Ebbets Field
On the ball
Back to school days
By DAVID BULLA
Ebbets Field Editor
The best things in life are far removed from this here keyboard.
Some are free, such as the view of an ancient rounded mountain that looks like the backside of the moon in Highlands in my home state of North Carolina, a freak May snowstorm in the Smoky Mountains or the sun going down over the mainland at Currituck Sound on a pink-sky fall evening while the crabs jockey for a stab at a chicken neck bone just below one�s net.
Most are not free, whether it is the long hoop jumping to an attractive job, providing for a family or maintaining worthwhile, life-long friendships.
For the last four years the consistently best thing in this humble life has been the Indiana Hoosier basketball team. After getting the boot as a high school coach in a hoops Siberia, I needed something to take the place of the long hours planning practice, washing uniforms, trying to get parents to understand why their sons where not playing 32 minutes a game, fighting with football coaches for an ounce of athletic department power and attending coaching clinics near and far.
Thus, I turned to the Internet, of which I was totally ignorant, and found Terry Bleizeffer�s website devoted to IU basketball. I volunteered to write about basketball, a soured love. Fortunately, even if IU basketball was not quite at the heady heights of the 1970s and �80s, it was still something I was attracted to because of the all-of-fame coach and because of the state�s immersion in the sport. My home state, for all of its pretension to being culturally predisposed to the game, is only a hoops oasis on the college level -- and only for the Big Four schools. The 19th State can have its largest newspaper call its best sports feature on its website �Indiana�s Game� and not even Commonwealthers could really argue.
Of course, while Mr. Bleizeffer gave me an opportunity to put a skill long dormant back to use, I also was able to gain intimacy with IU basketball, though still at a rather vast distance. Writing about something one rarely sees is an odd practice especially one does not have the talent or insight of a Beethoven or Hellen Keller. Instead, one must overcome the distance with hustle and passion. The distance also has certain advantages: no one expects you to work fast and it offers a fresh perspective.
Now, though, it is time to get close to something which means so much to me. Two weeks ago I resigned as a public-school teacher in North Carolina and next week I start graduate classes at Indiana University in Bloomington. Thus, I will be spending the next two years watching the Hoosiers up close. No longer will I be among the infidels in the Tar Heel state. No longer will I be allowed to have faulty judgment when it comes to hoop things. I can say this bluntly: the average basketball fan in Indiana knows more about the game than the best high school coaches in North Carolina.
Of course, the real reason I am now in Bloomington has nothing to do with basketball. I have come to finally do something I should have done 15 years ago: go to grad school. Indiana has one of the best five journalism schools in the country and that�s why I am here. Every time I took a class in the summer in recent years, I realized that I needed to go back to school. It�s not just a matter of recharging my mental battery. No, I need to fulfill a few internal needs that have been left on hold for too long. You see there�s nothing wrong with high school teaching. In fact, I think some of the best teachers in the world are there, not in college. I will miss my students, especially the executive editor of the newsmagazine I advised for the last four years. But he is in good hands now. He will be at UNC next August and in less than a decade will be a famous writer.
Moreover, going back to school affords me the opportunity to write a few things I have needed to write for nearly a decade. And what better place to do that in than Bloomington? The music and art galleries here are so good here that I wonder if I�m not in a major city. Moreover, there is no Kirkwood in my native Greensboro.
Still it is hard to say good-bye to so many things. A short list of what I will miss: Biscuitville (best buttermilk biscuits in the world), sweet tea, Cheerwine, the diversity of Ben L. Smith High School, my beautiful and bright niece, Lexington-style barbecue, Corolla Lighthouse, easy access to ACC football games, Eddie Hardin�s columns, Zuds, Mike Krzyzewski and, of course. my mother. Yet the flip side includes all the things I look forward to here in my new home: Assembly Hall, Nick�s English Hut, the Brave New Deil, the Trojan Horse, White Mountain Ice Creamery, high school basketball; and intelligent discussions about a variety of issues, writing some things that need to be written, riding my bike through Monroe County, witnessing Southern Indiana falls, not worrying about money since I won�t have any, the student newspaper, the best little quarterback in the country, several excellent FM radio stations, the occasional snow flake, the even more occasional Bass at the Irish Lion with a friend and, of course, a coach.
So my favorite waste of time -- Hoosier basketball -- is no longer a long-distance love affair. I have my first real date with that love tonight, at Assembly Hall, 8 p.m. Time to get my Bazooka Joe, lucky gray pencil and notepad ready.
Tonight my breaking away will be complete.
Best sports stories of 1999
1. Skip Bayliss of the Chicago Tribune on the women�s World Cup. Bayliss said what needed to be said: soccer is boring to watch, even if all the women took off their bras.
2. William Rhoden of the New York Times on Notre Dame�s football probation. Rhoden points out that the NCAA�s action was nothing more than a wrist slap; indeed, the Irish�s probation is more symbolic than practical.
3. Lynn Houser of the Bloomington Herald-Times on Kirk Haston after his mother died in tornado near Nashville, Tenn. A small paper gave a solid writer a chance to have a big hit in sending Houser to central Tennessee after this tragedy.
4. Tom Boswell of the Washington Post on the final round of the 1999 U.S. Open. Almost as good as being there when the late Payne Stewart took three putts on the final three holes to beat Phil Mickelson.
5. Jeff Shelman of the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer on the Indiana-North Carolina basketball game. Best game-story introduction in recent memory: �At the end, it was as basic as basketball can get -- one team executed, the other didn�t. It looked like something Indiana would do to some team in the Indiana Classic, the kind of treatment reserved for some hyphenated or directional school.� Now that�s writing.
Miscellaneous sports journalism deeds and misdeeds
1. Give political writer and Washington Post reporter David Maraniss a thumbs up for his biography of Vince Lombardi (When Pride Still Mattered). He got very lucky with a few sources, but Maraniss found in Lombardi the apt riposte to the subject of his previous work, which was a biography of the President.
2. Give CBS a thumbs down for firing Sean McDonough. He is the rare journalist in the booth. I will never forget his �Jacquez Green!�
3. The most overplayed story of the year: the women�s World Cup. Title IX was given its due; however, no major journalist pointed out its major counter-indication, the demise of many men�s college non-revenue sports, especially wrestling and swimming programs.
4. The most underplayed: Ben Christensen, the Cubs� No. 1 draft choice from Wichita State, who intentioanally pegged a player in the ondeck circle in a college game. Christensen, who was banned by the NCAA, should be in jail for assault, not playing in the minors. His victim, a University of Evansville batter, suffered a broken eye socket and still has blurred vision. Not chastising the pitching-thin Cubs for drafting this thug was an obscene oversight by the sports columnist brethern.
5. Athlete of the year: no brainer. It has to be Lance Armstrong. The guy nearly died of cancer. Yet he came back to win the greatest bike race in the world. Sports Illustrated could not forego the chance to score political and cultural points in choosing the women�s World Cup soccer team. No wonder I don�t know anybody who subscribes to that once august magazine anymore.
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