The glory is in the pain

I am going to tell you about the most physically damaging play of my football career, because we are starting to understand just how damaging football plays can really be, and it seems like a bigger deal in retrospect than it seemed at the time. But also because the most damaging play of my football career was also the most gratifying play of my football career.

This was the fall of 2000, my senior year, and I played on a bad Kansas Class A high school football team. We played eight-man football, and we went 2-7 that year. I weighed 165 pounds, and as I recall I was the fourth-largest player on our team. Our best offensive lineman, a hot-blooded Dutchman* named David VanderHamm, might have been 150 in his pads.

*“I’m not Dutch!” he used to say.

One of our games was in Oklahoma City against a school called Christian Heritage Academy, which was a lot like our school — private and Protestant — only a little bigger and with a much, much better football team. The rumor was that nine of the seniors on that team were going to be playing in college. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know the quarterback was about 6-foot-3, maybe 210, and the first time the running back came busting into my gap, he might as well have been Ricky Williams. On one play, he scored a touchdown by — I swear — diving from the 5-yard-line. Their fullback was — and again, I swear I am not making this up — a white kid who was constantly screaming and had one eye that looked at you and another that looked somewhere else.

Anyway, we ended up losing 42-21, and in the fourth quarter I was still in at linebacker, but CHA had put in its second-team offense, which probably would have beaten us, too. By this time, I was frustrated. I had spent all day not quite getting to the quarterback, not quite catching the running back, getting my clock cleaned by this banshee they had playing fullback. And they put in that second-team running back, and he looked like he weighed about the same as me, and I wanted to knock off his shoulder pads.

Well, they ran a sweep away from my side, which was perfect for that. Nobody on the line picked me up, which meant I had about 15 yards to pick up speed as I pursued the play. And I was running fast. As fast as I could. A lot of sweeps end up getting strung out and they end with the running back going out of bounds or getting tackled on the sideline. I didn’t want that. I ached for this kid to cut back, and I aimed my speeding body right where it looked like the cutback lane would be.

He planted his left foot and cut. And right when he did, I met him with as much speed and force as my body was capable of generating. CRACK! Like bat meeting ball. On the coaches film you can hear that crack, and you can hear a few people in the crowd ooh a little.

For a moment, probably about a second, I couldn’t see. My upper body wouldn’t move. I don’t mean to say I was momentarily paralyzed, because I wasn’t. I could feel everything, and it all hurt. My neck, my shoulders and especially my head. I squinted my eyes hard, like when you get a brain freeze from guzzling a slushee, and all I wanted to do was pop right up and enjoy the glory of the best hit of my life, to show that I wasn’t hurt, that this is just What I Do. Ain’t no thang. But I just … could not do it. Physically. I don’t know how to explain it, other than to say I needed a moment, down there in the grass, on my back, to put my being back together.

When I got up with the help of a teammate, I saw that the JV running back was still down, and there were tears pooling on the edges of his squinted eyes.

He left the game.

I stayed in.

It was a small victory, but it was a victory. That’s how I felt. Linebacker met running back, and linebacker won. I am sure this sounds dumb, because that was almost 12 years ago, but I have replayed that moment in my head a hundred times. Man, it felt good. So visceral. So explosive. So manly. It still does. I never experienced anything else in sports quite like it. I’ve hit home runs, and I’ve struck out people with the winning run on third base, and thrown touchdown passes, and sunk big free throws and dunked on my friends (on a nine-foot rim) and those things all feel great.

But not quite the same.

I have never knocked anybody out with a punch, but I imagine it must be something like that. It was so physical, so raw, so mano a mano. Who is tougher? That was the question, and the answer is always “the guy who’s still out there.”

That was one of my last football games. I didn’t play in college, so I am probably not at risk for the after effects of head trauma we keep hearing so much about with NFL players. Oh, I “got my bell rung” plenty. One time it felt like my left arm was on fire. One time I came back to the huddle and had a hard time remembering how to call a play. But we’re talking about maybe 20 bell ringings in my whole life. Maybe not even that many.

There are a lot of discussions going on about these issues now, and I don’t have the answers. But I think about that play whenever I see some linebacker or defensive back crush somebody at full speed. There are other ways to make a tackle. Safer ways. More effective ways. Ways that won’t get you penalized.

And you hear a lot of people wonder why guys still hit that way, knowing everything they know, knowing how it’s going to feel in the next moment or the next day or the next phase of life. But the answer is simple.

Because it hurts so good.

 

Decent guy Peyton Manning does a decent thing

Peyton Manning has done an altogether decent thing and even though I am naturally biased when it comes to this particular issue, I think I have a perspective that can hopefully be illuminating.

Here’s what I’m talking about: Manning called a beat writer at the Indianapolis Star to say thanks and goodbye. I just now read that story, and as I type these words, I am still in a state of shock recovery. Not because it was Manning; he has always seemed like a decent guy. And not because the athlete felt he had a relationship with a reporter; that’s common, too.

But it’s because either I’ve never covered someone who liked me enough to do something like that, or because Peyton Manning is one of the nicest guys to become an athlete in the modern age.

I can’t say with certainty such an act is unheard of, but I’ve never heard of it happening. This is mostly because of the complicated nature of the relationship between reporters and their subjects. We are taught not to trust them, and they are taught not to trust us, and there are good reasons for both.

There is a common tension between athletes and sportswriters that goes something like this:

Athlete: “Why do you guys have to be so negative all the time?”

Reporter: “Athlete, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say 90 percent of what I write is overwhelmingly positive.”

Both of them are usually right.

Let’s say a reporter is talking to a veteran point guard about his team’s season. The team is winning, although it is winning in part because this veteran point guard has accepted a reduced role while a younger star has taken control of the team.

The reporter’s budget line looks something like this: Joe Dingleberry, once the Toledo Sphincters’ great hope, is finally on the precipice of an elusive championship. It just took a reduced role to get there. 

Now, this certainly will be a story that makes some perhaps uncomfortable implicit observations — Dingleberry could not get it done. — but the eventual takeaway will be that Dingleberry is a good guy who made a personal sacrifice for the good of the team.

Yet in order to report that story, the reporter is going to have to ask Dingleberry some pointed questions about his role, how he felt about conceding it to a younger star, if he has any regrets about the years before, and so on. That’s the conflict that makes the story interesting.

But to Dingleberry, there is a decent chance he is going to feel like the reporter is merely trying to bait him into saying something inflammatory. He also might feel insulted by some of the questions and begin feeling defensive. This depends on myriad factors, including everything from the physical setting of the interview to the tone of the reporter’s voice to whatever pre-existing relationship the two of them have.

But, generally speaking, it is in the reporter’s interest to get the player to speak humanly and interestingly, and it is in the player’s interest to do the opposite of that.

So in the end, the reporter writes the story and can honestly say it painted the athlete in a positive light, and the athlete can honestly say, “Yeah, but you were poking me the whole time.”

So it’s complicated. We aren’t adversaries, but we aren’t on the same team, either. There is a good bit of confusion about that among the general public. People often assume sports writers are fans of the teams they cover. And I suppose, in most cases, we are more happy to cover a winning team than a losing one. But when it comes right down to it, our identity is not attached to the team the way it is for a fan. To us, this isn’t recreation or entertainment (even though it is often entertaining); it’s work. My former boss Kurt had the best way of putting it.

“I root for me,” he said.

And yet Peyton Manning called a Colts beat writer to say thanks. For what, it’s not entirely clear. It sounded general, like, Thanks for all the work over the years. It was recognition that those two men had gone to work (sort of) with each other every day for many years and that Manning respected Phillip Wilson’s work and their relationship.

That doesn’t mean much on a practical level. Manning can’t give Phillip Wilson a raise. And a journalist is always going to be a little bashful about receiving praise from one of his subjects, because he wouldn’t want it to indicate his coverage hadn’t been objective.

But it sure was nice of him.

A visual tour of the beautiful crumbling Astrodome

Yesterday the Astrodome opened its doors to some local media, who had to sign liability waivers before we walked in. Place is unsafe, they say. What I found was a place that, like a lot of things in Houston, was born in a very specific period, right as we were going to the moon and going to Vietnam, after the first oil boom but before the second, right as the Baby Boomers were hitting adulthood.

The Astrodome was finished 18 years before I was born, so I don’t know what it looked like then, but I got a strong impression not much has changed.

A tour:

The seats are quite comfortable for a building built in the 60s, but they're all cracked. Sitting in the Astrodome feels and smells like sitting in an old car that's been sitting in a dusty garage for many years.

The windows still let the light in. Soon after the dome was built, baseball players complained it was hard to find the ball against those windows, so there is a film over them now.

Can't remember where this was, exactly. But I assume it to be an original 1965 sign.

Don't think these work anymore, but all these signs have little lights around them that light up like a marquee.

When we say the Astrodome is crumbling, we mean that literally. Chunks of the building are falling off. It has been deemed unsafe for occupation.

Astroturf, you may know, was named for the Astrodome, and this is one of the last places on earth you can still find it.

This is the door to a dark room. You know, where they develop film on site. Remember film? One older member of the media said he and somebody else used to come back here for a seventh-inning toke. I couldn't tell if he was 100 percent serious, but this was the 60s and 70s we're talking about.

The press box was actually not that dissimilar from the press box at Minute Maid Park. Older TVs. Otherwise, a press box is a press box is a press box. Except for the one at TCU. Man, that thing is garbage.

"Welcome to The Show," it says.

Just one example of how so many things in the dome are stuck in a very specific period.

I didn't ask, but those looked like they probably still worked.

Carter vs. Permian. Written on the walls in one of the locker rooms. I actually got chills when I first saw this, then realized that 1988 game was played in Austin. This was done for the Friday Night Lights movie in 2004. Nonetheless, it's pretty cool that's still there.

There are limitations to my camera phone. Those signs say "Home of the Houston Oilers" and "Home of the Houston Astros."

A broken, discarded chair sitting in the tunnel that leads from the locker room to the field. Seemed poignant. By the looks of the label, this was from the Don Draper era.

Funny thing is, there were a lot of copycat stadiums after the Astrodome went up in 1965. SkyDome, Three Rivers, Riverfront, etc. When they started tearing them all down in the late 90s, early 2000s, everybody said they were cookie cutter stadiums. But look at this place. Unmistakable for any other.

There I am, standing on about the 20-yard line. I can't imagine playing football on that turf. There's nothing to it.

These are the lockers in the Oilers locker room. I was told quarterbacks and running backs would have been in this row. Earl Campbell, Warren Moon. Don't they look ... dumpy?

Let’s not tear it all down just yet

There seems to be a big paintbrush in the sky today. We are told Kentucky’s championship — it having been won with a collection of rentals — is an ominous sign for the future of college basketball. The one-and-done thing was not supposed to work, but it did, and now what is stopping John Calipari’s reign of terror?

I suppose I agree with that on a theoretical level. That Calipari won a national championship doing it this way certainly is a Louisville Slugger to the gut of some old illusions about college hoops. I don’t know that anybody thought it was impossible to win a national title with a team of freshmen and sophomores — Michigan very nearly did it in two different seasons, and that was 20 years ago — but the old thinking seemed to be that, yeah, you can go with Cal and run that freewheeling offense and get into the NBA, but your undoing will be inevitable, and probably at the hands of some senior with good grades. A team cannot live on talent alone.

So the fact Kentucky won on talent alone feels like a paradigm shift. It feels like Calipari has cracked the code and now will just keep hitting the refresh button ad infinitum until we all cry uncle.

But here’s the thing: That’s all based on a fallacy.

That Kentucky team that beat Kansas last night was not just a collection of one-and-done players. It was an especially selfless, congealed collection of one-and-done players which happened to include one of the most game-changing forces we’ve seen in college basketball in 20 years. We may go 10 or 15 years without seeing another player like Anthony Davis, and I think it’s at least fair to speculate that if, instead of Davis, Kentucky had some other more “normal” McDonald’s All-American like, say, Rakeem Christmas, the Jayhawks would have been the ones cutting down those nets last night.

The point here is not to take away from Kentucky’s well-deserved championship. And just save it with the “It’s going to get vacated anyway” stuff. Nobody cares. The point here is that this sort of proved you could win a title with a bunch of freshmen, but what it really proved is that you can win a title with Anthony Davis.

And let’s pause for a second to observe that it isn’t like Cal invented this. You know who else has tried to win that way? Bill Self. You don’t believe me? Kentucky started two guys last night that Self tried hard to get. Terrence Jones and Doron Lamb were big fish in KU’s recruiting pond. Self tried hard for John Wall, too. He did get Xavier Henry and Josh Selby the last two years, and if he could have signed Austin Rivers and LeBryan Nash, he darn well would have. Everybody would have. Nobody ever has inferior players as part of their coaching philosophy.

John Calipari has not re-invented the wheel, and if he is at Kentucky for 20 years he will win more national championships, but more of his teams will be like last year’s UK team than this year’s. This year’s team was stunningly talented, unusually mature and extremely well-coached and that’s why it won the national championship. But it was anomalous and it is about to completely disintegrate. And Kentucky will bring in another great class, probably headlined by the No. 1 player in it, Shabazz Muhammad. And Kentucky will be excellent again next year, most likely.

But it is not going to have Anthony Davis, and probably some other team is going to win the national championship. Probably some team with a couple senior starters and a couple young stars and some dude who can shoot the petals off a rose.

And what then?

Will Calipari stop trying to get all the players? Will the rest of college basketball adopt the new (old) model? Will players once again see Kentucky as a place where you can ball out but won’t ultimately win?

What will have changed? Calipari didn’t need a championship in order to attract guys. He was getting all the guys anyway. Terrence Jones went on national TV and committed to Washington, and Calipari still got him.

I mean, he can’t sign every single player, although I am sure he’s trying to find a way to do that right now. And every recruiting class isn’t going to have Anthony Davis in it. Every recruiting class will have a John Wall in it, and Cal is going to get him more often than not and so Kentucky will be a monster of a basketball program for the foreseeable future.

So what’s really changed again?

Harsh realities are Bill Self’s thing

Bill Self left me three voicemails one evening, and by the time I listened to them and called him back, I had realized he was asking me for a favor that I couldn’t believe he was concerning himself with.  He thought a headline on one of my stories about a big recruit was misleading and he was asking me to change it, because the family of that recruit read everything, and he didn’t want them to be mislead, even though he was all-but certain KU wasn’t getting the kid anyway.

He was standing at the bottom of a 100-foot well, fighting for an inch.

There’s another story I’ve heard, which isn’t mine to tell. But you know that Vince Lombardi speech, “What it takes to be No. 1?” There’s a quote in there that says this: “I’ve never known a man worth his salt who in the long run, deep down in his heart didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline. There is something in good men that really yearns for discipline and the harsh reality of head-to-head combat.”

I know that speech, and that specific part of that speech, means a lot to Bill Self. Remember when Self lost to Bucknell and Bradley in back-to-back years? And everybody was laughing at him? And everybody had their Self jokes? And Roy won the national title?And Self was still this Big Ten guy with his high-low offense who kept blowing it in the tournament? How would you have liked to be Bill Self in that moment?

Well, a friend of mine asked him. There’s something in the hearts of competitive men. That’s what he told him.

It seems like you can almost always say that a basketball team is a reflection of its coach. They all seem to adopt some major part of their coach’s personality. The team that won it all in 2008 had Self’s confidence. Those guys could be a little too confident sometimes. They thought they were the baddest mofos in the gym every time out, and they were usually right. I have a high level of confidence that if you caught Sherron Collins or Mario Chalmers in a genuinely honest moment on April 6, 2008, they’d have both told you they thought they were better than Derrick Rose. I think Self is quite a bit like that. I don’t think he’s ever met a room he didn’t think he could own or a person he didn’t think he could win over.

I think those teams with Sherron Collins and Cole Aldrich adopted something of Self’s too. Self always said he and Collins had very similar personalities, and I think because Self was the coach and Collins was the point guard those teams had a distinct temperament. Stubbornness. Always with something to prove.

His teams always play good defense, and they’re usually unselfish and if you want to see Self’s personality in there, you can always find it.

This team has those characteristics, too, but there is something else. This is the one that fights for the inch at the bottom of a well.

“It seems like when it kind of looks like it’s not going our way the most is when they kind of rise to the challenge and play their best,” Self said Sunday.

There’s something in the hearts of competitive men.

These guys were down 19 points to the No. 3 team in the country with 16 minutes left, and won the game. They trailed by double digits against Purdue, NC State and Ohio State in NCAA Tournament games and won all three.

This is not to say these guys aren’t confident. With the game on the line against Purdue, the shooting guard threw an alley-oop to the point guard on a fast break. Confidence is not an issue with these guys. But it is not their defining characteristic.

I think we give athletes too much credit sometimes for not giving up. One of my favorite quotes is from Bill Snyder, who was asked one day to credit his team for not quitting in a game the Wildcats ultimately lost.

“They don’t let you quit,” he said.

No, it’s not that impressive. Most teams don’t quit. Most teams keep trying to make plays even when the game has gone far in the other team’s direction. Most college basketball players will keep diving for loose balls, keep taking charges, keep fighting for rebounds, no matter the situation. It’s what you’re taught to do. It’s practically all you know how to do. It is the central tenet of athletic competition.

But there is a difference between not giving up and actually believing you can win. You have to believe that this rebound will make a difference. Maybe it only increases your chances by one percentage point. Maybe even less than that. But you’ll take it. And then the next play compounds it. One percentage point becomes four, which becomes 16, which becomes 64.

When Kansas was behind by 13 against Ohio State in Saturday’s Final Four game, college basketball sabergeek Ken Pomeroy calculated the Jayhawks’ chances of winning the game at 12 percent. Now, why a person who just watched a thrilling basketball game would feel compelled to pull out his calculator and perform a math problem is something I’ll never understand, and I think sabermetrics are sort of the novelty gift stores of the basketball world — Of what value is this remote-controlled fart machine/clutch-shooting metric? Not much, but it sure is fun to play with. — but I suppose I trust that Pomeroy gave us a more or less accurate idea of just how bad of shape the Jayhawks were in at that moment.

Yet there is no way to measure the psychology of a basketball team. Those metrics are based on ALL the college basketball teams, and the outcome of that game was based on Kansas and Ohio State.

“Beware of geeks bearing formulas,” Warren Buffet once said.

Buffet, Lombardi and Self might have some things in common. Buffet once bought a company whose owner counted the sheets of toilet paper in a roll to see if he was getting cheated, which he was. He admired that.

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago,” he said once.

Well, the Jayhawks are sitting in the shade today. They may lose tonight. Kentucky is better. There is not much doubt about that.

But there is something in the hearts of good men that yearns for the harsh reality of head-to-head combat.

On unwritten rules, video game football and the Oregon girls state championship

I don’t know which of us was the weird one, but my friend Bill and I had dramatically different approaches to playing video games.

Our game was the NCAA College Football series. The competition between Bill and I began in 2003, and he and I could not have played the game more differently. The first difference was in the mere selection of teams. I often chose Notre Dame, a team I have kind of cared about since I was a kid living in Indiana, or some other random school that felt good at the time. Georgia or something.

Bill almost always chose Oklahoma, because Oklahoma was awesome. Bill has never been an Oklahoma fan, he just liked that OU was awesome on the game. Now, there was no technicality stopping me from just picking USC or Florida or whoever. It wasn’t like he expected me to choose an inferior team as a way of setting some kind of handicap. But nonetheless I did not do this, even though I knew this put me at a decided physical disadvantage (and I realize how ridiculous that is to write about a collection of pixels).

We also called plays differently. I ran the ball a lot. I’d run the option, I’d run between the tackles, I’d set up the pass. Bill, on the other hand, quickly figured out that with Oklahoma, a play called “Slot Wheels” was pretty much indefensible. He didn’t complete it every time, but every time he did, it went for a minimum of 40 yards. And he completed it a lot.

So Bill just ran slot wheels every time. I’d blitz every time, and I’d either get there or I wouldn’t, and this was basically how our games were won and lost. I would run on first down and I’d punt on fourth down and I’d either sack Jason White or I wouldn’t.

It was not a very realistic representation of football, but Bill could not have cared less about that. He would have beaten me 100 to nothing if he could, and on one baffling night he very nearly did. He laughed until his face looked like a tomato.

I was a little different. Certainly I considered it a thrill to humiliate him, but I liked it when the game came down to real football strategy — when to throw, when to blitz, when the draw might be there, when to use your timeouts. All that. I wanted to beat him, but I wanted to beat him because I had outdone him with my football intellect. Bill wanted to exploit a weakness in the game to the fullest extent.

Neither of us is “right.” Neither of us was trying to win by cheating. I am no more noble for wanting to win a video game in a realistic way. I am probably more of a dork, actually.

All of which brings me to the Oregon Class 5A girls state championship basketball game.

You may have heard about this game by now. The final score was 16-7. The reason was that the underdog in the game, Willamette, decided its best opportunity to beat a Springfield team it had already lost to three times this year was to hold the ball until the end of the quarter and take a 3-pointer. This strategy was designed to reduce the effect of Mercedes Russell, who is (evidently) otherwise unstoppable.

It worked, kind of. Russell only scored seven points, although that was the same number Willamette scored, and Russell’s team won.

This brings up a couple questions. The first — why is there still not a shot clock in high school basketball? — is ultimately dependent on the answer to the second — should people be expected to abide by unspoken rules?

The result of that game is deeply unsatisfying, of course. I don’t think very many people would disagree with that. All of the things that make basketball aesthetically wonderful were removed. The game was far more interesting than a girls basketball game could otherwise expect to be, but for reasons that have little to do with basketball itself.

Assuming all you know about the person who coaches Willamette is that they are the kind of person who would try to win a state championship by (theoretically) taking four shots the  entire game, do you assume this is a good person or not?

Does this bother you? If Willamette had won 7-6, would you have considered that more or less of an accomplishment than if it had won 55-54?

In other words, do you expect people to follow unwritten rules?

I have not discussed this game with my friend Bill, but I have a high level of confidence he would find that strategy both (1) hilarious and (2) totally defensible. To him, the object is to win the game, to get the girl to go out on a date with you, to get the free upgrade at the rental car counter, to get a few extra potato oles tossed into your Taco John’s order, and anything (legally) done in service of those goals is perfectly acceptable, no matter how transparent or cheap or inauthentic it may seem to someone else. Once you get the girl, it doesn’t matter how you did it. You can do anything you aren’t specifically told you can’t do. I assume that’s how he would see this.

My perspective is different. I don’t think Willamette did anything wrong. I just don’t like it. I think that strategy was an attempt to exploit the good intentions of the people who make the rules in high school basketball. The reason there is no shot clock in high school basketball is that high school basketball is supposed to be a training ground. It’s where you learn to run the motion offense, to set a good screen, to use a screen, to make a V-cut, to throw a backdoor bounce pass. It’s where Normal Dale tells you to make five passes before taking a shot. A shot clock would distract from the teaching. Basketball is a tricky game. You don’t really figure it out until you’re too old to play it. Putting a timer on a high school basketball team’s possessions would only impede that.

That’s why there is no shot clock in high school basketball, and as long as nobody has their fingers crossed behind their back, then it can be played at a pace that suits the sport. Up and down. Run your offense, set your screens, make your five passes, take the shot.

Yeah, you can run off the clock if that’s what you really want to do, but is that really what you want to do?

Most of the time, people do abide by unwritten rules, and everything works OK. And I don’t blame Willamette for trying to win the game that way, just as I don’t blame my friend Bill for  running “slot wheels” all the time. You play to win the game.

It’s just that this is the kind of thing that forces people to write down the rules, and I think some rules are best left unwritten.

Tyshawn Taylor’s messy thrilling beautiful masterpiece

I remember the first time I met Tyshawn Taylor, which is unusual. I don’t remember meeting anybody else on that team. It was 2008, and he had just arrived on Kansas’ campus for summer school. He was wearing a white v-neck shirt. That look would become pretty popular over the next year or so, but Tyshawn was the first person I saw in it. He looked cool. I wrote earlier this week that sports are not cool, even though there are cool people in them. Tyshawn is one of those people. Tyshawn is cool. He just is. He has style and charisma. He’s his own man.

I don’t know exactly why I bring that up, but for whatever reason that has always seemed significant to me. I don’t know much about Tyshawn’s aptitude outside of basketball, but I have always assumed he is the kind of person who would thrive in a creative field. He has always seemed so sharply aware of the world and his place within it. He sometimes seems tormented by perception. His own and that of others. Tyshawn has always worn his emotions on the outside. He is a beautiful basketball player to watch, in part because he plays brilliantly, but also because watching him play basketball makes it feel like you know him. No other game is as intimate. In basketball arenas, the fans are right there. Close enough to read the tattoos. The players don’t wear helmets or hats. And basketball is not played behind the wall of structure and design the way football is. Basketball is naked and free. It is played at 5,000 RPM with no seatbelt, and Tyshawn Taylor plays it so honestly. His face always lets you in. His shoulders tell a story. Most players aren’t like that. Most players play covered in the pretenses of Intensity, Unflappability and Invulnerability. Tough guys. Tyshawn isn’t like that. Tyshawn always seems a little vulnerable, and a lot human. The beauty is in that honesty. It can sometimes feel like you’re watching an artist.

When Kansas played at Kansas State recently, and Tyshawn was messing up at the end of the game, and his shoulders started talking and his face started beaming out his insides and he missed the free throws and turned it over, I wrote on Twitter that it looked like Tyshawn was about to paint a masterpiece and cut off his ear. When I say watching Tyshawn play is like watching an artist, I don’t mean he is such a great player he transcends sports, I mean he makes it feel like you’re watching someone express themselves in the most imperfect, crazy, honest way they’re capable of doing it.

You can say many things about Tyshawn, and everybody seems to have something  to say about him. But whatever you say, say this too: Tyshawn Taylor is unforgettable.

If that wasn’t true before, I don’t think anybody at Kansas will ever forget about him now. I do believe Tyshawn became a Kansas legend on Saturday, when he played 44 minutes at an intensity and under a pressure most people will never know. He made one turnover. He scored 24 points. He scored nine points in overtime. Twice, he answered a huge Missouri play with one of his own, and when it came time to decide the game, it was Taylor on the foul line, with that face and those shoulders. He made them both, and Kansas won.

Jason King of ESPN.com got a great anecdote about that moment. Tyshawn’s mom, Jeannell, covered her eyes when her boy stepped to the line. She peaked through her fingers to see her son come through in the clutch, to see her son become a hero. “I broke down and cried,” she told Jason. “That’s my baby.”

Jeannell is such a big part of Tyshawn’s story. That sounds stupid, because considering she is the one who gave him birth, she is pretty much the biggest part of Tyshawn’s story. But there is more to it. It is difficult to explain without getting into vagueness and conjecture, and I don’t think it’s responsible to do that, but it is fair and accurate to say Tyshawn carries a heavy burden in his family, a greater one, even, than most kids from tough backgrounds. A greater one than someone his age should have to. I don’t know much, and I don’t mean to imply I do, but I know enough to know some of the valleys in the rolling hills of his career have not been his fault.

And yet there he was. Here he is. He has been on a peak for two months, mostly. He might be the Big 12 player of the year. He might end up on the All-America team, and if he does for the rest of time you’ll look up into the rafters at Allen Fieldhouse and see it: Taylor 10. Right up there with Chamberlain, Manning and Pierce. Can you imagine that?

What is the point of all this? I don’t know, really. That’s the good thing about having a blog. I don’t need a nut graph. I just found myself thinking about him last night and today, this incandescent kid from New Jersey who loves clothes and Jay-Z quotes and is at his best when he is right up on the rails, skating on the razor blade that separates control and chaos, the kid who can make basketball feel like something ethereal.

And I think we might have seen his masterpiece.

Rapping about sports will always fail

I hesitate to write this, because any attempt by a single person to define what is and isn’t cool is an open invitation to The Internet to destroy that person. It’s like putting an overcooked pork chop in front of a Chopped judge.

Alas, I am willing to become a martyr for this cause.

First, you need to familiarize yourself with the following videos:

I’m not going to spend much time on the exceptionally poor quality of the rapping in either of those videos or the excessive whiteness or that one of the guys in the Mizzou video is named “Tanner,” which — and this is true — was the stock name me and my buddies assigned to anyone who was popping the collar on his polo shirts in 2004, or that the guy in the KU video is ripping off a 50 Cent song that is eight years old and was never cool in the first place, or that the whole “I’m rich and drive fancy cars” thing is not as cool when it’s really your dad who is rich and his cars you’re driving or that the Missouri video has as much to do with Kansas as it does Missouri or that somebody is wearing a Santa Claus hat in the KU video.

I’m going to ignore that stuff, because it’s just dressing on the biggest point in all this. You ready? Here goes.

Sports are not cool.

Sports are fun. Sports are dramatic. Sports are intense. Sports are worthwhile. But sports are not cool.

Coolness is about individuality. It is about rebellion. It is about style. It is the guitar solo in “Johnny B. Goode.” It was Jay-Z’s Yankees fitted, it is the fins on a ’59 Cadillac and it is Farnsworth Bentley’s umbrella. It was the way Outkast sounded in 2000. It is Martin Luther King’s cadence, Bill Clinton playing the saxophone and the twinkle in Ronald Reagan’s eye when he knew he was saying something just right. It is Steve Jobs getting fired from Apple.  It is Barack Obama turning his back to the camera and walking off at the end of the “Bin Laden is dead” announcement. It is the Fab Five wearing their shorts long in 1992 and Dennis Rodman wearing them short in 1996.

Awesome.

Also awesome.

Cool is cool, and certainly there are cool people who ended up in sports. But the overall idiom of sports is inherently uncool. It is all about conformity and shared identity. It is about being part of something larger than yourself, which is the opposite of being yourself. This is not a bad thing. It can be a really good thing. The military, for example, could not operate effectively without this kind of culture, and neither could a sports team. Lots of good things come from conformity, but coolness is not among them.

More to the point, sports fandom is every bit as uncool as Star Trek fandom.* It’s all geeking out about people you don’t know and will never meet. It’s arguing about numbers. It’s coming up with justifications for caring about the outcomes of games. It’s having heroes.

It is not bad, but it is not cool.

*Oh, let’s not split hairs here. I’m exaggerating to make a point. 

This is why any attempt to rap about sports will inevitably fail. Jay-Z could not write a cool rap song about Kansas basketball. It isn’t possible, because Jay-Z might be cool, and Kansas basketball might have some cool things about it or some cool guys on the team, but sports are not cool. The two don’t mix. Sports are institutions, and nothing in sports is more institutional than college athletics. It practically defines the term.

Rapping about a team you like is the same as rapping about a rapper you like. It’s too meta.

Romance and sexiness work the same way. Once the mystery is gone — once you have made it clear you are actively trying to create sexiness — it becomes corny and lame. These things can only exist behind a veil.

Also, you know who is terrible at rapping? Practically everybody on earth, regardless of race. Let’s leave it to the professionals. Most of them are cool, which is why most of them wouldn’t rap about a college sports team. 

A Kansas kindergarten hero

You have probably heard by now the story of a little girl in Kansas who refused to do her kindergarten homework because that homework involved drawing a picture of the mascot of a team her parents don’t like. 

She has become a hero to many fans of the state’s other team, which her parents do like. She has become a big story. She is the dominant story in Kansas education right now. 

And you know what I say? Rightfully so. 

Like so many of you, I feel it is deeply troubling that in an educational setting a kid might be exposed to ideas not originating from within his or her own household. The key problem with discourse in this society is that there are not enough people who believe what they believe and only interact with others who share their specific beliefs and reaffirm their correctness.

 

Further, it should be re-enforced at every opportunity that sports team affiliation is the most important part of any human’s identity and that those who affiliate with sports teams you don’t like should be thought of as bad people who are (probably) prone to deviant sexual behaviors. 

 

And the sooner we can get kids thinking this way, the better. An open mind is one waiting to be ransacked by sexual deviants who wear the wrong colors. 

High school Newt Gingrich or MSNBC host?

Two of these people are hosts of political talk shows on MSNBC. One is Newt Gingrich’s high school yearbook photo. Can you tell which is which?