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Saturday, January 26, 2008
‘Climbing’ Dogs not getting far
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Knoxville — Georgia got an RPI bump just by showing up, not that the Bulldogs showed up in any competitive sense. Indeed, what they showed Saturday was that a program that hasn’t graced the NCAA tournament since 2002 isn’t as close to getting back to the Big Dance as it should be.
The Bulldogs entered as one of those odd-duck teams peculiar to college basketball: They had a decent record (11-5) but an awful RPI (117). Rule of thumb: Unless your RPI is under 50, you can forget being an at-large invitee. Conveniently enough, the schedule brought Georgia to the home of the current ratings colossus.
Tennessee is No. 1 in the RPI but entered having appeared pedestrian in losing at Kentucky on Tuesday. The Vols can look great when allowed to rip and run, markedly less great when forced to slug it out in the halfcourt. Against such an opponent, the idea is to slow it down and give yourself a chance at the end.
Georgia didn’t give itself a chance in the beginning. It made 15 turnovers before it sank its fifth basket. It defended so abominably that the Vols appeared to playing with an extra man. (Big Orange on the power play!) It trailed by 10 points after six minutes, by 21 at halftime, by 26 before Tennessee lost interest.
“Far too many times we weren’t strong and decisive,” said Dennis Felton, Georgia’s coach. “We were soft to start the game.”
Put bluntly, Georgia played a game that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 8-20 season of 2004-2005. That was Felton’s second season after inheriting Jim Harrick’s mess, and Felton could hardly be faulted then. But now it’s 2008, and there can be no more excuse-making for the Bulldogs.
Yes, Felton was dealt a lousy hand and has had some rotten luck since. The best recruit he has signed, Louis Williams of South Gwinnett, never enrolled. Last season’s team might well have made the NCAA had Mike Mercer not hurt his knee in February, and this bunch would be much more imposing if Mercer and Takais Brown hadn’t run aground academically. That said …
Felton has been coaching Georgia longer than the combined tenures of Tubby Smith and Ron Jirsa, nearly a full season longer than the disgraced Harrick. A U.S. president doesn’t get as long to fix the country as Felton has had to right a basketball program. Felton has been in place since April 2003, and still every discussion of Bulldog basketball — and there aren’t many — begins not with the incumbent but with the man he succeeded.
This is Bruce Pearl’s third season at Tennessee. While he didn’t follow anyone as egregious as Harrick, he did inherit a program that had run through four different coaches in 15 years. Pearl has Tennessee near the top of the national rankings — the Vols are No. 3 in the AP poll — and has brought a basketball buzz not felt since the days of Ray Mears and Bernard King and Ernie Grunfeld.
Asked to assess the state of Big Orange hoops, Felton said, “That’s a question for Tennessee.”
Fair enough. Asked then to characterize Georgia basketball, Felton said this: “Steady climbing. Steady climbing — that’s how I’d assess it.”
Earlier he’d said, “It’s really disappointing. There’s no shame in losing. Vanderbilt, one of the best teams in the country, came here and lost by 20. [Georgia lost by a fairly flattering 16.] You know that possibility exists against such a tremendous team. But we were soft to start the game.”
And that’s the alarming part. Even Felton’s 8-20 team could be counted on to play hard. Never well, but always hard. If ferocity has been lost and not much gained in the talent department, does that amount to steady climbing? Or is it instead an unsteady retreat?
Permalink | Comments (39) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
After all this time, just Kovy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Ten-plus years, seven-plus seasons, few plus-players, the remains of 15 goaltenders and zero playoff wins later, Atlanta sits in unfamiliar territory today: center ice.
Still seeking a presence in their city and direction in their existence, the Thrashers play host to the NHL All-Star Game Sunday night. These exhibitions, complete with skills contests and Alyssa Milano clothing lines, are designed to celebrate the sport and its stars. But more than a decade after the city was awarded a second-chance franchise, there is little to cling to, save Ilya Kovalchuk.
“I know they used to have a real nice team here, the Flames,” Kovalchuk said Saturday. “I think we’ve got a little history. But we never win anything. When you win the Stanley Cup, that’s when [fans] really realize that hockey is interesting. But when you’re not winning in Atlanta, it’s like they really don’t [care] because there’s a lot to do here. Shows, sports, football — that’s their favorite. You need to win here to get their attention.”
Atlanta has its core of hockey fans. It has its singular star. Ultimately for survival, it needs more. Certainly, Kovalchuk deserves more.
He is in his sixth season. He already has scored 239 goals. He ranks second in the NHL in goals with 37, fourth in points with 63. He’s a lock to surpass 40 for the fourth straight season and is on pace for another possible Maurice Richard Trophy as goal champion. (He’s four behind Alexander Ovechkin’s season pace of 64.)
Beyond that, Kovalchuk and his game have matured. Few could have envisioned that a talented but short-fused 18-year-old would ever develop into captain material. But Kovalchuk was one of the few Thrashers who didn’t look catatonic in the playoffs last year. He was the only one who played hard through this season’s 0-6 start, when his teammates seemed determined only to bury a coach. When general manager Don Waddell, survivalist that he is, sought career salvation by firing coach Bob Hartley, Kovalchuk was the only Thrasher who said Hartley made him a better player.
Suddenly, he isn’t merely Atlanta’s best hockey player. He is a centerpiece without a table. Or a room. Or a foundation.
Year 11. Season eight.
The hope was that the NHL All-Star Game would represent more for this city’s hockey fans than a welcome distraction. But now there is all this baggage.
Last season’s quick playoff exit smothered whatever hockey buzz might’ve existed after the division title. Waddell’s low-profile offseason moves did nothing to fuel interest. The slow start, the unofficial player revolt, the firing. The Thrashers got hot, then turned almost bipolar.
It all must wear on Kovalchuk. His early career reputation as being selfish has always been overstated, his desire to win understated.
“He cares a lot more about the team and winning and everything else than people give him credit for,” said former Thrashers captain Scott Mellanby, who is in town for the weekend. “He’s passionate. Last year in the playoffs, I thought he was our best forward. He got a taste of what it’s like to be there, and he doesn’t want to go through his whole career and not have team success. He knows people can be critical of athletes who don’t win, especially as superstars.”
The Thrashers have two players in tonight’s game. Only one seemingly has a future here. While Kovalchuk spent Saturday talking about his season and the All-Star Game, Marian Hossa again fielded questions about his contract and the likelihood of being traded in the next few weeks.
What then? With a weak farm system, Waddell’s uncertain status, a coaching vacancy, unstable ownership, how far off-stage will hockey be in Atlanta next year, with only Kovalchuk pulling the wagon?
Mellanby: “He’s only 24. I don’t think he would even want to try to think of the magnitude of what he means to the team’s future. I just know players want to be successful and know what it feels like to win.”
Asked if he is aware of his responsibility in keeping hockey on the map here, Kovalchuk said, “For sure. But I like that kind of pressure.”
Soon, he morphed into a chamber of commerce member.
“I think everybody will really enjoy it here,” he said. “Hopefully, everybody is in nice hotels and got a nice meal. Afterwards, they won’t say, ‘We’re not going to go back to Atlanta.’ “
Tonight is the diversion. People will need another reason to come back.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Thrashers / NHL
NFL greats blindsided by final blow
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Nobody tells a story better than Bill Curry, the former Georgia Tech player and coach, who starred in the NFL. So this one was riveting for several reasons.
Let’s start with the thought of Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey wandering aimlessly around a packed Catholic church during the funeral mass for Johnny Unitas. Not only were Mackey, Curry and Unitas members of the old Baltimore Colts, but Mackey and Curry were roommates near the end of their tenure with the franchise.
“So there was John, unable to find his seat after he apparently got up to go to the restroom, and everybody just froze, but the priest just kept right on going with [his eulogy],” said Curry, sighing. Then he continued to paint an even more chilling picture of Mackey moving about the aisles in search of nothing in particular, before Curry added with another sigh, “It was like a nightmare.”
It was that, but it also was dementia, a condition that zaps an individual’s judgment and memory in dramatic ways. It’s a condition that the 66-year-old Mackey battles in Baltimore after years of getting clobbered in the head by opponents. He joins other former NFL players such as Larry Morris, a Tech Hall of Famer who suffers from dementia in Flowery Branch. They all prove each time they deliver blank stares at loved ones that there is a correlation between football-related blows and various types of dementia.
You know, no matter what the NFL, the players union and their carefully selected group of doctors like to say.
Even so, courtesy of Mackey’s wife, Sylvia, sending a letter two years ago to former commissioner Paul Tagliabue about John’s woes (“Paul said he was so touched that he even showed the letter to his wife,” she said), the league and the union agreed to form something called The 88 Plan. That’s “88,” as in Mackey’s former number.
Through the plan, families of former players suffering from dementia can receive as much as $88,000 per year.
The money is fine, but that isn’t the whole story on dementia that will come to Atlanta on March 29 at Agnes Scott College. There, Curry’s wife, Carolyn, will meet with her six-year-old group called Women Alone Together. It’s an organization for women of all ages who are “widows, divorcees, single by choice or married but feel alone because of a chronically ill spouse or because [they are] physically, mentally or spiritually separated from their mates,” its Web site says.
Sylvia Mackey will be the organization’s guest speaker that day on dementia and its effects.
“Sylvia is just an incredible lady, and the Mackeys have been friends of ours since [the late 1960s],” said Carolyn Curry, owner of a Ph.D in history. “But also this issue comes home to us because of Larry Morris. I mean, he was this great, great player for Georgia Tech, and he’s still strong and handsome, just like John. But when you see both of them now, they’re like a 2-year-old. Sylvia says that just to get John to do normal things that a human being has to do, she’s had to find a different way.”
That way is called using anything involving the NFL. It began when Mackey returned one day from a long walk and refused to shower. Sylvia thought and thought before announcing to John that the NFL mandated that all former players must shower after any activity.
John showered. Just like he began taking his medicine for dementia after Sylvia called them “vitamins” and wrapped them inside a box that she told him came from the NFL. “Sometimes I’ll use my cellphone to call our house phone, and I’ll tell John that it’s Paul Tagliabue calling, and it always works,” said Sylvia, chuckling.
Kay Morris, Larry’s wife, said chuckling is good to relieve the stress involving taking care of her husband, 74, a Decatur High graduate who played professionally for the Los Angeles Rams, Chicago Bears and the Falcons. “We’ve been dealing with this now for almost 20 years, and he’s a little worse than [Mackey],” said Kay Morris, mentioning how Larry’s dementia ruined most of his business ventures and placed the family close to financial ruin. “I don’t even think he recalls that he played.”
She didn’t chuckle.
Permalink | Comments (61) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Tech / ACC, Terence Moore
Old-time All-Stars return, score again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
TJ’s Sports Bar in Alpharetta was a-bustle. Hockey was the theme. The NHL All-Star Game was in town, and its effect was being felt deep into the suburbs. Old hockey fans and young mixed and mingled, many who dated back to days of the Flames, and some not quite sure who was whom, as in the case of a young woman who boldly announced, “I want Gordie Hull’s autograph.”
Someone corrected her. “You mean Gordie Howe or Bobby Hull? They’re both here.”
“Oh, I’ll take either one of them,” she said, tossing her head, and in time, she did get both Thursday night.
This was not a mix of the old and the young. The stars of today were all downtown, doing what All-Stars do before they take the stage Sunday at Philips Arena. These were guys your dad and mom grew up with, Flames of the ’70s (before they took flight to Calgary) and Hall of Fame guys who had engraved their signatures on the game. Tough and unyielding on ice, warm and gentle as a parson nowadays. They spoke of collisions they had, of sticks across the face (skaters wore no masks then) and time spent in the penalty box. And they laughed and slapped one another on the back.
But now? “I went into the locker room at a game last year,” Gordie Howe said, “and I found out I couldn’t talk with the players. They all came from Europe, names I couldn’t spell and languages I didn’t speak.”
The league’s player supply once mainly came from Canada, and they spoke English, with a Canadian brogue. Rarely was a resident of the 50 states found in an NHL lineup. For that matter, at one time there were only four U.S. teams in the league, the Red Wings, the Bruins, the Rangers and the Blackhawks. Then expansion, and it did seem strange to see ice games being played in Tampa and Miami, and even stranger a couple of years ago when a team named Carolina won the Stanley Cup.
But I dawdle. This was more than a reunion, it was an occasion special to the old warriors. You see, players of the last century are strangers to most present-day headliners. Howe and Hull and the Espositos and Schultz and Clarke are not recognized as the stars they were. Present-day players were kids in some European country, not only didn’t read of the golden oldies, they didn’t know our language, and still have trouble with it. Even today names are botched. One sports club advertised a personal appearance by Dan “Rocket” Bouchard. Oops, the nickname was misapplied to Bouchard, the Flames goalie, who stopped “rockets,” confused with the great Maurice “Rocket” Richard.
This was something for the pensioneers, the introduction of the NHL Alumni Signature Wine line, all profits going to retired veterans and and charities of their choice. The NHL has a pension fund, but it is meager. Howe, as great a star as there is, gets $17,000 a year. And you may be aware of the drive to increase alumni benefits in other professional sports.
Jason Zentz was never a star. He played in the NHL, three years with the Bruins, “a cup of coffee,” as he described his career. He became a successful businessman in Boston, appeared at TJ’s in executive suit and tie, and spoke humbly of his dedication to the guys who went before him. This was the time and the place to announce it, and the wines got a popular introduction as the evening wore on.
It was like being in a living, breathing hall of fame. All 12 veterans were there to introduce their signature wines, and share with all the people TJ’s would hold into the night. Tim Ecclestone, the host and former Flame, was joined by two other Flame alumni, Willie Plett and Eric Vail, and there may have been others swallowed up in the crowd that grew into a milling throng. Many of the Atlanta Flames traveled on to Calgary for NHL seasons but never gave up their homes in the Atlanta area.
The league has lost much of its Canadian flavor. It has developed a pipeline to European sources, and as Gordie Howe said, you need an interpreter in most of the NHL locker rooms. But winning and losing is still the same in any language.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Thrashers / NHL
