Tag: basketball
LeBron Goes From Playmaker to Peacemaker

LeBron Goes From Playmaker to Peacemaker

By David Whitley, Orlando Sentinel (TNS)

LeBron James is being likened to Superman. A better comparison would be Spider-Man.

Superman can get triple-doubles at will in the NBA playoffs. Spider-Man could probably score 37 points against the Hawks, too. But it’s the words he lives by that matter these days.

“With great power comes great responsibility,” his surrogate father, Uncle Ben, counseled young Spider-Man.

We’re seeing that in the way James is handling the crisis in Cleveland. The city has been on edge since Saturday when a judge acquitted a policeman in the shooting deaths of two unarmed African-Americans. It’s a drama that’s become painfully familiar.

Protesters gather. Justice is demanded. TV crews swoop in to see if the city explodes.

“Violence is not the answer,” James said almost as soon as the acquittal was read.

You’d hope and expect influential local athletes to say something like that. Some do in times of crisis, but others have jumped to conclusions and at least tacitly inflamed high-profile situations.

Look no further than the five St. Louis Rams who came out of the tunnel in pregame introductions last year sporting the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose. It was to protest the shooting of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, Missouri A show of solidarity was fine, but the manner the Rams chose further divided a racially-torn city.

There was plenty of reason to suspect Brown did not have his hands raised or said, “Don’t shoot.” A Department of Justice investigation eventually concluded Brown attacked the policeman, who acted in self-defense.

The Rams were initially hailed as a latter-day Muhammad Ali, bravely speaking truth. But did their actions lessen any tensions, much less promote a just result?

Or look no further than James himself. He tweeted a famous picture of his entire Miami Heat team wearing hoodies in 2012 as the Trayvon Martin controversy was starting to explode.

Again, a show of concern for Martin’s family and the handling of the case in Sanford was entirely appropriate. But James’ accompanying hashtag — #WeWantJustice — revealed his mind already was made up.

Spurred by players like James, the NBA players union called Martin’s death a murder and demanded the arrest of George Zimmerman.

Maybe Zimmerman was a racist killer, maybe he wasn’t. That argument will live on forever.

But players were convicting him of murder, and it was still a year before his trial. Nobody knew the actual evidence or was in a position to accurately judge the case.

That’s why I wondered how James would react this time. The initial police incident sounded inexcusable. Cops cornered fleeing suspects and fired 137 bullets into their car.

The shooting victims were suspected of trying to buy drugs. They fled when police tried to pull them over. About 100 officers pursued the car for 20 miles with speeds reaching 100 mph.

Police thought the pair had fired at them. They were wrong. But as with all these cases, the facts were complicated and demanded a detached study if you truly want justice.

That’s what LeBron said he’d do. In the meantime, he pleaded for peace and said he’d do all he could to keep Cleveland from turning into another Ferguson or Baltimore.

“Sports just does something to people,” James said. “You just feel a certain way about rooting for a team that you love, get your mind off some of the hardships that may be going on throughout your life or maybe that particular time or period. It just does that.”

By extension, players have an inordinate influence on people’s lives.

Superman has pretty much become the most powerful person in Ohio. It’s good to see he’s up to that responsibility.

Photo: Craig Hatfield via Flickr

Go, Cavs, And Pass The Confetti

Go, Cavs, And Pass The Confetti

Now listen. We’re not going to work ourselves into a tizzy here in Cleveland because a columnist in Boston decided to launch his fiction writing career with a hit job on us.

OK, maybe we are, but let’s keep this meltdown brief, shall we? I love Boston and a few Boston sports fans, too, especially the one who is the father to two of our beautiful grandchildren. I’ve got the family peace to keep here. So go, Celtics — any time except right now.

After the Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Boston Celtics in Game One of the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs, Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy made fun of us. A lot.

Our confetti-drop at the end of the game struck him as “a little needy.” We do this after every game, which I guess makes us really, really needy. To someone who thinks confetti is a window into the soul, I mean. That’s deep, man.

Shaughnessy also called us “a hungry place, peppered with people with hungry faces.” I’m trying to imagine what a hungry face looks like. I keep seeing Joe McKenzie’s hound dog eyes as he tried to talk me into a kiss in the summer between sixth and seventh grades. I’m going with that one.

On and on Shaughnessy went, describing us as a “sad” and “quiet” town that is either “dead or dying.” Remind me never to count on him to call 911.

The “quiet” thing I don’t get. My husband and I are still popping our ears after Saturday’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions. The partying was so raucous and loud that we kept misunderstanding each other. During Green Day’s performance, for example, I thought he turned to me and yelled, “Ice your fat hair.” Turns out he said, “This is so great.” If we were a quiet people, I would have known that.

Now, I imagine some of you readers who don’t live in Cleveland might wonder why you should care about yet another out-of-town journalist’s trash-talking our town.

This isn’t just about Cleveland. This is about every misunderstood city in America that’s had three professional sports teams without a national championship for more than 50 years.

Granted, that narrows the pool somewhat — to exactly one, maybe — but we’re Midwesterners, and to make it all about us would suggest we’re sports fans in Boston.

OK, I winced as I wrote that because I’m breaking rule No. 1 of the Manual of Midwestern Manners, which instructs us to smile on the outside even when our hearts are curdling with revenge fantasies on the inside. To assuage my guilt, I’m going to go bake a casserole for a potluck somewhere.

On Tuesday, Shaughnessy told Cleveland’s WKYC-TV that he was sorry if we were offended. “There’s no new ground in there,” he said, referring to his column. “Nothing that hasn’t been said before.”

That’s some standard you got going there, Dan.

What this is really about is what it means to be a columnist these days. We are so needy.

There was a time when we wrote our opinions and they were published for a single day in the print newspaper and that was that. We’d get some angry calls and maybe some mean mail, but no one posted the worst picture of us ever online for a caption contest.

And we’re just not special anymore. These days, anyone with an opinion and a keyboard is a “columnist.” Our job performance is now measured not by the depth of our intellect or the breadth of our brilliance but by the number of online clicks, comments, and “unique visitors.”

By the way, dear readers, I want you to know I have always thought that each and every one of you is unique.

For most editors, any attention is better than being ignored. So we’re supposed to celebrate whenever the comments sections under our columns explode with stuff you wouldn’t say to a dog that has just lifted his leg over the toe of your Uggs. The new boots, the ones without the salt stains.

That stuff can play with your head. You might start to wonder: Maybe I do resemble my pug when I write about workers’ rights. Maybe my politics really have earned me the nickname Commie Connie. Maybe it’s true that I am a man-hating broom-flier with a closetful of sensible shoes.

Or not. Maybe you only worry about that if you’re a columnist in Boston.

Which brings us back to Shaughnessy for the most fleeting of moments. How time flies. As I write, the Cavs are now up 2-0 against Boston and are headed to the fine city that spawned our just-this-side-of-perfect son-in-law.

Grandma’s got her game on.

Go, Cavs.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including …and His Lovely Wife, which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Cleveland Cavaliers via Facebook

59 Years Ago, Discrimination Law And Sports Intersected

59 Years Ago, Discrimination Law And Sports Intersected

By Frank Fitzpatrick, The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)

The national controversy that clouded the run-up to a Final Four that concluded Monday night in Indianapolis wasn’t the first collision between basketball and civil-rights politics.

In Louisiana in 1956, as in Indiana 59 years later, a four-team basketball tournament involving a favored Kentucky team was engulfed in a political storm, though the divisive issue then was race and not sexual preference.

And as in Indiana, where a recent religious-freedom law was widely seen as discriminatory against homosexuals, the Louisiana dispute involved changing cultural mores, a conservative legislature, worried civic and business leaders and, ultimately, government intervention that saved the event.

The turmoil surrounding the 1956 Sugar Bowl, a Christmas basketball tournament run by the organizers of the better-known New Year’s football game, had been triggered two years earlier by the Supreme Court’s historic ruling outlawing segregation.

In the tumultuous southern reaction to Brown V. Board of Education, many cities and states responded by transforming long-standing Jim Crow customs into hardened law.

Louisiana’s legislature passed a flurry of such bills in 1956. One, Act 579, widely known as the Athletic Events Bill, outlawed all public interaction between blacks and whites.

“All persons, firms, and corporations,” it read, “are prohibited from sponsoring, arranging, participating in, or permitting on premises under their control any dancing, social functions, entertainments, athletic training, games, sports or contests, and other such activities involving personal and social contacts, in which the participants or contestants are members of the white and negro races.”

Powerful interests in New Orleans immediately foresaw financial consequences, though the only civic entity initially willing to speak out in opposition was the Mid-Winter Sports Association (MWSA), organizers of the popular football and basketball Sugar Bowls.

That group prodded Governor Earl Long to veto the legislation. But the son of populist politician Huey Long refused.

“My mail,” he told reporters, “is running four-to-one in favor of the legislation.”

Next, Sugar Bowl organizers sought to water down the bill, proposing an exemption for New Orleans. When lawmakers rejected that, the group devised a failed plan that essentially would have created tiny integrated islands within an otherwise segregated arena and stadium.

Racial restrictions in college sports were loosening slowly in the 1950s, but not in the South. The region’s three largest conferences — the Atlantic Coast, Southeastern and Southwest — remained segregated and would be for another decade.

The 1956 Sugar Bowl field was comprised of three Catholic schools — Dayton, St. Louis, and Notre Dame — and the most dominant team in college basketball, Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky.

When action to invalidate or weaken the Louisiana law failed, Notre Dame and St. Louis, each of whom had black players, withdrew. Dayton, though it had no blacks at the time, did the same.

“If we went to the tournament as it now stands,” said Dayton athletic director Harry Baujan, “we’d be condoning the law.”

Kentucky Governor Happy Chandler, assuming the event would be canceled, hastily made plans for a new Christmas tournament in Louisville, the Blue Grass Classic, that would feature the Wildcats.

Rupp’s Kentucky team was all-white. He wouldn’t add his first black player, Tom Payne, until the 1970-71 season, well after most SEC teams had integrated.

Some Kentucky alumni saw the Sugar Bowl controversy as a chance for the border-state school with national ambitions to make a positive statement on race. They urged UK to join the other schools in withdrawing.

“Here is a situation where the University of Kentucky could courageously show that principle is more important to it than the ‘sugar’ in the Sugar Bowl,” Herschel Weil, a 1922 grad, wrote to UK president Frank Dickey.

But as Rupp himself had done so often when questioned about racial issues, Dickey used contractual obligations as an excuse. The school had promised the organizers it would appear, Dickey said, and it intended to honor that commitment.

“I agree with you that the problem of the religious and moral implications in this situation is a difficult one,” wrote Dickey in response to Weil. “However [I] feel that the moral values of integrity and honesty are also involved.”

Rupp’s influence on the decision can’t be determined but he and Kentucky helped round up three southern schools — Houston, Virginia Tech, and Alabama — as replacements and the 1956 Sugar Bowl, which the Wildcats won easily, went on.

Asked for his reaction to Act 579’s impact on what had been one of the nation’s premier holiday tournaments, MWSA president Paul DeBlanc said: “That’s the law and we will try to live under it.”

Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that law unconstitutional.

But the Sugar Bowl, perhaps a little gun-shy given its 1956 experience, would not include another northern team until Xavier of Ohio in 1962.

Photo: wlef70 via Flickr

Late Night Roundup: Indiana Isn’t Getting Any Break

Late Night Roundup: Indiana Isn’t Getting Any Break

The state of Indiana was in for some more ridicule on the late night comedy shows, in the wake of the controversies over its “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

Conan O’Brien spoke with Indiana’s “Religious Freedom Czar,” played by former Saturday Night Live cast member Chris Parnell, to talk about all the detailed research he has done in order to be on the lookout for gay men.

Indiana native David Letterman presented a list, “Top Ten Guys Indiana Governor Mike Pence Looks Like,” based on Pence’s press conference Tuesday. (Spoiler: They’re all archetypal jerks.)

And Jimmy Fallon tried out a special prediction method to see who will win the NCAA Final Four: Having a bunch of puppies gather around four bowls of kibble, each named for one of the schools. (Well, it’s probably as good as any other predictor!)