How Colleges Treat Fired Coaches

End of the regular season and the coaching blood bath begins. 32 down, probably 40 total. And that only includes the men's basketball coaches. Already the bodies are being filled with new bodies.  Ever wonder what happens to fired coaches and what it does to Intercollegiate athletics?

One day your name headlines the neon signs on the football stadium. One day the media follows your every move and recruit. One day you are part of the face of the college and embody the values that university wants to project through sports.

One day in a closed meeting where remarkably little information is exchanged you are offered the chance to resign or just fired. The person who fires you assumes you know why and a bland announcements says "we decided to go in a different direction and thank coach X for his or her dedicated service to the university. We wish them well in their future endeavors."

The next day the ex-coach's name has disappeared from the web site and all the advertising of the university. All the speaking engagements where the coach would extoll the university are cancelled. All the recruits are hastily called by the sport administrator or AD or even the President depending on how important they are. During the night, movers surreptitiously come in and box books, trophies and pictures of you and boosters and players. Could be 3 years of stuff or 20 years of stuff, the same drill. No party, no farewell, barely a chance to say goodbye to friends. You are GONE. Actually you are not just gone, it goes deeper.

The ex-coach now becomes a nonperson, not a persona non grata, but literally a non-person like in Orwell's 1984. If you look, the terminated coach no longer exists in the athletic department web or marketing. The office name plates disappear. You can see the shadowed space where the plates used to be while everyone waits for a new coach. Maybe a lonely bus sign with the ex-coach's name or face still wanders the city streets. The empty spot on the portrait wall has been filled by moving all other coaches' pictures around.

Welcome to the end of an intercollegiate coach's job.

This is how the modern university treats their coaches. The do not fire them so much as erase them. Years, service, loyalty, exemplary conduct, none of it matters when the AD and boosters, and in big revenue sports, the President, huddle and decide.

This scenario should imprint on us why coaches sometimes  have trouble taking all the ideals and defense of intercollegiate athletes seriously. They know better. They may be men and women deeply committed to  helping the student grow as humans and excel as athletes.        BUT if a coach does not win,  graduation rates, the quality of humanity of their athletes, their public service matter nothing. If a coach ticks off boosters, character does not matter. As a matter of fact, as long as coaches are winning, most of the time character does not matter either.

I have seen this too many times now. Men and women I respect leaving in the night and not even able or willing to come back to the campus they served. With luck, their true friends will hold a party for them.

Most coaches have experienced this once, and they know that the boosters are not their friends; lord help a coach who believes a booster is a friend, just wait until they start to lose. Coaches live in a looking glass world  where everyone lionizes you and the university markets you, but discards you like a failed toothpaste brand.

The end of one coach marks the beginning of another. Another cycle launches. If we wonder why coaches' leave for other jobs, if we wonder about that attenuated loyalty of coaches or players, if we wonder why good coaches may be tempted to cheat, go no farther than the end of the job. The colleges created this, not the coaches.

"Once I was somebody."

Sacred Groves and Unholy Rivalry

I often extol how athletic competition and team loyalty provides a reference point for individual and community identity in the United States.The rabid and wondrous outpouring of interest at March Madness illustrates how deep and wide this can be.  For a country of immense mobility and strained family, local and work loyalties, these ties of loyalty and identity to our teams helps anchor selfhood and keep us whole as we traverse the fractured landscape of our country.

This identification with teams has many upsides, but a dark side always lurks. We are mortals, and we can turn any good into bad. The ugly vandalism of the Auburn tree grove three weeks ago reminds us of that. Some adults, not kids performing pranks, murdered the trees and we can only guess why. On the phone the alleged perpetrator said, "roll Tide, roll." 

I have never been to Auburn but lived on several campuses that had sacred trees and groves. These tree created places of haven are a remnant of the Greek origins of our universities. These groves provide places of respite and peace and reflection. Many of us remember moments of joy, refuge or even love and insight in those groves. They provide a locus of identity for the community.

The groves may be a place to celebrate victories, but more deeply, they celebrate the world of university. Living, growing trees carve out a space that commemorate the world of the minds and relations and the emotions we cultivate there.

So the wanton destruction in the name of sports rivalry should horrify all of us who value the communal aspects of sports.

I spend way too much time around grown adults, successful strong people, who find their lives rent by anger and depression or pure joy depending upon weekly fate of their college teams--no these are not the senior administrators or coaches, these are the boosters.

Too many of us live out our own lives through our teams rather than seeing them as aspects of our individuality who bring us joy and sadness in a community with others.

In college sports we talk about “rivalry games.” Most often we mean the intra-state games between the major universities. At Michigan we all loved the UM—MSU rivalry. Here at Washington, the UW--WSU  rivalry brings spice and week long frenetic activity before each game. The rivalries are both good-natured and intense. Oddly enough  many of the athletes are from out of state and don’t quite understand the intensity of the fans until they experience the games. The games provide bragging rights and lots of other social aspects before and after. Our neighbors to the south in Oregon call their rivalry “the civil war.”

The civil war metaphor taps something truer and more dangerous here; this illuminates the Auburn destruction. I have lived at schools where lots of pranks and stolen symbols or painted symbols surround the rivalry week. They are usually “pranks” and even the vandalism or theft of symbols is not permanent. But this destruction of living things strikes deeper. An abiding rival of Auburn, Mississippi State expressed its condolences given its own grove that served as a place of contact, celebration and party.

This speaks to a rivalry that has degenerated into hatred. I think of blood rivals. Children are born into schools. Kids can find themselves in trouble with their family and relatives if they go to the hated rival school. As in Alabama, the blood rivals may reflect class or geographic or status resentments. But the blood rivals linger deeper and meaner. Often the teams find themselves both confused by and caught up in the rivalries.

I think the moral worth of sports is desecrated when it inspires and reinforces this type of mean resentment. I remember Damn Yankees where a man sells his soul to help his beloved Red Sox beat the Yankees. I respect and admire sport, but it is not worth or worthy of selling your soul or destroying the sacred. 

End of a Season

It just ends. The clock ticking, thousands of fans stand and yell and scream. Everything hurries up compressing six months into .5 seconds. Then, it’s over. Just like that.

Reality rips apart, and the flow that consumed the lives of players and coaches for six months ends. One teams shouts in jubilation and relief, the other walks off heads hanging, towels over their heads, even though they have not reason for either, they just walk off the floor for the very very last time, together.

The season had ground on forever. It started with immense expectations, conference championships and deep runs into the NCAA tournament beckoned. A trip to Maui launched the campaign.

The season ground on. A long long season. A few early losses to good teams, a few beautiful victories. A top twenty appearance. Then a horrid midseason swoon, the team had visited this before. The media turned on the guys, the media forgot about the team, the boosters grumbled and struggled to make sense of all the talent laying waste.

No one believed in them but they themselves. Dreams died quickly and loudly in some bad losses. People tried to not to care or just felt confused as the team blew games and jumped from brilliant to disorganized and lost inside the same game and the same season.

But the loss of dreams gave birth to another slight hope. No one even mentioned it except the team to themselves. A tournament fun, a tournament championship based on a couple grind victories and a brilliant fun game of pure basketball decided at the last second.

Beneath the season the physical and mental attrition never let up. An early torn ACL of the starting point guard, but no one complained and the shooting guard grew into a leader and point guard. Three concussions threw off development of players and hurt the team and its evolution. Then a shadow of an investigation and lingering prosecutors darkened the team’s accomplishments and weighed on everyone all the time.

Guys grew up right before our eyes. Attrition and scrutiny could have broken them and certainly hurt, but a new dream grew from a dead dream.

Then off to the big dance, the team flew on a charter to the NCAA tournament. 2800 miles from home, the farthest any team had to travel. They took exams, studied and played.

The end always feels just too harsh, too sudden. It was a hard hard game. Good moments both teams playing college ball with runs and mistakes and amazement all woven together. Uneven foul rations but the game remained in their grasp. One missed inbound pass, the game, the season, the awful quiet of what might have been.

No one knows quite what to say. Anything you can say sounds like a cliché, until you realize that in context a lot of clichés are true.

The bus ride back is quiet and somber. Somber as in funeral, not quiet and focused like heading for a game. Everyone knows, and no one can articulate it that walking off the court was the last time this group will ever play together for high stakes. The last time this group will rely upon each other and share the trust and know the pain of loss and the jubilation and sometimes relief of victory. Three will go their way, but it is all too hard to think about. It just hurts.

At the hotel the room everyone ate in and planned and did scout is cleared out, no buffet line. The round tables and huddled screen area replaced by neat soldierly chair lines for the AFCO TECH sales meeting. No sign of the team. The TVs still play the next games with announcers abuzz with runs, and sterling plays and heartbreaking 19-year-old mistakes, but it's all background now to lost possibility, to lost probability.

The guys will recover some. Later they will celebrate at the banquet and remember the crazy roller coaster triumphant year, but right now it is too silent, too abrupt and the plane is going the wrong direction.

Grant Hill on "Uncle Tom" Basket Ball Players

Jalen Rose's unrepentant accusation that all black basketball players who played for Duke were "Uncle Toms" simply ignites the kindling of a long dried out battle within the black community over the nature of achievement and growth and being "authentically black." It echoes the play ground attacks upon young African American kids who study and get good grade and are demeaned for not being black.

I have lots to say about it, but nothing I could say can touch the clarity and eloquence of Grant Hill's response to Jalen Rose and his "Fab Five" cohort who resent and mock black athletes who attend high academic performing schools. His letter is about a much deeper image of success and accomplishment for the country and the community.

Here it is:

This is the full text of Grant Hill responding to Jalen Rose's current comments about Duke basketball.

"The Fab Five," an ESPN film about the Michigan basketball careers of Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Chris Webber, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson from 1991 to 1993, was broadcast for the first time Sunday night. In the show, Rose, the show's executive producer, stated that Duke recruited only black players he considered to be "Uncle Toms." Grant Hill, a player on the Duke team that beat Michigan in the 1992 Final Four, reflected on Rose's comments.

I am a fan, friend and longtime competitor of the Fab Five. I have competed against Jalen Rose and Chris Webber since the age of 13. At Michigan, the Fab Five represented a cultural phenomenon that impacted the country in a permanent and positive way. The very idea of the Fab Five elicited pride and promise in much the same way the Georgetown teams did in the mid-1980s when I was in high school and idolized them. Their journey from youthful icons to successful men today is a road map for so many young, black men (and women) who saw their journey through the powerful documentary, "The Fab Five."

It was a sad and somewhat pathetic turn of events, therefore, to see friends narrating this interesting documentary about their moment in time and calling me a bitch and worse, calling all black players at Duke "Uncle Toms" and, to some degree, disparaging my parents for their education, work ethic and commitment to each other and to me. I should have guessed there was something regrettable in the documentary when I received a Twitter apology from Jalen before its premiere. I am aware Jalen has gone to some length to explain his remarks about my family in numerous interviews, so I believe he has some admiration for them.

In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only "black players that were 'Uncle Toms,' " Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families. He leaves us all guessing exactly what he believes today.

I am beyond fortunate to have two parents who are still working well into their 60s. They received great educations and use them every day. My parents taught me a personal ethic I try to live by and pass on to my children.

I come from a strong legacy of black Americans. My namesake, Henry Hill, my father's father, was a day laborer in Baltimore. He could not read or write until he was taught to do so by my grandmother. His first present to my dad was a set of encyclopedias, which I now have. He wanted his only child, my father, to have a good education, so he made numerous sacrifices to see that he got an education, including attending Yale.

This is part of our great tradition as black Americans. We aspire for the best or better for our children and work hard to make that happen for them. Jalen's mother is part of our great black tradition and made the same sacrifices for him.

My teammates at Duke - all of them, black and white - were a band of brothers who came together to play at the highest level for the best coach in basketball. I know most of the black players who preceded and followed me at Duke. They all contribute to our tradition of excellence on the court.

It is insulting and ignorant to suggest that men like Johnny Dawkins (coach at Stanford), Tommy Amaker (coach at Harvard), Billy King (general manager of the Nets), Tony Lang (coach of the Mitsubishi Diamond Dolphins in Japan), Thomas Hill (small-business owner in Texas), Jeff Capel (former coach at Oklahoma and Virginia Commonwealth), Kenny Blakeney (assistant coach at Harvard), Jay Williams (ESPN analyst), Shane Battier (Memphis Grizzlies) and Chris Duhon (Orlando Magic) ever sold out their race.

To hint that those who grew up in a household with a mother and father are somehow less black than those who did not is beyond ridiculous. All of us are extremely proud of the current Duke team, especially Nolan Smith. He was raised by his mother, plays in memory of his late father and carries himself with the pride and confidence that they instilled in him.

The sacrifice, the effort, the education and the friendships I experienced in my four years are cherished. The many Duke graduates I have met around the world are also my "family," and they are a special group of people. A good education is a privilege.

Just as Jalen has founded a charter school in Michigan, we are expected to use our education to help others, to improve life for those who need our assistance and to use the excellent education we have received to better the world.

A highlight of my time at Duke was getting to know the great John Hope Franklin, John B. Duke Professor of History and the leading scholar of the last century on the total history of African-Americans in this country. His insights and perspectives contributed significantly to my overall development and helped me understand myself, my forefathers and my place in the world.

Ad ingenium faciendum, toward the building of character, is a phrase I recently heard. To me, it is the essence of an educational experience. Struggling, succeeding, trying again and having fun within a nurturing but competitive environment built character in all of us, including every black graduate of Duke.

My mother always says, "You can live without Chaucer and you can live without calculus, but you cannot make it in the wide, wide world without common sense." As we get older, we understand the importance of these words. Adulthood is nothing but a series of choices: you can say yes or no, but you cannot avoid saying one or the other. In the end, those who are successful are those who adjust and adapt to the decisions they have made and make the best of them.

I caution my fabulous five friends to avoid stereotyping me and others they do not know in much the same way so many people stereotyped them back then for their appearance and swagger. I wish for you the restoration of the bond that made you friends, brothers and icons.

I am proud of my family. I am proud of my Duke championships and all my Duke teammates. And, I am proud I never lost a game against the Fab Five.

Grant Henry Hill
Phoenix Suns
Duke '94

Bracketology by Species

I am not good at brackets, actually by NCAA rules, I cannot bet on brackets, which is a good thing. But the more I think about brackets, I have come to the conclusion that we need to rethink all the algorithms and other methods to weight and figure these things out. Actually I am not even sure I like the existing brackets.I am going to make up my own brackets around school identities and their mascots.

Looking at this in a different way, we should not worry about colleges or teams.  Instead I am going to focus upon the genus and species of mascot or nickname types since they reflect a deep reality about each of the schools. 

So rather than go through the absurd gyrations of algorithmic tea leaf reading for my brackets, I am going to get rid of brackets entirely. I will analyze the teams by genus/species type and then predict what the elite eight will look like.

 Now most brackets actually follow brackets when they match teams assigned in brackets. I propose that we have battles among the various species such as  felines—there are four wildcats after all—or canines, three bulldogs and two huskies!  Then we figure out which one will win in each category. Oh, I forget the plant/nut category; we only have three, the orange, sycamore and buckeyes.

I propose these categories for this year: avian; feline; canine; ursine; guys; plant/nuts and demonic. We should have a representative of each species or type.

Avian: We have two eagles, a roadrunner, peacock, blackbird, cardinal, owl and Jayhawk. The eagles are really pretty chicken and will fight and wound each other. The cardinals really will hide, although they are red. They will let the eagles kill each other off, then they will flitter out. Unfortunately, as those of us from the Midwest know, a Jayhawk will do in a cardinal any time, same with roadrunner and peacocks. The owls only really do the night thing, so in a day game; they will get massacred. So among the avian, we will end up with the Jayhawks. We might find a wounded eagle in the elite eight but definitely a Jayhawk.

Feline: I always considered it a bit unfair when birds face cats or dogs, I mean, how can any earth bound creatures fight against birds? Unless the birds  get too close, such as a golden eagle getting too close to a wild cat. So the felines are interesting. The four wildcats will tear each other apart no matter when they meet. So none of them will make it out or whoever does may  be too wounded. I am not sure what to do with the 2 panther/cougars. They are much cooler and tougher than wildcats or bearcats. It's probable a cougar/panther will make it. The  Tigers will pounce and rip them up. That leaves the remaining lions that look a lot better than they are. So among the felines, no wildcats will make it, the lions are useless and we should end up with a Tiger and a panther/cougar in the elite eight.

Canines:  2 huskies, 3 bulldogs and 2 terriers. Really no contest here. The bulldogs are cool and tenacious, but don't have the speed, endurance or teeth of the Huskies. The terriers are meant for lesser prey. A husky definitely makes the elite eight.

Ursine & Plant/Nut: The ursine category really is puzzling. I mean we have bears, bruins and grizzlies. I think the grizzlies should dominate, but the bruins really are smart and big and those claws, man. Well I think that somehow or another a bear, no, I am betting bruin because it sounds better, might make it to the elite eight. Then, again, I actually think the plant/nuts have a better chance. I mean the ursines can choke on the nuts or tree can fall on the bears. If the bears don't choke on the nut, they can excrete it and the nut grows into a tree, that fall son the bear. So   I think the ursines probably will not make it, but a plant will, probably a buckeye.

So we have a no ursines, a cougar/panther, maybe a wounded wildcat, a tiger, a Jayhawk and maybe a wounded eagle and a nut/plant.


Guys:   The guy category is spread all over the place, mainly we are talking about manly men. Think Volunteers, Commodores, Rebels, Mountaineers, Patriots, Musketeers, Irish, Gauchos, well you get the picture. In theory they should do well, being smart and all, but they generally have pretty limited weapons and coonskin caps, so I am not sure who will kill whom in this free for all. I do believe one will make it, on the basis of endurance and muskets, the mountaineers and on the basis of drinking ability the Irish or Volunteers. Speed, the running rebels or Gauchos. This being college sport, I go with drinking ability and think the Irish will make it, but it could easily be Mountaineers given the length of tourney and the need for endurance and going to strange new places to play.


I filled up the elite eight with species with one exception. I have left out other categories that could get us to badgers and wolverines and tar heels, but I will try that next year.

Demonic:  The last category has a significant advantage with its ability to evoke dark powers. I did not do a God's bracket this year, so the demonic are pretty sure to get one representative. Now some old favorites like Demon Deacons and Horned Toads are not around; that leaves only the Blue Devils. So for sheer having sold your soul cussedness, the Blue Devils will probably be there also.

So there you have it. The first species based bracketology analysis:
2 Felines--1 canine--1 plant/nut--1 guys--2 avians--1 demon.


I will do an inter-species analysis for the final four.

Ohio State Rips the Illusion of Presidential Control

The entire NCAA governance structure depends upon the concept of Presidential control. When the NCAA moved from a membership based voting  at conventions to a strong Presidential Board, it achireved a range of serious academic reforms that the Presidents pushed through. The whole philosophy depends upon the ideal that Presidents will weigh academics more seriously and protect student welfare more seriously than athletic directors and coaches given modern pressures upon them. It also means the Presidents will act with courage and stand up to boosters.

By and large the approach is right. Athletic directors mutter that the Presidents are too removed from the real world and don’t understand their “business.” This can be actually a good thing when the Presidents demand that the coaches and schools live up to accountability standards.

Gordon Gee, onetime President of Ohio State and Vanderbilt and now President again of Ohio State, has just made a mockery of this critical principle. With his actions around the case of his football coach Jim Tressel, he demonstrates the utter failure of the approach if  President lacks courage or common sense.

The  entire edifice of control falls apart when super star coaches become more powerful than Presidents. I have written on this before. We see regular examples of it at Louisville where the  president supports a married super star coach who has sex on table at a bar; or at Tennessee where a President tolerates a coach who lied to the school, the papers and the NCAA; or at Kentucky where the President hires a superstar coach who has had two titles vacated. I could go on, but the point may be that President’s have lost control of the sports too.

The recent experience at Ohio State finally strips away the veil. Jim Tressel is the football coach—he is 7-1 against Michigan—remember that;  it matters. He has collected a bunch of bowl wins and one national championship. While he can be sanctimonious, he has largely run a clean program. I even taught a chapter form one of his books. The chapter explores the role of love in sport and coaching.

Turns out Tressel is NOT one of the good guys anymore. Maybe he never was.

Tressel’s story has played out in the media. He discovered that his players had violated NCAA rules and kept the knowledge to himself for eight months! He had an obligation to report it to his superior and the NCAA; he did none of the above. So his team won games while the coach knew about the violations. He demanded that his players stay at school next year even though they have been suspended for five games.

Now it all comes out. Even as his  players were suspended for five games, the coach withheld information, misrepresented the facts, punished the athletes while knowing of the deed and essentially lied to everyone.

Now the two kickers. Ohio State, after immense and thoughtful deliberations, yeah, suspended the coach for two games—Toledo and Akron—and docked him 1/16 of his salary, that is three games less than the players. So Ohio State joins the parade of schools afraid to demand that coaches live up to their own ideals and words.The school has been justly ripped for this nonpunishment punishment that sends a clear message to athletes about what really matters in life.

The second issue strikes at the heart of the NCAA governance model. We know that the NCAA  reform movement deeply depends upon Presidential control. The athletic directors and coaches will NOT lead the charge to reform college athletics or the preserve the academic welfare of student athletes. They might like to but the pressures to win and make money are too great.

Only the Presidents can do this; this was the power of the movement that swept Myles Brand to power and can be harnessed by new NCAA President Emmert. The Tressel mess not only besmirches Tressel and Ohio  State, it reveals frailty of the reform  and control effort when the President has little courage or common sense but a strong survival instinct..

Gordon Gee announced the death knell of real Presidential control by admitting what many of us fear, that Presidents really are afraid and have no control over their super-sized coaches.

When asked if he considered dismissing his lying and misrepresenting coach , Gee, bow tie bobbing,  laughed and said,

"No, are you kidding me! Let me be very clear,  I just hope the coach does not dismiss me."

Nuff said.

The Medal of Freedom, Athletes and Race

A billionaire philanthropist, President of Germany and the United States, a great cellist, a poet laureate and iconic sculptor painter, a martyred medical humanitarian and a baseball and basketball player. These individuals received the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award from President Obama on February 17, 2010.  As they say on Sesame Street, “one of these things is not like the other.” Can you guess?

The Executive Order creating the Medal of Freedom states that it should be given to individuals who make "especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors," President Obama emphasized that the individuals who receive the medal “reveal the best of who we are and of who we aspire to be.” He added "they remind us that we each have it within our powers to fulfill dreams, to advance the dream of others and to remake the world for our children." 

So why would a baseball player, Stan Musial, and a basketball player, Bill Russell, be included in this august group? More than a few international folks don’t get it, and I think the answer to this question reveals a lot to us as Americans and the iconic role of athletics in our culture.

An odd place to start might be to remember that only the United States of all countries that award Rhodes scholarships ever took Cecil Rhodes statement of “vigorous body” to link the award for decades to intercollegiate athletic participation. Americans have always believed that the Greek ideal (even when they did not know it was a Greek ideal) matters that athletic excellence epitomizes the unity of mind and body.

The United States, alone of all countries, supports four, count them four! major pro leagues—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. This does not count fledgling soccer leagues and the endless array of tennis and golf tournaments as well as minor sports like lingerie football. The country chooses to saturate itself in viewing, following, thinking and obsessing about and spending on athletic competition.

Musial and Russell are not the first athletes to receive the award and the inclusion of them in this group reminds us of two aspects of sport. First, it is a valued and honored domain of life that possesses its own excellence. But we have Hall of Fames for that.

The Medal of Freedom, secondly, pushes beyond simple achievement of excellence. A person can be a great athlete or artist or businessperson and be an awful human being. The Medal honors impact and courage to extend one’s actions to better the world.

Both these athletes offer a glittering and fabulous array of accomplishments and milestones like 24 all-star awards or 11 NBA championships. Both men won championships but also went on to coach and win championships. Russell stood as the first black coach in NBA history. In this he was a pathfinder as were many other athlete Medal of Freedom winners. He, like they, broke barriers but also changed the conversation about the capacity of black citizens.

The commentaries on both awards highlighted common words like “gentleman,” “dignity,” or “class.” They reflect not just the superb accomplishments of these athletes or even their later philanthropic work. These words etch the importance of a way of being in the world.

These two persons like many of their predecessors such as Arthur Ashe, Jackie Robinson, Billy Jean King, and Joe DiMaggio revealed to us not just a glorification of achievement but how a person wears their greatness and models this for those who follow. This capacity to carry oneself with grace under pressure means even more when like Russell, Robinson, Ashe, or King an athlete must endure doubt, hostility and ridicule because of their race or gender. This “class” provides a mirror to the society of its own grotesque prejudices. The reflection bigots see is not reactive or vicious, but a person of dignity, talent and tenacity who achieves what the bigot admires despite prejudices.

The sports category carries so much importance in the United States’ pantheon lies in its attraction as a pure meritocracy. The founding myth of America and its dream depends upon the ideal that we all compete, if not on a level field, at least one that gives us a chance, a fair chance to develop and reveal our talent.

United States’ moral legitimacy depends heavily upon the claim that anyone has the fair chance to compete and succeed. It is an ideal too often violated at birth for so many that will be doomed to the destiny of their nativity position. But sport, sport presents a brutally honest and transparent field of competition. There are not safe havens and excellence, smarts and commitment can and often do WIN. The sheer openness of sport competition, the clarity of its rules and visibility of its victories and defeats goes farther towards ensuring merit-based achievement than in almost any other area of American life.

45 percent of the Medal of Freedom Winners in the sports category are black Americans. This predominance attests to that denial of opportunity in so many areas of life, including sport. Their presence in the sport category emphasizes the relentless success and achievement of black athletes when finally given a fair, even if not level, chance to compete. Americans have used sport to prove to itself that black persons can have access to a real meritocracy.

The award of the Medal of Freedom to sports figures reminds us of the cultural role athletes play in the United States, it also reminds us how mfar we have to go to live up to our ideals of freedom.

Why Care About Baseball Anymore? Part II

PART II

The defenders of this oligarchy cite the few teams who make the playoffs and sometimes steal a series, but these are clearly unstable anomalies. A rare team like Florida Marlins can steal a World Series but it resembles a fluke and dissipates immediately. The other model of long term investment and talent pool like Tampa Bay made the AL east so interesting, but they have to be dismantled very several years after their ascendancy. They  lose control of their players at that point, or they must bail out on players earlier to get some return. The bottom half needs an astrological convergence of all their nurtured talent coming together at once coupled with career years by veterans to have a chance. Then the convergence disappears and all that remains is a frame to rebuild again  like the skeletal Tamp Bay  after their recent fire sale.

The World Series winner in the last seven years had San Francisco (10), Yankees (1), Philadelphia (4), Boston (2), St. Louis Chicago (3),  Boston (2). The exceptions like Texas this year (27) keep critics at bay but dissolve under the stresses of the market and their inability to keep players. If they have loaded systems, they can replenish, but not with the strategic consistency as the Oakland failure of the last decade demonstrates.

Baseball now clusters into teams that: (1) always can compete unless hamstrung by stupidity like the Mets or hubris like the Yankees. (2) Some can compete through a combination of reasonable resources and or career years like the Giants or Chicago and  (3) the hopeless ones like my Kansas City Royals or Pittsburgh or Cleveland who will never compete under this regime. So Kansas City watches Zach Greinke announce he wants to leave a ship dead in the water (20) and ends up in Milwaukee (18) which has a very small window with its combination of veterans and soon to depart invested players like Prince Fielder.

A great organization, even a corporate shell sports franchise, still needs several attributes to attain excellence. It needs a relentless focus upon core mission--build a winning team--depends upon getting good people committed to the goal; creating a culture where everyone is not only competent but works endlessly to find, evaluate, train and organize personnel to accomplish it. The formula does not change--success grows from committed skill+culture+organization.

The fifty percent turnover in football playoffs each year illustrate what real competition looks like in a quasi equal playing field. Football shows how the combination of talent, smarts, and organization can make a difference. Equal playing fields places a value on every team having to evaluate talent and nurture players and draft or sign free agents judiciously.

This year's Super Bowl represents the impossible for baseball. Two regular not ultra rich franchises compete year in and year out and go through ups an downs, but stay alive because of the salary cap, revenue sharing and then win the test of smart management, supple vision and sustained commitment. A Packers could not even exit in baseball and the Steelers would be the Pirates, so people wonder why folks give up on baseball and migrate to football. Football offers hope, baseball kills it.

Baseball depends upon institutional talent development unlike football and basketball. Basketball burns through talent and relies upon AAU and sometimes college. The modern pro game is so deskilled that  in depth talent development does not matter. Football relies  upon college sport which develops players but also educates them and nurtures the  intelligence required by the sport. Baseball, however, takes much more time. College baseball does not come near the skill development level, and the international base requires heavy investment and maturation in minor league play. This is tragedy of the modern system that spawns an illusion of hope for low cluster teams, but then encourages the talent to bolt to the oligarchs once they reach their prime.

I love baseball. I appreciate the art and combination of individual excellence and spacing with integrated teamwork. I enjoy the pace and social aspect of watching, thinking and conversing. I like the time and space configuration as well as the social dislocation to an intensified but non frenetic or ultra violent competitive space.

I lived through expansions, steroids, lock outs, collusion, but in each case, I possessed the possibility of hope. Each spring brought possibility. The essence of sport competitions lies not just in the excellence it inspires, but in the fact that we do not know the outcome in advance. Baseball is destroying this hope for fans..

Why Care about Baseball Anymore? Part I & II

Spring training is beginning. Commentators wax rhapsodically about the rebirth of hope, spring and baseball. It is that glorious moment with only possibility before teams and fans. No wins, no losses, only hope. The cycle of sport seasons should renew people, offer hope, structure life for the next nine months with hope, conversation and following the execution and sport.

I hate this moment.

Each year I vow not to care anymore. The economic structure of baseball has skewed so radically that nothing resembling hope exists anymore. How much hope can a fan in Oakland,  Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Seattle,  San Diego or Baltimore have? Being a fan is anchored in loyalty and hope, baseball is killing hope.

Without a salary cap and without a mandatory minimum, baseball has evolved into a stable oligarchy of wealth and talent. This is not a monopoly, but with rare and brief exceptions, the winners and participants in championships can be predicted by the cluster of self reinforcing wealth of the top 10 teams. Most professional clubs exist like my old Kansas City Athletics did for the Yankees, as farm systems who develop talent, have them for four to five years and then must trade them or lose them to free agency to the elite wealthy teams like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. You can see by this comparison of the Yankee salary to the average of the rest.

Baseball owners and players both collude in a system that benefits them. Players make exorbitant salaries with long contracts that no other sport would consider. No one who understands the production curve of a professional athlete would award 20 million dollars a year for 7 years to a 32 year old player. This happens all the time among the baseball oligarchs because they do not worry about money in the hobby of billionaires. Small market owners, not faced with a minimum, hide behind the excuse and under-invest in their teams while reaping a profit from under investment and largesse distributed by the Yankees, Philadelphia and Boston with their mega salary structure.

It is already hard being a fan today  because so few teams have stable personnel. Free agency, money and hair trigger billionaire owners with a relentless drive to win produce unprecedented turn over on teams. We follow corporate shells that move fungible players in and out with the rare exceptions of stars who choose and stay at one team for their career. But it is almost impossible to be a fan for a team that offers no hope. It is like rooting for the Cubs but without the romance.

The Cliff Lees of the world are rare. Lee decided to sign for less money and spurned the Yankees for the Philadelphia. Almost no one takes less money unless you are already a millionaire several times over and can decide among winners. Even he  settled for "only" 20 million per year.  I cannot blame Lee and veterans like him who join teams who have real chances of winning championships as well as making him a millionaire. For most of the non-oligarch teams, they can maybe afford one Cliff Lee but cannot provide the supporting cast to be a real contender. The superb players migrate to the rich teams who offer real money and real chances to win. If you look at the Yankees and Boston and the Angels and Philadelphia you see teams built upon the investment and sweat of other systems who cannot afford to keep their players. No player wants to be consigned to a hopeless cause when teams that have the money and a real chance to win pursues them.

The more telling examples is watching the Albert Pujos example unfold. The best hitter in baseball wants a 10 year 30 million dollars a year contract. The Yankees can pay him and not worry a lot as he declines, but for the Cardinals, if they pay him 30 million, that is one third of their total salary structure so the declining production curve undermines their future and makes it impossible to surround him with the talent needed to compete year in and year out. So the deal was not struck, Pujos will leave at the end of the season or be traded late, and a strong well off team will once again lose out to the oligarchs.

So the team identity, investments and future dissipate under the internal ability to pay salaries and the external capacity of a few teams to cherry pick the best and rip out identities from the other team. So much for hope.

PART II

The defenders of this oligarchy cite the few teams who make the playoffs and sometimes steal a series, but these are clearly unstable anomalies. A rare team like Florida Marlins can steal a World Series but it resembles a fluke and dissipates immediately. The other model of long term investment and talent pool like Tampa Bay made the AL east so interesting, but they have to be dismantled very several years after their ascendancy. They  lose control of their players at that point, or they must bail out on players earlier to get some return. The bottom half needs an astrological convergence of all their nurtured talent coming together at once coupled with career years by veterans to have a chance. Then the convergence disappears and all that remains is a frame to rebuild again  like the skeletal Tamp Bay  after their recent fire sale.

The World Series winner in the last seven years had San Francisco (10), Yankees (1), Philadelphia (4), Boston (2), St. Louis Chicago (3),  Boston (2). The exceptions like Texas this year (27) keep critics at bay but dissolve under the stresses of the market and their inability to keep players. If they have loaded systems, they can replenish, but not with the strategic consistency as the Oakland failure of the last decade demonstrates.

Baseball now clusters into teams that: (1) always can compete unless hamstrung by stupidity like the Mets or hubris like the Yankees. (2) Some can compete through a combination of reasonable resources and or career years like the Giants or Chicago and  (3) the hopeless ones like my Kansas City Royals or Pittsburgh or Cleveland who will never compete under this regime. So Kansas City watches Zach Greinke announce he wants to leave a ship dead in the water (20) and ends up in Milwaukee (18) which has a very small window with its combination of veterans and soon to depart invested players like Prince Fielder.

A great organization, even a corporate shell sports franchise, still needs several attributes to attain excellence. It needs a relentless focus upon core mission--build a winning team--depends upon getting good people committed to the goal; creating a culture where everyone is not only competent but works endlessly to find, evaluate, train and organize personnel to accomplish it. The formula does not change--success grows from committed skill+culture+organization.

The fifty percent turnover in football playoffs each year illustrate what real competition looks like in a quasi equal playing field. Football shows how the combination of talent, smarts, and organization can make a difference. Equal playing fields places a value on every team having to evaluate talent and nurture players and draft or sign free agents judiciously.

This year's Super Bowl represents the impossible for baseball. Two regular not ultra rich franchises compete year in and year out and go through ups an downs, but stay alive because of the salary cap, revenue sharing and then win the test of smart management, supple vision and sustained commitment. A Packers could not even exit in baseball and the Steelers would be the Pirates, so people wonder why folks give up on baseball and migrate to football. Football offers hope, baseball kills it.

Baseball depends upon institutional talent development unlike football and basketball. Basketball burns through talent and relies upon AAU and sometimes college. The modern pro game is so deskilled that  in depth talent development does not matter. Football relies  upon college sport which develops players but also educates them and nurtures the  intelligence required by the sport. Baseball, however, takes much more time. College baseball does not come near the skill development level, and the international base requires heavy investment and maturation in minor league play. This is tragedy of the modern system that spawns an illusion of hope for low cluster teams, but then encourages the talent to bolt to the oligarchs once they reach their prime.

I love baseball. I appreciate the art and combination of individual excellence and spacing with integrated teamwork. I enjoy the pace and social aspect of watching, thinking and conversing. I like the time and space configuration as well as the social dislocation to an intensified but non frenetic or ultra violent competitive space.

I lived through expansions, steroids, lock outs, collusion, but in each case, I possessed the possibility of hope. Each spring brought possibility. The essence of sport competitions lies not just in the excellence it inspires, but in the fact that we do not know the outcome in advance. Baseball is destroying this hope for fans.