Prepare to be Shocked: Wichita State no Cinderella

First appeared on March 26, 2014
in The Lebanon Reporter

The blueprint for life is simple. Eight glasses of water a day, four glasses of milk, six helpings of fruit, a teaspoon of red meat here and there, stay on the right side of the road, avoid falling space junk, squeeze in twenty five hours of exercise a week and maybe you live to see sixty.

The blueprint for building a college basketball program is a bit more complex. Recruiting used to be simple. A high profile coach takes a Friday night trip to a small town gym. Red faced locals stop riding that new coach, the one who thinks you can win games playing zone and walking the ball up the floor, long enough to fawn over the big dog in the crowd. The high profile coach smiles, shakes hands with the parents, walks around and kicks the tires while saying all the right things. The deal gets done with a handshake, sealing a young player's lifelong dream of playing for State U.

Today coaches are up against ESPN, internet rankings, Twitter and the seedy underbelly of AAU circuits. Maybe that’s what made Gregg Marshall and Wichita State so appealing. They seemed to provided a much needed alternative. On the surface they were everything big time college basketball wasn’t.

Enter Kentucky and their high flying Blue Bloods. Hot off the AAU circuit, the best recruiting class in college basketball history. Enter John Calipari. One part college coach, one part politician, one part Dark Lord of the One and Done World. Work the phones, kiss some babies, get the top five guys on the board and ride them like the British are coming. And when the dust settles and they’ve all declared for the Draft, pick up your phone and start over.

Surely Calipari would take one look at Gregg Marshall and tell you that boy’s climbing on the horse from the wrong end. For if John Calipari’s a chef, Gregg Marshall’s an architect. Building something from the ground up. Taking kids so far from Kentucky’s radar they might as well have been playing in some remote Pacific island near Kiribati, shooting coconuts into empty oil drums nailed to palm trees. Molding them, shaping them, teaching them to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Maybe it was the fact Marshall’s speeches seemed so authentic, his words bordering on the prophetic that made me want to see Wichita State drum Kentucky Sunday. “Play angry, play for each other”. Maybe it was the little dog in the big fight that had me clambering onto the Shocker bandwagon, or maybe it was simply the fact that, as a Hoosier, I’m blessed with a bottomless reservoir of hatred for the Wildcats.

Either way it was short lived. In the end Kentucky’s thoroughbreds thundered past the Shockers. Thirty five wins and a cloud of dust. Still the power of the team isn’t lost. What five players, five recruits the big schools barely knew existed, connected on both ends of the floor can do, even when pitted against the best recruiting class in NCAA history.

They took Kentucky to the edge. They mussed Calipari’s perfect hair. And though they came up short on the scoreboard, Gregg Marshall did more than put Wichita State back on the map, he reminded us all what college basketball is supposed to be. Players committed to each other, committed to the name on the front of the jersey.

Players thinking, acting, responding and moving as one. In today’s land of one and dones, Wichita State was ice cold lemonade on the Fourth of July, proving Marshall’s blueprint, while not the most popular, remains time tested.

© 2014 Eric Walker Williams

Indiana Pacers will survive this Deep Freeze

First appeared on March 14, 2014
in The Lebanon Reporter

You know it’s too cold when a young and energetic State Representative, entirely convinced he was brought into this world to enact real change, surrenders and submits a bill to the Indiana House mandating the statewide erection of Penguin Crossing signs. What happened to the Global Warming goons and their rising temperatures? I suppose I need to get out and drive my car more. Turn on all the lights in my house and install a coal chute on my fireplace. Maybe that would warm this place up.

Perhaps the Indiana Pacers current free-fall is simply art imitating life. Losers of four in a row up until Boston came to town, Indiana helped the Celtics carry their bags from the bus, for nothing can stop a losing streak faster than facing a roster comprised largely of players who should be buried deep on another team’s bench.

How could a team with the best record in professional basketball appear so uncompetitive? Who knows. Why do news outlets insist on giving us poll numbers when we know they’ve been calling the same people over and over again for years? I don’t know about you, but nobody has ever phoned me about chemical weapons in Syria.

Some contend Indiana’s tailspin stems from a lack of ball movement, others blame poor defense. They look disinterested as a group, tired or it’s the impotent play of their young stud who’s been too busy reading writers far more gifted and relevant than yours truly telling the free world how talented he is. I’m sure at some point all of these apply and if I knew the real answer you’d find me interviewing Greg Popovich during a time out on national television.

Perhaps the Pacers, like their fans, have succumbed to temptation, looking past the remaining games on the schedule. The Playoffs are so close everyone with a horse still in the race can smell them. A potpourri of stale hot dogs, historic moments and 17,000 exuberant people with varying philosophies on personal hygiene sharing a poorly ventilated space in late May.

The playoffs, a place where Championships roam free in herds so large a man could sit down and watch them pass for days. Packed arenas in full throat and fervor, watching with wide eyes as careers are made and ruined with the bounce of one ball.

The unfortunate fact in all this is the Pacers are contractually bound to play the rest of the games on their schedule. Sure we’d all walk across the street to watch a seven game series with Miami tomorrow, but alas Milwaukee calls.

Milwaukee with its 51 losses and semi-professional roster, including one go-getter who stopped in mid play while his team was on defense earlier in the season to tie his shoe. Saying there are too many games in the NBA regular season is like saying Washington doesn’t work. We understand it’s a proven fact and to discuss it is simply beating a horse that died during the Stone Age.

So the Pacers are left to pick up the pieces and move on. Speaking in proverbials, they must rally, right the ship, circle the wagons and get everyone on the same page. It will warm up at some point and so too will the Pacers.

In the meantime sit back and enjoy the ride, this long and winding detour through Antarctica will soon be over and the Playoffs will be here. And if a banner is hung in Bankers Life come June, all the plunging temperatures, burst pipes and time spent digging out, which triggered an avalanche of blustery blizzard-like blues so deep and wide it buried our souls long ago, will have all been worth it somehow.

© 2014 Eric Walker Williams

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Bad Haircuts and the Death of America

First appeared on February 28, 2014
in The Lebanon Reporter

The Federal Court system is a complex entity managed by a group of highly decorated and intelligent men and women. The kind who rarely answer their own phones or experience the joy of cleaning up after their dog. People entrusted with the sobering responsibility of maintaining public order by holding dangerous criminals accountable or deciding if a basketball coach has the right to tell a player to cut his hair.

Nobody should take a 14 year old to task for anything his parents have allowed to happen. This is more about the parents. In fact, this is more about the parents currently suing their school corporation in Greensburg to challenge a coach’s right to demand his players meet certain expectations (hair that is above the ears, eyes and collar) in order to be part of a team.

‘Part of a team’. We don’t even understand what that means anymore. Today part of a team means everyone plays the same amount of minutes and receives the same sized trophy. This socialist approach has fostered a land of individuals choking on a sense of entitlement.

During WW II we were a team. Rosie the Riveter declared “We can do it”, not “I”. The result was a historic mobilization of labor and sacrifice that propelled us to Superpower status. This was unfortunately short-lived. We kept the Superpower status because it was cool and got us into all the best parties, we just gave up the working hard part.

In a world of instant gratification, ‘earning’ something through sacrifice has become altogether foreign. We round bellied Americans have been far too busy living off the momentum of the Forties and Fifties for any of that nonsense.

By definition a true team does not exist amidst the absence of hard work and sacrifice. Yet today hard work and sacrifice are looked upon as mere annoyances our great grandfathers had to deal with because there were only three channels on television and Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet. Our younger generations have developed a troubling clinical phobia of sacrifice and nobody is to blame but we as parents.

So little Johnny crawls out to meet the world and is blanketed with the popping flash of camera bulbs before being crowned ‘Greatest Child Ever’. The way he slobbers and chews on his teething ring is unlike any before. He may not be able to fight through a setback, but he can count to twelve in French.

And when they leave diapers, the skies only darken. Far too often we as parents tell our children their teachers and coaches CAN’T do something, as if the Founding Fathers, when not busy framing the Constitution, were getting tossed from AAU tournaments and going nose to nose with little Sally Jefferson’s cheer coach. When I was 14 I brought a paper home to my mom, complaining the cold hearted snake who moonlighted by day as my English Teacher had “given me a D”. After reviewing my work, my mom’s immediate response was “You should be happy, I’d have given you an F.” And to his credit, my father never once questioned my high school coach for refusing to play the greatest shooter in the history of basketball more.

It’s not their fault. In trying to do the right thing for our kids we unwittingly take their side in everything, thus dismissing persistence and determination. We are poisoning their perception of reality and accelerating the deterioration of the American Dream simultaneously. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians or the Lakers, every great civilization throughout history has eventually crumbled. NEWS FLASH- America isn't far behind. The good news is China and India are loving every minute of it, the bad news is fixing it will require a lot of hard work.

© 2014 Eric Walker Williams