Need someone to cheer? Here’s your guy
Reading the sports page this morning was like getting smacked in the head repeatedly with a frying pan.
Every headline brought more bad news.
“BCS has stench of corruption”. “Aqib Talib turns himself in”. “Report: Auburn players said they were paid”.
And that didn’t even include any headlines about the OU men’s basketball coaching search. Talk about bad news.
But then, I noticed a ray of light, a bit of goodness amid the gloom. I may have just discovered my new favorite athlete, too.
“Ryo Ishikawa to give 2011 golf earnings to victims”.
It was such a stunning headline that I had to read it again, but it is absolutely true. The 19-year-old Japanese golf phenom is giving all of his tournament earnings this year to victims of the massive earthquake and resulting tsunami in his homeland. There is also a report that he is going to make an additional contribution for every birdie he makes. If last year is any indication, Ishikawa will donate about $2 million to the relief efforts.
But if he plays better than he did a year ago, it could be more.
Much more.
Most of his earnings last year came from his play on the Japan Golf Tour, but he is playing more and more on the PGA Tour. If he has a good weekend somewhere along the way, he could make $2 million in one tournament.
Granted, this guy isn’t going to go hungry. In his native Japan, he is an endorsement machine. He’s young. He’s attractive. He is going to have a steady income no matter how much he donates.
But when was the last time you saw an athlete say that they were going to make this kind of unknown monetary contribution to help others? Sure, athletes have pledged big amounts in the past, but if Ishikawa has a breakout year, he could be writing a really, really big check. Being willing to make that kind of contribution takes guts.
Takes heart, too.
That’s why I’m pulling hard for this guy. Here’s hoping his goodness and generosity is felt by many now and when he writes that big check later this year.
Thunder’s Maynor relishes VCU victory
Eric Maynor can no longer lay claim to Virginia Commonwealth’s most magical March Madness moment.
And he couldn’t be happier
Even though the Thunder guard will always be remembered in VCU lore for his buzzer-beater that upset mighty Duke four years ago, the Rams now have an NCAA Tournament highlight that is grander. They beat Kansas in the regional final. They showed all those doubters that they belong.
Now, they are going to the Final Four.
Maynor beamed Sunday evening before Oklahoma City’s 99-90 victory over Portland as he talked about his alma mater’s win.
“I watched the whole thing before I came to the arena,” he said. “Excited for them.”
The players who knocked off the ‘Hawks and shocked the college basketball world aren’t just some random guys to Maynor. Jamie Skeen, the Rams’ swingman who blitzed the Jayhawks for 26 points, was sitting out the year after transferring from Wake Forest during Maynor’s last season at VCU. Joey Rodriguez, the Rams’ gutty point guard who just kept attacking the Jayhawks, was a starter alongside Maynor for two years.
Then this past offseason, Maynor spent a majority of the time in Richmond. He worked out with the team. He hung with the team.
These guys are his buddies.
“I talk with them all the time,” he said sitting inside the locker room before Sunday night’s game. “I’m just talking to one of them right now.”
He raised the cell phone in his hand.
“They’re so happy.”
So is Maynor.
He plans to have some fun with VCU’s success. Maynor, after all, has found himself on the receiving end of some serious ribbing from his Thunder teammates these past couple weeks.
First, they told him that VCU had no place in the NCAA Tournament.
Then, the Kansas alums told him that the VCU run would end against their guys.
“They’re upset with me,” Maynor said, a playful smile on his face as he glanced across the locker room at Nick Collison and Cole Aldrich. “I said something when I first seen ‘em.”
So, will that be it?
“We need to get this win today,” he said, “then after that I’ll start back talkin’.”
Maynor plans to let everyone know about his team’s success.
“Oh, yeah, I’m gonna keep talkin’,” he said. “We got a whole week before we play another game.”
He smiled again.
“I’m gonna talk a lot.”
Sure, he loves a little give-and-take with his teammates, but really, it’s more than that.
Maynor feels a part of what happened Sunday.
“One of my old teammates tweeted that we didn’t ever make it that far, but we’re gonna be on that court with ‘em,” Maynor said. “That’s how I feel.”
He helped lay the groundwork for this Final Four run. He set a high standard. He instilled a mentality.
“Just work hard all the time, and if you put your mind to something, you can do it,” he said. “You’ve just got to try to do it together, and that’s what they’re doing.”
Seeing the Rams play that same way today makes him insanely proud.
That shot Maynor hit to knock out Duke was VCU’s first tournament win in more than two decades. Only a few years later, the Rams are going to the Final Four.
Knowing he had a hand in this success eases his fall to No. 2 in VCU tournament lore.
OSU basketball tickets: Great move by Holder
A month or so ago, our man Berry Tramel wrote a bit about basketball ticket prices at Oklahoma and Oklahoma State in wake of the snow-storm freebies that prompted big crowds.
One line in particular caught my eye.
“The Cowboys have nothing in the $10 range,” Berry wrote. “They charge $25 for exhibition games, $30 for non-conference games and $40 for Big 12 games.”
Those numbers shocked me. Maybe it’s wrong to use these parameters, but the Thunder has become my point of reference on ticket pricing. The NBA team, one of the most exciting squads in the entire association, has a bunch of $10 tickets for each and every game. Sure, a vast majority of the area has seats that cost $30 and above, but there is at least a cheaper option.
OSU had no such option at all.
Now, it does.
Thursday, OSU athletic director Mike Holder announced that OSU was slashing ticket prices for men’s basketball on nearly 6,000 seats in the 300 level. The cost will go from $575 this season to $275 next season. The cut applies almost all of the seats that were added when Gallagher-Iba Arena expanded.
I remember when the expanded arena first opened. I trekked to the top of the arena and talked to a father and daughter who’d never been able to get into a Cowboys game in the old Gallagher-Iba, but with the expansion, they now had that chance. Those were the days when OSU basketball was a tough ticket.
Those days seem a distant memory now.
But maybe with this ticket reduction, it will help the Cowboys return to those glory days. Remember how much of a home-court advantage the Cowboys had when Gallagher-Iba was packed? Sure, the teams then were good, but there was an intimidation factor in that packed arena.
With the Cowboys preparing to welcome the best recruiting class in the Travis Ford Era, the Cowboys have a chance to be pretty darn good next year. Having a home-court advantage like the old days might help push that team to even greater heights. Every Big 12 team in the new slimmed down conference will make a trip to Stillwater next season. That means Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri and Iowa State will join the parade of Big 12 South teams.
Resurrecting the rowdiest arena in America could sure help the Cowboys chances.
Kudos to Holder and OSU for making this move.
Now it’s up to the fans to do their part.
Power Lunch Chat Recap: Jenni Carlson
Got those brackets filled out? Better hurry
The NCAA Tournament starts today.
And I don’t like it one bit.
Every year since I can remember, my favorite day on the entire sports calendar was the first day of the men’s basketball tournament. It was always on Thursday, and it was like a basketball explosion. Games started before lunch, and they went all through the day, the evening and into the night.
It was a sports fan’s nirvana.
Now, the start of the tournament has been pushed back with the expanded 68-team field and a pair of play-in games Tuesday and Wednesday. Granted, we’ve had the single play-in game for the past couple years, but with essentially the worst two teams in the field battling for a spot in the 64-team bracket, that didn’t feel like the start of the tournament.
But with four games and several teams that are legitimate squads — these play-in games now aren’t just 16-seed wanna-bes — this feels like the start of the tournament.
Our basketball explosion has been replaced by a basketball trickle.
It stinks.
The start of the NCAA Tournament has always been something of an unofficial holiday for sports fan. People take an extra-long lunch to catch some action. Some even play hookie from work.
But now? Is anyone even going to watch these first four games?
And what about brackets? Everyone always had until Thursday morning to mull over their choices and fill out their sheets. Now, it seems only right that brackets are filled out today.
(I did mine this morning on NewsOK.com’s uPickEm contest.)
This whole bracket expansion has completely thrown off the tournament rhythm that we have come to expect. I’m sure in time we’ll come to accept it, but right now, I’m not excited about the start of the tournament and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that way before.
It stinks.
Chat Recap: Jenni Carlson
OSU football: Pulling for Perrish difficult now
I wanted badly for Perrish Cox to make it.
The cornerback was always one of my favorite guys to chat with during his college days at Oklahoma State. He always had something to say, and he always seemed to be speaking from the heart. Since he hadn’t always had an easy time of things, I truly hoped that he’d succeed. It was a chance at a feel-good story, and I’m always in favor of those.
Now, it’s becoming more and more difficult to pull for Perrish.
Cox was arrested back in December for sexual assault. He is facing two felony counts accusing him of assaulting a helpless victim who was incapable of appraising her own condition.
Unsavory stuff, for sure.
Now, an attorney for the Denver Broncos cornerback is trying to bar the public and the media from his preliminary hearing. Presumably, he will try to get any other court proceedings in the future closed, too. The attorney says it’s because they don’t feel that Cox can get a fair trial if it’s open, but the whole thing makes you wonder if the details of the case are even more unsavory than we even imagine.
Cox, of course, has not be found guilty of anything to this point, but this whole situation is difficult to stomach.
Here’s a guy who had the world at his feet. He’d overcome a Cotton Bowl suspension, the result of not one but two missed curfews, boneheaded moves from a senior leader. He’d overcome missteps during the draft process, a pedestrian 40-yard dash time for starters that submarined his stock and made him a fifth-round pick. He’d put all that in the rear-view mirror and become a mainstay in the Broncos secondary.
He’d made it.
Now, he could face between two years to life in prison.
The charges that he faces are class three and class four felonies, so he could be in prison instead of playing for the Broncos next season.
The next chapter of Perrish Cox’s story will be written by the courts, and they are much more interested in justice than in a feel-good ending.
Power Lunch: Chat with Jenni Carlson
College football: SI/CBS piece fascinating, sad
Sports Illustrated and CBS News embarked on an ambitious project — do a background check on every player on every college football team in the 2010 preseason top 25.
What they discovered is fascinating.
And tragic.
The investigation determined that 24 of the 25 teams had players with police records and that six of the teams had more than 10 players who’d had run-ins with the law.
The team with the most players who’d been charged with a crime?
Pittsburgh.
The Panthers, now led by former Tulsa coach Todd Graham, had 22 players on their roster who’d had criminal records, including four who were arrested in four separate, violent crimes between mid-July and late September.
Pitt wasn’t the only school with high numbers. Iowa and Arkansas had 18 players each with police records while Boise State and Penn State each had 16. Virginia Tech had 13.
Oklahoma had nine players with arrest records as did Wisconsin and Florida State.
The most stunning statistic in the entire report, though, was that seven percent of all players on top 25 teams had been charged with or cited for a crime. That’s 204 players. That’s one in every 14 players.
That’s a tragedy.
Listen, I’m not here to say that every high school kid who’s ever committed a crime should never be given a scholarship. I’m not here to say that every college athlete who’s ever committed a crime should be booted from their team. Mistakes are made. People can learn. The piece that accompanies the SI/CBS investigation points that out, too.
But here’s the deal: many of the players who end up getting into trouble in college have been in trouble in the past. They didn’t learn. They just kept doing what they did before.
And when that happens, coaches are often quick to say, “We didn’t know. We thought he was a good kid.”
That’s because when most coaches check into a recruit’s character, all they’re doing is asking the kid’s high school coach. They aren’t talking to the police. They aren’t doing background checks. And hey, what are most high school coaches going to say? They’re going to say that their player is a good kid, and if that kid had been in trouble, they’re going to say that he just got caught in a bad situation. It’s best for the high school coach to paint a rosy picture; it gets the kid a scholarship and gives the high school a college football player.
But the SI/CBS investigation points out, background checks can be done relatively easy. In Florida, for example, $24 will get you anyone’s complete criminal history. That history includes many juvenile arrests.
Most coaches aren’t doing these kind of checks.
It’s time they were held accountable for that.
The next time a player gets in trouble and it’s determined that they had a previous record, we need to hold coaches’ feet to the fire. The oh-we-didn’t-know defense just won’t work anymore. Information is more accessible than ever.
If SI and CBS can find out all those criminal records, coaches should be able to do it, too.
More confirmation Sam Presti is a genius
Is this man a genius? Seems so. Photo by Jim Beckel, The Oklahoman
Just when you thought Thunder general manager Sam Presti couldn’t earn any more cool points, he goes and signs Kendrick Perkins to a contract extension.
It’s another stroke of genius.
Everyone expected the Thunder to have to wait until the summer to try and resign the newly acquired big man. Perkins’ contract is up at the end of the season, and he previously rejected a four-year, $22 million extension from the Celtics. But after the Thunder dealt for him before the trade deadline last week, it had until March 1 to renegotiate his deal.
Under the current collective bargaining agreement, teams can’t negotiate player contracts between March 1 and June 30.
The Thunder had a very short window to even discuss a renegotiation with Perkins, much less get it done.
But that’s exactly what Presti did.
It’s another nod to the expertise and the acumen that the talented Mr. Presti has brought to Oklahoma City. Few folks could have gotten this deal done. Most would’ve faced the possibility of losing Perkins after the season when any team in the NBA could’ve made a play for his services.
Now, the Thunder have what looks to be one of the big missing pieces to a championship puzzle.
Want more evidence of Presti’s brilliance?
The Thunder was near the limit on the salary cap before the trade deadline, but with the deals it did, sending Jeff Green and Nenad Krstic to Boston and D.J. White and Mo Peterson to Charlotte, it opened up about $2 million of salary cap space in this current year. That gave it the ability to renegotiate Perkins’ contract, something that couldn’t have been done unless his current deal was being increased and the team had the salary cap room to do it.
No doubt Presti saw this move as a possibility when he did all those other moves last week.
It’s a little like chess. The person who’s able to think the furthest ahead is usually the most likely to win.
Presti is that guy.
In the sports world, we often are so wrapped up in the Xs and Os that we forget that true genius at the pro level comes down to executives who are able to be part accountant, part lawyer, part financial planner, part diplomat and part visionary. It takes a unique skill set to excel as a general manager, and thus far, it’s safe to say that Presti has that skill set and then some.
In Sam we trust?
No doubt about it.
