Racing, Olympics and ESPN-ABC Announcers; Goydos keeps his sense of humor

I apologize for not having written a blog yesterday. On my way home Sunday from the Holy Cross-Bucknell game I kept having to pull over because there were potholes on Rte. 15 that I was afraid to go through at 200 miles per hour.

Sorry stock car fans, couldn’t resist. But seriously, the biggest event in racing delayed for more than two hours because the track has potholes in it? Who was in charge of track maintenance, the NCAA? Look, I know nothing about auto racing—I covered the Indy 500 once; thought the start was about the most thrilling thing I’d ever seen and then had little idea what was going on for the rest of the race. To be fair, that was the year when officials had to go back and look at the tape to figure out who finished second to Rick Mears. So it wasn’t just me.

But I don’t think you have to be a racing fan to understand that two delays caused by potholes is not exactly great theater nor is having the race finish when it is already dinnertime in the east. Apparently Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished second. Where was Danica Patrick? Oh, that’s right she was in the race Saturday that only the real racing geeks pay any attention to at all. She’s the biggest star in the sport—at least based on how often she’s on TV—and she runs in the equivalent of the NBA rookie game.

She got more attention for finishing 32nd in that race than all the other drivers combined did for the entire week. Gee, I wonder why. Couldn’t have anything to do with her looks could it?

Meanwhile, back at sports I know something about…(which means there isn’t going to be too much talk about the Olympics although I got a kick out of Bode Miller caring enough to win a bronze medal in the downhill and an American with a great name—Johnny Spillane--winning the first U.S. medal in Nordic skiing since Bill Koch in 1976. Seeing Koch’s name reminded me that when he won his medal (a silver in the 30 kilometer cross country race) I was in college and avidly reading The Washington Post. One American writer had thought to show up for the race—Lenny Shapiro from The Post—who was my hero then as he is now. He talked to Koch and wrote a great story about him and his solitary quest to be a Nordic skier in a country that had zero interest in Nordic skiing.

I swear I’d watch more of the Olympics but every time I switch over it seems that NBC is either in commercial or Bob Costas is saying, “let’s return now to figure skating….” Bring back Janet Lynn and I’ll return to figure skating. I finally figured out last night as I clicked back to college hoops as two more figure skaters graced my screen why I simply can’t stand it anymore: it’s not a sport, it’s a reality show. All it lacks are early tryouts with people who can’t stay up on their skates and Simon Cowell telling them that they suck).

Okay, now you are looking live at today’s blog. Sorry, I spent some of last night listening to Brent Musburger and Bob Knight. Talk about memories. Brent is now 70 and Knight is 69 but they both clearly love being in places like College Station, Texas doing a game on a Monday night in February. Hey, good for them. I wish I had that kind of energy sometimes.

Brent sometimes sounds like he’s doing an imitation of Brent but who cares? If ABC-ESPN gets the NCAA Tournament contract this summer, there’s going to be a battle royale over there about who gets The Final Four games. Dick Vitale HAS to do color because he’s Dick Vitale and he’s been waiting more than 30 years to go to The Final Four and not sell pizzas all week. I’d pair him with Knight because Knight’s sarcastic presence might tone Dick down a little and they could be the sort of Odd Couple that Al McGuire and Billy Packer became.

The smart betting on play-by-play would have to be Dan Schulman, who is the company’s rising play-by-play star and works most of the time with Vitale. Nothing against Schulman but I’d stick Brent right there in-between Vitale and Knight. It would be the climax to a comeback that began 20 years ago when CBS unceremoniously fired him on the eve of the 1990 national title game. And the guy still gets it done when the red light goes on.

Okay, I’m rambling. Some day I’ll tell the story about Brent and I almost getting into a fight about 10 minutes before the national championship telecast went on in the air in 1989 in Seattle. Billy Packer was standing there preparing, as he said later, to open the telecast himself. The whole thing has a happy ending. Brent and I have gotten along fine for years now.

The downer of the weekend for me was my buddy Paul Goydos coughing up the lead on the back nine at Pebble Beach. Anyone who knows me at all knows that Goydos and I have been friends since 1993 when I first began researching “A Good Walk Spoiled.”

I was at the Buick Open on the first day killing time in the afternoon before going to meet Billy Andrade for dinner. Larry Mize had shot 64 in the morning and the only player in the afternoon wave who had gone low at all was a rookie named Goydos, who had shot 66. After a lengthy debate, Chuck Adams and Mark Mitchell, the two on-site PGA Tour PR guys, decided to bring Goydos into the interview room.

“There’s no one else to bring in this afternoon,” Mitchell said. “Plus, it’ll be good experience for Paul.”

With nothing else to do, I wandered into the back of the interview room to see if there was any reason at all to listen. The first thing I heard Goydos say was, “I’m sure none of you have ever heard of me. There’s a reason for that: I’ve never done anything.”

Hang on, I thought, this guy might be worth listening to for a few minutes. He launched into a 10-minute monologue that was supposed to be a recap of his round but was more like a standup routine. “At 17 I hit 7-iron. When I’m playing well it’s because I get my slice going. I know if you’re on the PGA Tour you’re supposed to call it a fade but when you hit a 7-iron and it goes 20 yards to the right, that’s a slice.”

I needed to meet this guy. I introduced myself as he was walking out, said I was doing a book on life on tour and wondered if we could talk at some point. “Sure, I’ll talk to you all you want,” he said. “But you’re wasting your time writing a book on the tour. No one’s going to buy it.”

Fortunately Paul is better at golf than predicting book sales. He became the character in the book few people had heard of but continued to follow long after it was published. We became good friends. He’s won twice on tour and pieced together a pretty good career for someone who likes to describe himself as, “the worst player in the history of the PGA Tour.”

He had a great chance to win on Sunday, but came undone on the back nine with a couple of bogeys and then, disastrously, a quadruple-bogey nine that sent him spiraling to a disappointed tie for fifth. Talk about hitting a pothole.

On Monday I sent him an e-mail offering condolences. Typical Paul, this was the answer I got back: “Well, when I made my back-nine 9 on Sunday at The Hope it was on a par-three. This time it was on a par-5. I guess that’s progress.”

You have to love a guy who NEVER loses his sense of humor. There aren’t many people you can say that about.

Gotta go. I think Costas is about to introduce some more figure skating.

What You Need to Understand About Dick Vitale: It’s All Real

I didn’t watch very much of ESPN’s 24 hours of college basketball on Tuesday. I actually thought it might be fun to get up at 6 a.m. to watch a basketball game but then realized I had to get up at 6:45 anyway to get my son to school. I was out for most of the afternoon though I caught snippets of the Temple-Georgetown game and then watched Duke-Charlotte until it became a route (which was about five minutes in); a little bit of Louisville-Arkansas and a lot of Gonzaga-Michigan State. I didn’t stay up for Kansas-Memphis because, well, I had to get up at 6:45 again.

Maybe that was the game Dick Vitale did because I didn’t see him or hear him on any of the other games and there’s no way ESPN would televise 146 games on the same day without Vitale. Then again, maybe they sent him to New York for that bogus, ‘Coaches vs. Cancer,’ thing where the four teams advancing to the semifinals were pre-ordained by the promoters regardless of whether they won or lost their early round games. The network, believe it or not, doesn’t consult with me on these things.

It’s remarkable to think about how popular Vitale is and how IMPORTANT he has become to college basketball. I remember 20 years ago some people saying that his act was bound to wear thing, that 10 years was probably about enough and that he would be yesterday’s news soon.

Not exactly. Vitale’s been at it for 30 years now and if there is one guy that ESPN really can’t afford to lose its Vitale. Seriously. If the network decided tomorrow to tell Bob Knight he had to wear a jacket-and-tie like everyone else and he took a walk people would hardly notice. My friend Jay Bilas is very good at what he does but at ESPN it really doesn’t matter if you’re any good. They just put you on the air, promote you and promote you and promote you and eventually people actually think you’re good. Quality doesn’t really matter. ESPN is all about quantity.

But I digress. I know there are people out there who insist they can’t watch a Vitale game without turning down the sound. There are moments when he goes off on one of his tangents or starts promoting every assistant coach alive for a head coaching job or defends guys who are indefensible that you shake your head. I get that and I know there are those out there who would be happy if Dick retired tomorrow.

But here’s what you need to understand about Vitale: it’s all real. The enthusiasm, the love of the game, of the coaches, the players, the settings, the fans and of just getting to be DICK VITALE. He loves every second of it and, unlike a lot of guys who have become rich and famous, he truly appreciates it. He never moans about how tough his life is because he knows he’s been remarkably lucky even though he has had some serious health scares in recent years.

Let me say this: I didn’t always feel this way. Dick and I battled a lot years ago because I really did think it was an act and he was a shameless, self-promoter. We had a few shouting matches, most notably one night at Duke when he came out before the game and began throwing copies of his (first) book to the students (I refuse to call them the Cameron Crazies, they need less publicity these days not more) while they dove on one another to grab it because it was free and because it was from Dicky V.

I was standing at the end of the court watching all this when Vitale tossed the last book and walked over to me.

“Hey John, why don’t you do that with your books?” he said.

“Because people BUY mine Dick.”

It was a cheap shot and Dick correctly took it that way. We had a pretty good shouting match right there during which I probably said some things I shouldn’t have said and he probably did too. But I started it.

We also did the Larry King (radio) show together once—a booking neither of us was thrilled about—and that became a shout-fest too. I was on him for his association with Nike and he was on me for being on him all the time. King said it was great radio. I’m not so certain.

Fast forward a few years to 1993 when my mother died very suddenly. I had written a cathartic piece in Basketball Times about her and not long after it was published I received a lengthy, handwritten note from…you guessed it, Dick. He talked about my mom and how proud she must have been of me and said that even though he and I disagreed often he had great respect for my work and for my passion. “That’s one thing we share John,” he wrote. “We’re both passionate about basketball and what we do and I will NEVER not respect someone like you who brings those things to the table.”

I sat there and one thought ran through my head: he’s a bigger man than I am. I wrote back and told him that. We’ve been friends ever since. In fact, Dick came and spoke—for free, he usually gets huge fees to speak—at my charity golf tournament three years ago.

So while I still understand those who say their ears hurt after a Vitale game, let’s all be honest: if there weren’t Vitale games college hoops wouldn’t be the same. A lot of joy would go out of the game and if there’s one thing big time college sports needs more of it is joy. Everyone is SO serious about things (myself included a lot of the time) most notably coaches who take THEMSELVES so seriously.

Not Dick. Can you imagine Knight or any of the other ex-coaches who fill the airwaves being passed up through the stands in student sections around the country? The passion is genuine but so is the joy, the fun he is so clearly having. I know Dick loves being on the air, loves being at the big games (we all do) but I also know he loves standing around in a press room before a game arguing about teams and players and staying up long into the night doing the same thing.

So, I missed him last night. I thought maybe he’d have Michigan State-Gonzaga but it was Steve Lavin who definitely has better hair than Vitale but is no Vitale.

Actually no one but Vitale is Vitale. You can make fun of him, you can joke about him, you can hold your ears. In my first kids mystery, “Last Shot,” which is set at The Final Four, the boy protagonist, Stevie Thomas, is about to be introduced to Vitale by my real life pal Dick (Hoops) Weiss.

“Does he bite?” Stevie asks Hoops.

Actually there’s almost no bite in Dick Vitale. Just a lot of love and a lot joy. It isn’t a college basketball season without Dicky V. And if you disagree with me, that’s perfectly fine, but you’re missing out on a slice of Americana.

Long live—and long talk, shout, scream, revel in it all—Dick Vitale.