All Roads Lead To Lakeland, Again

Sitting under a pile of rosters, stats, and newspaper articles at my desk today, preparing for a second weekend of the Florida High School Athletic Association's basketball state championship games in Lakeland. You haven't lived until you've tried to come up with background information on a school with 219 students in grades pre-K through 12 (The Rock School, Gainesville. Class 1A finalist for the boys).

Anyway, Mike Bianchi's column on Dick Vitale's "gaffe" during a Knoxville radio interview reminded me of a brief exchange last week during the girls' finals between Sun Sports analyst Mark Wise and the head coach of an eventual state champion, who will remain nameless for reasons about to be explained.

Before every state championship game, Mark and I corral each head coach for a ten-minute chat. Like every production meeting between coaches and announcers in every televised sport in America, the goal is pretty simple: the play-by-play guy (in this case, me) needs correct pronounciations of the players' names and any relevant background info on the school that might be useful during the broadcast. The analyst (Mark) is looking for X's and O's -- what kind of defense will you be using, who's the one player on the other roster that concerns you, matchups, etc. It's terribly benign.

Yet, one of the head coaches -- again, who would end up winning a state title a couple of hours later -- flinched when Mark asked her what type of offense she'd be running. She froze a smile on her face and said, "we haven't decided yet."

This is one hour before the state championship game. Are we complete idiots? Do you honestly expect us to believe that you haven't had a game plan in place since last October? What's the issue here?

Mark gamely pressed on with his questions, gathering information, but he was pretty steamed afterwards. There's no reason for a coach to hold back. Considering that these games are tape-delayed on Sun Sports, and therefore won't be seen for at least a week, there's no possibility of giving anything away. It's not like the opposing team can run a cable from our production truck to a monitor hidden underneath their bench. It was a ludicrous case of a coach playing it waaaay too close to the vest, without cause.

I thought about it afterwards, and here's my conclusion: some coaches get it, and some don't. Television is going to win. We have the last word; we're the ones who present the storylines of the game to the viewer. The coaches who get it will understand this and use it to their advantage, singing the praises of a kid who needs a little recruiting attention, or perhaps selling the merits of their school to the audiences of Florida. The ones who get it will welcome us in, act as if they're bringing us behind the velvet ropes, even if they're really not telling us anything that the opposing coach doesn't already know. If they do that, Mark and I will leave with a positive impression, and that will come across on the broadcast. If they don't, we won't kill them on the air -- we're professionals, people -- but we'll have far less background with which to work, which does the school, its players, and the coach herself a disservice.

TV is going to win. We're wearing microphones, and the coaches are not. Some get it, and some don't.

Connection to the Vitale story? As Bianchi points out, "In his zeal to be beloved, Dickie V. won't tell us what he really thinks for fear of offending someone." So many fans insist that television network announcers bring biases to the broadcast; the truth is, most fans -- and announcers -- just want the truth. It's too bad that Vitale felt he had to apologize for unwittingly giving an honest opinion on a radio show. And as an aside, could you really argue with Vitale -- or with Billy Donovan, who claims he never said it in the first place -- for thinking that Al Horford's stock is higher than Joakim Noah's right now?

I mean, it is. So what? Is that offensive? It's not like Noah won't make it in the NBA. He will, and so will Horford. Horford is simply playing better at the moment. Is that groundbreaking or controversial, or simply an observation?

Off to Lakeland tomorrow. Six games in two days, for a grand total of twelve state championship games over the course of one week. See you on TV.

Haven't We Seen This Before?

So let me get this straight -- Pat Riley is returning to the bench in Miami now that the team's fortunes have improved, and Doc Rivers is coaching a team on an historic losing streak. What, are we getting a do-over on 2004?

If you'll recall, Riley stepped down as head coach of the Heat once before, handing the reins to Stan Van Gundy shortly before the 2003-2004 season. After an 0-7 start, the Heat came back to finish with 42 wins, thanks largely to rookie Dwyane Wade, who was the best player on the floor in Miami. Refreshed by his time off -- and smart enough to notice that Wade was on the verge of becoming the best player on the floor, period -- Riley returned to the bench in December of 2004.

Did I mention that Miami had traded for Shaquille O'Neal during the offseason? Made that decision pretty easy, I bet.

Riley's surgery for existing hip and knee problems took him back off the bench in January of this year, after the Heat hit New Year's Eve at four games under .500. Under interim coach Ron Rothstein, the team went 12-9, with six wins in seven games leading up to Tuesday night's home game with Portland. In a related story, Riley's hip and knee feel MUCH better.

Doc Rivers, meanwhile, was at the helm in Orlando during that '03-'04 season when the Magic embarked on a stunning 19-game losing streak - one more loss than the Celtics have currently enjoyed in succession, as of this writing - and Doc was fired during a road trip in Utah. Technically, Doc wasn't in charge for all 19 of those losses - he was relieved of his duties in November '03, when the Magic were only 1-10. Johnny Davis stepped in to guide the club to nine more L's, a streak that finally ended on December 8, 2003, with a home win over Phoenix. I was assigned to that game as the pregame/sideline host for Sun Sports (stepping in for Television's Paul Kennedy), and gleefully took credit for ending the streak.

While Riley's yo-yo act with the Miami coaching job is oddly familiar, Doc's situation in Boston bears little resemblance to his final days in Orlando. Boston has played without Paul Pierce for all but one of those 19 straight losses; the four Celtics who have logged over 1,000 minutes this season - Sebastian Telfair, Delonte West, Ryan Gomes, and Al Jefferson - are all second- or third-year players, all under the age of 25. Of the few proven veterans on the roster other than Pierce, none of them can carry a team alone. In short, Doc's in a no-win situation (literally), and Celtics management has to know it. That's why there's been a lack of "Fire Doc" chatter in Boston. They may not be tanking for a draft pick, but the Celtics are sacrificing today to play for tomorrow, when guys like Gerald Green, Kendrick Perkins, Rajon Rondo, and the four toddlers mentioned above will (hopefully) turn into something special. Doc's challenge is to hang on until that happens.

The Magic, on the other hand, had Tracy McGrady in 2003-2004. A healthy, explosive Tracy McGrady, in his 7th NBA season, who was coming off a first team All-NBA performance in 2002-2003: 32 points, 6 rebounds, and 5 assists per game, the first number good enough to win him the scoring title. While McGrady would repeat as scoring champion in '03-'04, he was simply too good to explain a 19-game losing streak (or a 1-10 start, for that matter). So Doc had to go, although in retrospect, I wonder if that '03-'04 season in Orlando said more about T-Mac than it did Doc. It's worth noting that McGrady is now ten years into his pro career and has yet to win a playoff series. Then again, neither has Doc, although his coaching career is about three years shorter than McGrady's playing record.

So as we exit the Wayback Machine, here's the question: which coach - Riley or Rivers - is more likely to be in his current position next season? In an upset, I'll say Doc. The Celtics are terribly young, but have promise at almost every position, and the chance of a very good draft pick this summer. Paul Pierce's contract ties up a big chunk of change through 2011, but he can still play. As long as Celtics ownership and Danny Ainge remain patient - a big "if" in this league - there's light on the horizon. It certainly helps that the Celtics play in the same market as the Patriots and Red Sox, which diffuses the media pressure considerably.

As for Riley, he's turning 62 this spring, and may be souring on the daily grind of coaching. Shaq turns 35 just a few weeks before Riles' birthday, and has missed at least ten games in five of his last six seasons. Yes, Riley still has Wade, arguably the best player in the league at the moment, but he's also got seven players on his roster at or near a decade in the NBA. If Miami makes a run in the playoffs this season, Riley may take the shuttle back to the upstairs office.

Just like old times.

Watch Your Mouth

There are two reasons for this post.

One, Brady Ackerman was at the Sun Sports studio this week to tape our "Tailgate Overtime Recruiting Special," and he mentioned how much he enjoyed my previous post on BS sportscaster terms. As far as I'm concerned, that's demand from the readers.

Second, Dan Patrick spent a good two hours on ESPN Radio earlier in the week on a related topic, stemming from Senator Joe Biden's ill-advised characterization of fellow Senator Barack Obama as "articulate." As we've heard ad infinitum from the cable news talking heads, simply calling Obama "articulate" wouldn't necessarily qualify as an insult. It would actually be a statement of fact. Barack Obama was once the president of the Harvard Law Review, for Heaven's sake. Of course he's articulate. Joe Biden can't carry the man's jock, intellectually speaking. It was the full text of Biden's comments -- "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" -- that made Biden sound like a clueless racist, despite the fact that the poor sap was trying to give his fellow Senator a compliment.

Interestingly, it was former ESPN personality Keith Olbermann -- like me, a Cornell graduate and former Sports Director at WVBR-FM in Ithaca -- who best "articulated" the problem when he said on Patrick's radio show, "it's the implication of surprise that makes it offensive." Biden's comment seemed to imply that he found Obama's razor-sharp intellect and commanding presence to be atypical - because, after all, he's black. That's the subtext, and that's why Biden found himself in twelve kinds of deep doo-doo immediately afterwards.

Dan and Keith spent quite a bit of time on this topic last week, applying it to the sports world, where the incessant media coverage provides ample opportunity for a coach, player, or team executive to place his foot in his mouth. Yet, in the many years that have passed since Al Campanis publicly dug his own professional grave with comments about the "necessities" for a coach or manager, you find very few Bidenesque fumbles in the public forum of sports. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, sports figures are far more cautious with their public statements, in large part to the lessons learned after the Campanis-"Nightline" fiasco of 1987. It would be foolish to suggest that we've all become more worldly and tolerant now; racism does, in fact, exist, even in sports. But the advent of 24-hour coverage via TV, print, radio, and internet has placed a premium on judiciousness. It's made us stop and think before we speak. That's not a bad thing. If we think hard enough, we might learn something.

Second, the expansion of American sports into global markets, and the steady flow of foreign-born athletes into American leagues, has changed the landscape. As sports announcers, we don't have the luxury of drawing lines based on color or creed. The diversity that we see on a daily basis makes that impossible. If you cover Major League Baseball, you deal with white players, black players, Latin players, and Asian players. The NBA is a melting pot of players from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and all corners of the globe. Hockey? Euros, French-Canadians, Native Americans, African-Americans. If you can't handle that, you're not long for this business.

Sports are now global enterprises; we know no other reality. When I take my seven-year-old son to a Magic game, he sees an Orlando roster that includes players from Turkey, Serbia, Puerto Rico, Ft. Lauderdale, and everywhere in between. It's actually a convenient place for me to teach him lessons in diversity and acceptance, as powerful a laboratory as his public elementary school classroom, which is also a cross-section of America.

Coded terms like "articulate," "athletic," "overachieving," and the like often carry a racial subtext. This cannot be argued. However, I would postulate that those who follow sports in this country -- any sport, college or pro -- are receiving a crash course in the true meaning of diversity. It's a giant leap forward to watch a team play without considering the background of each athlete, but millions of fans do it every night. We don't care where the guy is from; it's irrelevant. That, in my mind, is one value that sports can teach us, if we're willing to accept the education. Being a sports fan doesn't guarantee a new level of awareness, but you've got to be pretty thick to develop prejudices when faced with multicultural rosters. San Antonio's star point guard is French; the best player in the NBA's Western Conference is German. This is reality, and there's not a damn thing wrong with it. I can watch Tony Parker and Dirk Nowitzki play all day.

In short, Senator Biden: take in a ballgame once in a while. It might do you some good.