Blake Griffin, comedian?
Blake Griffin wasn’t known for his witty one-liners during his prep or college career. Truth is, the Oklahoma City native was one of the more straight-laced, straight-forward athletes around.
But he had quite the funny recently when talking to Dan Patrick. It was Patrick’s “Line of the Week” in the latest edition of Sports Illustrated.
When Patrick asked if Los Angeles was big enough for Kobe Bryant and Big Blake, Griffin said, “I don’t even know if it’s big enough for Kobe himself.”
Good one.
Big Blake at NBA Draft Combine
The next step in Blake Griffin’s NBA odyssey is this weekend — the NBA Draft Combine in Chicago.
Friday, he declined team interview requests. He also declined to do any of the drills.
According to New York Post blogger Marc Berman, Griffin said, “I just do what I’m told,” referring to directives given to him by agent Jeff Schwartz.
One thing Griffin did do was get measured. There was scuttlebutt that the Oklahoma City native and former Oklahoma Sooner might not be as tall as he was listed. Some even suggested he might be closer to 6-foot-6 than 6-foot-10.
The results are in, and according to Clips Nation, Griffin is 6-8 1/2 in his bare feet. Of course, he won’t be playing many NBA games in his bare feet, and with shoes, he’s about 6-10.
Tragedy averted.
Griffin is widely regarded as the No. 1 pick in this year’s draft, and according to Brian Hanley of the Sun-Times News Group, Griffin says he believes Clippers general manager and coach Mike Dunleavy when he says that Los Angeles will draft him.
But …
“You never say never,” Griffin said. “I’m playing it as if I don’t know right now. Which I don’t. I’m not guaranteed anything. I’m going through (the process) like everybody else.”
Well, sort of. It’s still believed that Griffin will only work out for one team, the squad with the top pick. That isn’t exactly an Every Man routine.
The Q&A: Outtakes
Enjoy.
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Jason Neville, Edmond resident and member of the U.S. World Championship taekwondo team
Jenni Carlson: You had long fought at 170 pounds, but you made the world championship team at heavyweight. Bet people were surprised when you showed up at world team trials as a heavyweight.
Jason Neville: Some in the division were trying to get me out of it. They didn’t think it was legal that I had moved into it and didn’t like the idea of a lighter, faster guy sneaking into this division, but didn’t break any rules, didn’t do anything wrong. It ended up working out well for me.
JC: Pretty amazing since you competed for the first time as a heavyweight in a pretty high-stakes tournament.
JN: I wasn’t so much nervous. I had convinced myself that as long as I get into this weight class, I was going to be faster, more agile, about the same height. In essence, there was really no reason I shouldn’t be able to succeed. I’d kind of built up the confidence in the game plan. We got into the first fight, ended up feeling good … so at that point, my coach looked at me and was like, “I’m not worried.” I was feeling like everything was still in my control.
JC: So, even from that first match you felt like you’d made a good decision?
JN: Oh, yeah. The first fight went well, and the second one was one of the ones I was really looking forward to. That was the fighter and his father/coach that were trying to remove me from that division. If I was going to hype myself up for a match, that was the one I was really ready for. That one ended perfectly. It was a point gap, where it’s almost like the mercy rule. Overall, success and satisfaction.
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Don Porter, International Softball Federation president
Jenni Carlson: You were the longtime head of the Amateur Softball Association here in Oklahoma City, and you still have a house here. You also have one in Florida. Most people buy the house in Florida as a vacation home, but your Oklahoma home is probably more of a vacation home.
Don Porter: It really is. Most of our family’s here. Some of our kids. A lot of our grandkids. We didn’t know what the future holds, the next six months or the next year, and so we felt we need to keep the house here. My wife can come back here at times that I’m gone. She was just here for about a month, caught up with everything, friends, church. But having the home down there in Plant City is convenient because of what we’re doing.
JC: But your travel schedule is crazy as you work to get softball back into the Olympics, right?
DP: It’s almost every week. It’s good from the standpoint of trying to get where we want to be. I have other people doing stuff, too, but a lot of times, they want the president. They don’t care that it’s me. It’s whoever the president is.
JC: How do you keep the energy up?
DP: It’s not easy, but I watch myself. I’m a vegetarian. I have to watch what I do because if I don’t, I won’t be able to do it. I spent six days in African last week. We had a good conference. We had a lot of good discussion. We’re trying … to get softball into the schools in Africa.
And another thing about OSU baseball…
Oklahoma State made the NCAA baseball tournament, causing a bit of a stir.
ESPN called it a strange inclusion. Yahoo! Sports dubbed the Cowboys’ bid comical. And Baseball America said no possible case could be made for the Cowboys.
Truth is, it’s all water under the bridge now. The Cowboys are in. Perhaps the selection process for the NCAA baseball tournament needs to be revamped, but then again, many have been saying that for years. The trouble with that is, the baseball tournament and college baseball in general aren’t big enough deals for the NCAA to get hung up on.
But that’s a blog for a different day.
I wrote today that OSU doesn’t need to apologize for getting into the tournament. The Cowboys had 32 victories this season, and even though they struggled in Big 12 play, they still had an RPI in the 20s.
And let’s be honest — when you’re talking about the last teams in and the first teams out, all of them have warts. OSU does, too, but consider this about the Cowboys — they had three rained-out conference games that could’ve gotten them into the Big 12 Tournament. When umpires called off the Sunday game in the Baylor series because there was standing water in the outfield, OSU was set to send Andy Oliver to the mound. The Bears didn’t even shower before loading the bus and hightailing it out of Payne County.
Not to say there was no standing water in the outfield, but the decision was a judgment call that could’ve easily gone the other way.
There were games played at Oklahoma during the last two weekends of the regular season with outfielders standing in ankle-deep water.
Some might argue that the umpires were just doing what they thought was best when they called those games. They were just making a judgment call.
Turns out, that’s what the NCAA selection committee did, too.
More draft lottery night drama
And you thought the only drama during the NBA Draft Lottery was who would get the No. 1 pick.
Let me introduce you to Jacketgate.
Around 9:45 on Tuesday night, my cell phone rang. I’d just finished my first edition column, and when I saw that the boss was calling me on deadline, I knew something was up.
Mike Sherman, our sports editor, asked if I’d seen the number sewn into Clippers president Andy Roeser’s jacket. I told him that I’d heard he had a No. 1 sewn into the lining, but he told me that he saw more than that. He swore that he saw a No. 23.
Blake Griffin’s number.
I told him that I’d check around the Internet and see what I could find.
For the next 15 or 20 minutes, I searched YouTube and Google and Yahoo and just about any other search engine I could think of. I watched a couple videos. Nothing. I read a couple stories. Nothing.
Then, I stumbled across an Associated Press story that mentioned not only the No. 1 in the jacket lining but also the No. 23. It was the only story reporting that the No. 23 existed, and without some visual proof, I had a hard time adding that information to my column.
So, I e-mailed Lisa Dillman, who covers the Clippers for the Los Angeles Times. About 10 minutes later, she e-mailed me back and said she hadn’t seen anything or heard anything about it.
My boss insisted that she must have missed it, but he, too, could find no visual proof of it.
I sent more e-mails. To the entire Clippers media relations staff. To the entire Clippers broadcast team. To the AP writer who had the story about the jacket lining.
Less than five minutes after my e-mail to AP writer Brian Mahoney, he e-mailed me back. He said he didn’t see the jacket lining but that another AP writer did.
I asked him if the other writer was sure and told him that I thought it was weird that we couldn’t find any photos of it.
Maybe, I suggested, Roeser was trying to hide the No. 23.
After a few minutes, Mahoney replied that my theory seemed right. He’d asked around the press room there in Secaucus, N.J., site of the draft lottery, and the reporters said that Roeser seemed to be trying to hide the No. 23 lining. At least one other writer saw it, though, when Roeser adjusted his jacket.
I wrote up an addition to my column and sent it in.
Almost as soon as I hit the send button, though, I got two e-mails from the Clippers PR staff. Joe Safety and Seth Burton wrote to say that, yes, Roeser’s jacket had a No. 1 and a No. 23 in the lining but that those numbers referred to current Clippers Baron Davis and Marcus Camby.
Safety, the team’s head PR honcho, even said that Roeser had owned the jacket for years, so the fact that he was wearing it and that Griffin wore No. 23 was just coincidence.
Fun stuff, eh?
I don’t know if Roeser really owned the jacket for years or not, and frankly, I’m not sure we’ll ever know for certain. But I do know that the whole Jacketgate saga was a grand side drama to night already filled with nail-biting, heart-pounding moments.
Will local be big-league hire or major-league bust?
The Arizona Diamondbacks made a shocking move a couple weeks back, hiring A.J. Hinch to be their new manager.
Oklahomans know of Hinch and his solid pedigree.
They might be the only ones.
Hinch was a standout at Midwest City High back in the early 90s, then went on to Stanford before pro baseball came calling. The catcher mostly bounced around the minor leagues for the next decade or so, but just about everyone who came in contact with him from the time he was in high school until the time he retired in 2005 was impressed by Hinch.
The guy is sharp as a tack.
So, it made sense that the Diamondbacks lured him into their organization and put him on the fast track to becoming general manager one day.
But then when they moved him from director of player development to manager, it left a lot of folks scratching their heads.
The New York Times has a fascinating read about the whole situation. Definitely worth your time. Not only are there some refreshingly honest comments from Hinch but also a quote from another face familiar to Oklahomans, former Oklahoma RedHawk R.A. Dickey.
Just for the record, the Diamondbacks are now 2-6 since Hinch’s hiring.
Wayman: Great man, great faith
More from The Q&A: Jonathan Horton
Catching up with Jonathan Horton is no easy task these days.
The Olympic gymnast and former Oklahoma Sooner is a busy training, finishing his degree and preparing for his June wedding. There’s also the matter of competing for his country.
Jenni Carlson: What about national and international duties?
Jonathan Horton: I’m on the national team until I lose my spot, until somebody beats me out of it, which I don’t think is going to happen.
JC: Not for awhile, at least.
JH: No. (Laughs.)
JC: Can you decide when you compete and when you don’t?
JH: I actually got invited to a competition last March, and I was like, “No.” The senior team coordinator, Ron Brandt, he invites me to everything. But I declined everything up until July. I’m going to Japan for a team competition there. Then, the next big competition after that is U.S. Championships, which is in Dallas.
JC: What will that team going to Japan look like? A lot like the Olympic team?
JH: They’re inviting the top eight teams from the Olympics to the meet, so it’s kind of a big deal. There’s nothing really riding on it … so they’re not going to send all the guys from the Olympics. They’ve got some newcomers working their way up.
JC: What do these young guys mean for the future of the U.S team?
JH: The United States is going to really surprise a lot of people in the next few years because … these young guys are ridiculous. I have to work my butt off to not let them pass me up.
JC: What about a couple of your former Sooner teammates, Chris Brooks and Steven Legendre? How good are they in terms of making an Olympic team?
JH: They’re both extremely good. In four years, who knows what they could do? They could potentially be 2012 Olympians, no doubt. And Steve, right now, could be by far the greatest tumbler anybody’s ever seen on floor. He may go to world championships this year, and there’s no doubt he can win. The U.S. hasn’t had anybody win an individual event in a long time. He’s ridiculous.
Wayman: All-American, all-world
The news of Wayman Tisdale’s death Friday morning hit like a sucker punch to the gut.
We’d heard rumors that he was battling cancer again, that the monster was back, that the treatments had started again despite the former basketball legend’s best efforts to fend them off. And when Tisdale appeared at a Thunder game last month, he didn’t look so good. He was thin. He was drawn. He might’ve needed to lose a little weight before, but he had lost it so fast that he looked unhealthy.
Something wasn’t right.
We found out just how bad things were Friday morning.
So, how can you celebrate the life of a man who reached the pinnacle in two entirely different professions — basketball and jazz — and who was a much better person than he was a player or a musician? That phrase is thrown around a lot in sports, but in Wayman’s case, it really was true.
My buddies Berry Tramel and John Rohde captured that as best they could in their columns today, while I wrote about how Wayman inspired people during these past couple years. There were powerful words and sentiments contained in those columns, and yet words just didn’t seem like enough.
Even as Berry and I sat down with sports editor Mike Sherman yesterday afternoon to talk about Tisdale for our weekly Press Row video, it was hard to wrap your head around this larger-than-life figure.
A quick clarification, too, from that video. During it, I said that Tisdale three first-team All-American honors would likely never be matched. A reader pointed out that recently graduated North Carolina star Tyler Hansbrough had been at least a three-time All-American, and that’s true.
The difference is that Wayman was a first-team Associated Press All-American. Hansbrough didn’t make the AP first team until his junior year, and that AP team is viewed by most folks as the granddaddy of basketball All-American teams.
Hope that serves as a little clarity.
Goodness knows, it feels like we need some. This tragic news has heads swimming and hearts heavy.
Prep phenom powered by peanut butter
A fun tidbit from my story on Del City High standout Toni Young ended up on the cutting room floor.
Through the power of the blog, it lives here as an outtake.
As I mentioned in the story, Young was a beanpole three or four years ago. Even now as an Oklahoma State basketball signee and the national high school record holder in the high jump, she’s won’t be mistaken for a bodybuilder, but she’s nowhere near what she was. She said she weighed about a hundred pounds in eighth and ninth grade when she first tried sports, but really, she admitted later, it was more like 85 pounds.
So, how did she go from beanpole beginner to 6-foot-1 powerhouse?
“Peanut butter and my brother,” she said.
While the story talked about her brother’s influence, I didn’t have a chance to mention the importance of peanut butter. Just about every night, Young mixed together peanut butter and syrup. She told me that the ratio had to be just right, too. The perfect formula was a little heavy on the peanut butter.
“If it has too much syrup,” Young said, “then it’s just nasty.”
Those syrup sandwiches helped her gain weight.
Without them, Toni Young might have ended up a hundred pound senior at Del City. Instead, she’s the best high school girls athlete in the state competing right now.
She finishes her outstanding prep career Saturday at the Class 6A state track meet at Moore High School.
