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World Series: Game OVER

Posted by :James Howden On : October 29, 2007
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My, now, that was quick! After finding Game One to be nearly interminable, suddenly the entire series is over. Yikes. A couple of the games were close, but the Rockies were never really in it. In basketball, opposing coaches will sometimes try to “freeze” a shooter before a critical free-throw by calling a timeout. Or even two. Essentially, the Rockies froze themselves by sweeping the National League playoffs, while the Red Sox needed seven games to take the ALCS.

Baseball’s an everyday game. More than any other sport — though fans of the Ottawa Senators felt that their long layoff hurt their Stanley Cup chances last year — baseball is an everyday game and a subtle one. Timing and touch are critical. For the most part, you can’t rely on energy and hustle to overcome accumulated playing rust, and as the Colorados showed, eight days is an eternity. Them Sox sher can hit, though, can’t they?

Football, At Your Age?

Posted by :James Howden On : October 2, 2007
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Another absurdly bright, uncannily warm autumn day found me crossing a football field this morning. Again. One of my main routes on the ankle express takes me through the grounds of the community centre on Donald Street. Behind it is a small gem of a gridiron, lighted and perfectly crowned, with that familiar blend of short tufts of green mixed with worn turf where the cleat marks dimple the dirt. Beyond the end zone on either end remain the baseball backstops that were the original anchors of this mid-city sports park. However, the football goalposts in shallow centre field, the bleachers along the chalked sideline, and the blocking sled which, outside practice grunting time, just blocks the right-field line make it clear: it is autumn, and Football is King. It has been all summer.

Some people never grow up, it seems. I found myself walking across the quiet field, local seniors doing their laps around the perimeter. I may have appeared to be just strolling, too, but actually I was running instant replays of gridiron exploits recorded nowhere but in my jumbled memory. The highlight reel starts a bit bumpily: getting thrown around by a crazy corner linebacker in my first high school practices; being flung by an opposing lineman, like a rag doll in the jaws of a Doberman, as an undersized rookie slotback on his first run with the ball (and trying to wipe the phlegm off my face before I got back to the huddle); getting wide open on our terrible team’s first-play fly pattern, and watching our beleaguered QB’s beautiful touchdown spiral bounce off the shoulder pads I’d never worn playing sandlot ball on the town square. There were 54-0 and 63-0 thrashings by the bigger schools down the road. But it got better. We won more than we lost by the time I was a senior, and there were solid tackles and touchdowns and one particular leaning sideline catch that meant little in the context of a losing match but made me feel like a pro. For a minute or two at the time, but forever in my mind. The older I get, the more spectacular it was.

Yup, the hands used to work. They still do, but mostly for laundry and dishwashing and driveway basketball with children. (Yes, and typing, certainement.) And, likely thanks to a decision to put aside football after high school, I have pretty good knees for an old guy. But basketball left me with high maintenance ankles that whine and creak every morning, and so I’ve noticed something different about this fall, and perhaps the last few.

Time was when the cooling nights and the falling leaves meant only one thing, and this long after I’d hung up my helmet: time to run. Not just to run, but to juke, cutback, straight-arm a hapless linebacker, lower my shoulder and stretch for the first down. 20. 25. 30! He’s headed for the 35, the 40… Yup, even after I’d passed the 40-year marker, I’d be minding my own business, going for a slow old jog down any old street, red and yellow leaves along the curbside, and suddenly I’d be possessed. I’d feel a pointed leather spheroid under my arm, my eyes would widen, and the urge to hit the hole and get outside and turn it upfield overwhelmed me. Well, almost. I wasn’t highstepping past any helpless pedestrians or spinning out of the grasp of the postman. I’m a fairly sane neighbour. But every once in awhile, on a dark and quiet street, I would make a sweet little cut to avoid a looming mud-puddle. And there was that dog two blocks over, left yapping at only air…

But this morning I noticed something different. Even crossing a football field, even when I tried to get the old motor fantasies running, I couldn’t. The thought of making a sharp change of direction makes my ankles ache. I can still hear the plastic cacophony of pads and helmets popping as an 18-year-old ballcarrier – me – is gang-tackled to the ground. I can still re-visit the perverse joy of that socially approved violence, but I wouldn’t want to live there again. I can imagine coaching that game. Maybe. (Barely. And rarely.)

As in this park near me, baseball is sidelined. Televisions will turn to the MLB now that October is here, maybe even mine. I hear there was an exciting play-in game last night, the Rockies knocking off the Padres. (Can you name their cities?) There must be some baseball played somewhere in my city, but I never see kids playing it in my part of town. Now there’s a game I miss. I miss it even better than football, maybe ’cause I played it into my 30s. And even in mid-life, I can still imagine a nice pick, a quick throw (though my shoulder might groan for a week afterward) and, especially, swinging that bat. Even with that more easy-going game, though, I’d be best off playing it in the theatre of the mind. No pulled hamstrings there. No ice-bucket evenings. I’ve had my fill of those.

A Long Look Back at Longboat

Posted by :James Howden On : April 17, 2007
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For a certain slice of the sport-loving public, Africa doesn’t immediately summon mental images of devastation by AIDS, ethnic strife, desertification or hunger. For devotees of distance running on road and track, Africans are the graceful, superbly fit athletes who dominate their sport in an almost unimaginable way. Moroccan, Ethiopian and, to an astonishing degree, Kenyan runners are the perennial champions of the most ancient and elemental athletic contests of them all. Never should we minimize the traumas of that deeply abused continent, but it is good to see Africans as winners and heroes.

Yesterday, at the Boston Marathon, Kenyan Robert Cheruiyot won for the third time. His countrymen came second through fourth, and have won the classic race fifteen of the last seventeen years. I became a fan of Kenyan running during the 1968 and 1972 Olympics, at each of which Kipchoge Keino won a silver and a gold medal on the track, from 1500 metres to the steeplechase. (And while we’re only a couple of days from remembering Jackie Robinson, here’s another brilliant athlete who is even a greater man. Please click here for more on Keino.)

So, go, Africans, go, but that isn’t even what I wanted to write about today. For me, and for a lot of Canadians, especially the down-home friends on the Six Nations reserve, the Boston Marathon yesterday was most importantly the 100th anniversary of the record-setting run of the great Tom Longboat. (There was a very fine Longboat tribute by James Christie in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail. Highly recommended.)

Though he ran so long ago, now, Longboat’s career arc is a fairly familiar one to us. It was all the more so in the days when an athlete’s already brief career was an insistently amateur one: to be an Olympian, or to defend his Boston Marathon victory, there was to be no salary, no endorsements. There were severe competitive restrictions for those who “sullied” their sport by accepting prize money. Indeed Longboat, still young and having trained largely on his own, was not welcome on Heartbreak Hill in 1908 because he had made a few dollars with his feet. His fall from grace was also accelerated by the enduring racism and privation experienced by Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. We love to kick our stars when they fall, and Longboat took an especially spirited beating. (Published references to him, even when he was winning, are, by today’s lights, cringe-worthy in their ignorance and stereotyping.) Longboat was a source of enormous national pride when he was winning and was ignored, or openly despised, when he no longer was. His reputation, badly damaged in early- and mid-century, is being redeemed, thanks largely to the efforts of a more contemporary running man, the quiet Canadian hero of sport and equality, Bruce Kidd. Kidd’s 1992 biography offers a modern and more sympathetic view of the Onondaga athlete.

I loved the Globe’s photo. There’s Tom Longboat in knee-length khaki shorts with a black leather belt and black high-top shoes. It is a picture, though, of a body made for running. The legs are thin and unusually long, the shoulders broad and well-muscled for a distance runner, perhaps because of the lacrosse and other tough sports that he loved to play. And it’s a familiar face, somehow. I went to high school in Caledonia, just after the graduation of more local Six Nations running legends named Anderson or Bomberry. But we all knew about Longboat, in a hazy sort of way. Some reports referred to him as the “Caledonia Cyclone”, as one of his earliest successes came in a race at the town fair, but he wasn’t from town.

Years later, teaching and coaching in that same school, I had a young Longboat on my basketball team. Reading a frustrated account of a Canadian sportswriter trying to interview the tight-lipped Tom, I couldn’t help but remember coaching young Todd – a relative, I’d guess from the Globe photo, though I was never able to find out – and feeling good whenever he was sufficiently at ease to smile. I don’t know if I ever got a complete sentence out of him, and I never knew exactly where he lived. He wasn’t an outstanding basketball player, but he ran his guts out and rebounded hard against far bigger guys. Our school didn’t do much with track and field, so I don’t know how well Todd had inherited the running gene. He was tough, I know that, but here’s another Longboat I need to find out more about.

So here we are, 100 years after one of the greatest victories in the history of Canadian sport, remembering with greater justice and comprehension the career of a magnificent athlete. It’s far too late for Tom Longboat, of course, who died in 1948, but idealism compels me to wonder out loud: where are the young native athletes who can be inspired, as the youth of Kenya were by Keino, by the legend of “Cogwagee”? History knows him as Tom Longboat, a young Onondaga man who ran the rural miles of Grand River country and made himself the best in the world. I hope that we shall see the likes of him again.

Faster ‘n Jack Robinson: Who Carries That Torch Today?

Posted by :James Howden On : April 16, 2007
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Apparently, it started with Ken Griffey Jr., centre fielder for the Cincinnati Reds, who made a request to change his number for a day. Not big news, except that the number he wanted was 42, and the day was April 15, 2007. On that date in 1947, a black man named Jackie Robinson sprinted out to play first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was an epic moment in American life, a case where sport was ethically ahead of much of the rest of the society around it.

Why did the Dodgers do it? Enlightened self-interest? Maybe, but even if that’s all it was, that’s not all bad. But it still took courage and resolve for Dodgers’ General Manager Branch Rickey to take the step that his peers were not ready to try, though everyone with a baseball brain knew there were superb black players available. Several Dodgers threatened a boycott if Robinson were brought in. Rickey’s response went something like this: Fine. Sit out as long as you like. Good luck finding other work.

So yesterday, not just Griffey but a large number of players and coaches across Major League Baseball, including the entire squad of the (now) Los Angeles Dodgers, wore number 42. Presumably, no opponents spit on their cleats or urged them to “go back to the cotton fields!” I suppose that their teammates didn’t refuse to eat meals or even play catch with them. There were many shots in today’s news of groups of players, wearing number 42, with their arms around each other’s shoulders, as Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese famously did 60 years ago to quiet the leather-lunged bigots in Cincinnati, where they love the gifted Mr. Griffey now.

Many point out the irony that, sixty years on, the African-American is again becoming an endangered species in baseball. There are lots of reasons for that, many of which have nothing to do with racism. Baseball is no longer The National Pastime – football and basketball have surpassed it not only in attracting black athletes but in appealing to sporting audiences – but it was in 1947. And this story is about so much more than baseball. (For example, there is a great story here about an ordinary day at one of the many Jackie Robinson Memorial parks and stadiums across America. )

Robinson was a rather old rookie, 28. His career was brilliant – Rookie of the Year, six-time All-Star, Most Valuable Player in 1950 – but comparatively short. He entered the Majors – by the way, only a couple of months before another superb man and player, Larry Doby, broke the American League colour bar with the Cleveland Indians – after being a Southern California multi-sport star, serving in the American Army from 1942-44, and dazzling Montreal sports fans while playing for the minor-league Royals after the War. Among other things, he was once court-martialled for refusing — more than 10 years before Rosa Parks did — to go to the back of a military bus in Texas. His “insubordination” charge was overturned, though, and he was discharged from the Army with honour. He also remained prominent in the civil rights movement after his baseball career. With Jackie Robinson, it was always about more than baseball. (Baseball is about more than baseball.)

This is his epitaph: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” Jackie Robinson is buried beneath, and ever exalted by, this inscription on his gravestone in Brooklyn.

Encore, Nash?

Posted by :James Howden On : April 15, 2007
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Don’t look now, but is Mr. Nash hunting for his third MVP? Surely the short, tat-free Canadian couldn’t be voted the Association’s best again? How many shoes is that going to sell?

After his first win in 2005, he proceeded to play and fill stat columns even better last season. The NBA hasn’t seen players that improve on MVP years. It was weird. He crosses over and spins past obstacles that other players won’t. And it’s happening again; a few games ago, he posted his career high in “double-doubles” for a season, and that’s not about caffeine and cholesterol, Tim Hortons lovers! He has been in double figures in two major categories – in his case points and assists – more than fifty times this year, higher than in either of his two MVP seasons. He’s shooting the three-pointer for an absurdly high percentage (46%), and shooting in general (53% from the floor overall) among the lead leaders in that category, who are generally big men, dunk machines like the über-athletic receiver of many of Nash’s immaculate deliveries, Amare Stoudemire.

The Suns are in a playoff push, and blew out the Jazz in Utah last night for their fifth straight win. Nash needed to score only 13, but fired 18 assists without a single turnover. (A 2-1 ratio of assists to turnovers is considered good work for an NBA guard.) Sheesh. He’s on everybody’s MVP ballot, and people might be forced to vote for him again, yea though the marketing machine would surely wish for another more poster-friendly young god of the hardwood. And on a weekend for honouring great sporting pioneers, well, Nash is no Longboat or Robinson, but he is a thoughtful and worthy bearer of the mantle of great athlete who is also a fine man.

Sports Justice Pioneer: I Meant to Tell You

Posted by :James Howden On : April 4, 2007
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Something in yesterday’s post about the guys from Concrete Hoops – young men who see sport as a chance to better their communities – reminded me of a story that I read last fall. Chances are excellent that you missed it, too, so let me introduce you to Peter Norman, today’s posthumous hero.

You may have heard of the Black Power salute given by 200 metre Olympic gold medallist Tommie Smith and his American compatriot, bronze medallist John Carlos. It was 1968, the year of the Mexico City Olympics. There were also bitter riots over Mexican poverty. Yes, and there were also the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and a level of social unrest that American culture had never seen before, or since. At least, not in the same way. During the medal ceremony, as the Star Spangled Banner played, Smith stood erect, bowed his head and raised a black-gloved right hand. Carlos raised his left.

Conservative America was outraged. Smith and Carlos were dismissed from the Olympic team for their perceived disrespect of country, and their athletic careers were over. I was too young to understand the implications of what happened then, but I was far from alone in missing entirely the significance of the silver medallist who shared the Black Power podium. He was a white Australian named Peter Norman. When he died last fall, Carlos and Smith were pallbearers. John Carlos said of Norman, “Peter was a piece of my life….I was his brother. He was my brother. That’s all you have to know.”

Norman, it turns out, was not an accidental bystander. He was a fellow activist, and though he did not raise a gloved fist, he stood beside his fellow athletes not only by athletic chance but by shared conviction. (The story goes that, when Carlos realized he’d forgotten his black gloves back at the hotel, Peter Norman suggested that each of them wear one.) In Australia, it was noticed that he showed no surprise at Smith’s and Carlos’s actions, that he wore the same badge on his Aussie warm-ups as they did: Olympic Project for Human Rights. He was vilified. He never ran for Australia again. He also never apologized for standing quietly for a principle that, to him, was a simple fact: that racism tainted the world of sport at many levels, and that it had no place.

There is a film on Norman coming out sometime this year. Meanwhile, it is once again thanks to American writer Dave Zirin that this significant passing, on the other side of the globe, did not pass me by. You can read his very fine tribute to Norman here. He called it “Brother of the Fist: The Passing of Peter Norman”.

CIS Championship Sunday

Posted by :James Howden On : March 22, 2007
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Game 9 (Consolation Final): UBC v. Concordia.  Now, they pay attention to winning streaks in RavensLand, where I live, as witness Carleton Athletics’ chronicling of an (admittedly incredible) 87-game winning streak in league and playoff action, which excluded a couple of Canadian losses and several to NCAA schools in pre-season action. (I believe that the gods of basketball struck them down when they went for number 88 last season, which would have tied the immortal streak of the “Walton Gang”, the early-70s UCLA Bruins. That streak had no exceptions or provisos, nothing but wins.) I bring this up to point out that Carleton’s current winning streak at Nationals, an absurd 18 games, includes their consolation-side wins in the last Halifax appearance in which they did NOT win the big trophy. I wasn’t that aware of Carleton basketball then, although I wondered about this Dave Smart character, a young guy I’d met at basketball camps, a fine and rather funky player who was going back to Queen’s to complete his last season of eligibility before turning to his burning ambition to coach. I was curious to know if he’d be any good on the sidelines. HA! When his Ravens, in ’01, lost in the opening round at Nationals, I have no doubt that they took the consolation games with the utmost seriousness. Shoot, practice scrimmages at Carleton look like life-and-death struggles.

But this year, the nation’s number 1 and number 2 seeds ended the tournament playing for very few of the marbles. It certainly looked that way, too, especially for the UBC Thunderbirds. I’m not saying they didn’t TRY, for goodness’ sake, but, as the hockey folks say, they didn’t play with desperation. (The Ravens, meanwhile, more than any team I’ve ever paid attention to, come close to treating each game, each possession, as a matter of great urgency and team pride.) The ‘Birds’ Casey Archibald was sweet to watch, once again, at least when he had the ball in his hands, and finished with 89 points in the tournament. He doesn’t rebound or defend with a lot of energy, and Kevin Hanson and his staff don’t seem to require it of him. And so Patrick Perrotte, Benjamin Sormonte and the Buckley brothers took the Consolation title for Concordia. It just meant more to them, and this seemed clear. Concordia has an ever-deepening pool of Montreal basketball talent to mine, and though Perrotte and Sormonte are through, maybe these Nationals wins do matter to the future of Stingers basketball. I think Coach Smart would say that “meaningless” consolation wins in ’01 helped prepare for the Raven Conquests of ’03, ’04, ’05, ’06…

Game 10 (The CIS Championship, live on TSN, not that the rest of the tournament got much media attention…): Carleton v. Brandon. Yes, readers, you know the result: …AND ’07! Brandon, a prairie school with a long (and mainly distinguished?) tradition of attracting American ballplayers to the middle of Manitoba, was good. They are very quick and skilled, but I didn’t believe they could gut out the kind of championship intensity that I knew Carleton would bring. But they did, and they never cracked. Like UBC, they are very talented, starting a 6’9” basketball vagabond from Las Vegas and three terrific athletes from Quebec, especially the guard tandem of Yul Michel and Dany Charlery, both from Montreal. (They also start a Brandon boy, Chad Jacobsen. He was superb, and hit one of the gutsier shots you’ll ever see to keep Brandon in it at the end. He must’ve grown up worshipping the great teams of the Jerry Hemmings era, when Coach H brought four CIS titles to the Plains.)

If you watched on TSN, you saw what I thought was a hokey, cliché-ridden and rather stiff you been disrespected all year! pre-game speech from their young coach, Barnaby Craddock. But maybe this stuff still works. Despite being held to 23 points fewer than their previous season low, the fastbreak-happy Bobcats were tough as nails against Carleton. Their mental resilience was remarkable, because they are not used to playing the game this way. And for the first time, the Ravens’ two-time CIS Player of the Year, Osvaldo Jeanty, played only a solid game in the national final, where he had been the Player of the Game in each of his previous four appearances. Mind you, although his shooting was off, he still fired 15, defended like a madman, and hit a circus shot to (nearly) seal the game. But this time, it was junior Aaron Doornekamp, the fourth of Smart’s nephews to star for him, who was the tournament and championship game MVP. A finesse forward, he rebounded furiously and his two late threes were the killer strokes in the final 52-49 slugfest over the Bobcats.

But don’t look now, Carleton-haters – and there are more than a few in CIS circles – but the Ravens did it again AND they return 11 of the top 12 guys in their rotation, most of them for two or more seasons. They were a young squad this year; their serious opponents here will all lose several fifth-year contributors. And who knows what Smart’s high school recruiting class will look like? Certainly there are many young star athletes that won’t go to Carleton because of the lofty and incessant demands of playing for Dave Smart, but kids like to win. The best (and smartest) young players also can’t ignore that he’s with the Canadian national team as its top assistant coach. What will happen to Ravens’ opponents if they actually get a dominating post player? Or the creative point guard they’ve played without for the last two national championships?

But they also won’t have Osvaldo Jeanty any more, and that is a leadership gap that won’t be filled anytime soon. A basketball lifer close to the Carleton program has it right: “Os is far from the best basketball player I’ve watched in the CIS, but he might be the greatest one.” Along, perhaps, with McMaster’s great point guard, Steve Maga, Jeanty has fewer of the natural gifts that hoops junkies look for than any other national Player of the Year, let alone other two-time winners. He is not tall or long. He is not especially fast. He does not leap well, and has at best only reasonable quickness. What he does have are a fabulous work ethic, a phenomenal ability to accept coaching, superb hands, and what John Wooden put at the top of his famous Pyramid of Success: Competitive Greatness. Real love of a hard battle. And the will not only to win – and he has it in spades – but the will to prepare to win. I’m anxious to see how much the talented Mr. Doornekamp has absorbed from the captain in this last regard. He clearly has talent, and he clearly has the fire.

Pay attention, people. There’s something awfully special brewing in CIS basketball, has been for a good stretch, and most of the sporting public is missing a good story.

CIS Halifax: Day 2

Posted by :James Howden On : March 20, 2007
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This is stale-dated, unfortunately; I wasn’t able to post directly from Halifax, but here are my notes on Day 2 (Saturday’s semifinal play) of the Canadian Interuniversity Sport men’s basketball championships.

Games 5 & 6 (Consolation Semifinals): The tournament’s top two seeds, Concordia and BC, overcame their first-round disappointments to advance on the Consolation side of the draw. Some consolation. It’s another distinguishing feature of the Canuck national final that there even IS a chance for first-round losers to play again; it is universally win-or-go-home in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, where even the third-place game in the Final Four was done away with 35 years ago. It’s hard for CIS athletes – especially those who genuinely believed that they were in the championship hunt – to commit mentally to the consolation round, but the competitive jones kicks in sooner or later as long as the game doesn’t get away from them early. For the administrators, it is simpler: Look, if we’re travelling all that way, we have to get at least two games. It’s money, but I’m not sure it makes even economic sense to play a game that nobody much wants to play or watch. At development levels, of course there has to be the chance to play the extra games, but with elite athletes? I don’t see the point, really. I must be missing something.

That having been said, top-seed Concordia pulled away from a lethargic Windsor team that was never really in it. Down 20 midway through the first period, the Lancers made a minor comeback in the second but never made it interesting. Yesterday’s doubts were confirmed: Windsor’s Wilson Cup home-court win over Carleton, which had little bearing on seeding for the Final 8, was their national championship, emotionally. The Stingers’ Patrick Perrotte, after a tough game one, was dominant inside against the Lancers. He’s an odd-looking player, a “Mister 5 by 5” who plays the post at a wide-bodied 6’1”. You’d never pick him out of a police lineup as a basketball player – he looks more like the guy who owns (and is the bouncer for) the slightly seedy bar downtown – but he’s powerful, skilled, very intelligent and has remarkably nimble feet for a man of his heft. Perrotte’s running mate, Benjamin Sormonte, also shot the lights out.

In the second consolation game, a casual UBC team allowed an Acadia club, scarlet from their 48-point spanking by Carleton the night before, to recover some pride. It seemed inevitable, though, that the Thunderbirds — maybe the most talented crew in the country — came back from a large early deficit to win fairly comfortably. Casey Archibald was a revelation, seemingly able to dial up a graceful offensive sally whenever it was needed. What a beautiful jumpshot. “How is this guy not on the national team?” was a conversation running through my section; he wouldn’t dunk on international competition as he does here, but he’s a 6’4″ guard who can shoot the long bomb and the pull-up mid-range shot. At this level, he takes over when he feels like it, and notched another 30-point effort. At the same time, the other thread running through the knowledgeable fans in the Carleton section was that he “couldn’t play for us”. Too soft? Not committed to defence? I’m not sure what was meant by that, other than Ravens Pride, but it was great to see him play after all that I’ve read. He’s the real deal, and what a great career, despite the T-Birds’ chronic failures at the Nationals.

Game 7 (Championship Semifinal): Brandon v. Saint Mary’s. After the Huskies upset Concordia in the opener, this game was exhibit B of the competitive advantage that the small Atlantic University Sport conference has had by virtue of hosting the Nationals for the past 24 years. Three times, for example, their conference runner-up has qualified as the 8th-seeded  host school and knocked off the tournament number one in the first round. It’s home cooking, baby, though not of the refereeing variety, at least not directly. But they’ve played at the Metro Centre frequently, which is a very different venue from the campus gyms that nearly all CIS games are played in, and Halifax comes out in force to yell for the Maritime teams. Here, the Huskies were decidedly outmanned against the Bobcats, but Brandon failed to put the finish on their 17-point second-half lead, and the loud crowd helped Saint Mary’s to come within three in a raucous run to the buzzer. When only one Atlantic school gets an automatic bid to Nationals over the next three years — they’re moving to Ottawa after their long Halifax engagement — things will be very different for the east-coast schools. Can AUS teams have anywhere near the success they’ve had during the Halifax years? One thing they won’t have: scoreboard “rally monkeys” bouncing and imploring the crowd to MAKE NOISE for Saint Mary’s. It clearly rattled the Bobcats, and gave renewed energy to a very tired group of Huskies.

Game 8 (Championship Semifinal): Ottawa v. Carleton. Round Four of the “Canal War” between these Capital rivals had the Carleton fans worried. OU gets up for the Ravens as they do for nobody else, and they had won two of the three tense struggles they’d had. I guessed that this would not be the case when it came to the Nationals, and my prediction of a relatively easy 13-point Carleton win suffered only from being too tentative. Carleton ground down a very game Ottawa team, which knew early in the second half that there were no more miracles in their toolkit. The Ravens were nearly as dominant, at times, as they had been in crushing Acadia in the first round. The lead got near 30, and the final spread was a startling 22 points. For those of you counting these things, that made for a 70-point margin of victory in Carleton’s first two games. If people wanted to see them go down, last year was the time to get them, when second team All-Canadian Aaron Doornekamp was out with a broken ankle. Astonishingly, the Ravens won anyway last year, and I can’t see anybody getting them now. They are SO hard to play against.

CIS: Finally in Halifax

Posted by :James Howden On : March 18, 2007
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Friday, March 16

After a long and wonderful drive down with son Ben, once upon a time a basketball player himself, I am in Halifax for the Canadian March Madness, the Canadian Interuniversity Sport men’s basketball championship. It’s been here for the past 24 years, and mainly because I was always coaching (or recovering from it) during the March Break, I’d never made the trip down. It comes to Ottawa, where I live, next year, so I wanted to see it before it left its Maritime home. I was excited.

And upon arrival, road-weary and just a bit late for Friday’s game 1, I had a little spasm of disappointment. My eighth-row seats were beyond the baseline, not foul-line high as I’d been led to believe. The programme had a hasty feel to it, including two photos of players from the favoured Atlantic school which hadn’t even qualified and one mystery photo in which the tiny shorts worn by the player proved it be at least a dozen years out-of-date. Leafing through, the listing of national Players of the Year (the Mike Moser Memorial Trophy) was not only incomplete, but it misspelled the name of Eli Pasquale, one of the greatest players in CIS history. (Never mind the substitution of “it’s” for “its”.) Brandon University, the second seed in the tournament, had incorrect numbers for most of its prime players that had to be revised at tipoff. High school stuff. The Metro Centre is a fine facility that (mostly) doesn’t overwhelm the event — good crowds here are six or seven thousand, and they have occasionally had more than 10,000 — but the mural of the Saint Mary’s Huskies, a local team, winning the ’99 championship also has a distinctly high school feel to it.

My excitement took a temporary dip, but I emerged from Disappointment Mode before long. Here are some other quick impressions from the Friday games, the four quarterfinal matches of this “Final 8” tourney. For game summaries and general tournament information, please go to the CIS tournament website here. What follows are some quick-and-filthy-clean impressions from this basketball vagabond.

Game 1: The number one seed was one I’d questioned, as the Concordia Stingers had run up victories in the small and undistinguished Quebec conference. And Upset Special it was, as the Saint Mary’s Huskies brought tears to the eyes of championship players from their glory days with a last-second victory. Having placed second in an upset-filled Atlantic qualifying tournament, the HomeBoys took full advantage of the friendly crowd and a curiously bland Concordia team. Sophomore Mark McLaughlin hit the winning free throw, and his toughness belies his slender frame. Nice player. Took me awhile to get into the thing, as the atmosphere I’d expected with an AUS team in it didn’t kick in ’til the last several minutes. When it did, it made a difference. Nothing like home cooking, and Stinger All-Canadian Perrotte was held down. Energizing finish.

Game 2: Brandon v. Windsor. Windsor had knocked off Carleton in the Ontario UA final in their own peculiar barn, and they looked good for a awhile in their first trip to the Nationals in ages, but they didn’t guard Brandon’s point Yul Michel well at all. He’s very quick, and was continually allowed to go right to his favourite moves. This one had the feeling of being over before it should’ve been. When Windsor was down 8, it felt like more. And soon it was. Chris Oliver, Windsor’s coach, is known as an uber-dedicated coach, one of the best technical minds that we have. He’s still a young guy, though, and a quiet, reserved presence on the bench. Maybe I just favour a more activist stance from a hoops coach, but I wonder if he has the fire to inspire. I think we’ll see, because I expect Windsor to be good for long while with him. Brandon is a very talented group. They were more than full measure for the win, and maybe Windsor’s big game was last weekend over Carleton, a great win for their young coach. For his players, maybe being here was enough.

Game 3: University of Ottawa v. University of British Columbia. OU, by contrast with Windsor, looked more ‘n ready to be at Nationals. Beating Carleton, the 4-time national champion, twice during league play will do that for you, as will a two-point loss to them in the OUA East final. Their intensity gave them an early jump on UBC, a talented two-seed, and the Gee-Gees have the horses to run with UBC. Their gifted young point guard, Josh Gibson-Bascome, sat for much of the end of the first half with two fouls, which allowed UBC back in to the game. Casey Archibald hit an effortless jumper to bring the Thunderbirds back to within two at half, but Gibson-Bascombe was tremendous in the second, seeming imperious in answering every UBC challenge. He dominated the first six minutes of the second, mainly with surgical passing. In the Carleton-flavoured contingent where I’m sitting, he’s not very popular, but he and his mates were very tough down the stretch, and UBC just didn’t defend well enough. And so continues the T-Bird tradition of national flameouts, and so another all-Ottawa grudge match is set up for the semi-finals.

Game 4: Carleton v. Acadia. Well, I gave away this one, but there wasn’t much surprise here. Acadia was a surprise winner in the Atlantic, maybe the third best team in the AUS, but put together some wins when it counted. Within five minutes, though CU wasn’t shooting well, I smelled blowout. The Ravens’ suffocating, truly obsessive rebounding and defence had the Axemen perched on their frustrated heels. Acadia depended so much on one All-Canadian guard, Paulo Santana (he’s good, but first team A-C? Come on), and ooh-aah shot-blocks and dazzling dimes. One problem: Carleton neither cares for nor allows much of that to happen. Acadia limped to the dressing room with 17 points at half, and Carleton was already up 21 without having too much going smoothly on offence. The second half was even more stunning. Acadia managed 21 points in the half to only lose by 48… The referees hadn’t the heart to keep calling Acadia for all their charges in the second half, or it could’ve been worse. WOW. An unbelievable butt-kicking, and what a great rest for CU’s stars, especialy the chronically gimpy, two-time national Player of the Year, Osvaldo Jeanty. And because of the way CU is built, garbage time doesn’t allow the pressure to relent. The scrubs play hard and insist on rebounding, because that’s The Smart Way. Coach Dave went berserk and called an angry timeout over boxout failures when the lead was 32. And so now they have to beat OU again. I’m predicting an easy time for a change, not of Acadian proportions but more comfortably than they have in the last couple of years. OU’s inexperience at Nationals will show. And CU looked to be on an implacable mission in their Drive for Five. Incredible performance.

Basketball’s Forgotten Pioneer (Dave Zirin)

Posted by :James Howden On : March 6, 2007
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Category: All About Sports

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[As I mentioned At First Glance, this is an excerpt from an article by Dave Zirin. I wasn’t able to link to it directly.]

Should someone who averaged 11 points and eight rebounds over a four-year NBA career make the Basketball Hall of Fame?….This is the story of…a movement to compel the NBA to do right by their own past.

Everybody knows Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947. Fewer will know the NFL was desegregated by Robinson’s UCLA teammate Kenny Washington and future Hollywood actor Woody Strode. The more serious sports fan will also will tell you that Nate “Sweetwater” Clifton was the first African American to sign a contract with an NBA team and Earl Lloyd the first to actually get off the bench and log some playing time. More will know the immortal Bill Russell was the first black basketball head coach.

But I challenge even the most die-hard hoops junkie…to name the first black NCAA All American. I challenge you to name the first African American to make the U.S. Olympic team. I challenge you to name the first black man to play in the NBA All-Star game….The answer to all these questions is Don Barksdale….Today, Don Barksdale is sports history’s invisible man, a trailblazer who resides in shadows. Barksdale died in 1993 of throat cancer at the age of 69, and there is a push simmering to make sure the history he represents doesn’t die with him….

The charge to put Barksdale in Springfield is being led by…Doug Harris. Harris is the executive director of Athletes United for Peace, and…also directed a documentary on Barksdale called Bounce….

This history is one of struggle against the racial barriers of bigotry, but it’s also the history of a great player who refused to be defined exclusively by play. The Don Barksdale Story is not another tale of a playground legend who ended up wrecked on the rocks of what-might-have-been. When the NBA slammed its door in Barksdale’s face after his All American UCLA career, he switched gears toward his other passion and became the San Francisco Bay Area’s first African American disc jockey….Barksdale at age 25 desegregated the gold medal winning 1948 Olympic team, where he was coached by “The Baron” from Kentucky, Adolph Rupp. (Barksdale was so good, Rupp even gave him significant court time; 20 years before he started recruiting blacks for his own Wildcat teams.)

When Barksdale finally signed with the slowly desegregating NBA in 1951, the 28 year old made sure the cash was worth his time. He signed a two-year deal for $60,000 with the Bullets, a big money deal in its day.  Barksdale’s hoops career stalled after four years and one historic All-Star game….

This past February, the NBA higher ups decided yet again to not include Barksdale on their annual list of Hall of Fame inductees. They need to ask themselves the question: how seriously do they take their own past? Is the history of the game sacred, or just filler material for more highlight videos?

So the question gets repeated: Should someone who averaged 11 points and eight rebounds over a four-year NBA career make the Basketball Hall of Fame? If that person is Don Angelo Barksdale, you’re damn right they should.

 

[Dave Zirin is the author of The Muhammad Ali Handbook (MQ Publications) and Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket). You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by e-mailing edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com.]