Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Just class stuff today

In my criticism class today we discussed this story. College sports’ racial, gender hiring practices getting worse instead of improving:

College sports received a C for racial hiring practices when it decreased slightly from 75.1% in 2021 to 73.3% in 2022. College sports also received a C for gender hiring, with 74.1%, which was a slight increase from 2021 when it was 72.8%. The combined grade was a C with 73.7%. That was down from 74.0% in 2021. In other words, overall, equal opportunity hiring practices are getting worse instead of improving.

As we look at the sidelines in the tournament, we see the best record for hiring of people of color and women as head coaches. But the coaches of color represent a fraction of the student-athletes on their teams. In 2021-22, Division I men’s basketball Black student-athletes made up 52.4% of the total, compared to the 24.8% of Black head coaches. We have a smaller percentage of Black head basketball coaches now than we had 17 years ago, when 25.2% of the Division I head basketball coaches were Black.

This is a project Professor Lapchick and his team at UCF undertake every year. They grade out the big professional sports leagues in the U.S., and also collegiate sports. The students picked this little story to read, and so we talked about the grading system a bit, Lapchick’s work, and also some of the math involved here, which was hilarious. A few of those students are in my organizational communication class, and they don’t know it yet, but we’ll be discussing Lapchick on Thursday, too.

We also considered this CNN piece. This injury has plagued MLB for most of the last century, but a new phenomenon is emerging:

It is an injury which has plagued Major League Baseball for the best part of the last century. The ligament in your elbow which connects the bone in your upper arm to the one in your forearm – and is only about as strong as “a piece of celery” – tears, leaving you unable to throw and facing a very lengthy spell on the sidelines.

This season, the likes of Gerrit Cole, Corbin Burnes and Shane Bieber have all had Tommy John surgery – the most popular procedure to repair a torn UCL – while Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani made his long-awaited return to the mound after almost 22 months away following the second elbow surgery of his career.

Dr. Christopher Ahmad, Tommy John expert and head team physician for the New York Yankees, has performed the surgery on some of the biggest names in baseball. But he has also been privy to the other side of the story.

“The alarms are going off on how devastating this problem is to the youngest players,” he says in an interview with CNN Sports.

One of the series of questions I try to get the students to answer is who is a story for, and who is the disadvantaged person, or group, in the story. Sometimes that’s subtle. Sometimes obvious. Wouldn’t you know it, at least two people in the room say they knew someone that had already damaged or ruined their UCL by high school.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to get the “piece of celery” imagery out of my mind when watching people throw a baseball.

We also discussed the Slaying the Badger documentary, which we watched last Thursday. I showed it because we watched a football-center documentary just before, and we’ll watch a basketball-themed documentary just after. There’s something to be said about watching something you nothing about. Plus, it’s a dramatic story.

I was impressed, they seemed to like it more than I would have expected. It is a trick and a challenge to try to explain a sport to an audience who may have no understanding of the sport, while also reaching an audience that knows a great deal about it, while also telling a riveting story. For the most part, the filmmakers here did that. (The book is better. Yes, the documentary was inspired by a book.)

I was proud of myself. I did not get too far into the weeds on the cycling minutiae while trying to answer their questions. That would have been easy to do.

Why was he wearing this jersey and now wearing that jersey? What’s the deal with stages?

You don’t need to know the sport to follow the story, but knowing the sport heightens your awareness of a film.

In org comm we had a great negotiation activity today. I was nervous about it, but it worked out well. I had one student play a quarterback who is about to become a free agent. I specifically chose a student who can be loud and opinionated and, often, correct, to be the player. That kept him out of the back-and-forth. I had two others play his agents. One of them a super smooth charmer, and another who is quite the thoughtful analytic type. They did their work with their client in the hall, and then they would come in and meet the team leadership for the negotiations.

The rest of the class I broke into groups representing his team. I wanted one person to be the GM, a student who also seems worldly and practical. The rest of the class broke up into various VP offices and so on. There was some designed conflict between those franchise groups, and every group had a certain series of motivations and criteria I gave them.

It took exactly one round for them all to get into the exercise. It took them five rounds of offers and counter-offers for them to reach a deal.

The most fascinating thing happened. though. Two of the team groups were supposed to be resistant to making a deal for budget and other considerations. So they had conflict with the boss group, my three-headed GM hydra. The GM(s), though, wanted to make the deal. So they had to go back and forth, which became incredibly animated. One group convinced themselves they were absolutely opposed to the signing. But when they finally reached a deal, franchise GM(s) and player-agents, everyone was so happy, and the various groups, even the ones that had been opposition just moments before, were “Welcome home!” and “Welcome to the team!”

The actual player will be a free agent soon. I’m curious to see how close, or how far off, our mock negotiation was.

I’m also wondering how we can take this org comm class and do more things like this, which are marginally practically and a lot of fun.

Monday / video — Comments Off
17
Nov 25

Still good advice

Friday / video — Comments Off
14
Nov 25

Bad words on poor words

First thing this morning I had a meeting. And then I spent the rest of the day writing. And also writing. And then there was rewriting. My process is to put a lot of words together in my head. Then drop them onto a page. And then stir them all up until they don’t make sense to me anymore.

I changed up the process somewhat because when I was working on this particular thing one night last week I turned it into a literary exercise. It felt good, even then — even as? — I knew that was all going to come out in the next draft. It was an exercise of getting it out of my system. Now, I am writing something so tediously specific no one will want to read it.

It’s a gift.

There are many styles in all of us, I am sure of it. We must only turn the right valves. And there’s an art in knowing which ones to use at a given time. Some people, I thought, today, never seem to heed those warnings. They just write the thing they wanted to write, the thing they needed to write, putting their magisterial collection of words and thoughts together in the way they must be written, this time. Or so we’d like to think. Even people that know the craft can get so caught up in the brilliant work of others that they are transported far, far away from the idea of drafts and editors. I don’t write like that, because it isn’t in keeping with what I do. Consequently I’m probably not good at writing like that. But it’s fun to dream about onomatopoeia and sizzling verbs and alliteration that affects us all.

I like to read it, though.

So I wrote the day away, which was fine. It was pleasant. It’s what I needed to do. I enjoyed it. I would print out a draft and sit in the window and read the thing I’d just written word-by-word. I am trying to develop a self-editing process for that. I think it would improve my output. It would make some of my writing better. At the very least, it would be a thing I could enjoy. With that objective in mind I’ll just keep doing it until I figure out the process. Then I’ll do it because it is a process.

Tonight we saw a comedian. We saw three comedians. Two of them were the opening and feature acts. It was a large arena show and I wondered if a comedian, on a big stage in a big venue like that, knows when he is bombing. The opener was not having a good night. He gamely plodded through. The feature act was better. And this is how it should be. We’re warming up the crowd for the headliner. The headliner who is doing an arena tour. And working on new material. But also offering to do a greatest hits set.

In a way, this is kind of sad for Bert Kreischer. He’s been closing with this bit for years and years now. It’s become Freebird. People yell it out to him. It’s paying the bills, and that’s great, but he hasn’t had to write a new finish in ages. So now he has to write an almost finish, but it can’t be bigger and better than his Freebird. What a fine line to have to thread.

He’s also doing these big arena shows and saying this is where he’s working on the stuff for his next special which will be recorded next year. I know even less about comic writing than I do about any other style of writing, see above, but I’d rather you work on that in small clubs. There’s a different intimacy there, and a tradition to honor. And it would fill. Tonight, he had about two-thirds of a basketball venue filled and were scattered and unpolished and it just wasn’t a good feeling. Also, a lot of empty seats.

I didn’t know, until recently, that there was such a thing as a showbiz review of stand-up comedians. By chance I ran across a review of this tour. The critic was dismissive of the effort. I thought, maybe the writer isn’t a fan of the genre. Maybe this person is new to stand up comedy. Maybe Kreischer had an off night. The critic said maybe Kreischer has run out of things to say. Maybe the critic was right.

The other possibility is that he’s too busy living the gimmick. I’m not sure when he can write while doing all of the things that his outsized personality and persona require. I’m sure there’s a process here. I’m sure he never sits down and thinks, “I wish I could write the most boringly dense thing possible that no one will read.” I’m sure his special next year will be good.

Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
13
Nov 25

Some days barely get titles

In class, we watched the documentary, “Slaying the Badger.” Last time we had a football documentary. Next time it is basketball, so I wanted to make a point about how we might see things in a program featuring a sport with which we aren’t that familiar.

Plus, it’s one of the greatest races of all time. And the documentary, which is gripping, is based on a book that’s even better. And next Tuesday we’ll see what they have to say about it. Hopefully it will be a useful conversation.

In org comm we discussed negotiations. I asked them what they have negotiated about. No one really had much to offer. Finally, someone said something like ‘We’re young. We don’t get to negotiate. We just do what we’re told.’ And I suppose there’s some truth to that, but then we spent some time expanding our ideas about what negotiations are. Then we talked about different sorts. Next week they’ll do a little in-class negotiation.

And I guess that was the day. I spent some other time working on other things, some things which are coming due in the immediate future and, thus, require the incredible crush of clarity that means my words will get blurry almost immediately.

I will print things out and pore over them, word-by-word. Tomorrow is going to be a lot of fun.

So let me get to that. I would call it a head start, but that implies beginning. I am not beginning. I am months into this project. Eight, nine, maybe 10 months into this. That’s not a beginning. I’m well beyond a head start. Let me, then, get back to building up some momentum.

football / overwriting / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Nov 25

Don’t get married on a Fall Saturday, anywhere

I tried to get this published elsewhere, but failed. I still like it. I’m sharing it here.

It started, perhaps, as an in-joke. Maybe a brother-in-law joke. Or a t-shirt, one of those hastily designed gaudy numbers you see at fan shops. Maybe the whole thing began as a bit on talk radio. Sometimes the organic nature of jokes, or even traditions, can be lost to us without a very serious investigation.

This is not that.

I remember it all those ways. A guy said it on the air, off the cuff, from the hip, and wherever else one-liners fall from. I saw it on a shirt. And, if you’re there long enough, you live it, unfortunately.

You don’t book weddings on fall Saturdays in the South.

I have been to several Saturday weddings in the fall in the Deep South, an exercise designed to weigh your love of sport and the ol’ alma mater against these two people standing up there. Who are those people, anyway? Strangers, probably. I mean, do you know the bride’s third quarter rushing stats? Have you memorized the tackle for loss numbers the groom has put up this season? What even is the win-loss record of the person performing this ceremony, anyway? Alternatively, it could be a deliberate measure to keep attendance low.

I mention this because, of course, weddings are organized far in advance, but not farther out than the more-than-a-century long tradition of watching dudes hit each other as hard as they can for temporary victory and immortal glory. Long is the memory, short is the ceremony. The same is true for any given football play, but one of these two events lasts longer in the memory of most of us.

Authurine Babineaux and Merrick Bourgeois — two people we don’t know at all, but who prove my point nicely — were married on Saturday, October 31st in 1959 in Cankton, Louisiana, right there at St. John Berchman Catholic Church. The writeup in the paper, as was the custom, describes the bride’s dress and what her attendant was wearing. There’s a photo with the notice, the image has gone fuzzy with digitization, but the new Authurine Bourgeois looks beautiful. The groom is wearing a white jacket. They had a little reception in the cafeteria of the school they both attended. Maybe they met there. Maybe they hit it off there. We don’t know. We do know there was a four-layer cake. We don’t know when the celebration ended, or if they were able to catch Billy Cannon’s immediately legendary punt return.

There are more than 2,000 returns for “married Oct 31” in the 1959 Louisiana newspapers. And some of, most of, or, perish the thought, all of those people who attended missed Billy Cannon’s Halloween Run at Death Valley. But which did they talk about more, as the years passed?

My first fall wedding on a Saturday in the South was in 1993. It was November 20th. It was 11th ranked Alabama at number 6 Auburn. It was the Iron Bowl.

It was a wedding in someone’s home. And they chose to do this event during the football game.

Perhaps there was some other event scheduled in the living room in the next hour.

Oh, the service was lovely, marred only by my running up and down the hall, getting scoring updates from the radio from the bedroom where the groom had previously been getting ready. “Does anyone have a reason these too should not be wed? And what is the score, young man?” Even then, as a young football fan, I wanted to share the news, and that news was the game and newly emerged folk heroes.

Auburn won that game 22-14. The Tigers were on probation that year: no bowls and no TV. Some entrepreneurial outfit sold Radio National Championship bumper stickers. They were everywhere for a time.

That house, where the wedding was, was full of people. I wonder which event is more memorable all these years later.

In October of 2012, my wife and I (who were married in the summer, thank you very much) attended a wedding that was scheduled on the Third Saturday in October. In the South, you capitalize it just like that. The Third Saturday in October. This is the Alabama-Tennessee game, a joyous collision that seriously impacts commerce in two states. Alabama being atop the polls and facing a heated rival probably hampered the wedding’s turnout. There were some other big games with implications that day third-ranked Florida was taking on ninth-ranked South Carolina, number six LSU had Texas A&M, ranked as the 20th best team in the land.

Why, I asked the bride, beforehand, did you choose this time of year? This date? She attended a huge football school. As did her brother and her mother and her father before her. As did everyone up and down her family tree. As did her husband.

She offered that the weather is too unpredictable in the spring. (It is not.) And that there would be TVs at the reception. (There were not.) It was a fine wedding. I remember there was a bar at the reception – but no TVs with games. On the bar were little chalkboards which told you the preferred drinks of the bride and groom, so you could order the same and be just like them. I don’t remember her choice, but the groom’s drink was rum and Coke.

You don’t have to ask yourself where he was on the idea of a Saturday wedding in the fall.

A few years later, in 2016, we attended a wedding in Tennessee. One of those where the bride and groom had reserved a beautiful chapel and everyone looked terrific, and every single person was in a festive mood. It was a mild October day. I was just getting over a cold and had a terrible coughing fit during the middle of the service. I left so as not to interrupt the beautiful ceremony.

I regained my composure but couldn’t get back to my seat without causing another scene, so I eased up the side of the chapel, and stood along the wall behind these guys.

He was anxious about the event; the game I mean. That installment of the Tennessee-Georgia series turned out to have one of the wildest finishes in the history of the sport. Those border rivalries are always tense, taut, and played close to the rented tuxedo vest.

The young couple got married and we gathered outside for the ceremonial send off. The bride and groom ran through the gathered loved ones and into the waiting car. That’s when the bomb was thrown, and the subsequent Hail Mary.

And that’s when this grown man, the guy above, a pillar of his community, a member of the local education board who was eager to see off a loved one started doing chest slides in the lawn in front of the chapel. The bride was beautiful. The bride was upstaged.

This isn’t about me, but that would become one of my bigger moments on social media. All the right people and outlets amplified the post and eventually it got back to the guy above, a person I did not know. I thought he might be angry that I’d outted him in profile. He thought it was hilarious. I assume that’s because his team won.

And that’s one of the risks you take with a wedding during football season. What happens if the wrong team wins. Now who has a sour taste in their mouth about your wedding day? Your guests? Your partner? Your parents? You?

“But, dear writer,” you may say, “this is not my concern. I am not in the South. I will not be wed in the South. I live here, in the world wide web.”

Fair enough, bride-elect or bridegroom-elect, but consider, that sport is part of culture. We, being social creatures, export the best parts of our culture. This, of course, is made that much easier – and each game made that much more important – because of the dazzling array of streaming and cable packages available to us today. These, then, are cautionary tales for the entire country, certainly a lesson less and less limited to the South.

Put another way, UConn and UMass have been at it since the 19th century, that series is tied, and they have two contests coming up in the next few years. Don’t ask a Huskie or the Minutemen to choose.

If you’ve got love and joyous union on the mind and there are leaves and footballs in the air, consider your audience, and consider the spring or the summer. Green leaves also make for a beautiful photographic backdrop. Baseballs are flying around.

Your guests will likely be paying much more attention to you than a routine pop up to right.