop. You are either inside or outside. In "Live from New York," Lorne Michaels describes going to the White House to tape President Ford saying, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night," the "S.N.L." intro: "We'd done two or three takes, and to relax him, I said to him--my sense of humor at the time--"Mr. President, if this works out, who knows where it will lead?' Which was completely lost on him." In another comic era, the fact that Ford did not laugh would be evidence of the joke's failure. But when Michaels says the joke "was completely lost on him" it isn't a disclaimer--it's the punch line. He said what he said because he knew Ford would not get it. As the writers of "Saturday Night Live" worked on sketches deep into the night, they were sustained by something like what sustained the Lunar men and the idealists in Tübingen--the feeling that they all spoke a private language.

To those on the inside, of course, nothing is funnier than an inside joke. But the real significance of inside jokes is what they mean for those who aren't on the inside. Laughing at a joke creates an incentive to join the joke-teller. But not laughing--not getting the joke--creates an even greater incentive. We all want to know what we're missing, and this is one of the ways that revolutions spread from the small groups that spawn them.

"One of Michaels's rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home," Shales and Miller write. "The collective approach of the show's creators could be seen as a kind of arrogance, a stance of defiance that said in effect, "We think this is funny, and if you don't, you're wrong.' . . . To viewers raised on TV that was forever cajoling, importuning, and talking down to them, the blunt and gutsy approach was refreshing, a virtual reinvention of the medium."

The successful inside joke, however, can never last. In "A Great Silly Grin" (Public Affairs; $27.50), a history of nineteen-sixties British satire, Humphrey Carpenter relates a routine done at the comedy club the Establishment early in the decade. The sketch was about the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed in the war, and the speaker was supposed to be the Cathedral's architect, Sir Basil Spence:

First of all, of course, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the German people for making this whole project possible in the first place. Second, we owe a debt of gratitude to the people of Coventry itself, who when asked to choose between having a cathedral and having hospitals, schools and houses, plumped immediately (I'm glad to say) for the cathedral, recognizing, I think, the need of any community to have a place where the whole community can gather together and pray for such things as hospitals, schools and houses.

When that bit was first performed, many Englishmen would have found it offensive. Now, of course, hardly anyone would. Mocking British establishment pieties is no longer an act of rebellion. It is the norm. Successful revolutions contain the seeds of their demise: they attract so many followers, eager to be in on the joke as well, that the circle breaks down. The inside becomes indistinguishable from the outside. The allure of exclusivity is gone.

At the same time, the special bonds that created the circle cannot last forever. Sooner or later, the people who slept together in every combination start to pair off. Those doing drugs together sober up (or die). Everyone starts going to bed at eleven o'clock, and bit by bit the intimacy that fuels innovation slips away. "I was involved with Gilda, yeah. I was in love with her," Aykroyd tells Shales and Miller."We were friends, lovers, then friends again," and in a way that's the simplest and best explanation for the genius of the original "S.N.L." Today's cast is not less talented. It is simply more professional. "I think some people in the cast have fun crushes on other people, but nothing serious," Cheri Oteri, a cast member from the late nineteen-nineties, tells Shales and Miller, in what might well serve as the show's creative epitaph. "I guess we're kind of boring--no romances, no drugs. I had an audition once with somebody who used to work here. He's very, very big in the business now. And as soon as I went in for the audition, he went, "Hey, you guys still doing coke over at SNL?' Because back when he was here, they were doing it. What are we doing, for crying out loud? Oh yeah. Thinking up characters."

How You'll Know Me

2006-03-14T16:00:00.000-06:00

Overheard a funny line. I think it's from a country song -
"If the phone don't ring, you'll know it's me."

This is a good one as well -
“A man who tries to carry a cat home by its tail will learn a lesson that can be learned in no other way.” Mark Twain

Stereotyping

2006-03-14T15:27:00.000-06:00

August 26, 2005
Chicago Sun-Times
BY MIKE MULLIGAN STAFF REPORTER

When a group of reporters looking for a feel-good story about advancements in race relations approached Jeff Blake at the Super Bowl in January, they got a reaction they weren't expecting. Blake, then a backup with the Philadelphia Eagles, wasn't nearly as impressed by the fact that half the quarterbacks on the Super Bowl teams were black -- Eagles starter Donovan McNabb, New England Patriots reserve Rohan Davey and himself. He was disturbed by the fact that only 17 of 96 quarterbacks in the league last season were black.

Blake, now the Bears' third-string quarterback, said he has seen the numbers increase since he came into the league 14 years ago, especially among starters, but he believes the percentage of black quarterbacks -- and black coaches, for that matter -- isn't nearly where it needs to be in reflecting the racial breakdown of the league.

What's interesting about Blake's viewpoint is that he doesn't believe racism is behind the numbers discrepancy. He says the problem is stereotyping, and it's a problem that affects white players as well as black ones.

"It's not about a black or white thing,'' he said. "It's about stereotypes. I'm sure there are white running backs that can come out here and be running backs. White guys that can be receivers or defensive backs. They are a minority in those positions [in the NFL].''

Blake said his life experience growing up in Austin, Texas, and playing high school football against all-white teams has taught him that players of both races are capable of playing at a high level at every position. And he believes certain positions being filled by certain races is reflective of decisions that are influenced by stereotypes and made by coaches, scouts and maybe even the players themselves.

"If you look at the teams in Austin where I am from, the majority of teams are all white,'' Blake said. "Look at West Lake High School, where Drew Brees and all those cats went. Their whole team is white. They probably have one black guy on the whole team. That is a big-time football school in Texas, and it has always been that way.
"I know some white boys that are fast, and they can play. I've seen some white boys play basketball. I've seen white boys that can run track. Do you see them in the NFL?''

Talking about race issues can be a minefield on which a single misstep makes the most socially conscious observer sound like Al Campanis or Jimmy the Greek. Blake, for one, is convinced that heredity and genetics are less important than opportunity.
He said he doesn't know enough about basketball to discuss the fact that the only white players to make the All-Star Game last season were foreign-born. He doesn't know enough about baseball to discuss how White Sox outfielder Scott Podsednik, who is white, leads the major leagues in stolen bases.

Really Fast Guys

2006-03-14T15:13:00.000-06:00

Far too often there is a stereotype that black athletes are better/faster than white athletes. It's just that, a stereotype.

Here's a nice article on Jeremy Wariner, Olympic gold medal winner in the 400 meters in the Athens olympics. The 400 was Micheal Johnson's event. Johnson was, of course, one the fastest humans ever alive. What do Wariner and Johnson have in common? They both had the same coach. Coincidence?

Wariner Breaking Racial Stereotypes

Baylor athlete looking for gold in today's 400

Aug. 22, 2004

By BOB BAUM
AP Sports Writer

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Jeremy Wariner is fast - and white.

If the 20-year-old Baylor University junior wins the 400-meter gold as expected Monday night, he would be the first white American man to win a sprint medal since Mike Larabee's 400 gold in 1964.

All of which means nothing to Wariner, who has no interest perpetuating the idea that he is some oddity in a realm dominated by black athletes.

"Your ability is what makes you - not what race, ethnicity, gender, whatever," Wariner said. "It's your ability and how you use it."

White runners from other countries have won Olympic medals. Soviet Valery Borzov was a medalist in 1968 and 1972. And Wariner pointed out Kostas Kenteris of Greece, the 200-meter champion in Sydney and world champion a year later. Kenteris, however, withdrew from the Athens Games amid widespread doping speculation.

On Saturday night, Yuliya Nesterenko of Belarus became the first white athlete to win the women's 100 since Lyudmila Kondratyeva of the Soviet Union in 1980, an Olympics the United States boycotted. However, such great white sprinters as Heike Dreschler of Germany and Irina Privalova of Russia have medaled in recent Olympics.

White American Kevin Little won the world indoor 200-meter title in 1997, igniting the same comments about race that Wariner's success has generated.

But for years, the 100, 200 and 400 have been dominated by runners of African descent. No white sprinter has ever run under 10 seconds in the 100; only two of the 30 Olympic sprint gold medals have been won by white athletes since the boycott of 1980.

The lack of white sprinters in America has nothing to do with genetics, said Wariner's coach, Clyde Hart, who also coached Michael Johnson at Baylor.

"Everybody seems to think there is a genetic superiority," Hart said. "I'm just saying that in my opinion that's not true. The kids just aren't out there competing. I think a lot of white youngsters are discouraged. Somebody is telling them it's a black sport. It's not. It's a sport for anybody - black, white, red, Chinese."

Otis Harris, Wariner's U.S. teammate and a medal threat in the 400, believes diversity is a good thing for all sprinters.

"It's definitely a good thing when you start to break down stereotypes on the African-American side, on the white side, or any side," said Harris, who is black. "When you break down stereotypes, it's the right thing to do."

Since many black athletes come out of difficult economic situations, Hart said, they see sports as a way out - a way to succeed when other avenues are not open to them.

"A lot of the white athletes are privileged," he said. "They have their automobiles. They don't need to be trying to get a scholarship or making an international team to see the world."

Wariner, who grew up in Grand Prairie, Texas, has no interest in leading a crusade for racial equality in sprints. He believes any athlete with natural talent and a will to get better can succeed, with the right coaching.

"Coach Hart knows what he's doing," Wariner said. "He taught Michael Johnson everything he knows. I'm getting the same treatment he did, so that helps a lot right there."

There are at least three other top white quarter-milers in the United States. Andrew Rock, who won three NCAA Division III titles at Wisconsin-LaCrosse, is in the 1,600-meter relay pool in Athens. The University of Minnesota produced two top 400-meter runners - Mitch Potter and Andrew Steele.

"The year before last, I ran in the NCAAs and two white guys from Minnesota beat me," Harris said. "Color, I have found, does not matter. When you line up, everybody is a threat."

Wariner expects to add the 200 to his repertoire in the coming years. Meanwhile, Hart hopes the young runner inspires every aspiring athlete to work hard to achieve success, regardless of race.

"Jeremy certainly is not a freak of nature," Hart said. "He's just a kid who decided that his avenue of interest was going to be track and field.

"Jeremy is doing it for the pure love of track and field."

The Great Athlete

2006-03-14T14:58:00.000-06:00

This is a fantastic article by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell.

May 19, 1997
DEPT. OF DISPUTATION
Why blacks are like boys and whites are like girls.
1.
The education of any athlete begins, in part, with an education in the racial taxonomy of his chosen sport-in the subtle, unwritten rules about what whites are supposed to be good at and what blacks are supposed to be good at. In football, whites play quarterback and blacks play running back; in baseball whites pitch and blacks play the outfield. I grew up in Canada, where my brother Geoffrey and I ran high-school track, and in Canada the rule of running was that anything under the quarter-mile belonged to the West Indians. This didn't mean that white people didn't run the sprints. But the expectation was that they would never win, and, sure enough, they rarely did. There was just a handful of West Indian immigrants in Ontario at that point-clustered in and around Toronto-but they owned Canadian sprinting, setting up under the stands at every major championship, cranking up the reggae on their boom boxes, and then humiliating everyone else on the track. My brother and I weren't from Toronto, so we weren't part of that scene. But our West Indian heritage meant that we got to share in the swagger. Geoffrey was a magnificent runner, with powerful legs and a barrel chest, and when he was warming up he used to do that exaggerated, slow-motion jog that the white guys would try to do and never quite pull off. I was a miler, which was a little outside the West Indian range. But, the way I figured it, the rules meant that no one should ever outkick me over the final two hundred metres of any race. And in the golden summer of my fourteenth year, when my running career prematurely peaked, no one ever did.

When I started running, there was a quarter-miler just a few years older than I was by the name of Arnold Stotz. He was a bulldog of a runner, hugely talented, and each year that he moved through the sprinting ranks he invariably broke the existing four-hundred-metre record in his age class. Stotz was white, though, and every time I saw the results of a big track meet I'd keep an eye out for his name, because I was convinced that he could not keep winning. It was as if I saw his whiteness as a degenerative disease, which would eventually claim and cripple him. I never asked him whether he felt the same anxiety, but I can't imagine that he didn't. There was only so long that anyone could defy the rules. One day, at the provincial championships, I looked up at the results board and Stotz was gone.

Talking openly about the racial dimension of sports in this way, of course, is considered unseemly. It's all right to say that blacks dominate sports because they lack opportunities elsewhere. That's the "Hoop Dreams" line, which says whites are allowed to acknowledge black athletic success as long as they feel guilty about it. What you're not supposed to say is what we were saying in my track days-that we were better because we were black, because of something intrinsic to being black. Nobody said anything like that publicly last month when Tiger Woods won the Masters or when, a week later, African men claimed thirteen out of the top twenty places in the Boston Marathon. Nor is it likely to come up this month, when African-Americans will make up eighty per cent of the players on the floor for the N.B.A. playoffs. When the popular television sports commentator Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder did break this taboo, in 1988- infamously ruminating on the size and significance of black thighs-one prominent N.A.A.C.P. official said that his remarks "could set race relations back a hundred years." The assumption is that the whole project of trying to get us to treat each other the same will be undermined if we don't all agree that under the skin we actually are the same.

The point of this, presumably, is to put our discussion of sports on a par with legal notions of racial equality, which would be a fine idea except that civil-rights law governs matters like housing and employment and the sports taboo covers matters like what can be said about someone's jump shot. In his much heralded new book "Darwin's Athletes," the University of Texas scholar John Hoberman tries to argue that these two things are the same, that it's impossible to speak of black physical superiority without implying intellectual inferiority. But it isn't long before the argument starts to get ridiculous. "The spectacle of black athleticism," he writes, inevitably turns into "a highly public image of black retardation." Oh, really? What, exactly, about Tiger Woods's victory in the Masters resembled "a highly public image of black retardation"? Today's black athletes are multimillion- dollar corporate pitchmen, with talk shows and sneaker deals and publicity machines and almost daily media opportunities to share their thoughts with the world, and it's very hard to see how all this contrives to make them look stupid. Hoberman spends a lot of time trying to inflate the significance of sports, arguing that how we talk about events on the baseball diamond or the track has grave consequences for how we talk about race in general. Here he is, for example, on Jackie Robinson: The sheer volume of sentimental and intellectual energy that has been invested in the mythic saga of Jackie Robinson has discouraged further thinking about what his career did and did not accomplish. . . . Black America has paid a high and largely unacknowledged price for the extraordinary prominence given the black athlete rather than other black men of action (such as military pilots and astronauts), who represent modern aptitudes in ways that athletes cannot.

Please. Black America has paid a high and largely unacknowledged price for a long list of things, and having great athletes is far from the top of the list. Sometimes a baseball player is just a baseball player, and sometimes an observation about racial difference is just an observation about racial difference. Few object when medical scientists talk about the significant epidemiological differences between blacks and whites-the fact that blacks have a higher incidence of hypertension than whites and twice as many black males die of diabetes and prostate cancer as white males, that breast tumors appear to grow faster in black women than in white women, that black girls show signs of puberty sooner than white girls. So why aren't we allowed to say that there might be athletically significant differences between blacks and whites?

According to the medical evidence, African-Americans seem to have, on the average, greater bone mass than do white Americans-a difference that suggests greater muscle mass. Black men have slightly higher circulating levels of testosterone and human-growth hormone than their white counterparts, and blacks over all tend to have proportionally slimmer hips, wider shoulders, and longer legs. In one study, the Swedish physiologist Bengt Saltin compared a group of Kenyan distance runners with a group of Swedish distance runners and found interesting differences in muscle composition: Saltin reported that the Africans appeared to have more blood-carrying capillaries and more mitochondria (the body's cellular power plant) in the fibres of their quadriceps. Another study found that, while black South African distance runners ran at the same speed as white South African runners, they were able to use more oxygen- eighty-nine per cent versus eighty-one per cent-over extended periods: somehow, they were able to exert themselves more. Such evidence suggested that there were physical differences in black athletes which have a bearing on activities like running and jumping, which should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who follows competitive sports.

To use track as an example-since track is probably the purest measure of athletic ability-Africans recorded fifteen out of the twenty fastest times last year in the men's ten-thousand- metre event. In the five thousand metres, eighteen out of the twenty fastest times were recorded by Africans. In the fifteen hundred metres, thirteen out of the twenty fastest times were African, and in the sprints, in the men's hundred metres, you have to go all the way down to the twenty-third place in the world rankings-to Geir Moen, of Norway-before you find a white face. There is a point at which it becomes foolish to deny the fact of black athletic prowess, and even more foolish to banish speculation on the topic. Clearly, something is going on. The question is what.

2.
If we are to decide what to make of the differences between blacks and whites, we first have to decide what to make of the word "difference," which can mean any number of things. A useful case study is to compare the ability of men and women in math. If you give a large, representative sample of male and female students a standardized math test, their mean scores will come out pretty much the same. But if you look at the margins, at the very best and the very worst students, sharp differences emerge. In the math portion of an achievement test conducted by Project Talent-a nationwide survey of fifteen-year-olds-there were 1.3 boys for every girl in the top ten per cent, 1.5 boys for every girl in the top five per cent, and seven boys for every girl in the top one per cent. In the fifty-six-year history of the Putnam Mathematical Competition, which has been described as the Olympics of college math, all but one of the winners have been male. Conversely, if you look at people with the very lowest math ability, you'll find more boys than girls there, too. In other words, although the average math ability of boys and girls is the same, the distribution isn't: there are more males than females at the bottom of the pile, more males than females at the top of the pile, and fewer males than females in the middle. Statisticians refer to this as a difference in variability.

This pattern, as it turns out, is repeated in almost every conceivable area of gender difference. Boys are more variable than girls on the College Board entrance exam and in routine elementary-school spelling tests. Male mortality patterns are more variable than female patterns; that is, many more men die in early and middle age than women, who tend to die in more of a concentrated clump toward the end of life. The problem is that variability differences are regularly confused with average differences. If men had higher average math scores than women, you could say they were better at the subject. But because they are only more variable the word "better" seems inappropriate.

The same holds true for differences between the races. A racist stereotype is the assertion of average difference-it's the claim that the typical white is superior to the typical black. It allows a white man to assume that the black man he passes on the street is stupider than he is. By contrast, if what racists believed was that black intelligence was simply more variable than white intelligence, then it would be impossible for them to construct a stereotype about black intelligence at all. They wouldn't be able to generalize. If they wanted to believe that there were a lot of blacks dumber than whites, they would also have to believe that there were a lot of blacks smarter than they were. This distinction is critical to understanding the relation between race and athletic performance. What are we seeing when we remark black domination of élite sporting events-an average difference between the races or merely a difference in variability?

This question has been explored by geneticists and physical anthropologists, and some of the most notable work has been conducted over the past few years by Kenneth Kidd, at Yale. Kidd and his colleagues have been taking DNA samples from two African Pygmy tribes in Zaire and the Central African Republic and comparing them with DNA samples taken from populations all over the world. What they have been looking for is variants-subtle differences between the DNA of one person and another-and what they have found is fascinating. "I would say, without a doubt, that in almost any single African population-a tribe or however you want to define it-there is more genetic variation than in all the rest of the world put together," Kidd told me. In a sample of fifty Pygmies, for example, you might find nine variants in one stretch of DNA. In a sample of hundreds of people from around the rest of the world, you might find only a total of six variants in that same stretch of DNA-and probably every one of those six variants would also be found in the Pygmies. If everyone in the world was wiped out except Africans, in other words, almost all the human genetic diversity would be preserved.

The likelihood is that these results reflect Africa's status as the homeland of Homo sapiens: since every human population outside Africa is essentially a subset of the original African population, it makes sense that everyone in such a population would be a genetic subset of Africans, too. So you can expect groups of Africans to be more variable in respect to almost anything that has a genetic component. If, for example, your genes control how you react to aspirin, you'd expect to see more Africans than whites for whom one aspirin stops a bad headache, more for whom no amount of aspirin works, more who are allergic to aspirin, and more who need to take, say, four aspirin at a time to get any benefit-but far fewer Africans for whom the standard two-aspirin dose would work well. And to the extent that running is influenced by genetic factors you would expect to see more really fast blacks-and more really slow blacks-than whites but far fewer Africans of merely average speed. Blacks are like boys. Whites are like girls.

There is nothing particularly scary about this fact, and certainly nothing to warrant the kind of gag order on talk of racial differences which is now in place. What it means is that comparing élite athletes of different races tells you very little about the races themselves. A few years ago, for example, a prominent scientist argued for black athletic supremacy by pointing out that there had never been a white Michael Jordan. True. But, as the Yale anthropologist Jonathan Marks has noted, until recently there was no black Michael Jordan, either. Michael Jordan, like Tiger Woods or Wayne Gretzky or Cal Ripken, is one of the best players in his sport not because he's like the other members of his own ethnic group but precisely because he's not like them-or like anyone else, for that matter. Élite athletes are élite athletes because, in some sense, they are on the fringes of genetic variability. As it happens, African populations seem to create more of these genetic outliers than white populations do, and this is what underpins the claim that blacks are better athletes than whites. But that's all the claim amounts to. It doesn't say anything at all about the rest of us, of all races, muddling around in the genetic middle.

3.
There is a second consideration to keep in mind when we compare blacks and whites. Take the men's hundred-metre final at the Atlanta Olympics. Every runner in that race was of either Western African or Southern African descent, as you would expect if Africans had some genetic affinity for sprinting. But suppose we forget about skin color and look just at country of origin. The eight-man final was made up of two African-Americans, two Africans (one from Namibia and one from Nigeria), a Trinidadian, a Canadian of Jamaican descent, an Englishman of Jamaican descent, and a Jamaican. The race was won by the Jamaican-Canadian, in world-record time, with the Namibian coming in second and the Trinidadian third. The sprint relay-the 4 x 100-was won by a team from Canada, consisting of the Jamaican-Canadian from the final, a Haitian-Canadian, a Trinidadian-Canadian, and another Jamaican-Canadian. Now it appears that African heritage is important as an initial determinant of sprinting ability, but also that the most important advantage of all is some kind of cultural or environmental factor associated with the Caribbean.

Or consider, in a completely different realm, the problem of hypertension. Black Americans have a higher incidence of hypertension than white Americans, even after you control for every conceivable variable, including income, diet, and weight, so it's tempting to conclude that there is something about being of African descent that makes blacks prone to hypertension. But it turns out that although some Caribbean countries have a problem with hypertension, others-Jamaica, St. Kitts, and the Bahamas-don't. It also turns out that people in Liberia and Nigeria-two countries where many New World slaves came from-have similar and perhaps even lower blood-pressure rates than white North Americans, while studies of Zulus, Indians, and whites in Durban, South Africa, showed that urban white males had the highest hypertension rates and urban white females had the lowest. So it's likely that the disease has nothing at all to do with Africanness.

The same is true for the distinctive muscle characteristic observed when Kenyans were compared with Swedes. Saltin, the Swedish physiologist, subsequently found many of the same characteristics in Nordic skiers who train at high altitudes and Nordic runners who train in very hilly regions-conditions, in other words, that resemble the mountainous regions of Kenya's Rift Valley, where so many of the country's distance runners come from. The key factor seems to be Kenya, not genes.

Lots of things that seem to be genetic in origin, then, actually aren't. Similarly, lots of things that we wouldn't normally think might affect athletic ability actually do. Once again, the social-science literature on male and female math achievement is instructive. Psychologists argue that when it comes to subjects like math, boys tend to engage in what's known as ability attribution. A boy who is doing well will attribute his success to the fact that he's good at math, and if he's doing badly he'll blame his teacher or his own lack of motivation-anything but his ability. That makes it easy for him to bounce back from failure or disappointment, and gives him a lot of confidence in the face of a tough new challenge. After all, if you think you do well in math because you're good at math, what's stopping you from being good at, say, algebra, or advanced calculus? On the other hand, if you ask a girl why she is doing well in math she will say, more often than not, that she succeeds because she works hard. If she's doing poorly, she'll say she isn't smart enough.

This, as should be obvious, is a self-defeating attitude. Psychologists call it "learned helplessness"-the state in which failure is perceived as insurmountable. Girls who engage in effort attribution learn helplessness because in the face of a more difficult task like algebra or advanced calculus they can conceive of no solution. They're convinced that they can't work harder, because they think they're working as hard as they can, and that they can't rely on their intelligence, because they never thought they were that smart to begin with. In fact, one of the fascinating findings of attribution research is that the smarter girls are, the more likely they are to fall into this trap. High achievers are sometimes the most helpless. Here, surely, is part of the explanation for greater math variability among males. The female math whizzes, the ones who should be competing in the top one and two per cent with their male counterparts, are the ones most often paralyzed by a lack of confidence in their own aptitude. They think they belong only in the intellectual middle.

The striking thing about these descriptions of male and female stereotyping in math, though, is how similar they are to black and white stereotyping in athletics-to the unwritten rules holding that blacks achieve through natural ability and whites through effort. Here's how Sports Illustrated described, in a recent article, the white basketball player Steve Kerr, who plays alongside Michael Jordan for the Chicago Bulls. According to the magazine, Kerr is a "hard-working overachiever," distinguished by his "work ethic and heady play" and by a shooting style "born of a million practice shots." Bear in mind that Kerr is one of the best shooters in basketball today, and a key player on what is arguably one of the finest basketball teams in history. Bear in mind, too, that there is no evidence that Kerr works any harder than his teammates, least of all Jordan himself, whose work habits are legendary. But you'd never guess that from the article. It concludes, "All over America, whenever quicker, stronger gym rats see Kerr in action, they must wonder, How can that guy be out there instead of me?"

There are real consequences to this stereotyping. As the psychologists Carol Dweck and Barbara Licht write of high- achieving schoolgirls, "[They] may view themselves as so motivated and well disciplined that they cannot entertain the possibility that they did poorly on an academic task because of insufficient effort. Since blaming the teacher would also be out of character, blaming their abilities when they confront difficulty may seem like the most reasonable option." If you substitute the words "white athletes" for "girls" and "coach" for "teacher," I think you have part of the reason that so many white athletes are underrepresented at the highest levels of professional sports. Whites have been saddled with the athletic equivalent of learned helplessness-the idea that it is all but fruitless to try and compete at the highest levels, because they have only effort on their side. The causes of athletic and gender discrimination may be diverse, but its effects are not. Once again, blacks are like boys, and whites are like girls.

4.
When I was in college, I once met an old acquaintance from my high-school running days. Both of us had long since quit track, and we talked about a recurrent fantasy we found we'd both had for getting back into shape. It was that we would go away somewhere remote for a year and do nothing but train, so that when the year was up we might finally know how good we were. Neither of us had any intention of doing this, though, which is why it was a fantasy. In adolescence, athletic excess has a certain appeal-during high school, I happily spent Sunday afternoons running up and down snow-covered sandhills-but with most of us that obsessiveness soon begins to fade. Athletic success depends on having the right genes and on a self-reinforcing belief in one's own ability. But it also depends on a rare form of tunnel vision. To be a great athlete, you have to care, and what was obvious to us both was that neither of us cared anymore. This is the last piece of the puzzle about what we mean when we say one group is better at something than another: sometimes different groups care about different things. Of the seven hundred men who play major-league baseball, for example, eighty-six come from either the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, even though those two islands have a combined population of only eleven million. But then baseball is something that Dominicans and Puerto Ricans care about-and you can say the same thing about African-Americans and basketball, West Indians and sprinting, Canadians and hockey, and Russians and chess. Desire is the great intangible in performance, and unlike genes or psychological affect we can't measure it and trace its implications. This is the problem, in the end, with the question of whether blacks are better at sports than whites. It's not that it's offensive, or that it leads to discrimination. It's that, in some sense, it's not a terribly interesting question; "better" promises a tidier explanation than can ever be provided.

I quit competitive running when I was sixteen-just after the summer I had qualified for the Ontario track team in my age class. Late that August, we had travelled to St. John's, Newfoundland, for the Canadian championships. In those days, I was whippet-thin, as milers often are, five feet six and not much more than a hundred pounds, and I could skim along the ground so lightly that I barely needed to catch my breath. I had two white friends on that team, both distance runners, too, and both, improbably, even smaller and lighter than I was. Every morning, the three of us would run through the streets of St. John's, charging up the hills and flying down the other side. One of these friends went on to have a distinguished college running career, the other became a world-class miler; that summer, I myself was the Canadian record holder in the fifteen hundred metres for my age class. We were almost terrifyingly competitive, without a shred of doubt in our ability, and as we raced along we never stopped talking and joking, just to prove how absurdly easy we found running to be. I thought of us all as equals. Then, on the last day of our stay in St. John's, we ran to the bottom of Signal Hill, which is the town's principal geographical landmark-an abrupt outcrop as steep as anything in San Francisco. We stopped at the base, and the two of them turned to me and announced that we were all going to run straight up Signal Hill backward. I don't know whether I had more running ability than those two or whether my Africanness gave me any genetic advantage over their whiteness. What I do know is that such questions were irrelevant, because, as I realized, they were willing to go to far greater lengths to develop their talent. They ran up the hill backward. I ran home.

The General Idea

2006-03-14T14:54:00.000-06:00

Welcome to the world of blogging. We'll see how this goes. I figure this might be an interesting way to collect some interesting thoughts or insights. Maybe a theme will emerge, but I have no master plan.