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Joe Willie talked with the Loudmouths yesterday. Be sure to check out his Joe’s website!
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Jane McManus picks Darrelle’s brain about the mindset before they head to Indy.
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Each time you read anything about Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, it’s hard not to come away with a similar feeling: “Man, that guy is just terrible.” After the jump, it won’t get any more difficult to think that.
SportsGrid
The rest of this post has a distinct lack of Conor Casey. Somewhat because I can’t stand the “let’s kick it at the big guy’s head and see if it goes in” soccer, partly because nobody in the history of MLS can remember a notable game involving Colorado. They’re a very beige team. Which probably means he’ll score a hat trick in the last 4 minutes of the MLS Cup Final when down 2-0 with two men sent off. And cure Taylor Twellman’s concussions.
Moving swiftly onward. My predictions from before the playoffs started:
RSL over FCD
COL over CLB
LAG over SEA
SJE over NYRB
Three outta four, baby. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than I did in 11th grade chemistry. The only game I missed was RSL/Dallas, which is just further proof that I’m terrible predicting anything having to do with Robbie Findley. Who seems to think that being useless in the World Cup is somehow worthy of a move to Europe. Have fun in the Allsvenskan, buddy. But I digress. This post is about people who don’t choke in the MLS Cup playoffs.*
And Landon Donovan.
The playoffs isn’t about who’s the best team, it’s about who’s hot right now. That’s why San Jose, who play the 8-Convey-Wando** formation, beat the Red Bulls and are going to beat Colorado, whose main threat is about as mobile as the Rockies. Of course, it helps to have the best team and be the hot club. Which is why I’m taking the Galaxy to win it all. Going out on a limb, I know. But the Galaxy have the most dangerous trio since Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and it only takes one Beckham set piece, one Donovan counter-attack, or one of whatever Buddle does before he scores, and the Gals have their hands on the trophy named after their petty cash drawer.
“And what of Dallas?” you ask, being the kind of perceptive, intelligent reader that leaves insightful and constructive comments and doesn’t pick on Jason’s spelling and grammar. To which I respond “Dallas are a solid team built on a decent defense backed up by great goalkeeping.” And for that reason exactly, I hope they lose miserably. Nobody wants a boring champion. Especially one that plays its home games in front of 80 people. Nothing against the Burn or either of its fans, who I’m sure are lovely, if misguided, people, but that’s a terrible advertisement for the league.
As is the team in the biggest media market and home of three DPs going out to the lowest-seeded team in the playoffs in front of their own fans on national television (Suck it, North Jersey). We don’t need a final not involving LA.***
*Yes, I’m aware he won it all last year and scored a substitute goal against Dallas, but it’s worth the suspension of reality for a moment just to shoehorn in this upcoming dig at Landon. Sorry for ruining the punchline, by the way.
**Joke adapted from an original quip from my buddy Mark Dunfee (@SoBBolton on twitter). He’s kind of an ass, but occasionally funny. There, you have credit. Happy?
***This is a fake footnote. Consider it a DVD extra. In that spirit, here’s some commentary: This post was written around midnight, while I was craving a sandwich. Preferably tuna. I listened to the albums Pinkerton by Weezer and Is This It by The Strokes while I was writing.
When it’s all over, your hair is sticky with champagne and beer and your clothes are wet and smelly. Getting pulled over by the police on the way home might prove problematic. Sometimes, when you pick up your camera or lens a few days later, something doesn’t work. But being in the locker room amidst the celebrations after a sports team wins a championship is a lot of fun, at least I think so (yes, I understand if you’re questioning my sanity at this point).
The San Francisco Giants held a 3 games to 2 lead over the Philadelphia Phillies heading into Game 6 of the NLCS in Philadelphia. My assignment for the post-game, should the Giants win and clinch the series, was to cover the locker room celebrations.
Photographers use a variety of strategies to protect themselves and their cameras from the inevitable sprays of champagne and beer. Rain covers designed for cameras can protect them from more than rain. Clear plastic bags placed over the flash can protect it. And construction safety glasses can protect your eyes (champagne really burns when it gets in your eyes – you’ve probably seen players wearing swimming or ski goggles during the celebrations).
I’ve tried every combination of these tactics. This time, however, I went with a simple strategy. No cover for the camera – it often just gets in the way and means you miss pictures; besides, when I’ve used them in the past, I’ve still found champagne on my camera afterward. No safety glasses – it’s just one more surface to clean off. I went in the locker room just ahead of the Giants players equipped with one camera with a wide angle lens and a flash, and a towel loaned to me by the Phillies’ team photographer.
A towel is essential: once there’s champagne on the front of your lens, you cannot make pictures – and there’s no way there will not be lots of champagne on the front of your lens. (Tip: simply wiping off the champagne with a towel will just smear it around on the front of your lens, making it impossible to take photographs, so spit on the lens or lick it to clean it. Not so pleasant, but effective). It’s a very chaotic scene – celebrations are all around you, the room is small, the athletes are big, you are not the only photographer or videographer inside – so there’s not much time or space to delicately clean off your camera to keep shooting.
When I got back to my hotel room I thoroughly wiped down my equipment with a damp cloth and took a hot shower.
Kudos go to the editors and processors. There’s no time to edit in camera – I shot for awhile, shipped a disk, and shot some more, so there’s a lot of frames to look through. The players are almost always wearing championship t-shirts, so their numbers are not visible, making it very hard to identify them. Everything is happening all at once in there so there’s rarely time to add voice tags even if you know who you just photographed. The editor and processor have to sort out who is who – not an easy task.
(Click on the image above to see the high resolution combination photo)
I’ve had players single me out to pour champagne over my head, I’ve seen the jokes the players play on each other while they celebrate and I’ve seen the players almost uncontrollably overjoyed with what they had just accomplished. Practical considerations and personal comfort aside, covering the locker room celebrations is great fun.
Alabama football is synonymous with one man – Paul W. Bryant. It is a fact that must be recognized and acknowledged before any true understanding of the program can proceed.
This presents a serious difficulty since Coach Bryant’s legend was already formidable during his lifetime and has scarcely dimmed in the years since. The night the Crimson Tide won the 2009 National Championship in Pasadena, an anonymous fan left a single rose in the hands of the coach’s statue. And every Alabama fan who heard about it felt it was completely fitting.
Despite that consensus of feeling, its almost impossible to condense into a simple explanation for others. Coach Bryant was a tough cookie to pin down when he was alive, and the task has only gotten harder since he passed away. The passage of years and the abundance of anecdotes have complicated things rather than clarified them.
Keith Dunnavant’s 1996 book on Coach Bryant’s life, Coach, The Life of Paul “Bear” Bryant is recognized as one of the best biographies of the Alabama legend. While it doesn’t seem to completely succeed at getting to the heart of this complex man, it certainly provides one of the best overviews of his life.
The story is simple enough: the son of an Arkansas sharecropper becomes a football player at a famed university and helps his team to a national championship. He then goes on to resurrect a series of downtrodden programs before becoming head coach of his alma mater and leading it to the greatest successful era in college football history. He stepped down after amassing the winningest record of any coach in the sport and passed away almost a month later.
The problem is it does nothing to explain that strange charisma that made players follow him unwaveringly despite the brutality of his practices and seemingly callous feelings for them. It can’t address his importance to the state and the South as a whole that went far beyond his position as a football coach. And it can’t tell why all of this reverberates so strongly almost three decades after his death.
Dunnavant’s book does a great job in trying to bridge this immense gap. He tells the story of Coach Bryan’ts life in a literary fashion relying on chronological order when it suits the narrative and abandoning it when it does not. He follows the ebb and flow of events that shaped Coach Bryant’s life and, in turn all those around him his life affected.
One canard Dunnavant takes particular care to destroy is the idea Coach Bryant hewed to a conservative approach to the game – defense and a rushing attack were the mainstays of his approach. Instead, Coach shows that while Coach Bryant wasn’t by any means an innovator, he wouldn’t hesitate to absorb a new strategy or approach if he thought it would give him an edge.
“Rather than being chained to a set of beliefs, Bryant was a pragmatists who was strengthened by the ability to adapt in order to give his team the best chance of winning,” Dunnavant writes.
It was, Dunnavant argues, his emphasis on organization to maximize results while preparing his players physically and psychologically that made him as successful as he proved to be.
Dunavant’s other book on Alabama football is the excellent The Missing Ring which recounts the Crimson Tide’s 1966 season and subsequent snubbing for the national championship. “Unbeaten, untied and uncrowned,” as he aptly phrases it.
The dual approach works well since The Missing Ring ends up being more about Alabama football and not Coach Bryant specifically. In Coach, the 1966 season is one element of the tale and the factors that went into its unfolding and the people who were involved are much more the focus.
The other book that Coach must be evaluated in terms of is Alan Barra’s biography of Coach Bryant, The Last Coach. Yet the way these two great books approach their subject matter is sharply different.
The dual approach works well since The Missing Ring ends up being more about Alabama football and not Coach Bryant specifically. In Coach, the 1966 season is one element of the tale and the factors that went into its unfolding and the people who were involved are much more the focus.
The other book that Coach must be evaluated in terms of is Alan Barra’s biography of Coach Bryant, The Last Coach. Yet the way these two great books approach their subject matter is sharply different.
Barra’s book is much more comprehensive and provides a contextual window for Coach Bryant’s life that is invaluable to understanding his impact to the school, the sport and the South as a whole. Dunnavant goes for a broader emotional picture. He’s less interested in mapping the course of Coach Bryant’s life than capturing the themes that drove it the course it did.
As a result, Coach is a much more personal work. It takes a great deal of time trying to humanize a man whose legend makes such a task almost impossible. There’s far too much invested in what Coach Bryant represented to completely ever see him as an individual. An Dunnavant points out this was a situation that Coach Bryant encountered with regularity during his lifetime.
“Coach Bryant had a kind of magic to him,” Dunnavant quotes a former player saying. “It was something you couldn’t really put your finger on, but you could feel it whenever he walked into the room.”
Still, the effort is important. While Dunnavant might not succeed at unearthing exactly what made Coach Bryant tick he does come closest at touching the emotional core of what he came to represent. I’ve read this book several times and still find myself tearing up at the account of Coach Bryant’s last months and passing. I’ll bet the next time you read it, you will too.
There is no more iconic moment in the Alabama/Penn State rivalry than the Goal Line Stand during the 1979 Sugar Bowl. That one play has come to embody the physical, determined approach the two teams share toward the game as well as something on the side of the sublime as well.
Certainly the fact the National Championship was on the line magnified the importance of the play but taken out of context it’s difficult to understand the gravity of the event. In terms of singular drama, the Goal Line Stand can’t match, say, the desperation block that clinched the Crimson Tide win over the Nittany lions in the final seconds of the 1989 contest between the two.
The Goal Line Stand was critical but by no means decisive. It occurred with more than five minutes to play in the game and with Alabama leading by a touchdown. There was a lot of football left to be played in the Superdome that fateful New Year’s Day. A score would have tied the game, not ensured a victory for Penn State.
In fact, its emotional power depends on the whole series of downs, from Don McNeal’s hit that denied Penn State’s Don Fitzkee end zone and put the ball on the one yard line as well as bothgoal line efforts that kept the Nittany Lion’s All-American tailback Mike Guman from scoring. It embodied the entire game in which it occurred as well as the season the Crimson Tide battled through to get to New Orleans.
And the outcome of the game didn’t answer the question of Alabama’s title either. The Crimson Tide had to wait two more days for the outcome of the final polls to be named the National Champion and even then folks on the west coast wanted to squawk about it. (Interesting aside: officials from ABC tried to put together a one-game playoff between Alabama and USC that was nixed by the NCAA)
Two books penned about Alabama’s 1978 National Championship team really help address this problem and give a full view of what that one play really meant and why it has achieved such stature in Crimson Tide football lore: Steve Townsend’s Tales from 1978-79 Alabama Football, A Time of Champions and Barry Krauss & Joe M. Moore’s Ain’t Nothin’ But A Winner, Bear Bryant, The Goal Line Stand and A Chance of A Lifetime.
From the point-of-view of the present, the 1978 National Championship season seems almost a pre-ordained event – the penultimate title for Paul W. Bryant, earned in the twilight of his amazing career. Both these books quickly discard that perception and reveal the season as a campaign that in doubt from the start and uncertain right down to the wire (and even past it).
The 1978 season started well with a number one ranking and a decisive victory over tenth-ranked Nebraska. The good feelings lasted until about halftime of the following week’s game against Missouri. The Tigers – who had proven an elusive foe for Coach Bryant in two prior meetings – turned the tables on the Tide that afternoon and seemed to be going for a hat trick against the Bear.
Tide linebacker E.J Junior blocked and recovered a punt and started a rally that led to the win. But a week after that, even his heroics couldn’t pull out a victory against No. 7 USC. Alabama fell to No. 7 in the polls and the chances of a National Championship reached a nadir.
Things got so bad that Alabama fans booed their team during the Vanderbilt game, according to Townsend. But by that time, Krauss writes, the team had come too far to consider giving up.
“What I remember about that season – particularly in the first half, when we were always behind and slugging it out for every win – is that we were a Big Play team. We lived off of them. They Turned losses into wins. They changed the momentum. They kept us alive.”
Townsend’s book provides a superb over view of the rollercoaster ride. Each game is accounted for but also the intense lobbying for positions in the polls and bowls that had to fall into perfect place for Alabama to have a shot at the title.
The Nittany Lion’s No. 1 ranking put Joe Paterno in the driver’s seat for the championship, his team’s final opponent of the season wasn’t clear until mid-December. And when that foe became clear, he realized he might have gotten more than he bargained for.
“I didn’t think Alabama was the best team we could have played until I watched them on film,” Paterno admitted in the days leading up to the Sugar Bowl. “I was wrong. This is by far the best team we have played or could play.”
So when Krauss met Guman at the top of the pile in the fourth quarter and denied the Nittany Lion tailback back from reaching the goal line, it crystallized a whole season’s worth of suffering and perseverance for the Crimson Tide. As great as the play was, it encapsulated something even more given the trials of the team.
“If there was ever one person whose life was totally changed by actions occurring in that single instant, I am that person,” Krauss writes. “For better or for worse, I became a part of the lives of those who had been impacted by that play.”
Moreover, the Goal Line Stand was the perfect analogy for the game in which it occurred. Both squads were immensely talented, superbly coached and played at the peak of their powers. Neither team left anything on the field that day and players from both sides admitted it was the most punishingly physical contest they had ever played.
Krauss has become the hero of the game but the books introduce you to the whole array of great competitors on that team that made the championship possible; defensive back Murray Legg, linebacker Byron Braggs and the whole Redwood Forest Defense not to mention running back Major Ogilvie, quarterback Jeff Rutledge and split end Bruce Bolton.
Townsend’s tome has the staccato style of a sports columnist and a distressing habit of abandoning chronological order for the sake of dramatic effect. The result is less enthralling than it is confusing. Krauss slides into a good-ole-boy familiarity at times that is less than endearing. The impression is he’s writing the book more for his old buddies than a general audience and few things are more boring than listen to people talk about the dumb things they did in college like they were the greatest thing ever.
Still, these negatives are pretty minor compared to the wealth of detail and insight both books provide in terms of their subjects. And both go on beyond that fateful game to continue the stories. Townsend gives the blow-by-blow account of Alabama’s 1979 season and Coach Bryant’s final National Championship while Krauss relates his time in the NFL.
Still, the emotional centerpiece for both books is The Goal Line Stand and, as one might expect, the man who comes closest to pinning it down is Coach Bryant speaking on the eve of the big game to a select group of reporters in his hotel room.
“It’ll be like all big games. Probably, come down to a big play or two in the fourth quarter, and the team that makes ‘em will go home happy and the team that doesn’t will always wonder what they could have done differently. I just hope and pray tomorrow Alabama makes those plays.”