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Saturday, January 19, 2008
Tech’s ‘Lethal’ trio just want to help
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
It’s a long climb for Georgia Tech’s basketball team, which mostly is double-dribbling in the valley of the ACC standings. Even so, Saturday’s 81-70 victory over Virginia Tech at Alexander Memorial Coliseum was a step for the Yellow Jackets toward higher ground.
They just have so far to go before reaching decency with the only losing record in the conference at 8-9 overall. This also was their first ACC victory after three previous tries, but here’s the deal: They could rise faster as a team and as a program if they had the legendary likes of Kenny Anderson, Brian Oliver and Dennis Scott, not only on the court, but off the court as well.
Remember those guys? They were christened as Lethal Weapon 3 after they shot and inspired the Jackets to their first Final Four trip in 1990. We mention this for a couple of reasons. First, they spent Saturday’s postgame in the annual Tech alumni game. They hadn’t been together in uniform since their glory days of yore. You know, as opposed to the Jackets’ gory days of now, with Tech trying to avoid its second losing record in three seasons and third in Paul Hewitt’s eight seasons on campus.
As for the second reason, Anderson, Oliver and Scott still bleed old gold and white, and they want to help.
They’ve asked to help.
They’ve pleaded to help.
“I wish Paul would use me more and use us more,” said Scott, the 3-point king back then who currently is the general manager of the American Basketball Association’s Atlanta Vision and a color analyst on Hawks radio broadcasts. “Right now, we’re used very little, and I understand that Paul is trying to create his own legacy, but every school has a tradition. Every school has a foundation. I know different coaches reach back to their history, because that’s where [the magic] is.”
For the Jackets, it is Scott playing all 40 minutes of a victory over Minnesota in that regional final 18 years ago and scoring a point per minute. It is Anderson connecting on a prayer at the buzzer the game before that against Michigan State to send Tech into overtime, where Michigan State didn’t win. It also is Oliver pushing his teammates as the gallant captain who kept playing and producing throughout the tournament despite a damaged ankle.
They want to help, all right, because as Anderson said, when contrasting his Tech experience with his 15 seasons in the NBA and his role now as head coach of the Continental Basketball Association’s Atlanta Krunk: “Those two years that I spent at Georgia Tech were the best years of my whole life, really.”
Oliver laughed, saying, “I’d have to say marrying my wife provided me with my best years.” That said, Oliver, who lives in his native Smyrna, added in a hurry that he cherishes his Tech experience so much that he wishes to contribute to a renaissance for the Jackets between erecting things (he just got his Tech degree in building construction) and working as a television studio host for college basketball.
Said Oliver: “I want to help the program, but in the same sense, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m meddling. I don’t want to make it seem like, well, they’ve been struggling, and now I want to put my hand in the cookie jar as if what he’s doing is not right. I have the utmost confidence in Paul Hewitt and what he’s done. I’m one of those who believes that what he’s done in the past is what he can do right now.”
What Hewitt has done in the past is take Tech to the Final Two. That was only four seasons ago. And despite the Jackets’ recent struggles, Hewitt wants them to become the Final One sooner than later, and he also wants Lethal Weapon 3 to help Tech accomplish as much.
“Those guys, they’ve been great to me already, and anything that we can do to have them involved, I’m willing to do,” Hewitt said. “Going back to the first year I was here, Brian Oliver gave the pregame talk at the ACC tournament, and I know Dennis and Kenny, they’ve been terrific and supportive. … Obviously, NCAA rules come into play, and they can’t help us in recruiting or things like that, but so maybe we need to figure out a role for them.”
Not maybe. Definitely.
They’re waiting.
Permalink | Comments (21) | Categories: Tech / ACC, Terence Moore
Despite flaws, Thrashers a major threat
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Say this for the Thrashers: They’ve held our attention. On Tuesday they beat the NHL’s best team and pulled into a tie for the Southeast Division lead. On Thursday they lost to Montreal in a shootout but claimed first place by themselves, and afterward center Eric Perrin said, “Consistency — that’s the one thing we’ve got to work on.”
On Friday, as if on cue, the Thrashers fell out of first place by losing 10-1 to a Buffalo team that hadn’t won in calendar 2008. Not that this franchise has been around all that long, but when you match the most-lopsided loss in team annals … well, that’s news.
If you’re the Thrashers, still being newsworthy is a victory. The way this season began — an 0-6 start and a coach firing — they seemed to have embarked on one of those nobody-cares campaigns. (A Hawks-like season, in other words.) But the Thrashers have risen to .500, and the rest of the division has backed up to meet them, and with 33 games remaining they have a realistic chance to make the playoffs.
“We knew we were a way better team than the way we started,” said Don Waddell, who has been vindicated in his decision to dump Bob Hartley and assume the coaching duties. The Thrashers are 23-17-3 under Waddell, and the GM/coach has come to believe in his team’s potential to the extent that he’s ready to make another round of roster-juicing moves.
“I’m a buyer for sure,” said Waddell, asked his stance as the Feb. 26 trade deadline approaches. “Things are so tight that if there’s a piece out there, it could make a big difference.”
Three months ago, you’d have figured the Thrashers would be deadline sellers and that Marian Hossa, whose contract is up at season’s end, would be their principal lure. But Hossa, who’d been having a tepid season — not quite an Andruw Jones contract year, but not anywhere close to vintage Hossa — has scored six goals in the past seven games and seems assured of being here through April if not longer.
Will calling out line changes keep Waddell from being as managerially active as he was at the deadline a year ago, when his moves for Keith Tkachuk and Alexei Zhitnik pushed the Thrashers into the postseason? “In our business, calls happen at 11 at night. It’s not like the New York Stock Exchange, where you can only trade between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.”
The Thrashers could stand another February stimulus package. Even with the splash made by rookie Tobias Enstrom — after nearly a decade of drafting, Waddell finds a defenseman! — the back line doesn’t scare anybody. (Nobody in the NHL has yielded more goals.) And Ilya Kovalchuk has scored a league-highest 27 percent of his team’s goals, which is a testimony to one man’s skill but an indictment of his supporting cast.
That said, just being in a place where strengths and weakness still matter is no small thing. Back in October, this season had all the makings of an unqualified surrender: A franchise reaches the playoffs for the first time only to hand back every shred of credibility it struggled so long to earn. That abject retreat has been arrested. The Thrashers still have a shot.
“We’ve beaten all the top teams — Detroit, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Boston,” Perrin said Thursday. “All those top teams know we’ve got the potential. … We want to make the next step and get above .500. We’re haunted by the fact that we can only get one game above .500. We want to be two games above.”
Within 24 hours the Thrashers slid back to .500 and ceded the division lead on a night when they yielded 10 big fat goals. By any measure, Friday was a lousy night. But the greater point is that the Thrashers haven’t let this become a lousy season. The greater point is that an 0-6 team has put itself in position to lead a division.
Permalink | Comments (24) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Thrashers / NHL
McKay finds end of bench
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Four years ago, Arthur Blank viewed Rich McKay as his football messiah. That was fairly well known even before he admitted, “I’ve been dreaming more about Rich McKay for two years than I have about my own wife,” which was something we basically allowed Stephanie Blank to sort out.
We now know that Blank miscalculated on McKay, whose relative unmasking as a general manager become an ugly sidebar to this Falcons’ season.
Executive meetings aren’t held before a live studio audience, so we may never know who exerted the most influence on matters regarding hirings, signings and direction — Blank or McKay. But this much is clear: McKay doesn’t want to talk about it. His roughly $3 million annual contract apparently comes with a cloaking device and a mute button.
Having been to several strange news conferences — including one called by Tom Cousineau specifically to announce that he wasn’t homosexual, as well as several others with Don King in the center ring — I can tell you that none had the bizarre overtones of Thomas Dimitroff welcoming.
It was a surprise in itself that McKay — who was publicly stripped of his GM title at the end of a Blank statement on Bill Parcells — showed up at the Dimitroff news conference. Maybe he just wanted to play the good soldier. Maybe he was told to play the good soldier. Maybe he had concerns about direct deposit being interrupted.
Regardless, he clearly didn’t want to be there. He looked worn and distracted. He briefly sat at Blank’s table but soon moved to the back of the room, which was adjacent to the door, which opened to a hallway, which led to an elevator, which descended to the garage, which is where his car was parked, waiting to take him anywhere but the palatial family offices of Arthur M. Blank.
I don’t know if McKay blew out any tires when he left. But I’m fairly sure he blew out the soles of his shoes.
While still in the room, two questions were directed to him. He answered from a distance. He ignored someone who tried to hand him a microphone. He said he would be there to support Dimitroff. He made some crack about his white hair. He admitted, “It’s been the longest 14 months of any one person’s life.”
But that’s as much as you will read from McKay in this column. I just didn’t think it was right to ask McKay a lot of questions during Dimitroff’s official introduction. And when the formal news conference ended, all but one guy stayed around for extensive one-on-ones.
I turned to find McKay, but he had vanished. Sort of like he did at Flowery Branch every time a fire broke out.
A team official promised that McKay absolutely, positively, happily would be available for an interview later in the week. I’m still waiting.
It’s sort of like the old county-western song: “If the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me.”
In as a savior. Out as a ghost.
It’s understandable to a degree why Blank would want to keep McKay around. He is liked and respected in the NFL office. He sits on the powerful Competition Committee. He is well versed in many things that Dimitroff isn’t.
That said, any definition of “healthy situation” does not include the Falcons’ executive flow chart right now.
How can having a stripped-down executive in the front office be healthy? How can McKay function while someone else performs his former job? Does he desire to run a team again one day?
These and other questions will not be answered. The next time the Falcons hold a news conference, I’ll be better prepared. I’ll wear track shoes.
McKay took over in December of 2003. Six days later, the downtrodden Falcons won at Tampa Bay. The following season, they went to the NFC title game.
Then everybody and everything spiraled. The quarterback. The coach. The general manager. Now Michael Vick is in jail, Jim Mora is in Seattle. McKay remains in the executive suite, shuffling papers and planning lunches for a stadium deal.
When things started to go bad, McKay began to live down to a reputation of disappearing in times of crisis. That became even more exaggerated this season when Bobby Petrino resided here. At one point, when the Falcons were falling apart and McKay was asked about changes, he actually said his practice is not to talk about personnel issues during the season.
I’m still not sure when he adopted that practice. Probably sometime after the 11-5 season. Sometime after Blank’s dream.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
John McHale was major league
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Let it not be said that John McHale has passed on and that Atlanta hasn’t paid him due homage. Before we go further, let it be pointed out that he was the first president and general manager of the Atlanta Braves as they arrived from Milwaukee, and we go from there. McHale sort of midwifed the delivery of the Braves franchise from Milwaukee to us, and that involves a lot of complicated history.
It begins, from this point of view, with a dinner before the major league All-Star game in Washington in 1962. Seated next to McHale, I was no less than shocked when he said to me, “Mr. [Lou] Perini is thinking about moving the Braves out of Milwaukee and he has Atlanta in mind.” Out of the blue.
Before that could take place, the Perini Co. suddenly sold 90 percent of the Braves to a group of young and wealthy Chicagoans. Enter Bill Bartholomay, Tom Reynolds and their band of 12. McHale was left to hold the fort in Milwaukee, and as the major remaining club official, the frequent target of disgruntled fans, knowing their ballclub was headed south. They littered his lawn with “For Sale” signs and garbage, wrote venomous letters, and the McHale children were often assailed. McHale bore the brunt of it. The new owners had the luxury of distance.
Once the transfer was official, the McHales moved to Atlanta. (Two of the sons schooled at Marist, and the elder, John Jr., is now vice president of Major League Baseball.) A little over a year after the move, a retired general, Spike Eckert, a shocking case of mistaken identity, was appointed commissioner of baseball — known as the “Unknown Soldier” — and there being a stressful need of a baseball figure in the office, McHale was appointed and took office as commissioner-without-portfolio. Then the Bronfmans of Canada came calling, and he was hired to escort Montreal into the major leagues in 1969, the Expos’ first president.
Baseball was John McHale’s life, and Atlanta was lucky to have him as its escort into the major leagues. MLB.com identifies him as “one of the towering baseball executives of the 20th Century.” He worked his way up, from the dugout to the head of the line. He had been a baseball star and played football at Notre Dame, signed with the Tigers and broke in at first base with their Winston-Salem club on a Class B farm club. A military call cut into his major-league prospects, and thus he was detoured into the front-office side of the game. He did, however, manage to work in an appearance in the oft-maligned World Series of 1945 against the oft-maligned Cubs, as a pinch hitter for the Tiger champions. Sorry to report, he popped up.
When the Braves transferred to Atlanta, McHale brought with him a cast of citizens who never left. The most enduring of them all, Ernie Johnson, arrived as an part-time director of public relations (and ticket dispenser), then after moving into the broadcast booth, has prevailed to this day. I must confess that the Braves fractured a friendship with our newspaper when they stole Lee Walburn away from the Journal staff to fill the vacancy Ernie left in the public-relations shop. But who was to complain? We had the Braves. The city had a new playpen. Atlanta was major league, which pleased Mayor Ivan Allen to no end. Each day the Braves played at home, a story went out across the country datelined “Atlanta.” Thus, the mayor’s dream had become reality.
At the head of all this was the fine figure of John McHale, of whom it is written in the book “Miracle in Atlanta,” “there is not a more honest man in baseball.” I believed it then. I believed it to the end, which came Thursday in Palm City, Fla. John McHale was 86 years old.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
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