Posted on April 5, 2013
Today, Centaur Seasons here exclusively on HoopsU.com takes a break from TALKING WITH JOHN WOODEN, its multipart March Madness series of never-before-heard conversations with the UCLA legend. (Come back Monday to HoopsU.com for the Final Four final installment.)
No, today Centaur Seasons is going to wade into the morass that is the Rutgers University/Mike Rice basketball-coach fiasco. (Surely you’ve heard.) I think that much of what Centaur Seasons has been about these past six months — the striving, the trying, the not exactly winning a whole lot — can find application here.
But to get there, some personal history.
I am the “father of sports blogging.” Really. Well, actually, the full quote was “the UNWITTING father of sports blogging.”
I was so dubbed in 2008 by Michael Gluckstadt an editor at Gelf Magazine and the host of Gelf’s Varsity Letters sports reading series. Mike declared me so for my efforts as the first writer of a brand new sports column — The Daily Fix — at The Wall Street Journal’s then-nascent online efforts.
It was August 2001. A time which within just one more month would already feel like a long time ago. The idea for the blog belonged to Bill Grueskin, now the Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Professional Practice at the Columbia School of Journalism, but then the wsj.com major domo. Why not write an online column, Bill posited, that would direct Journal readers to go to other newspapers to read what other writers thought about the sports stories of the day?
A radical idea then (the unwitting part), even if it doesn’t seem so now (the father part). There was little out there like it. Maybe nothing.
And Bill gave me the gig. He appointed Jason Fry (who now blogs here) as editor. Go, he said: Figure it out, find a voice, have fun. Boy, did we. I Loved it. Did it for a year. Best. Job. Ever.
Fast forward to this week and the ugliness that is the Mike Rice video (here, on the off chance you haven’t seen it) and the Sturm und Drang it has created at Rutgers and, indeed, across the country.
This story was tailor made for The Daily Fix — talk of the nation! — and it so far has weighed in twice. On Wednesday with this, “Rutgers Re-evaluates Rice Decision,” by Jeremy Gordon and on Thursday by David Roth with this, “Rutgers Changes Course, Fires Rice.”
Jayson Gay, also of the Journal, independently weighed in with his own terrific take on the blunders, under the headline “What Was Lost at Rutgers.” It would’ve been bad form for The Fix to call attention to itself, as it were, so allow me, self-proclaimed “Original Fixer,” to do the honors instead — applying the rubrics of The Fix to a Centaur Seasons’ blog.
” … [I]t would be useful,” Mr. Gay writes in Thursday’s paper of the coach’s belated firing, “to take a step back and consider the broader picture, which is how a school with presumably good intentions could get to this point, how its sense of priorities and values could become so skewed it took the public airing of a videotape for people in charge to do the right thing.”
And then a moment later he avers: “Intoxicated by sports, a school lost its way.”
In was Mr. Gay who inspired me to reach back into my bag of Fix tricks to find some lessons in past Centaur Seasons posts and apply them to the here and now.
Forty years ago, at a brand new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, we Centaurs did not lose our way. No way.
“We were just happy to be able to play the game, to play it as hard as we could,” says Jerry Wilkinson, a senior co-captain when I was a sophomore, in this post about the first day of practice on October 15. Hard to forget where you were and why you were there, Wilk says, when you realized how lucky you were to be there at all: “I really enjoyed playing the game with my teammates — at a level I never suspected I would ever play.”
Chris Cashman, a four-year Centaur stalwart and one of the team’s most important leaders, talked about the values he learned while a Centaur at Allentown College in this post about a bus trip to an away game where (in fact!) we did get lost. “’The things I learned, the values I learned,’ Cash said, ‘I learned there’ – and then. ‘I don’t know if I would have learned it at Villanova. I don’t know if I would have learned it at St. Joe’s or Harvard or Yale or Fordham.’ A lot of colleges, he said, offer a lot of similar experiences. But with Allentown being so new — and we new to it — it was like we were ‘born there and grew up together.’”
And finally, this.
“In a crazy way, in the purest sense of the word, it was just playing the game for the love of the game,” said Joe Thomson in a blog post about Centaur Seasons that I was invited to write for D3hoops.com. And Joe has it right.
Though don’t get me wrong. We Centaurs at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, back then, we would have LOVED to have been big time. Heck, we would have settled for some bigger small time.
Instead, we were who we were. And that’s fine.
“There weren’t a lot of externals,” Joe Thomson said in my D3Hoops essay. “We weren’t getting money, we weren’t on scholarship. We didn’t have to worry about who was getting all-conference. We just played. We didn’t like the losing, but when we did we just got ready for the next game. To me it was pure sport. We were just a bunch of guys playing ball.”
How much you wanna bet Mike Rice — and the Rutgers University Scarlett Knights — would like to get themselves back to playing the game like that?
CENTAUR SEASONS can also be found at www.centaurseasons.com. The centerpiece will be the posting in "real time" of the diary that Steve kept of his 1972-1973 junior-year season, beginning on November 30. Prior to that (and after), Steve will be posting regularly about his freshman, sophomore and senior seasons, as well as about what it was like to be there at the beginning to help get a struggling college basketball program off the ground.
Steve was the original writer of The Wall Street Journal's popular sports blog, "The Daily Fix" in 2001-2002, and was even dubbed "The Unwitting Father of the Sports Blog" by Gelf Magazine, the online publication of the "Varsity Letters Reading Series. Steve was the Journal's sports editor for its original Weekend sport section and was involved in all of the Journal's Olympics coverage, Winter and Summer, from 1996 through 2008.
He is the author of three books, most recently "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease," which he is adapting as a one-man show. For his first book, "The Call of the Game," Steve traveled the country in search of sports events -- including the famous N.C. State Wolfpack victory over "Phi Slamma Jamma" of the University of Houston. For his second book, COACH, among the 150+ coaches Steve interviewed are/were college basketball coaches John Wooden (UCLA), Pat Summitt (Tennessee), Frank Layden (Niagara), Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), P.J. Carlesimo (Seton Hall), Bill Guthridge (North Carolina), Abe Lemons (Texas), Stan Morrison (USC), Kathy Rush (Immaculata), Jim Satalin (Duquesne), Charlie Thomas (San Francisco State), Butch Van Bredda Koff (Princeton), Bill Whitmore (Vermont) and LaDonna Wilson (Austin Peay).
For more, you can click on www.steve-mckee.com, where you can find a TODAY show appearance and an NPR interview.
- CENTAUR SEASONS: A new Inductee to the DeSales University Hall of Fame recognizes the contributions of the school’s orginal athletes … - September 18, 2013
- CENTAUR (OFF) SEASONS: A dozen ways to read the 97 posts in the scorebook thus far — until a new roster begins taking the floor in the fall - June 13, 2013
- CENTAUR SEASONS: In a ‘Carnival of Opportunity,’ One of Our Own Shines in an All-Star Game - May 14, 2013
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