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According to Albert

Posted by :James Howden On : May 17, 2006
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I came across a brief and simple meditation on the virtue of humility this morning. As ammunition for my argument that you can find spirit everywhere if you’re willing to look, I’ll point out that this exercise in quiet virtue was found in the on-line version of Sports Illustrated magazine. It was an interview with the Cardinals’ monstrously good batsman, Albert Pujols. Alongside other things I’ve read about the great Dominican, I think we can take this straight up, no grain (or mitt-full) of salt required.

Albert’s Law:

As long as you don’t get caught up thinking you are better than the game, or you think that you’re better than everybody else, as long as you don’t get caught up in that, you’ll be fine. If you stay humble, you’re going to survive to play this game — if you stay healthy — for 15-20 years. That’s what I want to do. Stay humble before God. Stay humble before my teammates. And just have fun out there and play the game.

It might not sell too much beer or get a Manly Personal Fragrance named after him, but it makes it all the easier to appreciate Mr. Pujols.

How do you do it, Mr. Nash?

Posted by :James Howden On : May 8, 2006
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How do you explain a kid from Victoria who doesn’t just build NBA castles in the air but also manages to “put foundations under them”, as Thoreau advised? How does a guy go from barely holding his own playing pickup ball as a freshman at the University of California-Santa Clara to being two-time Conference Player of the Year? (And, in a Sports Illustrated feature, being labelled “Little Magic” by Mr. Johnson himself.) What changes that fine college player from a three-year professional backup to an NBA All-Star? And what took Steve Nash, in his 30s, from “nice little player” to two consecutive Most Valuable Player trophies, something that Larry and Wilt, Kareem and Michael have done, but that only Magic had ever done from the point guard spot?

I just re-read Jack McCallum’s SI feature “Point Guard from Another Planet” from the January 30 edition. The best quote came from Nash’s younger brother Martin – clearly a superior athlete to Steve – who asked, “How do you explain where drive comes from? That Steve drive – who knows?” We just have to shrug our shoulders and acknowledge the ridiculous: this double-MVP coup is the greatest individual athletic achievement by any Canadian, ever. And I include Number 99, the one that Nash most resembles in his intuition, his modest physique and subtle way of dominating his sport. Nash won’t have Gretzky’s astonishing career numbers – it is likely that nobody in any sport ever will – but he is swimming circles around enormous fish in a much bigger pond than the Great One played in.

And never mind Canadian accomplishment: this is one of the most astonishing athletic trajectories we’ve ever seen. To come from a basketball backwater and join the pantheon of basketball greats, in a time when the game has a world profile second only to soccer, is incredible. To improve upon that first MVP performance the following season, with his team having endured injury to its other star and wholesale changes, is just plain silly.  Giftedness in anything is, as Martin Nash knows, a pretty mysterious thing, but his big brother is leaving behind some tremendous clues.

 Size and strength are nice, but not essential.
“Athletic ability” is not stored only in the legs.
 Good eyes. Sure hands. Balance. Imagination. These are athletic qualities, too.

 And they still don’t tell the whole story.

 How do you respond to adversity? What happens when you fail?
 Do you know how to learn? Do you have a plan that you never lose sight of?

 Steve Nash put it like this back in January: “Most guys somewhere along the line will meet an obstacle they aren’t willing to clear….They will not keep on going. I kept on going.” Simple as that, eh?

Sure it is.

Thanks for comin’ out, Miguel

Posted by :James Howden On : May 1, 2006
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Today is May Day. Pinkos everywhere still celebrate it, though it never became a big deal in the Excited States, where it began. (Where credit is due: “Excited States of America” is all Allan Fotheringham, booted from Maclean’s magazine but still kicking at www.drfoth.com .) It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out today, though, as the minds behind “A Day Without Immigrants” try to show Americans how their lives would be changed without the newcomers that so many former newcomers would love to deport.

There’s a very interesting article by Dave Zirin on www.edgeofsports.com on how this would really come home to Americans. What if fifteen big-league games happened today and no Latinos played? Some clubs wouldn’t be able to field a lineup without Triple A call-ups. Over 35% of today’s MLB players, including many of the greatest stars, are from Latin America, and the numbers are going to rise. The third world doesn’t only produce our cheap T-shirts and cool shoes; it also produces our favourite athletic entertainers, including the ones coming from the poverty of the black American underclass. (Hockey, for the most part, avoids this by “virtue” of its fantastically expensive nature. The game has luxury taxes right at the roots.)

Mr. Zirin, as usual, is caustic in his latest column. I can’t always get with his extremism – I like George Will on baseball, for example, though I confess that I haven’t read him otherwise – but Zirin jabs a finger directly on a blister that we don’t want to acknowledge: we will cheer ourselves hoarse for an athlete that many of us wouldn’t want living next door. And there’s the other side of idolatry, too; when we turn against black players (Terrell Owens, Barry Bonds) or Latin ones (is it just me, or did Sammy Sosa take a harder ride than Mark McGwire after the Congressional hearings on steroid use?), it tends to be vicious.

The same dynamic applies to white athletes, too, but to a lesser extent. In professional sports, the performers are idolized or demonized, two sides of the same dehumanized coin. We think little of what conditions they have come from or how many like them are on the scrapheap of thanks for comin’ out, now get lost; and we care little about where they go after their legs do. And we hate them for how much money they make, though we’ll cheer as long as they make us feel better about ourselves.

All the Way With LBJ

Posted by :James Howden On : April 24, 2006
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Here’s a big question in the Toy Department, professional basketball division: has LeBron James, 21-year-old hoops wizard and savvy Goliath of the sneaker wars, done enough this year to be named MVP of the National Basketball Association? Or will he, as I suspect, need to pay further dues? (And just by the way, by what club are these “dues” being collected? Presumably, it’s the CREWS – the Chronically Resentful and Envious Writers of Sports.)

I wish I was seeing more LeBron Live than Magazine LeBron and King James the Pitchman. Even a jaded old dunks-are-overrated dude like me can get a buzz from some of his highlight reels, but there are several things about James that excite me a whole lot more. One of the first times I saw him play, he tapped a loose ball toward a teammate and hustled out to fill a lane on the fastbreak. The dunk at the end was sweet, but I was blown away by his hustle and speed; I’ve ever seen a big man so fast. And he fills up scoresheets, not just the points column, not to mention that with a Sports Illustrated cover in 11th grade (and another at 20 musing about him being “The Best of All Time” when he hadn’t even made the playoffs yet), James has every reason to be a flaming idiot.

My impression is that he isn’t. He speaks thoughtfully, doesn’t appear to think he’s bigger than the game, and his teammates seem to enjoy playing with him.  Best of all – at least until he becomes a philanthropist and advocate for the disadvantaged – LeBron James loves to pass. For a young guy with hops and scoring ability, he understands the game at a high level. He’s rare. I loved what he said last week, which went something like this: it’s cool to get that ‘Oooh’, but when you make the great pass, you get two ‘Ooohs’, one for the dime and one for the dunk. Not to mention that, suddenly, the game isn’t all about ME anymore. Imagine: brothers in short pants doing their thing together. Unselfishly!

Things are looking good for the Association when its Most Valuable Player is likely to be either King James or the reigning king of delivery, Steve Nash. And looking at the dominance of the Pistons, it looks like Team Ball and “playing the right way” (ah, but Larry Brown, where are you now?) are getting cooler by the quarter. Nice!!

Lefties are Right

Posted by :James Howden On : April 10, 2006
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I’m no golf guy, but there are some loyalties too important not to proclaim. I’ve only been on a golf course without windmills 6 or 8 times in my life, but as a member of The Loyal Order of Crooked-Armers, I extend a modest salute to Mr. Mickelson. Big Lefty has won the Masters, a sporting tradition hyped like no other. And Little Lefty, the crooked-armed upholder of the mighty maple leaf, Mike Weir, wasn’t far off the pace, tying for 11th. (Another Canuck, Stephen Ames, was right there with him, though it must be noted that he does hit from the wrong side of the ball.)

I’ve always said that golf is a game I’ll take up when I can’t run and play sports any more. (Oops. That day is dawning.) But I have always swung my hardwood (and, I confess, my aluminium) from the correct side of the plate, and Wayne and I know how to hold a hockey stick. I didn’t actually watch any of the lush and hushed semi-athletic drama from Augusta over the weekend — the pace is too brisk for me — but my golf-fiend big brother took it all in on my behalf. (I’d forgive him his enthusiasm if he didn’t hit from the wrong side. No sexual innuendo intended.) Anyway, my slicing and dicing aside, lefties rule. If it weren’t for that potbelly, I’d say that Mickelson might save golf.

The Reason for Driveways

Posted by :James Howden On : April 6, 2006
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Today, in my driveway, an ungainly apparatus appeared. Wheeled out of my neighbours’ garage, where it had lain in secret for several days, our family basketball goal now dominates our front approaches. (There isn’t much competition.) As is well and proper, our car has been banished to the curb. For the first time since I was 17 at Mom and Dad’s, I have a hoop at my house and, thanks to clever cranks and levers, I can still grab the rim. Thanks, Sam!

Samuel Justice – Number Four Son in your program, tied for first in my heart – turned six today, and we’ve honoured it with a home court. We got through three big brothers without one, somehow. Most often, there just wasn’t a driveway where we lived, but the main reason was that I was the local high school coach and community hoops maven. I had keys to the gym. The older guys got all the basketball they wanted; Ben and Dave were done with competition by grade 10, and Will put down his ball after three years on the high school varsity. We’ll see how long Sam keeps at it. I try to care less, and it seems to work.

This week, he’s going to the Olympics. He has a crazy energy and my-way stubbornness that feels athletic: a long way from coachable, but who needs that when he’s six and just wants to play? His travelling, quadruple-dribbling and truly eccentric version of one-on-one is a blast to play because he laughs the whole time. (He madly chuckled, too, throughout the goofy hockey games on our Tiny Perfect Backyard Rink™ last winter.) He’d rather shoot the ball like his buddy from Sunday school than the way silly old Coach Dad suggests, and he’s so proud when he makes that string music. Thank you, Mr. Naismith! Fathers and sons and driveway hook shots have to be the reason your game was invented. (Either that, or to feed Latrell Sprewell’s family.)

The Dulling of One Shining NCAA Moment

Posted by :James Howden On : April 4, 2006
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It’s possible, just possible, that I may be growing up. (And I’m not sure I like it.) Maybe it’s because I was by myself. I hadn’t loaded up well on munchies. The couch was a bit substandard, as was the amount of suspense – it was over before it was over. But I think it’s mostly me. I didn’t enjoy the NCAA final, the April dénouement to a March of Madness, like I used to in the good ol’ days…

…when Duke or UCLA won…
…when I loved Billy Donovan as a player (before disliking him as a coach)…
…when Billy Packer seemed to offer actual insights into the game…
…when players celebrated a good play with their teammates rather than by themselves, hoping for face-time and 15 seconds of micro-fame…
…and maybe, just maybe, before my extended adolescence finished its 20-year run.

It’s getting harder and harder to stand the commercials. (Especially when Coach K is prostituting his coaching art to hawk cars. Coach, how do you talk about leadership and trust to players who can finish the spiel for you? Absolutely, Coach. That’s why Chevy is the best-selling brand in America!) Except for sport, I don’t watch much network or cable TV, so the firestorm of selling sneaks up on me at times. I suppose, television being one of my most fertile plots of pessimism, that we’re not going to have fewer commercials. But surely the NCAA could reconsider whether teams should have the same number of timeouts available when there’s one coming every four minutes of PT anyway! The live experience of a nationally televised game must be numbing. (It must be like watching an NBA game, with lower sideline production values.) Two thirty-second timeouts per game, one full TO for the last two minutes. Other ‘n that, coaches, you’re at the mercy of the network! (Aren’t we all?)

I’m also finding it harder to ignore the “student-athlete” hypocrisy. Joakim Noah actually mentioned studying in a post-game interview, and my eyes brightened. Wow! You don’t hear that often! I was obviously grasping at an idealistic straw, since he was saying he wouldn’t be doing any. (Still, doesn’t that imply that he does sometimes? See the good, buddy. See the good.) It’s getting harder to enjoy Dick Enberg’s truncated and oddly desperate halftime essay. (Was it your heart that wasn’t in it, Dick, or was it mine?) Stubborn loyalist (doomed addict) that I am, I stayed glued right through the traditional tournament summary “One Shining Moment”, though its clichéd collection of super-hyped images and sentimental pop hasn’t moved me in years. I was hoping.

(See the good.) But at least until the game was over and the microphones came out, it was very hard not to like Joakim Noah. He’s one of the most gifted, interesting and intelligent players I’ve seen in a long time. I hope he and his buddies stick around for another year. I hope UCLA’s guard duo, Farmar and Afflalo, does the same. Come next March, God help me, I’ll almost certainly be watching again.

Four Straight Titles — Does Anybody Hear?

Posted by :James Howden On : March 20, 2006
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If a basketball team wins four straight national championships and hardly anyone notices, does it make a sound? (Does anybody but Mom and Dad meet them at the airport?) Do they go to Disney World? (Or maybe Ray’s Reptiles?) Will they meet the President? (The President, say, of their own university? Okay, this is Canada, and the school is in Ottawa. Maybe the Prime Minister will…Nah.) Wait. I know what happens. Finals are coming; these guys will probably be in class today. (No, Toto, I don’t think we’re talking about the NCAA anymore.)

Yes, the Carleton University Invisible Ravens did it again, and it makes no sense to me. [Editor’s note: they aren’t actually invisible. They just perform amazing feats of tough effort and athletic intelligence and united commitment when hardly anybody’s looking. Yeah, it’s a CIS thing… CIS, not CSI. We’re talkin’ actual people, not TV science cops. Canadian Interuniversity Sport… Yes, they have sports… Yes, they are sometimes on television, if local-access cable counts… No, they’re actually students at the university they play for…Yes, I’m totally serious!)

The Ravens don’t have an actual point guard nor a real post presence. Their most talented player missed the title run with a bum ankle. They’re outsized almost every night. But the Carleton basketball men do have some mysterious and some blatantly obvious qualities that allowed them to win the National Championship again. They’re fiercely competitive, defensively intimidating without either a shot-blocker or on-ball pickpockets, offensively disciplined without being tentative, and they rebound like their erectile function depended on it. Hey, it’s four in a row, kids. Don’t you think some attention should be paid to these guys?

Manny Jean-Marie just doesn’t make a mistake. For my money, he doesn’t make enough; when their gargantuan home winning streak was broken in January, his cautiousness and deference to teammates was exposed. When the Ravens had even less firepower available in the title game, though, he did more than “just being Manny”: his shots were daggers to the UVic Vikings, not just his stops and big boards and every loose ball. When Carleton actually had point guards during his first two seasons, Ryan Bell was an undersized but athletic forward. Yesterday, he convinced me that maybe the Ravens do have a point guard, one who happens to be their best rebounder. Bell took over the game late, and even got some clear-outs called for him when the shooting star had been taken away. (Finally.)

Because it’s not as if that Star, Osvaldo Jeanty, hadn’t already rained enough threes and drained enough clutch off-balance finishes to be named MVP of yesterday’s final. That, my friends, is another Four Straight. The Wizard of Os has been named the Final Ten tournament’s best man twice, including this year, but he has been Mr. Clutch in the national championship game every time he’s played in it. Four for four. (If CIS basketball ever decides to brand itself, they can just modify the Jerry West-inspired NBA logo with an Os silhouette. And unlike the original Mr. Clutch, Osvaldo actually does go to his left.) And next year, he’s gunning to fulfil the goal he set for himself and his team when Dave Smart recruited him: Coach, we’re going to win the CIS five times by the time I’m done. That’s the plan. Even before all those titles, Dave was a confident and spookily focussed guy, but I’ll bet even he had trouble not smirking. Sure, kid. Yeah. The Carleton dynasty. You bet.

Well, now it’s here. This was the year for the rest of the country to get ‘em, especially with star sophomore forward Aaron Doornekamp on the shelf. Their top 8 players, at least, are expected back. Osvaldo, a Business major, has some unfinished biz to take care of. I hope Os takes a day off. The Drive for Five, though, probably started today. Today, this will be a pretty big story in Ottawa, but not for long. I know Carleton students who don’t know much about the Ravens. Listen, I still can get a buzz about big-money athletics, but I must tell you: this is the most interesting ongoing story in my personal Wide World of Sports.

Tournament Time

Posted by :James Howden On : March 13, 2006
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It’s March Break for all the school kiddies, and I still feel like taking a week off. I spent a lot of years desperate for the break from the chalk-stained grind of teaching. I’d have put away my whistle by now, too, because high school ball was finished. Provincial championships were decided last Friday (and who won? I can’t believe how clueless I am these days). The days are longer and brighter and the ice and snow are melting furiously.

But the biggest sign of spring is good ol’ March Madness, the NCAA tournament back with all its hoary old stories that I can’t get enough of: the grizzled old coach faces his protégé, the little-known mid-major David faces the big-time razzle-dazzle Goliath, the hard-luck athlete triumphs over his disadvantaged background…(and who knows, he may even graduate one fine day!)

As much as I love Davids — the teams I coached were generally composed of skinny or lead-footed underdogs with slingshot dreams — I’m pulling for Duke. People say they’re the Evil Empire, that they’re the Yankees, for cryin’ out loud, but I don’t see them that way. They’re good because they’re GOOD, because Mikey recruited ’em good and made ’em better. They play hard. They play together. They graduate. And besides, I Was A Teenage Blue Devil, and later coached for years at that same small-town high school. (“Devils Rule!” was our football team’s favourite slobbering victory chant, which might have been a bit disturbing to our local church elders; thank God nobody paid much attention to high school sports! Whew.) In ’01, I went to a fall coaches’ clinic at Cameron Indoor Stadium, where we could watch the Dookies practice and then hear from Coach K and the boys about what they were trying to accomplish. Their practices were tough, disciplined, ferociously competitive and surprisingly profane.

American college athletics is a deeply hypocritical institution, in many ways, and the abuses in the name of big-time sport are easy to find and may be getting worse. But Lord help me, I still love it. And I’ll be trying to find televisions that receive the Tournament, which my home-rigged antenna most emphatically won’t. (We get TVOntario’s sweet and heady offerings, and the local French stations come in pretty well, thanks.)

And I don’t forget the CIS Nationals. The playing levels and, especially, the TV production values are much higher in the Excited States, but I’ll still be paying attention to the Canadian championships. I’ll be conflicted. My alma mater, McMaster, and its terrific coach Joe Raso will be trying to shed their bridesmaid status; they’ve won four CIS silver medals in his 14 years, so they’re in Vikings/Bills territory. Go, Marauders! If they play Carleton, the team I follow closest now, The Dynasty That Came From Nowhere (or perhaps the Smart family driveway), I can’t lose, I guess. Coach Dave is after his fourth consecutive title, and his teams are astoundingly focused. Go, Ravens!

Yes, and Go, Duke, too! And if the UCLA Bruins meet them in the Final Four, a hinted return to the glory days under John R. Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood and my hero, then I will be a little twisted up for that one, too. Go, Bruins! Go, Everybody! (Cripe, Syracuse even has a Canadian kid, Leo Rautins’s son, so I may even have to pull for the Orange a little. Yecch. But not Florida. Can’t stoop that far.)

And while we’re at it, God bless all the countries…

Jim Rome is Melting

Posted by :James Howden On : March 3, 2006
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If you don’t haunt sports radio, you may not know Jim Rome. I didn’t until I switched on The Team one afternoon and thought their regular 20/20 Sports Update guy was on vacation. This newbie (I first thought he was a young local producer pressed into service) seemed to be trying too hard to make an otherwise-average voice sound radio-rugged and testosterone-friendly. (And it cracks under the strain fairly regularly.) He allowed substantial pauses in delivering his opinions and had no fear (or awareness) of repeating himself. I didn’t know it that first time — I switched it off before long — but I had stumbled into The Jungle, into The Jim Rome Show, one of the biggest talk-radio programs in North America, which goes to show what I know…

Rome is known as “Van Smack” to his “clone” listeners (as in talkin’ smack, which used to be called trash-talkin’, which was once known as poor sportsmanship.) “Have a take. Don’t suck” is the challenge to callers, who try to write their way onto the radio, leapfrog their fellow Clones and attack the sports world’s Target du Jour. They consult their Putdown Thesaurus for the most caustic comments and fight-ring ridicule they can manage, hoping to get “racked” for their verbal punches without being “run” for going below the belt. Though I often find it more of a sociological study — “The American Male in His Basement Habitat” — I have warmed to Rome and his followers. It takes a much younger man than me to find the Jungle as funny as it thinks it is, but I often grin at the sheer goofiness of it. It’s a guilty pleasure. (It makes my wife wonder who she married, though. My vegan anarchist son wonders where he came from.)

Rome is very well-prepared, never slips into ums and ahs, and loves some of the best in sport alongside the cheapshots, cheek by jowl with the masculine gossip about the low points of athletic and other celebrity infamy. (Hello, Barry Bonds! Terrell Owens, who’d you push under the bus today? José Canseco, Paris Hilton, come on down! And how can we mock Michael Jackson this week?) The “King of Smack” also manages to pull in a great roster of guests, ironically enough, because his interviews are as bunny-soft (even fawning, at times) as they are meticulously researched. Rome knows his stuff, knows his demographic, and has parlayed it into a radio empire and a TV show called Jim Rome is Burning, which apparently is a condensed and Clone-free version of the radio program.

There is also a distinct thread of morality that runs through the Jungle. Juvenile my town’s not as stupid as your town rants and freakish obsessions with the screwups of the rich and silly are IN, but racism, homophobia, and primitive attitudes toward women are OUT. It’s oddly touching, the line Rome walks while alternately encouraging and mocking the sophomoric preoccupations of his core audience. But he is a loving husband (Allegedly!) and father, too, and he’s not afraid to get soft and squishy or even to go beyond the pro sports playpen.

Case in point: the Jason McElwain story. (It’s the autistic-boy-makes-three-point-good story, the “Miracle at Greece Athena High”. I wrote about it here.) Wednesday, Rome interviewed J-Mac’s coach, Jim Johnson, and yesterday it was his Mom. The whole thing is heartwarming (though I’m a little worried about Mother-Mac’s talk of a movie deal). These are good people to whom a memorable and soul-stirring thing happened. The coach was a great reminder of what sport should do and be. Jason’s Mom reminded us of what families (and especially, the kids) with special needs go through. “Not a week used to go by without Jason being picked on or teased somehow. Maybe that’s over now. We just hope he’ll be able to get an education.” It was sweet and refreshing, and it was obvious that the Jungle felt good about itself for having invited in such a ray of small-town light.

I like it when Rome gets sentimental, and the Clones eat it up like starving men (and a few deeply appreciative women). It feels like spring cleaning, like a warm and sunny weekend after a dull, slushy work-week. It was a fine series of interviews and commentary on its own, and a superb counter to the smack-tacular content of the average Roman day: dissing and dismissing soccer or the Olympics because there’s no tailgating for it in LA. And hey! Nobody’s masculinity seemed threatened at all.