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Friday, March 9, 2007
Tiger the tail that wags the tour
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Frankly, it boils down to this: That while Tim Finchem occupies the chair of commissioner of professional golf in the United States, the most powerful — or maybe that should read influential — figure is one of the players. As Jack Vickers spoke at the last rites for his International Tournament, it’s Tiger Woods, and El Tigre has just proved again that he is the man at the wheel. When he plays, the event is a guaranteed success, at the gate, on the course and in the television towers. What else is there?
Vickers was left holding the bag after 21 years of trying to breathe life into his tournament at Castle Pines. Not that Woods left The International a casualty by the roadside, but merely by committing to show up he could have given that tournament one more chance at life. Now, is that fair? Perhaps not. Was it Woods’ responsibility to help save the only unique tournament on the PGA Tour? Not necessarily.
Instead, guess what Tiger will be doing on that vacated Fourth of July weekend hole in the schedule? He’ll be the centerpiece of a tournament being played in the Washington area, benefitting the Tiger Woods Foundation. Conjecture is that it will be played on the Congressional course, a U.S. Open venue in years past. (It’s unique in that it’s the only major I know of with a par-3 finishing hole.)
Tiger’s partner in the project will be AT&T, which already has its name on two other tour events, one at Pebble Beach and the new AT&T at Sugarloaf near Atlanta. The title, I hear, will be AT&T National.
For four years, Woods has lent his person to the Deutsche Bank Championship in New England over the Labor Day holiday, another generous contributor to the foundation. He has the two Buick tournaments, representing one of his commercial clients, the Invitational at San Diego and the Buick Open in Michigan. So he virtually has his own tour, considering the majors and those World Championships that draw his favor. It makes him a good “company” man to show up at events dear to the heart of the commissioner.
The truth is, that Finchem needs Woods more than Woods needs Finchem. Each has power peculiar to himself, but it is important to consider that Woods is a free agent. He can move here or there at his own whim, Finchem is locked in the commissioner’s chair, presumably bossman to every player on the PGA Tour, but none who is as essential to his image as Woods. It’s nice when Woods plays ball with the boss, such as signing on for the AT&T National.
“Tiger has a habit of playing in events where the foundation is involved,” Mark Steinberg, his frontman, told Golf World, a confirmation of old news. He found a likely one around the capital of the nation around its birthday. Make no bones about it, what Woods is doing with his foundation is bringing golf and other pleasures to several communities around the country. What he is doing through the First Tee project is an enormous stroke for golf, yet it was somewhat strange that he passed up the Tour Championship last fall, site one of First Tee’s early projects at East Lake.
So, you see, it’s strategically political that Finchem play the game with Woods. I don’t know that he has any other choice, but try giving some thought to the tour as it is today, leaning heavily on its television pot of gold, should there suddenly be no Tiger Woods to bank on. On the other hand, consider Tiger without the PGA Tour for a stage. One hand washes the other, and so on.
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Gators in their own league
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Florida had 17 points before Georgia managed one, and that was your ballgame right there. A great team played great. A pretty good team saw its immediate future spelled out in the glow of the Gator starpower on dazzling display, and that destination read …
N-I-T.
Georgia could play Florida a hundred times and might — might — win once. Georgia has a nice little nucleus. Florida has the whole blessed atom. Florida could well win four more games in the Georgia Dome over the next 23 days, and if they do the Gators would be three-time SEC titlists and back-to-back national champs. Until proved otherwise, this team remains the class of the collegiate game.
It was the Bulldogs’ lousy fortune to run across Florida at a time when their NCAA chances hung by a fraying thread. Georgia tried to convince itself that this was the best time to play the Gators — after the regular season but before the Big Dance — but there’s never a time to play the Gators if you’re Georgia. Not on the last Saturday of October in Jacksonville, and not on any day on any basketball court until the Bulldogs add players and Florida subtracts three or four.
Georgia is pretty good because it tries really hard with what it has. Florida tries just as hard and has five times the resources. No Bulldogs player would start for the Gators. Chris Richard, who’s Florida’s sixth man, is no worse than Takais Brown, who’s Georgia’s leading scorer and rebounder.
The only question about Friday night’s game was whether the Gators would take it seriously, and leads of 17-0, 28-4 and 31-6 supplied the emphatic answer. The three losses Florida suffered in their last three regular-season road games? They were the inevitable February letdown of a team pointing toward March, and if anything they served as coaching tools for Billy Donovan and his assistant Larry Shyatt. Anyone who thinks this team isn’t primed to defend its title(s) suffers from utter delusion.
“You see I haven’t written anything down,” said Ole Miss coach Andy Kennedy, sitting courtside Friday night and ostensibly doing reconnaissance on the Gators. “When you scout a team you look for something to exploit, but with them there’s nothing you can exploit. You can only hope to limit them with surprise and change and smoke and mirrors, and then you hope you shoot it well and they don’t.”
Last month Dennis Felton called Florida the best aggregation he’d faced as a head coach or an assistant, and he spent six years working in the Big East and the ACC. Kennedy went even further back to find antecedents: “The Vegas team of 1991 that we played against [at UAB], the one that went undefeated but lost to Duke, was great, and Duke had some great teams, too. This is a team like that.
Said Sonny Smith, who coached Charles Barkley at Auburn and who does TV commentary for CSS today: “I don’t know that Joe B. Hall ever had a team like this [at Kentucky, and Hall’s Wildcats were 1978 national champs]. I don’t think LSU ever had a team like this, not even with Chris Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal.”
Kentucky’s two-deep 1996 NCAA titlist might have been a match for these Gators 1 through 10, but only five men can play at a time, and Florida’s five is better than the Wildcats’ first unit of 11 years ago. Kennedy again: “They’ve got four guys who’ll be first-round draft picks, and the fifth [Lee Humphrey] is the best open shooter in the country.”
There can be no disgrace in losing to a team of this eminence — disappointment, yes, but no disgrace. Georgia wanted to win Friday so as to be invited to the NCAA tournament. Florida wants to win a second consecutive NCAA tournament. Georgia’s dream wasn’t realistic. Florida’s is.
Permalink | Comments (46) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
Tar Heels have winning look
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Tampa — The starting lineup includes three freshmen and a sophomore. The center has a broken nose. The coach is prone to momentary lapses on geography, and conference, and sport, because that’s the only logical explanation for Roy Williams referring to the ACC tournament Friday as “the world’s largest cocktail party.”
None of this might seem like the backdrop for a national champion. But North Carolina is making the case for being more than just a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.
“They have talent to win the whole thing, and I don’t think it matters if they’re a 1 seed, 2 seed, 3 seed or 4 seed,” said Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton, who, of course, would settle for any seed.
The Tar Heels made their ACC tournament debut Friday, and they did something rather unusual for a favorite. They won. Easily. Despite the masked and freakish-looking Tyler Hansbrough recording nearly as many fouls (five) as points (six), Carolina slapped Florida State 73-58.
Too young?
Too soft?
Too flawed?
Not worthy of a top seed?
Was this the Carolina team everybody’s questioning?
The Tar Heels led Florida State by as many as 25 points. They would’ve won by more but started laughing and nearly hyperventilated.
Don’t wonder about this team any more. Carolina went 5-4 down the stretch, leading some to wonder about its previous lofty status. But Friday, even with their best player, Hansbrough, looking insignificant, the Heels rolled. They have matured. They have gotten smarter and tougher, mentally and physically.
If Carolina slips up while trying to win its first ACC title since 1998, it shouldn’t be overanalyzed, because there’s clearly something in the water down here.
In January, Florida State lost to North Carolina by 26. But Hamilton says there is no comparison between that team and this one. This one’s way better.
“They demonstrated a lot more patience,” he said. “They executed better. They seem to be in sync. It’s very difficult when you play that many players, especially when you have that much youth. Roy has overcome some of [those] development [problems].
“Personally I think the losses they’ve had will probably make them a better team in the tournament. Sometimes when you’re young and growing and having success, you don’t have a chance to look at yourself critically. But when you make mistakes along the way, that’s the time of learning and teaching. With a young team, that’s not at all bad.”
Carolina couldn’t get much from Hansbrough, who was whacked across the schnozzola by Duke’s Gerald Henderson. Hansbrough wore a clear protective mask for protection, prompting teammate Marcus Ginyard to say, “He’s got that ‘Psycho T’ persona, and the mask just makes him look more like an animal.”
Other teammates called him “Jason,” but Hansbrough really wasn’t that intimidating. He said having to wear the mask was frustrating. “I’m not even a guy who gets taped, so putting on a mask really is something new,” he said
He had trouble seeing the ball, which can be a problem when the game you play involves a ball. “It affects my peripheral vision,” he said. “The mask comes down from my nose and sticks out so I can’t see things straight in front of me sometimes.”
Doctors have told him he might have to wear it for two more weeks. What he couldn’t figure out Friday was why he got called for a foul every time he so much as breathed on an FSU player. It’s not like a guy with a broken nose is going to look for somebody to punch. Besides, Duke already left town.
But the Tar Heels should be able to survive with a diminished Hansbrough for a while. The three freshmen — Wayne Ellington, Ty Lawson and Brandan Wright — combined for 43 points against the Seminoles.
Carolina also is motivated to win this tournament for the first time in nine years.
“I haven’t won it since I came back,” Williams said. “Everybody acts like I pooh-pooh the ACC tournament because there’s that thought process that you play for nine weeks, why do you have to play them again in three days? But since we’re here, I want to win this sucker.”
They may also win that other sucker.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC
Dogs rise, but Gators are too tall an order
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
They’re the fifth-best team in a 12-member conference that produced half of last year’s Final Four, fifth-best in a league that had five teams in the Associated Press preseason Top 25. They’re the fifth-best team in the SEC, which has dispatched at least five representatives to each of the past 10 NCAA tournaments, but it’s in keeping with the Georgia Bulldogs’ run of rotten luck that they’ve picked the wrong year to be fifth-best.
Georgia beat Auburn in the first round of the SEC tournament, a result that still leaves the Bulldogs with a fighting chance. All they have to do is beat the reigning national champion tonight, and if they manage that then suddenly the league’s fifth-best team will look like one of the nation’s 35 or so finest outfits. Beat Florida and Georgia is probably — that’s probably, as opposed to positively — bound for the Big Dance.
As we know, not many teams beat Florida. Only five have turned the trick since February 2006, and only one of those (Kansas) managed it on a neutral court. And the Bulldogs cannot count on any sort of crowd advantage tonight in, of all places, the Georgia Dome. As ever, Georgia arrived at the SEC tournament with the smallest complement of fans, which makes no sense unless you’ve grasped just how much pride Bulldog backers seem to take in disliking basketball.
And that, as ever, is a pity. This Georgia team is a clever and resourceful bunch, an assemblage of both pride and principle. “We’re not yet as talented as we need to be,” Dennis Felton said before the tournament commenced, “but we’re still highly, highly competitive.”
The Bulldogs showed as much Thursday, falling behind 10-3 and then dismissing Auburn the way a good team should handle a mediocrity. Georgia led by 10 at the half and by 18 soon thereafter, and a guy sitting courtside was gripped by the same belief he has held since December — that this team is good enough to play in the NCAA.
But the cold numbers, alas, are still rather chilly. Georgia is 18-12. It entered Thursday’s game with an RPI of 63, which isn’t nearly enough for realistic at-large consideration. Then again, the RPI would surely spike upward if the Bulldogs beat Florida, just as Georgia Tech’s did after its victory over North Carolina last week. Winnning tonight would change all dynamics. As Felton said Tuesday, “Two more wins would certainly get us in.”
Discouraging words: Georgia hasn’t beaten Florida since 2004. The Bulldogs lost by 16 in Gainesville in January and by 10 in Athens last month, and the winners were so impressive in the latter game that Felton labeled them, correctly, “a special, special team.” But strange things happen in conference tournaments. Miami beat Maryland on Thursday, and California beat UCLA. And the Gators, who have won the past two SEC tournaments and who know they’re going to be an NCAA No. 2 seed at worst, might not care a great deal about winning here.
This much we know: Georgia cares very much. “If we win this game,” said swingman Billy Humphrey, “we really send a message. We tell the [NCAA tournament] committee, ‘We’ve earned it — give it to us.’?”
Said center Dave Bliss: “We’ve had some amount of success already. Getting to .500 in conference play was a big step. But the bigger goal is to get to the NCAA tournament, and to do that we have to win this game.”
They probably won’t. The Gators are likely too good to lose to these Bulldogs anywhere. And if that’s the case, it will come as cold comfort to Felton and his ambitious men that, for all their conspicuous progress, they wound up being the SEC’s fifth-best team in a year when they needed to be the fourth-best.
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Tech’s loss a puzzle
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Tampa — By the time Georgia Tech stepped onto the court Thursday night, the ACC tournament had already mutated into something unfamiliar.
Maryland lost to Miami.
Duke lost to N.C. State.
Traditionalists lost their lunch.
Fortunately for the Yellow Jackets, they didn’t have to take a form totally unfamiliar to fans. To the contrary, the form they took in the opening round against Wake Forest was a reminder of a painful stretch that led coach Paul Hewitt to take the players’ names off their jerseys.
For most of Thursday’s game against 11th-seeded Wake Forest, the Jackets returned to the often sloppy and defensively lax bunch that drifted to a 2-6 start in the ACC. By the time they woke up, it was too late to discourage an inferior opponent.
The Jackets took the shine off a strong regular-season finish, losing to Wake Forest in double overtime, 114-112. This is the same Wake team Tech beat by 14 only two weeks earlier.
Go figure. The pressure was off to make the NCAA tournament. The confidence was up to win this tournament. This just wasn’t the right time for a logical conclusion.
Try this for logic: In day one of the ACC tournament, seeds 9 through 12 knocked out 5 through 8.
Last year, Tech also was one and done, getting blown out by 18 points by Maryland in Greensboro, N.C. But last year, an early exit was anticipated. This time, the Jackets expected to make it to the weekend. This time, they were toying with thoughts of their first ACC title since 1995.
If Wake Forest looked confused at the outset of the night, it’s understandable. It couldn’t possibly know who to prepare for.
Tech played with two personalities this season, and the Demon Deacons saw both. In January, Wake dumped the Jackets 85-75 (their fourth straight loss). Three weeks later, Tech won the rematch 75-61 in the midst of a 7-2 finishing kick.
Why even bother looking at game tape?
It’s difficult to say who — or what — the Jackets looked like in the first half. They led 37-33 but struggled in the simple areas, like boxing out on the offensive boards.
It didn’t help that the first half amounted to a painful concerto of whistles. Tech and Wake combined for 22 fouls and 29 turnovers. The word “flow” did not come to mind. The words “cruel and unusual,” maybe.
Hewitt had grown accustomed to seeing things run smoothly. He didn’t take this well. He got noticeably heated during a timeout with 3:02 left, imploring his team to play smart and pick up the defensive intensity. That hadn’t been a problem of late. The Jackets had allowed an average of only 67.8 points in the past nine games, compared to 78.8 during a four-game skid that threatened to smother another postseason.
If the Jackets didn’t quite backslide to the team that started 2-6 in the ACC, they certainly didn’t resemble the bunch that followed 6-2. At times against Wake, they looked disjointed and struggled.
Tech led 56-50 eight minutes into the second half, but then went cold at the same time Wake’s Michael Drum got hot. He drained three straight 3-pointers to put the Deacons ahead 64-58. Suddenly Tech was reeling.
At that point, it became a game of survival. Wake built the lead to eight, 70-62. The Jackets came back to pull even at 74-all. Wake jumped ahead 79-74 with 1:39 left after consecutive jumpers by Ishmael Smith.
Over? No.
A Javaris Crittendon driving layup with 13 seconds left tied it, 82-82, but the freshman missed a free throw that would’ve given Tech the lead. The game went to overtime. The Jackets kept falling behind but kept coming back. Anthony Morrow’s 3-pointer with one second left sent it into a second overtime.
Tech took the lead at 111-108. But Harvey Hale (who scored 21 of his 22 points in overtime) hit a pair of 3-point shots to put Wake ahead with 26 seconds left. Morrow had another potential tying shot at the buzzer bounce off the rim and out.
But nobody figured it would come down to that bounce.
Nobody figured we would see this Tech team again.
Permalink | Comments (51) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC
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