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Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Italian is poster boy of wafer-thin draft
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
New York — The most intriguing player in a draft laden with intrigue has an upper torso that would be politely be described as scrawny. Hailed as the next Dirk Nowitzki, Andrea Bargnani makes the German look, by way of contrast, like Shaquille O’Neal.
Asked what he needs to develop most, Bargnani said Tuesday: “The body … the defense.” Asked what question he hears most from Italian fans, he said: “Usually people ask me why a big guy plays outside.”
He’s a skinny 7-footer who averaged 12 points a game for Benetton Treviso, the just-crowned Italian champion, and he stands the best chance of being the first player taken tonight. “From the things I’ve been hearing,” said Shelden Williams, believed to be ticketed for the Hawks, “it’ll be this kid Bargnani.” And the description, not to put too fine a point on it, was most apt.
LeBron James looked like a 30-year-old man as a high school senior. Bargnani, who’s 20, looks like he’s 17. He’s skilled but not strong, and he has no idea how powerful the guys who populate the NBA truly are. And if he’s most apt to go No. 1 overall, it tells us the 2006 draft is as thin as one of Bargnani’s arms.
Examples: When last LaMarcus Aldridge played a game, he was outscored 26-4 by LSU’s Glen Davis. When last Tyrus Thomas, who was Davis’ teammate, played a game, he was benched by his coach for a goodly chunk of the Final Four semifinal loss to UCLA. When last Rudy Gay and Hilton Armstrong and Marcus Williams played a game, those massively talented UConn Huskies couldn’t manage to beat George Mason. When last Adam Morrison played a game, he started crying.
Put simply, this isn’t the 1984 draft (Hakeem Olajuwon, Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins, Charles Barkley). This isn’t the 2003 draft (James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade). This is one of the worst crops ever, which is why there’s no consensus among the teams who’ll do the drafting. They’re not so much concerned about who looks great as who looks less bad. And maybe that’s Bargnani, who’s the son of an insurance executive and an English teacher and who met the media Tuesday and spoke — Mama would’ve been proud — passable English.
What would he bring to the team that drafts him? “Maybe I can shoot the ball.” What will he try to develop? “The athletic coach will tell me what I need.” What’s the difference between the league he’s leaving and the one he’ll be joining? “The NBA has a lot of big athletes compared to European athletes.” And was that a legitimate penalty at the end of Italy’s World Cup match against Australia? “Yeah.”
He claimed to weigh 245 pounds, though that seems a trifle ambitious. He liked being in the Big Apple if no other reason that he could find clothes to fit. (Not many shops in Roma cater to 7-footers.) He could walk the streets here and be noticed but not really recognized, which wasn’t a whole lot different from home. “In Italy, soccer players get all the attention.”
Bargnani played an exhibition game two years ago in Toronto, and the Raptors hold the No. 1 pick. General manager Bryan Colangelo has already hired Maurizio Gherardini, who was the GM for Benetton Treviso, as his assistant, prompting speculation that Bargnani-to-Canada is a done deal. But nothing in this fluid draft seems a really done deal, apparently not even the much-rumored Williams-to-Atlanta tacit agreement. (Williams, for the record, said he has been promised nothing by the Hawks.)
And that, on Draft Eve, was where things stood: lots of teams looking for players, not many real players available. Andrea Bargnani might grow into a big-timer in three years, but he wouldn’t have dominated the SEC or the ACC. If he’s the No. 1 pick, it says more about the rest of the players in this draft than it does about him.
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Barbaro, book opening our eyes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
It probably never occurred to you that if Barbaro had been running in a $25,000 claiming race when he went down on Preakness Day, he would have been euthanized on the track. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Barbaro was spared, at great expense, because of his future as a breeder. Let me assure you, though, that even some of the great ones aren’t spared, mercilessly destroyed by brutal owners who have no further use for them once their productive days are done.
This has weighed on my mind since a copy of “After the Finish Line” reached my desk awhile ago, months ago to be shamefully honest. Bill Heller, a writer for Thoroughbred Times, produced it, and I’ve dawdled about trying to decide when and how to get about it. I’ve bred and raced thorougbreds, but I only got close to one, named Middleburg Life, co-owned with Sam Huff of the NFL Huffs. This son of Academy Award won a few races before he came down injured a second time, and it was then that Sam and I agreed that we should find a good home for him, and we did, in a lady’s pasture in Virginia.
Exceller won on dirt and grass, he won on two continents. In the same race, the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park, he beat both Seattle Slew and Affirmed in 1978. Retired to stud, he bred several stakes winners, but was eventually sold to a man in Sweden. It is cruelly ironic that in the same year he was voted into the Hall of Fame at Saratoga, 1997, he was killed in a slaughterhouse in Sweden.
Once it became public knowledge, Exceller’s fate set off a wave of revulsion in this country, but it wasn’t enough to save the life of Ferdinand five years later. You remember Ferdinand. Won the Kentucky Derby in 1986, but when he didn’t produce in the barn, he was exported to Japan, and when he didn’t produce there, was slaughtered. A Kentucky Derby winner becomes dog meat!
It was nearly a year before the news broke in the United States, and a storm of outrage followed. But what kind of a dent did it make in this country? Not enough to halt the rate of slaughter, said to be about 50,000 a year. That includes all varieties, thoroughbreds, quarter horses, standardbreds, ponies, dray horses, just horses. But horse lovers of all sorts have been moved to action by the slaughter of classic champions.
Various and sundry individuals have sprung to the fore, some acting alone, some creating save-the-horse organizations. One was a sports writer from Boston who took early buy-out to pursue his mission in Kentucky. Michael Blowen’s organization is known as Old Friends, located on a farm near Midway, and has found help coming from all directions. One of his first “clients” was a filly by Exceller, sardonically named Narrow Escape. She had failed to get a bid at a major auction, and the auctioneer donated her to Old Friends.
These are just some of the cases Heller tells us about, most all referring to racing thoroughbreds. Not all the horses spared the slaughterhouse have the exciting background of one named Rich in Dallas. Rich in Dallas had portrayed Seabiscuit in the movie, but had soon slipped from view. Blowen found him running in $2,500 claiming races at Los Alamitos, the last step before the slaughterhouse, bought him and moved him to Midway, where he is enjoying pasture retirement.
There are several other organizations dedicated to the humane service of sparing the thoroughbred whose usefulness both on the track and in the breeding shed is over, Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation among others, but they can only skim off the top. Their rescue operation is mainly directed toward the racing horse, for there are people who feel a certain affection for these warriors, lowly as some may have been.
While there are cases of famous horses whose slaughter creates indignation, there are companies in Texas and Pennsylvania, cited in Heller’s book, that run horses through like cars at a car wash. “After the Finish Line” deals mainly with the racing thoroughbred and Heller’s repulsion at the slaughter. I can only scratch the surface here, but let me repeat what Bill Nack wrote after hearing of Ferdinand’s death: “Kentucky Derby winners are not meant to be part of a food chain.”
I can add to that, that no horse is.
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