Category Archives

27 Articles
Fox Claims US Am to Remember, but Was It Ever Live?

Fox Claims US Am to Remember, but Was It Ever Live?

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Anyone who missed Steven Fox’s unlikely victory in Sunday’s 36-hole final of the U.S. Amateur Championship is the lesser for it. You won’t witness a better argument for the dramatic glories of match play and its magnificent leveling qualities. Fox should never have beaten Michael Weaver, as he ultimately did on the 37th hole at Denver’s Cherry Hills Country Club. Indeed, if it weren’t for the vagaries of tape-delayed telecasts and modern media alliances, I’d have missed it myself.

Here’s what happened: I was called away Sunday afternoon by a gaggle of visiting relatives, so I recorded (with my DVR) what I presumed to be NBC’s edited/taped presentation of the final that aired from 4-6 p.m. EST. Saturday’s NBC telecast was tape delayed and generally I’ve got real problems with networks presenting golf events on tape, as the viewer knows in advance the action has been edited to fit a specific programming period, which can in turn lead to the outcome being revealed ahead of time. For example, if it’s 5:50 p.m. EST and some dude is two up with two to play, clearly the other dude isn’t going to stage a monumental comeback, nor is the match going to extra holes — because the local news is coming on at 6 p.m., come hell or high water.

Still, I wanted to see this final. I wanted to see Cherry Hills, which I played a few years back, and I wanted to see which unheralded participant would win this match-up of 60th and 63rd seeds (!). So, late Sunday night, I settled in to watch what I presumed to be NBC’s taped coverage, which I in turn had taped.

On the 17th hole with Weaver dormie, the tape ran out. Apparently, the telecast ran over its allotted 2-hour time slot. For all the world, NBC’s coverage resembled the pre-packaged, edited version they always present on the Amateur’s final day — salted strategically, of course, with myriad feel-good features on the competitors, their families, the vaunted trophy room at Cherry Hills (site of 9 USGA championships), and Arnie’s driving the 1st green en route to a closing 65 to win the 1960 Open.

But maybe NBC had run the event live. Why else would the 4-6 p.m. time slot have been breached? … Or maybe my DVR clock was off kilter… Or maybe they switched the live telecast at 6 p.m. over to their partners at The Golf Channel? … Maybe the match had indeed ended just seconds after the tape ran out — Weaver was just a putt from claiming a 2 & 1 victory…

Mystified and slightly irked, I flipped over to The Golf Channel, where, 5 hours after the fact, surely the event was still being parsed 16 different ways. But lo and behold, what was on TGC but an encore presentation of Sunday’s NBC telecast! And here’s the really weird part: I switched it on almost precisely where my DVR’d version had cut out — on the 17th green, both guys with birdie putts, Fox’s to stay alive and Weaver’s to close out the match.

It was sort of eerie. I mean, The Golf Channel programmers surely had no idea that I had taped the NBC telecast. Even if they did, surely they wouldn’t have any idea WHEN I would watch the recording. Or would they…

In any case, a hearty round of applause for NBC’s partnership with The Golf Channel, without which I would have missed one of the most compelling finishes to an Amateur since Steve Scott took Tiger Woods to extra holes before losing in 1996.

Fox drained his birdie at 17, while Weaver missed, leading to a crazy 36th hole where Fox looked dead to rites (in the thick right rough) but somehow found the elevated green from a steep, side-hill lie. His two putts left Weaver with a 4-footer to win it all, but the Cal student authored one of the most cruel and violent lip-outs I’ve ever seen, on TV or in person.

Turns out all the syrupy flashbacks and references to Palmer driving the 1st green in 1960 had resonance, because Weaver’s decision to drive the 346-yard, 37th hole cost him the Amateur. He pulled it left, beyond the green and the 2nd tee. He fluffed his chip, then chunked another. Fox hit 6-iron off the tee, dropped his approach 15 feet above the pin, and coaxed into the cup his birdie attempt when two putts would have sufficed.

Fox had no business winning that match. His unorthodox swing, his lack of length and collegiate pedigree should have left him happy to have merely qualified for match play, much less the final. But he was dogged and nervelessly drained every putt he looked at, all day. Still, if Weaver had made that 4-footer on the 36th hole, it would not have been enough.

But it was enough. It was heartbreaking. It was thrilling. It was all highly unlikely, and eventually I got to see the best bits, plus the extraordinary denouement, via recordings of a recording, on two different TV outlets, late at night, on the couch by myself.

Bob Ryan Retires: All Hail the All-Time NBA Sage

Bob Ryan Retires: All Hail the All-Time NBA Sage

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

The encomia are surely piling up across the web, but I couldn’t let slide the fact that Bob Ryan has retired from The Boston Globe as full-time basketball sage and de facto Commissioner of all things hoops (a title bestowed decades ago, by his fellow scribes). Here’s a link to his farewell column, delivered Aug. 11 with his signature directness, brevity and authoritative elegance.

Having grown up in Greater Boston, I latched onto Ryan early, in the mid-1970s, when the Celtics were winning championships and knowledge of the team was nearly the exclusive province of Mr. Ryan, whose game reports and columns were often the only worthwhile analyses available the next morning. Yes, some games were televised locally, but only a few. Radio was an option, but Johnny Most was so bombastic, his account of the goings-down, while entertaining, could not be trusted.

Above all things, Ryan could be trusted — to authoritatively tell you the “why” behind wins and losses; the “who” when it came to contenders and pretenders. His appraisal of players was never erring. When Larry Bird was drafted, as a junior, and all of Boston watched his senior year at Indiana State wondering if his game would translate to the pros, Ryan put that matter to rest. He sized up Bird a basketball genius way before it was obvious to the rest of us, and so Larry turned out to be.

His between-the-lines sizing-up of personalities was similarly spot on and vital to a young basketball mind in its formative stages. It really was about the guy’s authority. You could tell when Ryan truly admired a player (Dave Cowens) or didn’t deem one worth a damn (Sydney Wicks). It was clear when he admired someone but didn’t necessarily like him (David Stern), and when someone didn’t like Ryan (Tommy Heinsohn). It was all done very professionally, perhaps a bit coyly, and I found it all thrilling — that someone could earn a living by chronicling such fabulously interesting things in a public forum.

All through my high school, college and early years as a sports writer, Bob Ryan’s professional life was the one I wanted for myself. One time, in high school, circa 1979, my mom got us tickets to a Celtics game (vs. the Jazz) at the old Boston Garden, where she endeavored to introduce me to the guy before tip-off. I remember that he was cordial but not especially helpful or inspiring. My mom was a bit disappointed, but I couldn’t hold it against him — he was probably concocting some new way to convey to readers the utter ineffectiveness of James Hardy and Ben Poquette.

I did indeed try to follow Ryan’s path but his times were not my times. In his farewell column, he writes about going straight to the Globe sports department after graduating from Boston College in 1968. In the mid-1980s, no one did that — years of daily newspapering experience were required before one would even be considered. Further, by that time, the Globe sports section was a veritable all-star team of talent, and thousands of aspirants were all clamoring for the opportunity to sit at Ryan’s knee, along with those of Will McDonough, Peter Gammons, Dan Shaughnessy and Leigh Montville. Even if you had the experience, and the chops, the Globe was notorious for its minority hiring policies. I remember one reporting colleague claiming that he’d already have a job on Morrissey Boulevard, “If only I were a black, female, Cape Verdean.”

In any case, dreams die and/or they’re deferred. I left daily newspapers in 1992, having had a chance to cover the Celtics (and all the Boston teams) for smaller newspapers with nothing like the Globe’s reach and influence. I was tired of making no money, tired of being essentially nocturnal. Soon the newspaper model would collapse, and I frankly count my blessings that I got out when I did.

Ryan pressed on through this period of industry decline, adapting to the web realities and even moving into television a fare bit. Personally, I could listen to him talk about basketball and other sporting matters till the cows came home, but I think even he’d admit that his rapid-fire, staccato delivery — along with his advanced age — never truly dovetailed with the medium as it exists in the 21st century.

This winter, at the height of the Jeremy Lin craze, Ryan sat and did a podcast with Bill Simmons, the guy who has emerged as Ryan’s heir apparent on matters NBA. Check it out here; it’s linked as part of my own post comparing/contrasting Billy Ray Bates and Lin. It would seem that Simmons was the guy who successfully crafted for himself a Ryanesque place in the basketball firmament, and I enjoy his writing and podcasts nearly as much.

Best of luck to them both. The torch has been passed.

With Paterno book due in August, A Question Nags

With Paterno book due in August, A Question Nags

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

One thing’s for sure with the Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky/Penn State scandal-saga, which re-emerged to dominate headlines this week upon release of Louis Freeh’s damning report: I’m glad Jerome Carboni didn’t live to see it. Had the father of my college housemate, Dennis Carboni, not passed away a few years ago, this Paterno debacle would surely have killed him.

The Carbonis were a hardcore football family and though it hailed from Meriden, Conn., hundreds of miles from Happy Valley, Mr. Carboni worshipped Joe Paterno and Penn State football. Dennis hinted to me that it might have had something to do with a shared Italian-American heritage, but let’s be honest: There was a lot for a 70something football fan to admire in the way Paterno conducted his affairs at Penn State. The perceived emphasis on academics. The pointedly unflashy blue-and-white uniforms. The long tenure. The hundreds of victories. The absence of scandal.

Joe Posnanski is 50something, but he was similarly drawn to this Paterno story-myth. Starting in early 2011, Posnanski, then a Sports Illustrated baseball writer, went so far as to secure access to Paterno and his family, relocate to State College, Pa., and set about researching a biography. The idea, as detailed in his own book proposal, was to “tell the remarkable story about a man who could have been anything but decided that the best way he could help change America was one college football player at a time.”

Like Jerome Carboni, Joe Posnanski was a true believer.

The contents of this eagerly awaited book — scheduled for release in August — will be all the more anticipated for the author’s pre-publication seclusion. Posnanski has said or written next to nothing about the project since going underground shortly after the scandal broke in November 2011, other than to acknowledge the obvious: The tenor of said book has changed dramatically. He’s also been under the gun; Simon and Schuster moved up publication of the book some 10 months to cash in on the salacious topicality of the subject. (Since leaving SI to write it, Posnanski has found time to partner with Major League Baseball on a web venture that involves USA Today, apparently).

I have nothing against Posnanski, but I’ve read pretty much everything I can find online about his peculiar role in this ongoing drama (which, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, certainly qualifies as tragic), and nowhere does the SI man offer, nor does any media colleague care to ask, the most nagging question here. So allow me: What did Posnanski know and when did he know it?

With every passing day, it gets harder to believe that an experienced, by all counts ethical, professional biographer was ensconced in State College doing research for months ahead of November 2011, and never got any wind of the allegations against Sandusky. People in the Penn State community knew what was going down. Janitors. Administrators. Journalists. Grand juries, the likes of which leveled the charges against Jerry Sandusky back in November, don’t get called or conducted in a vacuum. Word gets around. Consider all of Sandusky’s alleged victims across the community. You’re telling me they were all so cowed by Paterno, so deludedly intent on avoiding damage to the school’s football “brand”, that no one would have taken Posnanski aside and said, “You should read what this guy Mark Madden’s been writing in the Beaver County Times”? One conversation like this one and a single Google search would have put most writers well on the scent.

Maybe these sources were indeed too intimidated to have that conversation with an SI reporter on book leave. Freeh’s report indicates that janitors in the locker rooms witnessed many damning things but never reported them, so fearful they were for their jobs. That’s logical, that Paterno would wield enough power to deter a janitor from reporting a child rape in a Penn State locker-room shower. And, as we’ve read in Freeh’s report, Paterno did know about what had happened and moved concertedly with administrators to keep it hidden.

It’s complicated, but Posnanski is damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. If he knew something and sat on it, yikes… If he didn’t know anything, what sort of research was he doing all through 2011? A lot of sitting around the kitchen table with Joe Paterno and his family, apparently.

The latter is certainly less damning on the ethical scale. There’s no moral lapse in setting out to write a sports hagiography; they are written and read all too frequently. But if he was truly caught unawares, the surface nature of Posnanski’s research becomes embarrassingly clear when we consider the massive powder keg he failed to notice.

Jeremy Lin Channels his Inner Billy Ray Bates

Jeremy Lin Channels his Inner Billy Ray Bates

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

 

Two-plus weeks into the Jeremy Lin Era, you’ve no doubt heard the odd reference to one Billy Ray Bates. When basketball sage of yore Bob Ryan recently did a podcast with heir apparent Bill Simmons, Billy Ray’s out-of-nowhere emergence in 1980 was held up as the only apt comparison. Indeed, Ryan — whose stellar work for the Boston Globe in the 1970s and ‘80s fueled my interest in sports writing — claims to have been the first to make the Billy Ray analogy.

Not so. I believe I can claim to have made it almost immediately — not only because I, too, revere David Halberstam’s iconic book, “Breaks of the Game”, in which Billy Ray’s legend figures prominently, but because I stare Mr. Bates in the face every day when I sit down in my barn office. Yes, I own the poster pictured here and have since 1981. I only wish I’d have taken better care of it through the years. I mean, how many of these can there be out there?

Listen to the podcast linked above. It’s 45 minutes of all-world basketball chatter. But it should be said that even the Billy Ray analogy doesn’t quite fit (despite the fact that he, too, was cut by the Rockets before signing the 10-day contract that stuck). Bates was a brawny, 6’4” shooting guard, not a point guard like Lin. What’s more, he wasn’t completely unknown and unheralded: Billy Ray was voted Rookie of the Year in the Continental Basketball Association, the D League of its day; he won the CBA All-Star Game dunk contest and is reported to have broken no less than four backboards. Even in the media dark ages of 1980, word like that gets around.

In other ways, Lin has a ways to go in order to produce the same impact. Billy Ray was a gunner par excellence — he once scored 40 points (in 32 minutes) against the San Diego Clippers, and 35 in 25 minutes against the Mavericks — but he saved his best for the playoffs, averaging 25 ppg in the 1980 tournament and 28.3 ppg a year later (still a franchise record).

So while the Billy Ray-Jeremy comparison might be the best we can identify in the long history of the NBA, it’s not perfect — which merely speaks further to the truly anomalous goings-on in New York these days. The point guard aspect makes it completely unique. There simply isn’t any sort of precedent for a point guard emerging from developmental-league obscurity to score and dish on this scale.

If we mine the point guard vein a little deeper, we begin to better understand the evolution of this phenomenon. Lin was an excellent high school player and solid contributor on some decent Harvard teams, decent for the Ivy League anyway. But he never starred or produced anything like the numbers we’ve seen these last few weeks. Further, he was cut by both the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets this year. Clearly he didn’t show this sort of offensive firepower in either place.

Why? Well, because he was doing what he’d always done, what marginal back-up point guards in the NBA are supposed to do — that is, run the offense and avoid mistakes.

Lin himself has said that he was determined in New York to try something else — clearly what he was doing in Houston and Oakland weren’t working. This is not the same ol’ Jeremy Lin now setting the League on fire. It’s a radical departure, of his own making. That he landed in New York beside a coach who doesn’t care about defense (Lin remains a suspect defender) and encourages such aggressive (some would argue reckless) offensive hedonism is either blind luck, fate, or both.

Perhaps without knowing it, Lin changed his game in New York by channeled his inner Billy Ray.

 

James Connects Unlikely Dots Between Dewey, Pitt & my Wife

James Connects Unlikely Dots Between Dewey, Pitt & my Wife

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Out of the blue Thursday night the wife suggested we order, On Demand, one of the movies nominated for Academy Awards. It came down to Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris or Moneyball. We went with Moneyball and both found it extremely enjoyable.

Some 12 hours later, I happened upon an all-too-rare but typically brilliant article from Bill James, the godfather of modern statistical analysis as it relates to sports, baseball in particular. I’ve been a fan of James for more than 20 years (his Historical Baseball Abstract is perhaps the finest bathroom reading ever devised by man), but in the last 24 hours I’ve been jolted anew by the power of his thinking.

Without James, I would never have considered Dwight Evans Hall of Fame material, despite watching him patrol right field for the Red Sox for 17 years. Further, without James there would have been no Moneyball, neither book nor feature film.

For a woman who likes baseball well enough (my wife once resided in the Chicago neighborhood of Wrigleyville) and lives in New England (surrounded by “die-hahd” Red Sox fans), there was a lot in the film for her to like and/or relate to: Brad Pitt, naturally, but also a triumph- and pathos-packed story and myriad Sox references. Still, I was surprised by the extent to which she was engaged by the statistical analysis on which the story is based — the idea that ballplayers can be cannily appraised with such statistical breadth, and that a modest organization like the Oakland A’s could use that edge to compete with richer teams. It was handled beautifully in the context of the movie. I had assumed Hollywood would find ways to soft-peddle it, and they did — building up around it other storylines (Pitt’s single fatherhood, the magical rise of one-time journeyman and former Sox catcher Scott Hatteburg) to defray the essential wonkiness of the stat theme.

But the stat stuff was interesting to her. I hope she reads the James story linked here because what Moneyball author Michael Lewis and the makers of this film (Bennett Miller directed) have done is attach broader meaning and appeal to the gob-smacking insights James pioneered. Maybe she won’t care enough about Dewey Evans to read all the way through, but I would never have dreamed to share such a story with her before we watched Moneyball together.

Paterno? Forget that… What did Posnanski know?

Paterno? Forget that… What did Posnanski know?

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

For a cringe-inducing sports podcast experience without peer, it’s hard to beat Jonah Keri’s Nov. 3 Grantland Network pod with Sports Illustrated writer Joe Posnanski, who, prior to sitting down for this lengthy interview, had apparently spent the last several months ensconced in State College, Pa., researching a biography of Joe Paterno.

Subscribe to the Grantland Network via iTunes, listen to the first 18 minutes of this interview, then note its issue date: Nov. 3, 2011. It was recorded/aired roughly 48 hours before the college football world was rendered slack-jawed and the Fiefdom of Joe utterly torn asunder by revelations that Paterno’s longtime defensive assistant had, before retiring 12 years ago at age 55, allegedly been molesting young boys under the cover of a philanthropic foundation he administered — one that shared facilities with and operated with the imprimatur of JoePa’s storied football program in State College.

By now the details of this story and these allegations are widely known. However, listening to Posnanski on Nov. 3 is nothing short of surreal: One would never have gathered the slightest inkling that any of this was about to come down. Set beside the events of more recent days, the contrasts and ironies of this interview are myriad, stunning and puzzling.

No one can forecast the future, of course. On Nov. 3, 2011, the story had not yet been broken nationally.

Still, one has to wonder what sort of research Posnanski was doing all that time in State College. These rumors had been circulating in the local press since April 2011, as we’ve since learned, and it seems strange that a writer of Posnanski’s professional standing could immerse himself in Penn State culture and know absolutely nothing about it.

Further questions come thick and fast.

Is this merely an intersection of art and commerce? To be sure, the writer of this sort of book has a stake in building up the subject, not tearing him down. That’s part of the reason he did the interview with Keri, to promote the book. There’s nothing inherently wrong with sports biographies, or promoting them, but it strains credulity that Posnanski could have been researching one while unwittingly sitting atop one of the biggest powder kegs in American sports history.

Forget Paterno. What did the writer know and when did he know it?

Posnanski isn’t saying, not directly. He posted on his SI blog Nov. 8, with the clear implication that he will not be elaborating further. This story “needs time”, he wrote. Two days later, on Nov. 10, he apparently spoke to a Penn State class called “Joe Paterno: Communications and the Media,” during which he had this to say. [This tweet and other’s like them have been scrubbed; here’s a lesson for you journo students out there: always link and reproduce the tweet in the body of your story, for posterity].

For his part, Posnanski is sorta damned if he did know and damned if he didn’t. If he knew anything about what was going down and sat on it — in order to secure continued access to and cooperation from Paterno and Penn State; in order to protect his investment in the book project — it’s not unreasonable to question his ethics.

If he didn’t have a clue, it’s not unreasonable to question his research methodology and motivation.

Journalists don’t like to spell this out, but motivation drives research. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect that an uncritical, hagiographic book on Joe Paterno would never delve deeply or critically enough into the subject to produce revelations like those we’ve seen in the last two weeks.

Some in the Penn State community, some in the local media clearly knew what was going down. Grand Juries aren’t called out of thin air (its report was what busted this story wide open on Nov. 5). Prior to Nov. 5, all but a few locals surely treated this as a highly classified state secret, especially when an SI reporter was in their midst.

Posnanski’s situation would be a lot less complicated if he admitted that it was never his intention to write anything but a puff-piece biography on Paterno. That sort of motivation would explain his never having conducted enough real research to learn of this mess ahead of Nov. 5, 2011. He might simply maintain that he took on this project because he clearly admired Paterno and everything he’d built at Penn State (you can hear this esteem coating everything Posnanski said about the coach, the program, State College and PSU during his pod chat with Keri) and because Paterno would soon be passing Eddie Robinson for the all-time record in Division I college football victories, something that indeed did take place on Oct. 29, 2011 vs. Illinois.

From a sentimental, hagiographic and pecuniary standpoint, this is just the sort of formula around which obsequious sports biographies are routinely written, published and sold. (No one could have dreamed that record-setting victory would be Paterno’s last game as a Penn State employee.)

But that’s not what Posnanski is saying.

In his temporary farewell blog item, Posnanski does not take that tack. He appears determined to portray Paterno as a complicated figure of longstanding — as someone whom people have always simultaneously revered and despised. It was this complicated personality that attracted him, Posnanski writes.

Well, complicated figures have detractors. If Posnanski was motivated by the complicated nature of Joe Paterno’s story, it’s hard to imagine during his long sojourn in State College he didn’t sit down and chat at some point with Mark Madden, the Beaver County Times columnist who has been following this story all along, or simply read Madden’s April 3, 2011 column online. That’s all it would have taken not to have been blindsided by the Nov. 5 Grand Jury report.

For a guy who could be damned either way, there’s a strong likelihood that Posnanski will come out of this smelling like a rose. The terminus of this story is nowhere in sight, but Posnanski will surely be weighing in, eventually, with a book — a very different sort of book than he’d planned, one that stands to be far more prurient, far better promoted, far better read, and far more lucrative than the fawning bit of treacle he was promoting on Jonah Keri’s podcast Nov. 3.

I don’t know what that is, but it ain’t justice.

The Curmudgeon tackles Asia, GPS, Celts v. Picts

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Great to be with Peter Kessler, again, on his radio show, “Making the Turn,” a staple of the PGA Tour Network. It’s on XM, and this aired a week back but I reckoned I’d share it with you here, under Curmudgeon guise, as a podcast. Ireland vs. Scotland is the burning question. We answer that and touch on course development in Asia, GPS in rental cars, what makes a course worth playing over and over, and more Eire antics. Got to know Peter better during our recent Irish golf trip. The guy is a serious Beatles fan, which explains his show’s segue music. Enjoy.