AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > June
June 2007
Braves now just a team in transition
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
During 14 full seasons we witnessed the extraordinary. We saw a team finish first every single time. There was no impediment so immense the Braves couldn’t figure a way around it, or over it, or through it. Indeed, if the great streak were still intact we’d be sitting here fully believing they’ll find a way to overhaul the Mets.
But the great streak isn’t intact. It ended last year. And the Braves are something different, something less. They’re the team that, since the beginning of the 2006 season, is 121-121. That’s the definition of ordinary.
They awoke Saturday having won four in a row. They began the week having lost five in a row. That’s what the Braves do now. They look good for a little while, and then they look less good. They have too many gifted players — and too shrewd a manager — to be dismissed, too many holes to be seen as a threat to win the World Series. That used to be the stated goal here every year, but it faded about the time the payroll started coming down.
A lavish payroll, as we know, doesn’t guarantee excellence, but a big-spending team has the luxury of outspending its mistakes. The Braves must now settle for tinkering and tweaking. Should we really be surprised that the team with the 15th-highest payroll among 30 major-league clubs has played .500 ball over the last season and a half?
Credit the Braves for being resourceful. They turned an outfielder into a decent second baseman over the winter, and they’re trying to turn a catcher into a first baseman now. They’ve been buoyed by a new left fielder and a rookie shortstop who has been asked to play two other positions. These maneuvers have kept the Braves afloat at a time when their All-Star center fielder is hitting .199, but it defies rational thought that Willie Harris and Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Yunel Escobar can continue to carry the team Andruw Jones was supposed to carry.
And it defies rational thought that this rotation will be good enough to hold up over three more months. Mike Hampton was supposed to be the linchpin, but he never got started. Mark Redman was supposed to fill the gap, but he’s already gone. Lance Cormier was supposed to be the needed reinforcement, but he’s back on the disabled list with a “tired arm” after yielding seven home runs in 7 2/3 innings.
We keep expecting the Braves to make a trade to rectify the rotation because making big trades is what the Braves used to do. But should we really expect the team that opened the season with a half-new infield to find a difference-making starting pitcher in the next month? And should we really want the Braves to acquire a pitcher who isn’t apt to stay with the Braves beyond this season — Mark Buerhle, say — if it means losing Salty or Escobar?
This is officially a team in transition. It’s no longer the club that can count on massive seasons from the Joneses — Chipper for reasons of health, Andruw for reasons unclear — or seamless performances from the rotation. The staples are staples no more. We knew the great run of first-place finishes would end someday, and now that it has it’s hard to imagine this middling team finishing first, or even a wild-card-worthy second.
And yet we continue to hold out hope that the Braves will think of something again because during 14 full seasons the Braves always thought of something. The sad truth is that these Braves aren’t those Braves. They still have a chance in the East because the Mets lost 14 of their first 18 in June, but the Mets aren’t apt to do that again. The Mets, see, have better players. The Mets, see, have a better team.
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Hawks should have taken Conley
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Let’s see. Going into this week’s NBA draft, the Hawks needed two things: A center and a point guard. So, with a couple of splendid picks overall, they grabbed somebody who is sort of a center at No. 3, and then they grabbed somebody who is sort of a point guard at No. 11.
Yeah, that makes sense.
The Hawks didn’t need another forward of any kind. Even so, they just drafted another one for the sixth consecutive year during the Billy Knight regime.
The Hawks really, really needed a point guard. Instead, they continued their habit of passing on a definitive one in the draft (hello, Chris Paul and Deron Williams) and selected Acie Law, more of a shooting guard than a point guard.
At least the Hawks resisted their urge to risk rolling snake eyes again by ignoring the gamble that is China’s Yi Jianlian. Which brings us to this: You know you’ve been a woeful franchise when the best that can be said about your draft is that you didn’t totally screw it up.
With the Hawks making NBA-ready forward Al Horford the overall No. 3 pick and grabbing clutch-shooting Law eight spots later and letting Yi stay on the board for somebody else, the Hawks didn’t totally screw it up. They just didn’t totally get it right, not with Mike Conley Jr. sitting there as the player they needed the most. He is as engaging as the majority of the Hawks are bland. He’s a great passer, a relentless defender and an accomplished winner. He’s also a definitive point guard.
Not only that, Conley is the Hawks’ Calvin Johnson, and that’s not good.
Just as the Falcons foolishly passed on Johnson in this year’s NFL draft to allow the former Georgia Tech wide receiver to take his charisma and greatness to the Detroit Lions, the Hawks will look as omnisciently impaired as the Falcons when Conley does wonders for the Memphis Grizzlies at the point and at the box office.
The only way the Hawks soften their Conley blows on the horizon is to hope Law isn’t what he appears to be, and that is a glorified Salim Stoudamire. The Hawks already have the real Stoudamire, a prolific shooter in college who showed quickly that he can’t distribute the ball well enough in the pros.
“I mean, [Law] is a point guard, but he’s just a scoring point guard,” Hawks coach Mike Woodson said Friday. “He’s kind of been lumped into this role of being a scorer, because at the end of games, he looks to take over. And I don’t care how you cut it: [Hawks All-Star] Joe [Johnson] is going to be double-teamed, so we’ve got to have guys who can make shots around him.
“I’m not saying Acie is going to be a big-time scorer at this level, but we just felt he could distribute enough and make shots enough for us. At least, that’s what we’re hoping.”
Sound familiar? The Hawks always are “hoping.” They also have this tradition of trying to make a triangle into a circle. When they acquired Johnson from Phoenix, they were adamant he’d lose his shoot-first mentality and run their offense. The Joe Johnson Experiment at point guard lasted closer to days than weeks.
Now the Hawks have the Al Horford Experiment at center. He spent most of his time helping Florida win back-to-back national titles as a power forward. The Hawks could keep the 6-foot-10 Horford at his natural position and ease their self-inflicted glut of “3s” and “4s” by acquiring an experienced point guard. The guy mentioned the most in trade rumors is Seattle’s Luke Ridnour. Such a move would create more questions.
For instance: If Ridnour is among the Hawks’ answers, why was he splitting playing time with the great Earl Watson for an awful Sonics team?
If the Hawks were going to trade for a point guard, why did they use such a high pick on Law?
Why didn’t they just get Conley?
Permalink | Comments (222) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Terence Moore
Hawks take right players, next step
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Sitting in the first row of Philips Arena, Michael Gearon Sr. cocked an ear. “No boos,” he said, sampling the initial reaction to the announcement that the Hawks, the team in which Gearon Sr. holds ownership, had taken Al Horford.
And then there came a round of booing. Not a full-blown roar — Adam Keefe’s name was greeted by a full-blown roar in 1992 — but boos all the same. It will be the first and last time Al Horford is booed in Philips Arena.
The Hawks did well Thursday night. The Hawks got the players they needed — a big man and a guard — in the best possible combination. With picks No. 3 and 11, Billy Knight had to weigh a package of Horford and Acie Law IV against one including Mike Conley Jr. and, say, Al Thornton. “We felt this is better,” Knight said, and there’s no disagreement here.
Horford was clearly the draft’s third-biggest talent. “A unique combination,” Knight kept saying. Also this: “You don’t usually see power players like him,” meaning power players who can pass and shoot and defend and, above all, play multiple positions. It’s entirely possible, Knight conceded, that Horford, who’s listed as a forward, could become the Hawks’ starting center.
It’s likewise possible that Law will start at point guard before the 2008-2009 season is through. (If he doesn’t, the Hawks will have miscalculated.) He’s not exactly what you’d want in a distributor — “Unorthodox,” was how Knight described Law’s game — but he’s the guy you want working in tandem Joe Johnson. Law is used to having the ball in his hands at the end of games, and he’s accustomed to making game-winning shots.
“We have to have a shooter alongside Joe,” Knight said, the reason being that Johnson, alone among incumbent Hawks, draws double-teams. Double-teams mean open shots for somebody else. Law is a master of the contested shot; imagine what he’ll do if nobody deigns to guard him.
(And why, you’re doubtless wondering, not pick Conley at No. 3? Said Mike Woodson, the Hawks’ coach: “He couldn’t shoot the ball.” End of discussion.)
The Hawks transformed themselves with this draft. Just like that, the team with too many wingmen and no real direction has a shape and a balance it has lacked since the late ’90s. This should be a playoff team next spring. Even Knight, who has consistently backed away from such proclamations, is backing away no longer. “We’re ready to move past [just having a gaggle of young players],” he said. “Their games have to translate to us winning.”
Said Woodson: “This is the season we’ve got to make a move. It’s very pivotal we get to the playoffs.”
After reading Internet reports that the All-Star Amare Stoudemire was bound for Atlanta in a tripartite trade, there might be some civic disappointment today over having to make do with two collegians. There shouldn’t be. That deal was never close to being consummated, and rumors that the Hawks’ front office was divided over the No. 3 pick — some owners were said to have preferred Yi Jianlian — were put to rest with the selection of Horford. For once, this organization functioned as an organization should: It did its homework and made sound decisions.
As Bob Williams, the arena’s president, told Gearon Sr. in the hallway: “This is a defining moment for the team.” Indeed, after this draft we all need to redefine our longstanding image of the Hawks. They no longer seem luckless or clueless. They got a break in the lottery and maximized it. They drafted the right guys at the right time.
And in the end, even the Philips audience seemed satisfied. When Law’s name was announced, there were only cheers. Not one boo. Miracle of miracles.
Permalink | Comments (183) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Mark Bradley
Don’t believe the draft hype
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
For about eight hours, all the speculation about draft picks — Horford or Conley or Yi? — was tabled. Maybe not in the real world, but definitely in the wide world of Internet sports. The Hawks were about to land Amare Stoudemire, a first-team All-Star.
And then, after we’d all worked ourselves into a lather, they weren’t.
And that’s the trouble with the wide world of Internet sports. Rumors spread so quickly they’re taken as fact. No matter what happens tonight, some Hawks fans will remember the 2007 draft as the time at least one Hawks owner passed on acquiring Stoudemire. That’s the latest report from by ESPN.com. Here’s the key sentence: “On Wednesday, sources say one of the Hawks owners vetoed a hypothetical deal for Stoudemire for financial reasons.”
Note, please: “A hypothetical deal.” But wouldn’t a real deal — sorry, Mr. Holyfield — require some input from Stoudemire’s current team? Here, from the Arizona Republic, is this telling paragraph:
” ‘We’ve never spoken with Atlanta about Amare,’ Suns general manager Steve Kerr said Wednesday night, when he also called Stoudemire to assure him all rumors were bogus. ‘We have no idea why anybody would speculate on that.’ “
The Hawks might still wind up with Stoudemire, though it’s tough to imagine any team giving away a 24-year-old All-Star (even if it gets Kevin Garnett in return). But suddenly the story, at least the cyber-driven version, has gone from the Hawks being in prime position to improve themselves via the draft to the Hawks’ owners squabbling again. ( ESPN.com, again citing “sources,” contended the dissenting owner in the “hypothetical deal” was — you guessed it — Steve Belkin.) And word is also flying — from ESPN.com and its “sources” yet again — that Billy Knight wants to draft Al Horford at No. 3 but is being pressured to take Yi Jianlian by Michael Gearon Jr.
I don’t know what will happen tonight, but I do know Knight and I do know Gearon Jr. And I can’t imagine the owner who has steadfastly supported his GM in every conversation I’ve ever had with him — and I’ve had several lengthy ones — would order the man he considers one of the best talent evaluators in the business to go against his instincts. Nor can I imagine Knight, who famously refused to shake Belkin’s hand in a Boston courtroom, going along with such a decree.
I’m not going to pretend that Atlanta Spirit LLC is the new paradigm of a successful ownership group. But everything I know about the non-Belkin faction leads me to believe it will back Billy Knight to the bitter end. Until proven otherwise, I’m still viewing this draft as the GM’s moment to define his franchise, not to defer to someone else.
Permalink | Comments (99) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Mark Bradley
Expect a good Knight for Hawks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Call me silly. (Go ahead. I’ll wait.) Call me crazy. (Get it out of your system.) But I believe the Hawks, who have become to the NBA draft what the Buffalo Bills were to the Super Bowl, are about to defy all skeptical expectations. I believe they’re going to have a really big night.
I believe this because I’ve listened to Billy Knight, and I believe the usually inscrutable GM grasps the magnitude of the gift he has been handed. The Hawks entered the lottery not knowing if they’d have a first-round pick; by grace of the ping-pong balls, they exited with two of the first 11. Such luck has rarely kissed this franchise. Such a windfall, at this late date, cannot be squandered.
And this realization, I submit, is why Knight sounds different than in past Junes. In the run-up to previous drafts he worked hard at saying nothing. This week he all but issued a proclamation: “After three years of adding players, we’re in position to make a move.”
That doesn’t mean accumulating more talent without heed to actual positions. That doesn’t mean drafting somebody who won’t contribute until 2009. That means using picks No. 3 and 11 to turn a mismatched roster into a real team. That means using picks No. 3 and 11 to find, either in the draft or via trade, the two commodities Knight hasn’t yet procured — size and steering.
This draft has more good big guys than good little ones. For all the clamor to acquire a point guard (much of it raised in this space), I’m not sure Knight will see his way clear to take Mike Conley Jr. at No. 3. I believe he’ll use that pick to address size. Late speculation holds that they’re enamored with Yi Jianlian, who’s 7-foot and Chinese but who isn’t a true center and who had middling numbers (6.2 points and 5.7 rebounds) in the 2006 world championships. In sum, he’s not Yao Ming.
A better option exists. Al Horford would give the Hawks the heft they lack and would add a touch of championship class to the roster. And then, having filled one need, the Hawks would be able to spend the 11th pick on the other.
Conley probably won’t be around then. (If he is, the Hawks won’t just have gotten lucky; they’ll have broken the bank.) Knight will have to decide between using the pick on a project — Javaris Crittenton isn’t quite ready and Acie Law isn’t quite a point guard — or using it to land someone more established. (Seattle’s Luke Ridnour is a popular name, but I’m not sure averaging 11 points for a team that won one more game than Atlanta stamps him as the answer.) But the key here isn’t that the Hawks are seeking a guard: It’s that Knight admits as much.
“We think we’re going to get a guard in this whole deal,” he said, and by Knight’s lights that amounts to a major concession. The Hawks, as we know, gave every possible excuse — Marvin Williams was too good to pass up, Marcus Williams wasn’t good enough to take at No. 5 — to keep from drafting a point guard the past two drafts, but now they’re saying what we’ve all known all along. They need a point guard above and beyond Speedy Claxton.
For as much as we all have ridiculed this team and this GM, the Hawks aren’t far away. With the probable exception of Shelden Williams, Knight hasn’t yet made a truly rotten Round 1 pick. His sin has been in not taking the right guy at the right time. Tonight he gets the chance — two chances, actually — to get it right at last.
I like the way he’s approaching this draft. (I wouldn’t have said the same last year or the year before.) I like that Knight, who has often seemed maddeningly indifferent to the passage of time, appears to have developed a sense of urgency. Come midnight, I don’t think we’re going to saying, “See? Same old Hawks.” I think we’ll be saying, “Nice job, Billy.”
And if the night ends with Amare Stoudemire coming here, we’ll be calling Billy Knight a magician.
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Hawks thinking wrong on draft
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Uh-oh.
The more you listen, the more it sounds like the Hawks are infatuated with Yi Jianlian, a projected first-round pick in Thursday’s NBA draft not named Mike Conley Jr.
Can Jianlian’s wonderful play against Chinese competition translate into a productive NBA career?
Maybe.
Does Conley’s three state titles as a prolific point guard in high school before leading Ohio State to the NCAA title game last season mean he can prosper with the big boys of the pros?
Definitely.
So why mess around with a “maybe” instead of a “definitely?” The answer: We’re talking about the Hawks here.
Yi is another one of those “long and athletic” types that Hawks general manager Billy Knight craves. In other words, here’s what Knight and his lieutenants likely are thinking: At 7 feet and 247 pounds, Yi would give them the big guy they need. He also would create a buzz for a boring franchise as the Hawks’ Yao Ming with a heavy dash of Dirk Nowitzki.
The Hawks do need a big guy, but they really, really need a point guard. So, with that No. 3 pick in the overall draft, they can’t afford to do what they have done in these situations: Blow it by passing on another “definitely” at point guard.
Hello, Chris Paul and Deron Williams.
Could Conley be available when the Hawks pick again at No. 11 overall?
Maybe. There’s that word again.
Permalink | Comments (149) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Quick Hit
For so many fans, Munson is the Bulldogs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
College football, in its moleskin and hightop-shoes days, grew up with those unseen heroes of the broadcast booth. Television was yet no more than a wisp of somebody’s imagination. Your team was identified with an old familiar voice. You turned on the old Philco or Atwater Kent and out came this familiar tone bringing to life in words the stars you knew otherwise only through headlines and blurry newsprint. You and your favorite broadcaster thereby became close kilocycle friends.
Once television came along, gradually moving through the “snowflake” stages to high definition, taking over your game room with huge, enveloping screens, the old broadcaster was sort of lost in the dust. Some, not all. Larry Munson not only held his place, but seemed to grow in the affection of the loyal Georgia Bulldogs follower. At least television never cut into his faithful populace. You identified Georgia football and Munson, Munson and Georgia football. You wondered how and why, since every game day the stadium was packed and rolling with woofing patrons decked out in some combination of the colors red and black.
Dramatic moments in Georgia football are etched in history by something Munson blurted out in one of his totally spontaneous verbal creations. It came across in a vinegary voice that cannot be imitated, hoarse and throaty and strictly Munson. You may have watched it by television, but chances are the televised voice was drowned out by a radio tuned to Munson.
My exposure to Munson has been limited. I was in some press box somewhere, trying to create something of my own. But I had time. Munson had no delete button on his voice. Once it was said, it was history. To this day, though, he has never found himself impounded by something carelessly thrown out across the air. The late, great Ted Husing once described a Harvard quarterback’s play as “putrid,” for which he was subsequently banned from Harvard games.
Well, time closes in, and Munson has decided to draw the curtain. Imagine, if you can, a Georgia football game broadcast without Munson presiding in his crackling description. (“The Dawgs line up at the Auburn 5, and …”) How all these men of broadcast have become as much a part of the game as the coach, many of them gone, but, oh, the sounds they left behind — John Fulton, Jim Fyffe, Al Ciraldo, Stan Torgerson, John Ferguson, and the pioneers, Ted Husing, Graham MacNamee, and — Georgians, hold your breath — Bill Munday.
Munday came first. Famed nationally, as one of “The Big Three” with Husing and MacNamee. He was the original Munson, with phrasing distinct only to himself. Brought down by booze, reduced to operating an elevator in city hall before he was rediscovered and brought back in the ’50s, dried out and infused with his passion. Munson will depart with a far broader reverence, when the time does come, and it would be this old crock’s expectation that Scott Howard steps into the breech.
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Hawks can’t pass on Conley
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The Hawks are on the verge of becoming the Hawks again. They are two days shy of doing the wrong thing by using their No. 3 pick overall in the NBA draft to grab another “long and athletic” guy (Billy Knight’s words) for an already stuffed frontcourt.
This time, Shelden Williams, Josh Smith, Solomon Jones, Josh Childress and Marvin Williams are named Al Horford.
This time, the Hawks can save themselves from themselves. All they have to do is take a deep breath, count slowly to 10 and repeat the following: We need a point guard. We need somebody with charisma. We need a natural leader.
We need Mike Conley Jr.
The thing is, Conley’s pre-draft workout Monday at Philips Arena was more for show than for real. Horford likely is the Hawks’ choice at No. 3. If so, they’ll use their No. 11 pick in the draft for Acie Law or Javaris Crittenton, the inferior point guards in this mix. Then Conley will become the latest Chris Paul and Deron Williams by evolving into an instant success for somebody else when he could have done the same for the Hawks.
“If I could play in Atlanta, and then become a star along the way, wow, that really would be something for me, especially since I grew up in a small Arkansas town [Fayetteville],” said Conley, sounding older than 19, while flashing his bright smile after he impressed witnesses by using his 6-foot-1, 180-pound frame to become a blur during drills. “To work with all of the young guys that they have on this team, and to be known in a city like this would really be great. I’d love the opportunity.”
We’re talking about somebody who is a wonderful passer, splendid in the clutch, plays defense with passion and can make Tony Parker-like penetrations in the lane. It’s just that Conley has to dribble his way around conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom says Horford is the most NBA-ready player in the draft. Conventional wisdom says the young and slight Conley is a reach at the No. 3 pick, especially since critics question his jump shot.
The thing is, conventional wisdom only works in professional sports when you’re talking about a franchise that has flashed signs through the years of having any kind of wisdom.
In other words, the Hawks should forget about conventional wisdom and remember how they blew the 2005 draft by ignoring Paul and Williams.
The foolish have spent years ignoring Conley in basketball. He’s been lost in the massive shadow of Greg Oden, projected as the draft’s No. 1 pick. After Conley’s family moved from Fayetteville to Indianapolis, Conley joined Oden in leading their high school to three consecutive state championships. They also were together last season as freshmen during Ohio State’s run to the NCAA championship game. In fact, the same Conley who supposedly can’t shoot went 7-for-13 from the field for 20 points against a Florida team with three players slated to go in the top 10 in this week’s draft.
“I coached [Mike] and Greg since they were about 10 years old, and since that time, they’ve lost only 16 games altogether,” said Mike Conley Sr., the former world-class track star, in town with his son. The older Conley serves as an agent for Oden and the younger Conley.
Once, when the younger Conley was 8 years old, the older Conley popped in a video of himself running the 200 meters at Arkansas. “I was the proud father showing my son how fast I used to run, and how I took second place in college against a silver medalist in the Olympic Games,” recalled the older Conley. As the younger Conley watched the video, he burst into tears after the older Conley crossed the finish line. “He was crying like crazy and saying, ‘You lost, Daddy. I can’t believe you lost.’ That tells you how competitive he’s always been. You can’t teach that.”
No, but you can draft that.
Permalink | Comments (116) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Terence Moore
Braves have bigger problems than squabble
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
The worst thing about this is it’s not even a he said/he said. What do you call this: He suggested/he perceived?
Whatever happened to the days when guys just threw punches?
Can’t this team even fight right?
“I think if anybody questioned whether or not someone is hurt, you’re questioning their heart, their integrity, their dignity,” Chipper Jones said Sunday. “Most people don’t react [well] to having their heart questioned.”
OK, I get it. Chipper got his feelings hurt because John said something he shouldn’t have (and for the record, I find it difficult to believe that EVERYBODY took certain remarks one way when Smoltz meant them another).
Chipper got mad. John got upset.
Back in the day, this kind of exchange often was followed by, “Oh yeah!?! Meet you after school! By the bike racks!”
Hey, here’s an idea guys: Win a game.
The Braves shifted into damage control Sunday. They’re not used to having even the most mild of squabbles play out publicly. The dugout and the clubhouse belong to Bobby Cox. Everything else belongs to John Schuerholz, who assured all of us: “We are a team full of humans. I’ve never signed an android.” (For the record, Dan Kolb was animal, vegetable or mineral.)
But the uniqueness of this situation — an open disagreement between two team leaders (for the sake of argument) — shouldn’t lead anybody to believe the clubhouse is being ripped apart at the seams.
If you want to play amateur psychologist and project that this venting somehow will turn into a great bonding agent for the Braves, have at it, Dr. Jung.
But a group hug by Cox, Smoltz and Chipper is not suddenly going to make sense of the Braves rotation or help Andruw Jones break .200 because, like, duh.
As far for fights, or arguments, or whatever, they happen all the time. (Jones: “We’re together eight months out of the year. You’re gonna have little riffs here and there. We’ve had our share.”) The Braves just do a better job than most keeping things quiet.
Other teams and managers have a different philosophy.
Some just don’t care.
Jim Leyland, the Detroit Tigers’ manager, is as beloved by his players as Cox. But he has operated around bonfires his entire career. In Pittsburgh, he managed Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla and other assorted explosives. He has twice managed Gary Sheffield, whose interviews can be a daily stream of unconsciousness.
This whole concept of getting along — way overrated, Leyland said.
“I know that’s always been big with some people — clubhouse chemistry,” Leyland said. “That’s the most overblown thing in the world. It’s all bull. When I was in Pittsburgh, we had fights in the clubhouse. Did it matter? We still won three division titles. I’ve had teams that went out to dinner together and chapel together and they couldn’t win a freakin’ game.
“It’s big in the media, ‘Oh, he’s great in the clubhouse.’ Let me tell you something: I don’t give a [hoot] what he’s like in the clubhouse. I care what he’s like in the batter’s box, on the mound, or shortstop, or centerfield. People are different. Personalities are different. That’s OK.”
Leyland did not want to address the Braves’ situation. But he has been in similar situations. He never cared.
“Do I want my players talking about a teammate in the newspaper? I really don’t care if they do or not,” Leyland said. “But they’ve got to be held accountable — not by me, but by their teammate or somebody else. If some player wants to say, ‘Jim Leyland is a horse[bleep] manager, then say it. The next day I might say, ‘Maybe he’s right. But I think he’s a horse[bleep] player.’ I don’t have a problem with people speaking their mind.”
The Braves: Different story. Cox hates this (“It’s over. It’s all taken care of. Enough said.”). He orchestrated the meeting of the angry minds Sunday.
Smoltz spoke on briefly, calling it a “total misunderstanding.”
Jones, who homered Saturday and started again Sunday, says he’s playing now because he feels better, not because he perceived he was being called out.
Also this: “We’re both a little embarrassed that it got outside this clubhouse.”
Fact is, the Braves have several reasons to be embarrassed. But look on the field, look in the standings. This should be way down the list.
Permalink | Comments (104) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
Pro baseball glamorous but uncertain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
A newlywed wife of one of the young Braves asked her husband the other day, “What kind of business is this? They move players around like cattle.”
Professional baseball is, indeed, harsh and heartless. Nothing is guaranteed. A Brave one season, on the road to Pearl, Miss., or on a bench in the Kansas City, or even riding as bus over the Appalachians the next. The Braves once had a corps of young prospects, and they banded together like a Scout troop. They stayed in touch after the season. They went to each other’s weddings. Atlanta was hometown to a lot of them. They thought it would never be over. You belonged, your membership was good forever.
Then reality set in. It began to come apart. Adam LaRoche was traded to Pittsburgh, and there went one of the golf guys. A couple of the pitchers came down with arm troubles. A month after the season opened, Ryan Langerhans was traded to Oakland, and what the Braves got in return was that embarrassing Joe PTBNL. In other words, “player to be named later.”
Before he even got unpacked in Oakland, Langerhans was on his way to Washington. Two games and out. What did the A’s want with him in the first place? With the Nationals he would be just one of three guys with the first name of Ryan. He, Church and Zimmerman. At least Pat Corrales was Manny Acta’s bench assistant, and he knew him from Braves days. Things never got much better. His batting average is still under .200.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, some of the guys were kicking up some dust. Kelly Johnson, one of the Texans, had stamped his label on second base. Marcus Giles wasn’t being missed at all. Scott Thorman, Canadian, also a newlywed, wasn’t another Adam LaRoche, but the kid was outhitting him. Adam had developed a critics chorus in Pittsburgh. Thorman had his good days, a long ball now and then, but he was still on learning status around the bag.
The Braves have made some strange moves this short season. All of a sudden John Schuerholz announces that Brian McCann has been signed to a six-year contract for about $26 million. Good investment. Could stand some defensive polish, but he’s a prize commodity. Quite a sight, seeing the bearded kid walking off the field with the bearded old guy, Bob Wickman, after they’ve put a good finish together. No doubt, you want McCann around a long time, but this goes against the business line.
It was early in David Justice’s days as a Brave. He was already a star, but hadn’t reached arbitration stage yet. He was given a modest raise, when I said to Schuerholz one day, “Why don’t you go ahead and give him a big contract, then he’d be easier to deal with when the time comes.”
He looked at me as if I was mad. “You think he’d settle for less because we were generous with him now? It doesn’t work that way.” But now it does, and McCann benefits from the change in executive stance. Now along comes Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and they’re overstocked with catchers, and down the road there’s more heavy negotiating ahead.
Now, to get around to the case of Macay McBride. Signed for a plump bonus out of Sylvania a few seasons ago, a first-round investment. Surely his future was here, only left-hander in the bullpen, but he came with the traditional left-handed problem — control. Suddenly last week, McBride was told he had been traded to Detroit. Shock. Disbelief. He wouldn’t have to leave town, only switch clubhouses. The Tigers were coming in.
Here was a kid who had grown up in Georgia, a Braves fan, found his home with them, concluded that he was a Brave for life, and now he was a Tiger. Traded for another left-hander, Wilfredo Ledezma, who had walked more batters than he struck out. You want a Spanish accent, he’d speak Spanish. It was the suddenness of it. Lifted one night with two out in the ninth, traded the next day. Just one of the cattle, eh?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
Reading college football crystal ball
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
If I thought Georgia could ever win in Jacksonville, I’d pick the Bulldogs to take the SEC East. But I don’t, so I won’t. If I thought Georgia Tech would benefit from Reggie Ball’s absence as much as many Jackets fans do, I’d pick Tech to win the ACC Coastal. But I don’t, so I won’t.
Yes, it’s time for the annual long-range look at college football, a feature guaranteed to bring me nothing but grief once the actual games begin. So why do I continue to offer up such predictions? Because deep down you know there’d be a void in your lives if I didn’t.
— Georgia will go 10-2 and come within an eyelash of rendering the reigning BCS titlist a runner-up in its own division. I see the Bulldogs winning in Knoxville but losing in Tuscaloosa. Part of me even envisions Georgia beating Florida on Oct. 27. Then another part — the brain, I believe it’s called — recalls that the Bulldogs stopped enjoying Jacksonville about the same time Vince Dooley stopped coaching.
— Alabama will win as many games (nine) as Auburn. That sound you hear is the Tigers’ window of opportunity slamming shut. Nick Saban isn’t a very nice guy, but he’s a very good coach. He’ll have the Tide playing for the SEC title within two years.
— Auburn had the schedule to play for the BCS title last season but lost twice at home. This year the Tigers must face those conquerors — Arkansas and Georgia — on the road. They must also go to Baton Rouge and to Gainesville. That’s not a championship schedule. That’s a bound-for-the-Chick-Fil-a Bowl schedule.
— Virginia Tech will win the ACC and will, for obvious reasons, become an even bigger story than last year’s ACC champ (Wake Forest) was.
— Wake Forest will finish 6-6 as reality rears its head.
— Southern Cal will play Texas for the BCS title. Southern Cal will win this time.
— LSU will again have the SEC’s most talented team and will again lose twice — once when the Tigers go to Tuscaloosa and get outcoached by the guy who used to coach them and then against Florida in the SEC championship game. That will serve as payback for the Gators’ loss in Baton Rouge on Oct. 6.
— Georgia Tech will go 8-4. One magazine projects the Jackets as a Top 15 team, but I can’t imagine how losing the nation’s most talented player and a four-year starting quarterback makes you better. Yes, Taylor Bennett looked good throwing to Calvin Johnson in the Gator Bowl, but Johnson could make any quarterback look good. (Even Reggie Ball — sometimes.) Tech was staring at a breakthrough season last November and couldn’t beat Georgia or Wake. Sorry, but I don’t see this year’s Jackets being quite as good.
— I see Florida State being lots better with Jimbo Fisher calling plays. I see the Seminoles winning the ACC Atlantic.
— Darren McFadden won’t win the Heisman because he’ll get hurt. (Louisville’s Brian Brohm will take the trophy.) Stripped of his best player and fan support, Houston Nutt will step down before Thanksgiving. He’ll announce his resignation via text message.
— Speaking of the ‘Ville: The Cardinals will lose at West Virginia on Nov. 8 in a Thursday-night matchup of unbeatens. And the Mountaineers will go 12-0 but will be barred from the BCS title game because Southern Cal and Texas will be similarly undefeated. And the drumbeat for a playoff system will sound again. And it will, as ever, go unheeded by those in position to make it happen.
— Phillip Fulmer will be replaced by David Cutcliffe the first week in December. (The final straw will be Tennessee losing to Kentucky for the first time since 1984.) Hearing the news, Johnny Majors will laugh deep into January.
Permalink | Comments (219) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
Don’t gripe if Hawks draft Horford at 3
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Just because the Detroit Lions drafted dud wide receivers in years past doesn’t mean Calvin Johnson will be a similar dud. Just because the Hawks should have taken point guards with their first picks of previous drafts doesn’t mean they should take one this time.
Mike Conley Jr. is a fine player who was, over the three weeks of March Madness, the NCAA tournament’s MVP. Conley is a point guard, and the Hawks, as the world knows, still lack one of those. But the guess is that they won’t make Conley the draft’s No. 3 selection, and they might not make him the No. 11 even if he’s available.
The belief here is that the Hawks will keep the No. 3 pick and spend it on Al Horford. And before you start screaming, “Another forward!”, be advised that Horford isn’t a replica of any current Hawks player. He’s a polished power forward who’s close to being a center. He’s not quite Tim Duncan, but he surely has elements of the splendid Spur about him.
Horford can shoot — he improved his jumper hugely from Florida’s first title run to its second — and can rebound and block shots, and mostly he can pass. Like all those delightful Gators, he knows how to play. Brandan Wright could well develop into a Horford in two years’ time, but Horford is already there. In a draft where there’s a gap between the top two players and everybody else, Horford seems clearly the best of the rest.
He can bring to the Hawks what Billy Knight, thinking wistfully, hoped Shelden Williams would. And if you’re thinking Horford would simply wind up playing behind Josh Smith at power forward — obviously you’d want a dead solid starter from such a lofty slot — remember that Smith will be a free agent after next season and could be packaged, perhaps with the No. 11 pick, in a trade for a seasoned point guard. (Mike Bibby, maybe?)
Even if Smith and Horford wind up on the same roster, they aren’t necessarily overlapping talents. Horford can work with his back to the basket. Smith can play small forward. (Stop me if you’ve heard this, but Knight likes guys who can man multiple positions.) And no, Horford isn’t a point guard, but there’s a greater issue: If the Hawks didn’t feel Marcus Williams, whose body and skills were more suited to the NBA than Conley’s, was worth the No. 5 pick last year, why would they believe Conley is worth the No. 3 this time?
Conley is 6 feet 1 and 175 pounds. He didn’t make more than two treys in any game last season. Back when Knight and I were on speaking terms, he told me, “So many possessions in the NBA wind up with the ball in the point guard’s hands with five seconds on the shot clock.” For that reason, I always believed he preferred Deron Williams — who’s bigger and stronger and who shoots better from distance — to Chris Paul. (Stop me if you’ve heard this, but Knight wound up not taking either.)
For that reason, I believe there’s a guard who could well be available at No. 11 who fits what Knight wants more than Conley, more than Acie Law. Javaris Crittenton is, depending on which listing you trust, 6-4 or 6-5. He’s very strong. He shoots the trey effortlessly. He’s not yet a polished distributor, but he shows signs. Is he ready to start for an NBA team? Not in Year 1, but he’s capable of doing as Jarrett Jack did in Portland, working as a sub for a season before taking over.
I don’t know that Horford and Crittenton would put the Hawks in the playoffs next season, but they would in 2009 and for several years beyond. Drafting Horford and dealing for Bibby would have greater immediate impact, but if the Hawks are serious about wanting to keep all their young players, taking this big forward and this big point guard would be, ahem, big steps forward.
Permalink | Comments (140) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Mark Bradley
There’s no replacing Larry Munson
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The question of the day — ‘Who’ll be the next Munson?’ — is fun to ponder but utterly off-point. There’ll be no next Munson because no radio announcer will ever again mean to any audience what Larry Munson has meant to Georgia.
Munson is essentially the last of his kind. He became the voice of a team at a time when radio was the primary link to that team. Today, with almost every game available on live TV, radio has been rendered a curio. Yes, Georgia fans are famous for turning down the TV sound and listening to ol’ Larry, but will they do the same when ol’ Larry isn’t around to growl and fret and break his chair on-air?
Look around. Wherever a beloved radio voice of long standing has stepped down, the replacement voice has had a muted impact. Bob Kesling does a nice job at Tennessee, but Kesling isn’t John Ward. Ralph Hacker became an object of scorn when he took Cawood Ledford’s seat at Kentucky, and Tom Leach, who has since succeeded Hacker, is a pro who knows his stuff. But Leach isn’t Ledford. Nobody could be. The medium and the marketplace have simply changed too much.
Munson didn’t just become the voice of the Bulldogs. He became the eyes of Bulldog Nation. The Rex Robinson game in Lexington — October 1978, Munson hollering, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” — wasn’t on live TV. The epic Herschel Game in Knoxville wasn’t on live TV. The Auburn game of 1982 — “Look at the sugar falling from the sky!” — wasn’t on live TV. If you wanted to know how the Dawgs were doing, you couldn’t rely on the cathode-ray tube. You had to listen to Larry.
Munson came along at a time when radio men weren’t just announcers but storytellers. Today we can flip on the TV and see, in glorious high-def, whether or not it’s raining on the Bulldogs in Jacksonville or whether or not Auburn is acting like she wants to score between the hedges. We can follow the stats with GameTracker. We don’t have to rely on one voice, even a great and distinctive voice.
The best Munson’s eventual successor — and I’d love to see Jeff Dantzler, who’s smart and funny and who has a great grasp of Georgia and its history, get a shot — can hope is that he’ll be judged in the context of the world as it is and not the world we remember. If the young Larry Munson were coming along today, he couldn’t possibly become the Larry Munson we came to know and love. This is 2007, not 1966. And radio, sad to say, belongs to yesteryear.
Permalink | Comments (108) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
Benching Andruw a good move by Cox
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Given the possible forces of nature that have conspired to scramble Andruw Jones’ head and liposuct his batting average, you would have expected some drastic remedy by now.
In Curaçao, where Jones is from, many still practice forms of voodoo. I’m thinking we wouldn’t have made it past May without some sort of spiritual sledgehammer. But in Atlanta, all the Braves’ struggling center fielder had to show for himself was a .202 batting average and beaded necklaces hanging in his locker.
“People just give them to me,” he said. “They’re not for luck.”
Not going to hang a dead chicken?
“No. Hopefully not.”
The problem isn’t what Jones is hitting but when he’s hitting it. Two years ago he was hitting .175 when he asked Bobby Cox to rest him in a game in Washington. But that was in April. (He came back to hit close to .300 with 22 homers in May and June.)
But it’s already late June. Jones’ average is so anemic that agent Scott Boras may have to fabricate two secret bidders for his client, not just one. You don’t dig holes like this without paying some sort of price in free agency.
Jones is on a pace for 592 at-bats. With a .202 average, he would need to hit .289 the rest of the season just to finish at .250. History and logic scream: He ain’t hitting .289 the rest of the season.
You worried Jones would have to take a hometown discount to remain a Brave. But he’s already marked down.
The Braves closed out a series [mercifully] against Boston Wednesday. Cox didn’t sacrifice a chicken (he would opt for a starting pitcher first). But he did bench Jones.
It was only the second time this season Jones was scratched, the other in Game 2 of a doubleheader at Boston. So this makes twice he was absent against the Red Sox, who last season inquired about trading for him. (Stats Boras hasn’t kept: Jones is 0-for-17 with seven strikeouts against Boston this season. Coco Crisp, who might’ve been dealt here in return, hit a three-run homer.)
Now, the Braves are trying to act calm about all this. But they had already dropped Jones in the order. Benching him against the best team in baseball — twice — is significant.
Jones probably inadvertently put it best when he said: “I think [Cox] just felt like we can play without me.”
He says he’s not feeling the pressure of impending free agency. He says he has never hit for average (though adding: “I never was a .200 hitter”). He claims his home run and RBI numbers aren’t far off (actually, they are).
He is understating his struggles, and everybody around him knows it.
“I’m just trying to get him to settle down and relax, do what he can do instead of what everybody expects him to do,” hitting coach Terry Pendleton said. “The toughest part is trying to get him to slow down. He’s trying to rush. He’s trying to make up 50 points with one swing. He’s trying to drive in 10 runs with one swing. He can’t do that. It’s impossible.”
Jones says he doesn’t pay attention to the criticism.
“We all say that,” Pendleton said. “He hears a lot. He’s just trying to prove people wrong. Some guys just say, ‘Forget that.’ “
General manager John Schuerholz said he has “genuine frustration” and “genuine wonderment” about Jones’ plight. But he still believes there will be a market correction.
“A player who is 30 years old and has the body of work he has, he’s eventually going to [return to form],” he said.
Jones actually was looking forward to sitting out. “It’ll be good to just rest and watch the game from the bench, get the extra day off, and come back Friday and start a new series,” he said.
This was a good one to miss. With a blindfold. The Red Sox won 11-0. But the Braves, despite losing 12 of 18, are only 1 1/2 games out of first place.
Some things, like that deficit, can be overcome. But .202 in late June — not so much.
Jones says he doesn’t feel the heat. The numbers and his absence Wednesday say otherwise.
Permalink | Comments (60) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
U.S. Open drought continues
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
It may not have occurred to you, but the last time our Open golf championship traveled overseas for the fourth time in a row, William Howard Taft was president. And, coincidentally, Mr. Taft was the first president to have tinkered with golf. It’s probable that his handicap was, that because of his considerable girth, he had trouble seeing the ball.
In those days, leading up to 1910, we Americans were still trying to get the hang of the game. Players were imported from Scotland or England to teach us, and every country club had to have a professional from one of the two, or it was somewhat behind the times. Finally, in 1911 the first American won the U.S. Open, then John McDermott won it again the next year. Then came the upset of the ages, when a caddie at the Brookline club in Massachusetts, a mere lad by the name of Francis Ouimet, beat both Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, the two most acclaimed pros in the world, in a playoff, and our rocket was launched.
Americans have pretty much defended the flag staunchly from that time forward. An occasional foreigner would crash the home country line, but from Long Jim Barnes down through the years to David Graham, our national championship stayed home. The Masters, though, through its international goodwill, began to open the shores. Gary Player finally broke our monopoly, and in the 1980s and ’90s, foreign guests were stocking up on green jackets, Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, Nick Faldo, Jose Maria Olazabal and Vijay Singh, native of Fiji, though a longtime resident of Florida.
Our Open, though, was pretty zealously defended, thanks mainly to Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and with occasional intervention by Hale Irwin. Then came a renewed foreign insurgence, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, both South African, and both of whom won it twice. Then Michael Campbell of New Zealand, Goeff Ogilvy of Australia, who won just standing around, watching Phil Mickelson crash (“I am such an idiot,” he wailed, and who was to disagree), and now the latest from the south of us, Angel Cabrera of Argentina.
Remember when Palmer used to toss his cigarette away while he putted? And Lloyd Mangrum, who left a trail of smoke wherever he went, and many another inhaler? Well, you wouldn’t believe these bloggers who have taken the whip to Cabrera, who had the audacity to light up on the course at Oakmont during his run to the championship. He is a rather oddly conformed golf player, constructed along the lines of a blocking back or a pulling guard, and the rolling walk which inspired the nickname of “The Duck.” Not a figure to be envied.
It came across as something of a disappointment that he had to rely on a translator to caddie him through press conferences. Roberto de Vicenzo did not, for I recall, after he had disqualified himself by signing for the wrong score at Augusta, he scolded himself with, ‘I am such a stupid.”
What I’m getting around to here is the absence of home-grown contenders, beyond Tiger Woods, Mickelson and Jim Furyk, clubbed himself out of a playoff at Oakmont. Where have the guys gone who were once looked upon to carry the challenge? Davis Love, once No. 3 in the world, had a three-year drought until he picked off the Greensboro tournament, on a course he designed, and is now down to No. 35. David Toms, except for the PGA Championship he won at Atlanta Athletic Club, rollicks along making happy in familiar precincts at New Orleans and Memphis. He made a slight push at Oakmont but finished fifth and now ranks 20th.
After Mike Weir won the World Golf Championship, then followed it up with the Tour Championship and the Masters, he was ready to join the giants. Then he disappeared. He is now ranked No. 45. Charles Howell has never caught fire. Chris DiMarco’s big moment remains the winning putt in one of those Presidents Cups. Chad Campbell was once forecast as the next great American player. He’s now just another guy from Texas. All of this has opened the course for the revival of Scott Verplank and Steve Stricker, and the rise of a few guys named Boo, Bubba, Zach and Brett.
What it all comes down to, it seems, is this: Give me a few good endorsements, let me score well enough to get some good television time, let me make a good living, and let the majors fall where they may, Argentina, South Africa or wherever. Come on, guys, how about one for the home team?
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Golf
“Pacman” ablaze in controversy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN…
10: So I’m curious. If you’re Adam “Pacman” Jones and you’ve just released a statement that says, “I met with [Roger Goodell] to tell him about the steps I have taken to change my life since being suspended by the NFL,” where exactly does being wanted for questioning in a shooting at an Atlanta strip club at 4:15 a.m. fit in?
9: Michael Huyghue, Jones’ agent, claimed last week his client would be spending the off-season working out and taking online courses from West Virginia. So I guess we’re to assume that Club Blaze on Moreland Avenue actually is a 24-hour Internet cafe. With a topless support staff. And laptop dances.
8: Maybe Michael Vick just doesn’t like camp.
7: Would the last Georgia Tech player who leaves the building please turn out the season?
6: Paul Hewitt will tell you that the Jackets will be just fine without Javaris Crittenton and Thaddeus Young (neither of whom, by the way, are ready for the NBA). But losing the team’s two leading scorers can’t exactly be termed a step forward. Especially when they’re only freshmen. Even in this one-and-done era, Hewitt never could have anticipated he would lose both.
5: Delta has renamed several of its 757s the “Hank Aaron 755.” There also were plans to rename an MD-88 in honor of Barry Bonds. But the plane mysteriously morphed into a space shuttle in the off-season and the head couldn’t fit into the hangar.
4: Just wondering how Leo Mazzone likes the view now in Baltimore. The Orioles fired his buddy, manager Sam Perlozzo. Mazzone worked for Bobby Cox for 15 seasons. He worked for Perlozzo for 20 months.
3: Michael Vick has canceled an appearance in his kitchen later today because of “scheduling” conflicts.
2: Kobe Bryant asked to be traded. Then he recanted. Now he has asked to be traded again. Is there any way that clause in Billy Donovan’s contract banning him from the NBA for five years can be imposed on this guy?
1: Pacman’s Internet study group will meet tonight in Sugarloaf, at Lisa Ann Taylor’s house.
Permalink | Comments (197) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Local fans don’t measure up
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
It’s a free country. You’re allowed to root for the team of your choice. But every so often there comes an Atlanta sporting event that makes you wonder if this is still Atlanta and if there’s such a thing as an Atlanta sports fan.
Monday night was another installment in a weird and distressing series, a night when the titular host was made to feel like a tourist. To report that there were more Red Sox fans than Braves backers at Turner Field would be a slight exaggeration. To report that the 20,000 Boston zealots shouted down the home folks — at least until the old nemesis Curt Schilling got shelled — would fall under the heading of distressing old news.
“Sounded like more Red Sox fans,” said Jeff Francoeur, who was asked if such a thing bothered him. “It doesn’t when you’re winning.”
Such a thing, as we know, has happened here often. It happened in 2003, when legions of Cubs fans celebrated a Division Series clinching. It happened in 1994, when Pacers people flew in by the planeload knowing there’d be playoff tickets available at the old Omni. It happens whenever the Cowboys or Steelers play at the Dome. Question is, will it ever stop happening?
This has been a big-league city for more than 40 years. That’s time enough for the local franchises to have imprinted themselves on the marketplace, except that ours remains the trendiest of towns. Our imprints are issued in washable crayon.
Mike Fratello said he knew his Hawks had arrived in the late ’80s only because there weren’t as many “green people” in the Omni when the snooty Celtics came calling.
The Braves were hot in the early ’90s, when the Tomahawk Chop became a weapon of intimidation. But here it was a Monday night in June 2007, and the sections directly behind home plate included patrons with jerseys bearing the names Ortiz and Ramirez and Schilling and Varitek and Youklis and Papelbon, none of whom play for the Braves.
“It was like this in Oakland,” said Gordon Edes of The Boston Globe, once an AJC colleague. “It was crazy in Arizona, where [the Sox] had never played a regular-season game before. And with ticket prices the way they are in Fenway, it’s almost cheaper to fly to Baltimore for a game there.”
But why is it always this way here? The Atlanta Braves have won just as many World Series since 1918 as the beloved Sox, but hardy New Englanders are passionate about their team in a way we Atlantans seldom get about any of ours. Maybe we’re too transient a city for such roots to grow. But if that’s true, then how do you explain our mania for college football?
“It’s kind of a bummer,” said Mike Mills, the bassist/keyboardist/singer for R.E.M., speaking of the proliferation of Sox fans around him. (Mills has standing in the matter, being a longtime supporter of Atlanta teams and a Braves season-ticket holder.)
“It’s crazy,” said Grady Baxley, who’s from that famous Bosox bastion of Jacksonville, Fla. “We couldn’t believe how many [fellow Sox believers] are here.”
Baxley’s traveling party included three other Sox-lovers. Two were wearing David Ortiz’s name and number. Matthew Gilligan, who grew up in South Boston, sported a “Cowboy Up” T-shirt from the 2003 Sox postseason and a red “B” on his biceps.
It’s a free country. You’re allowed to bear the tattoo of your choice. But every so often there comes a scene that makes you wish Atlanta sports fans would take it upon themselves to Cowboy Up.
This baseball team has been really good for a really long time. Just because this ballpark doesn’t have a Green Monster doesn’t mean it shouldn’t brim with the same hometown fervor as the famous Fenway. But it rarely does, and whose fault is that?
Permalink | Comments (356) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Oakmont wins; trophy heads offshore
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Oakmont, Pa. — Well, they know now. Oakmont is just as tough as they said it was, even without the trees. Tiger Woods did his best to replace them, but he fell a stroke short. (You know, Woods for trees. Oh, well.)
They came from around the world to attack this old American original, and once again Oakmont won, but once again America’s golf championship took a trip overseas.
Three years ago it traveled to South Africa with Retief Goosen. Two years ago it went to New Zealand with Michael Campbell. Last year it moved to Australia with Goeff Ogilvy. This time it’s Argentina, and an interpreter was required. Angel Cabrera is 37 years old, speaks limited English, but plays world class golf. He plays the American tour, accepts American moolah, but when it comes to public speaking he is comfortable only with a translator at his side.
It wasn’t a pretty thing. The early part of the day, it looked as if nobody wanted to win it. The first hole set off a series of crashes. The overnight leader, Aaron Baddeley, triple-bogeyed. Bubba Watson double-bogeyed. Justin Rose bogeyed. Paul Casey missed a birdie putt no longer than his arm. Cabrera parred and was never over par the rest of the scrambling round on his trip to the moon.
He has taken the pledge with the PGA Tour, but still goes home to Cordoba in Argentina, where he took his first steps into golf as a caddie.
Oh, this should be a glorifying moment for the AFLAC duck. Cabrera is known as El Pato, Spanish for duck, probably for his waddling stride, though this has not been confirmed. He has won championships around the world, 15 of them, and has come close in some of the World Golf Championships, but this was his first inside these borders, and it didn’t come easy. Just when he should have been coasting home, he bogeyed the par-3 16th hole, which was playing at its extreme, and followed with another bogey on the par-4 17th, which had been birdie-bait this week. Then he finished his second round of 69 this week and went into seclusion while Jim Furyk and Woods took their shots at his 285, 5-over par, and fell back.
The 21-year-old rookie, Anthony Kim of Dallas, had whipped around the course in 67 strokes early in the day, and it looked as if Oakmont might be a soft touch.
No such thing, surely not for Furyk, who was even par, nor for Woods, who was 2 over. The 69 Woods shot Saturday seemed to have left him low on ammunition, and after he double-bogeyed one of the “Church Pew” holes Sunday, he was never on his game the rest of the day.
Still, he had one last downhill putt on the 18th green that would have set up a playoff today. The ball rolled harmlessly off line, right of the hole. Cabrera was shown on camera, celebrating with his caddie.
Crusty old Oakmont fought back with its usual resistance, and took its toll on the best players this national championship could attract. After the round Woods played Saturday, inspiring such gushing commentary on the network telecast, the charge his worshipful followers expected never came off Sunday. That round Saturday, so vigorously serenaded, still netted him a gain of only one stroke.
Play began Sunday looking like the club championship at Wretched Hollow. It picked up in tension, but old Oakmont kept its guard up, and throughout the four days of play, par was broken only eight times. Thus, the national golf championship remains outside our borders. Next year, California gets it chance when the Open moves to Torrey Pines, near San Diego.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Watson learns from Tiger, can’t beat him
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Oakmont, Pa. — Don’t think for a minute that I expected Bubba Watson to win the U.S. Open. Not at Oakmont, of all courses. But he’s making headway. Three years ago he missed the cut and finished 87th. This time he made the final pairing Saturday afternoon, and that’s pretty hot stuff for a guy from Bagdad, Fla. Yokel country to these Western Pennsylvanians.
Better watch your tongue there. That panhandle part of Florida is pretty rich golf country, and taking a few bows. Bubba and his pal Boo Weekley sound like a production out of Hanna-Barbera, the cartoon filmmakers. But Bubba is our main man today. He may sound like something out of Li’l Abner, but Bubba has been to college. He was All-American at Faulkner State Community College in Alabama, then not only made the team, but was a second-team All-SEC golfer at Georgia before he decided it was time to get on with his challenge to Tiger Woods.
As a matter of fact, he didn’t shuffle around and “aw shucks” his way to Tiger; he went straight to the mountain himself. He just walked up to Tiger and asked how about playing a practice round with him. Tiger goes out early to beat the gonkers, so Bubba started showing up early. “I bug him enough, he just lets me play with him,” Bubba said. “I just ask him a bunch of questions, like a little dog nipping at his heels, and see how he ticks, and he lets me do that.”
Tiger hits the ball a long way, but Bubba hits it farther. He hits it farther than anybody else on the PGA Tour. “I blast it by him all the time,” Watson said. “He always talks about his majors and I always talk about how far I hit it.”
Bubba is anything but a yokel. Dresses well, always neat and tidy, firm jaw and neatly barbered. And he’s left-handed, in case I forgot to tell you. Bagdad is not some kind of society center. Doesn’t have a stoplight, just a few stores and a post office downtown, and when Bubba was growing up, he walked to school every morning. His father was a Green Beret, just like Tiger’s, and if you’re into names, his real one is Gerry Lester Watson. He hates it.
Bubba is getting a double dose of language education this week. He and his pal, Boo, were paired with Japan’s Nobuhiro Masuda the first two days, then his partner Saturday was Angel Cabrera of Argentina. All was going well early on. In fact, he held the lead at one time, then came the ninth hole. This is the most unusual hole you’ll find on any U.S. Open course. Part of it is the practice green and the lower part is in play. Here is where Bubba blew a fuse and let the game get away from him. A triple bogey took him right out of it.
He’ll be kicking himself, and should, for he blew his cool, and whatever chance he had to move up. He doesn’t have a swing coach. Fitness is a foreign word to him. He hates running and he hates lifting weights. “I don’t want to change anything. I don’t want to change my body shape. I like things the way they are.”
He might take a closer look at Tiger’s contours. Ever notice those biceps and shoulders on a trim, lithe body?
Well, to get down to it, after a full afternoon of Tiger gushing and a thousand of idiots bellowing, “In the hole,” let’s just get it on and get it over. All those challengers expected to be barking at his heels are out of town or out of it. For Bubba Watson, there’ll be another year.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Only belt, not tie, will satisfy ex-champ dad Holyfield
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Sunday is Father’s Day. Evander Holyfield is training in Houston. His kids are all somewhere else.
And he beat me to the punch(line).
“I’m sure they’ll call me,” Holyfield said by phone, laughing. “But if I get 11 phone calls, I’ll be on the phone all day.”
It would be nice if that were all he did today.
“Former heavyweight champion, 44, suffers cauliflower ear from excessive wishes. Brain safe.” We could live with that.
Not Holyfield. He has fought 51 times as a pro. It appears he will fight well beyond 52.
In two weeks, Holyfield will meet Lou Savarese in El Paso. Then maybe they can catch the early bird special at Denny’s. Savarese turns 42 next month and is recently back from his own two-year “retirement.”
If nothing else, the danger level appears low for this one. According to the world rankings on Boxrec.com, which is not affiliated with any sanctioning body, Holyfield is ranked 58th among heavyweights. Savarese is 121st. At 125th, you’re legally dead in 17 states.
Now it’s clear why these guys won’t stop: They can fight each other.
We see a red light. Holyfield sees no worse than a flashing yellow, when he sees at all. (“He can’t see the right hand coming anymore,” said Don Turner, his former trainer.)
On this Father’s Day, he won’t put on slippers and a robe, or smile while eating burnt toast, or collapse and veg in a hammock. He’ll just train for another fight.
“Sometimes my kids will say, ‘Why do you have to work on your birthday?’?” Holyfield said. “But this is how I live. It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday. If you take one day off, it can mess up the whole year. I don’t do that.”
We see a finish line. He follows an endless line.
Win this, Holyfield said, and there’s a “95 percent chance” he’ll land a title fight against one Sultan Ibragimov, belt-buckle holder of the lesser known WBO title.
“When I said my objective was to be undisputed champion again, I had it in my mind that it would be the WBA, WBC and IBF,” Holyfield said. “I wasn’t even thinking WBO. But since they’re first, I’ll take it.”
Yes, the man is no position to tell the WBO, “You are beneath me.”
Consider the lack of buzz surrounding his comeback, his title chase and almost everything boxing-related these days. The heavyweight title is fractured into little pieces. It doesn’t account for much on the sports landscape even when whole. The belts are owned by a Ukranian (Wladimir Klitchko), two Russians (Ibragimov and Oleg Maskaev) and a guy from Uzbekistan (Ruslan Chagaev).
In Kiev, this sells.
To reach this pool of heavyweight obscurity, Holyfield wades through the division’s flotsam: Jeremy Bates, Fres Oquendo, Vinny Maddalone, Savarese. He works his way down the food chain of Texas cities: Dallas, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, El Paso. A legend is now a Trivial Pursuit game.
Promoters are trying all avenues to sell this. Holyfield gave a pep talk to the Houston Texans. (They presented him with a No. 5 jersey, an allusion to his quest to be five-time champion.) On June 26, four days before the fight, he’ll be a “bench coach” for the El Paso Diablos, a minor-league baseball team. He’ll probably give another speech and bring out the lineup card.
Projected impact on pay-per-view: negligible.
That’s not a big concern for Holyfield. Soft competition notwithstanding, he’s won three in a row and he says his body feels good. He watches film of training sessions and sees the reflexes returning. It doesn’t matter what anybody else sees.
His kids will come to the fight. The older ones no longer ask him when he’s going to stop.
“Like I tell them, you have to set goals for yourself and you can’t let somebody else determine what you do,” he said. “If I mess up because of something I did, I can live with that. If I mess up because of something somebody else tells me to do, I would have to live with that, too. So at the end of the day, it going to be about how I feel.”
And he’s just not feeling the slippers.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Jeff Schultz
Tiger steals ink; Bubba grabs glory
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Oakmont, Pa. — Call the cops! Oakmont has stolen Tiger Woods’ game.
You know how it is when Tiger is in any tournament. All things revolve around him. The first round of the U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club, Tiger was one among 16 players who checked in at 1 over the par 70. A nice young Englishman, 25-year-old Nick Dougherty from Liverpool, took the lead with a 68. But whose picture was on the front page of the paper dropped at my door? Tiger Woods.
There was a small print of what we used to call a half-column cut of Dougherty on the inside, so since there’s no one else to tell you about Nick, I’ll fill you in briefly: He is tall and slender, is playing his sixth season on the European Tour, and has won one time, the Singapore Masters, which has a pretty impressive ring in our environs.
Nick didn’t have a very good day Friday, but another Brit stepped up to fill the void, Paul Casey, who has made a few headlines in the United States. Came over here to school at Arizona State, then went back to tell the homefolks all the things he didn’t like about Americans. He has won eight times on the EuroTour, plus another, the WGC-World Cup in 2004, shared with Luke Donald. Then he stuck it to Our Side again when he delivered a hole-in-one in the Ryder Cup matches the USA lost so ingloriously in Ireland.
Casey went out early Friday, 7:33 in fact, in the company of Stewart Cink, and when the day was done, put a round of 66 on the board. Now, memories are hard to shake off around here, so this week there has been a lot of talk about the round of 63 that Johnny Miller posted and won the Open here in 1973, especially since Miller is around doing his own memories on television.
Some able historians right away said Casey’s 66 was stronger than Miller’s 63. Both played on the same course, and yet not. Rain had softened the course the night before Miller’s final round. Arnold Palmer said he might have turned the juice on Johnny, but his putter failed him, and it wound up that Miller only had to beat the less-than-renowed John Schlee home. Besides, par then was 284. Par today is 280. A different world and a different course, but what does that matter. It’s only Friday.
Meanwhile, somewhere out on this cruel acreage, Tiger Woods was still slashing away, in the new furrowed hazards, the “Church Pew” bunkers, just trying to gain some ground on all those ahead of him. Casey was one of them, but his 66 still left him 3-over par, but only six guys were ahead of him. It hasn’t been easy to hold a lead on this daunting course, whose main intention is to intimidate. If you want a definition of “tough,” Oakmont is it. It was built to be tough, and the members like it that way. Twenty is a good handicap around here.
One of those hovering around the lead was Bubba Watson, the left-handed swinger who played at the University of Georgia, then headed for bigger game. Bubba comes from that hotbed of golf in the Florida Panhandle, Milton High School, which has produced Boo Weekley and Heath Slocum. The improbability of Bubba Watson contending at a U.S. Open is almost too much to digest, everywhere but in Bagdad — the Florida one — his hometown.
Sadly, Bubba made five bogeys and finished the day in second place at 1-over par. Oops, word just in. Woods bogeyed No. 7 — his 16th hole — and his name came off the leaderboard. I tell you, it’s tough out there on the hostile grasses of Oakmont.
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Braves’ road not taken took Bonds toward 756
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
With No. 755 so close to becoming secondary in baseball’s record books to No. 756, there are several questions to ponder involving Barry Bonds as an almost Braves player. For instance: What if he spends the past 14 or 15 seasons in Atlanta while chasing the all-time home run record held by franchise icon Hank Aaron?
In contrast to now, does Aaron say he will attend games featuring Bonds on the verge of snatching his slugging crown, especially since Aaron is becoming more active as a Braves executive?
Consider, too, that Bonds is from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he has played for the hometown Giants for more than a decade. The BALCO labs also were from that region, and they contributed to Bonds’ controversy with performance-enhancing drugs. If he leaves those wicked influences on the West Coast and spends the bulk of his career in Georgia, does he remain a lean but potent Hall of Famer in waiting? Or does he continue to evolve into just another artificially enhanced slugger with an expanding cap size?
Here’s another thing: Given the Braves Way, which stresses team over individual (no earrings, no lounge chair or big-screen television at your locker, no special group of handlers in the clubhouse), is the Braves’ Bonds a kinder, gentler soul instead of the Giants’ Bonds who is as likeable to many as a stale box of Cracker Jack?
“I would like to think we would have had a great and positive influence on Barry, because off the field, every time I’ve talked to Barry, he’s been great,” said John Smoltz, the Braves pitching ace and resident historian. “It just seems like the scenarios he’s been in and the atmosphere that he’s been in, for whatever reason, have become the news that we’ve known.”
Not good news, by the way. Bonds has served as the poster child in baseball’s steroids mess. He allegedly said during the BALCO investigation that he didn’t knowingly use the stuff, and he also has refused to deny taking amphetamines through the years. As a result, you even had former Braves standout and eternal nice-guy Dale Murphy blasting Bonds last week during a TV interview.
Bonds, a Brave? Just doesn’t sound right for many reasons. Even so, the Braves easily could have had the guy.
Twice.
There was the first time that John Schuerholz discusses in his recently published book. He wrote of agreeing to a deal with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the spring of 1992 that would have brought Bonds to town in exchange for reliever Alejandro Pena and a couple of prospects. Instead, former Pirates manager Jim Leyland exploded with the secret news, and the Pirates reneged at the last minute.
The second time was a year later, when Bonds was a free agent. He signed with the Giants, but here’s the rest of the story: He told me that summer of 1993 that he was so convinced he’d join the Braves that he went house shopping in Atlanta the previous autumn. That’s when his Pirates played the Braves for the National League pennant. Said Bonds, frowning, “Atlanta just didn’t want me, man.”
Schuerholz said a shrinking budget forced him to choose between Bonds, the huge free-agent slugger, and Greg Maddux, the huge free-agent pitcher.
Right choice? Well, I’m taking Bonds, especially since those Braves teams were loaded with pitching, but Smoltz smiled, saying, “That’s really a tough one to answer. Greg won four straight Cy Young Awards. So we’ve seen over the years, to answer that fairly, what great pitching can do to great hitting.”
Some combination of Cy Maddux, Cy Glavine and Cy Smoltz got the Braves a record 14 straight division titles, but only one world title. With (seven-time) MVP Bonds, they probably win fewer division titles but more world championships.
“As you’ve heard me say before, Barry Bonds is the best player I’ve ever played against,” Smoltz said. “This is one of those questions you can toss up, spit out and not come up with a really good answer.”
Or any answer.
Permalink | Comments (50) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
Course will provide entertainment
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Oakmont, Pa.— Before we go any further with this U.S Open, the l07th, if you’re keeping score, there are a few little items that should be brought before the house. First, let me say that there shall be no discussion of the wrist in golf. We all know a wrist is very important to the swing, but haven’t we sort of overdone Phil Mickelson’s? (What about his putting?) And that guy walking along with him on the course holding his hand the other day. Who do they think they’re kidding? (Just kiddin’.)
Nor will we speculate on just how becoming a father will change Tiger Woods’ game. Most of us males have all become a father at some time or another — three times for me — but never did it affect the Earth’s rotation such as this one. I read somewhere the other day this story headlined “Fatherhood Fits Tiger Well.”
Swell. I think that’s just great. I don’t know how the study was made, but I presume that Mrs. Woods was included among those consulted. I’ll say this, that being a father, and raising my three sons, was the highlight of my life.
We’re here, at Oakmont Country Club — the president is a Georgia Bulldog, by the way, Bill Griffin out of Morgan County — to play the national golf championship on a course that’s pretty much the same as it was when it was created in 1903. It was simply plopped down along this acreage along Hulton Road, and here it lies. Greens were laid out on ground the way Mr. H.C. Fownes found it. No bulldozers, no shapers, no false ponds. You might say the original designer was God. It is, to continue its mystique, the only golf course in the country with an interstate highway running through it, I-76. Otherwise known as the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
You’ve read, too, I’d suppose, about how the course is “treeless.” Stripped over the years by a carefully and slyly managed program, cutting out a few here and a few there until there wasn’t tree left on the course. Well, that’s not altogether true. There are trees all over the place, spreading oaks and elms and beech and so on, but not on the course itself. None of the trees left affect play. The quality of golf was not affected, though Joyce Kilmer would have been crushed. You know, “I think that I shall never see,” and so on.
Hear what Arnold Palmer says of Oakmont. (He lives about 45 minutes away.) “Some golf courses you play and get comfortable with. Oakmont just doesn’t happen to be. I’ve played it since I was 12 years old, and I’m still not sure I understand it.”
Oakmont is a golf course meant for the U.S. Open. It plays hard and it plays mean. It can be stretched out to a length of 7,230 yards, not exasperatingly long by any means. But it’s deviltry is not wrapped up in the length, it’s undulation and harsh greens. Since I first came here in 1973, the year of Johnny Miller’s 63, I’ve parked by the 10th green hours at a time for some of golf’s cruellest entertainment. The hole is 462 yards, all downhill, to a green that’s also downhill, with a serious slant. By the end of the Open, it’s a good bet that the 10th hole will have taken the most blood. It’s like watching a horror movie.
The USGA elves take delight in their clever pairings. For instance, all three of the Spaniards, Jose-Maria Olazabal, Sergio Garcia and Pablo Martin were lumped together. Worked for Jose-Maria, who came in at 70. It had to be in a moment of high humor when Boo Weekley and Bubba Watson, the two drawling Floridians, were paired with Nobuhiro Masuda from Japan, who was heard to say afterward, “Don’t anybody around here speak American?” In Japanese, of course.
Best bet: Not one of the heavyweights will win this Open. Pick your favorite underdog.
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Little E now on big team
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Mooresville, N.C. — Let’s start by squashing any lingering concerns that Dale Earnhardt Jr. might still struggle to distinguish himself from his legendary namesake and others on the NASCAR circuit.
Because the only way Earnhardt could distinguish himself any more right now is if he was dipped in dayglow orange.
He is leaving the company started by and still named for his father. He declared himself a free agent with six months left in the season. And after five weeks of playing footsie with competing teams, Earnhardt said Wednesday he is going to race next season with his current chief rival.
I realize several things are unique to NASCAR. (One guy owning four competing teams. Nice.) But I hear Earnhardt — in June, with 22 races left — speak of how much he’s going to love driving for Rick Hendrick and palling around with Jeff Gordon next season and I think of Tom Brady announcing in Week Six, “I’ll be with the Jets next season. Hey look, we play them this week!”
Junior wanted to move out on his own.
Junior wants to stand on his own two feet.
Junior, you are so far out there now. OK, let’s see what you’ve got.
It’s easy to forget, amid Earnhardt’s popularity and $20 million in annual earnings, that he has won only two races in the last two and one-third seasons (zero this year).
Yes, it comforts his legion of fans to blame the evil stepmother, Teresa, because, well, she’s not on T-shirts. But two weeks ago, Earnhardt’s obscure teammate, Martin Truex Jr., won a race in Dover in only his second season. Dale, the lesser Jr., finished 22nd.
Was that Teresa’s fault, too? Did she sabotage Dale’s tires again?
Junior: Say goodbye to excuses.
Hendrick spoke Wednesday of the pressure he felt he was going to be under to supply the best equipment and atmosphere for three of the sport’s marquee drivers — Earnhardt, Gordon and Jimmie Johnson (also on the team: Casey Mears, in the role of Zeppo Marx).
That might be true. But nobody should feel more pressure than Earnhardt. This shouldn’t be about making money or pleasing sponsors or displaying a cool, easy charm for fans, all of which he does extraordinarily well. It’s about winning a race.
Earnhardt acknowledged he feels some pressure but said, “I’m excited. I feel comfortable. I don’t think the pressure will get to me.” That was the right answer.
But when alluding to expectations and competing for a championship, he could’ve used a speechwriter.
“I’ve always said I’ve done more in this sport than I’ve ever anticipated,” he said. “I just wanted to be able to pay my bills. Once I got past that, everything was a bonus.”
He said he would “cherish a championship on my mantel when all is said and done.” But it almost sounded forced and lacked conviction.
It’s not like Earnhardt has been devoid of any success. He has won 17 races.
But now he needs Mapquest to find victory lane. He has been there only twice since winning six times in 2004. He has only one top-five finish this season. He has led only one lap in the past six races, three laps in the past eight. He also was docked 100 points and his crew chief was fined $100,000 and suspended six races for an illegal modification to the rear wing (read: cheating).
Right now, Earnhardt has brand recognition and nothing else. If not for that, you wonder if anybody would fight over him.
We can’t begin to know how this will work until Daytona next season. Fans have some time to decide which direction to go, following Junior or staying with DEI. There are no divided loyalties in NASCAR (at least not outside of ownership).
Earnhardt fans so despise Gordon, his impending Hendrick teammate, that they threw beer cans at his car after he won his 77th career race in Talladega because he passed the elder Earnhardt on the all-time wins list.
This isn’t to suggest that if Earnhardt doesn’t start winning, he will be pelted by his own fans. But as targets go, he won’t be hard to find.
He stands out.
Permalink | Comments (19) | Categories: Auto Racing, Jeff Schultz
How do ya like Jr. now?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Mooresville, N.C. - So I’m here just off I-77 in a city that I didn’t know existed, just down the road from the North Carolina Auto Racing Hall of Fame and Gift Shop, which I also didn’t know existed.
And here’s my question: If you were a Dale Earnhardt fan, what do you do now?
Dale Jr.’s has just held a press conference to announce that he will be joining the Hendrick Motorsports team.
This might actually be a stranger move than leaving a team started by his late father and run by his stepmother.
So, Joe Fan, what do you do?
Pull for whoever will be driving for DEI?
Pull for Dale Jr.? How about his new Hendrick bunkmate … Jeff Gordon?
Earnhardt and Gordon - teammates?
Or is that just enough to turn all of you into Kyle Busch fans?
Permalink | Comments (58) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
The Stark Truth - Andruw’s not overrated
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The best center fielder I ever saw on a consistent basis was Cesar Geronimo, the Gold Glove king of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine.
Well, that was before Andruw Jones came along. And, no, he isn’t overrated. He is underrated by those who only see the Braves’ Gold Glove king on occasion.
Like Jayson Stark, for instance.
Stark is the author of “The Stark Truth: The most overrated and underrated players in baseball history.” Let’s just say Stark doesn’t place Jones among those receiving hugs and kisses in his book.
According to Stark, Jones gets low marks for having fewer putouts each season for the last several years. Thing is, Jones still accumulated more putouts after each of those years than most of his peers, and we haven’t even mentioned the other stuff involving Jones.
His ability to play shallower than nearly anybody in baseball. His knack for diving after flyballs only when necessary, which means he generally positions himself well on batters. His habit of making the spectacular catch look routine.
Yeah, that sounds like an overrated center fielder, but only if you’re watching Jones with your eyes closed.
Permalink | Comments (58) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
USGA business never better under Driver
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
His stern features leap out at you from the cover of Golf World, Walter Driver, like the principal you have been called before to answer for some misdemeanor. Seriously handsome, jaw firmly set, his salt-and-pepper hair strategically in place. This is the chief executive of the U.S. Golf Association, of whom the headlined question reads: “Can the USGA Survive Walter Driver?”
Not some driving club named Walter, but the man of whom the subhead reads: “The tumultuous reign of the association’s controversial president.”
USGA presidents usually glide smoothly into office and usually glide just as “untumultuously” out. Usually, they are lawyers, bankers, brokers, realtors, and usually with a respectable handicap. In some cases, champion players, as was Driver’s predecessor, Fred Ridley Jr., who had been U.S. Amateur champion. Rarely ever a newspaperman, as in the case of Reg Murphy, once editor of papers in Atlanta, San Francisco and Baltimore, hence retired and living at Sea Island.
Walter Driver Jr. came out of Texas, schooled at Stanford and settled in Atlanta, chairman presiding over about 800 lawyers at the firm of King & Spalding at the time he cut his teeth as general counsel of the USGA. A player himself, three-time champion of Peachtree Golf Club, noted for the handicap caliber of its membership. Driver’s entry into the USGA presidency came on the wave of a storm.
The Open had returned for the third time to Shinnecock Hills in 2004. Driver was chairman of the USGA’s competition committee, which means the responsibility of setting up the course was his. “His arid setup,” as Golf World phrases it, “was an embarrassment,” a term to be questioned.
“Arid” refers to the rain which was forecast, but didn’t fall, and the winds which dried out the greens. Curses to the competition chairman. Now, checking the record, you will find that when Raymond Floyd won the first Open played at Shinnecock, his score was 1 under par. When Corey Pavin won the second, with a storied 4-wood to the 18th green, his score was even par. When Retief Goosen ran down Phil Mickelson in the stretch in 2004, he played the “arid, embarrassing” course four strokes under par. Weathering the storm, so to speak, Driver moved ahead in the order of succession into the presidency.
Thus, he became the bull’s-eye in a public-relations shooting gallery. He was dead game. But did he flinch? Not Walter Driver. He forged ahead with his game plan unruffled, to instill some sound business principles into a somewhat “bloated USGA” (Golf World’s term), and addressed it head-on with his speech at the annual convention in February, titled “The USGA As An Organization and a Business.”
It’s noteworthy here that since his ascension to the presidency, Driver has left King & Spalding for a career with the investment firm, Goldman Sachs, which has been a raging inferno of prosperity of late. He’s still based in Atlanta, chairman of the southeast region, and it all fits into his ambitious plan for the USGA. He has his critics within the stuffed-shirt, navy blue, red, white and blue-tied drawing-room culture, but here Reg Murphy speaks up.
“I would say his effort to instill a new level of business-like procedure at the USGA has been important,” he tells Golf World. “He’s tried to create a more business-like organization.”
Driving the USGA deals with a variety of avenues. Grooves. Trampoline effect. Coefficient of restitution, or COR. This golfspeak reads like some planetary tongue to the everyday golfer. What they don’t speak of with enough force is reigning in the ball, one of Jack Nicklaus’ main interests. Driver has a few more months to put his USGA plan into play, but this week will be his last on the public stage.
This will be the last U.S. Open of his presidency, played on one of the classic old courses in the country. This will be the eighth Open played at Oakmont, and only once in modern times has par been broken there, in 1994, when Ernie Els, Loren Roberts and Colin Montgomerie checked in at 279, one under. (Els won the playoff.)
This will not be an Oakmont any of these players remember. A few years ago, a rather surreptitious tree-cutting program was started, and carried out so devilishly that all of a sudden, one day members looked around and said, “What happened to our trees?”
They’re all gone. The place looks like one huge prairie of green. And nobody can blame Walter Driver and his little red axe. It was all done before he got there.
Permalink | | Categories: Furman Bisher, Golf
The Tuesday Countdown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
10: OK, I’m confused. Is the sheriff who released Paris Hilton from prison because of some mysterious “medical condition” related to the Surry County DA who mostly ate Bon-Bons and watched Green Acres repeats during the Michael Vick investigation? Or is Hilton’s return to jail just another case of The Man being out to get famous white, blonde, basement-dwelling socialites?
9: So last week, Arthur Blank and Rich McKay sent a letter to Falcons season-ticket holders asking them to remain calm during the Vick investigation. On Friday, the balance on their accounts comes due. I’m sure that’s a complete coincidence.
8: I actually do feel for the Falcons being held hostage by this process. They don’t know if Vick will be available for 16 games or 12 or zero. That said, to feel the need to remind everybody in the letter about all of the Falcons’ community service projects and charity endeavors was unbelievably transparent.
7: Question: Do any of the ESPN or sportstalk radio talking heads have any idea the small percentage of their viewership/listeners who have HBO and actually watch the “Sopranos”?
6: Yes, I know about the baggage and potential health issues. But a lot of NFL teams would be nuts not to look at Daunte Culpepper as a potential starter.
5: For those who are starting to spread Ken Griffey-to-the-Braves rumors (again), I’d like to know your plan for adding an $8.44 million player to a payroll that presumably is frozen. Somebody has to come off the roster, and the team either can’t or won’t deal anybody in that salary range (Mike Hampton, Andruw Jones, Chipper Jones, Edgar Renteria, Tim Hudson, John Smoltz).
4: Also, stating the obvious here: If the Braves make a trade, it needs to be for starting pitching, not another bat.
3: Do we have to pick a side in the John vs. Sherrie Daly debate? Who’s less of a mess: The fat, drunk slob or the loving wife who spent five months in prison stemming from drug and gambling charges?
2: I’m sure the Orlando Magic realized it would’ve looked really bad if they didn’t offer to refund deposits for the 200-some people who bought season tickets, expecting Billy Donovan as coach. But still it was a class move to do so.
1: This just in: Paris Hilton says from prison that she’s “not that superficial girl” anymore, and she’s found God. Look, if Hilton really wanted to change her image, why not just show up for OTAs with a new haircut?
Permalink | Comments (124) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
If Andruw bolts, welcome Hunter ‘home’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Ideally, Andruw Jones stays with the Braves. Not only after this season as a free agent, but forever. Still, if he decides to bolt to the highest bidder with his mighty bat and magic glove, his replacement makes too much sense.
Torii Hunter.
“Me, playing in Atlanta?” said Hunter, with wide eyes, during a chat last week before a game involving his Minnesota Twins in Anaheim. He laughed, saying, “Kind of getting ahead of things with that thought, but if I could go to Atlanta, I’d be highly visible. People would get a chance to see my face as an African-American, and they definitely would get more of the African-American population coming to games.”
That’s African-Americans, Caucasians, Asians, Samoans, Martians.
Everybody loves Hunter. In fact, nobody in baseball is more engaging than this center fielder with six consecutive Gold Gloves in eight full seasons. Jones has nine straight in 10 seasons. And while the 30-year-old Jones is a more prolific slugger, the 31-year-old Hunter has a higher career batting average and swifter legs. If you add all of that to Hunter’s fan-friendly ways, he is a public relations dream for anybody.
He is also a pending free agent, and his Twins, who host the Braves in a three-game interleague series starting tonight, are suggesting they haven’t the funds to keep him.
So listen to this: If Hunter can’t stay with the Twins, he said he wouldn’t mind joining the team he idolized as a youth growing up in Pine Bluff, Ark. He was so much into it while watching TBS that he wore a Braves jersey on June 3, 1993, the day of the major league draft that year.
“I was sitting there thinking I was going to get picked by the Atlanta Braves,” said Hunter, nodding. “I was hoping I would get picked by the Atlanta Braves.”
The Twins got Hunter instead. Even so, the Braves still could make Hunter’s smile blind the sun even more than it does.
With no Jones, they could sign Hunter, but they likely won’t.
See, there is something else you should know about this guy: He owns an honest tongue, and he isn’t afraid to flap it. In other words, he’s a David Justice clone.
We’re talking about the same David Justice who was dealt by the Braves’ Designated Geniuses in his prime for having too much of a tutti-frutti personality in their preferred world of vanilla.
Just last week, when others blasted former Braves outfielder Gary Sheffield for saying many of his fellow African-American players were being replaced by Latin players for various reasons, Hunter agreed with Sheffield. Hunter also went further by saying baseball will lack African-American players within 10 years.
Somewhere, after hearing Hunter’s words, John Schuerholz was probably leading the Braves’ braintrust in a collective cringe.
We can hope, though.
“Atlanta has a big part of my past, because my granddaddy made me watch the Braves all the time, so I was kind of brainwashed with them,” said Hunter, chuckling. “I couldn’t go outside and play, because my granddaddy made me watch what the Braves were doing.
“Terry Pendleton in the eighth or ninth inning getting clutch base hits. I’ve got David Justice in my head hitting two home runs in a game a couple of times. Ron Gant, his power surges for a month at a time.”
What about Hunter becoming the next Andruw Jones? “I would love to, but, wow, he was there for so many years, and even if he leaves, he’s going to leave that mark in center field,” Hunter said. “It’s going to be like, ‘This was Andruw Jones territory.’ I’d have to come in and fill his void. I don’t know if I want to do that. I’ve got my own name. I’ve done my own thing, so it would be tough to go to Atlanta and play after what Andruw has done.”
Then Hunter thought, then thought some more, before saying, “Man, I’ve got so many friends from Pine Bluff in Atlanta, maybe 40 or 50. I also have a couple family members there and a couple of ex-teammates. I wouldn’t be a stranger. It would be right at home for me.”
So come on home.
You know, if the Braves’ honchos don’t lock the door.
Permalink | Comments (194) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
Signs of life after a dismal stretch
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
On the first pitch of the night, Tim Hudson fired a fastball on a rail toward Alfonso Soriano’s ear (Soriano’s rotating shoulder intercepting the delivery).
Now, we can’t be certain if this is what John Smoltz meant when he said of Hudson before the game, “I guarantee you he will approach this game like it’s special.” But when a team has been outscored 22-7 in four straight losses, and its fan base is having acid flashbacks to last year’s 6-21 June, and Soriano is the same guy who clubbed three home runs the night before — hey, we’re not talking Oliver Stone here.
Hudson denied he was trying to dent Soriano’s cranium. Not surprisingly, Soriano’s cranium had a different viewpoint.
Regardless, do you feel a little better about things now? The Braves showed a pulse Saturday. So let’s put the panic on hold.
They won a game.
They trail the New York Mets by 3 1/2 games.
They have 99 games to play. This isn’t have-to-make-a-trade time.
The starting pitching? It’s still not good. On the same day the Braves announced their No. 1 starter, Smoltz, would not start tonight because of a sore shoulder, their No. 2 starter, Hudson was punched for four runs in the first inning and left in the third after taking a liner off the shin. But they dumped the Cubs 9-5 at Turner Field, and all is well for one day.
The Mets’ magic number is 98.
Feel better now?
The Braves started the season 7-1. They haven’t quite maintained that pace. But anybody who expected as much, particularly with the injuries this team has absorbed, was delusional.
If you need a thought to wrap yourself around, consider this: Almost everything conceivable has gone wrong for the Braves in the last two months and still they are only 3 1/2 games behind the division-leading Mets — who, by the way, are 8-10 since starting 28-14.
What the Braves are experiencing now are the realities of a young team. Also, a thin team.
Unlike clubs with fatter payrolls, the Braves generally don’t have bench players who can start or should start or maybe ever will start. They have bench players who are merely cheap. Think of Bill Gates being out with laryngitis, and Fred from the mailroom now running the meeting.
It’s logical to assume that when you lose a projected starting pitcher (Mike Hampton) and a solid reliever (Mike Gonzalez) for the season, your best player (Chipper Jones) sits for an extended period and the player who should be picking up the slack (Andruw Jones) instead nosedives, there are going to be problems.
“It is, and this is not a whine, when the difference between a moderately ranged payroll and a healthier-ranged payroll come into play,” Braves general manager John Schuerholz said. “It’s the depth of the team and the quality of the [backups]. It’s not excuse making. It is what it is.”
Except that, it is what it is in only early June. It’s not July. It’s not August. It’s not a lead in the ninth with plastic explosives coming in from the bullpen.
Maybe the embers from where Chris Reitsma used to sit and last season’s 6-21 June have shortened the transition to panic in some corners of the fan base.
“It’s terribly frustrating and awfully disappointing and sometimes even maddening,” Schuerholz said. “But it’s not panic.”
This is not a dying team. Hudson struggled, but the bullpen behind him was strong. Willie Harris, Edgar Renteria and Andruw Jones, the Nos. 2, 3 and 4 hitters, were a combined 7 for 13 with seven RBIs. Jones made a diving catch in the seventh.
Hudson? At least he sent a message. If he wasn’t trying to plant one in Soriano’s ear, he certainly wanted him to hear the ball whiz by.
“I didn’t see that coming,” Soriano said. “It caught me by surprise.”
Soriano flied out in the second inning. When he jogged past the mound, he said something to Hudson, drawing the expected reaction. Soriano did not divulge what he said, commenting only, “I was very mad.”
Consider that a step forward from an opponent’s laughter. And still 99 games left.
Permalink | Comments (33) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
First-rate class joins Atlanta Sports Hall
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
It was like rifling through the pages of an old scrapbook, though in this case, the clippings came to life and they had voice. The Atlanta Sports Hall of Fame was into its third class, “third class” only numerically. There was no question about the first, Henry Aaron, three Bobbys (Jones, Dodd and Cox), Tommy Nobis and Dominique Wilkins, but this group moved a little nearer the present, and so the hall at Emory Conference Center was aflow with memories.
This all began with one man, a Realtor named Larry Winter, obviously a man of sentiment, and has developed support with each passing year. It’s a work of heart, for Winter is quiet of nature and in pursuit of no personal acclaim. First, the roll call of this class: Tommy Barnes, Gayle Barron, Lou Hudson, Ernie Johnson Sr., Dale Murphy and Jeff Van Note. What they did and why they were chosen is easily identified by each name. Only Tommy Barnes, best of Atlanta’s amateur golfers for years, was unable to make the scene, and for Lou Hudson, “SuperLou” in his days as a dominating Hawk, it was an ordeal.
Historically, Barnes registers as one of the three men who played Bobby Jones’ last round of golf with him, and later on was one of those who saved the grand old East Lake Club from extinction, until Tom Cousins could move in and create a new community around it. Ironically, it was Barnes who broke Jones’ East Lake course record with a round of 62, 11 strokes less than his age 73 at the time.
The two more moistening moments developed when it came Hudson’s and Johnson’s turn on the podium. “SuperLou” took the time to speak to “stroke awareness,” with strong conviction. He was stricken a few years ago and could speak from experience.
“Watch your blood pressure, watch your cholesterol, check your family history,” he said.
He was determined to leave his wheelchair and walk to the podium. “I was going to walk up to this stage, and I did,” he said, with justifiable pride. To see a great athlete stricken by some crippling ailment is heart-rending. Here is a man of admirable determination, unwilling to compromise with his cruel adversary. “I’ll be back in the fall, and I shall play golf,” he pledged. Oh, that he makes it.
It was a teary moment, as was one of a more sentimental nature involving the Johnsons. Ernie Jr. spoke of admiration for his dad, when Ernie Sr. broadcast Braves games. ” ‘Wow! That’s my dad,’ I’d say when I heard him,” and introducing his family, he came around to Ernie Sr. “Wow,” he said, “here’s my dad.”
When he first met his wife-to-be, Ernie Sr. said, “Lois asked me what I did. I told her I played baseball. She said, ‘But what do you do for a living?’ That’s it, I play baseball. When she saw my first paycheck, she said, ‘You call this a living?’ “
It was not an evening short in mutual admiration. Phil Niekro was Murphy’s presenter — as was Wilkins for Hudson, and Nobis for Van Note, three incumbents standing up for their comrades — and spoke of a time not many of us recalled, when Murphy was his catcher. Niekro’s knuckleball, Murphy said, “was a pitch that couldn’t be caught. I had five passed balls in one game. Then they tried me at first base, where I led the team in errors. Then they finally found a place they could hide me in center field.”
When seriousness took over, Niekro said, “If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I want to come back as Dale Murphy, the finest person I ever knew in baseball.”
Now, how did Lou Hudson of Greensboro, N.C., wind up at the University of Minnesota? “Bones McKinney,” Lou said. “He coached at Wake Forest, and that was before integration. He couldn’t recruit me, so he called John Kundla in Minneapolis. They’d played together in the NBA, Kundla called the coach at Minnesota, and that’s how I got there.”
From Greensboro to Minnesota to Atlanta, where 17,940 points later he’s still revered. That’s a service the Atlanta Sports Hall of Fame provides, memories that should not be allowed to fade away.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Cremins feels Donovan’s discomfort
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
For nearly four months in 1993, with Bobby Cremins’ head throbbing “during the worst time of my life,” the hate mail kept coming from South Carolina basketball fans to his office at Georgia Tech.
Then came a three-week trip to Florida, and not to see Mickey Mouse.
Since Cremins couldn’t shake the embarrassment of leaving Tech for South Carolina before returning to the Yellow Jackets just two days after changing his mind, former Tech athletics director Homer Rice gently urged his suffering coach to see a psychiatrist.
“The shrink there put me on drugs to knock me out, and then I came back, and I was still on some antidepressant stuff and some sleeping pills,” said Cremins, sharing the extraordinary depth of his flip-flopping pain for the first time. He spoke from another part of South Carolina, where he now coaches the College of Charleston. Added Cremins, sighing while reflecting, “One Saturday morning after I went to Florida, I woke up, down where I used to live on Columns Drive [in Marietta], and I went out and ran five miles. When I came back to the house, I took all of the prescription drugs, and I threw them in the garbage.”
He was cured. Well, he still quivered at the sight of garnet and black, the colors of South Carolina, his alma mater. He was cured, but he was scarred by his dramatic about-face forever. He wished to share those stories and others with the latest poor soul to pull a Bobby Cremins. In fact, soon after Billy Donovan spent the end of last week going from coaching the University of Florida to signing with the Orlando Magic to rejoining the Gators inside of a fastbreak, Cremins phoned his good friend.
No answer.
Not only that, Cremins’ messages were ignored.
To which Cremins shrugged. Been there and done all of that. Whether you’re talking about Donovan, Glen Mason, Bill Belichick, Greg Marshall, Dana Altman or others, Cremins is the undisputed president of the flip-flop club in the coaching ranks over the past 14 years. He has accepted his dubious place in history. As a result, he doesn’t mind hearing that somebody just pulled, is pulling or will pull a Bobby Cremins.
“Oh, not at all,” said Crem- ins, who coached Tech to impressive seasons during much of his tenure from 1981 to 2000, with stars such as Mark Price, Kenny Anderson and Stephon Marbury. “But when I see somebody do what I did [in flip-flopping], it always brings back bad memories. It’s happening right now. I can image Billy and his wife, and all of the embarrassment they’re going through. He probably feels like a fool, just like I did. But he’s a tough guy. A young guy.”
Donovan is 42. Cremins was in that vicinity (45) when he accepted the South Carolina job, and Cremins also was a tough guy. Still, neither Cremins’ youth nor his grit could keep his internal horror away when he determined hours after his South Carolina news conference that he officially was a Ramblin’ Wreck. You know, in more ways than one.
“Your body tells you what you just did,” said Cremins, referring to a coach discovering in a hurry that he left a job that he really wanted to keep. “My body shut down. And I’m sure Billy went through the same thing. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I’m sure that once he did it, he realized this isn’t what I want. Then you only have two choices. You go forward and hope things get better, or you go backwards. It takes courage to go backwards.”
Yes, it does. The easy thing would have been for Donovan to have joined the Magic and for Cremins to have joined the Gamecocks and for both coaches to have lived in misery ever after. They both came to their senses, though.
Now Donovan will join Cremins in misery only when recalling it all.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Tech / ACC, Terence Moore
Ex-Hawk Hudson still unstoppable
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
In 1970, he was Sweet Lou, sleek and strong, a professional athlete pictured on the cover of Sports Illustrated guarding another legend, Oscar Robertson.
In 2006, Lou Hudson was something else: the cover subject for StrokeSmart magazine, his right hand resting on a basketball, his left hidden from view, his mind and spirit now far more willing than his limbs.
“I’m going to walk up to that stage,” Hudson said Wednesday night. “I told them, ‘I’m not going to take the wheelchair. I’m going to walk.’ “
There will be no sweet jump shot tonight, just a man nearing his 63rd birthday, exhibiting the same will and desire that enabled him to score 30 points with a broken hand as a college senior and carried him through a 13-year NBA career.
Two and a half years after suffering a stroke, which has robbed him full use of the left side of his body, Hudson will be honored in a reception tonight as part of the third class of the Atlanta Sports Hall of Fame.
The great ones are defined by how well they overcome obstacles. Hudson is still proving it, with every hour on the elliptical machine, every therapy session, every stated goal, all wrapped in self-effacing humor.
“I can barely walk now,” Hudson said. “I can’t shoot a jump shot yet. I can’t use my left hand, but I never really was that good with it, anyway.”
He wants to play hoops. He wants to golf. He wants to jog and lift weights and ski, which is outside his front door in Park City, Utah. Patience has been a difficult lesson.
Hudson was a six-time All-Star with the Hawks. He moved here with the franchise from St. Louis in 1968. He sank the first basketball in Atlanta history. He led the team in scoring (21.9 points per game), guiding the Hawks into the conference finals — the first of five straight playoff seasons in Atlanta. (Yes, it was a long time ago.) His impact on the franchise was great enough that his No. 23 jersey was retired.
Hudson remained an athlete in retirement. On the day of his stroke, Feb. 12, 2005, he had just finished skiing when he began feeling light-headed. Still, he planned to keep to his routine and stop by the gym for a swim before going home.
“When I walked into the gym, I knew something was wrong,” he said. “I’m actually lucky it happened when it did because 10 minutes later I would’ve been in the pool and I probably would’ve drowned.”
Hudson was walking through a therapy room when he became disoriented, then collapsed. Therapists in the room immediately recognized the problem. Several members of the local fire department happened to be working out in the gym, and they quickly arranged to have Hudson taken via helicopter to the hospital.
The stroke attacked Hudson’s speech and the left side of his body. He was confined to a wheelchair formonths. But he is now going to rehabilitation six days a week, and progress has been significant. After a two-year absence, he will be back running his basketball camp this summer.
“I told the guys I’m going to be back in the gym next year, and then the fun will be over,” he said, laughing.
“This is the toughest thing I’ve ever done, a lot tougher than playing basketball. I’m not there yet, but I’m making it, slow but steady.”
Hudson keeps up with the NBA. Last year, Hawks coach Mike Woodson arranged for Hudson to address his players at the Utah summer league. Hudson spoke about what it takes to be successful, and of his own goals to park his wheelchair.
“Those players probably saw my picture on the wall in the locker room and figured, ‘He’s not around anymore,’” Hudson said. “Most guys with their picture on the wall are long gone.”
Asked if he had any exchanges with Hawks players last summer, Hudson laughed and said: “One said, ‘I thought you were bigger.’ I’m about 6-4 — that used to be tall. I got an award for being the best guard played by a small forward.”
In some ways, standards haven’t changed. Hudson is as big as ever.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Jeff Schultz
Braves need pitching now, not later
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
A week ago, Braves president Terry McGuirk said: “Everyone feels like we’re going to be a playoff team.”
Allow me to introduce myself: I’m the guy who doesn’t feel this is going to be a playoff team.
Since starting the season 7-1, the Braves are 26-26. They just lost three of four to the sub-.500 Marlins in a series where John Smoltz and Tim Hudson worked and Dontrelle Willis didn’t. What we’re seeing is what more than a few folks figured would happen the longer the season went: The starting rotation has been reduced to Smoltzie and Huddy and Hope You Get Lucky.
A telling stat: In their 26 starts, Smoltz and Hudson have worked at least six innings while yielding three or fewer earned runs — a “quality start,” in the vernacular — 21 times. The rest of the rotation has produced quality starts 11 times in 34 outings. The Braves got away with it so long as Smoltz and Hudson won every single time, but Hudson has lost three of four and has seen his ERA, which was 1.40 after a stellar April, climb to 3.09.
Kyle Davies started Wednesday and yielded five runs before he recorded nine outs. “We were down five before it ever got started,” manager Bobby Cox said, and that’s what happens too often to teams with a shaky rotation. (It is, by way of contrast, what almost never happened to the Braves from 1991 through 2002.)
And here’s the worst part: A shaky rotation tends to get shakier as the games and innings mount. The Braves are counting on the reactivated Lance Cormier — “We hope he can pitch the way he did last year,” Cox said — to make a disproportionate impact. But how, you ask, did Cormier fare as a starter last season? He was 2-4 with a 4.31 ERA.
Already Mark Redman has come and gone, and already Davies has seen his ERA ascend to 5.31. You can make the case that the Braves have been unlucky — “All our [starting] pitchers aren’t here,” Cox said — but how realistic was it to hope that Mike Hampton, who hadn’t pitched since July 2005, would be the same guy he was? (As it happened, Hampton remains the same guy he was in one respect: He’s hurt again.)
Too many questions had to be answered correctly for this rotation to carry its weight. Too many fair-to-middling pitchers had to turn into 15-game winners. And now, with 60 of 162 games gone, we see what the Braves must do if they’re to play beyond Game No. 162: Find another reliable starter, and they can’t wait until the July 31 trade deadline to do it.
The Braves ran neck-and-neck with the Mets deep into May, but New York has begun to open a gap. (And the Mets figure to get Pedro Martinez back at some point.) For a time, it seemed the wild card would hail from the NL East, but San Diego and Arizona and Los Angeles, all of which pitch better than the Braves, have pulled ahead of the hometown club. The Braves have enough good players to stay above .500, but without a stouter rotation they can’t hope to run off 12 of 15 and separate themselves from teams that can deploy a stout starter most every night.
“We all know what we need to do,” Davies said. “Trust me, we want to win as much as anybody else. I want to go seven, eight, nine innings every time and give our team a chance to win.”
Reality check: Davies has worked four quality starts in 11 tries. On Wednesday, he was gone after five innings, his team chasing yet another game.
There are things to like about these Braves: The bullpen is superb and the hitting is robust. But we saw for more than a decade why baseball men insist that starting pitching is the game’s greatest determinant, and we see now why the Braves as constituted will fall short of the postseason.
A team can overhaul only so many five-run deficits. A team cannot subsist over a six-month trek when three of every five games are shrouded in uncertainty.
Permalink | Comments (134) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Donovan fiasco will blow over
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
There is way too much fuss over this Billy Donovan thing. He finally came to his senses.
That’s all.
What do these people have in common? Lon Kruger. Rick Pitino. Leonard Hamilton. John Calipari. P.J. Carlesimo. If you haven’t guessed, they all lost their minds by leaving wonderful jobs in college basketball to become woeful NBA coaches.
With Donovan pulling a Bobby Cremins by orchestrating a return back to the University of Florida after leaving to take over the Orlando Magic, everybody is better off.
The Gators are better off, because they retain the best coach they ever had in any sport (That Spurrier guy only won one national championship to Donovan’s two). The Magic are better off, because they don’t have to hire an overmatched college coach they’ll have to fire in two years. Donovan is better off, because his heart is with the college game instead of pro game.
Contrary to popular belief, this won’t hurt Donovan in the long run. So many coaches have pulled a Bobby Cremins over the past 14 years - from Glen Mason to Bill Belichick to Gregg Marshall — that everybody has become immune to this now.
Not only that, there are so many coaching changes in the NBA after a given year that somebody will seek Donovan again. He is only 42, and NBA general managers are running out of fresh names.
Donovan will be fine. So will the Gators and the Magic.
Permalink | Comments (31) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Buddy’s 2nd win a longtime coming
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
When you go to the ballpark to watch a game between two pitchers with a collective record of 6-18, you’re not expecting a classic. As in Spahn and Koufax, or Hubbell and Dean. In fact, you’re wondering how these two happened even to be here, in Turner Field on a Tuesday afternoon.
The Braves were in desperation mode. Their guy was Earl L. Carlyle, who goes by the playground name of “Buddy” in the trade. If Bobby Cox had a full house of healthy starters, Buddy Carlyle would have been in Pawtucket, where the Richmond farm club was playing last night. On the other hand, take Fredi Gonzales’ situation with the Marlins. His starter was Sergio Mitre, who had to be pulled after four innings against the Cubs his last time out. Something to do with a hamstring, one of those infernal things.
Of the six games Mitre and Carlyle have won, five belong to the Marlins pitcher. Carlyle won his one game in relief, pitching for the Padres in 1999. For a guy 28 years old, the right-hander has a lot of mileage on his odometer. Twice he has pitched in Asia, first with the Hanshin Tigers in Japan, then, just last year, with a team called the LG Twins in Korea.
The Braves picked him up off the street last December, with the Richmond club in mind.
If you checked all the asterisks on the Braves roster, you’d get an idea of why they are in such a pitching bind. Mike Hampton hasn’t thrown a pitch in a pennant race in two years. Mike Gonzalez, thought to be a real catch from Pittsburgh, instead became another surgical case, as is Tanyon Sturtze, whom you haven’t seen throw a pitch. He was sort of an investment in futures, I’d guess. Lance Cormier just tried to make it back, but too soon. John Smoltz removed himself from action last week, and he was to give his business arm a test later in the evening.
But the Braves’ story is Buddy Carlyle, and you’ve gotta like it. He doesn’t blow you down with heat, Sometimes the big meter in left field registered in the 70s, but when he came in with his flame-thrower, the Marlins were shocked.
In seven innings they touched him for just one hit, damaging though it was. It was a home run by Aaron Boone in the third inning, and the game teetered on that thin line until the Braves came to bat in the seventh. Carlyle had filled the pitching void gloriously, given his team seven good innings, but still he was losing, 1-0.
Fate owed him something, and fate was about to pay off. Jeff Francoeur singled, one of his three hits. Scott Thorman popped out trying to bunt, and now came the kid, rookie Jarrod Saltalamacchia, whom the Braves have to fit in some place. Today he was the catcher, his natural trade. He looked at Angel Pinto’s first place, and he liked it.
The ball sailed like a rocket into the left-field stands, and if that wasn’t enough, Chris Woodward followed with another home run, and the scales of justice had balanced. Carlyle was staked to a 3-1 gift. The sparse gallery, a little over 21,000, was so elated it broke out into a wave, something you don’t see around here much anymore.
The rest was left up to the April-and-September battery of the moose Bob Wickman, 38, and the kid Saltalamacchia, 22, and they sauntered off into the glow of twilight. Which, I might add, had been blessed by spray of rain, not enough to hint salvation, but encouraging. The beautiful part of it all in the end was that the playing took only two hours and 20 minutes.
Now, that’s real baseball, played in the loveliness of a Georgia afternoon.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Falcons should’ve tried to get Johnson
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The Falcons’ collection of draft picks this spring weren’t bad. In fact, they were pretty good.
You can start with exceptionally quick Jamaal Anderson at defensive end. You can move to Justin “Big Bank” Blalock as a welcomed giant among dwarfs along the offensive line. You can continue with the nice potential of cornerback Chris Houston, wide receiver Laurent Robinson and linebacker Stephen Nicholas.
Mostly, you can envision seven, eight or maybe nine of the Falcons’ 11 picks overall starting someday.
It’s just that the Falcons didn’t get Calvin Johnson.
They didn’t even try.
“I mean, how in the world could you not even try to get this guy?” said Shawn Jefferson, the former Falcons wide receiver, who isn’t exactly displeased with his old team’s negligence. Jefferson is entering his third season as an offensive assistant with the Detroit Lions, and his new team did get Johnson in the NFL draft.
The Lions have had the all-everything wide receiver from Georgia Tech via Sandy Creek High School in Tyrone for slightly more than a month. Even so, they’ve seen enough of Johnson in mini-camps and organized team activities (OTAs) to determine that the league’s worst team over the past six seasons just got that much closer to the middle of the pack and beyond. They’ve discovered what many of us have known forever, and that is, Johnson, the person, is as sensational as Johnson, the player.
No wonder Jefferson spoke of Johnson as if he were his second son.
“We all knew he was an exceptional talent, but he’s better than we thought, and he’s a great young man,” said Jefferson, the Falcons’ vocal leader during his three seasons with the team through 2002. “If a meeting starts at 8 o’clock in the morning, Calvin is there at 7:45, just waiting on everybody else. He’s always the first to arrive and the last to leave. What a role model and a perfect individual to build your team around.”
Translated: The suddenly image-damaged Falcons blew it.
Big time.
Maybe you’ve heard about Michael Vick and this dogfighting thing. Well, with the gifted Johnson and his brilliant smile on the Falcons’ roster, this latest and ugliest in a string of controversies for No. 7 isn’t barking as loudly.
The Falcons could have used a combination of their No. 8 pick overall during the draft and their two second-round picks to grab that No. 2 pick overall from Detroit. They could have proceeded to get one Michael Jordan instead of several Sam Bowies. They could have gone from a pretty good draft to a pretty great one. They could have gotten Calvin Johnson, and remember the words we just typed. Then again, you won’t be able to forget them: The Falcons could have gotten Calvin Johnson. You’ll hear that often during the next few weeks, months, years and even decades.
That’s because Johnson has the size, speed and skills to reach Canton as more than a visitor. In part, the words below Johnson’s bronzed bust should read, “And even though he was an Atlanta native and did many miracles at Georgia Tech and dreamed of playing for the hometown Falcons, he was drafted by somebody else.”
Jefferson still is pinching himself, along with his bosses. They’ve been doing so since their phone never rang in their war room during the 15 minutes they were on the clock for the first round. They didn’t hear from the Denver Broncos, Washington Redskins or Tampa Bay Buccaneers, three of the several teams who hinted before the draft of calling. Most strikingly, they didn’t hear from the Falcons who needed Johnson for so many reasons. “They really could use a big-time wide receiver, couldn’t they?” said Jefferson, already knowing the answer to his question.
Nobody knows the answer to this: How loudly will Falcons fans scream every time the guy they could have had does something greater than great?
Permalink | Comments (111) | Categories: Terence Moore
Donovan deserves to be sanctioned
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN…
10: Went to CNN.com. They’ve posted a video, “How Paris Hilton spent last hours of freedom.” Where have you gone, Wolf Blitzer?
9: If Billy Donovan ends up claiming he rushed into a decision about originally taking the Orlando job, it would qualify as Grade A Bunk. The man has been considering his next career step since Florida won its second title (and, logically, actually was thinking about it even before). He flirted with Kentucky. He flirted with Memphis. He thought long and hard about making the jump to the NBA before the Magic came calling with a $27.5 million contract.
8: But maybe some good will come of all this. If the NBA really decides to “ban” Donovan from coaching in the league for five years, as ESPN has reported, it would be the first time any governing body takes some sort of action against a flip-flopping coach. As my peeps would say: Mazel Tov!
7: How about this as a follow-up? Any time a coach leaves his college team with three, four, five years left on his contract, the NCAA bans him from a Division I job for the same three, four, five years?
6: CSI Surry reports that three plasma TVs were stolen from Michael Vick’s former house in Virginia. But investigators managed to lift a clean paw print and found Milk-Bone particulates leading to the driveway.
5: We don’t know if Vick will get charged, or convicted, or suspended, or told to sit, roll over or play dead. But in case you’re wondering, a sports gambling website is taking bets on at least one of those scenarios. According to Bodog, “no suspension” ranks as a very slight favorite (5-6) over a three or four-game suspension (even money). A one or two game suspension is 3-2 against; five to eight games is 5-2; over eight games is 7-2.
4: And, on a related note: Bodog has set the over-under on Falcons’ wins next season at 7 1/2. Not sure if that’s Joey Harrington-aided.
3: Tank Johnson shouldn’t be too upset about the eight-game suspension Roger Goddell just gave him. He’s going to need the time to bring down his cholesterol and percentage of body fat. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Johnson spent $700 on vending machine food during his two months in prison. The partial breakdown: 162 beef sticks, 40 honey buns, 35 blocks of summer sausage, 35 bags of barbecue chips. The newspaper speculated he also might have tried to piece together a Mexican combo plate, with nine tortillas, nine packages of jalapeno cheese and six packages of refried beans.
2: One more win by the Ducks and the last three Stanley Cup winners will have been Tampa Bay, Carolina and Anaheim. Doesn’t seem to be helping the TV ratings.
1: From an Associated Press news story: “Hilton’s booking photo showed the heiress wearing what appeared to be a V-neck shirt, eye makeup and lip gloss that highlighted a slight smile. Her long blond hair was draped over one shoulder.” Thank you, Mr. Cronkite.
Permalink | Comments (35) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Sheffield offends everyone
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Before acquiring Gary Sheffield in 2002, the Braves agreed to a request to void his contract’s option year, allowing him to become a free agent after two seasons.
Imagine everyone’s surprise a year later when Sheffield belabored the pressures of his impending free agency and said: “I can’t go out here and put all my trust and loyalty into something when nobody has given loyalty to me.”
Um, huh?
Sheffield is playing for his seventh team. The thinking is, he keeps running out of shrinks and has to move on to a new city. He is alternately one of the game’s greatest talents and biggest headaches. His mind works like a knuckleball — never dull, sometimes over the plate, maybe off the barn door or through the kitchen window.
After a while, you become numb to it.
“Sheff says he may retire? That’s nice.”
GQ magazine just gave Sheffield a forum for his thoughts.
Fire, meet gas can.
Sorry. But there comes a point when, “That’s Sheff,” doesn’t explain everything, and we just reached it.
When asked in the current issue of GQ about the decline of African-American players in Major League Baseball, Sheffield said: “I called it years ago. What I called is that you’re going to see more black faces, and there ain’t no English going to be coming out. [It’s about] being able to tell [Latin players] what to do — being able to control them. Where I’m from, you can’t control us. You might get a guy to do it for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end he’s going to go back being who he is. And that’s a person that you’re going to talk to with respect, you’re going to talk to like a man. These are the things my race demands. So, if you’re equally good as this Latin player, guess who’s going to get sent home? I know a lot of players that are home now can outplay a lot of these guys.”
Al Campanis was run out of baseball after saying African-Americans “may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or, perhaps, a general manager.”
Question: Is what Sheffield said any less inflammatory?
He just demeaned all Latin players, suggesting they’re only here because they’re easy to handle.
He demeaned mostly-white front-office officials, saying personnel decisions aren’t really based on talent.
He sort of demeaned his own race, suggesting African-Americans are harder to control.
At least he’s an equal-opportunity offender.
Richard Levin, MLB vice president for public relations, was asked about Sheffield’s comments. “Consider the source,” he said.
As to whether Sheffield will be disciplined, Levin said, “It hasn’t hit the radar screen.”
This is how we translate: “Let’s see how big the brush fire gets.”
I’m not campaigning against free speech. But racially divisive comments, particularly inaccurate ones, shouldn’t be quietly dismissed.
If you were a Latin player, how would you take suggestions that you’re here only because you’re easy to handle?
Eddie Perez is from Venezuela. He was a teammate of Sheffield’s with the Braves. He said “wow” twice after reading the comments, then shook his head.
“That’s going to hurt a lot of people,” he said. “I don’t know [if he’ll be suspended], but somebody needs to say something.”
Perez wanted to be guarded in his comments, saying, “I’m not a player anymore.” But he added: “I don’t think we’re taking anybody’s food off the table. We’re just putting food on the table for us.
“They’re paying Latin players lots of money. But it’s not because they like us — it’s because we’re doing good. When we play, we play hard. You don’t hear too many Latin players talk a lot of trash.”
Andruw Jones (Curaçao) declined comment. So did two other links to Sheffield’s Braves past, Bobby Cox (though he did roll his eyes) and Terry Pendleton. So did Willie Harris, the Braves’ lone African-American.
Edgar Renteria, a Columbian, played with Sheffield in Florida. He likes him personally but was thrown by the comments. “What is he talking about when he says, ‘control’? What does that mean?” Renteria said.
“Latin players — we come here to play the game. That’s it. We’re not here to be a martyr. We’re here to play the game.”
Sounds simple. Maybe too simple for a mind like Sheffield’s to comprehend.
Permalink | Comments (163) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
Dooleys thankful for each other, modern medicine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Vince Dooley had a speaking engagement last week. Trouble was, he couldn’t speak. Following surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his throat, the former Georgia football coach and athletics director was under doctor’s orders to keep silent for 10 days. But he’d committed to appearing at a fund-raiser for a library in Jefferson, so he went anyway and signed books.
His famously talkative wife gave the speech, much of it, as you’d expect, about her famously forbearing husband.
“I always said Barbara usually has the last word,” Dooley said. “That night she had all the words.”
With the moratorium finally lifted, Dooley spoke over the weekend in what his wife described, accurately, as “a gravelly whisper.” He said he feels fine — he has been going to the office he still occupies on campus even though he couldn’t talk to anyone there — and is confident that, after a round of radiation treatment, he’ll be rid of his cancer.
“It’s very, very treatable,” he said. “The doctors feel very good about it. I wish I’d had these odds in every game we played.”
Said Barbara: “I told him, ‘You do not have to worry about dying of cancer. Your problem will be me killing you.’ “
Ten speechless days had a trying and comic effect on the Dooleys’ marriage, which has lasted 47 epic years. Thinking ahead, Barbara bought her husband some dry-erase boards to use as communication devices.
“He ruined two by using an [indelible] Magic Marker,” she said. “We lost both erasers. I thought I was going to have to pin messages on him.”
Said Vince: “Barbara was a little difficult. She wouldn’t let me finish a [dry-erase] sentence. My daughter [Deanna] was a lot better. I tried to get her to come over and stay.”
Barbara and Vince Dooley are, in their diverse ways, great conversationalists. Barbara says pretty much anything that springs to mind; Vince can seem reticent until he happens on a subject that intrigues him, and then he’ll rattle on at encyclopedic length. (Get him going on his garden. Or the Civil War. On the sunset in Johannesburg.) They tease each other relentlessly — “I often say talking to Vince is like talking to the wall,” Barbara said — but in those 10 days of silence there came a poignant discovery.
“We’re apart a lot,” Barbara said, “but what I didn’t realize until this last week was how much we talk on the phone. I’ll call him and say, ‘Are you coming home for dinner? What time will you be here?’ We’ll talk for 15 minutes every night [when Vince is traveling]. And then I couldn’t do that.”
Vince Dooley, who’s 74, is scheduled to begin radiation therapy June 22. His biggest concern is that he’ll have to commute between Lake Burton, site of the annual Fourth of July clan-gathering with his four children and 11 grandchildren, to Athens for treatment.
Barbara Dooley was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2005 and underwent chemotherapy in 2006. Today she’s selling real estate. “I’m fine,” she said. “Every three months they tell me I’m fine, and that’s what they told me a month ago.”
Said Vince, speaking on the wonders of modern oncology: “I’m glad we all came along when we did.”
The radiation is expected to render Dooley hoarse, if not completely mute. Might that be an opportunity for the family to try, say, text-messaging?
Said Barbara, hooting: “He has not grown with modern-day communication. We can’t e-mail him, we can’t text-message him, and we sure can’t get him to write on a dry-erase board with the right pen.”
Permalink | Comments (17) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
Reeves doesn’t see his Vick in headlines today
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
No, he didn’t hear, see or suspect anything involving Michael Vick and illegal dogfighting during the three seasons they were together. No, he never had a significant problem with the suddenly trouble-filled Falcons quarterback either on or off the field. No, he hasn’t a clue about how this will end.
Here’s what former Falcons coach Dan Reeves does know: Before he maneuvered in 2001 to make Vick the No. 1 pick overall in the NFL draft, he did what most of his peers would have done. That is, he called those in charge of the league’s security staff to check for anything strange in Vick’s past, dogfighting or otherwise.
Nothing, the NFL told Reeves. Still, last week an unidentified police informant told ESPN Vick was present and betting heavily on dogfighting in 2000, when he played at Virginia Tech.
“I spent a lot of time talking to [Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer], and he certainly didn’t know anything about [Vick and dogfighting],” said Reeves, now an NFL analyst for Westwood One radio when he isn’t helping Georgia State with its football ambitions. “I never heard anything about any misdoings by [Vick] coming out of college, and the league certainly didn’t know of anything. I mean, Michael was like a son. I enjoyed being around him, and he was fun to be around.”
As a result, with the feds, the Virginia judicial system and the NFL’s no-nonsense commissioner starting to bark at Vick louder than those 66 dogs involved in his latest controversy, Reeves gave an invitation to Vick three weeks ago. “I talked to him, and I told him at that time, ‘Hey, you know, I’m here. You need somebody to talk to, to bounce things off of, whatever. You know, don’t hesitate to call me,’ ” Reeves said. “So I’m always there to talk to him if he needs help. He knows that. I don’t want to interfere with him, but all of that has got to come from him.”
The phone at Reeves’ Buckhead home has yet to ring with Vick on the other end, but Reeves should stand by.
News continues to break about Vick’s possible role in dogfighting. That news ranges from the Virginia prosecutor in Surry County claiming he has enough evidence to indict as yet unnamed persons to AirTran dropping Vick as an endorser to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell sending league security to the scene to assist in the local investigation.
Not good. In contrast, there was 2002, when Vick finished his last full season under Reeves with the highest quarterback rating of his career. Vick also was maturing as a person. Among other things, Reeves hired someone to help Vick with his diction to improve his speaking in the huddle and in interviews.
“Michael was very much involved in wanting to be the best he could be and trying to do the right things,” Reeves said. “He had a great heart. Now there is no question he had some things you had to talk to him about, involving his associations. He was greatly influenced by what people would say, because he was young. There were several things that happened, but it was more about, ‘Michael, you got to be careful about who you associate with.’ And I think that’s a little bit of what’s happening now. It’s just gotten out of hand.”
Which brings us to this: Reeves has been around the NFL awhile. He went to Super Bowls as a player and coach in Dallas, Denver and Atlanta. He even froze as a player during the Ice Bowl in Green Bay.
So what’s going to happen here? “I have no idea, but I’m hoping and praying Michael’s not going to be involved and that the only thing he’s guilty of is making some poor decisions as far as letting people on his property and so forth,” Reeves said. “I mean, [dogfighting] is a felony. It’s not like you not knowing this is illegal. It’s illegal most everywhere you go.”
Then Reeves paused, before mentioning his love affair with golden retrievers, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, and other types of canines. “Shoot, man. You don’t mess with my dogs,” said Reeves, easing into a chuckle. His chuckle got louder, when the Americus native added, “Dogs are the only things that you can count on that will love you when you come home. No matter what the score is.”
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Paterno upholds values at Penn State
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Leave it to Joe Paterno. He’s more than 80 years old and loves to coach a football team. He got so close to the action last season that a leg was broken in a sideline pile-up. He still kept showing up, on crutches or wheels. He believes football is a team game. No players’ names on Nittany Lion jerseys, which are as plain and unadorned as a garbage collector’s, which brings me around to the subject of the day.
In early April, one of his players, Anthony Scirrotto, and a girlfriend were insulted on the street and Scirrotto was slugged by some passers-by. He called some of his teammates, and a number of them, 14 or 15, came to his aid and crashed a party where the sluggers had come from, and a bigtime brawl broke out. More football players joined in, and in the end, it all wound up in court in State College.
Paterno waited for the legal process to play out; then he swung into action. The punishment he dealt will go down in history, and might get the attention of coaches who usually punish such dudes by ordering them to run stadium steps, or do workouts at dawn. Not Joe. Rather than try to sort it all out, he laid a sentence on the whole team. Get this:
Next season, the Penn State football team, all of them, will clean up Beaver Stadium after each home game, tidying up after 107,282 guests. That’s how many Beaver Stadium seats. The players will get a major test right off. Notre Dame plays there in early September, after which the place will look like a storm struck. There willl be seven home games in all, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio State and Purdue to follow.
But why the whole team? Wouldn’t some of the innocents say, “Why me? I wasn’t there.”
Paterno answered the question before it was asked. Rather than try to figure out who did what to whom and who was to blame, he went for the whole team, once again demonstrating an above-average standard, as one might expect of a Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year choice, not once, but twice.
“I just thought we had 14 or 15 kids — I don’t know how many — that were involved in something embarrassing and I wanted to prove that we are not a bunch of hoodlums,” Joe said. “I don’t condone fighting. Our kids were wrong.”
First thing the average alumnus would worry about is, “Oh, my gosh, what will this do to our recruiting?” Well, Paterno isn’t worried about recruits. He’s worried about the reputation of Penn State football. This was a shot across the bow.
Usually, stadium clean-up is handled by members of club sports teams at Penn State, crew, lacrosse, volleyball, soccer and such. They share a $5,000 fee for each game. The clubs will continue to join in the clean-up, and collect the same fee, but this season they’ll have some upper-class help. As a sort of warm-up for the job ahead, Penn State’s football players will build a house for Habitat for Humanity and work with Special Olympics this summer.
“We’re all going to do it. We’re in this together. This is a team embarrassment,” Paterno said. If anything like this has ever been done before, it has never been recorded in the history of college football — at that level at least. In the small-college leagues, perhaps, but as a necessity there, not as punishment.
“So far, the only reaction we’ve had,” Jeff Nelson, the sports information director, said, “has been e-mails and others expressing support and pleasure. Of course, students are away for the summer and the campus newspaper isn’t being published.”
But this is not something that will rock Paterno’s boat. He has weathered storms before and charged back. “Team” is Paterno’s theme, as he said: “We’re all in this together.” His main concern may be when cameras and reporters show up on Sunday morning, making a story of it, players collecting wrappers, cups and such trash, hosing down stairs and doing the work of a garbage crew.
Call it the Paterno Rule. He wants to prove that Penn State players aren’t “trashy.”
Permalink | Comments (19) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
Golf Hall gets short shrift
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
The battle of the halls of fame is on in Georgia. Everybody has a favorite. Governor Perdue favors the Sports Hall of Fame at Macon. Others favor the Golf Hall of Fame at Augusta. As a member of both, I suggest that the golf project is getting the back of the governor’s hand.
The Sports Hall was built at a cost of $8 million to $10 million, and costs the state anywhere from $600,000 to $800,000 annually to keep operating. The logical location was the Georgia Dome, which was being built about the same time and would have tied it in with a guaranteed flow of sports fans.
But, “Middle Georgia gets nothing. It needs an attraction like this. Atlanta gets everything.” That was the major plank in the mid-state politicos’ platform.
Located in Macon, off the speedway that is I-75, it has no way of attracting casual visitors and assuring its upkeep. And the demand will worsen, for structural repairs and maintenance will become a constant strain. Its appeal is regional.
The Golf Hall is located in Georgia’s golf central. Augusta is home to the Masters, whose prestige is international. It generates more publicity for the state, due to its proximity to the Masters, and the statuesque presence of such great Masters champions as Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Raymond Floyd, plus the abiding presence of Bobby Jones, this state’s most widely renowned athlete. More than $7 million has been spent on the project, so it is written, but there is still no housing structure. Now it has become a sparring issue between Governor Perdue and Rep. Ben Harbin of Evans, two Republicans of differing ilk.
This is unfair to the sport that has brought more publicity to Georgia than can be measured. Governor Perdue has vetoed any appropriations for the Golf Hall, whether in the interest of budget-balancing or par for the course in a match between political rivals. Ah, the governor does enjoy his vetoes.
Permalink | | Categories: Furman Bisher
Once again, players left on hook by coach
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
On Tuesday, Billy Donovan said he was close to a new contract at Florida.
On Wednesday, Billy Donovan said he was still close to a new contract at Florida and, no, he hadn’t spoken to the Orlando Magic.
On Thursday, Billy Donovan finally agreed to a new contract. With the Orlando Magic. Negotiations presumably took only 18 seconds, or were conducted via Ouija board through Donovan’s spiritual adviser, Pinocchio.
So coaches lie. That’s no revelation. Let’s move on.
The issue here is not that a basketball coach would leave one job for another. The issue is what little recourse is afforded his former players.
When a coach leaves a school, the NCAA doesn’t allow players to transfer, at least not without sitting out a season. That’s almost no option at all. And it’s wrong.
Coaches can be as adept at schmoozing as drawing plays. They slither under the front doors of recruits’ homes. They convince them to sign letters of intent. They make promises they don’t intend to keep.
They are well practiced at looking a mother in the eyes and saying, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of your son.”
Then, two weeks later, the coach is in Boston, or New York, or Orlando. Weasels aren’t particular.
Florida probably would allow Donovan’s incoming recruits out of their commitments, if requested. But the school is not required to do so by NCAA bylaws. Even worse, returning players have no choice but to stay or sit out a season.
It seems loyalty only flows in one direction.
“I agree — it’s wrong,” Georgia coach Dennis Felton said Friday. “I think that whenever there’s a coaching change, all players involved should be free to move to another school, with no restriction or penalty. Signed players should have the freedom to do what they like to do. Sitting players should be free to transfer without sitting out a year.”
Well, that’s one vote. But don’t expect this to be the start of a movement. Too many agendas at work.
Felton can’t remember a rules change ever coming up in debate. He figures the NCAA would never yield such freedom to student-athletes because, “It wants to protect its institutions.”
Schools would never want such a rule because, as Felton said, “It may not be as easy for schools to jump up and fire a coach if it also means that it’s going to be easy to lose their players.”
But the current situation simply isn’t fair.
The counter-argument — that a student-athlete is committing to a university, its academics and its program — is naive. Yes, maybe there are things that Duke or North Carolina or Florida offer that could be considered unique. But when a basketball player signs a letter of intent, the coach — Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Billy Donovan — is the primary motivating factor.
Four years ago, when Felton replaced the deposed Jim Harrick in Athens, he agreed to let four recruits (two high school seniors, two junior college transfers) out of their commitments.
“I told them we’d like to have them here at Georgia, but I would not restrict them if they wanted to go elsewhere,” Felton said.
“It’s not only naive, it’s wrong to think that student-athletes, when they choose a school, that it’s not based on the people in that program. It’s not the buildings. It’s the same for all students who are recruited for other things on campus. You connect with the people, the professors. You connect with the culture created by the people in that program. That’s why students come to a school.”
Donovan knows that. But if he feels any guilt, $27.5 million will buy a lot of therapy.
He wasn’t wrong for taking the job. If he pulls the same crash-and-burn as other college coaches in the NBA, he can always return to campus life.
Somebody will pay him. Then, Donovan can tell recruits, “This is the place to be. I’m not going anywhere.”
And kids and moms will believe him, and sign the letters. They had just better realize that their futures are being tied to concrete, not a human.
Permalink | Comments (57) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Jeff Schultz
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