Catching up with Washington Post articles: Maryland's Honor Violation; Navy Steps in the Wrong Direction

Tweet

Here are two of my latest from The Washington Post --------

When the Maryland basketball team won the national championship in 2002, Gary Williams received hundreds, if not thousands, of letters congratulating him on taking the Terrapins to a place few dreamed they could ever go.

Williams read almost all the letters. Some meant more than others, coming from old friends and coaching colleagues. One stood out. It came from a former Maryland coach.

“Congratulations,” it read in part. “You have now made Maryland the UCLA of the East.”
The note came from Lefty Driesell.

It was Driesell who made the term “UCLA of the East” famous when he came to Maryland in 1969 and boldly predicted he would build a program somehow comparable to college basketball’s most incomparable program.

Driesell came up 10 national championships short of John Wooden but he did put Maryland basketball on the national map, taking the Terrapins to eight NCAA tournaments in 17 seasons, twice reaching the Elite Eight. He left in 1986 in the aftermath of the Len Bias tragedy.

It was Williams, after the disastrous three-year tenure of Bob Wade, who picked up the pieces of a shattered program and made Maryland matter again. Ultimately, he did what Driesell could not do, taking Maryland to back-to-back Final Fours and the national title that brought the kind of joy to the Maryland campus that for years seemed impossible in the wake of Bias’s death.

Click here for the rest of the column: Maryland's Honor Violation

------------------------------

In November 1995, I was standing on the sidelines at Michie Stadium on a frigid afternoon watching the Army football team practice. Al Vanderbush, then Army’s athletic director, was watching with me. In the midst of small talk about plans for Thanksgiving, Vanderbush suddenly said, “Mind if I ask your opinion on something?”

Flattered, I said, sure.

“What would you think about us joining Conference USA?” Vanderbush said.

My answer was instinctive rather than thought-out: “You’re kidding, right?”

Sadly, Vanderbush wasn’t kidding, nor was anyone else at West Point. They thought that being part of Conference USA’s TV package would give them more exposure and more revenue and being part of a league would help in recruiting.

Put simply, the end result was a disaster, culminating in an 0-13 season in 2003. To be fair, Todd Berry, who was hired in 2000 to replace Bob Sutton as coach, and Rick Greenspan, the athletic director who hired him, had as much to do with that record as playing in Conference USA did. But the decision to join C-USA in 1998 led to Sutton’s firing and a fall from football grace so precipitous that, all these years later, Army is still recovering.

Click here for the rest of the column: Navy Steps in the Wrong Direction

My newest book is now available at your local bookstore, or you can order on-line here: One on One-- Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game 

This weeks radio segments (The Sports Reporters, The Gas Man)

Wednesday I joined The Sports Reporters in my normal time slot (5:25 ET on Wednesday's). Click the permalink, then the link below, to listen to the segment from this week. We started the segment discussing Gary Williams and whether he will ever coach again then moved on to the topic of the week, Jim Tressel's resignation and if Gordon Gee and Gene Smith are next. Based off that topic, maybe its time for the major college programs to break off from the NCAA. We ended this week's talk discussing Jack Nicklaus's comments on Tiger Woods.

Click here to listen to the segment: The Sports Reporters
 
-----------

Also Wednesday I joined The Gas Man in my normal weekly spot. The Gas Man's broadcast was live from Vancouver, prior to Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final, so we jumped off talking about Seattle's love for the Canucks. After that we moved on to the power NCAA programs and as more problems creep up, will the schools look to break off from the NCAA?

Click here to listen to the segment: The Gas Man

Washington Post column: Maryland's Gary Williams was in perpetual motion

For today's The Washington Post ---------------

On the night in 2002 that Maryland won the national championship, I was standing on the Georgia Dome floor with Gary Williams’s daughter, Kristin. As she watched her father cut down the last strand of net, she said, “Maybe now he can relax a little.”

I laughed and said something like, “Have you met your father?”

Relaxing was never something Gary Williams was any good at during his remarkable career as a basketball coach. On that same night, when I congratulated him on reaching the top of the mountain he had spent his entire adult life trying to scale, he shook his head almost as if he was bewildered. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do with myself tomorrow.”

Now that he has decided to retire after 22 years at Maryland, who knows what Gary will do with himself.
“I didn’t want to be one of those coaches who is still hanging around at 70 and can’t stand up to get off the bench during a game,” he said in a phone conversation Thursday. “I’m 66. There are a lot of things I want to do.”

I know he believes that right now. I know he was worn out by a lot of things: 15 years of battling an athletic director who couldn’t stand Williams being the face of Maryland sports; the skepticism of his own fans even after he revived a beleaguered program and delivered its only national championship; the complete cesspool high school recruiting has become; and, finally, his most talented player’s misguided decision to turn pro rather than return for his junior season.

Gary would never put it on any kid, but I suspect Jordan Williams’s departure was the last straw.

“I told Joe Smith to go; I told Chris Wilcox to go; I told Steve Francis to go,” he said a couple of weeks ago. “They were lock lottery picks. Jordan’s not. It’s better for him to come back. Sure, we’re better with him than without him, but I’ve been at this long enough that I think I can look a player in the eye and tell them the truth.”

Click here for the rest of the column: Maryland's Gary Williams retires

Washington Post column -- College coaching can be hazardous to one's health

Tuesday's column for the Washington Post:

Like millions of others, Syracuse basketball Coach Jim Boeheim watched the extraordinary finish of the Michigan State-Notre Dame game Saturday night. After the Spartans had won 34-31 in overtime on an audacious fake field goal attempt that they turned into a touchdown, Boeheim kept his TV on to watch the postgame interview with Michigan State Coach Mark Dantonio.

"I remember thinking as I watched, 'For a guy who just won an unbelievable game, he doesn't look too good,' " Boeheim said on Monday afternoon. "He almost looked a little bit sick."

As it turned out, Dantonio was sick. Several hours later, he was in the hospital, having surgery after suffering a heart attack. Michigan State is describing it as a "mild" heart attack. There is no such thing as a mild heart attack. Dantonio, 54, was very lucky.

"Sometimes you can be fit and in shape, and it happens to you anyway," South Carolina Coach Steve Spurrier said. "There are no guarantees in coaching except if you don't take care of yourself, you're almost guaranteed to have something happen. That's why I work out five days a week all year round. I've done it for as long as I've been coaching."

Coaching, especially on the so-called big-time level, is one of the more stressful jobs going, in part because there are limited opportunities each year to succeed (or fail) and in part because you are being judged by an unforgiving public every time your team goes out to compete. Coaches tend to keep crazy hours in-season. They often eat late at night, and they don't eat a lot of salads. 

Fifteen years ago Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams missed four games late in the season after being rushed to the hospital with pneumonia. As sick as he felt, he might not have gone if his trainer, J.J. Bush hadn't insisted on it.


Click here for the rest of the column: Coaching can be hazardous to one's health

Colleges have long had problems with agent-player contact -- time for NCAA, NFL and NBA enforcement to change

Back in 1981, I was the Maryland beat writer for The Washington Post. Lefty Driesell had two clear-cut first round draft picks on that team: Albert King and Buck Williams. King was a senior; Williams a junior.

After games, when I was in the locker room talking to players, I frequently saw two men who very clearly weren’t members of the media circling the room, glad-handing the players. Often, they would wait until those of us on deadline finished and then swoop in to tell King and Williams how wonderfully they had played.

The two men were David Falk and Donald Dell. In those days, they were still partners, Falk working for Dell at ProServ, which was then one of the mega-agencies in sports, trailing only IMG for prestige, power and name clients. I remember saying to Driesell back then, “why do you let agents in your locker room?”

Lefty shook his head and said. “If I don’t let ‘em in, the players will be upset. They’ll think I’m trying to keep them away.”

“You SHOULD keep them away,” I said. “Agents shouldn’t be talking to players during the season under any circumstances and you shouldn’t be sanctioning it by letting them in the locker room.”

Lefty didn’t listen to me just as 99 percent of the coaches alive would not have listened to me. Like most coaches, he was afraid that if banned the agents, they would tell the players (which they would) ‘your coach isn’t looking out for your best interests. He’s only worried about what you can do for HIM.’

At the end of that season, Buck Williams left Maryland a year early and turned pro. The agent who guided him through the process of making that decision was—you guessed it—David Falk. (Dean Smith once told me that the first time Dell introduced him to Falk he said to his assistants, “I don’t trust that young one.” Boy did he have the one right).

Years later, agenting had become more sophisticated. The big-shots like Dell and Falk only made their presence felt when they truly needed to do so. Falk spent a lot of time in the 90s traveling to Duke to woo Mike Krzyzewski. He didn’t spend much time with the players. Instead, he would go in to see Krzyzewski after games to tell him what a great job he had done that night. Eventually, Krzyzewski hired him as his agent and a lot of Duke players landed with Falk—just as virtually every Georgetown player has landed with Falk since John Thompson became a client of his thirty years ago.

In 1994 I was on a trip to Hawaii with Maryland. Joe Smith was a sophomore and a lot of people thought he had a chance to be the first pick in the NBA draft if he turned pro that spring. Throughout the trip there was a guy hanging around the team who was clearly bird-dogging for an agent. He was outside the locker room waiting whenever the bus pulled up and would hug most of the players as they walked inside. One afternoon I saw him walking on the beach with Smith.

Later that day, just prior to a game he walked up to Chuck Walsh, who was Maryland’s sports information director and said, “Hey Chuck, my man, you got a media guide for me?”

Gary Williams was standing no more than 10 feet away and his face was chalk white as Walsh went to get the media guide. He said nothing. As soon as the bird-dog walked away, Gary went off on Chuck. “What are you doing?!” he screamed. “Why are you helping him? Don’t you understand—he’s the ENEMY! You don’t help him in any way.”

Gary was exactly right. He WAS the enemy. Smith turned pro at the end of that season and there was nothing he could do about it. If he had told Smith to stay away from the bird-dog or any other agenting types, just as Lefty had said, Smith would have seen the order as selfish and self-serving and the agents would have reinforced that every chance they got.

That’s what makes this latest spate of NCAA investigations into player-agent relationship so difficult to deal with as an outsider. It’s very easy to say, “police the agents,” but how? To begin with, the NBA and NFL would have to work with the NCAA and that almost never happens. Beyond that, most agents are smart enough to not leave a trail behind. As Digger Phelps once said about coaches paying recruits: “it’s tough to prove cash.”

It’s tough to prove anything—especially given that the NCAA has always been monumentally understaffed in enforcement and seems more concerned with not talking to the media than with actually getting anything done.

Look, I’m not making excuses for anybody. The agents and the people who work for them shouldn’t be anywhere near college athletes and if they go anywhere near one, coaches should have the guts to tell them to get the hell away. If a player gets upset about it, you explain to him why he cannot be associated with an agent or anyone who has even been breathed on by an agent. If they don’t understand that, chances are they already have their hand out and you (the coach) have a serious problem.

Any agent caught dealing with a college athlete should be banned. And if it someone who works for him in any way, same thing. By banned I mean he can’t be registered with the NFL or the NBA or negotiate a contract with a team on behalf of an athlete for at least two years. I don’t mean if he’s caught giving a kid money, I mean if he shakes hands with a kid.

Years ago, when Eddie Fogler was still an assistant at North Carolina, I was standing with him on the court at University Hall at Virginia about 45 minutes before a game. All of a sudden, Eddie said, “oh dammit, now I’ve got trouble.”

I looked up and saw a man walking in his direction, hand out, smile on his face. I honestly don’t remember the man’s name but Eddie began waving his arms and saying, “Mr. Jones (made-up-name) nothing personal, but I can’t even shake your hand, I’ll be breaking the rules.”

The man was a potential recruit’s father. The last thing Fogler wanted to do was be rude. But the no-bump rules back then meant even accidental contact could be a violation.

Did Fogler act that way because I happened to be standing there? I don’t think so, but even if he did—fine—those are the kind of rules agents needs to be forced to live under. We all know all these excuses are, to put it in polite terms, hooey. The agents are friends of the family; they’re trying to help a kid out (that’s the biggest lie of them all); they just happened to have a house they could rent to a kid’s parents for $25 a month—and on and on. Just say none of those excuses wash. If it WAS an innocent mistake, well, too bad, you lose.

And the notion that the players don’t know they’re doing something wrong? Oh please. They’re all told the rules and they’re all told to stay away from three groups of people: agents, gamblers and the media. (We’re bad guys too because we ask questions). Here’s what I’ve heard coaches say to players: “If ANYONE wants to give you something for free, come tell me. Do NOT accept it, not even a movie ticket.”

The players know the rules but they’re also taught that they’re above the rules. And most of the time, even when they get caught—see Bush, Reggie; Mayo, O.J. et al—they don’t pay the price, the next generation of players and coaches pay the price. That’s another problem with NCAA enforcement: it moves so slowly that the guilty parties are usually out of dodge by the time the posse gets to town. (See Carroll, Pete and Floyd, Tim—who is somehow coaching at UTEP this coming season with no penalty while USC is still under NCAA sanctions).

The bottom line is this: It’s a hard problem for everyone. But the solution is NOT to do nothing. The solution is to understand that no answer is perfect but try to find one that sends a clear message to players, coaches and agents that this behavior won’t be tolerated. And if that behavior upsets a player—tough. Gary Williams was right—agents (and their surrogates) ARE the enemy. In college athletics it isn’t some of the time that they’re the enemy it is ALL the time.

Stranded at home; Lesson from Bob Woodward on using the description of weather in stories

This snow thing is now officially out of control. As I sit here the conditions outside my window are pretty close to a white-out. The snow is falling hard and fast and the wind is blowing it all over the place. How long the power holds out is anybody’s guess. Yesterday, when I tried to run errands, I had the sense that people were preparing for the Apocalypse. (the snow-palypse?)

Parking was close to impossible since there weren’t that many spaces to begin with because of piled up snow from the weekend and the whole world was out trying to get any supplies available. What was interesting was that no one was fighting over spaces or over food or even over batteries. It was as if a calm had come over everyone, a quiet acceptance that the next few days (at least) were going to be miserable and all anyone could do was hope for the best.

I’ve lived in Washington for more than 30 years and I’ve never seen anything even close to this. If you live in Buffalo you may have a sense of what this is like (except that snow belt places are far better prepared to deal with this sort of weather than we are) but otherwise you can’t imagine it. I certainly couldn’t.

Last weekend I escaped the first storm by leaving town Friday afternoon to drive to West Point so I could do the Army-Colgate game on TV on Sunday. That turned out to be a wise decision. There wasn’t a drop of snow up there and I saw a bunch of my Army friends and stayed in the Thayer Hotel where there was plenty of heat, plenty of food and no snow to be found. My trip home was a breeze—until I hit Baltimore.

Only then did I have a real sense of what had happened. The interstate was closed because abandoned cars (there had been a trailer-truck accident in the middle of the storm Saturday) were still being removed. I zigged over to The Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which was down to one, snow and ice-covered lane. The rest of the trip home was a nightmare.

We’re being told it will snow all day today. Given that travel was still very difficult yesterday three days after the weekend storm had ended, I can’t see the area being close to dug out before the weekend. It will, of course, be much more difficult this time because there is already so much snow piled up from plowing.

I would have loved to have gone to the VCU-George Mason game last night, which turned out to be a great game—Mason coming from 15 points down to win in overtime. I would have gone to tonight’s Virginia-Maryland game except there is no Virginia-Maryland game because it was postponed by the snow. Now, among other issues, I have to figure out a column for Sunday’s Post since one of those two games would have supplied me with a column of some kind. I’m supposed to do Bucknell-American on TV tomorrow night. Normally, AU is a 15-minute drive from here. I have no idea if the game will be played or, if it is played, if I’ll be able to get out of my driveway, off my street and to the campus. I just have no idea.

Back in 1985, the first time I covered The British Open, Bob Woodward dropped me a note when I got home. I still have it someplace. (I’ve kept any and all notes I’ve ever received from people I admire and Bob is at the top of the list). The note said something like this: “Great job on the British Open. Best thing you did all week was make people understand what the weather was like and how it affected everyone. You can never write too much about the weather: it affects us all and we can’t control it.”

Just as when Woodward told me a few years earlier that the key to any investigative story and most stories of any kind was, “getting the documents,” I remembered what he said. In fact, a year later, when I wrote ‘A Season on the Brink,” I almost always described the weather on a given day. If you go back and look, the first sentence of the book describes the weather.

Jeff Neuman, the editor who (after five rejections from other publishers) who bought my proposal for the book for McMillan and Company, kept trying to get me to take out all the weather references. “People don’t need to know what the weather was every single day you were there,” he said.

“Yes they do,” I said. “Bob Woodward says they do.”

To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of snow.

I know people romanticize it all the time, “winter wonderlands et al,” and if you watch movies like, “White Christmas,” you’d think there’s nothing better than snow. I just don’t see it that way. It may look pretty on TV and, I’m like everyone else, I remember sledding as a kid (In Riverside Park, right near the 79th street boat basin there was a great hill) and loving it. Now, snow is a nuisance at best and frightening at worst.

I don’t mind cold. The two mornings I was at West Point I happily got up in the morning and walked around the post for an hour in temperatures that never got much above 20 degrees. That’s fine. I also know there are people who will say, ‘hey, what’s wrong with a couple of days at home, sitting in front of a fire, taking it easy.

When I hear stuff like that I think of something Gary Williams said to me a few years ago. Maryland had ended its season with an embarrassing first round loss in the NIT at home against Manhattan. I called Gary that night just to see how he was doing. The next day he called me back.

“Hey, sorry I just got your message,” he said. “I drove right to my beach house (in Delaware) after the game to get away.”

“Good idea,” I said. “A few days just walking on the beach will do you some good.”

“John,” he said. “There are only so many days you can walk on the damn beach before you lose your mind.”

He’d been there 24 hours.

To be honest, I’m the same way. Sitting at home in front of a fire at night watching the Islanders (they finally won a game last night!) is fine. But one night in a row—maybe two—is enough for me. There are games to go to, work to be done, places to go.

I won’t be going anyplace for the next couple of days. No games, no work, nothing. I can’t stand it. And I still need a Sunday column.

This week's Washington Post columns:

Below are today's, and Sunday's column for The Washington Post - Brett Favre and Gary Williams are the focus of the articles. -------

Perhaps the best way to describe the football career of Brett Favre is to say that he has come to embody Hamlet, Shakespeare's greatest and most famous character.

There is no doubting that Favre is heroic. That was never more evident than in the fourth quarter of Sunday's NFC Championship game, when he hobbled in and out of the Minnesota Vikings' huddle but somehow managed to keep back-pedaling and scrambling away from pass rushers to throw laser beam passes while getting knocked down by the New Orleans Saints again and again.

He is also tragically flawed -- the word "tragic" being limited to the context of football. For all the spectacular numbers Favre has put together during his remarkable career, he has won as many Super Bowls as Mark Rypien and Doug Williams and played in as many as Joe Theismann. Oh sure, Peyton Manning's numbers are exactly the same at the moment, and Dan Marino never won a Super Bowl. But none of them ever failed as dramatically as Favre has the last two times he reached the brink of a Super Bowl.

Click here for the rest of the column: Brett Favre: the hero without the happy ending

-------------------------------

Ninety minutes before he would walk onto the court at Comcast Center on Saturday evening, Gary Williams sat in the coaches' conference room that adjoins the Maryland locker room. As always on a game day, his face was filled with tension even though his dry humor was as firmly in place as his game face.

As he prepared for his 1,000th game as a college basketball coach at the age of 64, he didn't feel all that different than he felt just before coaching his first game in 1978 at the age of 33.

"When you stop looking ahead to the next game, to the next season, to the next thing -- whatever it may be -- that's when you stop coaching," he said. "I think I can honestly say I've never done that. When the day comes that I don't want to do that anymore, then it'll be time to stop."

Looking ahead most of the time doesn't mean he can't look back on occasion, because after 1,000 games there are a lot of memories.

Click here for the rest of the column: After 1,000 games, Maryland coach Gary Williams has plenty of good memories

DC Sports Bog lists decade's top ten events in DC sports – my #1 was Mason’s run; What is most thrilling moment in all of sports over the past decade?

My friend Dan Steinberg, who has done a remarkable job the past few years making his “DC Sports Bog,” a must read for a lot of us, has been doing (like so many others) various “End of the Decade,” rankings this week.

This morning’s list was the top ten events in DC sports. He ranked Maryland’s 2002 national championship No. 1 and George Mason’s run to the Final Four in 2006 second.

With all due respect to Maryland and to Dan—wrong.

The rebuilding job Gary Williams did at Maryland was remarkable. I’ve said that and written that dozens of times, especially when the sharks—led by his athletic director—start to circle every time the Terrapins slide at all. I often re-tell the story about the Maryland alum who came up to me at a game midway through the 2001 season and said, ‘the time has come for Gary to go. The Sweet Sixteen is as far as he can take us. We need to get Mike Brey in here and start over.’

I kid that guy often about what happened next. Brey, by the way, who has done an excellent job at Notre Dame, still hasn’t been past the Sweet Sixteen.

Maryland’s national championship was a wonderful story of redemption, a program rebuilt in the aftermath of Len Bias’s death and the probation brought about by Chancellor John Slaughter’s idiotic decision to hire Bob Wade as the basketball coach. But in the end it was the kind of thing that happens in athletics all the time: a fallen program brings in the right coach, the coach catches a break or two in recruiting—Juan Dixon and Lonny Baxter both being largely overlooked—and it all falls into place.

Dean Smith took over a program that was on probation at North Carolina in 1962. Mike Krzyzewski was 38-47 his first three years at Duke. Georgetown’s President asked John Thompson to “try and make the NIT every few years,” when he hired him in 1972. Most Connecticut fans thought U-Conn needed to get out of The Big East when Jim Calhoun arrived in 1985.

Great coaches build and rebuild. All those coaches are in the Hall of Fame because they rebuilt fallen programs and won a national title. Only North Carolina from that group had previously won a national championship. Someday, Gary should join that group in the Hall of Fame. Maryland cutting down the nets in Atlanta was a memorable story, one that I personally savor. I still remember the first thing Gary said to me on the court that night: “Fort Myer. You’re one of the guys who remembers Fort Myer. I’m glad you were here to see this.”

Gary had started his head coaching career at American University in 1978 and his team played home games at Fort Myer, an Army base in Arlington, Virginia. The gym was cold and drafty every night and the locker rooms were actually weight rooms. My favorite memory from, “The Fort,” as everyone called it, was Gary having to talk the MPs out of arresting an opposing coach after he had kicked a wall walking into the locker room at the end of an overtime win for AU. Part of the wall fell in and the MPs showed up in the locker room wanting to arrest him for damaging government property.

I covered AU a lot back then: I was the kid reporter on The Post staff and it was apparent to me that Gary was a comer in the coaching business. Plus, I liked him and I liked his team---which won 24 games his third season and came within a missed jump shot of making the NCAA Tournament.

So, Maryland’s national championship was a thrill for me. I knew how low Gary had been in his early days at his alma mater.

Having said all that, George Mason’s story was the best in college basketball since Texas Western in 1966. The school didn’t even play Division 1 basketball until the late 1970s. It didn’t even have a FIGHT song until 1987. Seriously. I was there the night they unveiled it. Jim Larranaga had built a solid program after coming in from Bowling Green but that’s what Mason was: a solid CAA program, a contender in a league that hadn’t received a second bid to the NCAA Tournament since 1986. The closest any CAA team had come to a Final Four had been David Robinson’s run with Navy in that 1986 season. The Midshipmen made it to the elite eight before being crushed by Duke. THAT was a once in a lifetime experience since Robinson had come to Navy as a 6-7 kid recruited more for his potential as an engineer than as a basketball player.

He didn’t even start his freshman year, then grew six inches that summer and turned into, well, David Robinson.

Remember that a lot of people—led by Jim Nantz and Billy Packer—didn’t think Mason even deserved a bid. The Patriots had lost in the CAA semifinals to Hofstra, a game in which point guard Tony Skinn sucker-punched a Hofstra player in the worst possible place, causing Larranaga to announce he would be suspended for Mason’s next game, whether it was in the NCAA’s or the NIT.

A lot of people thought that Skinn’s suspension would be the difference between Mason getting in or not getting in. When the Patriots went up on the board that Sunday night, Nantz and Packer spent considerable time grilling basketball committee chairman Craig Littlepage on what they had done to deserve a bid. Nantz read through their schedule and asked, “what is in here that we’re not seeing that caused you to give them a bid?”

We all know what happened next: the Patriots stunned Michigan State (without Skinn); shocked North Carolina; beat Wichita State and then, in one of the most dramatic upsets in tournament history, beat Connecticut in overtime to make The Final Four. To be honest, I thought they’d blown it when U-Conn tied the game at the buzzer in regulation. To be even more honest, I couldn’t believe the game was close.

I still remember the first thing Larranaga said to me when I shook hands with him on the court: “I can’t wait to get to Indy to see Nantz and Packer.”

He got his chance early. On Wednesday night, Mason was having dinner in “St. Elmo’s,” the great steakhouse in downtown Indy when Nantz and Packer walked in. I happened to be in there with some friends and when they stopped to say hello I couldn’t resist saying, “Hey, George Mason’s in the back, I’m sure you guys want to go and say hello.”

To his credit, Nantz made a beeline for the back room. Larranaga told me later he congratulated everyone and said he and Packer had been wrong and they had been proven wrong. Packer lingered at our table, talking.

“Well,” I said finally, “Aren’t you going to go in there and apologize?”

“I don’t have anything to apologize for,” Packer said. “I still think what I said was right when I said it.”

That was one thing I loved about Billy: he always stuck to his guns even when the whole world was saying he was wrong.

Mason’s run inspired a lot of people who had never heard of the school prior to March of 2006. Even Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun shook his head in the aftermath of what had to be one of the most disappointing losses of his career and said, “this is why basketball’s a beautiful game.”

As it happens I have a fair number of George Mason T-shirts. They’re actually swimming shirts because I’ve worked out through the years at Mason since the swim coach there, Peter Ward, is a friend of mine. A couple of months after the ’06 Final Four, I was in Coral Springs, Florida for the Masters short course national championships. I was wearing a Mason swimming T-shirt one morning when I walked across the pool deck to jump into the warm-up pool.

As I was walking, I became aware of the fact that people were applauding and apparently the applause was directed at me. Maybe they really liked my new book on Q-school? No, not this crowd. Finally I heard a few of their voices: “George Mason, way to go, great job!” They were applauding for my shirt.

I’ve worn a lot of shirts from a lot of different places through the years. Occasionally I’ll get a pat on the back from ONE person someplace if I’m wearing Navy gear. But that’s about it.

Maryland fans were thrilled by Maryland’s national title. The entire country was thrilled and inspired by George Mason.

-------------------

Since the question has been raised, let’s broaden it a little: Last ten years, what’s the most thrilling moment you remember in sports? I can honestly say Mason is probably number one for me with Jason Lezak’s anchor swim in the 4x100 freestyle relay in Beijing a strong number two and Paul Goydos’s win in Hawaii three years ago (yes, that one is personal) after all he’d been through in his personal life, probably number three. If Tom Watson had parred the 18th at Turnberry this past July it would have blown everything else away and been number two on my all-time list behind the U.S. hockey team at Lake Placid.

Other Games I’d Like to See; Comments on the Len Bias Documentary

As I'm sure is apparent to anyone who reads this blog, I love doing Navy football games on the radio. There is only one drawback and that's the fact that I don't have the flexibility to go to games involving other teams, especially this time of year. Every week I look at the schedule and, while I look forward to the game I'm doing that Saturday, I see games I'd really like to be able to go to that week.

More often than not, these aren't the games the TV talking heads are analyzing and re-analyzing 47 times during the week. This Saturday, I would love to be at the Williams-Amherst game. I've never seen one although I know all about the traditions--thanks in large part to a superb piece my pal Larry Dorman wrote in The New York Times years back--and I know that just about every year the game decides the league title. This year is no different: Amherst is 7-0, Williams is 6-1. In their conference the schools play eight games, none outside the conference, so it is pretty easy to figure out who is in first place. To give ESPN credit, it did take its self-important College Game Day show up there a couple years ago, a rare acknowledgment from the BCS apologists that there is football outside the six major conferences.

There is also Penn at Harvard this Saturday which will pretty much decide The Ivy League title. Al Bagnoli has coached at Penn for 17 years, Tim Murphy at Harvard for 16. They have been the league's dominant coaches during that time, each winning multiple league titles and putting together undefeated seasons. Penn, by the way, has played more games than any college football program in history--it just went past 1,300 last month. In the 1890s, John Heisman played there. Later he coached there. That game would be a lot of fun to see.

The other game I'd really like to see on Saturday won't be played very far from Harvard: Lafayette at Holy Cross. I have an affinity, as people know, for The Patriot League because of the book I wrote a few years back, "The Last Amateurs," about Patriot League basketball and because I continue to do the league's basketball TV package. (It is on CBS College Sports this year for those of you who need to sign up to get that network). But because of my friendships with people in the league, I follow the football programs pretty closely too.

When I was working on the book, Lehigh was the dominant program in the conference. Now, the Mountain Hawks have fallen off and Lafayette, Holy Cross and Colgate--which reached the Division 1-AA national championship game a few years back--have come on to the class of the league. Holy Cross is a remarkable story. Six years ago, Crusaders Coach Dan Allen was dying of ALS, trying to coach from a wheelchair. He died not long after the 2003 season ended and was replaced by Tom Gilmore who has done a remarkable rebuilding job.

The key though for the Crusaders has been their quarterback, Dominic Randolph, who didn't even start in high school and is now getting serious looks from NFL scouts. Pete Thamel wrote a great piece in The New York Times on Randolph a few weeks ago which included quotes from his high school coach. One of them was, "Someday when Dom's an NFL quarterback people are going to say, 'so who's the dope who didn't start him in high school?" I love coaches like that. The final score of this game might be 70-63 because both teams can score but can't, as my old pal Bob Knight used to say, "guard the floor." Lafayette beat Colgate 56-39 last week. Holy Cross's only loss was to Brown in a game in which the two quarterbacks threw more than 100 passes and gained close to 1,000 yards.

Of course next week is Harvard-Yale, The Game as it is called. It's in New Haven this year. Navy is off. Maybe, if I can get a hall pass, I'll take a drive up there. I saw Harvard-Yale once, way back in my early days at The Post, in Boston. At either place, it is a unique experience. The only problem this year is that Yale isn't very good, although it does have a good defense.

I'm not saying the big time games aren't worth seeing or that I don't care about them. I do. I would probably care more if the games were leading to a playoff rather the silly BCS, but they are still worthy of attention. I've never been to USC-UCLA and would like to do that someday. I'd like to see Boise State play and I'd like to see TCU play. I know Gary Patterson from his Navy days and couldn't be happier for the success he has had since taking over at TCU. I'd like to spend some time at South Carolina and hang out with Steve Spurrier. He may not be the coaching superstar he was in his Florida days but he's still as entertaining and interesting as anyone in the sport. I'd like to see West Virginia play Pittsburgh, regardless of the team's records in a given year. There are plenty of other traditional games worth seeing and maybe someday I'll have a chance to do that. At least I get to see Army-Navy every year. That's one game I would never miss under any circumstances.

-----------------------------------------------

I finally watched The Len Bias ESPN documentary the other night. I had avoided it, in part because I'm really not into the self-aggrandizing ESPN series which pop up as self-celebrations every five years, but more because I know the story, I lived the story and I didn't think I needed to see someone else's version of the story. But, I was flipping around the other night, missing baseball, with no hockey to watch and came upon it being rerun, so I stopped on it because my pal Mike Wilbon was on the screen at that moment.

I'm almost hesitant to write about this because every time I write about ESPN I know my bias against the suits who run the place is probably in play. But I sat there and watched and waited for someone to say something like, "Len Bias did this to himself." Instead, it almost sounded as if Len Bias was a martyr. One person after another came on screen to say what a great guy Len Bias was and then--this was the best part--how he had saved lives by dying as if he had run into a burning house to rescue people and died after carrying people to safety.

Look, I knew Len Bias well. I covered Maryland during his sophomore and junior seasons and saw him emerge as a star. I liked him and spent considerable time with him. Check the clips on the stories I wrote about him. He was bright, a talented artist, almost a mama's boy when I covered him. He admitted to me once that he took his laundry home for his mother to do whenever he had the chance. I also know during his senior year, when everyone knew he was going to be a very high draft pick, a lot of people who knew him became concerned about the hangers-on who had come into his life. I heard it from a number of people second-hand because that was the year I was in Indiana doing "A Season on the Brink."

Bias's death was stunning and it haunted Maryland for years and years. It was one of the reasons Bobby Ross fled as football coach and it led to Lefty Driesell being forced out as coach by the self-righteous chancellor John Slaughter. Slaughter then hired a high school coach, Bob Wade, who promptly got Maryland into an NCAA investigation that led to major sanctions. In 1997, when I was doing my book on ACC basketball--11 years after Bias's death--Maryland lost a game at Duke. Afterwards, I sat with alone with Gary Williams, who was in the process of rebuilding from the rubble left after Bias and after Wade. Gary was disconsolate and emotional at that moment. He later told me regretted saying what he'd said but at that moment I know it was what he felt.

"When a player comes to Duke," he said, "he expects to play in The Final Four. There are times when I think all our players want to do is get out of here (Maryland) without dying of an overdose of cocaine."

An over-reaction to a tough loss? Perhaps. But it symbolized just how much Bias's ghost continued to stalk the Maryland campus. I believe it was only after Gary took Maryland to the Final Four in 2001 and won the national title in 2002 that it was finally exorcised.

There's almost none of that in the ESPN documentary. There are just excuses: people didn't know how serious cocaine was in 1986 (they may not have known it could be instantly fatal but they certainly knew it was dangerous and illegal). The notion that Bias had never used before is repeated by almost everyone except the county prosecutor who says, "recreational users don't use that pure a form of cocaine."

Many, if not most of the people interviewed barely knew Len Bias. The exceptions of course, are his parents, Lefty Driesell and some of his ex-teammates. Understandably, they want to protect his memory. Even Brian Tribble, the guy who was doing cocaine with Bias that night, is portrayed as someone who just made this one horrible mistake--even though it was seven years later that he was convicted for drug possession.

Clearly a lot of money was spent on this thing and, since ESPN can self-promote better than anyone, it will get a lot of attention. I would like to think if it was any good, if it shed any new light on the tragedy, that I would say so and give credit where it was due. To me though, it came off as an infomercial. No one doubts that Bias's death was a tragedy and there's no questioning that it had a deep, long-term affect on many, many people. I liked Len Bias, enjoyed the time I spent with him. But he was no martyr regardless of how many people the director lined up to lionize him.

The summer that Bias died, Bob Knight spoke at The Five Star camp. He talked about the dangers of drug-use to the campers. "A lot of people think that using drugs is cool," Knight said. "Len Bias thought it was cool. He was so cool that now he's cold."

That may sound cold and harsh. Sadly, Knight spoke the truth--unlike most of the people on camera during the documentary.

A Long, Great Monday at ‘The Bruce’

I know I wrote last week about Bruce Edwards and the annual charity golf tournament--'The Bruce,' as everyone calls it--but we held our fifth one yesterday and I would be remiss if I didn't write about it today.

There are a lot of bad things going on in the world every day but when you get involved in an event like this one--and I'm sure anyone who has ever been involved in a charity event of any kind can attest to this--you really find out a lot about people. The most gratifying thing is that most of it is good.

Many people are aware of Tom Watson's tireless efforts to raise money for ALS research since Bruce was first diagnosed in January of 2003. I've said often that I honestly think Tom knows more about ALS and what's going on in that world than any non-doctor alive. But he's not the only one--by any stretch--who has worked to make this event a success. His pal Andy North always comes and plays a major role in what we do not just by playing but encouraging other guys to come and helping out in any way he can. Last night we had an auction item that was three flags in one frame--one from The Masters, one from the U.S. Open, one from The British Open. Tom had signed them all with the years he had won them.

Obviously Tom wasn't going to get up and tell people that this was--literally--a one of a kind item because there's nothing else like it in existence. Andy volunteered to do it and spoke warmly and emotionally about how proud he was of his friend during this year's British Open. Andy is what my mom always calls a mensch.

So is John Cook. Bruce worked for him a lot during weeks when Tom wasn't working and John, in his own quiet way, is as loyal to Bruce and his family as Tom has been. He's been to every 'Bruce,' regardless of his schedule and last night HE got up to talk about our other, 'Tom,' item: six framed Sports Illustrated covers after Tom won majors--all autographed too. Before handing the microphone back to the auctioneer John said quietly, "I'd like to start the bidding at $7,500--and I'm the bidder."

You could see that Tom was knocked back a little bit by that gesture.

Both those items were put together for us by Neil Oxman. You may have heard Neil's name during The British Open because he now caddies for Tom during odd-numbered years. The reason for that is that Neil is one of the top political consultants in the country and the even-numbered years he buried in work trying to get Democrats around the country elected--something Tom forgives him for. Talk about an odd couple. The two guys love one another and they agree on absolutely NOTHING politically.

It was Neil who first suggested to Bruce in 1973 in St. Louis that he see if Watson, carrying his bag into the clubhouse after returning from his honeymoon, might need a caddy for the week. The rest, as they say, is history. Neil was in law school then, caddying during the summer and he and Bruce had become friends. Bruce's other close friend early on tour was Bill Leahy, who, like Neil, went on to make a lot of money (at Smith-Barney) and now plays a huge role in 'the Bruce,' every year. No way does the event happen each year without Neil and Bill.

I really don't want to turn this into a list of 'thank-you's' because I know how boring they are but guys like Paul Goydos and Billy Andrade and Jim Calhoun and Gary Williams have been amazing. So has Steve Bisciotti--or as I like to call him, the anti-Dan Snyder--who has played every year and has always been the leader in the clubhouse during the auction. I have never met a truly wealthy person less impressed with the fact that he's wealthy than Steve. Like I said, the anti-Dan Snyder.

There's no doubt that putting on an event like this is really hard because there are always crises you can't anticipate. Guys drop out--some for very legitimate reasons like Jim Boeheim tearing ligaments in his ankle and breaking a rib (while playing golf!) and others who just drop out because they decide its too much work to get there. I'd honestly prefer if they just said no in the first place. Somehow, we make due every year and guys often have stepped up to help at the last minute.

The day always has funny moments--my favorite was the year when Gary Williams introduced Mike Krzyzewski as the dinner speaker. Mike's a non-golfer but came to speak anyway. "This is my dream come true," Gary said in his best deadpan tone. "Being the warm-up act for Coach K."

Mike came up and said, "As I was packing this morning my wife said, 'remind me again, where are you going tonight?' I told her, 'I'm going to a golf tournament and I'm being introduced by Gary Williams.' She said, 'no seriously, tell me where you're going.'"

Another year Gary and Roy Williams each agreed to auction off a seat on their benches for the Maryland-Carolina game in College Park. This was 2006, the year Roy had lost his top seven scorers after winning the national championship. "Now you understand," Roy said. "The seat we're auctioning off here is MINE. I'm going to go sit with Gary."

"You can have MY seat," Gary said, which wouldn't have done much good since he doesn't have a seat on the Maryland bench, which makes sense since he hasn't sat down yet in 30 years as a head coach.

The good news from last night is that even in a down economy we managed to raise about $350,000 which will go to The Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins. We're now closing in on $3 million after five years of doing this. The better news was that one of the scientists from Packard spoke to the group and told us that there is actually--FINALLY--the beginnings of hope that a cure will be found. You could hear a pin drop as she spoke even though most of us could actually understand maybe 20 percent of what was being explained to us. The day was a lot of fun but that news was really what it was all about.

Am I tired today? You bet. Am I proud to know all of these people (and others I didn't get a chance to mention)? You bet.

Remembering Bob Novak, a Friend Bonded by Two Passions: College Basketball and The Children’s Charities Foundation

ESPN was so over-the-top (surprise) with its coverage of Brett Favre yesterday that Brian Kenney—one of the good guys up there—jokingly said, “more coming up when we return to FavreCenter in a moment.” Wonder if he got a talking to for that.

But while ESPN and most of the sports work was obsessing about Favre’s latest return—by the way, isn’t it pretty clear that Favre flat out lied to the New York Jets when he told them he was definitely retired in the spring and then began negotiating with the Vikings about 15 minutes later?—there was a truly significant and sad story that broke yesterday.

Robert Novak died.

His death wasn’t surprising: he hadn’t been healthy since his diagnosis with brain cancer last year but it was nevertheless very sad for those of us who were fortunate enough to know him. No doubt it will surprise anyone who knows my politics to learn that Novak and I were friends but we were: bonded by two passions—college basketball and The Children’s Charities Foundation.

Novak was a sports fan but his true love was college hoops. And, even though he was an Illinois graduate, he became a full-throated Maryland fan when Lefty Driesell was the coach there. He never missed a home game and frequently traveled to road, games, often chartering a plane to get someplace just in time for tipoff. That was how I first met him—covering Maryland for The Washington Post when Lefty was in his hey-day in the early 1980s.

He was initially suspicious of me because I was a Duke graduate. “Elitist school for rich kids,” he liked to say. To which I would respond, “You’re right Bob, it’s a place where a lot of the Republicans you support send their kids. You have a lot of loyal readers there.”

It didn’t take long for him to out me as a liberal and when I covered the Maryland state legislature in the mid-80s, he frequently joked that it was the one legislature I could cover because it was about 85 percent Democrat. The funny thing was my best sources back then were the Republicans who, for some reason, were the jocks and knew me from the sports pages.

In 1994, Peter Teeley, who had been George Bush the first’s speechwriter and later ambassador to Canada, came up with the idea of a local college tournament in DC that would raise money for kids at risk. He had read a column I had written on the subject once so he approached me about joining the board and he approached Novak and his friend Al Hunt knowing that Novak was connected at Maryland and Hunt was connected at Georgetown.

To make a long story short, Gary Williams instantly agreed to take part and John Thompson instantly said no. To this day, Maryland is the centerpiece of an event that has raised more than $10 million for charity and Georgetown has never participated. While I had a close relationship with Williams and with some other coaches who agreed to come and play, it was always Novak who bridged the gap when Maryland Athletic Director Debbie Yow started making noise about Maryland not being able to give up home games to play in the event. Teeley would say, “Bob, it’s time to work your magic with Ms. Yow.” And he would.

Whenever I was with Bob, he wanted to debate basketball issues. He was a political reporter whose passion was sports. I wanted to debate politics. I was a sports reporter whose passion was politics. We argued, naturally, non-stop although we agreed on the disaster that was the Iraq war.

Novak was tough to argue with because he was smart, always had his facts and, naturally, had a lot of inside information I didn’t have. I did win one from him once and, to his credit, he always brought it up to me. In 2006, Ben Cardin, who had been speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates when I covered the legislature ran for Paul Sarbanes senate seat. Cardin and I had remained friends after I got out of politics and I actually spoke at a campaign rally on his behalf.

Two weeks before the election, Novak came up to me at a Children’s Charities board meeting and said, “Your guy Cardin is going down. (Michael) Steele has all the momentum.”

Novak saying this made me nervous but I stuck my chin out and said, “no way. Ben will win easily.” We made a friendly bet: if Steele won I had to say something on the radio about Bob being right and me being wrong. If Cardin won, he had to say something nice about Duke somewhere in public.

As luck would have it, Maryland opened its season on election night and we were both at the game. As I walked into The Comcast Center I called a friend of mine who had access to exit polling. “Ben’s winning easily,” he said as I breathed a sigh of relief. “Looks like he’ll get at least 55 percent of the vote.”

As soon as I saw Novak I beelined over to him and reported what I knew. “No way,” he said, grabbing his cell phone. He called someone demanding exit polling from Maryland. Whomever he called didn’t have it. “How in the world can a SPORTSWRITER know this stuff and we don’t!” he yelled.

Before the game was over, he walked over to me, put his hand out and said, “Congratulations. One for your guys.”

I always took great pleasure in telling my Republican friends that their hero Robert Novak was a registered Democrat—which he was. Living in Washington, D.C. there was no point registering as a Republican because all elections are decided in the Democratic primary.

“I registered Democrat so I could vote against Marion Barry,” he liked to say.

Hard to argue with that.

He was a man of great passion on all subjects His work for The Children’s Charities Foundation was hugely important and was critical in helping raise millions of dollars for kids in desperate need of help. He was a great friend to many people, someone with a very big heart that he didn’t like people to know about because it might affect his, “Prince of Darkness,” image.

When I think of him many memories will flood back but none more vivid than the night Maryland won the national championship in Atlanta in 2002. He had tears in his eyes when I saw him after the game. “I’m so happy for Gary,” he said.

I know for a fact that one of the people Gary was happy for that night was Bob. They both deserved it.