AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > August
August 2007
Bulldogs, Cowboys an unlikely matchup
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
You know, I love college football. Always have, since the time I saw Wake Forest and N.C. State play a scoreless tie when FDR was president. Loved it when they kicked off right after noon and you could get home before dark. Hate it when they kick off under sunshine and it ends under moonshine, and I still have to drive home. If I lived in Waycross or Whigham, or even Blue Ridge, I’d hate it even more.
But all I have to do is write about it. Think about the guys back in the office. They’re, like, sitting in a windstorm. They have five or six games crashing in on them at once. Braves are playing. So are both major leagues. Five or six college games are closing down at the same time. Tim Finchem’s folly is in the second stage, and this one is a headliner. Tiger’s back from “vacation.”
Hmph, call it “vacation?” Some people call playing golf a vacation. Woods calls getting away from golf “vacation.” His office is 18 holes of grass. But, I dawdle.
What’s happening here today is business of another form. Used to be, the big-time colleges liked to open with a “soft touch,” a designation not a lot of coaches like to hear, except for the big payout that comes with it. When I was in college, the Furman-Clemson game was a blockbuster in upper South Carolina. My class never lost a game to Clemson. Now Clemson plays Furman as a sort of a “breather,” which a lot of us old-timers don’t like at all. Georgia Tech used to do the same until Furman beat the Jackets one time, then tied them another, after which the North Avenue school turned elsewhere for its calisthenics.
In days of yore, it was customary that SEC schools opened with a less muscular opponent. Tennessee liked to pick on little Maryville College. Georgia lured Mercer or Stetson or Oglethorpe to Athens for a good payday and a brisk whacking. Mark Richt got to break in against Arkansas State, but that was only a tease. The next two seasons it was Clemson, but he was armed and ready by then. Then Boise State was invited in, but that was before they realized how dangerous Boise State might get to be. BS has become one of the big boys.
Now, we come to what is before us today. I’m not certain just how Oklahoma State happened to get on Georgia’s dance card. There was a time when the Cowboys from Stillwater were more famous for golf than football, won one NCAA championship after another. When they lost Les Miles to LSU, they turned to one of their former stars, and Mike Gundy is just gearing up. Gundy still stands as the finest passer in Oklahoma State history, a youngish 40-year-old who took his team to the Independence Bowl last year, beat Alabama, and probably sunk the fatal dagger in Mike Shula’s career in Tuscaloosa.
Georgia has played Oklahoma State twice, right after World War II, and that was living dangerously, for the Cowboys had lost only game in 1944-45. Wally Butts’ timing was perfect, though; he got the Okies first when the great Bob Fenimore, two times an All-American, was injured and then after he had moved on. So, the record shows Georgia winning twice, Oklahoma State zero, for whatever that means in 2007.
Teams aren’t as much a mystery to one another as they once were, with all the film and television and clinics about. Still, Georgia and OSU are strangers in conflict, sort of throwing darts in a darkened room. Their quarterback is a seasoned veteran, junior Bobby Reid, almost as dangerous running as he is throwing, if you buy into stats. The rest, we’ll find out between sundown and midnight, and all of his faithful followers will be able to get the news through the guttural tones of Larry Munson. There is something to be said for the comforts of home. Game over, turn out the light, party’s over, no 200 miles to drive to Albany, Valdosta, Brunswick or wherever, part of a long, strung-out series of a flickering taillight monster.
Permalink | Comments (28) | Categories: Furman Bisher
The Pedro watch is day-to-day for Mets
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
They should’ve had it won a while ago. They almost had it won six days ago, when they led the NL East by seven games with 34 to play. But now the befuddling Mets, more than simply not having it won, are flirting with blowing it altogether.
“A week ago,” Tom Glavine said, “we probably were where we thought we should be … We thought, ‘Here we go — we’re going on the kind of run we’d anticipated based on the talent in this room.’ “
Yet here the imperial New Yorkers were, losers of five in a row, the latest four coming in an egregious sweep in Philadelphia that included two walk-off defeats, and for their sins they got a weekend trip to Turner Field, their little shop of personal horrors.
Recent and distant history notwithstanding, the Mets’ clubhouse wasn’t a gloomy place Friday afternoon. Pedro Martinez, icepacks attached to his shoulder and his hip, was bounding around spreading his stylized brand of cheer. After briefing the assembled media, he hollered, “Hey, I’m officially back!” Even if that isn’t yet officially true, it was a sunny note in a bleak week.
Then things got sunnier still. John Maine outpitched Tim Hudson — the Braves managed but four singles, their run scoring on a wild pitch — and the Mets nudged their nemesis a bit closer to the brink. This wasn’t at all what the Braves had in mind. They’ve owned the Mets this season and most seasons, but on the last night of August one of their two aces got trumped. It has, as we know, been that sort of year.
“It’s been an up-and-down summer for all three teams,” said Glavine, including the second-place Phillies in the conversation. Such oscillations are the function of pitching, or the lack thereof. Which brings us back to Pedro.
Martinez hasn’t pitched for the Mets this season. Having undergone nearly a year’s worth of rehab after shoulder surgery and having thrown an encouraging session Friday in the Turner Field bullpen, he might start for them Monday in Cincinnati. Or he might start that day for the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets’ Class A affiliate. (“It’d be the biggest game in Brooklyn since ‘56,” cracked Joe Gergen, the Newsday columnist.)
If that sounds confusing — the bigs of Cincy or the bushes of Flatbush? — it’s because the Mets themselves seemed confused. Omar Minaya, their general manager, said Pedro’s next assignment depends on how the pitcher feels this morning. But Minaya also conceded it could depend on how Orlando Hernandez, who’s known as El Duque and who has a sore toe, feels. “He’s day-to-day,” Minaya said of Hernandez. “That adds to the possibility of us [using Pedro] in a major league game.”
The Mets have sought to err on the side of caution with Martinez, but now they’re so strapped for pitching they’re in a hurry. Mike Pelfrey, who’s 0-7 in nine big-league starts this season, has been summoned from Class AAA to work today’s game here, which tells us something. Then again, the Braves will deploy Chuck James, just off the disabled list. See, nobody has enough arms.
Asked if his team was in trouble, Martinez said: “If we stay in first place, we’re not in trouble. If we fall from first place, then trouble is around the corner.”
They should’ve had this thing won. They shouldn’t need a late push from the talismanic Pedro, who would be happy to supply one. “I look at my team, getting away from that big lead,” he said. And then: “I would love to be the one to help them out.”
Maybe he will be. But only a week ago, trouble and the Mets didn’t occupy the same area code. Now trouble lurks just around the corner, trouble with a capital “T,” which rhymes with “P,” which stands for …
Pitching. And also for Pedro. But also for Philadelphia.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Tech, Irish on O’Leary’s mind
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Ten years ago, when Georgia Tech last spent a week on The Flats preparing for a trip to South Bend, Ind., George O’Leary was furious. Seems one of the fraternity houses across the street from Rose Bowl Field kept playing the Notre Dame Victory March at incredibly high decibels during the Yellow Jackets’ practices.
While O’Leary’s face kept getting redder, his hair kept getting whiter.
“Who the heck’s doing that?”
“Hey, go tell them that this is Tech. This ain’t Notre Dame.”
“GET THAT OUTTA HERE.”
O’Leary laughed this week over the phone from Orlando, where he coaches Central Florida football these days.
“I acted like I didn’t know what was going on back then, but I set the whole thing up myself,” said O’Leary, laughing some more at a trick that nearly worked. If not for a long touchdown drive by Notre Dame deep into the fourth quarter, O’Leary’s Jackets would have upset their 13th-ranked hosts.
That was then. As for now, O’Leary will go from late afternoon Saturday through early evening stiff-arming the impossible. He will be in Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh with his Central Florida team, but he also will be at Notre Dame Stadium with Tech against those Golden Dome folks.
All you need to know is that he is part Yellow Jacket, part Fighting Irish and part Golden Knight. So he wasted little time admitting that he’ll spend today juggling the plights of three teams (Central Florida, Notre Dame and Tech) inside his head.
Well, make that four teams, because O’Leary also is consumed with North Carolina State, Central Florida’s season-opening foe.
“I’ll still have an interest in how that Georgia Tech-Notre Dame game is going, and I’m sure that, because Tech is an ACC team, that the stadium announcer [at Carter-Finley Stadium] will be giving the score from South Bend,” O’Leary said. “I’m going to be more involved in our own game against N.C. State. But that’s a game [Tech-Notre Dame] … Hey, I enjoyed my Tech career, and I’m sure I would have enjoyed my Notre Dame career.”
Then O’Leary chuckled, adding, “You know, I was at Tech a heck of a lot longer than I was at Notre Dame.”
Yes, we know.
Everybody knows.
There were O’Leary’s 13 seasons at Tech as an assistant and head coach compared to his five days in charge of Notre Dame’s fabled program. This was the saddest thing, because coaching Notre Dame was O’Leary’s dream job. He grew up in New York idolizing the Irish, but courtesy of inaccuracies (OK, lies) about his football and academic prowess in college, O’Leary spent just one official day in the head coach’s office at Notre Dame.
I was the only journalist around for O’Leary’s one official day, and we talked of dining the next night. He gave me the phone number of his mother, Peggy, now deceased, and he invited me to call her. He spoke with dancing eyes of how she was proud that her Irish-Catholic son finally was working in the shadow of Touchdown Jesus.
Before I could call Mother O’Leary the following afternoon, the son was gone that morning. He was punted away from his dream job in shame. That was six years ago, and O’Leary hasn’t forgotten.
Folks won’t let him.
“I don’t think about it, but I get stopped an awful lot — whether it’s Notre Dame fans or stuff,” O’Leary said. “It’s like, ‘Coach, sorry it didn’t work out.’ And it would have been a good situation up there, but my wounds were self-inflicted. I wish it could have been worked out. But, hey, life moves on. I have no animosity toward anybody, because it was stupidity on my own part, and as my mom said, ‘The good Lord doesn’t close a window unless he opens another.’ “
So who are you cheering for this weekend besides Central Florida? “Well,” said O’Leary, switching his emotions to Notre Dame Stadium. “I hope it’s close, and Tech wins at the end.” He laughed, adding, “As for allegiance, I guess [13 years] is longer than five days.”
Permalink | Comments (25) | Categories: Tech / ACC, Terence Moore
Stafford grasping what QB requires
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
What Georgia needs from Matthew Stafford: Less whizbang, more wisdom. What Georgia needs Matthew Stafford to be: Less Jeff George, more David Greene.
It was the big arm, as we know, that made Stafford the people’s choice before the ballyhooed freshman had taken a collegiate snap. It was, and is, the arm that impresses most, and it was, and is, one heck of a limb. Stafford can, as the old baseball line goes, throw a strawberry through a locomotive. But an arm, as we also know, doesn’t necessarily make the man.
Jeff George, once a Falcon but never a fixture anywhere, had the arm but not the head, and for a quarterback that’s the worst package possible. A quarterback with a big arm believes he can make any old throw any old time, defenders and percentages be hanged. A quarterback with a big arm but a faulty gyroscope winds up keeping both teams in the game - his with the occasional rainbow, the opponent with the more-than-occasional jaw-dropping interception - and such quarterbacks don’t last.
Stafford was that sort of quarterback as a freshman. He authored seven touchdown passes against 13 interceptions. In the abject loss at Kentucky, he threw the ball to the Wildcats on consecutive series - first from Georgia’s 1-yard line, next from Kentucky’s 2. “There’s something in young quarterbacks,” coach Mark Richt said that gray day, “that they have a hard time burning the ball.”
Give Stafford this. He grew up in the span of seven days. He played a beautifully measured game in the upset of Auburn the next Saturday - no interceptions! - and once threw the ball out of bounds rather than risk a turnover. (“I wanted to cheer,” Richt said.) He engineered the game-winning drive against Georgia Tech and the epic rally against Virginia Tech in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, although it must be said that another Stafford interception helped create that massive deficit in the first place.
And now he’s the unchallenged incumbent as Georgia embarks on what should be a better season. He looks more comfortable than he did this time a year ago. (You would, too.) He’s conspicuously sleeker - for a few scary months, it seemed Stafford was bound for Jared Lorenzen dimensions - and he says he’s no longer daunted by the size of the playbook.
The job is no longer his to win. From here, it can only be lost. Last season’s shuffle did none of the quarterbacks any favors, and Richt, in hindsight, concedes as much. Having a real No. 1 quarterback, the coach says, “affects everything. It affects how you design a plan. It affects the perception of the program.”
As Stafford goes, so go the Bulldogs. He’s talented enough to do all the things he needs to do; he just needs not to do those things that will undercut the whole operation. He needs to manage games the way Greene famously did - 72 touchdowns against only 32 interceptions over four distinguished seasons - and to manage himself and his big arm. He doesn’t have to complete every pass. “A punt,” Richt keeps telling him, “is not a bad play.”
There’s no reason Stafford can’t become what he was advertised to be: the next great college quarterback. He has the aptitude, and he seems to have the attitude. (Remember, he was so impressive in preseason practices after being designated the co-No. 3 quarterback that Richt scrapped any notions of redshirting him.) He appears to have a grasp on who he is and, more important, what his precious position entails.
Asked at media day if Georgia needed to find an every-down tailback, Stafford said: “I don’t think so. It’s more important that the offense have one focal point, one leader [meaning the quarterback]. Running back is more a physical position.”
And that’s the thing: Playing quarterback requires physical gifts, sure, but the mental makeup matters more. Were having a big arm the sole requirement, Jeff George would have been Joe Montana. But it isn’t, and he wasn’t.
Permalink | Comments (39) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
Pocket this pick: Jackets straight up
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
(The following is not affiliated with Q, T, P-Funk, P-Tart, D-minus, Y-Ask, I-Giveup; anybody who finds religion 12 seconds after a plea and seven seconds into their first press conference; the Notre Dame player who was suspended three games for soliciting an independent contractor named Candi, who must’ve not been tithing; and certainly not the Georgia Department of Education — because not just anybody can follow a 46th-place ranking in SAT scores with a press release that begins: “Georgia’s 2007 high school seniors held their ground versus the nation on the SAT.” Dude, when you’re 46th, nobody’s challenging your ground.)
Hello. I am back. The Altered States vs. Weekend Predictions, a/k/a J-Zzzzzzzzz.
By now, you should know how this works. Every week, I give you the winners — it’s your job to find them. Occasional “losses” will be sprinkled through our season portfolio intentionally to throw off competing investment firms and NBA referees.
This week’s main attraction finds Georgia Tech traveling to Notre Dame, which will be without the services of the Love Doctor, defensive lineman Derrell “Slow” Hand. The Irish are still gaga over coach Charlie Weis, so much so that it’s easy to forget he’s even with Ty Willingham in bowl wins (zero).
The Jackets have a new offensive coordinator (John Bond), a new quarterback (Taylor Bennett) and a belief they can somehow get better despite losing the best player in the country (Calvin Johnson).
Don’t know about that. But I do know Weis fell significantly short of brilliant in last year’s opener when Tech defensive coordinator Jon Tenuta had an entire off-season to prepare. And here we are again.
Notre Dame generally is overrated early in the season. So what does it say that the Irish aren’t even in the Top 25, and drew fewer votes in the “also receiving votes” category than Southern Miss?
History says Tech hasn’t won in South Bend in 48 years. The line says Irish by 2-1/2. Here’s your higher power: Grab the points, but Jackets win straight up.
Early-season specials
(Buy three picks and win a copy of, “Public Icon’s Public Rehab For Dummies ‘07.” Chapter 1: Carry copy of New, Old or even Gently Used Testament. 2. Liquidate assets and dig a nice hole under a palm tree somewhere in South America. 3. Animal Planet, 24/7.)
Okie State at Georgia: The last time Athens was shaking this much about a season opener, Boise State lost by 35. Save your angst. You’ll need it in Jacksonville. This is Mike Bobo vs. a defense that ranked 89th last season and Matthew Stafford vs. a secondary that allowed opposing QBs a rating of 136.98. I got your rhinestone, Cowboys. Dogs cover 6.
Western Carolina at Liar Liar: Know why Nick Saban really left the Dolphins? He couldn’t get Western Carolina on the schedule. Saban’s first game at LSU was a 58-0, sand-kick over the Catamounts. His first opponent at Alabama: The carcass. Bama fans are asked to bring a used textbook to the game since there’s no money left in the state school system, thanks to the new Czar. No line. But let’s say Tide goes under-58.
Tennessee at Cal: Hate to hammer on Phil Fulmer so early (not really). But in the past two years, the Vowels are 8-8 in the SEC (14-10 overall), and they play Cal and Florida in the season’s first three weeks. The starting QB, Erik Ainge, has four good fingers on his throwing hand. Not so good. Berkeley covers 6.
Kansas State at Auburn: Actual facts (hey, it happens): K-State had six 11-win seasons in a seven-year span (1997-03) but is only 16-19 since. Should’ve kept scheduling Western Kentucky. Tigers cover 13-1/2.
Florida State at Clemson: Bobby Bowden has helped saved Tommy’s job three times in the past four years. Isn’t it about time he save his own job? Pecking order restored in the family and the conference: Noles cover 3-1/2.
Wake Forest at Boston College: Wake is determined to repeat as ACC champions. Mallet, meet head. B.C. covers 6-1/2.
Scoreboard
Last season: 119-16-2 against the spread (computer hard drive damaged but results committed to memory).
This season: Profits almost guaranteed.
Lock of the week: Deadbolt.
Permalink | Comments (63) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
Braves need pitcher more than Tex
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Trading for Mark Teixeira was the right move — he’s the first-rate first baseman the Braves haven’t had this century, and he provides middle-of-the-lineup cover when Andruw Jones takes his leave — but it wasn’t the right move at the right time. The Braves needed, and still need, a starting pitcher more.
It’s a funny thing. The Braves are convinced they could win the World Series with this splendid everyday eight and these two great starting pitchers. (I wouldn’t disagree, and I’ve written as much.) Indeed, you can win 11 postseason games with two big-time starters — the Diamondbacks did it in 2001 with Johnson and Schilling, and the Marlins did much the same in 2003 with Penny and Beckett. Trouble is, you can’t get to the postseason without a back end of a rotation.
And that’s why the Braves are where they are, as far back in the wild-card race as they are in the NL East. They’ve lost 4 1/2 games in the wild-card standings in two weeks and have been reduced to trotting out a 40-year-old on three days’ rest, and here it is not yet September. And here we are, realizing yet again that the most important stat in baseball isn’t runs scored or runs allowed or anything Bill James dreamed up. It’s innings pitched.
The Braves won those 14 division titles because their starting pitchers worked more good innings than any other team’s. Their starting pitchers gave them more chances to win than did the opposition’s. Their back end of the rotation — some years John Smoltz was, if you can believe this now, the No. 4 starter — outclassed most front ends.
And now it doesn’t. The back end is the reason the Braves are five back in both pursuits with 28 games remaining. Teixeira has done all anyone could have asked — more, even — but he can’t go out and give this team six good innings every fifth day.
Permalink | Comments (163) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Vick listening now
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
At least for the moment, Michael Vick is embracing the tens of supporters that he now has over the millions who once existed in his world. To that end, he is quietly attending a little church near his mother’s home in Chesapeake, Va. Even before his mea culpa this week after he pleaded guilty in a Virginia federal court to charges related to dogfighting, the 100 members or so spent recent weeks singing and praying over the Falcons quarterback at the altar in an attempt “to scream the demons out of him,” according to a famous visitor.
It’s a start.
So there is hope.
Since Vick says he has become a Christian while evolving from NFL star to convicted felon, we’ll summarize his plight in biblical terms. Instead of the King James Version, we’ll use the standard NFL translation: He was sacked for a huge loss, but he still can score a touchdown. It’s just going to take a few more hits for a guy who kept ignoring his blockers.
Blockers, prophets, advisers. Same thing in this case. Vick had so many folks trying to push him away from idol gods, but he ignored them. Now, he has to reap what he has sown. Still, courtesy of his confession from the heart, he has shown contrition, and he has asked for forgiveness. Repentance remains, but only because he didn’t listen to his ever-present voices of reason earlier in his career. He heard a couple of those voices during the summer of 2002 in Greenville, S.C., where Vick huddled for the longest time with an icon from the civil-rights movement and an Atlanta columnist after a Falcons practice during training camp at Furman University. What started as a conversation of two became a trio after Andrew Young waved for me on the far side of the field to join them.
The discussion wasn’t about the intricacies of the draw play. The discussion was about what Vick needed to do to avoid becoming another professional athlete with lots of money and notoriety getting embarrassed — or worse — before flashing cameras and live microphones. The discussion was about how he needed to use professionalism on and off the field. The discussion was about how he needed a spiritual rebirth.
Through it all, Vick used his ears more than his mouth.
So what happened?
“He became guilty of ghetto loyalty,” said Young, the former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador, sighing on Wednesday with the memory. For instance: Soon after that huddle, Vick joined Young and other athletes for a trip to New York to help those needing wheelchairs via something called Wheelchair Charities. That’s when Young told Vick, “These are the things that you have to keep on doing. And, actually, if he had gone to trial, some of those guys had called me, and they were preparing to come to support him.”
Then Vick became larger than life on the field and the rest of life around him became insignificant beyond his crew. It was one of his crew members who stole an expensive watch in his presence after they went through security at the Atlanta airport. In the midst of it all, his crew was hanging and drowning dogs.
Young sighed again, saying, “I’m in Africa quite a bit, so I lost track of Michael for a long time. I did not follow up much with him, but he expressed an interest in learning how to do the right things, and he is a bright kid, but he has no background and no support network. That’s why [during that huddle in 2002] I was trying to help him to realize that, all of a sudden, he is a star and a celebrity, and that’s a heavy burden, and you can’t carry it alone. You need a support network around you.”
Enter that little Virginia church, with missionary work in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Mozambique. Instead of sending money, clothes or food, the members go to those countries with farm machinery to help the citizens grow their own food. Vick’s mother, Brenda Boddie, lives next door to the church secretary, and after becoming that famous visitor to the church earlier this summer, Young suggested to church members that they invite Vick to attend.
Before long, Boddie was in the pews, along with her son.
“I mean, I don’t believe anybody hardly in the church has ever been to college, but they’re just common-looking people that are maids, and they work in laundries, and they just do simple things,” Young said. “They have the spirit, though, and they ain’t playing. They’re having church. When they get through screaming and shouting over you, something’s going to change.”
That’s the hope with Vick.
There’s that word again.
Hope.
Permalink | Comments (124) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Hope rises out of ashes of QB mess
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
This is the tale of two quarterbacks. One, the new Michael Vick standing, before a rapt audience declaring his newly forged relationship with God. The other, a journeyman of modest achievement, first in line to be his successor as a Falcon, Joey Harrington. The day was Aug. 27, and the lives of the two would intersect only in the most disparate of ways.
In Richmond, Vick would stand before a judge and plead guilty to a hideous felony, then take the podium at a hotel nearby and reveal a Michael Vick none of us had ever perceived. He threw himself on the mercy of the people in a subservient manner that caused a response of compassion. It was revealing of an inner Vick none had ever known. Impeccably clad, no flashing jewelry, stern features, kind of pleading in a way, deporting himself in a manner that reached for your heart.
No further cause here to go into a repetition of his misdeeds, only a gnawing query of how an athlete of such extraordinary talent could have lowered himself to such depths for his private amusement? For one thing, he had been over-endowed with a contract of riches that was hugely excessive. One hundred thirty millions of dollars to fling or carry a football? Arthur Blank’s impulsiveness was fed by the dramatics that Vick brought to the football field. Vick had found his Midas. That relationship will be abruptly severed once the Falcons reclaim what they can of the huge bonus that preceded it all.
For all your hopes and dreams, you have seen the last of Michael Vick clad in his Falcons No. 7. While he stood before a crowded press herd, sopping up his confessional like a sponge in Richmond, Arthur Blank stood before an audience equally thirsty for his benediction to an era, though ever so brief, in Atlanta. Their divorce as employer and employee was being declared. It was a morose conclusion to what had been blessed with glorious promise.
Later that evening, the other quarterback would take his place, previously occupied by Vick, in the Georgia Dome. He is the traditional type, take the snap, drop back, find your target, deliver the ball. The Falcons were playing their third preseason game against Cincinnati. Joey Harrington had been picked up off the street, so to speak, a matter of desperation in the view of Vick’s defection. His rival for the evening would be a Heisman Trophy winner, Carson Palmer, a glittering star when the two played in the Pac-10. Harrington had been a star at Oregon, but far from the glitter of Southern Cal and Palmer, and was drafted by Detroit, later traded to Miami, which was a form of rejection.
His ascension as the successor to Vick became automatic. He was all they had. What a predicament for Bobby Petrino, new on the job. There was no mourning. If he ever mentioned Vick’s name, it never got beyond the gates at Flowery Branch. He put his team on the field, rounded up a couple of spear-carriers to back up Harrington, and said “bring ‘em on,” a term attributed only to me.
Now, this was critically coincidental. The day of Vick’s plea in Richmond, Harrington would get his introduction to the home fans. Many caroused outside in defense of Vick. Many inside wore shirts bearing Vick’s name. The Dome was smatteringly attended, but somehow the crowd seemed to grow, as did its approval of Harrington as the game wore on. He completed eight of his first nine passes, often under a hard rush. But he held his ground in the pocket and fired bullets. Touchdown passes were completed to Adam Jennings and Jerious Norwood, and Roddy White dropped one in the end zone, causing some to wonder just which Roddy White this was. (That’s also the name of the Falcons’ event director.)
Harrington put his firm clasp on the job. It wasn’t one of those games that fluttered with exciting plays, but most encouraging trend was, once in the lead, the Falcons had the defense to hold it. Petrino was conspicuous by his inconspicousness. No nose for the camera. What he put on the field bore his signature. Like a well-fitting pair of gloves on a pair of hands, it seemed, he and Joey Harrington having their opening night together. One performance does not a season make, or even establish a trend, but there was something the Falcons were quite proud of.
After Harrington had left the field to Chris Redman and Casey Bramlet, it was revealed to the press box that Harrington’s passing rating was 118, the kind of stuff of which the road to Canton is paved. Foolish thought, oh, how foolish, but it was a treasured testimonial for one exceedingly nerve-racked day in the life of the Falcons.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Furman Bisher
Bennett already steady for Jackets
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Georgia Tech recently had a quarterback who had skill and passion but was prone to emotional face-plants. There really wasn’t any reason to dislike Reggie Ball. It’s just that after four seasons, Tech fans were sick of watching a whiffleball in a windstorm.
The Yellow Jackets open the season Saturday at Notre Dame. We can’t predict how Taylor Bennett will react to the seemingly out-of-whack expectations set up by his three-touchdown flash dance in the Gator Bowl or the inevitable descent that interrupts any young quarterback’s season. But don’t expect emotions to be an issue with this guy.
Bennett has already endured the toughest setback for a Tech quarterback — Calvin Johnson’s departure. He found out in January when his cellphone made that unfortunate you’ve-got-a-really-bad-text sound.
“I was in Arizona taking a shower, and I could hear somebody sent me a text message,” he said. “I knew right away it was Calvin, because he was supposed to make his decision that day. I got out and picked up the phone and the message just said, ‘I’m leaving.’ I wanted to take my phone and throw it against the wall.’ No kidding.”
Probably serious. But he recovered. Get used to it.
Sometimes you get a sense for whether a kid will have a tendency to pop a spring. Ball was walking blowtorch from the time he stepped on campus. The only question was whether he would ever find the “low burn” indicator.
“Reggie was an unbelievable competitor,” said coach Chan Gailey, choosing his words carefully. “That worked for him sometimes and against him sometimes. But more for the good than the bad.”
Gailey on Bennett: “He’ll be fine.”
That was easy.
The Jackets are loaded with returning starters. But they lost the best player in the country. You can spin it any way you like — a great running game, great offensive line, great balance — but you don’t take a player like Calvin Johnson off a roster and get better.
So the season’s pretty much up to Bennett.
No pressure or anything.
“I don’t mind,” he said, smiling. “If I fail, I’ll just say we lost Calvin.”
He gives the standard response on pressure, that he’s his own worst critic. It turns out his mother is a close second. Wendy Jones would take him to summer camps when he was in high school and quiz her son in diners on defensive coverages.
“I didn’t know anything,” Bennett said. “My mom would pull out sugar packets in the restaurant and start asking me questions. I was trying to figure out what ‘cover 4’ meant and certain blitzes and stuff like that. Now when she sees something in a game, she’ll ask what happened on a certain play and we’ll get out the sugar packets.”
Now he speaks football. As well as Russian and Spanish. The former he took for three semesters, mistakenly believing it fulfilled his language requirement for his International Affairs majors. (For some reason, Tech recognizes only Spanish, French and German for the major. I guess in Tech’s world, the U.S. and Russia don’t have International Affairs.)
But it hasn’t dissuaded from Bennett’s desire to visit Russia or follow up on his career aspirations. He wants to be a spy.
Now might be a good time to design a few misdirection plays.
“I’d like to do something for the Department of Homeland Security, or maybe CIA,” Bennett said. “I don’t want to be like a secret undercover spy who goes around shooting people. But I’d like to be involved in operations abroad. The whole idea of clandestine services sounds interesting.”
South Bend is three days away. This is generally when nerves start to build. Bennett: “Nervousness comes from not knowing things.”
I know. Sounds too good. You think: He’ll walk into the stadium that even he refers to as, “The Holy Land of college football” and his knees were wobble.
But he didn’t look nervous in his last start. He doesn’t seem intimidated now. The whole spy thing? Makes perfect sense to Gailey.
“He’s got that kind of preparation — a little bit of sneakiness to him,” Gailey said.
“If things don’t work out for him in football, I would trust him to safeguard our country.”
Somewhere between eight wins and world peace would suffice.
Permalink | Comments (39) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC
No Blank check coming from Vick
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN
10: I understand completely the Falcons wanting to recoup $22 million in bonuses from Michael Vick. But they probably have a better chance of selling Vick jerseys for full retail than getting all of that back.
9: Going after the money is the right thing for the Falcons, primarily because it can create salary cap space. It’s right for the league because it sends a message to players who jump the rails in their personal life and mistakenly believe it won’t hurt them financially. Who knows, the Falcons might even be able to navigate the long and complex process of winning a judgment. But …
8: They only regain the cap space if they actually collect the money from Vick, not merely win a judgment. Those are two different animals. Just ask the Goldmans (and, no, I’m not comparing Vick to O.J. Simpson, so take your finger off the e-mail button). Vick isn’t about to say, “You’re right. Here’s my ATM card.”
7: We know Vick has made a lot of money but we don’t know how many assets he actually has, to what extent they’re shielded and how much money is actually buried in a hole between two palm trees on a remote island in Fiji. So good luck, Mr. Blank. This won’t be as easy as, “Cap space, aisle six.”
6: Even as a media member, I agree there should be certain rules of etiquette for press conferences. For example, there was the reporter who Monday dipped into the wrong bag of clichés when he asked Arthur Blank if he planned to “keep his players on a shorter leash.” Ugh.
5: Gotta admit. I’m so worn out by the perceived racial fallout of the Vick case that I actually liked seeing a picture in ajc.com of three white guys in Vick jerseys holding up a sign that read, “I will redeem myself.”
4: And now for something completely different: I’ve been collecting a few items from local sports teams for a benefit auction. The Braves last week were nice enough to send me two autographed balls. One by John Smoltz, the other by Bob Wickman. I do believe one has just become a chew toy.
3: It would be nice if at least one of the Falcons’ Virginia Tech products (Vick, DeAngelo Hall, Jimmy Williams) didn’t turn into a punch line. But Hall isn’t helping. Last night he had “I Own U 85” — a reference to Cincinnati receiver Chad Johnson — shaved into his hair. Johnson burned him for five catches for 83 yards and a touchdown in less than three quarters. Clearly, Johnson owned Hall — and I’m not talking about his scalp.
2: Yes, that was Hank Aaron, relaxed in a room full of reporters Monday at Blank’s foundation office, calmly answering all questions — fully realizing not even one would include the words “steroids” or “Bonds.”
1: Four days until college football Saturday. Oh, how I long for the relatively amusing crimes of the SEC.
Permalink | Comments (135) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Falcons move forward, but ghost lingers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Arthur Blank spent the outset of his opening statement Monday explaining why the Falcons were not officially going to cut Michael Vick, even if every ounce of his soul, his retailing prowess and a very itchy trigger finger screamed otherwise.
“Cutting him today may feel better emotionally today,” Blank said at a press conference held after Vick formally entered a guilty plea in federal court. “But it’s not in the best long-term interest of our franchise.”
As it turns out, some people actually think before the act.
So there Monday night in the Georgia Dome was Vick, sort of. A Falcon, in paper only. A ghost.
He will haunt the team this season in merchandising sales and the salary cap. He will remain a part of the franchise until Blank can convince a series of judges and arbitrators that he deserves $22 million in bonuses back — or until Judge Henry Hudson covers Vick with gravy and orders him to run ahead of the Iditarod field, which ever comes first.
To what extent Vick haunts the Falcons this season remains uncertain. But consider their first home game minus Vick the first step in a year-long exorcism.
Joey Harrington threw two touchdown passes in the first half against the Cincinnati Bengals. He had a potential third touchdown dropped in the end zone in the third quarter by Roddy White (whose drops have not yet equated to a felony).
By the time he left the game in the third, Harrington had thrown for 164 yards on 13-of-21 passing with no interceptions (though three sacks). It amounted to a quarterback efficiency rating of 118, which team officials were so proud of that they announced it in the press box.
Life goes on. A team goes on. The Falcons got to wear uniforms and play a game and everything. They even won. Go figure.
“We don’t want to overblow this,” coach Bobby Petrino said. “It was a preseason game. But it was important.”
How about this for a foreign concept: After his teammates had left the team’s facility Saturday for time off, Harrington stayed back to draw up plays and study more video, according to Petrino. “With all of the adversity and controversy, it was important that he come out and play well,” he said.
It was a rare moment of joy for Blank, who earlier in the day looked worn down from another long news conference at his home office. NFL owners just aren’t built for this many off-season spin sessions.
“A lot of people have asked me how I feel about this,” Blank said of Vick’s exit. “But it’s not about me. It’s about animals that have died. It’s about players who were with Michael for six years. … It’s about moving forward.”
His heart tells him to remove any reminder of Vick in this city, even if it means knocking on doors to collect old Nikes and No. 7 jerseys. But he can’t.
Think of Vick this way: He’s a car you financed over five years that broke down after two. The bank says it’s still yours, even though you’re now riding the bus. Or Harrington.
In Richmond, Vick suddenly showed contrition when he addressed the media after his plea. But Blank has experienced Vick saying one thing and doing another. It’s not about words, it’s about actions.
If there was any doubt about how Blank feels, it became apparent when somebody asked him about Vick claiming he had “turned my life over to God.”
“You have to match that up with personal responsibility, in addition to turning your life over to God,” Blank said. “This isn’t a religious sermon. But I don’t think God is saying, ‘OK, it’s up to me from this point forward.’ God gives us the ability to make choices and what we do with those choices is our responsibility, not God’s responsibility.”
Meanwhile, back down here on Earth, an NFL team tried again to move on. The replacement quarterback looked passable. The offense functioned, certainly better than some on the defense (cornerback DeAngelo Hall didn’t appear to be all here in coverage, in mind, body and spirit).
In two weeks, the Falcons will start things for real in Minnesota. Vick will still be awaiting sentencing. Before long, he’ll be in a cell. For now, he’s a ghost. Some spirits you can’t get rid of so easily.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
There’s still hope for Vick
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Richmond, Va. — Once he posed for this newspaper dressed in a Superman shirt. On Monday he stood in a courtroom and later in a hotel ballroom, no longer invulnerable or impervious, a god-like hero revealed as all too human.
On the day he became a convicted felon, Michael Vick indicated that he, perhaps contrary to popular belief, has both a heart and a conscience. When he turned toward his family after court was adjourned, his look was one of abject shame. His blue suit seemed a size too large, adding to the sensation that this 27-year-old athlete was somehow just a little boy gone way, way wrong.
Forty-five minutes later and two blocks away, Vick met the assembled media for the first time in 3-1/2 months. He deflected nothing. (“I’m not pointing fingers,” he said, twice.) He kept using the word “totally,” saying, “I’m totally disappointed in myself” and “I’m totally responsible.”
He didn’t read from a text. He walked to the podium and said, by way of introduction, “Most of my life I’ve been a football player, not a public speaker.” Then he made as graceful a speech as anyone will ever deliver on the worst day of his/her life. He apologized often. He admitted lying to Arthur Blank and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. (“I was ashamed,” he said.) He condemned dogfighting as “a terrible thing” and said, “I do reject it.”
And then this: “I offer my deepest apology to everybody out there in the world who was affected by this, and if I’m more disappointed with myself than anybody by this, it’s because of all the young kids I let down … I hope that every young kid out there … will use me as an example to using better judgment and making better decisions.”
In sum, he said all the things we’ve waited to hear Michael Vick say, and he said them not as part of some legal bargain but as a plea to the rest of humankind. In his conspicuous devastation, he evinced the universal desire to be understood and, yes, forgiven.
He said he’d “found Jesus” and “turned my life over to God,” and skeptics will note that a disproportionate number of religious conversions occur when the convert is about to become a convict. Somehow, though, nothing about Vick rang false this day. He kept saying, “Yes, sir” to Judge Henry Hudson, even as Hudson delineated all the rights a convicted felon forfeits — to vote, to bear arms, to serve on a jury — and then noted that, the plea bargain notwithstanding, he could serve the full five years if the judge so ordains. Did Vick understand?
“Yes, sir.”
Could this have been, as his lawyer Billy Martin said, our first post-dogfight look at “the real Michael Vick”? (Martin: “What we’ve seen is an aberration.”) We can only hope. Vick will go to jail and serve his NFL suspension, and then there’ll be the rest of his life. It need not be a tale of woe. With the right amount of contrition (from him) and compassion (from us), it might even become a heartening story in three acts: The rise, the fall, the redemption.
Vick: “I will redeem myself. I have to.”
The guy typing this should stipulate that he thought he’d come to know the real Michael Vick years ago. The guy wrote, several times, that Vick was a decent fellow who cared deeply about doing the right things. On Monday the guy walked within three feet of Vick on the way out of the courtroom and tried twice to make eye contact. And twice Vick looked away, as if to say, “I’m sorry I wasn’t the person you thought.”
It was a sobering spectacle, seeing this worker of athletic wonders admit to being a criminal. And if that’s the last we ever hear from Vick, this will have been, as Martin averred, “a tragic situation.” But as Michael Vick stood before the cameras, a humbled man trying not to cry but in no way trying to duck, here’s what the same guy thought:
There’s hope for this one yet.
Permalink | Comments (222) | Categories: Mark Bradley
Falcons’ past and future overlap Monday
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
If you view it as warped irony that the Falcons would be playing a preseason game tonight, the same day their former quarterback is expected to rubber stamp a plea deal in Virginia, at least there’s this: The game wasn’t held Sunday — which happened to be National Dog Day.
Will this ever end? Or is the Falcons season destined to become a series of self-replicating, mutating ironies?
Coming soon: Pit Bull Appreciation Week coincides with the opening of the NFL season. The Westminster Kennel Club opens a satellite office in Newport News. It’s almost enough to make you forget about preseason football (which in itself isn’t a bad thing).
This morning, the Falcons’ past will wear a nice suit in a Richmond courtroom. This evening, the Falcons’ future will be unveiled just a little bit more, when they play their third exhibition and first at home against the Cincinnati Bengals, who at least can relate to standing on the wrong side of a courtroom.
The Falcons have lived with this since April. They’ll have to live with it through 17 weeks of the regular season. Vick is gone, in body if not disturbed spirit. But this stain isn’t coming out for a while. DogGate, salary cap hit and a p.r. gut shot sets back a team that already has spent too much time behind the curve.
“That’s something Rich McKay and Arthur Blank will have to deal with,” said Jeff Van Note, the former Falcons player. “But somebody’s hoping to make the team on punt return this week.”
Sort of puts things in perspective. Relatively speaking, it’s not quite the attention grabber of all matters Ookie. But hum-drum can be good. The Falcons would embrace hum-drum right about now.
No franchise, not even one with as many self-inflicted wounds as the Falcons, deserves this.
No owner, let alone one who’s as passionate as Arthur Blank and devotes so much time, energy and resources to his product, should be subjected to this.
The preseason should be a time of optimism. But this one is a Stephen King book.
The most successful pro athletes are the ones who can compartmentalize. But is it possible to navigate around so much baggage, even if avoiding opening a newspaper or turning on a TV or radio?
“I really don’t think this has been that difficult for the players themselves,” said Van Note, who is on the Falcons’ Ring of Honor after an 18-year career, and is now a radio analyst for the team. “Young players are focused on trying to make the team. Veterans are focused on staying on the team and learning new schemes. This has been a big story. But as a player what good does it do you to think about it if you’re not on the team?”
It sounds good in theory. But isn’t it like trying to ignore the elephant in the room — or at least what the elephant left behind?
There will be ongoing stories for months related to Vick’s plea deal, his prison term, his suspension, his future, or any time his name comes up in connection as a cooperating witness in other dog-fighting cases (which seems a given).
There will be related stories. Blank going after Vick’s bonus money. Empty seats. Maybe a family member on Oprah.
Already, Vick’s mother and sister defended him in a New York Post story Sunday. This came after Vick’s estranged father, Michael Boddie, told the AJC that he had told his son for years to stop dog fighting. Next up on the Family Feud — little cousin Davon Boddie? How long can he avoid another arrest, given his anonymity is toast.
Bobby Petrino, the new coach, is trying to stay out of this. His players are doing the same. But about the only positive thing the Falcons can point to right now is they haven’t played a real game yet.
They have the same record as the Colts.
Also, somebody has to win the lottery.
Van Note: “I don’t think I ever played a game, with the exception of Catholic grade school, where I didn’t think I was going to win and be successful. The season will prove whether you’re wrong or right, but that’s the attitude you maintain. It’s a new year. You look forward to that.”
Tonight it’s just a practice game. Ah, the serenity.
Permalink | | Categories: Jeff Schultz
Braves find a winner in moving Johnson to second
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
These are not the best of times for the Braves, once they get past Smoltz and Hudson. There’s no more comfort in looking ahead to the appointed closer, but closing has been more a “crashing” of late. Thus, turning elsewhere to find something to cheer about, let’s settle on Kelly Johnson, solid, clean-cut, a day-in, day-out player, more a station wagon than a sports-car kind of guy.
The first time John Schuerholz saw Kelly Johnson, he knew the Braves had something there. He was barely out of a Texas high school, but there was a calm about him you didn’t find in teenagers. Not only that, but he could handle a bat. Here was an infielder who could hit, and so the story was off and running.
It came to a sudden halt last season when he had to have the kind of surgery usually reserved for pitchers, and bears the name of one, Tommy John. A cold, hard winter lay ahead, but Schuerholz didn’t allow it to go to waste. He took upon himself two gambles: (1) he handed first base to a raw rookie, Scott Thorman, and (2) he made Kelly Johnson a project. Not one who has to be tailed by a detective after hours.
“I looked out my office window on cold, gray days and there he was, out there working with Glenn Hubbard, one of the best second baseman I ever saw at turning a double play,” the Braves general manager said. “Day after day he and Kelly were going at it, hundreds and hundreds of ground balls.”
Marcus Giles was about to be de-chaired, not only saving the Braves a substantial payroll hit, but inventing a new model second baseman. Johnson had played shortstop but never second base, and there is a difference, especially making the double play. That’s the drill Hubbard put him through mainly.
“It’s different. It’s like looking at in a mirror. At shortstop, you’re coming across the bag looking to the ball. From second, you run into the ball and you have to turn to make the relay,” Johnson said. “It’s just the opposite of everything I’d done before. I wasn’t so sure how it was going to turn out, but I’ve begun to get comfortable.”
Drill, drill, drill, day after day, come rain, shine or chill. “I’ll tell you this,” Bobby Cox said, “he’s as good as Lemke or Hubbard now, and this is just his first year,” speaking of Mark Lemke, second baseman on the Braves’ pennant winner and team MVP of the World Series of ‘91.
If the contest is open for Most Valuable Surprise of the season, the nomination is made: It’s Johnson. At the end of April, he was hitting .321, five home runs and 15 runs batted in. Schuerholz held his breath. He was batting .500 himself, for as it turned out, Thorman wasn’t ready for front-line duty. Second base is not an “out” position when it comes to bat production. Some of the game’s great hitters have been second basemen: Rogers Hornsby, Frankie Frisch, Charley Gehringer, and, to throw in a present-day batsman, Jeff Kent. There is no “banjo” in Johnson’s bat. He hits doubles in clusters, has 13 home runs, and drives in runs, and he goes about it with quiet confidence.
He doesn’t waste words, and he doesn’t deal in acrobatics. His transformation into a second baseman is complete, and if you’re looking for noise in the clubhouse, it won’t be Johnson. He comes, he goes, he speaks in mild tones, and you might call him the All-Texan Kid. A clubhouse full of Kelly Johnsons would be a manager’s dream.
“He’s just a great kid,” Cox said, “just look at the way he has handled all this. He gets a job and he does it. He’s as good as anybody in the league,” which is pretty strong stuff for a guy who had to be given an escort to second base.
“Bright, athletic, all those intelligent elements,” Schuerholz said. “He’s light years ahead of Giles [who happens to be hitting in the .220s at San Diego],” spoken with the pride of a father.
And don’t forget the patience of Glenn Hubbard. “He gave me all that time,” Kelly said, “day after day, ground balls by the hundreds.”
The “project” has turned out well. Scott Thorman, well, that’s another case that’ll have to wait until another day.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
Notre Dame vs. Tech a classic matchup
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Off and on, Georgia Tech has been playing Notre Dame since 1922, for better or worse, and more times than not, for worse. Anytime Notre Dame is on the schedule, the floodlights go up, trumpets sound, bugles blare and the nation’s eyes are upon you, as they will be the first day of September in South Bend. Only five of the 33 times Georgia Tech has played Notre Dame have the Yellow Jackets come away in celebration.
No, make that six. (We’ll get around to that later.) The series record reads 27-5-1. It’s the “1” that takes the stage here, one of the monumental views I’ve ever had from a press box. And there have been some show-stoppers in this infrequent series. Twice, the Jackets have handed the Irish defeat under the circumspection of Touchdown Jesus.
Take you back to 1942 and a freshman named Clint Castleberry, still a mystical figure in Georgia Tech football history. A local kid, not of national renown, Castleberry so rattled the Irish that Tech upset them in South Bend 13-6 and in the process ensured himself of All-America status. Sadly, he never had another season. Somewhere out of North Africa the bomber he was piloting during World War II disappeared, and he was never heard from again. His jersey still hangs among Tech’s display of historic memorabilia.
The fuse was lit, and something was bound to explode in 1953, when Tech, saddling an unbeaten streak of 31 games, rode into South Bend. Naturally, the Irish were favored, particularly since Bobby Dodd elected to start a freshman quarterback, Wade Mitchell. The weather was gray. The stadium was stuffed and the heavily bundled spectators were full of negative charm. This was the game in which Frank Leahy failed to appear after halftime, stricken by a pancreatic attack in the locker room. The game turned on a high snap and a blocked punt, and the Irish won 27-14. Names of the perpetrators, one dead, the other long retired, are omitted here in the interest of good sport.
Six years later Georgia Tech returned to South Bend, this time with more exhilirating results. Snow had fallen overnight, and the campus was scenic in its whiteness. Should have been Notre Dame kind of weather, but Marvin Tibbetts took control at quarterback, and with a surge from Taz Anderson, then a fullback, he scored both touchdowns and managed a 14-l0 victory, most definitely an upset.
Tech never won again until 1976, which, it turned out, was not a partcularly good year — Pepper Rodgers’ team put up a 4-6-1 record — but Saturday, Nov. 6 was a good day. It was a rare game in that the Jackets never threw a pass. Gary Lanier, a stubby little quarterback, kept the ball on the ground, and Tech humiliated Notre Dame at Grant Field 23-14. The most memorable view remaining is the sight of the Notre Dame coach Dan Devine striding out on the field holding a fish in his hand for an official to see, one delivered by some knave in the student section. Devine wanted divine intervention, but got none.
Now, about that “1,” the one tie in the series. The year was 1980, Bill Curry’s first as head coach. Tech had beaten Memphis State and no one else. Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, even Tulane had shredded the poor Yellow Jackets. Notre Dame rode into Grant Field No. l in the nation. It was the same day Georgia was playing Florida in the glamour game of the season, the “run, Lindsay, run” game. Nobody was paying attention to Grant Field, except a few devout football Catholics.
Tech’s starting quarterback, Mike Kelley, was hurt. Two replacements came on and got nothing done, but neither did Notre Dame. Curry turned to a player who had been recruited as an end, and sent him in with the cautionary message: “Whatever you do, don’t dare throw a pass.”
The kid — he was from Augusta — maneuvered into field-goal position late in the third quarter, and Johnny Smith kicked a field goal. Incredibly, Tech led 3-0. Late in the fourth quarter, Notre Dame’s Harry Oliver kicked a wobbler through the pipes, and the Irish got out of town with a tie. Since everybody else on our staff wanted to be in Jacksonville, I got the short straw, but I got to see one of the most memorable games of my life.
Oh, the name of the freshman “quarterback” from Augusta — it was Ken Whisenhunt, later an NFL end for the Falcons and Redskins, and now, as you may have noticed, head coach of the Arizona Cardinals. So there you are, and Georgia Tech returns to South Bend to open the season this year. Nothing will ever match the tie of 1980, and as it turned out, Georgia later completed a state sweep. The Bulldogs played Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl for the national championship, and won.
Permalink | Comments (21) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Tech / ACC
Vick did what cowards do
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
A coward to the end.
He won’t directly say he killed dogs. He will admit to heading a group of degenerates when dogs were killed. Does somebody award points for semantics? “Ookie” tells “T” or “Q” or “P-Funk” to “Drown the dog,” but he keeps his hands in his pockets. Is this the Vito Corleone defense?
A coward to the end.
He won’t admit to gambling on dogfights. But he’ll admit to funding an illegal business enterprise that gambles. Well, that should appease NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Because I’m sure if “Bad Newz Kennels” ever accumulated significant gambling debts, a bookie would pressure “T” or “Q” or “P Funk” — not the NFL player with the $130 million contract who gave the money to “T” or “Q” or “P-Funk.”
How does this happen? How can somebody we admired for his courage on the field turn into such an invertebrate off it?
He runs in games. Did he have to run in the real world? Is it that difficult to admit guilt and say, “It’s my fault. Everything.”
We are, by nature, forgiving. We embrace the comeback. We want people to overcome obstacles, shed their baggage, become whole again.
This we shouldn’t forgive. First, we need to see remorse. Michael Vick hides behind attorneys like an offensive line. If only he had hid that well as a Falcons quarterback, he never would’ve been sacked.
He doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about exact wording in legal PDFs.
He doesn’t care about accepting responsibility. He cares about limiting blame.
If he feels anything, he doesn’t show it. It’s only obvious that he’s sorry he got caught. That doesn’t count. That’s pathetic. He’s pathetic. Vick doesn’t need a 12-step program for healing. He needs a conscience.
When will he realize that he did something wrong? When he’s lying in a cell, wide awake at 2 a.m.? When he’s scrubbing a floor or washing dishes for 12 cents an hour? Maybe while he’s under house arrest, walking around with an ankle bracelet?
Try avoiding the rush with that, big guy. There’s your new Michael Vick Experience.
This is not how people with character defects should begin rehabilitation. This is not how to repair an image or damaged career aspirations.
Come clean on everything. Express sorrow, contrition — then we’ll talk.
Vick did what cowards do. He not only hid behind some legalese, he agreed to cooperate with the government in turning in others. Maybe you view that as being a team player. But there’s another view: There goes the street cred.
Page 5 of the plea agreement reads: “The defendant agrees to cooperate fully and truthfully with the United States, and provide all information known to the defendant regarding any criminal activity as requested by the government.” It states this includes testimony at grand juries and trials. Vick also must submit to a polygraph test at the whim of the government.
Nobody agrees to such mandates unless they’re backed to the edge of a cliff, with the cavalry approaching. So why not just come completely clean? At least he would look like he cared.
I can’t imagine the hundreds of thousands of dollars Vick will have paid attorneys when this is over. I hope the verbiage was worth it.
We knew he struggled to read defenses. Turns out he can’t read an offense, either. The story broke in April in Surry County, Va. Vick’s reaction: “I’m never at the house. I left the house with my family members and my cousin. They just haven’t been doing the right thing. … It’s unfortunate I have to take the heat behind it.”
He thought it would go away, of course, like a disappearing water bottle incident. He goofed. Had he settled things with Virginia authorities, maybe the “United States vs. Michael Vick, a/k/a ‘Ookie’ ” never happens.
Then officials dug up the yard at 1915 Moonlight Road. They found dog corpses. Vick still thought, “I can’t be tied to this.” The lying continued. Vick’s fan base screamed racism or warnings about the Duke case revisited.
Then it fell apart. “T” and “Q” and “P-Funk” rolled on him. Suddenly, Vick was the last man standing. The last coward standing.
Maybe one day he’ll step to a microphone and express remorse. But we’re past the point of trust. Repentance needs to be wired to a polygraph.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
Gailey will hit number again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Two things we know about Georgia Tech under Chan Gailey: It will always beat somebody it probably shouldn’t, and it will always find a way to lose at least five games. Last season’s five losses took some doing, given that the Jackets were 9-2 with one game remaining in the regular season, but they found a way. That in mind, here’s a game-by-game look at how 2007 will play out.
Sept. 1: Georgia Tech at Notre Dame
The Jackets beat Auburn at Auburn in the 2005 opener when the Tigers were coming off an unbeaten season. Notre Dame is coming off a disappointing year and has lost its three best offensive players. Charlie Weis, who’s looking a bit overrated, won’t divulge his starting quarterback until the day of the game. This is exactly the sort of test Gailey’s teams ace. Tech 20, Notre Dame 13.
Sept. 8: Samford at Georgia Tech
Something else nice about Ol’ Chan: He owns Samford. (He coached there for one season, going 5-6 in 1993, whereupon he left for the Pittsburgh Steelers.) He’s 2-0 against the Bulldogs, and students of Tech history know that’s no small thing. Bill Curry beat Georgia and Alabama twice each but never could master mighty Furman, going 0-1-1 against the Paladins. Tech 30, Samford 14.
Sept. 15: Boston College at Georgia Tech
And here’s exactly the sort of test Gailey’s teams flunk. The Eagles will be playing their first road game under new coach Jeff Jagodzinski, and Tech fans, high off the victory at Notre Dame, will be casting their eyes down the schedule and thinking, “Know what? We could be undefeated when Virginia Tech comes to town Nov. 1.” Know what? Tech won’t be. Boston College 20, Tech 16.
Sept. 22: Georgia Tech at Virginia
Remember when Al Groh was going to turn the Cavs into the ACC’s next colossus? Remember when Ralph Sampson was going to lead UVA to four consecutive NCAA titles? Groh has fallen into the same trap that ensnared Terry Holland (who did rather well in years without Sampson): Groh gets his constituency excited on signing day, less so on game day. Tech 27, Virginia 21.
Sept. 29: Clemson at Georgia Tech
The Division I-A record for career victories is held by Bobby Bowden. The Division I-A record for long-term occupancy of the coaching hot seat is held by his son Tommy, who has been in place since 1999 and has accomplished very little beyond keeping his job. Clemson whipped Tech badly last season and then went in the tank. Tanking starts earlier this time. Tech 24, Clemson 14.
Oct. 6: Georgia Tech at Maryland
The Jackets were playing their best ball of the season, having just thrashed Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, when the Terps came to town last October. Tech needed to fend off a first-and-goal inside the final minute to win. The guess is that Ralph Friedgen won’t call the same strange plays in the red zone that he did a year ago. Maryland 23, Tech 17.
Oct. 13: Georgia Tech at Miami
Another thing about Ol’ Chan: He has done well lately against the Hurricanes. (Granted, that would have been a bigger deal five years ago than it is today.) And it bodes well for Tech that Patrick Nix, who last season took a unit with Calvin Johnson and Tashard Choice and turned it into the nation’s 67th-best offense, is now coordinator in Coral Gables. Tech 17, Miami 10.
Oct. 20: Army at Georgia Tech
This would have been an intriguing game had Bobby Ross, who won a national championship at Tech, still been coaching the Black Knights. Alas, he resigned in January, leaving the job to assistant Stan Brock. This figures to be one of those games where the Jackets thrash about for three quarters before setting things right in the final 15 minutes. Tech 31, Army 20.
Nov. 1: Virginia Tech at Georgia Tech
The game to decide the ACC Coastal championship falls on Thursday night. Look for the Hokies, who figure to be an inspiring national story this season, to seize the chance to show the viewing public: (1.) That they’re a legitimate BCS team, and (2.) that they weren’t nearly as bad as they looked against the two Georgia teams last season. Va. Tech 28, Ga. Tech 17.
Nov. 10: Georgia Tech at Duke
Steve Spurrier gave Duke another 25th-place vote on his preseason ballot, which means the Devils have managed one more point in the ESPN/USA Today coaches’ poll than they managed victories on the field last season. Ted Roof, the former Jacket, has been coaching Duke since 2003. He has won five games. One of those was against Tech. This won’t be the second. Tech 40, Duke 10.
Nov. 17: North Carolina at Georgia Tech
The Tar Heels finally dumped John Bunting and upgraded to Butch Davis, who has already notched a well-regarded recruiting class. But Davis’ signees will be forced to play way too soon, and by this point in the season they’ll be tired and discouraged. Assuming Davis’ health holds, this will be a strong program down the road, but not just yet. Tech 24, Carolina 16.
Nov. 24: Georgia at Georgia Tech
One final thing to say about Ol’ Chan: He’s the worst-ever Tech coach in this one game. He’s 0-5. Nobody else who lasted this long at the Flats has taken so long to beat Georgia. He’ll need at least one more try. And right now you’re saying: But that’s only four losses. What happened to Five-Loss Chan? Never fear. The Meineke Car Care Bowl awaits. Georgia 24, Tech 17.
Permalink | Comments (108) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
Dogs’ close of ‘06 gives hope for ‘07
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
There are so many reasons to cringe when contemplating Georgia’s upcoming football season. The offensive line is dominated by junior-college transfers and freshmen. The defense has neophytes everywhere. Who knows if the receivers actually can catch for the first time in a couple of years?
No problem.
Just take a deep breath, close your eyes and remember Auburn and the two Techs (Georgia and Virginia).
If you do such a thing, and if you’re among the barkers in the Bulldog Nation, you won’t have to consider peeking between your fingers at Georgia — from the opener in Athens against Oklahoma State through the visit in November to Bobby Dodd Stadium.
Courtesy of Auburn and the two Techs (Georgia and Virginia) last season, maybe the Bulldogs will survive South Carolina this season despite the Gamecocks’ renaissance under Steve Spurrier. Maybe the Bulldogs will leave Tuscaloosa smiling after ruining Alabama’s anticipated renaissance under Nick Saban. Maybe the Bulldogs will turn Big Orange Country in Knoxville into Big Blue Country. Maybe Georgia will make its fourth trip to the SEC championship game in six seasons by defeating Florida for only the third time since that other George Bush was in the Oval Office.
Maybe Georgia qualifies for a BCS bowl, and then maybe … then again, maybe not.
Surely you remember the way the Bulldogs finished last year. They shocked what was the nation’s No. 5 team in Auburn. After that, they returned home to dispose of Georgia Tech, ranked 16th at the time. If that wasn’t enough, the Bulldogs left the Chick-Fil-A Bowl at the Georgia Dome with an upset of No. 14 Virginia Tech. Mostly, they sprinted to goodness down the stretch of their season after looking rather ordinary or worse.
“I’ve been on a national championship team with Miami back in 1983, but I think one of the best situations that I’ve ever been involved in was what happened last year during that three-game stretch,” said Georgia defensive coordinator Willie Martinez, who has spent more than 20 years in coaching. “When you have adversity, you never know how you’re going to react to it, and during that three-game stretch, guys just tightened the screw down.”
Many of those guys are gone, including accomplished defensive ends Quentin Moses and Charles Johnson, solid defensive back Paul Oliver and all of those offensive linemen. And several of those guys are back — 45 returning lettermen, to be exact. They include rising quarterback Matthew Stafford, a trio of nice running backs (Kregg Lumpkin, Thomas Brown and Knowshon Moreno) and defensive back Kelin Johnson, who was among Georgia’s top five tacklers last season.
No question, Stafford, Johnson and Georgia’s other returnees recall what made Auburn and the two Techs (Georgia and Virginia) so impressive. There was that ugliness for the Bulldogs during each of their seven previous games. It began with a near home loss to a shaky Colorado team before Georgia barely survived a shaky Ole Miss team in Oxford. That all foreshadowed the Tennessee fiasco that had Georgia’s defense relinquishing 37 second-half points.
There also was yet another loss by the Bulldogs to the hated Gators, a near loss to shaky Mississippi State and brutal losses to Vanderbilt and Kentucky.
Then came Auburn and the two Techs (Georgia and Virginia), which showed three things about the Bulldogs: They had the talent, the coaching and the drive. They still have the talent and the coaching. As for the drive, well, let’s talk around Halloween. That’s about the time of Georgia’s little trip to Jacksonville.
Permalink | Comments (29) | Categories: Terence Moore, UGA / SEC
Jackets vs. Irish has created classics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Off and on, Georgia Tech has been playing Notre Dame since 1922, for better or worse, and more times than not, for worse. Anytime Notre Dame is on the schedule, the floodlights go up, trumpets sound, bugles blare and the nation’s eyes are upon you, as they will be the first day of September in South Bend. Only five of the 33 times Georgia Tech has played Notre Dame have the Yellow Jackets come away in celebration.
No, make that six. (We’ll get around to that later.) The series record reads 27-5-1. It’s the “1” that takes the stage here, one of the monumental views I’ve ever had from a press box. And there have been some show-stoppers in this infrequent series. Twice, the Jackets have handed the Irish defeat under the circumspection of Touchdown Jesus.
Take you back to 1942 and a freshman named Clint Castleberry, still a mystical figure in Georgia Tech football history. A local kid, not of national renown, Castleberry so rattled the Irish that Tech upset them in South Bend 13-6 and in the process insured himself of All-America status. Sadly, he never had another season. Somewhere out of North Africa the bomber he was piloting during World War II disappeared, and he was never heard from again. His jersey still hangs among Tech’s display of historic memorabilia.
The fuse was lit, and something was bound to explode in 1953, when Tech, saddling an unbeaten streak of 31 games rode into South Bend. Naturally, the Irish were favored, particularly since Bobby Dodd elected to start a freshman quarterback, Wade Mitchell. The weather was gray. The stadium was stuffed and the heavily bundled spectators were full of negative charm. This was the game in which Frank Leahy failed to appear after halftime, stricken by a pancreatic attack in the locker room. The game turned on a high snap and a blocked punt, and the Irish won 27-14. Names of the perpetrators, one dead, the other long retired, are omitted here in the interest of good sport.
Six years later Georgia Tech returned to South Bend, this time with more exhilirating results. Snow had fallen overnight, and the campus was scenic in its whiteness. Should have been Notre Dame kind of weather, but Marvin Tibbetts took control at quarterback, and with a surge from Taz Anderson, then a fullback, he scored both touchdowns and managed a 14-l0 victory, most definitely an upset.
Tech never won again until 1976, which, it turned out, was not a partcularly good year — Pepper Rodgers’ team put up a 4-6-1 record — but Saturday, Nov. 6 was a good day. It was a rare game in that the Jackets never threw a pass. Gary Lanier, a stubby little quarterback, kept the ball on the ground, and Tech humiliated Notre Dame at Grant Field 23-14. The most memorable view remaining is the sight of the Notre Dame coach Dan Devine striding out on the field holding a fish in his hand for an official to see, one delivered by some knave in the student section. Devine wanted divine intervention, but got none.
Now, about that “1,” the one tie in the series. The year was 1980, Bill Curry’s first as head coach. Tech had beaten Memphis State and no one else. Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, even Tulane had shredded the poor Yellow Jackets. Notre Dame rode into Grant Field No. l in the nation. It was the same day Georgia was playing Florida in the glamour game of the season, the “run, Lindsay, run” game. Nobody was paying attention to Grant Field, except a few devout football Catholics.
Tech’s starting quarterback, Mike Kelley, was hurt. Two replacements came on and got nothing done, but neither did Notre Dame. Curry turned to a player who had been recruited as an end, and sent him in with the cautionary message: “Whatever you do, don’t dare throw a pass.”
The kid — he was from Augusta — maneuvered into field-goal position late in the third quarter, and Johnny Smith kicked a field goal. Incredibly, Tech led 3-0. Late in the fourth quarter, Notre Dame’s Harry Oliver kicked a wobbler through the pipes, and the Irish got out of town with a tie. Since everybody else on our staff wanted to be in Jacksonville, I got the short straw, but I got to see one of the most memorable games of my life.
Oh, the name of the freshman “quarterback” from Augusta — it was Ken Whisenhunt, later an NFL end for the Falcons and Redskins, and now, as you may have noticed, head coach of the Arizona Cardinals. So there you are, and Georgia Tech returns to South Bend to open the season this year. Nothing will ever match the tie of 1980, and as it turned out, Georgia later completed a state sweep. The Bulldogs played Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl for the national championship, and won.
Permalink | Comments (26) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Tech / ACC
Dogs’ schedule says BCS bowl
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
It’s amazing how far that “what’ve-you-done-for-me-lately” mentality can carry you. Georgia closes a season with victories against Auburn, Tech and Virginia Tech, and suddenly everybody forgets about coupled losses to Kentucky and Vanderbilt for the first time in 33 years. But in this case perception is reality. Georgia will return to a BCS bowl this season. Not that it’ll make a difference in Jacksonville. Ugh(a).
Sept. 1: Oklahoma State at Georgia If Mike Bobo is nervous about inheriting the play-calling duties from Mark Richt, this should be a nice sedative. Oklahoma State’s offense can score, but the defense is a doormat. The Cowboys ranked 92nd in total defense last season and allowed 30 or more points in seven of their last 10 games. Check? Georgia 41, Oklahoma State 16.
Sept. 8: South Carolina at Georgia
Steve Spurrier is upset about admissions policies in Columbia, as if this were Princeton. Or even College of Charleston. He either really believes he has elevated the program to the extent that it should be above such things, or he’s already looking for an exit strategy. The Gamecocks are better, but so’s everybody else in the East. Quarterback Blake Mitchell can be a pretty good when he’s not in a bar fight or blowing off summer school. Oops. Georgia 27, South Carolina 14.
Sept. 15: Western Carolina at Georgia
Nothing like scheduling the annual punch-buddy from the Southern Conference. Western Carolina lost its final nine games last season, ending with a 62-0 face-plant at Florida. The Catamounts play Alabama and Georgia in the first three weeks. Presbyterian can declare last rites in week four. Georgia 48, Western Carolina 3.
Sept. 22: Georgia at Alabama
UA-Tuscaloosa gave Nick Saban a $32 million contract, which basically means there are several potholes in Alabama that aren’t going to be fixed for a while. But lost in Saban’s rock star status is the realization that ‘Bama just isn’t very good. The Tide is no closer to winning the conference than the Dolphins were to winning a Super Bowl when Saban arrived there. So right now, the man is selling dreams. Georgia 24, Alabama 16.
Sept. 29: Mississippi at Georgia
The Rebels are still losing (3-13 in the SEC under Ed Orgeron), but at least the quality of losses has improved. They gave scares last season to Georgia (14-9), Alabama (26-23, overtime), Auburn (23-17) and LSU (23-20, overtime). But the offense is still a Yugo, and Georgia gets Mississippi the week after it’s slapped silly by Florida. This time, not close. Georgia 24, Mississippi 6.
Oct. 6: Georgia at Tennessee
Everybody remembers the losses to Vanderbilt and Kentucky. But the season’s implosion really began when the Dogs allowed 51 points at home to a Phil Fulmer offense (which is sort of like trebled damages). But the Volunteers don’t have much on offense, and tailback LaMarcus Coker is on one of those chemical suspensions. Noteworthy: Ray Goff and Jim Donnan were 0-5 in Knoxville; Richt is 3-0. Georgia 27, Tennessee 24.
Oct. 13: Georgia at Vanderbilt
The Dogs will tell you they’ll be motivated for the Vandy game. Like that made a difference a year ago. Stomped by Knoxville (51-33) one week, humbled by Nashville (24-22) the next. Fortunately, Murfreesboro (Middle Tennessee State) wasn’t on the schedule. The Commodores return 17 starters to a team that went 4-8. Is that good news? Georgia 26, Vanderbilt 10.
Oct. 20: Bye week. 7-0.
The annual premature national title parade goes down Lumpkin, then left in Milledge.
Oct. 27: Georgia vs. Florida (Jacksonville)
Three titles in two sports in a span of 13 months. There are few things that can make a Georgia fan feel worse, except maybe this: Uga VI’s new caretaker — Michael Vick. Florida loses nine starters on defense. The offense is young. Does it matter? Have you not been watching for most of the past 17 years? I’ll believe a turnaround when I see it. Until then, here’s the safe bet: Florida 31, Georgia 27.
Nov 3: Troy at Georgia
The annual dirge and funeral procession will start down Lumpkin. … Fans in a funk. Players in a funk. Fortunately, here comes Troy, which actually isn’t a bad team, assuming you play in the Sun Belt. Georgia 37, Troy 16.
Nov 10: Auburn at Georgia
With Saban at Alabama, Auburn is back to being the ignored team in the state, even if still the better one. Auburn was 9-1 when its SEC hopes were punched out by a 37-15 home loss to the Dogs, who were coming off a loss to Kentucky. The Tigers might feel like they have something to avenge, but it won’t make a difference. Their running game will be average, which means Brandon Cox will be average, which means this year they don’t get to 9-1. Georgia 23, Auburn 20.
Nov. 17: Kentucky at Georgia
The Wildcats last year went 8-5 and won their first bowl game in 22 years. It would be time to give Rich Brooks another contract extension, except I think his current deal runs through 2027. Seriously, Kentucky has a good quarterback and, like, so what? Georgia 41, Kentucky 20.
Nov. 24: Georgia at Georgia Tech
Richt is 6-0 in this game and the worse news for the Yellow Jackets is the window for ending the cross-state misery probably closed last season. Letdown? Forget it. A BCS bowl awaits. Georgia 20, Tech 16.
Permalink | Comments (214) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, UGA / SEC
No ‘Sopranos’, no historic theft for Franco
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH: Not bragging, but ours may be the only household in America that never watched one episode of “The Sopranos.” … Julio Franco, 49, stole a base in his first game at Class A, but he’s not the oldest player to steal a base in a professional game. Jim Poole, then 51, did it when he played first base at Moultrie in the Class D Georgia-Florida League in 1946. Of course he had an edge. He owned the team. … Whatever became of Doug Johnson? You know, the Falcons QB who beat Dallas, then faded from view? Last I heard, he was on the Cincinnati Bengals roster.
Remember Bob Kurtz? Now pastor of a church in Cullman, Ala., he put on an endurance show for charity, all the golf he could play in one day, and he got in 220 holes by sundown, matching his age four times, and was 22 under par. In case the name strikes a bell, he was a sportscaster at Turner Broadcasting before turning to the ministry. … What the Braves have done is follow a drafting course that varies from the Falcons, and with exciting success. They’ve delivered such homegrown produce as Jeff Francoeur, Brian McCann, Chuck James and several young prospects developing in the farm system. The Falcons, on the other hand, have drafted only seven Georgia alumni, and even fewer from Georgia Tech. … Sometimes gambles pay off, sometimes they don’t. Pitcher Tanyon Sturtze was one that didn’t, a loss of $750,000. You’d have better luck at the roulette table,
Micah Owings, Arizona’s pitcher who put on “The Natural” show against the Braves last week, isn’t the only athlete in the family. His father, Jim, was a split end at Georgia Tech in the early ’70s. … Yes, the Southland is due its pride in Dr. James Andrews, whose surgery has revived many a pitching arm. But, let us not forget that the surgeon who pioneered this procedure is Dr. Frank Jobe, of Southern vintage himself. Grew up in Greensboro, N.C., before settling in Los Angeles. … You know, watching Arena Football to me would be like watching Wimbledon transferred to table tennis.
How the PGA Tour intends to make its payout in the FedEx Cup championships is still a muddle to most. Some say deferred payments may be claimed at age 45, others think it’s 60, but one of the major concerns is what about the caddies? When do they get their cut? They’d like to have their checks presented on the 18th green at East Lake. … The next Bob Hope tournament is being advertised as “hosted by George Lopez.” Beg pardon? Who’s going to introduce George?
Joe Garagiola in his new book, “Just Play Ball”: “These young players think we’re antiques. I tell them we had pitchers who threw 90 mph. We just didn’t make a big fuss about it. They did it for nine innings.” … Ever notice how similar are the facial features of Ryan Howard and Babe Ruth? Or maybe you don’t have an old sepia of Ruth lying around. As a pitcher, say this for the Babe, he did his own closing. … First time I saw Craig Biggio, he was a catcher in Asheville, leading his league in stolen bases, just a few weeks out of Seton Hall University. From an Asheville Tourist to 3,000 hits as a Houston Astro.
I don’t know that this is anything official, but I’d have to agree with a recently released list of the five most underrated college football coaches: Paul Johnson at Navy, Ralph Friedgen at Maryland, Chris Peterson at Boise State, Bret Bielema at Wisconsin and Bobby Johnson at Vanderbilt. … Peterson, by the way, may become one of the first to coach a game in China. Boise State and Oregon are planning to schedule a game in China in 2009, which would be the first. NCAA approval awaits. … Market experts rate the five most difficult college game tickets to come by, and Notre Dame is in four of them. … Most inane interview question put to an athlete after he has just won the big one: “What does this mean to you?” … Selah.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Categories: Furman Bisher
New Falcons ticket buyers ready to sell
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
On July 6, the same day federal investigators were back in Surry County, Va., digging up Michael Vick’s little yard of horrors, ESPN erroneously reported the Falcons’ quarterback would not be indicted.
On July 7, Orlando Daniels of Acworth, facing a deadline and buoyed by the report, submitted his deposit for two club-level season tickets at $1,390.
Ten days later, Vick was indicted.
Ever feel like you just paid a premium for drilling rights, only to hit sand? Evidence is all over the Internet. Since Vick’s tenure with the team unofficially ended with news of a plea agreement, fans have flooded eBay, Craigslist and StubHub with their season tickets. The Web suddenly looks like a surf shop in Des Moines.
“Dude, there are people selling season tickets on the lower level, 50-yard line for below face value,” said Daniels, who had been on a waiting list for tickets for three years. “That’s unheard of in any market.”
Another fan, Josh Lewis of Greensboro, N.C., also came off the waiting list and immediately purchased two pairs of upper-level tickets for $1,400 in April. He planned to make the six-hour drive for home games, reasoning, “I’m getting married in September, and I figured a couple of wedding presents would cover it. About a week later is when all the dogfighting stuff started to come back. It kinda made me sick.”
Daniels is more than sick. He’s jumping head-first into the conspiracy pool. He believes it’s too big of a coincidence that the ESPN report coincided with his deadline to purchase tickets, and charged that the Falcons and owner Arthur Blank leaked the “news” to spur ticket sales. Nothing like a ticking Hail Mary to start the year.
“At the end of the day my gut instinct tells me that Blank, with millions of dollars at risk, had something to do with the [ESPN] story … or the [timing of the] indictment,” Daniels said. “I’m as upset as anybody about Mike. But I believe a bigger fraud has happened … people bought into a press story and made a financial commitment based on false or misleading information.”
In better times, conspiracy theories would be laughed off in Flowery Branch. Um, these ain’t better times.
Falcons executive vice president Kim Shreckengost said the charge is “absolutely not true.” She added: “We don’t control the media, and we certainly don’t control the government. We learned about the indictment at the same time everyone else did, and had no inside information about whether or not he would be indicted along the way. More importantly, we would never treat our fans that way.”
Now, I’m sure there are worse jobs today than trying to market the Falcons. But I can’t imagine too many exist outside of Washington or Baghdad. No Vick. An aging running back (Warrick Dunn) coming off back surgery. Little in the way of star quality. Or playoff hopes.
With Vick, the Falcons were a tough ticket. Now they’re a tough sell, at least emotionally. Yes, the games already are sold out. But empty seats seem inevitable.
“It’s going to be like it used to be, an empty dome with more visiting fans than Falcons fans,” said David Easley, a 10-year season-ticket holder. “It almost makes me want to go because I hate when that happens. But not for this much money.”
It’s a little late. Easley owns his four tickets at $890 a pop. His ad includes the words, “Make me an offer.”
He decided 10 years ago to purchase Falcons instead of Georgia tickets because of the proximity of the stadium and the available seats. “Now I regret it,” he said. “I bought Thrashers tickets last year for the first time, and it seems like they take better care of you with benefits. I’d rather keep my Thrasher tickets and go back to Georgia games.”
He said he “feels sorry for Blank,” but only to a point. “He can sell the team tomorrow, and he’ll have a good return on his investment. He’s not losing money.”
The Falcons say they haven’t been overrun with fans demanding refunds. But logic dictates most people know better. As Daniels said, “I didn’t want to waste my energy calling. I know it’s buyer beware.”
Another buyer, Ryan McDowell, was told this year he could purchase up to six tickets. He went for the max at $520 each.
“I had a friend who sold tickets to the Steelers game last year and made money,” McDowell said. “I thought I could make a profit and still keep two. That idea’s pretty much gone.”
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
Vick paved his path of shame
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
The broadcast media were awash in it. Our front page gave readers a split-image of his face, close up. Atlanta was red-faced with embarrassment, from Her Honor, the Mayor, on down. The fairy tale of Michael Vick had become the odious story of a brilliant career crashing down in ruins.
On the inside of the sports section was a story of another nature. Uplifting. Of an athlete of another nature. The state of Alabama had inducted its native son, Henry Aaron, into its Academy of Honor. The story bore a minor headline, what we call a 14-pointer, but it told more about a man than all the copy footage told us about Vick, the blemished Falcons quarterback.
Arthur Blank, Vick’s former employer and fond admirer, had this to say: “You think you know somebody for six years and you find out another side of his personality that you didn’t know.” It was a painful admission of a man-child spoiled. Knowing one side but not the dark side, the feeling that he was the real No. 7 inside all those shirts on the backs of Falcons fans, and invincible. Error-proof. They have been marked down or removed from the rack.
The first error made was when Dan Reeves was fired during the season. It was 2003, when Vick had injured a leg in preseason and Reeves was without his quarterback much of the schedule. He presented a fatherly figure, which in more ways than one was the opposite of the coach who succeeded him, Jim Mora, a kind of free-wheeler whose demeanor was less authoritative than Reeves’.
No further reason to sear Arthur Blank for his coddling, for his sideline fellowship with Vick. He had, in his mind, found a treasure, and the light was very bright at the end of the tunnel. However, there have been enough “red flags” raised to have aroused his attention, and those have been recounted time and time again. All, apparently, brushed off under the heading of “boys will be boys.” I don’t know that any person in authority with the Falcons ever came close to envisioning the scenes so often flashed on your television screen of late. The house that Vick had acquired for extracurricular activity, fun and games with his posse, could never have been imagined to be the den of sin now depicted.
Earlier in the year, when the Falcons’ backup quarterback Matt Schaub was traded to Houston, I wrote a column that suggested, “They traded the wrong quarterback.” Now, I’m not dumb enough to even suspect that Vick was tradeable, with the investment Mr. Blank had made in him and all the baggage that went along with him. But my facetious theme met with derision, so did the backup quarterback, who was addressed as The Great Matt Schaub. Oh, but wouldn’t it be nice if Bobby Petrino had The Great Matt Schaub in his camp now.
At this disturbing stage of the dilemma, there isn’t much left to be said. That final decision is in the hands of the federal court in Richmond and the commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell. The probability is that Vick will be a long time away from any football game short of something similar to “The Longest Yard.” No amount of apology can wipe his slate clean and restore him all burnished and glistening to the league. When he lied before a judge, to commissioner Goodell, and to whoever else, he paved his own way to degradation.
I choose to leave it at that. It seemed that I simply have joined in the conga line of writers and naysayers who have spoken out. Now I have, and selah.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Furman Bisher
Making light of Vick’s debacle
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN
(It’s a week until the next court appearance, but the Web never sleeps.)
10: I’m hearing all of these stories about Michael Vick jerseys being used as chew toys and mops in kennels. So what to do with your Jeff George jersey?
9: Does Nike make a Leavenworth jersey?
8: As many questions that’ve been answered about this nightmare, closure will leave many questions open. For example: What current or former Falcons players and coaches would’ve been called to testify before the Grand Jury or at the trial? Because, do you really believe that nobody else knew?
7: Some of you are only now coming to the realization that Vick will never play for the Falcons again. Folks, he may never take a snap again - anywhere.
6: Once he gets past jail and suspension, consider: 1) An NFL team would have to be willing to take a PR hit for somebody who seldom showed the maturity to play quarterback; 2) Several Arena League teams are owned by NFL owners, and as for the rest: Does Vick really fit the mode of an Arena quarterback (quick accurate passes being the mandate); 3) Canada. Anybody want to be a Blue Bomber?
5: So where does that leave one of the most dynamic athletes we’ve ever seen? I dunno. I guess the Braves have had worse guys coming out of the bullpen.
4: If I’m Frank Beamer, that whole, “Well, you know this is where Michael Vick went to school” speech on the recruiting circuit kinda goes out the window.
3: NBA commissioner David Stern probably owes Vick a thank you and maybe a job. Nobody has done more to overshadow possibly the worst scandal to ever hit a sports league — because in the big picture, gambling referees go to the heart of a league’s credibility.
2: Gerald Poindexter, the Barney Fife-ish commonwealth attorney in Surry County, says now that he is going to pursue charges against Vick. This might be a good time for him to also look for a new career.
1: Headline on the back page of the New York Daily News: FLEA BARGAIN.
Permalink | | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Vick had it all — except character
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
He owned a team. He owned a city. He owned a league.
He spit on all of it. Everything and everyone.
This isn’t a time for apologies, unless your name is Michael Vick. No excuses, no alibis. This didn’t happen because of bad friends today or a bad family situation as a youth or the pursuit of some ravenous and misdirected and racist media.
An icon has just lost his freedom and possibly his career, and it’s not because Michael Vick is a great guy who made one bad decision. He is flawed. Not a little, but deeply.
People of great character make bad decisions and rebound. They don’t fund and operate an illegal operation whose primary functions are to fight and kill dogs. They don’t go through life always deflecting blame on friends or family. They grow up. Michael Vick never grew up. He probably never felt he had to.
He is as wonderful an athlete as we’ve ever seen. But he was flawed on the field, the residual of poor work habits and laziness. He got away with it because coaches and surrounding yes-men let him, and all the money in the world apparently couldn’t buy him a decent mirror.
He owned this town with his smile. But he was flawed off the field. So many people have said Vick is not a bad guy, but they miss the point. Somebody doesn’t have to be a bad guy to do awful things. When somebody in a position of power is immature, arrogant and just plain stupid, it’s a lethal combination.
He lied. Easy and often.
He lied to the owner of the franchise who gave him a $130 million contract and the platform to earn millions more. He lied to the commissioner of the most powerful sports empire on earth. He lied to you, the people who defended him and adored him and bought his jerseys.
He lied, probably because it worked before and he saw no reason to change. He thought he could skate. Why wouldn’t he? It happened after the water bottle incident in Miami, which devolved into a great tap dance by Vick and the Falcons organization. Rather than show appreciation to authorities and accept that he got away lucky, Vick suggested the police tried to frame him. That didn’t go over well in Miami or Flowery Branch.
He flipped off a crowd but figured people would forgive him quickly. Many didn’t. He allegedly transmitted an STD to a woman, but he and his attorney didn’t move quickly to bury the matter and settle the case, probably because he figured she would disappear. She didn’t. The result was talk-show lampooning and what some in the Falcons’ front office viewed as a permanent defect.
He lied about missing flights for testimony before Congress, incorrectly thinking that his endorsement company (AirTran) wouldn’t throw him under the plane. Oops.
Nike. How do you become so tarnished that you lose Nike?
Vick seldom took the blame when things went wrong. But it was so easy to blame coaches, wasn’t it? Dan Reeves. Jim Mora. Greg Knapp. Do you feel for them a little more today?
Such a wonder as an athlete.
Such a catastrophe as a leader.
So many people have wanted to make this about race and not the individual. ESPN recently explored Atlanta’s racial divide on this and several issues, dating to the Civil Rights era. But in doing so, its Web site juxtaposed photos of Vick with the likes of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Ralph David Abernathy, as if they were somehow equals, either in morals or objectives.
Michael Vick and Martin Luther King — are you kidding?
“Not guilty,” Vick said three weeks ago.
“I have a dream,” King said, a week short of 44 years ago, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
This isn’t the case of a person with great character jumping the track with one bad decision. A six-year operation does not constitute one bad decision. So many other incidents don’t constitute one bad decision. Betraying those who trusted you, particularly owner Arthur Blank, does not constitute one bad decision.
We’ve seen great athletes throw away careers before. Drugs, spousal abuse, a general attitude of feeling above the law. We’ve never seen somebody blow so much over something so dumb. But all are symptoms of the same thing — serious defects.
Judge Michael Vick by the content of his character. And what he just spit on.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
Vick must come clean
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Even now, with Michael Vick doing the inevitable on Monday by admitting his guilt to the feds, the gory details remain over his role in illegal gambling and the Virginia felony that is dogfighting. That’s why there is something he must do for the sake of the Falcons, the NFL, his delusional followers and himself.
He must become the anti-Pete Rose, which means Vick must come absolutely clean about his self-inflicted scandal that keeps dominating the news cycles, and he must do so now. Not only that, he must do it dramatically enough to make you believe that he believes what he is saying about confession and repentance. He must do so himself and not through lawyers, agents, PR folks, Falcons honchos — like he has been wont to do, including with his latest apology through attorney Billy Martin.
If Vick bares his soul in public, and if his delusional followers stop encouraging him to stay defiant by excusing away everything he does wrong (the water bottle thing, the flipping off the fans, the stiffing of the U.S. Congressmen, the Ron Mexico deal, the watch incident), he will be forgiven by more than just a Higher Power. He will be forgiven by just about anybody you can imagine.
“Oh, I agree,” said Dr. Patrick J. Devine, professor of psychology at Kennesaw State University and a former sports psychologist for the Braves. “The mindset of the public is like, ‘Give it up, Michael. Just admit that you screwed up and let’s move on.’ I mean, there is nobody out there who relishes seeing him go to trial and go through all of that stuff. Look. The American public likes heroes so much that they always want to forgive them quickly.”
Rose wouldn’t know, because he wasn’t paying attention. Just as Richard Nixon never admitted to involvement in the Watergate break-in or cover up, and just as Woody Hayes never admitted to slugging that Clemson player, Rose never admitted to gambling on baseball in general or his Cincinnati Reds in particular.
Well, Rose sort of did nearly a decade later by writing a book, but nowhere among the pages did the all-time hits leader fully explain or apologize for the thing that got him permanently banned from baseball. Just like Nixon and Hayes, Rose convinced himself that the lie that he created surrounding his “thing” was actually the truth. Just like Nixon and Hayes, Rose was defiant over his thing.
Which brings us to Vick: He needs to stop anything that resembles defiance (“Everywhere I go around the world, people love Michael Vick,” he said into a television camera after he was slapped with those illegal dogfighting charges). He needs to avoid blaming others for his predicament, because it is his house associated with this dogfighting mess, and it is his “friends” who said they were involved. Mostly, he needs to admit to everything.
Like now.
Times. Dates. Motives.
Then Vick needs to cry on Barbara Walters’ couch on national television. After that, he needs to call Larry King. Then he needs to do “60 Minutes,” and with legendary bulldog Mike Wallace prodding and poking, he needs to pull a Jimmy Swaggart. Through it all, Vick needs to save a few sobs for Bryant Gumbel on HBO’s “Real Sports,” but you know exactly where I’m going: Oprah.
What is more amazing than America’s willingness to forgive anybody for just about anything (including the hanging and the drowning of dogs) is how many folks don’t understand what I just said.
Why?
“Part of it is ego, and over the years, people always have done just about everything for them, and made excuses for them, and spun stories certain ways when they’ve gotten in trouble,” said Devine, who inadvertently was describing how Falcons officials have joined Vick’s delusional followers in coddling the guy for years. “No doubt, we pamper our athletes so much that they begin to look for that knight in shining armor coming over the hill whenever they get into a tough spot.”
The only thing coming over the hill now for Vick is more trouble, and it is holding a mighty sword. Still, he can block it with the shield of an open heart.
That and lots of tears.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
A day when win bigger than history
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Notwithstanding the elbow surgeries, the shoulder inflammation and any other assorted aches that generally come pre-packaged with 40-year-old power pitchers, John Smoltz is quite aware that his biggest problems sometimes aren’t physical.
It happens. You pop a spring.
Maybe when a pitch isn’t working, you overthink, then overthrow. Maybe you forget you’re getting paid a lot of money to play a game. Maybe you let a visually challenged umpire get to you. Again.
Cleansing breaths, John. Pure thoughts.
“I want to enjoy what I’m doing, and lately I haven’t done that,” Smoltz said Sunday. “I’ve been hard on myself. I think I’ve had a fantastic year, with the quality starts and all. But sometimes I expect so much. Sometimes I lose perspective. I have to remember this is supposed to be fun and just relax. I haven’t done that in a while. There were times today I wanted to bite my glove.”
A run in the first. A run in the third. Smoltz battled thoughts of here-I-go-again. They’re to be expected, given the lack of run support he has received. Smoltz hadn’t been awful of late, he just hadn’t been dominant or lucky. He had just one victory in his last seven outings despite six “quality starts” (defined as three runs or fewer in six-plus innings).
Then came Sunday. After being slapped for two runs and three doubles in the first three innings, Smoltz, well, found his happy place. Fact is, he was Mr. Chuckles when he came to bat in the sixth inning. With the Braves leading 6-2, Smoltz cracked a joke to umpire Wally Bell as he stepped to the plate with one out and the bases empty.
“I think I told him that no matter where the pitches were, just call them strikes,” Smoltz said. “I wasn’t going to argue.”
Understand the desire to get back out to the mound. This was Smoltz’s best start since returning from the disabled list with a sore shoulder. He threw 118 pitches and felt like he could keep going. He went eight innings, allowing only one hit after the third, struck out 12 — becoming the franchise’s all-time strikeout leader in the process — and led the suddenly desperate Braves past Arizona, 6-2.
Smoltz briefly lobbied manager Bobby Cox to let him finish the game, but Cox didn’t want to take a chance.
“He knows me well enough that I’m not going to let him start an inning with 120 [sic] pitches,” Cox said.
So he turned it over to Bob Wickman, the man who ate Dan Kolb.
Wickman (who had blown two of his last five save opportunities) loaded the bases with two outs, before getting Orlando Hudson on a groundout. Nothing like a little drama to ruin the moment.
Smoltz downplayed the significance of the strikeout record (he now has 2,920, passing Phil Niekro at 2,912). He says he “had no clue” about it until somebody mentioned it afterward. But if ever circumstances overshadowed a career achievement, this was it. The Braves had lost three straight and four of six since trimming New York’s lead to 2 1/2 games.
Forget the team’s new sudden Sluggo lineup with Mark Teixeira. The bullpen was still a thrill ride. Starter Chuck James was looking more like a project every day. Buddy Carlyle had turned back into Buddy Carlyle.
The Braves didn’t just need Smoltz to win Sunday. They needed him to be a blowtorch. If he and Tim Hudson aren’t dominating, they’ve got no chance.
“I don’t think we can do it without me or Hudson,” Smoltz said. “We know what we can do if we get to the playoffs. But we have to get there. He and I have to win our games.”
The unspoken reality: There is no counting on starters 3, or 4, or 5 du jour. Maybe that’s why Smoltz has felt frustrated, trying to be too perfect.
It’s not about the shoulder any more. It’s about the head, which affect the arm and the mechanics.
He got angry at himself Sunday. He forced himself to take a walk around the mound in the third before throwing another pitch. But he recovered.
It was a day to enjoy the moment.
Next challenge in five days.
Permalink | Comments (30) | Categories: Jeff Schultz
PGA’s FedEx Cup won’t fly
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Gentlemen, start your drivers! Put your 3-metal to the pedal. The FedEx Cup is upon us.
Strange, you say. “I thought we’d already played the four majors,” and they have. This is the, shall we say, “second season.” None of the four major championships belongs to the PGA Tour. The tour has its Players Championship, and likes to think of it as “the fifth major,” but that won’t sell historically.
So, commissioner Tim Finchem came up with his own creation, the FedEx Cup, a title shared with FedEx, its benefactor, and modeled, no less, after NASCAR’s Chase for the Nextel Cup, a sort of race-off among the top 12 in the points standings with 10 races remaining on the schedule.
Now, the tour “race-off” starts this week with the Barclays at Westchester in New York, then the Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston, then the BMW Championship near Chicago. The “regular season” ends in Greensboro today, and the 144 FedEx point leaders move into center ring for the scramble for the Tour Championship at East Lake in mid-September. Last year, you may recall, both Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson passed up the grand finale, the Tour’s showpiece, and this did not set well at all. Not that this snub fueled the FedEx Cup. That was already in motion, but like a jigsaw puzzle, pieces were still being slipped into place. Fact is, they still are.
A lot of us want to know what happens to those who don’t make the 144-player FedEx list, and are left without a game once the run to East Lake cranks up. After each of the playoff tournaments, a number of players are lopped off until, at the Tour Championship, the field is sized down to 30 survivors. What happens to those players eliminated during the qualifiers?
The Tour Championship was moved up nearly two months to avoid the November football rage. The main local competition is Georgia Tech’s game with Boston College. Georgia has a workout game with Western Carolina, and the Falcons are in Jacksonville. So much for that fret.
Next concern — will the Tour get the major boost it expects between its marquee players at East Lake? Woods had committed to play the table, from the Barclays to the Tour Championship, but he has already pulled out of the Barclays. That would have been stretching his customary schedule. Rarely does he ever play two tournaments in a row, but he already has, between Akron and Southern Hills. If he follows through, from the AT&T in July to the Tour Championship in September, that would have been eight tournaments in roughly two and a half months, something he has never done before.
But there’s another commitment here. Finchem gave him his own tournament near Washington on the Fourth of July weekend, the AT&T Congressional. One hand washes the other. He owes Finchem one, all the way down to East Lake, and no way he can bail out on him this time, and there is a $10 million payout to the player who wins the FedEx Cup, highest payoff to any champion in any sport. The entire purse comes to $35 million. Players get a double dip in the three qualifying tournaments, for the Barclays, the Deutsche and the BMW all offer $7 million payouts on the spot.
Money is no issue with Woods. The tour is the stage on which he performs and creates his endorsement connections. For that matter, it isn’t cash in hand, anyway. At first the payout was referred to as an annuity, then later it was changed to “deferred compensation.” Thus, players don’t collect their winnings until they retire from tour competition, and not before they reach age 45, this affirmed by the office of Bob Combs, vice president of communications.
This might be a threat to the prosperity of the Champions Tour, for how many seniors might decide to take early retirement with a fat deferred payment there to be collected?
If all of this sounds complicated to you, join the crowd. I’m not sure the PGA Tour is sure just how it all will work out down the road, this, a sort of shakedown cruise into the great unknown. Especially, should Tiger Woods stay the course, for in the long run all that would do is simply reconfirm him as the champion of the year, and we already knew that.
Permalink | Comments (30) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Win or lose, Vick hangs over team
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Orchard Park, N.Y. — Every step that Arthur Blank took Friday night at Ralph Wilson Stadium, there was an interview waiting to happen. He accepted them all, because he hadn’t a choice. Some things, you just have to do as an image-conscious NFL owner, especially when your $130 million quarterback is accused of hanging and drowning dogs.
That’s for starters. Well, if you believe the horrors resulting from Vick placing himself in position to get indicted by the feds for illegal gambling and the Virginia felony that is dogfighting.
But let’s return to Blank, looking strikingly weary while strolling the sidelines before the Falcons’ exhibition game against the Buffalo Bills. Although the answer was as obvious as Vick preparing sooner rather than later to head to the slammer for a long, long time, the question deserved to be asked again to Blank: Can you say whether you want Vick back on your team?
“I can’t. Really, that hasn’t changed,” said Blank, pausing to reflect on the latest Vick news involving the alleged torturing of animals by a player who regularly came to Blank’s home to play video games with his young sons. “Obviously today’s statement of facts from the two of three co-defendants with Michael is very damaging, you know, very troubling, very disturbing to me and the organization. We have yet to see Michael’s statement of fact, so we don’t know what his position is going to be on that or whatever, but it’s certainly distressing. Very distressing.”
This is bad.
This is really bad.
This is going to remain exceptionally bad for the Falcons, because Vick was bigger than life as a player. Now, if you believe his former pals who turned state’s evidence against him, Vick is threatening to become bigger than life as a criminal.
You have the gruesome details of the killing of losing pit bulls at the Virginia property that Vick owns. Then there are the lowlives associated with it all, which is significant, because Vick often boasted that those lowlives were part of his lifetime “crew.” If you add that to Vick ranking as the undisputed face of the Falcons during his six seasons, then it doesn’t matter that he’ll likely end the fantasy next week that he hadn’t a clue about any of that criminal stuff by working a plea deal with the feds.
This is so bad that it has turned the Falcons into a dysfunctional mess. It’s a mess that won’t correct itself any time soon. It’s a mess that surfaced early during the first half of their exhibition game against the Buffalo Bills when the starters were still around. The Falcons failed to score on third and fourth downs from the Bills’ 1-yard line after sprinting inside the red zone on the opening drive. There was that terribly underthrown pass by Joey Harrington that went for an interception.
There also was a fumble.
This isn’t to say the Falcons’ other units looked all that better during a lackluster effort. Once, backup quarterback Chris Redman went one way on a play while his teammates went the other. Not only that, the Falcons spent another week as simply boring. They had instant charisma whenever Vick took the field, but now they have no charisma. That’s especially true after D.J. Shockley, the people’s choice of Bulldog fame, showed some pizazz in relief of Redman in the fourth quarter. It’s just that he slipped after a nice run, damaged his knee and cringed in agony while leaving for the locker room on a golf cart.
Redman returned later to toss a 1-yard touchdown pass inside the final three minutes to give the visitors a 13-10 victory, but the evening ended mercifully for the Falcons. Through it all, the tiny but vocal crowd kept amusing itself with the periodic chant of, “Who let the dogs out? Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof.”
Were any or all of those moments Vick related? Doesn’t matter. Anything less than good that happens to the Falcons this season will be blamed on No. 7.
That’s because much of it can be blamed on No. 7.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
If Braves make playoffs, they can win it all
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
We’ve focused on the wrong number. It doesn’t matter if the Braves catch the Mets. Going on recent history, it’d be better if they didn’t. The idea isn’t to win the NL East. The idea is to make the playoffs. In the wild-card era of baseball, that’s all it takes.
Four wild cards have won the World Series in the past decade. Only once in that span — heck, only once since 1989 — has the team holding baseball’s best record done it. Over the past seven postseasons, the playoff qualifier with the worst record has won it all twice; the team with the best hasn’t prevailed since 1998.
Because we’re conditioned to the Braves finishing first, we obsess over the division title. We shouldn’t. The number that counts isn’t 3 1/2 games, the margin of the Mets’ lead, but a single game, which represented the spread between the Padres, who carried the best record among second-place teams pending their result Thursday, and the Braves.
The Mets don’t have to fall apart for the Braves to have a chance at the World Series. The Braves have to finish ahead of only the Padres, who don’t have much hitting, and the Phillies, who don’t have much pitching, and the Rockies and Cubs and Brewers, who don’t have much history. Because at this moment, these Braves seem as good a bet as any to win 11 postseason games.
That’s provided they get there.
“Anybody could win,” said Bobby Cox, speaking of the playoffs in general, and pretty much anybody keeps doing it. The Tigers were considered dead last season after they blew the AL Central in the final weekend, and they wound up in the World Series. The Cardinals were, on the record, the second-worst playoff team in baseball history, and they reign as world champs.
This hasn’t been a classic Braves’ bunch. They’ve played a game over .500 since April 11. But they got a lot better at the trading deadline, and no other club improved half as much. There’s no reason this team as now constituted couldn’t be a postseason terror, not even the recent bullpen palpitations.
Case study: The Cardinals lost closer Jason Isringhausen in September last season. Adam Wainwright, the former Braves’ minor-leaguer groomed as a starter, saved four of those 11 postseason victories and didn’t yield a playoff run. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. If Bob Wickman and/or Rafael Soriano continue to wobble and Octavio Dotel doesn’t return, might Peter Moylan be this year’s Wainwright?
Asked if the Braves hold any doubt that they have what it takes to win in October, Jeff Francoeur said: “Absolutely not. There’s a big difference between this year’s team and last year’s. We didn’t make big moves at the trade deadline last year because I think we knew we didn’t have the team. This year we know we have the team.”
They have more professional hitters — meaning fewer flailers, Andruw Jones notwithstanding — than at any time since Fred McGriff and David Justice took their leave. They have just enough starting pitching to win 11 playoff games. Francoeur again: “We’ve got [John] Smoltz and Huddy [Tim Hudson], and that’s the 1-2 punch you need. You need power pitching in October. You need a couple of starters and a bullpen.”
At issue is whether the third, fourth and fifth starters can get this team past its 162nd game. (Thursday’s game wasn’t a promising sign, Chuck James yielding four homers in the first four innings to a Giants’ lineup missing Barry Bonds.) This writer’s belief that these Braves weren’t a playoff team was predicated on the gaps in the rotation, but rotations shorten in the postseason. If the starting pitching steadies over the next six weeks, this could be one crazy autumn.
If the Braves get in, they can win. Yes, it’s a substantial “if.”
Permalink | Comments (108) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Vick’s fall diminishes many
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
I want to be clear about something: I take no pleasure from Michael Vick’s legal difficulties. I like Michael Vick. I’ve never had a cross word with him. I’ve been around him for six years, and I’ve seen him handle himself with surpassing grace in some difficult situations. I’ve always thought — indeed, I’ve written — that the Falcons were lucky to have a nice guy as their superstar.
I have never believed that, as a player, he was anything but a first-rate quarterback. And yes, I said a quarterback, as opposed to a glorified running back. I’ve seen him throw the ball too well too often to buy into that canard. I’ve seen him win too many games — as an NFL starter, last season was his first with a losing record, and I believe that was a function of lousy coaching — to consider himself anything but an on-field asset.
I continue to believe in his right to due process. But I also believe he has, no matter the disposition of his court case, let an awful lot of people down. Whether we like it or not, athletes are seen as heroes and role models. Whether we like it or not, athletes touch the masses in a way that, say, a poet or a physics instructor or a patrolman never can. I believe Vick’s descent from star player to celebrity defendant has diminished us all.
I get paid not to root for teams or players, but I’m a human being. And I can only imagine what Michael Vick, a human being himself, is going through right now. That was the genesis of the column I wrote Tuesday afternoon. I kept asking how it must feel to be Michael Vick not because I was trying to be funny but because I have no idea how it feels.
I know only how I feel about this whole thing. I feel really sad.
Permalink | Comments (190) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Georgia’s ‘D’ will be fine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Athens — Sometimes, you have these hunches. For instance: Despite Georgia’s defense preparing to face the horror that is an SEC football schedule with just three returning starters and uncertainty wrapped in youth everywhere else, the Bulldogs will bark just fine, thank you.
Georgia has two things going for it before Oklahoma State comes to town in 16 days in search of torching the hedges with its sizzling offense:
Tradition and talent. The Bulldogs’ coaching is impressive, too, which brings us back to tradition. As Mark Richt and his assistants like to say to their players, tradition never graduates. More specifically, when it comes to defense, that tradition has produced a slew of teeth-rattlers from Thomas Davis to David Pollack to Tim Jennings and lofty national defensive rankings in Richt’s six seasons.
There also is talent throughout Georgia’s depth chart. With the Bulldogs always ranking among the national elite in recruiting, their No. 3 guys could be Mr. Everything guys elsewhere.
Not only that, you can add truth to that tradition and talent. No matter how many ways I asked Georgia defensive coordinator Willie Martinez about what he thought his inexperienced group would do this season, he responded with the same answer or a derivative thereof.
“I don’t know.”
That’s because Martinez doesn’t know. I mean, who does know? The Bulldogs lost both starting defensive ends to the NFL, and they are missing three linebackers with a combined 76 career starts. They also watched accomplished defensive back Paul Oliver leave abruptly for the pros after academic issues.
Plus, the Georgia defense must try to conquer everything from a rising South Carolina offense under the ol’ ball coach to a Florida spread offense that remains potent while trying to defend its national championship.
So Martinez kept telling the truth (“I don’t know”), when others in his situation would have kept telling the myth (“We’ll be better than people think.”).
We’re back to that hunch, and that is, Georgia’s defense will be better than people think. Because Martinez kept telling the truth, you could believe him about those other things. Like whether Georgia defenders have progressed, regressed or stayed the same during the months since their ghastly effort in the spring game. In addition to allowing more than a few gigantic plays, there were missed tackles and botched assignments combined with a mighty dose of lethargy.
Martinez nodded, before leaning forward in his office to say, “The experience that some of the younger guys have gained between then and now has helped, but the mentality is just different. The offseason of strength and conditioning also has been a big plus, and whereas they were missing tackles, now they’re grabbing and holding on. They’re also getting off blocks better, and a big thing is that we have more depth this fall than we had in the spring.”
Here’s another big thing: According to Martinez, Georgia is filling the leadership void with the maturation of middle linebacker Brandon Miller and strong safety Kelin Johnson, two of those returning starters. “They’ve been contributing and having really good camps, and that’s a positive, because the younger players can see that,” said Martinez, whose unit finished last season ranked eighth nationally in total defense. This is Martinez’s third year as Georgia’s coordinator, and, at 44, he’s been coaching for more than a couple of decades, including every year of the Richt regime with the Bulldogs.
So, surely, Martinez has a feel about what his current unit …
“Don’t know,” Martinez said quickly. “You’re talking about 18- to 22-year-old kids. With three aspects of college — academics, athletics and social life — there are a lot of things going on in their lives, and you don’t know how a young man is going to prioritize those things. You also don’t know how they’ll react to adversity.”
This is what we do know: The Mighty Gators have one fewer returning starter on defense than the Bulldogs. Does that mean Georgia will conquer Florida for only the second time in 10 years?
Don’t know.
Permalink | Comments (52) | Categories: Terence Moore, UGA / SEC
Plea won’t please NFL commish
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Do you remember what happened on Saturday, April 28, 2007?
Roger Goodell does.
Boy, does he.
That’s when the NFL commissioner asked Michael Vick if he was involved in illegal dogfighting. That’s when the Falcons quarterback looked Goodell in the eyes and said he wasn’t involved in illegal dogfighting and that none of it occurred on his Virginia property.
That’s when Vick set himself up for leaving the NFL for a long, long time and likely forever.
Maybe you’ve heard. Vick and his lawyers are discussing whether to accept a plea deal from the feds by Friday. If Vick does so, he would be telling the world that he was involved in illegal dogfighting and that it did occur on his Virginia property.
Translated: Goodell would not be pleased, especially since the no-nonsense commissioner doesn’t strike me as somebody with amnesia.
Permalink | Comments (57) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Vick left to mull fast rise, fall
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
How must it be, being Michael Vick?
From prince of this bustling city to pariah of an entire country; from idol of millions to cheap joke on the “Tonight Show;” from having too many friends to having no friends at all — how must that feel? How must it feel to arise each morning believing the walls have moved ever closer in the dark of night?
Twenty days ago you stood in a federal courtroom as one of four defendants. Today you stand apart. The other three have, or will, plead guilty. The other three have turned on you, the old pal they called Ookie. The other three are scrambling to save themselves. At this late date, who saves Michael Vick?
Not Arthur Blank. That cord has been all but cut. So completely have you fallen from the rich man’s graces that he has been moved to apologize, nearly four years after the fact, for the hardly heinous act of pushing you in a wheelchair. How must that feel, knowing Blank once deemed you worth $130 million of his money and all of his conspicuous affection but having no reason to believe he ever wants to see you again?
How must it feel, knowing you came as close to Having It All as anyone from your background — heck, as anyone from any background, the Rockefellers included — ever can? How must it feel, having gone from seeing your replica jersey adorn the backs of folks from all walks of life to being reduced to the indignity of your likeness peddled as a $7.99 doggie chew toy?
How must it feel, having spent your formative years dreaming of bigger and better, having risen from the rough neighborhoods of Newport News — Bad Newz, as it’s known, the same name you gave your ill-fated “kennel” — only to find that those old ties were a snare? How must it feel, knowing the speed that enabled you to run away from everybody cannot shake the feds?
The feds, you learn with every passing day, aren’t the Carolina Panthers. They aren’t the Miami-Dade cops. They don’t want your autograph. They want to throw you in jail. The feel-good story of rising from the streets of Bad Newz to owning a mansion in Sugarloaf is surely yielding to the stark reality that you could be prison-bound. How do you sleep at night? In whom (besides your many lawyers) do you confide?
Warrick Dunn told reporters Monday he’d spoken with you recently. He also said, “I don’t think anybody on this team, right now, is hoping that Mike comes back.” Perhaps that sounded harsher than Dunn, a genuinely nice man, meant, but the sentiment was coldly instructive. Once you were the face and future of this franchise. Now you’re yesterday’s man. The Falcons don’t want you and act as if they don’t need you. How has it come to that?
Your legal options have apparently been reduced to two lousy choices: Either plead guilty or get hit with more charges, these surely bolstered by testimony from your former buddies. It’s still possible you could be acquitted at trial, but do you dare take that chance? Guilty at trial could mean five years in jail. A guilty plea might mean a year. How must that seem, the grim notion of a lesser sentence as best-case scenario?
And what of football? If you plead guilty, when might you be cleared to play again? What team would want you and your baggage if/when you are? You spoke often of wanting to be a great quarterback, a Super Bowl quarterback, but now, at age 27, you’re damaged goods. You haven’t been brought low by debilitating injury — you’re long past the broken leg of 2003 — or an act of God. You’ve undone yourself. You put yourself in places you didn’t need to be.
And now you’re alone. You don’t really have a team or teammates anymore, and you mightn’t have a job for long. How must it feel, to have been given so much and to have thrown it all away? How must it be, being Michael Vick?
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McKeon: It’s not the Braves’ year
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Although Jack McKeon is wrong about the next king of the National League East, the accomplished manager of yore is right about everything else along the way to the divisional throne.
I mean, with apologies to McKeon, the Braves will overcome Andruw Jones’ microscopic batting average. They will survive the significant holes on their pitching staff. They will discover ways to have as much energy in the division against the little boys of Florida and Washington as they do against the big boys of New York and Philadelphia. They will return tonight to Turner Field against the San Francisco Giants after splitting six games on the road with the Mets and the Phillies to sharpen their focus for the stretch drive.
They will win the division.
“You know, I got to say that you’ve got to lean toward the Mets, and I like to think that the underdogs are the Phillies and the Braves,” said McKeon, 76, in his second year of semi-retirement in Elon, N.C., after leading Florida to three of its four winning seasons, including a world championship. Since the early 1970s, there also were managerial stints for McKeon in Kansas City, Oakland, San Diego and Cincinnati. He spent a decade with the Padres becoming “Trader Jack” as their general manager. Even now, as a special adviser to the Marlins with hopes of managing again, McKeon watches an average of “three to four” baseball games per day on television between puffs on his omnipresent cigars.
So, except for that logical but wrongheaded thinking involving the Mets as NL East favorites, McKeon knows what he’s talking about. For instance: He knows the key player for the Braves the rest of the way isn’t exactly Martin Prado.
It’s Jones.
The other one.
“Yeah, they’ve got to keep Chipper healthy, because you can see a big difference in that ballclub when he’s not in there,” McKeon said of the Braves’ third baseman with the NL’s third-best batting average (.337) to complement his mostly clutch 19 home runs and 66 RBIs. He also is second in the league in on-base percentage (.428) and third in slugging percentage (.596). That said, the most significant numbers for Jones are “52-14,” which is the Braves’ record when their frequently aching slugger is in the lineup, and “10-14,” which is their record otherwise.
Added McKeon, “You put Chipper in the class with Barry Bonds. Then you put him up there with people in the past like Thurman Munson, Joe Carter. Guys that, when things get tough for your club, they always seem to be able to rise to the occasion. Chipper has done that kind of damage to me enough. He’s a real professional. He’s a money player.”
He’s also a member of the Braves’ veteran quartet of Bobby Cox, John Smoltz and Andruw Jones when it comes to pressure in division races. It’s a veteran quartet that will help the Braves conquer the Mets despite that little fact: The Mets are better, but only by a Billy Wagner.
Other than Wagner’s closing prowess, the Mets’ pitching is flawed, especially without injured Pedro Martinez for maybe the rest of the season. It’s just that the Mets are slightly less flawed on the mound than a Braves bunch that has mighty questions at the end of its starting rotation and throughout its bullpen.
As for the potent everyday lineups of both teams, it’s about whether you prefer baseball’s version of chicken or fish after the Braves acquired Mark Teixeira to make Chipper Jones even more frightening to opponents.
“You really can’t leave out the Phillies, because even though they don’t quite have the pitching with all of their injuries, they’ve always been a team that has had the talent but has never seemed to be able to put it all together,” McKeon said. “You know, with those three teams going at it, I just think it’s going to be a nailbiting time for everybody during the next six weeks.”
Two words: wild card. Not a bad consolation prize for the Braves, Mets or Phillies. McKeon’s Marlins were one in 2003, and they won it all.
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Austin and Els put the heat on Woods
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Tulsa, Okla. — It was the hottest day of the championship, miserably, energy-sapping hot, and Southern Hills all but dried up and blew away. Tiger Woods won the 89th PGA Championship, as one might have expected, but it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. All it took was a 69. Five guys outscored him on Sunday.
One of them, Woody Austin, the Mr. Jitters of the PGA Tour, said, “I went over the card and I outplayed him. Trouble is, you can’t give somebody seven shots, especially when he’s the best player in the world.”
By the end, Austin had whittled the margin to two, but there was no catching Woods, though by the time Woods teed off, Simon Dyson, a Yorkshire man, checked in with the lowest round of the day, a 64, but all that did was draw him even with par. Ernie Els joined the five with a round of 66, and two players well below and out of contention, Pat Perez and Hunter Mahan, who schooled down the road at Oklahoma State, both checked in at 68.
It was Austin the galleries had their eyes on, for though he grew up in Florida, he now lives near Wichita, a somewhat territorial figure. He came out from a bank teller’s window in Tampa and took to golf and has done right well at it, a winner three times, one just recently in Memphis. He started off five strokes back of Woods, and Tiger added to it on the front nine. Austin, though, was driven, disdainful of his treatment by the television networks.
“He hits his drive through the fairway, same line as mine,” he said, referring to an earlier round, “and he slams his driver to the ground. They call it ‘competitive fire.’ I do it, they call me a ‘loose cannon.’ I’m not competitive?”
Austin and Els were the two hounding pursuers, and at times each would creep nearer Woods, only to fall back, or see Tiger put some ground between them. Not to diminish the feat of Dyson — his 31 was the low front nine of the week — but the Englishman was never a threat to the leaders. He has played and won on both the Asian and European tours. Els, however, was of another caliber.
The South African picked up two strokes on Woods on the front nine but simply couldn’t sustain a surge. When he bogeyed the 12th and the 16th, it was clear his day was over, and it almost came earlier due to the smothering heat.
“I felt it today. Some of those holes out there, I thought I was going to go down. Today was the hottest of them all,” he said.
He was a frayed and exhausted warrior visiting with the press. When asked to go through his birdies and bogeys, he asked, “Do I need to?”
Woods, however, conformed to habit. Hot as it was, no less than 105 degrees, he still came out in his traditional red shirt, with a supply of towels. He birdied the fourth, seventh and eighth holes, but bogeyed the second and seventh on the front nine. He could feel the pressure from Austin and Els, but managed to stay clear of them down the stretch as their vigor ran low, though he managed only an even-par back nine.
“I had a good start,” he said, “and I was 2-under after eight holes. Ernie and Woody were making runs, but they were going to have to come get me for I had a two-stroke lead.”
Thus, Woods brought an end to the major-less aspect of his year. No Masters jacket, no U.S. Open trophy, no claret jug from Carnoustie to decorate his premises. But, a new face to share this joy with him, and he spoke gently of his newborn daughter, Sam Alexis.
“It’s a feeling I’ve never had before. I was so excited I just gave Elin [his wife] and Sam a kiss before I signed my scorecard,” he said, a quite proud first-time papa, to say the least.
He is now embarking on a course off the usual run of business for him. He played the British Open, then the Bridgestone Invitational at Akron, then this hard run for the Wanamaker Trophy, and after a week layoff, he’ll go into the four straight weeks of FedEx Cup pursuit, provided he progresses all the way to the Tour Championship at East Lake. None, however, will have the exhausting conditions that turned Oklahoma into an earthen oven.
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Let Hank solve Selig’s mistake
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Baseball’s all-time home run champion will stop by 755 Hank Aaron Drive this week, and that man is no longer Hank Aaron. Many among us insist that the new record is invalid and its new holder a cheat (not to mention a jerk), but sometimes denial is, to paraphrase Mark Twain, just a river in Egypt.
Barry Bonds is the new king of clout. Deal with it.
No, I don’t know exactly how Bonds has hit each of his 758 homers. Neither do you. Neither does Bud Selig, who over the last month managed to make himself seem sillier than ever. After the usual dithering, Selig showed up for No. 755 but conspicuously did not applaud the deed and later issued the least enthusiastic statement in the history of congratulations, the second sentence of which began:
“No matter what anyone thinks of the controversy surrounding this event …”
Still, in his ham-handed way, Selig hit on something. No matter what you think of the man and the allegations and the arrogance and the investigations, the fact remains: Barry Bonds has hit more home runs than any player in big-league history, and nowhere along the line has the sport found cause to prevent him from doing it.
Maybe that says more about the sport than it does about Bonds, but it wasn’t as if he hit those homers playing under an assumed name for a barnstorming team going (borrowing from the late great Lowell George here) from Tucson to Tucumcari. All 758 have been struck under the imprimatur of Major League Baseball. All 758 are legitimate in the eyes of the sanctioning body. All 758 count, and nobody else has 758, not even Bud Selig’s buddy Hank Aaron.
As Selig’s sullen tracking of Bonds unfolded, it was hard to know why the commish seemed such a sourball. Was it because he knew he’d allowed this whole steroids cloud to form by doing nothing a decade ago? Or was it because Bonds was about to break his friend’s record? (Significantly, Selig never spoke to Bonds during the long slog to No. 756 — he called him only after the fact — but admitted talking to Aaron on a regular basis.)
Aaron himself stayed above the fray and recorded a taped congratulatory message that was played at AT&T Park. Aaron chose not to chase Bonds around the country waiting for No. 756, but now the countdown is done and there’s no need to chase anybody anywhere. Bonds is coming to 755 Hank Aaron Drive for a three-game series starting Tuesday.
We Atlantans know there’s no sight so rare as seeing the greatest Brave ever in attendance at an actual Braves game. He’s on the board of directors and he holds the title of senior vice president, but Aaron doesn’t like going to ballgames. (He does use the Turner Field workout facilities, we’re told.) And that’s fine. He wouldn’t have to stay for a single pitch. Aaron could just show up during batting practice and shake Bonds’ hand.
There would be no need for any statement or briefing. The photographs, which would be splashed across the front of every sports section the next day, would send the message that frankly needs to be sent: That baseball, its scowling and dissembling commissioner notwithstanding, salutes the new record-holder.
It would be the sort of grace note Selig is incapable of sounding. It would provide a bit of symmetry — Bonds hit his first homer off Craig McMurtry on June 4, 1986, across the street in the now-razed stadium where Aaron hit his 715th — and would extend to the new holder a courtesy baseball didn’t offer the previous one. For decades Aaron seethed over the lack of official fuss made over No. 715 — Bowie Kuhn was in Cleveland that momentous night — and Selig has made it a point as commissioner to make his buddy feel more appreciated.
Let’s say, 33 years from now, baseball still hasn’t contrived to strike Bonds’ records from the book. Let’s say he’s still the all-time home run champion. Will some other commissioner be apologizing to him the way Selig did to Aaron? Or would one handshake from the Hammer be enough to make the new king of clout and the watching world forget all about blundering Bud?
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Weekley’s 65 nearly as fun as big ol’ fish
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Tulsa, Okla. — You’ll get your quota of Tiger Woods elsewhere today. This one is reserved for Boo Weekley, known by his birth name of Thomas Brent only by the IRS. But first, a little joust with our television friends here. Late in the second round Friday, the TNT crew had turned to heavy emoting as Woods neared the end of his round, impassioned with a possible round of 62 in view.
“Historical!” it was exclaimed. “Something never before done in major golf.”
True, absolutely true, except that TNT never alerted the audience to the fact that not all majors are played on par-70 courses. The true measure is the number of strokes shaved off par. Southern Hills’ par is 70. Two rounds of 63 have been shot on PGA Championship courses of par 72, nine under par, by Gary Player and Jose Maria Olazabal. Two by Nick Price and Greg Norman in the Masters, par 72, one round of 63 by Paul Broadhurst in the British Open when St. Andrews was played at 72. The best Woods could have done with a birdie on 18 would have been eight under, nice day’s work but nothing historical.
Boo Weekley wouldn’t have been much help, for as he said after a day truly historic in his career, “I never was good at math.”
Boo had just finished a round of 65 on Saturday, his best in a major championship, and he kept an audience of interviewers full of chuckles. He spoke often of his two favorite sports, fishing and hunting, but occasionally of golf. “I had a good day and it was fun, but it would have been funner if I’m setting at the house catching about a 10-pounder,” he said.
Boo played in the British Open this year, his first excursion overseas, and asked if he was surprised at the way he was accepted at Carnoustie, he said, “I was very surprised, I mean, being a foreigner and being who I am. I reckon as long as you’re being yourself, you can’t go wrong.”
The Europeans among the press were knocked out, a sort of a Bennie Hill moment in reverse. Boo was a model of Southern manners. He answered questions with “yes, sir”and “no, sir,” just like his mama taught him. And the weather was just like he liked it. “I like to sweat. The hotter the better.”
Now, to serious business, “Are you looking forward to the FedExCup, and what do you know about it?”
“I don’t know nothing about the FedExCup. I’m just playing golf, and that’s all that matters to me.”
Now, how about the Ryder Cup? “Do you have ambitions to play in it next year, and have you followed it in the past?”
Boo said, “If they invite me to come, I’ll come play. But I don’t know a whole lot about the Ryder Cup stuff.”
Boo Weekley’s career just sort of cropped up out of thin air. All the sports he played as a kid, “I got hurt in every one of them.”
Then a high school coach introduced him to golf. He went off to college, ABAC in Tifton, but the school dropped golf, and Weekley returned home to Milton, Fla., and got a job in a nearby chemical plant for three years. Jack Slocum, Heath Slocum’s father and a local pro, insisted that he use his talent and get back to golf.
“They were laying off at the plant, so I took the layoff and started playing golf.”
He won the first tournament he played in, called The Moors in Milton, and he had found his new career. If it’s not the majors that drive him, then what is it?
“I want to play 10 or 12 years, whatever it takes to get enough money in the bank. I’m done. I love the game; I get tired of the grind. But my heart is really with hunting and fishing,” he said.
“How much money would enough be?”
“I don’t know. I ain’t got that far yet,” Boo said, about which time word arrived that his partner for the day, Sergio Garcia, had been disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard, one that Boo filled out. Had Boo’s bad arithmetic caught up with him?
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Vick’s blind loyalists are just wrong
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
It’s the Atlanta sports version of the perfect storm, and it involves this blind loyalty given to Michael Vick by many in the African-American community despite his self-imposed horrors.
I don’t get it.
Then again, I do. This goes back to that perfect storm, soaking everything from Peachtree City to Lake Lanier.
You have the thunder, which is the emotional thing that comes from centuries of watching African-Americans mistreated in this country from the old cotton fields to the new corporate offices. You have the lightning, which is the hype thing that turns a professional athlete into such a superhero that the average fan can’t separate reality from fantasy. You also have the rain, which is the inferiority thing that comes from a slew of pitiful Atlanta teams that nevertheless have produced a Mount Rushmore of sports icons in the African-American community: Dominique Wilkins, Deion Sanders and Vick.
Why did they trade ‘Nique when he was all the Hawks had?
Then they let Prime Time get away over a bunch of foolishness.
Now they’re out to get Vick because of a bunch of dogs.
It’s just dogs.
Add all of that together, and it leads to Charles Steele, the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, declaring last week that Vick should be “honored” for being “an outstanding human being.” It causes hundreds to march to the Georgia Dome to declare that they will support Vick whether he’s guilty or innocent. It makes some of us become verbal tackling dummies for those wishing to vent their displeasure over the media’s treatment of their last Mount Rushmore guy.
Never mind that Vick is mentioned more than 50 times in a federal indictment for dogfighting. Forget that he hasn’t exactly been Warrick Dunn, a certified “outstanding human being” after years of flourishing on and off the field.
“It’s just dogs,” I keep hearing as a mantra, from the church to the barbershop to the grocery store.
Well, guess what? Whether you like it or not, you can’t rob a bank, you aren’t allowed to kidnap people, and you’re not supposed to fight dogs. Whether you like it or not, dogfighting is a felony. If you wish to be defiant by robbing that bank, or kidnapping those people, or getting involved in dogfights, then you shouldn’t complain if you’re a jury away from munching cold beans on a tin plate someday.
Let’s consider a few indisputable facts about Vick. For one, he gets paid more than any player in the NFL. For another, his position of quarterback is the most visible in his sport. Plus, until recently, he was part of more than a few national and local advertising campaigns.
So nobody is “picking” on somebody like that, to use a favorite word of his blind loyalists. If you’re Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby or anybody else of high profile, and if you put yourself in a criminal situation, you’re naturally going to get scrutinized in this era of endless news cycles. Which brings us to the indisputable fact that Vick put himself in a criminal situation.
His property in rural Virginia apparently featured the Mother of All Dogfighting Operations during all five years of his ownership. Not only that, those involved were part of the so-called “crew” that he has sworn allegiance to since his youth.
Speaking of youth, here’s another indisputable fact: Contrary to the thoughts of Vick’s blind loyalists, he isn’t a kid anymore. He’s 27. He has played six years in the league. He is old enough to know better. Instead, he spent the months before his dogfighting case putting himself in situations involving that water-bottle craziness, the flipping off of fans at a Falcons home game, the Ron Mexico deal, the stiffing of U.S. congressmen for an event, the stolen watch by his boys, the holding of something resembling a blunt in an Internet photo.
This should be all about protecting the youth. For instance: What sort of example are we setting by saying anything less than the truth about these knuckleheads? The truth is that, when they put themselves in criminal situations, they are wrong. That’s whether they can use their famous legs to sprint through a perfect storm without getting wet or not.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Welcome to life without Vick
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
East Rutherford, N.J. — The franchise officially showed up without its face Friday night, which is just as well given what the face looks like these days — battered by an indictment and picketers, no longer protected by image-makers and a powerful sports league.
Maybe Michael Vick was watching from his couch in Virginia. Maybe he thought, “They need me. They want me. I’ll get past this. I’ll be back.”
If so, he’s probably deluded. Maybe the Falcons need him, but there’s nothing to indicate they want him. And if they’re even thinking about him, they did a good job concealing it Friday night.
“When you’re out there in the heat of the moment, your adrenaline is flowing, the last thing you think about is somebody who’s not here,” Keith Brooking said. “You’ve got 300-pounders looking you square in the eye, coming downhill on you. I was out there to watch our football team. I wasn’t thinking of anybody else.”
We watched the Falcons play an exhibition game without Vick. That alone wasn’t unusual. A broken leg in one of these a few years back had long since reduced Vick’s August appearances to cameo roles.
We watched a moving-on process shift into the final stages. The Falcons played a game without Vick on the field, on the sideline, and only barely on the roster.
We watched Joey Harrington. It was only three possessions and one touchdown drive in one of the NFL’s super-sized scrimmages. The game will mean nothing statistically when the real season starts Sept. 9. But it wasn’t completely without meaning.
Harrington was asked if it felt like his team.
His response: “It felt like that the first day of training camp. I’m not looking to fill somebody’s shoes. Mike’s a very good player in his own right. But there are things I do well, too. From the moment I got into that huddle the first day of training camp, I knew I could only worry about myself. I had to get myself ready to play for this team.”
The Falcons lost to the New York Jets 31-16. Like it mattered. The NFL’s preseason is about player analysis. Given what the Falcons have gone through this summer and the absence of several starters with injuries, this game was more about who can walk and talk.
It was ugly. It rained. Giants Stadium was two-thirds empty. When coach Bobby Petrino ran onto the field with the team, he probably thought he was here for the Louisville-Rutgers game. Given the circumstances, maybe he wished he were.
Harrington, however, did his best to raise hopes. He completed 6 of 9 passes for 88 yards. He had only one real misfire (two other incompletions being more the result of coverage). He had completions of 22 and 37 yards to set up a 10-yard touchdown run by Jerious Norwood.
You would have thought the Falcons had just a clinched a playoff spot by Harrington’s reaction. He ran around, high-fiving teammates. He ran toward the end zone to greet Norwood. He ran back to the sideline and embraced offensive coordinator Hue Jackson.
“You have to be impressed with him,” general manager Rich McKay said. “I was impressed with Joey, especially since this is somebody who didn’t find out until two days before training camp that he was going into camp as the starter.”
McKay tried to downplay the significance of Vick’s absence. The front office has long since shifted into that hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil mode.
“I kind of viewed the [recent] press conference as that moving-on process,” McKay said during the game. “The way I look at it, you have to deal with who you’ve got. You spend more time worrying about who’s playing than who’s not playing.”
It’s the right thing to say and the right thing to do. But Vick was center stage almost since he was drafted in 2001. This was like staring at an empty TV box, devoid of a screen, circuits and wires.
Get used to it. There is no magic wand that will make all of this go away for Vick. The U.S. government is not going to say, “We give up.” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is not going to say, “All is well.” The Falcons aren’t sending Vick a plane ticket to Minnesota.
This is the franchise now — faceless and possibly buzzless. But they have 16 games to play, and the same can’t be said for Vick.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
Verplank at home at Southern Hills
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Tulsa, Okla. — Well, Oklahoma has its man for the 97th PGA Championship. “Ok-LA-homa, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain, dah de, dah …” and so on. Can’t say born and bred. Scott Verplank was born in Texas, but Oklahoma has been home since childhood, Oklahoma State was his school, and when his name rose to the top of the leaderboard at Southern Hills for a while Friday, everything was up-to-date in Tulsa.
You could hear the cheers rising up around the course during the morning, but it hit a crescendo after Verplank made the turn. The birdies began to fall and the cries arose, “Go Cowboys” and “Go Pokes” from the galleries venting Stillwater affection. It was sort of a repeat rendition of what took place in Dallas, where Verplank exercised his unique facility for playing the territorial game earlier in the year. There, he won the Byron Nelson, and there, too, the “Cowboys” and “Pokes” let themselves be heard.
This, though, is more like home. He lives down the road in Edmond. He has surrounded himself with his four children, parents, in-laws and other varieties of relatives at the house he has rented for the championship. “I was like an accountant Monday night, getting all the tickets in the right envelope. I think I left 15 envelopes at Will Call, then I said, ‘That’s it. I’m done,’ ” he said.
His life in golf hasn’t been a stroll down Easy Street. He developed diabetes when he was 9 and still wears an insulin pack and checks his blood-sugar count five or six times a round. Three prime years of his career were lost to surgery, elbow repairs. This, you understand, coming after Verplank had come out of the gate afire. He won the 1985 Western Open as an amateur when he was 21 and suddenly found himself among the top 10 players in the world.
“I was an early bloomer. Now maybe I’ll be a late bloomer here,” he said.
Winning has been rare and widely spaced since the Western. He won the Buick in 1988, at Reno in 2000 and the Canadian Open in 2001, and then followed a fallow six years until the Nelson. He has had more hills to climb and misfortunes to overcome than most. This is his first thrust at a major.
“You can’t force winning a major or anything else. I’m probably just as pleased that I’ve overcome as much as I have,” he said. “When I was 21, if I had kept progressing at that rate, I would have been sitting up here a lot more often.”
Here at Southern Hills, the time is ripe and the galleries are ready for a home hero. After he made the turn 1 under par, he birdied the 11th, the 15th and the 17th holes, and made a remarkable par save out of the water on the long 13th. That’s when the Okie cheerleaders broke out in a spontaneous whoop that followed him up the hill into the scorer’s cabin, where his round of 66 was registered, 136 for the 36 holes and close to the lead.
Verplank’s face is pure Okie, athletic features, easy smile, a sort of corn-fed drawl and a puckish sense of humor. He was asked if he might be commuting from Edmond.
“No, I lost a rotor on my helicopter. It’s in the shop,” he said, and laughter broke out as he smiled.
His career hasn’t been what it might have been, then again, as he said, “I’ve had other things to deal with that other people haven’t.”
There could be no better place for a sixth. Tulsa, as in Oklahoma.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Golf
Aaron happy to be finished with it all
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The biggest sigh of relief didn’t come from Barry Bonds after home run No. 756 flew deep into the San Francisco night, but from Hank Aaron, still exhaling over the joy of becoming just another retired guy in southwest Atlanta.
Unlike his neighbors, Aaron has 755 career home runs and a bronzed plaque in Cooperstown. He also has a revamped look on his life.
“I thought things were pretty normal for me at one point after going through what I did [while chasing Babe Ruth’s home run record during the early 1970s]. Then, all of a sudden, it crops up again with all these questions, and to be honest, I still don’t know how I managed to get thrown into this Bonds thing,” Aaron said on Thursday in an exclusive interview with the Journal-Constitution.
Just so you understand, Aaron didn’t want any part of this Bonds thing, because it reminded him of that Ruth thing, when he was an African-American player chasing the record of a white icon through a slew of death threats and hate mail.
Now, after 33 years as baseball’s all-time king of home runs, Aaron’s No. 755 is second to Bonds’ expanding record. Aaron couldn’t care less. As a result, this famously private man who nevertheless continues to reign on the throne in the hearts of many can return to the shadows.
That is, when Aaron isn’t dealing with his many projects involving youth, or becoming more active as a Braves executive, or exercising his 73-year-old body. “I try to work out every day, and I have this trainer here to help me try to keep this old body in shape,” said Aaron, chuckling, after his session at Turner Field. He gave another one of his contagious laughs, then added, “Oh, I feel tremendously relieved. I’m so glad this [Bonds’ record chase] is done with, and now I can just go my own way.”
Yes and no. Some things never will be the same for Aaron after he spent the past couple of years doing exactly the right thing: He said little or nothing about Bonds, the frequently surly star who is the poster child of baseball’s steroids era. Aaron also did exactly the right thing by staying with his vow of not becoming an unofficial member of the San Francisco Giants traveling team to see Bonds’ record-breaker.
Still, Aaron was ridiculed for remaining mostly invisible. Bonds even informed others — including commissioner Bud Selig, among Aaron’s closest pals, and myself — that he was upset that over the years Aaron never called him in general or visited him when the Giants came to Atlanta.
Through it all, Aaron discovered that several of his so-called friends were only acquaintances or worse.
“It really got to the point where a lot of people started wanting to give you advice about what you should do, and they didn’t know what the hell the situation was,” said Aaron, losing his post-755 calm for the moment. “I mean, these were people that you had been knowing for a long time, but they couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting involved in this thing.
“Then they would come forward and say things like, ‘Well, you need to do this. You need to do that.’ They wanted to give you all of this advice, and they didn’t know what was all involved in it, really.
“That’s the thing that really bothers you. Friends that you’ve had a long time are all of a sudden coming forth and telling you things like, ‘Well, I don’t understand why you aren’t making comments, or why aren’t you doing blah, blah, blah.’
“Well, you know what? You’re not supposed to understand any of it, because you’re not in it.”
Aaron paused, then he broke the silence with another one of his laughs. That’s opposed to what he did on Tuesday night when Bonds connected for the record-breaker in San Francisco.
What did Aaron do? “Well, first of all, I was asleep. It was 1 o’clock in the morning,” he said, chuckling. “Heck, I’m not going to sit up and watch a baseball game. It’s just like I wasn’t going to be able to travel all over the world to watch [Bonds break the record]. It wasn’t being disrespectful or anything. It’s just a matter of, hey, the body needed to go to sleep.”
As for Saturday night, when Bonds tied Aaron’s No. 755 in San Diego, Aaron was awake, but he was attending a function for his wife, Billye, who was being honored in Atlanta by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was after the Aarons spent a week in Puerto Rico, and not because they were trying to ignore Bonds’ chase. They annually join Japanese baseball legend Sadaharu Oh at something called the World Children’s Baseball Fair, which features more than 4,000 kids from around the planet with aspirations of becoming the next Aaron or Oh.
This isn’t to say Aaron ignored Bonds’ march to history. Last month, Selig asked Aaron to do one public statement regarding the matter. Not only did Aaron agree, but he stood before a film crew at Turner Field last month to tape a classy video message that was displayed on the big screen at AT&T Park after Bonds’ big blast.
The gesture delighted a visibly moved Bonds and others. Said Aaron, “I’ve gotten a lot of calls saying that was the right thing to do, and these were from people who know a little bit more about this situation than just the average person.”
Which brings us to this: Will Aaron call or meet with Bonds at some point for whatever reason? “Eventually, if I happen to see him somewhere, I’d probably say something to him,” Aaron said. “To be honest, I’m as happy for him as anybody.”
Then Aaron gave his most contagious laugh yet, before saying, “Hey, you know, 33 years with the home run record, that was long enough for me.”
Permalink | Comments (36) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
Cink takes positives from ‘01 missed putt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Tulsa, Okla. — Some guys survive a crash like Stewart Cink’s and they resign from the planet. They clam up. They sulk. “What would be the point of that, except to look like a jerk?” he said. “I don’t mind talking about it.”
You see, it has been six years. He missed a putt and lost the U.S. Open, and this was the first time he’d been back to the Southern Hills Country Club, this time for the PGA Championship. To show how little history bothered him, he was staying in the same house the man who beat him had rented that year.
To show you further the kind of stand-up guy he is, “I’m not going to ever say, forget it, we’re not talking about it,” he said. And so he talked about it, the Open of 2001, when he and Retief Goosen left the 18th green in ruins on Sunday afternoon. As it turned out, the putt that Cink missed didn’t mean anything until Goosen followed him and missed his. “Just a tiny putt,” Cink said of his, “no longer than this,” and he held his hands about 2 feet apart. Double bogey.
“Then all of a sudden everybody sort of went, hey, that means that Cink’s putt would have got him in a playoff.” Then Cink’s missed putt looked bigger than Mount Rushmore, and he still had a chance if Goosen had missed his final 3-footer. That put him in a playoff with Mark Brooks, which he won yawning, and Cink was left with a what-might-have-been.
So, here he was back at Southern Hills and the locusts were in flight. But, as he said, “considering it was the focal point of the golf universe at the moment,” what could you expect? People are curious about visiting the scene of old calamities.
“What that did show me, though, was that I can win a major. That’s what I take from that,” he said.
Since that time, Cink’s game has picked up some steam and he has gained stature points along the way. Won a couple of tournaments and picked up the pieces for the American team in a calamitous Ryder Cup match last year. This is about a man who, as a kid, didn’t have much interest in golf. “That was about the time I was fighting my dad for control of the television. I wanted to watch cartoons.”
He had one of his choice moments last year at the World Golf Championships in Akron. In a playoff with Tiger Woods, he carried the great one four holes before losing. Just one of those occasions when Cink failed to call up his killer’s instinct.
He had another flirtation with the gods at this year’s British Open at Carnoustie. He made a “snip at the lead,” as he put it, on Sunday afternoon and finished tied for sixth.
“It was good experience because I had never played well in the Open. To go over there where I had been 20-over par in ‘99 meant a lot to me,” he said. “But there’s no comparison between that place and this, just because of the temperatures, if nothing else. I wore my rain suit three days and it wasn’t raining all that time. It was cold.”
So this is more his kind of temperature, the kind that can broil a steak on the hood of a car. The greens have been made more kindly, but you don’t see much difference on 9 and 18. In fact, Cink bogeyed 18 this time, which would have put him in the playoff in the ‘01 Open. He came around in good order Thursday, a day when some strange scores hit the board.
The shock of it all was that John Daly made a rush and held the lead for a while. Angel Cabrera had a 10 on the sixth hole, a par-3. Corey Pavin had six bogeys in a row. A club pro from San Jose had seven. Phil Mickelson was off to a characteristic stutter start. But, if you’re looking for consistency, try Cink. On an average day, his score would have been even par, but the way the PGA of America set up old Southern Hills, his 72 was 2 over, but close.
Permalink | | Categories: Furman Bisher, Golf
Chipper swats away Mets, N.Y. media
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
New York — Chipper Jones awoke to flaming tabloid headlines Thursday, like “CHIPPER’S A-BOMB” and “A’ROID SHOCKER,” which wouldn’t have been so bad if they had been paired with stories like, “I CLONED MYSELF AT BREAKFAST” and “ELVIS TAUGHT ME HOW TO HIT A CURVE.”
Then at least there would be some comedic value.
But a day after having his comments about his friend, Alex Rodriguez, infected by the New York media and spun into an attack, Jones wasn’t laughing.
Well, maybe just a little, at the end.
He crushed a three-run homer, which sailed a cartoon-like 470 feet off the right-field scoreboard, to ignite the Braves’ 7-6 win over the Mets. He now has a career-high 38 home runs against New York, with 118 RBIs and a .331 average. He has hit 19 homers in Shea Stadium, more than any venue outside of Atlanta.
If the Braves could just figure out a way to fly insult-hurling New York fans and mutant tabloid headline writers to other cities, they would rarely lose a road game.
“Well, if you had to listen to what I listen to going back to the dugout,” Jones said, “you’d be pretty motivated to make left turns [on the basepaths].”
For some reason, he has thrived in this toilet of a stadium and the appropriately named surroundings of Flushing. As pitcher Tim Hudson joked, “They hate him here for a reason. It’s like an ongoing joke for us when we come to New York. You know their fans are going to be crazy, and Chipper’s going to drive in six or eight in a series.
“I’m sure he’s probably going to tear up when they blow this place up.”
But Jones has had it with the city’s tabloids. Before Wednesday’s game he was asked by an Associated Press writer about the Yankees’ Rodriguez and the potential for steroids allegations by Jose Canseco in an upcoming book. Jones said he didn’t believe A-Rod took performance-enhancing drugs but suspected that he would be dogged by questions by the media, just like every power hitter in this era, including himself.
Match, meet gasoline. The tabloids exploded. Then it was Jones’ turn.
In amusing pre- and post-game scenes, Jones refused to talk to New York media members, actually shooing packs away from his locker, saying, “Beat it!” It was like watching a human flyswatter.
Then he held private media sessions with Atlanta writers. (I have to admit, it was a nice change, being so loved.)
Jones referred to the New York media as “the pot-stirrers.” He said he was bothered when one “weasel” asked him after Wednesday’s game to clarify comments about Rodriguez.
“But what more do you expect from people who follow high-profile guys around with camera phones so they can get them in trouble,” Jones said.
He said he plans to phone Rodriguez, whom he has known since high school days, to make certain their friendship wasn’t damaged. But he added: “I think he’s pretty familiar with how sensationalistic this journalism is up here.”
The unwanted attention didn’t hurt Jones’ swing, it fueled it. He went 6-for-13 in the series with four extra-base hits and five RBIs. The swings continued afterward. He emerged from the shower to see a horde of New York media members waiting at his locker. “You’re going to be waiting a long time,” he said. “You started the crap yesterday.”
Later, to the Atlanta media, Jones said: “You take an article in which I was actually defending A-Rod and turn it into me slapping him in the face. … I was implicating myself. What if I hit 500 home runs and I’m catching Mickey Mantle and Eddie Murray? I’m going to have to go through the same stuff.”
But nothing threw Jones off his game — not the fans, not the headlines, not the team bus that took 90 minutes to make the usual half-hour drive from Manhattan. Most Braves took the early bus. Jones and Hudson opted for the later one. Problem: The driver got caught in city traffic after mistakenly circling the hotel and didn’t reach Shea until an hour before the game.
Suffice to say, Jones was a little irritated by the time he walked into the clubhouse. Then he merely did what he always does here: He made news.
Permalink | Comments (123) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
There’s something about these Falcons
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
It’s August. Two-a-days aren’t over. The exhibitions haven’t started. The Falcons haven’t yet lost a game of any kind. So maybe it’s not noteworthy that the mood in Flowery Branch is decidedly upbeat. Then again …
In the time I’ve been watching the Falcons — that dates back to 1984, for anyone who cares — there have been summers when it was clear any optimism was artificial. (It was likewise clear last fall, when Jim Mora was giving his “Fight on” briefings and nobody in his locker room seemed to be listening.) I have to say I’ve been impressed with the way these players have taken to Bobby Petrino. He’s not their buddy, but they seem to believe he’s an awfully good coach.
And that seems rather essential, given the reversals these Falcons have already sustained. (Michael Vick gone. Lots of veterans hurt.) At such moments, a team can look only to its coach. If the team decides the man in charge doesn’t know what he’s doing, then that team has no chance. I don’t see that happening here.
This team has a chance. Not a great one, probably not even a good one, but a chance. The 2007 Falcons figure to play hard if not always well, but the belief here is that they’ll look like a fairly resourceful team. I still think 5-11 sounds about right, but the occasional optimist in me notes that it’s possible to go a heartening 7-9.
The Falcons did just that in 1997, their first season under a new coach. The next year they played in the Super Bowl.
Permalink | Comments (63) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Quick Hit
Jerious’ chance to ‘go the distance’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Flowery Branch — The name’s Jerious. Rhymes with “various,” which represents the number of ways Bobby Petrino plans to deploy him. In the exhibition opener Friday, the coach wants to see his tailback run between the tackles. Back in training camp next week, the schedule calls for a heavier regimen of pass-catching.
The coach, see, is intrigued. The coach has never coached a running back who can run like Jerious Norwood. “Once you see his speed and his ability to cut, it excites you,” Petrino said Wednesday. “He can go the distance. It’s hard to have long drives, so you need big plays. He gives us that chance.”
The name’s Jerious. Doesn’t rhyme with “serious,” but it very well could. On a team in almost daily flux, Jerious Norwood is about to become a seriously stabilizing force. He gave indications as a rookie; in Year 2, he should provide living proof.
“Everyone on the team is important right now,” Norwood said, but that’s modesty talking. With Michael Vick elsewhere, Warrick Dunn rehabbing his realigned back and Alge Crumpler hurting, the Falcons’ offense looks understaffed. Norwood could change that perception in a hurry, and he’s pretty good at hurrying.
The name’s Jerious. Rhymes with “nefarious,” which is how opposing defenses figure to regard him in Petrino’s offense. For reasons best known to Greg Knapp, Norwood was limited to 12 catches — and Dunn to 22 — in 2006. This despite Norwood’s conspicuous capacity to run fast in open spaces. This despite Norwood’s assertion that “my hands are some of my best aspects.”
Be advised this won’t happen again. Of Petrino’s sounder, saner scheme, Norwood said: “I like it. … It’s a spread offense. We’ll throw the ball to the backs and throw it deep.”
The name’s Jerious. Doesn’t rhyme with “delirious,” though the man himself plays football in something approaching a giddy state. “Every time I go out on the field, I try to make things happen,” he said. “I’m a playmaker.” Also this: “I don’t think about missing a protection or a read — I go out there to have fun.”
Norwood concedes his blocking needs a little work, but he’s working. And if he can demonstrate the capacity to pick off blitzing linebackers, there’s no reason he won’t be on the field an awful lot this autumn. Even when Dunn is fully healed, Petrino envisions his tailbacks not just as a tag team but as a tandem.
The name’s Jerious. Rhymes with “hilarious,” and if you’re a Falcons fan you should roundly enjoy the sight of two swift backs fanning out in pass routes. (Funny how the West Coast Offense never seemed to allow for such a double-up concept.) If you’re a Falcons fan and you’ve suffered through this deflating offseason, Norwood and his inherent potential remain reasons to keep hope alive.
Aspirations? Norwood cited these: “Hopefully I’ll break 1,200 yards [rushing], and the ultimate goal is to go to the Super Bowl.”
The name’s Jerious. Doesn’t rhyme with “imperious,” nor should it. Norwood is an upbeat and unadorned guy who doesn’t think it’s all that hot — he’s from Mississippi, where it likewise can get steamy — and who recognizes the opportunity at hand.
From a Round 3 draftee by a team that already had Dunn and T.J. Duckett, Norwood is, as he said, “as of right now the starting man.” Petrino won’t commit to him remaining the No. 1 tailback when Dunn returns — the 32-year-old has a mighty impressive body of work - but this savvy coach clearly sees the younger man as a massive asset in 2007 and beyond.
The name’s Jerious. Doesn’t really rhyme with much else. But his middle name rhymes with “breakout fall,” which is what Jerious Montreal Norwood is primed to have.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley
Baseball’s fickle, cyclical
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
No sport ranks with baseball in providing an eerie dose of symmetry when it comes to historical moments. For instance: Tuesday night in San Francisco was September 1985 all over again. That’s because Barry Bonds was Pete Rose.
As for September 1985, I was there when a highly emotional Rose became the all-time hits leader over Ty Cobb.
Somehow, the baseball gods allowed Rose to break the record in his hometown of Cincinnati.
Afterward, with Rose standing at first base following his Ty-breaking single, the Cincinnati Reds icon looked toward the sky, pointed in acknowledgement of his deceased father and cried in the arms of his son who served as a bat boy for the game.
Wow. You know where I’m going. I wasn’t there Tuesday night at AT&T Park, but that’s where the baseball gods allowed a highly emotional Bond to break the all-time record for home runs for the hometown Giants.
Not only that, the San Francisco Bay Area is where Bonds was raised.
After No. 756 sailed into legend, Bonds shouted thanks to his deceased father while glancing upward and fighting back tears. And, yes, Bonds’ son served as a bat boy for the game and shared sobs with his father while they embraced on the field.
Cue “The Twilight Zone” music.
Or maybe just “Take me out to the ballgame.”
Permalink | Comments (48) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Bonds chase not down glory road
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
We don’t celebrate the number anymore. We celebrate the athlete.
We don’t view 756 like we did 715, and it’s not because Barry Bonds is arrogant or grumpy. It’s not about race. It’s how he got there. Mark McGwire could be pleasant and is white. But we don’t celebrate the memory of 70 home runs and his eclipsing of Roger Maris. Not since Andro turned him mute before Congress.
We are in different times now, times of lab-created cleanup hitters.
The number doesn’t define the athlete anymore. It’s the other way around.
“Will this record be embraced by everybody? Probably not,” said Tom House, the former Braves pitcher who caught Hank Aaron’s 715th home run 33 years ago. “But the record will be broken again, probably by Alex Rodriguez. So I guess people will be looking forward to that.”
Barry Bonds is baseball’s home run champion.
A-Rod is on deck.
Please, somebody start the countdown.
Aaron passed Babe Ruth on April 8, 1974, and held the record for more than 33 years. Bonds may hold it for as few as six. Rodriguez, often cast as mush in clutch moments by fans in New York and beyond, figures to become the player we wrap our arms around. He averaged 42 homers per year from 1996 to 2006. Maintain that and he’ll be in the 750s by 2013. And then, we’ll stand.
How many superstars, in any sport, could break such a hallowed mark and not receive even one major endorsement during the chase? The pursuit should’ve been worth millions, not scorn. A soft drink commercial, a snack food, a car.
Imagine if this was Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan approaching a record.
Imagine anybody but such a pariah.
One Web site is selling foam asterisks with “steroids” imprinted on it. Another is hawking T-shirts that read, “Hank Did It On Steak And Eggs!” I think BarryBonds.com might be selling “Go Barry!” buttons, but I’m not sure.
Does this sound like a celebration?
A career home run record speaks to talent and longevity. Bonds should be remembered as one of the game’s greatest players. But his late-career inflation in hat size and homers taints this.
He hit 445 in his first 14 seasons. An average of 31.8. He hit 258 in the next five. An average of 51.6. It wasn’t just that he ate more carrots.
We see an unfortunate mix of greatness and BALCO. We see a strong, enduring 43-year-old, against the backdrop of ongoing investigations by the feds and baseball.
In 1974, we saw only Hank.
Oh, there was racism. Aaron had to endure hate, like Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe. But when he passed Ruth, it was, as House recalls, “a pure baseball moment.” Most of the animosity facing Bonds isn’t rooted in racism but rather the perception that he cheated the game.
Aaron: He did it on steak and eggs and heart. Al Downing of the Dodgers threw the pitch. Aaron drove it over the wall in left-center at the old stadium. House, a Braves relief pitcher, didn’t have to move in the bullpen.
“I remember making the catch, I remember a long fishnet held by a fan shooting in front of me, I remember [Bill] Buckner running back and jumping to try to make the catch,” said House, still a pitching instructor based in San Diego.
“I got the ball and the first thing I did was run onto the field. I reached out and gave the ball to Hank and he just said, ‘Thanks, kid.’ He had tears in his eyes and tears on his cheeks. It stunned me. This was steady Henry Aaron. But he was hugging his mom with tears in his eyes.”
House says he doesn’t have any ill feelings about Bonds breaking the mark. But he understands why others do. “The perception is he cheated,” he said. “I can’t condone performance enhancements, but the reality is there were a lot more home runs hit in the non-steroid era.”
In total, true. In annual average, not so much. Therein lies the issue. It’s why Bonds is not held in the same esteem as Aaron and Ruth, Mays and Mantle, Robinson and McCovey. It’s why we look down the road to Rodriguez.
“A-Rod will break it, and that’ll be it,” House said. “It’s about talent, consistency, health and longevity. Nobody wants to play 25 or 26 years anymore.”
Rodriguez is at 500. Start the countdown. Please.
Permalink | Comments (128) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
You can’t fool us, Bobby Cox
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
New York — In his continuing quest to lead the majors in group hugs and downplay anything that might tempt an emotional ripple, Bobby Cox reacted accordingly Tuesday when asked about the significance of this series against the New York Mets.
“It’s like April,” he said. “It’s just a series. Every series is the same in my book.”
Yes, Bobby. It’s just a series. It’s April. It’s not August. That’s why your general manager just sent four prospects to Texas for Mark Teixeira. To make a statement for May. Cute.
Did the Braves clinch something Tuesday night? No.
Will anybody clinch anything this week? No.
But it was telling that when the Braves opened a three-game series against the Mets, it was difficult to tell who was leading whom in the division. It was 6-0 after, like, 10 minutes.
The Braves are closing, and the Mets know it. They had the better team on paper after the trade deadline last week, and they certainly had the better team on sod Tuesday. They won 7-3. They have won six of their past eight overall. They have drummed the Mets in seven of nine meetings since dropping one to New York, 11-1 … in April.
It is four months later. And, yes, the players realize that.
Told of Cox’s comments, Chipper Jones smiled.
“That’s prototypical Bobby.
“I think we’re a little more focused. We know whenever we play them we can gain ground.”
The second-place team has momentum. The first-place team looks like it’s on a hamster wheel.
Maybe you thought the Mets running away with things last year would start a trend. Now it looks like an aberration. They were inferior in every area: starting pitching, relief pitching, hitting, the defense (they turned three double-plays, negating a meaningless error).
A year ago, the Mets woke up with a 13-1/2 game lead over Philadelphia and 15-1/2 over the Braves. They were 23 games over .500 (67-44). The Mets were good. The fact the Braves’ bullpen resembled gasoline alley merely turned the deficit into something mutant.
But neither team bares much resemblance to those of last year. The Braves have a rebuilt bullpen (four relievers threw four shutout innings Tuesday) and probably their best lineup in a decade. They also now have a legitimate third starter in Buddy Carlyle, who has evolved from novelty act.
The rotation used to be: Tim Hudson, John Smoltz, then get smacked by a Winnebago. (Among the flattened: Kyle Davies, Mark Redman. Mike Hampton never made it out of spring.) Now look. Carlyle, with his seventh organization and not far removed from the Hanshin Tigers, is 7-3. He has only three fewer victories than Smoltz.
How important is Carlyle? “Well, you saw what happened with Redman,” said Cox, alluding to his 11.63 ERA.
The Mets have gone the other way. They are on their second hitting coach and third starting second baseman. They did nothing of significance before the trade deadline, unless you count this: On the same day the Braves acquired Teixeira, Dotel and Ron Mahay, New York put Carlos Beltran on the disabled list. That sure fired up the masses.
This was the teams’ first meeting since the Braves’ makeover. Paper spoke volumes. The Braves scored six earned runs in five innings against a pitcher (Oliver Perez) who had held them to three in 20-2/3 in three previous starts.
“It’s nice to get a little momentum,” Jones said. But he soon channeled his manager.
“What did we cut the lead to — 3-1/2 games,” he said. “It can be right back to 4-1/2 if we don’t play well [today]. In that sense, that’s why Bobby’s saying those things. When the clock strikes midnight, you flush it.”
It’s the right approach. But the flushing sound seems to be coming from the other clubhouse.
Permalink | Comments (46) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
Ruth makes case for greatest ever
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Throughout all this home-run hassle, Barry Bonds and the drug quandary, Alex Rodriguez thumping his way into the act, and the stiff-necked defense of Henry Aaron as the real, true-blue home-run king, re-enter the heroic figure of Babe Ruth. Yep, he, too, plumped up as he aged, but it was a different kind of plumping. He just got fatter. Bonds bulged, and there is a difference, but I’m going to let you figure that out.
(Speaking of me and figures, I’m a casualty at mathematics. The other day I wrote that Joe Sewell struck out every .016 times at bat, a terrible misprint. Remember, Sewell struck out only 114 times in just over 7,000 at-bats in the major leagues, as far as I’m concerned, the most incredible record in baseball. So it should have read that he struck out only once every 62.6 at-bats. Accept this apology from a guy who managed to squeak through college without taking a course in math, which I obviously needed.)
Babe Ruth had a unique career. He pitched for five seasons with the Red Sox before taking to the field full time. Not just some donkey of a pitcher who filled in now and then. He was a full-time starter and won 94 games. In 1918 he set a World Series record for consecutive shutout innings that stood for years. I’ve read that he always spoke of that as his most treasured record, not all the slugging feats. Even one season as a pitcher, he led the American League in home runs. Hitting ‘em, not throwing ‘em.
He was 24 years old before he switched from pitching to the outfield full time. Those days the major leagues played a 154-game schedule, not increased to 162 games until 1961, in the American League, long after the Babe was gone. The comparisons between Ruth and the other mighty home-run bombers gets more interesting the deeper you get into them.
Aaron had 12,364 official times at bat. Bonds was up to 9,771 through Monday. Ruth went to bat only 8,399 official times, nearly 4,000 less than Aaron and losing ground to Bonds every week. Along the way his batting average gets lost in all the home-run babble. Babe Ruth was a lifetime .342 hitter, some of that in “deadball” times.
Aaron leads them all in runs batted in, not much above Ruth, but seemingly out of reach of Bonds. Aaron drove in 2,297 runs, Ruth 2,213 and Bonds stood at 1,980 through Monday, not within catching reach of Aaron, it would seem. Aaron was as solid a hitter as ever came down the road. He swung for base hits, not home runs, most of his career, and he leads them all in extra-base hits (1,477) and total bases (6,856). If you were going for distance, Ruth was your man. It has been calculated that put together, Ruth’s home runs traveled farther than any other slugger’s.
While all this has been going on, another combatant has moved onto the scene like a horse on the rail. Rodriguez has just turned 32 and, banking on good health, could be in action another eight years. That being the possibility, all of the above is moot, even the impressive records that Aaron has set as a target. Thus, all those records could be wiped out, though throw in Ruth’s as a pitcher and he stands alone.
Rodriguez has 500 home runs earlier than them all, and chances are, he’ll pass Aaron’s RBI and extra-base hits total in time. Through Monday, he had driven in 1,460 runs in 7,179 times at bat, with 916 extra-base hits. At that pace, he could take the lead in every power-hitting category. Nobody’s record would be safe, that is, except Ruth’s, all variables considered.
And those considered, his career as a pitcher, his late switch to outfielding, his arm, his home-run production in far fewer swings, and the seasons of 154-game schedules, there’s a strong case here that, while all the noise and speculation swirls around the later generations and the present, the greatest major leaguer of all-time probably was George Herman Ruth, the Babe.
Permalink | Comments (155) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
Spurrier flies off the handle
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN
10: So I guess the SCLC just ran the first reverse of the football season.
9: Off to New York to watch the Braves vs. the Mets and Joey Harrington vs. the Odds.
8: Considering buying another fake Rolex in Battery Park. The last one I had lasted a year. I figure it’s worth getting another, just so I can conduct a little science experiment. Who/what stops ticking first: Harrington or the watch? Anybody want to post a favorite?
7: Seriously, I don’t have any idea how Harrington will do with his third team. I know he’s a good guy. I know he talks a good game, which may or may not mean a thing. But I’ll crawl out on this limb: If he does perform another face-plant, it won’t be because he feels overwhelmed, as was the case in Detroit. It’ll just be because he’s not very good.
6: Steve Spurrier is a great coach, great recruiter, great for college football. But if the man thinks anybody is going to bite on this woe-is-me act concerning the South Carolina admissions department, he’s a nut job.
5: Any university has a right to set its own admissions policy, regardless of NCAA minimum standards. The fact that school officials have rejected two of Spurrier’s recruits hardly ranks as an unusual occurrence in college athletics. Nothing against South Carolina. But it’s not the Harvard of the South. It’s not even the Harvard of South Carolina.
4: Spurrier said, “Hopefully, I truly believe this is the last year this is going to happen, because I can’t operate like that. I can’t operate misleading young men.” Yeah. OK, let me translate: “You had better start admitting my really fast but academically borderline recruits so I can start winning more football games, because otherwise, me and my golf clubs are so outta here.”
- Sitting on a plane right now. Read an item about the drunk (allegedly) ASA flight attendant who told a captain, “You’re dead.” (allegedly). Got an idea. Make her sit in an aisle seat as passengers keep slamming the drink cart into her knee.
2: Before you get too excited about Liberty Media blowing open the Braves budget: The real test of ownership is not paying one-third of a player’s contract (like Mark Teixeira’s this year) but after the season when Andruw Jones is a free agent and potentially after next season when Teixeira can walk.
1: Barry Bonds is at 755. Blindfolds in place, everyone?
Permalink | Comments (47) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Brooking has confidence in ‘solid’ team
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Flowery Branch — Keith Brooking shared a back row with Morten Andersen on the bus carrying the Falcons from the Metrodome after their epic overtime victory in the 1998 NFC championship game. Said Brooking, then a callow rookie: “This is pretty cool.”
Said Andersen, already ancient and therefore aware of the moment and its enormity: “Pretty cool? Do you realize what we just accomplished?”
Pretty cool soon got pretty weird. On Super Bowl eve, Eugene Robinson was arrested hours after receiving the NFL’s citizenship award. The next night, Andersen missed a point-blank field goal and Rod Smith beat Robinson for an 80-yard touchdown on consecutive snaps. Thus did even the greatest Falcons season wind up reminding us these were still the Falcons.
Nearly a decade later, the only remaining player from the Falcons’ only Super Bowl sweats through a training camp that opened to oral and aerial protests. From a solicitation arrest along Biscayne Boulevard to a dogfighting indictment in Virginia — some franchise, huh?
Says Brooking, now in his 10th professional season: “Nothing really surprises me. … It’s been a roller coaster.”
A guy doesn’t last in the NFL by getting queasy with every dip, and goodness knows the linebacker has felt his share. The way to react, Brooking says, is not to react. “You hear something or you see something and, taking nothing away from your teammates, you have to have that move-on mentality. Some things are out of your control. You have to have tunnel vision and look straight ahead.”
Brooking was one of a half-dozen veterans who met the media on the first day of training camp. Earnestly and collectively they maintained this latest furor can be overcome by the team Michael Vick leaves behind. A historian would recall similar pronouncements in 1999 after Jamal Anderson hurt his knee in Week 2 and again in 2003 after Vick broke his leg in the second exhibition. Both times the Falcons wound up 5-11.
“We had Jamal and Vick going down, and those [circle-the-wagons] scenarios didn’t take place,” Brooking says. “But you see those scenarios all around the league.”
He mentions the 2006 New Orleans Saints, who came off a losing season and a coaching change and Katrina-caused displacement to play for the NFC title. “I don’t think [Vick’s absence has] made it easy on us, but anything worth earning doesn’t come easy.”
And then: “I know we have the right head coach. [Bobby Petrino] has tunnel vision like I’ve never seen in my life. We have the right pieces in place. The schemes are solid. The coaches are solid. … You need everybody pulling on the rope, and I don’t think anybody’s pulling in the opposite direction. We’ve all bought in.”
If nothing else, Vick’s indictment came before camp commenced, leaving the Falcons and Petrino more than a month to adjust. “We have a lot of practices,” Brooking says. “Joey [Harrington, the new No. 1 quarterback] will get his work, and it gives guys time to exude confidence in Joey. That’s important. I’ve told Joey, ‘I believe in you, I’m here for you and I’ve got your back.’ “
And, unlike in 2003, these Falcons are operating under the assumption Vick will be gone for the duration, not six to 10 weeks. “It’s that tunnel vision again,” Brooking says. “We can’t be wondering, ‘What if he’s back in three weeks, or two games into the regular season?’ We can’t look beyond [today].”
Over time, not much has gone right for the Falcons. (Forty-one seasons and still never winners two years running!) Without Vick, this autumn has the makings of one of the worst. But, should Brooking and his mates squeeze out seven victories, it would deserve to be hailed as one of the best. In the grand scheme, just hanging tough would be pretty cool.
Permalink | Comments (76) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley
Tech needn’t worry about old ghosts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The myth of Touchdown Jesus and its resurrection power over Notre Dame football continues. This is splendid news for Georgia Tech, because the Yellow Jackets are 26 days from opening their season at the site of the most overrated home-field advantage in sports.
That’s right. The Gipper, Leahy and the rest left the Notre Dame campus for parts unknown soon after they helped the Fighting Irish slay Charlie Ward’s explosive Florida State bunch 14 years ago.
“It should be a great advantage for Notre Dame, because you’ve got the pep rally before every home game,” said Lou Holtz, the old coach, speaking over his cellphone with his famous lisp. Added Holtz, who ranks in Irish lore between the Four Horsemen and Ara Parseghian, “You have the walk from the church with thousands of people lining the way. You have the band playing the Victory March. You have enthusiasm everywhere. But you’re right: It’s not a great advantage.”
No, it’s not. Take it from me, a South Bend, Ind., native who saw more than a few Notre Dame ghosts push the Irish to improbable victories in the shadow of the Golden Dome. Those ghosts were exorcised in the 1990s around the time lowly Stanford surged to victory at Notre Dame Stadium after a ridiculous deficit. The late Bill Walsh, in his second stint as Cardinal head coach, displayed his noted sarcasm during his postgame remarks by saying, “Gosh, just to think I may have used the same toilet as Knute Rockne.”
There also was that implosion at home against Tennessee when Notre Dame blew another mighty lead. While trying to spoil Tennessee’s upset in the final seconds, Notre Dame’s walk-on kicker became the anti-Rudy. He drilled his short field-goal try into the butt of a Tennessee player.
Then there was No. 1-ranked Notre Dame sprinting toward a second national championship in three years, but visiting Penn State shocked Notre Dame in the final seconds. That was three seasons before the Irish’s infamous home loss in 1993 to Boston College. The week before, Notre Dame was heading for another national championship after surviving Ward’s No.1-ranked Seminoles. Then Boston College kicked the game-winner at the end in the direction of Touchdown Jesus.
We’re still in the 1990s. You had the Northwestern stunner, and the BYU stunner, and the Air Force stunner.
Then came the 21st century with Michigan State (as opposed to, say, Michigan) whipping Notre Dame in South Bend five straight times. There also was Southern Cal’s fourth-and-forever miracle and Reggie Bush’s dubious shove of Matt Leinart into the end zone to keep Notre Dame mostly a wannabe in monster games at home.
I mean, what in the name of Gerry Faust is going on here?
“The other team is very excited to play against Notre Dame, and they are going to play their very best at Notre Dame,” said Holtz, who countered by telling his Irish players: “There are very few things that would motivate me more than to play against Notre Dame, except one thing. To be able to play for Notre Dame.”
Still, Notre Dame Stadium remains a friendlier place than you think for visiting teams. It’s the noise. There is little of it when the game isn’t bigger than big. The Notre Dame students are always loud and loyal. It’s just that there only are about 6,000 of them at home games. That leaves more than 74,000 of everybody else.
“You have so many people who come to Notre Dame games for the first time,” Holtz said. “And they’re going, ‘Wow. There’s Touchdown Jesus. Look. That’s where Rockne walked. Wow. That’s the end zone that Pat Terrell knocked the pass down against Miami.’ They’re just in awe. They’re observing, but they aren’t fans, which comes from the word ‘fanatic.’ It’s not like traveling to LSU, for instance.”
Or Bobby Dodd Stadium, which was rocking on its foundation for last year’s Notre Dame game.
So all of this is a huge advantage for an already solid Tech team. That is, if the Jackets remember like everybody else visiting Notre Dame these days that the Gipper really is dead.
Permalink | Comments (64) | Categories: Terence Moore
Long live the king: Henry Louis Aaron
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The world hasn’t stopped spinning, but it sure feels like it. After 33 years as the sole owner of 755 home runs, Hank Aaron, the people’s choice, is sharing the most glorious number in sports with Barry Bonds, few of the people’s choice.
Let’s pause for a moment of prayer. Maybe when we open our eyes, this will all go away. Maybe we’ll discover this was only a mirage. Maybe this was created by the baseball demons. Maybe they want us to believe Bonds really wasn’t juiced during the past decade or so while he sprinted to within another blast of becoming the all-time home run king.
To the chagrin of those who love truth, justice and royalty not being attained by athletes through artificially inflated means, Bonds will wear the crown by himself when he slams No. 756.
Well, officially.
Unofficially, the king isn’t dead. Long live the king, and his name is Henry Louis Aaron, the classy icon who used only adrenaline to slay Babe Ruth’s previously magical “714” in 1974 at old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Aaron kept ignoring the hate mail and the death threats that were as prevalent during his Ruth chase as the fastballs and the change-ups. His walk with dignity - no matter what - gained even the bigots’ respect. Then Aaron spent his final two seasons ripping enough home runs to make “755” baseball’s new magical number, supposedly for the ages.
So you know what that means? We must be in the final days, because Bonds is threatening to reach the upper 700s in homers and beyond. He is 43, with a slew of aches and pains, but he says retirement isn’t in his immediate vocabulary. He could leave the San Francisco Giants for the American League, where he could become a designated hitter. A relatively healthy Bonds as a DH could reach the lower 800s, but sports psychologist Harry Edwards had it exactly right when he mentioned in May that “755” and its original owner always will remain the standard bearers.
All Bonds will do is become the record-holder. Nothing more, not since he is closer to chilly and indifferent than warm and cuddly. Worse, he is forever tainted in the minds of many as the poster child for baseball’s steroids era.
Aaron prefers not to discuss Bonds’ ongoing milestones beyond a prepared statement, and the standard bearer didn’t return messages Saturday night. Still, Aaron told me several months ago that, even though he isn’t “bosom buddies” with Bonds, he isn’t convinced baseball’s gigantic cloud of suspicion involving steroids should hang over the gigantic head of Bonds. If you believe leaked grand jury testimony from the BALCO investigation, it’s a gigantic head of Bonds that has kept expanding over the years from performance-enhancing drugs - especially since he spent his early years in Pittsburgh as a sleek line-drive hitter with normal dimensions.
“Listen, I’d be wrong as heck to sit back here and point a finger and say whether or not my record or anybody else’s would be tainted by somebody,” Aaron told me back then. “It’s kind of up to Barry to do his own thing, and he hasn’t admitted to anything. If he did something wrong, then he’s the one who is going to have to pay for it. So, really, to be honest, I’m out of it.”
Actually, Aaron is still in it, but in a wonderful way. Whenever those among the public hear Bonds’ name, either positively or negatively, they usually hear Aaron’s name soon afterward. Not only that, when Aaron’s name does surface during conversations involving Bonds, Aaron’s name often is surrounded by implied hugs and kisses. In fact, Bonds once told me with a smile at his locker at San Francisco’s AT&T Park, “I’m helping to keep Hank’s name out there.”
That’s nice of Bonds, but Aaron really doesn’t need his help. For 23 Hall of Fame seasons without the hint of scandal, the eternal king of home-run kings helped himself, thank you.
Permalink | Comments (152) | Categories: Terence Moore
Dogs look for primary ballcarrier
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Athens — Last year’s question — who’s the quarterback? — has been answered. This year’s question has become almost an annual stumper. Once again, Georgia doesn’t know who’ll be the primary ballcarrier. Once again, Georgia doesn’t even know if it’ll have a primary ballcarrier.
It has been a strange passage, this metamorphosis from Tailback U to Tailback Who? The school that gave the world Herschel Walker and Tim Worley and Rodney Hampton and Garrison Hearst has become the school where no back sticks out. Only once since 1992 — and only once under Mark Richt — have the Bulldogs produced a 1,000-yard back. Perhaps not coincidentally, that year was Georgia’s best of the past quarter-century.
Being his placid self, Richt doesn’t see the lack of a 1,000-yard back as a problem. “The good thing about Musa [Smith, who gained 1,324 yards in the breakthrough 2002 season] was that we had consistency there,” Richt said Saturday, speaking at Georgia’s media convocation. “But we didn’t have as many guys ready to play there. Musa was head and tails above everybody else. Until somebody separates himself from the pack, we’ll probably be [tailback] by committee.”
The latest committee includes Kregg Lumpkin and Thomas Brown, both of whom have been starters, and the redshirt freshman Knowshon Moreno, of whom much is expected. Much was similarly expected of Lumpkin in 2004, when he was coming off a heartening freshman year, and then he hurt his knee on the first day of summer practice. He missed all of that season and wasn’t really right in 2005, but there were long moments last autumn when Lumpkin, who’s known as Lump, was clearly first among equals.
Not coincidentally, one of those moments came Nov. 11 at Auburn, when Lumpkin carried 21 times for 105 yards in the emphatic victory over the nation’s No. 5 team. That was pretty much the ideal, Lumpkin said, a big back getting the ball again and again “to pound and pound. I got goose bumps.”
It was, however, more an aberration than standard procedure. Only once before — in the Capital One Bowl against Purdue on Jan. 1, 2004 — had Lumpkin carried more than 20 times in a game. Contrast this with Tashard Choice, whom Lumpkin knows from high school camps: Choice averaged 21.2 for Georgia Tech last season.
“That’d be the running back’s dream,” Lumpkin said. “A lot of running backs would like to be in his position.”
Yes, Lumpkin is among those. The tailback-by-committee approach, he admitted, bothers him “a little bit. But it’s not all about you.” And he doesn’t envision the status quo changing anytime soon. “It’s hard to say, today being the first day of practice, but I imagine we’ll open up the offense for all three backs.”
There’s some merit in Richt’s rotation — fresh legs tend to move faster — and it’s true that Georgia averaged more yards rushing in 2004 and 2005 than in Musa Smith’s banner season. “If we had 180 yards but no one over 100,” Richt said, “I’d be more excited than if one guy rushed for 101 but that was all we got.”
Still, there’s much to be said for continuity, and there have been times when Georgia seemed to change backs just when Lump was beginning to pump and thump and develop those goose bumps. Another stat, a fairly telling one: The Bulldogs under Richt are 23-2 when they generate a 100-yard rusher.
In the grand scheme, it isn’t as essential to find a tailback as a quarterback. (And Matthew Stafford has assumed that position rather nicely, thanks.) But it’d be a shame if Georgia looks up five years hence and realizes it left another resource untapped. Lest we forget, Terrell Davis never had a 1,000-yard season as a Bulldog under Ray Goff. As a Denver Bronco, Davis had four.
Permalink | Comments (34) | Categories: Mark Bradley
A mark many swung for, missed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
So it is remarkable that Cy Young won 511 games. (He also holds the record for losing.) That Henry Aaron hit 755 home runs, which is the record in my eyes. That Cal Ripken Jr. played in 2,632 consecutive games, remarkable just for showing up for work. That Ty Cobb had a lifetime batting average of .367, and that Rogers Hornsby hit .424 one season. They still write of Ted Williams’ season of .406 as some magical figure that will never be struck again. And they write songs about Joe, Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.
Well, let me tell you about Joe Sewell. It’s not a name that rings a lot of bells in the mind of baseball these days. Oh, he’s in the Hall of Fame, elected in 1977. He reached the major leagues ahead of time on account of the only death of a player that ever happened in a major league game. Carl Mays’ submarine pitch caught shortstop Ray Chapman in the head and killed him in 1920. Cleveland called Sewell up from the New Orleans farm, then just a kid of 21. He finished the season, and 13 more followed.
In his 14 seasons with Cleveland and the Yankees, Joe Sewell struck out only 114 times. That’s right — one hundred and fourteen. I’m not talking about some designated hitter, (ugh!) or a guy who sat when left-handers were pitching. He played every day, 1,902 games at shortstop and third base with the Indians and Yankees. That came to 7,976 plate appearances, 844 bases on balls, a lifetime average of .312 and 1,051 runs batted in.
Four of those seasons, Sewell struck out only four times. FOUR. (Some guys have struck out more than that in one game.) It all averaged out that he struck out only once every .0l6 times at bat. In modern times, so to speak, Lloyd Waner of the Pirates came closest. He struck out only 173 times and resides, as well, in Cooperstown. Illustrative of an abiding respect for guys with a keen eye among the Hall of Fame voters.
Not so in a major league feature recently filmed under the title “Baseball’s Most Unbreakable Feats.” You get the usual collection, such as mentioned above. There are others, Nolan Ryan’s all-time strikeouts, Rickey Henderson’s all-time stolen bases, Pete Rose’s all-time hits, among the ten most highly regarded by the producers of the DVD. (Not the narrator, Roger Clemens, if you will. And I’ll say this, “The Rocket” gets a good mark for his performance.)
For one thing, Ted Williams’ season of 1941, when he was the last major leaguer who hit for a .400 average, is viewed as a “record.” It’s likely true, we’ll never see another .400 hitter again, but a “record” it’s not. Rogers Hornsby hit .424 in 1924 with the Cardinals, and musty character that he was, that’s still the major league record for a season.
Ripken’s streak for consecutive games is viewed as the “most admirable” feat of them all, and who’s to joust with that? It should be added that Ripken gets credit for being the kind of human being he was, and is. His Hall of Fame partner, Tony Gwynn, posts another record that’s unlikely to be bettered or equalled. None of us ever expects to live long enough to see one man lead one of the major leagues in hitting eight times.
Perhaps Sewell’s immaculate feat isn’t the kind of positive stuff they were looking for. A streak of batting efficiency, not of muscular offense. May be, but it gets my vote as a kind of out-of-the sky performance, contributing to offense in its own way. Sewell hit for an average over .300 in 10 of his 14 seasons, struck 436 doubles and even slipped 49 home runs into his modest power production. Twice he played on two winning World Series teams, one each with the Indians and Yankees. Say this for him, he didn’t give the pitcher much of a strike zone. He was 5 feet 6-1/2 inches tall and weighed in steadily at a trim 155 pounds.
When it was over, he went home to Alabama and coached the baseball team at Tuscaloosa for several years. His brother, Luke, a catcher, played 20 seasons, then turned to managing and put one up for mankind — he produced the only pennant ever won by the St. Louis Browns in 1944. Another record that can’t ever be broken, but 114 strikeouts in a 1,902-game career of a .312 hitter? Let me see somebody top that!
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
Ex-Falcon Mathis dreams of being GM
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
No offense to Rich McKay, but Terance Mathis wants his job.
More specifically, Mathis wants to replace anybody in the future with the job of his eternal dreams, and that job involves serving as general manager of the Falcons. Not only that, Mathis expects to have that job long enough to keep the Falcons among the NFL elite, and he told Arthur Blank as much soon after the former Home Depot king bought the club five years ago.
“My thing is this: I think there needs to be a new breed of general manager out there, and I’m that guy,” said Mathis, 40, the former Falcons wide receiver and Redan High School standout, speaking with the same passion he used to slice through defenders for 13 NFL seasons. “I can’t tell you everything I want to do as a general manager. But after being on the field, and getting released when nobody would return my phone calls, I know there needs to be a connection with players. The NFL is a business, but you’re messing with people’s lives. If you don’t have that connection, you won’t be successful as a franchise.”
Now all Mathis needs is for McKay to retire or to move on. Neither is likely at the moment. As a result, Mathis continues with the Baltimore Ravens during his first stint as a coaching and scouting intern. His primary role is schooling the Ravens’ wide receivers at their training camp in Westminster, Md., but his secondary role is studying the guy living his eternal dream.
Ozzie Newsome.
“He’s gone from being a player to a coach, and then he went into scouting, and now he’s the Ravens’ general manager, so I know I’m on the right path,” Mathis said of Newsome, who became the league’s first African-American general manager five years ago. Mathis has huddled with Newsome as often as possible. Added Mathis, “I’ll tell you how well the Ravens draft and pick up free agents. I don’t know how they cut guys. The ones they cut, you can make another team, and they would win eight or nine games. So I’m just picking the brains of Ozzie, scouts, coaches. That’s my whole job right now.”
Then, when Mathis’ internship expires before the start of the regular season, he wants to become an assistant coach in the NFL or the college ranks. He plans to follow in Newsome’s cleat steps after that as a scout, and you already know what Mathis wants to do after that. “No one is going to just say, ‘Hey. Come on in and be our general manager.’ You have to earn your way,” Mathis said. “I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.”
If nothing else, Mathis is consistent with his goal and his game plan.
For instance: When Blank delivered his first words at Flowery Branch in early 2002 to the players he inherited, Mathis was among those listening with fellow wide receiver Tony Martin. Afterward, Blank strolled through the locker room. That’s when Martin leaned over to Mathis and spoke loudly enough for the new boss to hear every syllable: “Tell him what you said. Go ahead. Tell him.”
Since Mathis is the owner of a famously blunt tongue, he didn’t need much prodding. He stood before Blank with a strong voice to say, “I’m going to be your next general manager of this team.”
And Blank’s reaction? “He kind of looked at me, giggled, and then he went on his way,” said Mathis, who didn’t become the Falcons general manager back then. In fact, Mathis wasn’t even a Falcons player a few days later. After eight seasons of moving toward becoming the team’s all-time leader in receptions and touchdown catches, he was released for salary-cap reasons. He played the 2002 season with the Pittsburgh Steelers before he eventually retired to do some local broadcasting and to dabble as a potential NASCAR owner.
Those weren’t parts of Mathis’ eternal dream, though. “If it takes me five years, 10 years. Whatever. I’m going to get there as the Falcons GM sooner or later,” Mathis said, with another strong voice.
Permalink | Comments (21) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Counting on a guy who couldn’t beat out Ball
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Not many schools have ever viewed their new starting quarterback as an upgrade over the departed four-year starter. Then again, no other school ever had Reggie Ball as a four-year starter.
It’s possible Taylor Bennett will be as good as many Georgia Tech fans are convinced he’ll be. It’s also possible those fans, who’d soured on the erratic Ball, are thinking fancifully. Said Chan Gailey, who doesn’t traffic in fancy, of Bennett’s rousing Gator Bowl performance: “To have all those yards and make some of the throws he made, I didn’t know he’d do that. I was pleasantly surprised.”
Said Bennett: “That game means absolutely nothing.”
It might not. Then again, it might.
The Jackets, some of whom met the assembled media Thursday, have arrived at a peculiar place: They’re looking for a breakthrough season the year after they coulda/shoulda broken though. They’re looking for better things from the redshirt junior who couldn’t beat out Reggie Ball. Indeed, if not for the promise Bennett showed in the Gator Bowl, not being Ball might qualify as his chief attribute. But perception changed on New Year’s Day, and the new conventional wisdom goes like this:
Tech was playing the wrong guy all along.
“I haven’t heard [that],” Bennett said, kidding. Truth to tell, he has heard it often. But he won’t suggest as much himself, nor will he criticize his coaches or his predecessor. Bennett claimed he was given “a fair chance” to win the job in previous seasons and simply could not. As for the beleaguered Ball …
“When you win [as a quarterback], people praise you,” Bennett said. “When you don’t, they’re going to criticize you … [He and Ball] made a dedication that we weren’t going to read the papers. It’s useless. Those are opinions, and you don’t need those kind of opinions.”
Some facts, then: Starting for only the second time as a collegian (Ball having been declared academically ineligible), Bennett completed 19 of 29 passes for 326 yards and three touchdowns against West Virginia in Jacksonville. Nine of those completions went to Calvin Johnson, now a Detroit Lion.
Will Bennett look half as terrific throwing to mere mortals this fall? The correct answer, as opposed to the one Tech backers are taking on faith, is nobody knows. This includes Gailey, who said: “That’s what you have to be careful of — letting one game crown somebody. I think he’s going to be a very good quarterback, but time tells on these things. Can he handle it when it’s all his?”
Some parts of it, yes. Bennett watches game film the way more typical collegians devour “The Colbert Report.” Sometimes he has to stop himself, he said, “or else your eyes fly out of your head.”
Bennett was a counselor at Peyton Manning’s camp in Thibodaux, La., this summer, and he lapped up every bit of footballing wisdom the famously studious pro imparted. “He said he watches every play 16 times,” Bennett said.
Does that mean Bennett now watches every snap 16 times? “I don’t know about that. I might hit the rewind button 10 or 12 times.”
Bennett will probably make fewer mistakes and have fewer wretched games than Ball. Still to be determined is whether he’ll make half as many big plays. And there will, it’s safe to assume, come a time when the new quarterback’s capacity to influence a game will be tested. On Sept. 1, say.
“It’s the holy land of college football,” said Bennett, meaning Notre Dame Stadium, site of Tech’s opener. “Hopefully I don’t mess up.”
He has waited a long time for this chance. More than a few Tech fans have likewise waited, not entirely patiently, and are about to get their wish: They’re about to go into a season with a quarterback who isn’t Reggie Ball. This might fall under the heading, “Be careful what you wish for.” Then again, it might not.
Permalink | Comments (94) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
Oct. 1 a pivotal date for Vick?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
By now it’s pretty much assumed Michael Vick won’t play this season. Procedurally, however, something else needs to happen before we can say as much with absolute certainty.
Contrary to popular belief, Vick hasn’t yet been suspended by either the NFL or the Falcons. He has been excused from training camp with pay by commissioner Roger Goodell pending the league’s own investigation. It seems a reasonable assumption that the NFL will find cause to suspend him for the season. But what if it doesn’t?
According to the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement, the maximum a team (as opposed to the league, which has broader powers) can suspend a player is four regular-season games. The Falcons were prepared to do that — they’d already drafted the letter — when Goodell stepped in. So let’s say, at the end of camp, the commish declares Vick is eligible to return to the Falcons, who promptly suspend him for those four games. The Falcons’ fourth game will be played on Sept. 30. So what would happen on Oct. 1?
Either Vick rejoins the team, or the Falcons cut him. (Arthur Blank has already ruled out the much-discussed paid leave of absence.) We’ve all been focusing on Nov. 26, the day Vick’s trial is scheduled to begin in Richmond, but the date of Monday, Oct. 1, could be just as intriguing.
And what’s the chance Vick will do as co-defendant Tony Taylor has done and cop a plea? Not likely. Not if he wants to play in the NFL again anytime soon. The league, see, would surely treat a guilty plea, even to a lesser charge, as an admission of guilt, duh, and could well move to dock Vick for all of the 2008 season, too.
Being rich and famous and able to afford the best lawyers, Vick will probably be better served taking his chances in front of a jury. As grim as the charges seem today, it takes only the slightest kernel of reasonable doubt in the minds of one or two jurors to override a mountain of evidence. But you knew that already.
Permalink | Comments (491) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Harrington’s seen, heard a lot already
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Flowery Branch — When the Falcons signed Joey Harrington a few months back, people generally reacted in one of two ways. There were those who believed he wasn’t fit to quarterback the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. And there were those who believed he was.
Probably not the best choice to appease the masses.
“Do I get offended? No,” he said. “It just motivates me. There was a time in Detroit when I let what people said affect me. I got a bit out of whack. But not now.”
Harrington will make his Falcons debut in a preseason game next week. Are you ready, Atlanta?
Understand, this isn’t a preview of what happens if Michael Vick turns his ankle. It’s more likely a preview of the season. Given Vick’s impending trial and the irreparable damage he has done to the franchise and his relationship with Arthur Blank, the chances of Vick ever playing another game here are somewhere between slim and Ookie.
Harrington politely shook his head no when asked if he had ever been to a dogfight. (Sorry, it’s the new standard for opening questions.) He says this situation won’t overwhelm him. He says he has “been through more in five years in the NFL than a lot of guys go through in their career.” Dre’ Bly, a teammate in Detroit, publicly blamed him for coach Steve Mariucci’s firing. Fans booed him. Even PA announcers were out to get him.
When Harrington returned to Detroit last season as a member of the Miami Dolphins, the Dolphins asked the Lions to introduce the defense and not Harrington. The response was the public-address version of the middle finger. The Lions introduced the defense. Then they showed Harrington on the video board and introduced him while playing the song, “Piano Man,” a reference to his skills as a jazz pianist.
His sense of humor remains intact.
“I always thought it was ironic that in Motown, I was criticized for playing the piano,” Harrington said. “I laugh about these things now.”
It helped that he threw three touchdown passes and the Dolphins won the game.
“Yeah, that was nice,” he said, smiling. “Every time I was on the field, they booed me. But that was no different from when I played there.”
He is 23-43 as a starter, though he began a U-turn in Miami (5-6). He has thrown more interceptions (77) than touchdown passes. But confidence isn’t an issue. A year in Miami was like therapy. He is starting to feel like he felt at Oregon, where throwing for nearly 7,000 yards and 59 touchdowns in three years led to Detroit drafting him third overall.
Now, (dis)organizations like the Detroit Lions can make anybody look bad. But Harrington admits they shouldn’t turn a man’s mind to mush.
“I let it affect me because I had never dealt with adversity before,” he said. “We went 25-3 [with Harrington as a starter] in college. We never hit a real road bump. Everything was easy. Everything was fun. You get to the point where you expect everything to be like that. Then when I got to Detroit, everybody was criticizing, guys weren’t getting along. I had never been through that before. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I’ve been publicly called out by my teammates and fans. But I’ve grown because of it. I’ve had to learn things besides the playbook.”
Is there any way to quantify what went wrong?
“Everything,” he said. “There’s blame to be placed on everybody, myself included.”
After four years, Detroit dumped him for a conditional draft pick. Miami didn’t bring him back, but the Falcons must see something. They gave him a two-year, $6 million contract.
Harrington doesn’t possess Vick’s physical skills, but coach Bobby Petrino says he likes his “knowledge of the game. He understands what defenses like to do. He does a real good job on his reads. So I think he’ll be able to execute the offense and distribute the ball where it needs to be.”
But suspect linemen will keep him fleeing at a considerably slower speed than Vick. The receivers are largely unproven. Warrick Dunn is coming off back surgery. Otherwise, life is grand.
Petrino might have to shrink the playbook, minus Vick. He’ll begin to get a better understanding of things next Friday in New York. So will we. Harrington? Not worried.
“I’m just looking forward to an opportunity to prove people wrong,” he said.
Opportunity won’t be a problem.
Permalink | Comments (278) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
Celtics about “now” — what about Hawks?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The best things to happen to the Hawks this summer were Boston’s franchise-changing trades that brought megastar Kevin Garnett and megastar Ray Allen to the Celtics to join megastar Paul Pierce.
Or were those trades the worst things to happen to the Hawks this summer?
I mean, just like that, the Celtics went from one of the most wretched teams in the NBA to one of the best.
The Hawks …
They’re still on their perpetual three-year, four-year, five-year plan. They haven’t reached the playoffs in an NBA-high eight consecutive seasons. They’ve added draft picks Acie Law and Al Horford to join the two Joshes (Smith and Childress) and the two Williamses (Marvin and Shelden) to help the Hawks’ future.
The Celtics are about now after they just swapped seven players for Garnett. In contrast, the Hawks haven’t been about “now” since the days of Dikembe Mutombo, Mookie Blaylock and Steve Smith — or maybe since those of Dominique Wilkins, Doc Rivers and Spud Webb.
Is that good or bad?
Hmmmm. I’m guessing they”ll have more fans and energy at the Fleet Center this season than at Philips Arena.
Permalink | Comments (47) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
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