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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Johnny Football and the Case of the Missing Paycheck

First appeared on September 13, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

So Johnny Football put his Johnny Hancock on a few footballs and a stray mini-helmet or two and the world loses its mind. Meanwhile Syria continues to eat itself from the top down and Senator Dianne Feinstein goes on television to talk about intervention vowing to vote against her constituents because “quite simply, they don’t know what I know”. What a wonderful world indeed.

Though the same can’t be said for Senators, it used to be Heisman Trophy winners conducted themselves with class. They’d score their parents a luxury apartment on a “friend of the programs” dime and arrive at award shows via limousine, or in other cases flush a Hollywood career down the toilet after being accused of killing their ex-wife.

So Johnny Football sells some autographs, gets booted from a summer camp and does the same thing 97% of college students do with regularity anyway and suddenly he’s public enemy number two behind Bashar al-Assad. If History’s any guide, we should cut the kid some slack. After all, those who’ve come before haven’t exactly been ripped from a Rockwell painting.

For many years the argument for paying college athletes has welled up like a great reservoir of greed, equality, compassion, righteousness and justice (the last two we recognize as distant possibilities) behind a dam that is the NCAA. And here comes Johnny Football, full head of steam, shoulder lowered, charging towards an already much assaulted, aging and crumbling dam.
And what should be a dislocated shoulder becomes instead an earth-shaking moment as, with the power of ESPN and the rest of the college football media behind him, young Johnny hits the dam with all the force of a Ram Pick Up.

So as the torrents rage from behind the dam, we pause on our long journey down the road towards equality to take a long look in the mirror. Is this about making things right with college athletes or making things right with ourselves? We know full well college athletics are dirty and there’s obviously little the NCAA can do about it. This means, in order for us to keep cheering our favorite teams on in good conscience, we’re suddenly fine with athletes being paid.

When everything’s “over the table” we somehow feel as if we still hold some control over the six headed monster we refuse to believe busted its chains and left the reservation a long time ago. Putting everything “over the table” supposedly eliminates “friends of the program “and those greedy ambulance chasers lurking in the shadows. It levels the playing field and makes the SEC an actual entity of the NCAA instead of Minor League Football.

Putting everything “over the table” makes college athletics the Frankenstein to our Gene Wilder. And we stand alongside beaming with pride at how we’ve tamed this gruesome beast using a crude brain transplant machine, a hunchbacked assistant and a fortuitous bolt of lightning. The audience claps and cheers with happy amazement until the stage lights begin exploding and Dr. Frank-un-schteen loses complete control of his great experiment.

As with most things in the real world there are no simple answers. Simple answers exist only on The Brady Bunch or in Third Grade. The NCAA will react in the way we’ve become so accustomed to seeing the NCAA react as the problem continues to grow uglier and faster than a malignant tumor. One thing’s for sure, we don’t have to worry about Washington mucking this deal up anytime soon. It appears they’re far too busy tossing the old political football around out on the Mall to worry about little Johnny Football.

© 2013 Eric Walker Williams