Michael Atchison

Good Teams on the Great Plains

2011-02-09T13:42:00.004-06:00

The rejuvenation of teams at Missouri and Kansas State has revitalized a once-great three-way rivalry, with both programs still chasing Big 12 powerhouse Kansas.

[This story appears in the February issue of Basketball Times and is reprinted here with permission. You can follow Basketball Times on Facebook. This story went to press three weeks ago. Facts on the ground, especially pertaining to Kansas State, have changed since then.]

By Michael Atchison

On February 12, 2006, Missouri hosted Kansas State in a basketball game attended by 10,682 and remembered by no one. The box score says that Marshall Brown led Mizzou with 18 points in a 74-71 win that broke a six-game skid. It was the Tigers’ first game without Quin Snyder, the head coach dismissed mid-season in the wake of scandal and erratic play. K-State coach Jim Wooldridge, who would be fired at season’s end, wasn’t there either due to illness. Missouri would finish the season 5-11 in the Big 12, good for eleventh place, while K-State’s 6-10 mark equaled the program’s best finish in Wooldridge’s six seasons.

Two programs, once proud, floundered while Kansas, the team each considers its greatest rival, won yet another conference title.

Once, these programs were equals, or something very close to it. In the thirty-eight seasons that the Big 8 conference existed (1959-1996), Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri won or shared the league title thirty times, with each claiming at least eight championships. But in fourteen seasons of Big 12 conference play, Kansas has won ten titles, while Missouri and Kansas State have none between them.

During the triangular rivalry’s peak, each season saw six games of true grit. But by 2006, Kansas was good, Kansas State was bad, and Missouri was just plain ugly.

Since then, though, Missouri and K-State have experienced resurrections that are little short of miraculous. Over the past two seasons, even as the Jayhawks have continued to dominate the league, the Tigers and Wildcats have each advanced to an NCAA Elite Eight appearance, and each has won as many or more tournament games as Kansas in that short span.

Earlier this season, for the first time ever, the three teams enjoyed simultaneous top ten rankings. Kansas’s success reflects decades of consistency. But for Missouri and Kansas State, it has been a climb out of chaos, in ways that no one could ever hope to replicate, and it represents the rebirth of something that once cast long shadows across America’s heartland.

* * *

Once upon a time in the Midwest, before non-stop national television, Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri helped to fill a void that stretched from Indiana to UCLA.

Norm Stewart is the living embodiment of that history. As an All-America player at Missouri in the 1950s, and then as the Tigers’ coach from 1967 to 1999, he participated in 167 games against the Jayhawks and Wildcats. In thirty-two seasons leading Mizzou, Stewart battled three coaches from Kansas and six from Kansas State. But the thirteen-season span from 1970 to 1983 when Stewart was at Missouri, Ted Owens was at Kansas, and Jack Hartman was at Kansas State gave the conflict its distinctive flavor. In that era, the three programs combined for twelve Big 8 championships, with each winning at least three. The games produced tough basketball and hard feelings.

The spirited Stewart and staid Owens cultivated a prickly relationship. “He had an established program, and we were trying to fight for survival,” says Stewart. “A lot of unfortunate things happened.” In the self-policing old days of wild western basketball, Oklahoma State’s Henry Iba would convene the league’s coaches and Colorado’s Sox Walseth would mediate disputes, including those between Stewart and Owens, who could never quite see eye-to-eye.

While Stewart and Owens were vastly different, Stewart and Hartman were too much alike, unforgiving competitors who taught a physical, defensive style of basketball. Stewart recalls a conference tournament game in Kansas City where Hartman crossed over to Missouri’s side of the floor, an act Stewart deemed both an affront and an invasion. Decades later, Stewart tries to clean up what he said to the K-State coach, but even the edited version is strictly for mature audiences.

Missouri won five conference championships during those thirteen years, the Tigers’ first titles since 1940. It was a rough climb. Mizzou had won just six of forty-nine games in the two seasons before Stewart took over. Making Missouri a championship-caliber program was his life’s work. Watching the program tumble into disarray years later was hard to take.

* * *

To understand how bad things got at Missouri, roll back the clock to the morning of March 26, 2006. The university’s curators are meeting to consider dismissing athletic director Mike Alden for the way he fired a basketball coach who, by acclamation, desperately needed firing. Granted a reprieve, if not a vote of confidence, Alden then makes his way across campus to a press conference where he introduces Mike Anderson as the University of Missouri’s new men’s basketball coach. Before an audience bewildered that two such disparate events could occur on the same day, Anderson, fresh off of four successful seasons at Alabama-Birmingham, dons a Mizzou cap and says “My goal is to win the national championship. I can get it done here.”

You’ll forgive even the truest believers who couldn’t help but shake their heads.

It’s hard to know where bottom is, especially when a program falls, hits bottom, blasts through the bedrock, and then falls some more. Was it July 4, 2004, when point guard Ricky Clemons, already suspended following a domestic violence conviction, failed to make his halfway-house curfew after crashing an all-terrain vehicle at a private party hosted by the university’s then-president? Was it November 19, 2004, when, as the Tigers lost to Davidson in their third-ever game at palatial Paige Sports Arena, ABC News 20/20 reported that the billionaire heiress for whom the building was named had acquired her college degree by academic fraud? Or was it February 10, 2006, days after a humiliating loss to Baylor, when Alden awkwardly dismissed Quin Snyder in a manner that prompted people to wonder whether Missouri could even fire a coach properly?

The prologue to Anderson’s tenure makes what has happened since all the harder to fathom. He began by employing the frenetic, defense-first system that he learned from Nolan Richardson as a player at Tulsa and then as an assistant coach at Arkansas. Known as Forty Minutes of Hell in Fayetteville, it became the Fastest Forty Minutes in Basketball in Columbia. Some questioned whether the running, gunning, full-court pressing style could succeed at the highest level.

After Anderson’s third season at Missouri, no one doubted.

With ball-hawking guards J.T. Tiller and Zaire Taylor on the perimeter, and skilled forwards DeMarre Carroll and Leo Lyons inside, Anderson’s Tigers won the Big 12 Tournament championship and a school-record 31 games, and advanced to the 2009 Elite Eight with a 101-91 win over Memphis in the regional semifinal. After reaching the second round of the 2010 NCAA Tournament, Anderson assembled his most offensively gifted team for the current season. The Tigers completed their non-conference slate with a 14-1 record. The last two times Missouri started a season with such success, the Tigers ultimately ascended to the top of the polls and won their league title.

Gary Link, who played for Norm Stewart’s Tigers in the 1970s and has been the team’s radio analyst for thirteen years, has watched Mike Anderson transform the program. “He didn’t waver one minute from his standard of how to coach a team and how to build a program,” Link says. “Everybody said ‘maybe that [style of play] will work at UAB, but can it really work at the Big 12 or a BCS school?’ And the answer is yes.”

Still, as good as the Tigers have been through the first half of this season, it’s a team built for next year. Ten players average more than ten minutes per game in a rotation that features six juniors, just one senior, and no obvious candidates to depart early for the NBA.

During Anderson’s time at Missouri, the system has been the star, with personal glory sacrificed for the good of the whole. But one player – Marcus Denmon – is starting to earn some stardom of his own.

The 6-3 junior guard from Kansas City, largely unknown at the start of the year, has played his way to prominence. The hoops world began to take note in late November, when Denmon rallied Mizzou from an 18-point deficit against Georgetown, only to fall in overtime. Before a national television audience, he scored 27 points on 10 of 12 shooting (including 5 of 7 from three-point range), demonstrating the sort of offensive efficiency that has gained notice around the country. In the Tigers’ next game at Oregon, he scored 19 points despite taking just seven shots from the field. Throughout the season, Denmon’s shooting percentage, overall and from behind the arc, has hovered around 50%, while he has made free throws at an 87% clip. Those numbers alone reveal his value, but add his 2:1 assist-to-turnover ratio and two steals per game, and it is apparent why Marcus Denmon is the perfect guard for Mike Anderson’s style of play – he scores in bunches, finds open teammates, protects the ball and defends like a madman.

He also comes up big in the most crucial moments.

Missouri hosted Vanderbilt in early December, just a day after a cousin (who Denmon said was more like a brother) was shot to death in Kansas City. The game was tied in the closing seconds of overtime, and the Commodores held the ball with a chance to win until Denmon stole a pass, sprinted the length of the floor, made a layup, got fouled, made the free throw and sealed an 85-82 victory.

But that was nothing compared to what he did to Illinois two weeks later.

Missouri led by two with a minute to play when Denmon stole a pass and dished to Ricardo Ratliffe for a layup. When Illinois made a three-pointer to cut the lead to one with 43 seconds remaining, Denmon received the inbounds pass and fired a bullet sixty feet ahead to Laurence Bowers, who laid the ball in and absorbed an intentional foul. On the ensuing inbounds play, Denmon lost his man on a hard cut to the bucket and converted another layup. He added four free throws in the final half-minute. Up two with a minute remaining, Missouri won by eleven, and it was largely Denmon’s doing.

Marcus Denmon and his Missouri teammates have made the Tigers’ troubles of five years ago fade like the sun in the western sky.

* * *

In some ways, by 2006 Kansas State’s program had sunk lower than Missouri’s. Quin Snyder had known success at Mizzou, reaching four straight NCAA Tournaments and the 2002 Elite Eight before things fell apart. But K-State’s supporters had to look back much farther to recall similar achievement. The Wildcats had been a national power up until the point they lost to Kansas in the Elite Eight in 1988. Kevin Kietzman, a Kansas State alum and host of a popular radio sports talk show in Kansas City, says “If you look right up until the game where they lost to Kansas to go to the Final Four, the histories of KU and K-State basketball are extremely similar. And from that point on, the next twenty years was a complete whitewashing.” Indeed, at the time that Wooldridge was let go, Kansas State had won just one of its previous thirty-three meetings with its arch rival.

Firing a coach was easy. Finding the right fit for what many saw as a dead end job in a dust bowl town should have been much harder. But luckily for the folks in Manhattan, Kansas, there was a cowboy coach looking for work.

Bob Huggins won 76% of his games in sixteen seasons at Cincinnati before being ousted in 2005, and then spent a year out of coaching but maintaining contact with some of the top high school players in the country. Known for tough defense, elite recruiting and winning games, Huggins also carried the reputation, fairly or not, of running an outlaw program where off-court troubles overshadowed on-court success.

“There was elation” when Huggins was hired, Kietzman says. There were also results. Season-ticket sales doubled as the coach’s swagger infected the fan base, and Huggins immediately changed the culture, taking players recruited by the prior staff and winning. The Wildcats finished fourth in the Big 12 and earned a spot in the NIT, their first post-season bid in eight years.

Huggins also raised expectations to heights recalled by few. He scored a commitment from blue chip recruit Bill Walker, and assembled a staff that included Frank Martin, an erstwhile high school coach from south Florida who served a year with Huggins at Cincinnati, and Dalonte Hill, a former UNC-Charlotte assistant hardwired into the rich talent pool of Washington, D. C. youth basketball.

Hill was attached to power forward Michael Beasley, perhaps the top talent in the 2007 recruiting class. Though he originally pledged to play at Charlotte, when Hill moved to Manhattan, Beasley followed. Many K-State fans believed they were about to turn the tables on Kansas.

Then came the purple panic. Huggins left after one season to become head coach at West Virginia, his alma mater. With a championship future flashing before their eyes, “K-State fans were in complete fear,” Kietzman says. “Now what do we do?”

What they did raised eyebrows. Kansas State named Frank Martin head coach on April 6, 2007, despite a relative lack of collegiate experience, and Dalonte Hill became his top aide, soon inking a contract that made him – by far – the highest paid assistant in college basketball. From the outside, the decision was met with a wave of criticism and cynicism, regarded by some as a ploy to ensure that Beasley would keep his commitment to Kansas State. How does a recruit hire a coach? And what happens after he bolts for the NBA in a year?

Those concerns have melted away.

With Beasley and Walker leading the way as freshmen, the Wildcats beat Kansas, qualified for their first NCAA Tournament since 1996, and won their first tourney game in twenty years. Then, after the freshman stars left for the NBA, things got even better. Bolstered by cobra-quick point guard Denis Clemente, a transfer from Miami, Martin’s Wildcats changed their identity and began winning from the perimeter. The team tied for fourth in the Big 12 in Martin’s second season, and advanced to the second round of the NIT. But like at Missouri, the big success came in year three.

Though Beasley and Walker garnered the attention, the most important long-term contributor in Martin’s first recruiting class has proven to be Jacob Pullen, a six-foot guard from Chicago who has a chance to finish his career as K-State’s all-time leading scorer. Playing alongside the senior Clemente, Pullen blossomed into one of the best and toughest guards in the nation as he averaged 19 points per game and earned first team All-Big 12 honors. Kansas State recorded a school-record 29 wins, including a two-overtime Sweet Sixteen victory over Xavier in the signature game of the tournament’s first two weeks.

And that historic season led the K-State community to fully embrace Frank Martin.

On its face, it’s an odd marriage. The son of Cuban immigrants who settled in Miami would seem to have little in common with the residents of the Little Apple. His fits of sideline rage stand in stark contrast to the high plains stoicism that prevails there. But Kietzman says that Martin is cut from the same cloth as the citizens of central Kansas. “He comes from a place that is about as liberal and freewheeling and open and wild as there is in America,” says Kietzman, “and has settled in one of the most conservative places in the country. And he loves it. . . . His beliefs and philosophies of what gets you where in this country and how it works, because of his unique experience of his parents coming over from Cuba and having to work and earn everything . . . this is an unbelievable guy.”

Still, the challenge to sustain success remains. Picked by the Big 12 coaches to win the conference this season, the Wildcats have occasionally sputtered through the first half of the year. Pullen, the preseason pick for Big 12 player of the year, has struggled at times with Clemente gone, and he and fellow senior Curtis Kelly, another preseason All-Big 12 pick, were suspended several games for accepting merchandise from a local department store at a deep discount. Martin is faced with repairing the chemistry of his current squad and with looking toward next year when Pullen and Kelly will be gone and Kansas and Missouri figure to be loaded.

“I don’t think we have a final verdict on Frank Martin on whether he’s a great coach or not,” Kietzman says. “I think he’s a very good coach. But I don’t know if he’s an elite coach.”

Martin may answer those questions over the next year and a half.

* * *

In addition to battling for national recognition and conference titles, these three rivals fight for the heart of a city.

For more than sixty years, the teams have met in conference tournaments in Kansas City. Columbia and Manhattan are scant two-hour drives from downtown, while Lawrence sits just beyond the city’s western suburbs. Proximity and protracted excellence have given the Jayhawks a special local standing.

“This is our NBA,” Kietzman says. “Kansas basketball is Kansas City’s team. I know a lot of people who live in Missouri who have no affiliation with any school, and they’re Kansas fans. It’s because Kansas is really good. I think that’s what makes the rivalry so great. Because there’s such disdain from Missouri fans and K- State fans toward Kansas that you’ve got to pick a side.”

Still, Kansas City can seem like home to all three teams. Each program has played at least one de facto home game at Sprint Center this season, all before big crowds. Kansas State’s meeting with top-ranked Duke may have been the most anticipated early-season game in the nation, and Missouri’s overtime slugfest with Georgetown may have been the best.

“To have three top twenty programs all playing before sold out crowds is great for this city and region,” says John McCarthy, director of the NAIA national tournament and the man leading an effort to brand Kansas City as the college basketball capital of America. “And with Mike Anderson, Frank Martin and Bill Self coaching these teams, it’s likely to stay that way for many years to come.”

But even as Missouri and Kansas State battle back to local and national prominence, they face the daunting fact that Kansas may be more dominant than ever. Since Bill Self took over in 2003, the Jayhawks have won a national championship and advanced to the Sweet Sixteen or beyond three other times, and their active streak of six straight conference titles matches a school record set in the 1920s.

“Bill Self’s an outstanding coach,” says Gary Link, noting that some people think that anyone can win at Kansas. “That’s nonsense,” he says. “What [Self] has done to win at that level, year in and year out, and to dominate – not just win the conference, but to dominate – has been outstanding.”

Kietzman puts it more succinctly. “Kansas is a machine.”

Though Kansas State was the pick to win the conference this season, Kansas, which finished its non-conference schedule without a loss, has reestablished itself as the favorite. In January, hoops statistician Ken Pomeroy ran a computer model that showed the Jayhawks winning this year’s Big 12 title 83.5% of the time. No other major conference program has owned a league over the past decade like Kansas has.

Link is remarkably candid when assessing the task in front of the Big 12’s other eleven members. “We’re not in [Bill Self’s] league,” he says. “Not even close.”

* * *

While coaches in the Big 8’s old days feuded, the current threesome expresses nothing but admiration for one another. The civility is welcome, but some local fans miss the clashes that used to be part of the theater of basketball in these parts.

Still, as time passes, good feelings grow among adversaries who fought so hard for so long. At halftime of a game at Allen Fieldhouse in January 2003, Kansas presented Norm Stewart with a rocking chair, and the crowd that had formerly treated Stewart so coldly welcomed him with genuine warmth. And today as he remembers a bitter rival, Stewart speaks reverently of the late Jack Hartman, calling him “a super competitor and a heck of a coach.” But it’s a more recent memory that causes a catch in the voice. Norm Stewart and his family suffered the worst kind of devastation in August 2009 when Jennifer Stewart, the eldest of nine grandchildren, was killed in a car crash. “Ted Owens,” he says, halting, “was one of the first people to call.”

Eventually, even the old gunfighters lay down their arms.

The Gaslight Anthem: "People Wanted Something Honest"

2010-07-28T09:27:00.001-05:00

I recently interviewed Ben Horowitz, drummer for the terrific young band The Gaslight Anthem. You can read the results in the new issue of The Providence Phoenix.

The Universal

2010-07-27T16:33:00.001-05:00

I saw Paul McCartney play over the weekend, and it blew my mind a little. I posted thoughts at Teenage Kicks. Find them here and here.

Same Time Next Year

2010-07-06T10:17:00.009-05:00

For one week each March, thirty-two college basketball teams meet in Kansas City at the tournament that time forgot.

By Michael Atchison

(This story appeared in the June 2010 issue of Basketball Times under the title NAIA: The Alternative Channel. It is reprinted here with permission. To visit Basketball Times online, go here)

The building sits nonchalantly along 13th Street like a man with a secret. Thousands pass by every day, but few know. By all rights, the place ought to be as famous as Madison Square Garden or the Palestra. Nine NCAA championship games were played here, including the 1957 classic that saw undefeated North Carolina beat Wilt Chamberlain and Kansas in three overtimes, and the 1964 game that gave John Wooden and UCLA their first title. Thirteen NCAA regional finals were decided here, including in 1944 when Utah’s Blitz Kids breezed through Kansas City on their way to history. No arena has hosted more college basketball games of greater consequence. And this week in March 2010, it will host the best national championship game that no one will see.

In the late 1930s, as he was set to retire from the faculty at Kansas, Dr. James Naismith conspired with two local businessmen to create a championship for the game he had invented nearly a half century earlier. The result was the National Intercollegiate Basketball Tournament, an eight-team event that debuted in 1937 (the National Invitation Tournament and the NCAA championships followed in 1938 and 1939, respectively). In its second year, the event grew to 32 teams, and soon thereafter spawned a governing body, the National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball, which, by the early 1950s, had evolved into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. And while the NIT has withered and the NCAA Tournament has grown to the extent that it sets the national agenda for three weeks every year, the NAIA Tournament exists now as it did then, in the same gym that played host back in ’37.

Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium wears its age well, if not elegantly. Except for the small video screens at each end of the floor, it looks very much like it must have appeared seventy years ago. There is no giant scoreboard overhead, no ribbon screen circling the perimeter, no luxury suites peering down from above. It carries the regal touches of 1930s architecture, with pristine sightlines throughout. Municipal was home to every NAIA Tournament through 1974, when the event moved a few miles away to Kemper Arena for nineteen years, and then on to Tulsa, Okla., for eight, before returning to its birthplace in 2002. Today, the building is full of marble and echoes and the dim gray light of the past.

Thirty-two teams converge here every March. Six days later, one leaves as the champion. The NAIA bills the event as College Basketball’s Toughest Tournament, a claim that’s tough to dispute, as teams vie for the title in the crucible of five games in a single week. On each of the first three days, with the building filled to but a third of its 10,000-seat capacity, the floor plays host to eight games, a morning-to-midnight-and-beyond blowout facilitated by scant ten-minute breaks between games, and no media timeouts. To keep things moving, teams warm up at halftime of the preceding game. In this part of the country, they say if you don’t like today’s weather, just wait till tomorrow. At the NAIA, new games blow in like storm fronts every two hours, a constantly evolving swirl of high-tension hoops.

For the fan, each new game brings a mystery, because all but the most dedicated hardly know the teams before the tournament begins. To a newcomer, the school names can sound like screenwriter creations from some slapstick football comedy. Montana Western. Southern Polytechnic State. But for those who have been attending for years, the names are as familiar as Duke and Kentucky.

Jack Gant is a patriot, a veteran, a maker and upholder of the law. He served as a Missouri state senator for ten years and as a county judge for far longer. Still, Judge Gant holds a grievance against the United States government, one he has harbored for more than six decades. In 1947 and 1948, Marine corporal Gant requested leave from his post at the Japanese war crimes trials on Guam to return home to Kansas City for the NAIA national basketball tournament, which he had attended without fail since 1941, but was denied. After all these years, the faint residue of resentment bubbles up as he speaks through a jaw ever-so-slightly clinched: “I was unhappy.”

Instead of sitting in his living room or a local bar watching the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament on television, the lively 82-year-old spends a week in the middle of each March in his familiar seat in section 110 of Municipal Auditorium. Irked at the month’s main event – “the NCAA is trying to gobble up everything,” he says – Judge Gant settles in for what he calls “the greatest test of endurance” in college basketball. He’s referring to the players, but he may as well be talking about himself. Ask how many games he’ll watch over the tournament’s six days, and he replies “all thirty-one if I can.”

Uncle Sam’s inflexibility means that the active attendance streak belongs to Buck and Betty Farmer, who witnessed their sixty-fourth straight NAIA Tournament in 2010. The TV room in their suburban Kansas City home is a shrine to small college hoops. Seventeen autographed basketballs adorn the shelves, one signed by John McClendon, who won three NAIA titles as coach at Tennessee A&I, and later became the first black coach at a predominantly white school when hired by Cleveland State in 1966. There are plaques, awards and certificates recognizing their dedication, and scores of photos, including one of McKendree University’s Harry Statham, the only men’s coach ever to win 1,000 games at a four-year institution. It is not hyperbole to say that the Farmers have witnessed the full evolution of the modern game, including one of its singular moments. They were there in 1948 when John Wooden coached Indiana State to the final with Clarence Walker – the first African-American player to participate in the title game – in the lineup (Wooden’s refusal to play in 1947 helped put an immediate end to formal segregation).

Betty won’t say so, but she may love the event more than her husband does. After all, it was she who attended one year in Tulsa despite battling liver cancer, a cot set up in the hospitality room for intermittent rest. She even feels a little chary about calling it a streak because she did miss a few games at one tournament just after adopting a newborn. But while Buck smiles broadly and says “I like to see the ball bounce,” Betty’s eyes reflect a steely intensity when she calls the whole thing “an addiction.” And lest anyone think that this all began with a woman acquiescing to her husband’s interest, keep in mind that for two years while Buck was overseas during World War II, Betty was courtside at Municipal Auditorium.

The event’s profile has changed over time, as college basketball became fully integrated at every level and the NCAA Tournament grew to dwarf all competition. Today’s NAIA players are a mix of second-chancers, hopeless dreamers, tweeners, dead-enders, late bloomers, reclamation projects, and many who have found a perfect academic and athletic fit. It’s a place where a 6-7 post player (like Mountain State’s Nick Aldridge) can dominate, while a true giant (Aldridge’s teammate, 7-8 Paul Sturgess, the tallest man in his native Britain) can languish on the bench while his game grows to match his frame.

It wasn’t always that way. In the old days, some of the game’s best rolled through Kansas City. Buck Farmer recalls Tennessee A&I’s Dick Barnett (who went on to star for the New York Knicks) as the finest player he ever saw, and also reminisces about Willis Reed, Jack Sikma and Dennis Rodman, who Betty remembers as a fine young man, though she winces at what has become of him lately. Before he was a Detroit Piston, Rick Mahorn was a Hampton Pirate. Before he was The Pearl, Earl Monroe was a star at Winston-Salem State. Before he was All-World, Lloyd Free was the event’s MVP. Players of that stature are beyond rare in the current NAIA, but with the right confluence of personal and academic circumstances, one can appear from the mist.

Mike McCollow, a former assistant coach in the NCAA and NBA, and now a studio TV analyst for the Minnesota Timberwolves, was a sharpshooting guard in the 1980s at Avila University, one of the many NAIA programs that dot the heartland. He fondly recalls the long bus rides in what he calls “glory days” for small college hoops, a time when the likes of Scottie Pippen and Terry Porter played NAIA ball. Asked if NBA personnel professionals still pay attention to the NAIA, he says “the best ones do,” though few elite talents remain in the small school ranks. McCollow says that the rise of summer basketball, which sees high school players travel about the country and play head-to-head, means that virtually no high-level recruits fall through the cracks like they did in the past. And the NCAA’s complete media dominance causes every young player to dream of playing in the Big Dance. Still, McCollow says, the rare player who develops late or whose NCAA dreams are derailed by injuries or academic issues has the chance to the make the leap from the NAIA to the NBA. The pros take the best players, he says. They don’t care where they come from.

John McCarthy is affable and forty, with a genuine, low-key charm befitting his Rust Belt upbringing. He’s like many of the NAIA’s fans, having chased the game down two-lane roads and through small town gyms. The difference is that, as the tournament’s director, he runs the show. A former NCAA Division II basketball coach, he first approached the NAIA with a skeptical eye. But in three years on the job, he has become a true believer. It’s a simpler system, he says, without the overwritten rule book designed to battle the big money abuses that follow big time basketball. In the NAIA, recruiting restrictions are few and rules enforcement is handled on an ad hoc basis, but there’s less incentive to cheat when there is little money to be made. While the NCAA expanded its tournament to generate millions more in TV revenue, the NAIA pays production costs for its championship game and then gives the rights away for free. Schools pay their own way to the tournament without hope of reimbursement. While some may view the NAIA as a lightly regulated outlaw circuit, from up close McCarthy sees a rare purity in the game. Unlike the big boys, he says, “we’re not in the entertainment business.”

Oklahoma Baptist is an extreme example of how an NAIA team can come together, and a vivid illustration of how one can come to dominate. Their starting five consists entirely of players who weren’t on campus two years ago. Senior Nate Brumfield, in his second year at OBU after attending junior college, is a small college Charles Barkley. An interior force despite being listed at a generous 6-5, Brumfield’s 260 pounds have ways of opening paths to the hoop. Garrett Steinmetz, a 6-6 senior swingman, and junior Tim Bowman, a broad-shouldered 5-11 pass-first point guard, likewise came from junior college. The Bison also feature two NCAA Division I veterans whose winding roads led them to the Shawnee, Oklahoma school. A.J. Hawkins, a svelte 6-5 wing, played two seasons at St. Bonaventure and averaged 12 points and 5 rebounds as a sophomore before transferring to Wichita State, where his production dropped sharply in one year as a starter. A devout and quiet young man, Hawkins was rocked by the 2002 death of his father, a minister and former college basketball player. With a wife and young son, the Oklahoma City native opted to play his final season near the comforts of home and transferred to OBU, where his brother Adam enjoyed a fruitful career for coach Doug Tolin. But the team’s most fascinating figure is Kevin Swinton.

A former North Carolina high school player of the year, Swinton took his big time talent to Wake Forest where he played sparingly and found small time trouble off the court in two undistinguished seasons. He transferred to UNC-Wilmington, but never played a game for the Seahawks, after being arrested on a gun possession charge and dismissed from the team shortly after arriving on campus. Two years later, after time spent getting his academic affairs in order, he made his debut at OBU, but didn’t stay in the lineup for long. A minor scare involving his kidneys and a suspension related to a fight at a Shawnee bar combined to cost Swinton eight games. When asked about Swinton’s off-court behavior, a person close to OBU’s program pauses, the words lodged between a grimace and a grin, and finally says “Kevin is a good kid . . . down deep.”

On the court, though, Swinton looks the part of an elite athlete more than anyone else in the NAIA field. A sleekly muscled 6-8, his movement is fluid, spiced with the swagger of a player who knows he’s good. When he gives full effort, he seems ferocious, even exaggerated. He leaps and grabs errant shots like he’s trying to crush the ball, and lands with sharp elbows spread wide as condor’s wings, protecting his catch. He is sometimes slow up the floor, but when he catches the ball with his back to the basket, he displays an array of moves foreign to most of his peers. And when he dunks, he emits a whiff of the menace that seems attached to his star-crossed career.

In one 30-second span of OBU’s semifinal game against Robert Morris University (the Illinois school, not the Pennsylvania one of the same name), Swinton looks like the kind of player that made NCAA coaches salivate six years ago. He skies for an offensive rebound and dunks the ball in one violent motion, forcefully rejects a shot on the other end, and then runs down the floor, takes an entry pass, and executes a nifty post move for a layup. With its array of talent, OBU should put Robert Morris away in the second half, but can’t. The Bison’s big men are too often slow getting back on defense, and RMU attacks in transition. And when OBU thwarts the initial rush, Robert Morris spreads the floor and picks the Bison defense apart. The teams trade buckets throughout the second half, and neither can sustain a lead. When Brumfield sinks two free throws with 14 seconds to play, he ties the score, and when Morris fails to convert on its next possession, the game goes to overtime.

A three-pointer by Hawkins and buckets by Brumfield and Swinton propel OBU to a 79-72 lead, but Robert Morris scores seven straight points to tie the game with 35 seconds remaining. OBU runs the final play for Brumfield, and he rewards that confidence. He spins in the lane and scores with 3.3 seconds to play, putting the Bison into the championship game.

OBU’s opponent there, Azusa Pacific, doesn’t lack for talent, either. Dominique Johnson is a spidery, slippery 6-3 senior guard who can score from all over the floor, and center Reggie Owens posted a line – 16 points, 16 boards – as square as his 6-5, 270-pound physique in the Cougars’ semifinal win over Southern Polytechnic.

The final produces the week’s biggest crowd, more than 5,300, as a throng of boisterous Baptists makes its way to Municipal Auditorium, giving the impression of a home game for the Bison. It’s a sharp contrast from the tournament’s largely local flavor, fueled by high school bands that wail during timeouts while local high school players compete in the three-point shootout. Gone is the more clinical atmosphere that prevails in the earlier rounds when neutral hoop junkies gorge on games. With fourteen green-and-gold clad cheerleaders chanting nonstop, the game takes on a raucous edge even as half the seats remain unfilled. The difference in support is evident even on press row, where a single student handles every element of Azusa Pacific’s internet radio broadcast, while Oklahoma Baptist’s production features a three-man team, led by a play-by-play announcer who once served as the university’s president.

Azusa Pacific’s lineup reflects the different reality of NAIA play. No starter exceeds 6-5. The game is physical (Swinton gives one Cougar a hard shoulder on a trip down the floor), but the pace is fast and Azusa Pacific is hot. The Cougars shoot 53.6% from the floor, make five of nine three-point shots, and sink all twelve of their free throws en route to a 47-40 halftime lead. Swinton keeps OBU in the game by making six of seven shots, while Azusa frustrates Brumfield with double-teams, allowing him just five field goal attempts in fifteen minutes of play.

But at the start of the second half, OBU scores nine straight points to take the lead, Azusa hits a three-pointer to take it back, and a game that would be talked about for decades were it an NCAA final is on. Brumfield goes to the bench with his third foul with 16:39 to play, and in his absence, Azusa’s defense collapses on Swinton, and the officials allow the Cougars to rough him up with impunity. After being limited by foul trouble in the first half, Azusa’s Reggie Owens heats up in the second half, scoring 13 of his 17 points. But it is Dominique Johnson, wearing the star’s number of 23, who carries the Cougars, making play after play on his way to a game-high 24 points. It takes both of OBU’s wing players – Steinmetz and Hawkins combine for 28 points in the half – to keep the Bison in the game.

Down the stretch, it plays like a command performance for NAIA royalty. Newly-inducted college basketball hall of famer Travis Grant, who won three NAIA titles at Kentucky State and scored more than 4,000 career points, sits at center court, eight rows up, just in front of Buck and Betty Farmer, and the teams conjure up all the magic of tournaments past. While Dominique Johnson carves up the OBU defense, the Bison respond by pounding the ball into Swinton, who often has to kick it back out for open shots.

Azusa holds the ball and a three-point lead as the clock ticks below one minute. OBU fouls Johnson, sending him to the line to shoot a one-and-one with 55.9 seconds remaining. Azusa owes its lead largely to dead-eye free throw shooting, having made 20 of 22 tries, and Johnson is perfect in eight attempts. But he misses the front end, and OBU grabs the rebound. The Bison run their half court offense and feed Swinton under the hoop. Three Cougars converge on him, he takes a shot to the face, and the tournament’s most dramatic sequence begins to unfold.

Seeing stars and spitting blood, Swinton shuffles to the bench for treatment, and college basketball’s newest rule is invoked. In prior years, OBU would decide which player would shoot free throws in Swinton’s stead. But beginning this season, the decision has been the opposition’s prerogative. Azusa coach Justin Leslie picks A.J. Hawkins, who has made 63% of his free throws on the year, lowest among the OBU players on the floor.

Hawkins’s first effort is straight, but almost too short. It hits the front of the rim, then the backboard, and then falls in. Azusa leads 83-81. His second shot goes up, hits the rim and falls away. Bodies crash in the lane with such force that no one is able to grab the ball before it hits the floor. But Nate Brumfield, the most powerful man on the court, snags it on its first bounce and makes a hard move to the hoop. Three Cougars pounce on him. Without a shot, a man celebrated for his scoring and rebounding makes the assist of his life. Hawkins has slid from the free throw line to a lonely place beyond the three-point arc. With Azusa’s players packed in the lane, Brumfield fires the ball to his senior teammate. A lone Cougar desperately runs toward the shooter, but it’s too late. Hawkins buries a trey. In a flash, OBU has gone from down three points to up one. Thirty-five seconds remain.

Everyone in the gym knows that the game now rests in Dominique Johnson’s hands. Holding the ball beyond the three-point line, he makes his move with 20 seconds on the clock. He drives toward the middle of the floor, preparing to head down the lane, but Brumfield leaves his man and strips the ball at the free throw line. Five bodies go to the floor, and the officials call a held ball. The possession arrow points toward Azusa. The Cougars inbound the ball, and Johnson comes around a screen to get it. But he stumbles just as the pass is made, and the ball sails out of bounds with sixteen seconds to play.

Oklahoma Baptist gets the ball to sophomore Emmanuel Wilson, an 87% free throw shooter. Azusa fouls him with 12.2 seconds remaining, but Wilson misses both shots, and Reggie Owens collects the rebound. Azusa Pacific has the ball, down one, with ten seconds to play.

Dominique Johnson brings the ball up the floor and floats toward the left end of the free throw line, where he puts up a contested fall away jumper as the clock dips below four seconds. The shot, hard and flat, hits the rim and bounces off to the right. Azusa’s Marshall Johnson, a 6-3 guard, grabs the ball with less than a second left and heaves it toward the rim as the buzzer sounds. Swish. Streamers pop from the rafters and fall to the floor.

Someone has just won the NAIA national championship. But who?

The officials wave the shot off, and at first glance, they seem to be right. There’s no way Johnson could have gotten that shot off in time. Is there?

When they go to the tape, it appears closer than it did to the naked eye. After a couple of minutes of review, the call is confirmed. The ball left Johnson’s hand too late. How late? One-tenth of a second, maybe two-tenths.

Oklahoma Baptist’s players erupt in celebration, while Azusa Pacific’s fall to the floor or shuffle about the court with jerseys pulled up over their heads. The Bison are champions because a college basketball game lasts forty minutes and not one second longer.

Fans stay in their seats and players mill about the floor waiting for awards to be presented, and it’s an OBU sweep. The Bison get their trophy, Doug Tolin is named national coach of the year, and Nate Brumfield is recognized as player of the year. Brumfield also earns the Chuck Taylor Award – yes, that Chuck Taylor – as the tournament’s MVP, fitting since the event has changed so little since players actually wore Chuck Taylors. Brumfield headlines a ten-man all-tournament team that also includes Swinton, Hawkins, Dominique Jones and Reggie Owens.

As most fans file out, a few linger. Travis Grant, elegant in a gray suit, graying hair and a winning smile, signs autographs for kids whose parents were not yet born the night he scored 60 against Minot State. Oklahoma Baptist’s players scale a ladder and cut down the nets with all the joy that Duke’s team will display two weeks later upon winning the NCAA title. John McCarthy, running on his last few drops of adrenaline at the end of a marathon week, takes it all in. Tired and satisfied, he beams at what he has just seen. Is this the best tournament final ever? “I haven’t seen all seventy-two,” he says. “But it’s hard to imagine that there’s been a better game.”

The First Cinderella

2010-03-17T09:04:00.005-05:00

Joe Posnanski is one of my favorite writers, and I am not alone. Long revered for his work in The Kansas City Star (my hometown paper), he twice earned recognition as the nation’s best sports columnist before leaving this past August to take a full-time job at the magazine we’ll be discussing here. Still, Joe was humbled fifteen months ago when he had a feature published in Sports Illustrated for the first time:

I grew up reading Sports Illustrated. It was the inspiration for me to become a sportswriter. More than that, it was then the inspiration to become a certain kind of sportswriter. Sports Illustrated, through the years,has been Frank Deford and George Plimpton and Gary Smith and Scott Price. It is Hunter Thompson getting sent to Las Vegas, it is Bill Nack on Secretariat, it is Mark Kram on the Thrilla, it is Dr. Z on Howie Long, it is Rick Reilly on Jim Murray, it is Dan Jenkins riffing on the Open at Cherry Hill, it is Alex Wolff on Wooden, it is Steve Rushin on how we got here.
And sure, I romanticize it. How can I not? Sports Illustrated has represented the pinnacle to me — it is Carnegie Hall, it is Fenway Park, it is the Sears Tower, it is the Kodak Theater, it is still, to me, the biggest stage going.

If a guy of Posnanski’s stature gets a little awestruck at being in SI, imagine how a hobbyist like me must feel.

The new issue of Sports Illustrated contains “The First Cinderella,” a feature I wrote with Alex Wolff, the same Alex Wolff mentioned by Joe. I am thrilled, of course, and grateful at my good fortune. And even though this has been in the works for more than a year, there are moments when I still can’t quite get my head around it.

A few years back, I wrote a book called True Sons, A Century of Missouri Tigers Basketball. One of my favorite parts involves the 1943-44 season, when unpredictable consequences of war pushed a mediocre Missouri team into the NCAA Tournament. There, they lost to a Utah squad that went on to win the national title. The Utes were an extraordinary team even by championship standards, and their story stuck with me. After the book came out, people asked what I would write about next, and I always said I don’t know, but someone should write a story about the 1944 Utah team. And then, eighteen months ago, I decided that I should be the one to write it.

I started making calls. And within days, I was talking to Arnie Ferrin and Wat Misaka, heroes of the team that had won the title sixty-five years earlier. It is not false modesty to say that I was a nobody. I could boast no affiliation with any publication, nor could I promise that I could interest anyone in the story. Still, for reasons no more complicated than that they are very nice men, Arnie and Wat gave me their time and their memories. I put together 6,000 words on their championship season and their lifelong friendship, and then tried to find a home for them. Among those I contacted was Steve Rushin – the same Steve Rushin mentioned by Joe – who has become a friend in recent years. He suggested I send the story to Greg Kelly, an editor at Sports Illustrated.

And so I did, thinking that Greg might know someone in the business who would be interested, or that maybe (if I were lucky) he might want it for the magazine’s website. But within a few days, Greg came back with a proposition: How would I like to work with Alex Wolff and develop the story for the magazine?

Asking if you’d like to collaborate with Alex Wolff on your college basketball story is akin to asking if you’d like to work with Mark Twain on your Mississippi River adventure. I said yes (of course), and Alex and I spent time over the past year talking with the surviving members of the Utah squad, plus families of players lost over time.

The fruits of our efforts are in the magazine this week. It’s a piece I’m proud of; one built on the memories of teammates Arnie Ferrin, Wat Misaka, Bob Lewis, Fred Lewis and Herb Wilkinson, and the children of Dick Smuin and Masateru Tatsuno. I am grateful to all of them, and also to Alex, who is as gracious and generous a collaborator as I can imagine. My appreciation also goes to Steve and Greg (who has since left the magazine), without whom this would not have happened, and to Trisha Blackmar (the editor who succeeded Greg and added immeasurably to the story) and Kelvin Bias (the fact-checker who displayed good humor and patience while I struggled to find evidence supporting the assertion that chicken fighting was legal in Utah in the early 1940s).

The story of Utah’s 1944 season is all about miracles. This feels a little miraculous, too.

Taking recommendations

2010-03-08T13:31:00.002-06:00

I found myself listening to music while reading Evening's Empire and drinking beer while reading The Pint Man. Anyone know of a novel where the protagonist sips coffee and reads The Atlantic on a saturday morning while his children play quietly? I would ask for one about a nerdy guy who cavorts with supermodels, but fantasy novels have never been my thing.

The Perfect Pint

2010-03-04T16:05:00.004-06:00

Full disclosure: It would be presumptuous to call Steve Rushin a friend (I know him solely through online exchanges), but he recently did me a colossal favor (details here in a couple of weeks) that I could never fully repay (he also busted my hump in a recent blog post). That said, I would rave about Steve’s new novel The Pint Man even if he locked me in the fetid Gents at Boyle’s, the New York Irish bar that serves as the book’s hub.

The Pint Man is Rushin’s first foray into fiction, but he has already known a sterling career as a writer, most notably for the nineteen years he spent at Sports Illustrated. He has mastered writing long (“How We Got Here,” a sprawling reflection for SI’s 40th anniversary, remains the longest piece ever in the magazine), short (his weekly Air and Space column was a staple at the front of SI for years) and shorter (Steve’s tweets are reet petite). Now, he masters something entirely different.

Inevitably, discussions of Rushin’s writing focus on wordplay, his spellbinding way with anagrams, spoonerisms and palindromes. And it’s hard not to be mesmerized by lines like this: “A bottle of Cockburn’s was shelved next to a bottle of Dry Sack. Given their proximity, Rodney thought of them not as port and sherry but as twinned male medical afflictions, the former leading inevitably to the latter.” Still, Rushin’s facility with words, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook, is just part of the story, the deadliest weapon in an arsenal full of moves.

Steve is to prose what Elvis Costello is to lyrics, crafting lines that stand on their own as self-contained things of brilliance, but also doing much more. As words careen within lines, lines coalesce into paragraphs, and paragraphs morph into narrative that unfolds in ways both funny and affecting. The book is funny, but it’s not just funny. It’s also warm and sad and charming. And much of the charm rests within the fundamental, flawed decency of its main character.

Our protagonist is out-of-work Rodney Poole, a dedicated follower of fiction, who pursues employment and a woman named Mairead (rhymes with parade), though not with equal vigor. Rodney often finds himself lost – in a pint, in a book, in his thoughts – in the midst of efforts to find himself. He knows what he doesn’t want to be – unemployed, alone – but he struggles to find what he does want to be well after he has grown up. Whatever that thing is, it must involve words, the one true currency in his life.

(An aside: Rodney often finds himself free associating, a habit that’s contagious. A minor character is dubbed Wanamaker because his punched-pillow face and jug-handled ears call to mind the trophy awarded to the winner of the PGA Championship, but for me, the PGA inspires thoughts of Rick Springfield, who famously sang “Jessie’s got himself a girl and I Wanamaker mine.”)

Throughout, Rodney is a good guy who occasionally does bad, a sweet fellow who is not always smooth, a fine man who pines for a better woman. In other words, he’s a lot like me, and probably you, and every decent person you know. Rodney is funny, not farcical. He’s real and relatable, and that makes all the difference.

I could go on (and on), but I don’t want to give too much away. Suffice it to say that I love this book. It’s full of good beer, great bars, classic books, fine music, smart women, and a man just wise enough to appreciate all of those things. And that’s a man I want to know.

[Buy The Pint Man at Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble or Powell's]

Evening’s Empire: My interview with Bill Flanagan

2010-02-11T15:53:00.004-06:00

Recently, I had two great pleasures. One was reading Evening’s Empire, a funny, sad, heartwarming and unfailingly entertaining novel about growing up and growing old in rock and roll. The other was interviewing Bill Flanagan, the book’s author, as decent, smart and generous a guy as you could hope to meet. When Flanagan isn’t writing terrific books, he’s making editorial decisions at MTV Networks, where he serves as executive vice president.

I’ve read plenty of fiction set in the world of popular music, and even excellent writers have trouble capturing the feel. Not Flanagan. Every word in Evening’s Empire is note-perfect, which perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise: The guy has actually lived the life. But most folks who have lived the life couldn’t possibly render it in such vivid, rewarding prose. You don’t have to love rock and roll to enjoy the book – it’s far broader than that. But if you do love rock and roll, Evening’s Empire is required reading.

My interview with Mr. Flanagan can be found in The Providence Phoenix.

An Open Letter from the Dark Side

2010-01-05T10:06:00.002-06:00

(This piece was written last summer and published in October 2009 in The Maple Street Press Jayhawk Tip-Off, 2009 - 2010)

How strange to be in these pages, like Al Franken riffing for The American Conservative. It must be strange for you, too, to see a Missouri guy (or toothless Ozark hillbilly if you prefer) defiling the sanctity of this holy writ in which the Jayhawks’ fourth national title is foretold. I can feel your contempt through the paper. And I like it.

My assignment was to explain why Kansas fans should look out for Missouri. But instead, let me suggest that you shouldn’t. Give these Tigers no more thought than you gave the middling Mizzou squad that beat the juggernaut Jayhawks in two overtimes in 1997. Pay them no more mind than the tailspinning Tigers who clipped Kansas when Thomas Gardner couldn’t miss a three and Christian Moody couldn’t make a one. And show them no more respect than the Big 12 coaches who picked Mizzou to finish in the league’s bottom half last year, only to see the Tigers win 31 games, take the conference tournament, and advance to the Final Four’s doorstep.

But if you’re inclined to ignore my counsel, the main reason must be Mike Anderson. After sucking poison from the program for two years, Anderson won more games in his third season than any Tiger coach had won before. More than Bill Self ever won at Illinois or in any of his first three years in Lawrence. Then Anderson rejected mountains of money from other schools to plant his flag firmly in Columbia and build on last season’s promise.

In just seven years as a head coach, Mike Anderson has restored two programs in decline, taking each to the NCAA Sweet Sixteen or beyond. Though the teams he inherited had become familiar with futility, Anderson has known no failure, averaging 22 victories per year, winning more than 60% of his postseason games, and displaying an unflinching commitment to doing things his way. The canard that Anderson’s chaotic defensive style can’t win at the highest level hasn’t just been discredited. It’s been disintegrated.

When introduced as Missouri’s coach, Anderson said “My goal is to win the national championship. I can get it done here.” It seemed laughable then, but it hardly seems preposterous now. With less than 12 minutes to play in March’s Western Regional final, Missouri stood tied with Connecticut. In just his third year, with a roster full of transfers and freshmen, Mike Anderson got Mizzou to within two TV timeouts of the Final Four. And with better athletes now on Missouri’s recruiting radar, there’s cause to believe that he might someday achieve his goal.

This season, Anderson’s mission is made easier by a battle-tested backcourt. J.T. Tiller (who smothered Sherron Collins last year in Columbia) returns for his senior season, and Zaire Taylor (who struck the fatal blow that night) is back, too. Sophomore guards Kim English and Marcus Denmon stand among six returning Tigers who scored 15 or more points in at least one conference game a season ago. That quartet, plus sophomore Miguel Paul and gifted freshman guard Mike Dixon, will key Missouri’s 40-minute fury.

The frontcourt is less proven, but doesn’t lack promise. Keith Ramsey, Mizzou’s best post defender a year ago, returns as the last line of defense, and Justin Safford became an inside-outside scoring threat late last season, converting 9 of 12 three-pointers in the final nine games. Gravity-resistant Laurence Bowers, occasionally explosive (though rarely healthy) as a freshman, will be asked to help fill the vast void left by DeMarre Carroll and Leo Lyons, among the nation’s most productive forward tandems a year ago. Though results are hard to project for Mizzou’s relatively untested interior, it is certain that the entire team will play fast and furious basketball. I suspect that even the most hardened Jayhawk fans might admit that this team should be fun to watch.

I also suspect that somewhere deep inside your shriveled, coal-black hearts, you’re rooting for the Tigers to sustain their resurgence, because this rivalry – perhaps the best in college basketball – deserves to be great again.

Missouri and Kansas have battled since 1907, when James Naismith coached his final two games for the Jayhawks and lost both to the Tigers. But our great war really blossomed near the time of The Great War, when two hall of fame coaches arrived. At a game in 1920, Missouri mentor Walter Meanwell rose to his feet to argue a call, and a young Phog Allen shouted “Sit down, you big boob!” It was the kindest exchange in Border War history. Allen and Missouri coach Sparky Stalcup nearly came to blows in 1947, and Jayhawks giant Wayne Hightower and the Tigers’ towering Charlie Henke actually did in 1961, sparking the ugliest brawl imaginable.

But the brutality has often yielded beauty. Anthony Peeler’s 43. Bud Stallworth’s 50. John Brown’s rage. Danny Manning’s grace. Lee Coward’s ruthless cool. And Sherron Collins’s extreme retribution last year in Lawrence, an act of hardcore vengeance disguised as hardwood brilliance.

Back in 1989, Norm Stewart beat cancer because it sounded like beating Kansas, and that’s just what he did in those days. His Tigers swept the Jayhawks that year, and again the next, twice claiming KU’s #1 ranking for themselves. The teams played on a national stage back then, but despite what anyone in Bristol, Connecticut says, rivalries – like politics – are local. What counts is not in the eye of the beholder but the hearts of the stakeholders, the fans who have loved their team and loathed yours for decades. The South Jersey kids who make their way to Duke don’t harbor a deep-seated distaste for North Carolina. They put it on with their face paint when they enter Cameron Indoor Stadium.

But kids from Ottawa and Osawatomie to Osceola and O’Fallon grow up with the Border War, a tradition passed through generations of degeneration, steeped in modern day insanity and Civil War inanity (the 1860s mythos provides character, but does anyone think Confederate sympathizers can be found in the Tigers’ locker room?). Any given game can break your heart or make your year, and even bit players in each program’s history can live forever in memory simply by making one shot, as Corey Tate and David Padgett have shown us all.

And though these ancient hostilities often prove magical, until the Tigers triumphed last season in Columbia, Mizzou had failed to keep up its end of the rivalry in recent years. So on behalf of Missouri Tigers everywhere, let me apologize for not beating you often enough over the past decade. We promise to do better.

Michael Atchison is the author of True Sons, A Century of Missouri Tigers Basketball.

Sarah & the Shipmates

2009-10-21T12:10:00.003-05:00

My run of talking to fascinating folks continues with a conversation with Sarah Vowell about her most recent book The Wordy Shipmates.

Lowe Life

2009-10-07T11:20:00.002-05:00

Nick Lowe has long been one of my musical heroes. Several songs he wrote early in his career - "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," "So It Goes," "Cruel to Be Kind" - stand as classics of the punk and new wave era. And in recent years, he has released a string of impossibly elegant albums that echo the sounds of Memphis and Muscle Shoals in the 1960s. I talked to him by phone last week, and the results can be found in the new issue of The Providence Phoenix. Click here. Surpassingly generous, Mr. Lowe gave me more than could possible fit in the paper, and much of it was gold. After an appropriate passage of time, I'll put the full director's cut up here.

Orlando Magic

2009-09-30T12:04:00.004-05:00

Last week, on the eve of my family’s second trip to Walt Disney World, I tried to explain to my eight year old daughter why I enjoyed the first one so much. I told her that I’m sure it’s better to be a kid now than it was thirty-five years ago. Everything is available now, and it’s available all the time. But when every experience is replicable, none is quite as special. When I was her age, we had five or six television channels, and save for Saturday mornings, none was geared toward kids. My hometown had one movie theater, and that theater had one screen. There were no VCRs, DVRs or DVDs. You got one shot at everything. So when Disney’s Robin Hood (not even one of Walt’s better flicks) came to town, it was like magic, and when The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh got its once-annual TV screening, I welled up with such wonder I thought my chest would explode. These things spoke to me, fired my imagination, became touchstones of an idealized time. And visiting Disney brought all of that back to me.

The trip was terrific, of course, but it seemed more grueling than the previous one. The kids were too tired the first day (we had arrived late at night), and it was unseasonably hot even by Floridian standards. The second day was a fourteen-hour marathon as we tried to hit every last corner of two different parks. The third and final scorching day was spent at Animal Kingdom, and by dinner, we were spent, too. Still, Grace wanted one more run through the Magic Kingdom, so we sent her mom and kid brother back to the hotel and headed for Main Street U.S.A.

I was glad to have the chance. Sometimes I feel like I don’t give Grace the attention she deserves. Her little brother is a sweet kid, but he’s demanding, which has forced Grace to be the more independent child since the age of three. So I grabbed her hand and headed to the turnstile. It was 8:00 p.m., and the nightly parade kicked off just as we got through the gate. We walked along with it and then went off to Tomorrowland to shoot aliens with Buzz Lightyear. Then it was on to Toon Town to ride Goofy’s Barnstormer. After that, as we headed to Fantasyland for It’s a Small World, it began to sprinkle on us, and I said “this is the first time it has rained in our two trips to Disney.”

When we walked out fifteen minutes later, the skies exploded. We were leaving at 7:00 the next morning, and we couldn’t afford to be trapped in the park. So instead of finding cover, we made a run for it. But that’s a long run, and it was a hard rain. Despite the downpour, the evening’s fireworks went off as scheduled. While we ran, skyrockets burst over Cinderella’s castle through the deluge. In places the water was ankle-deep. After a while, you can’t get any wetter, and there’s no use in fighting it. So we stopped, looked back at the fire and rain, and I realized that we weren’t likely ever to replicate the experience. With us both soaked to the bone, I picked my girl up and pointed to the castle.

“Take a look, babe. You’ll remember this forever.”

Mr. President

2009-06-07T22:36:00.001-05:00

This has been a Change Year. A time of Historic Firsts and Cracked Ceilings. A time of Audacity and Hope. A time when things like race and gender are no impediment to status and power.

And so it is with a sense of pride that I report that a man has broken the feminine stranglehold to become president of my kids’ elementary school PTA. And it is with a touch of despair that I report that this man is me.

How could this happen? When the previous president, a longtime friend, pressed me to succeed her, I said “if nominated I will not run,” but I neglected to add “if elected I will not serve.” And after failing to lift a finger in support of my candidacy, I somehow managed to win in a landslide. I knew I was unopposed, but still I expected better of the voters.

And so now I’m on the job, making budgets, learning the intricacies of yearbooks and science fairs, and preparing to lead a group of go-getting volunteers. Most will be supportive, but some may blanch at my bloodless management style, as spending gets slashed in this uncertain economic time. If you’ve ever wondered why women are called the fair sex, just come to one of my meetings, where “that’s not fair” will be uttered more than any three-word phrase, save for “we elected him?”

Like my predecessors, I have children. But unlike them, I have not borne children. My kids have caused me grief, but they have not caused me pain. Now I have 550 kids, and it’s causing me panic. I know I don’t stand in loco parentis, but still it’s making me parentally loco. I don’t have the motherly instinct to keep my brood close at all times. I have a hard enough time with two kids. How am I going to handle hundreds through school assemblies and variety shows and field trips? In the business world, if I keep 99.5% of my inventory from spoiling, I’m a success. At PTA, if I lose two or three kids, I think people are going to notice.

When fear gets the best of me, I lean on my Y chromosome like a metronome, and try to keep it steady. I think of the kids that we have – and they’re great kids – some of whom have real needs, both social and academic. And I look at the inscription that my friend Kelly, the immediate past president, wrote in a book she gave me. Her words reflect on twenty years of friendship and latch on to the idealistic streak that still lies within. Boiled down to their essence, they say “do good, and you will do well.” I shall do my best.

In truth, I suspect I don’t fear what the job requires of me as much as what it says about me. It is the last, biggest, brightest sign that my childhood days and rock and roll ways are behind me. Somehow I doubt, even in his forties, that Johnny Rotten sat in the principal’s office and devised strategies to boost test scores. And perhaps I have forfeited my rock and roll bona fides by taking this gig. But I still share something with all the best rock and rollers: We’re just doing it for the kids.

Whoah, Juliet!

2009-05-04T15:55:00.003-05:00

Nick Hornby's next novel, Juliet, Naked, comes out in September. Last week, on his blog, Hornby attempted to give readers a world premiere of the cover, but his effort at posting the image failed, and we just got to see a tiny red x. Being an internet expert, I took matters into my own hands and did a Google image search. Suffice it to say that when you put the words "Juliet, Naked" into Google, Hornby's book is not what is retrieved. Yeow.

The Truth is Out There (Somewhere)

2009-04-17T17:35:00.001-05:00

On Sunday, while driving from St. Louis to Kansas City, I did something I had never done before. I listened to a golf tournament on radio. Toward the end of Augusta’s front nine, a broadcaster stationed at the tee described Tiger’s and Phil’s swings, and tracked balls until they vanished, while a colleague at the green located the incoming orbs and picked up the call, two sides to the same story. One saw a ball well-struck, the other saw a shot well-made. One saw the effort, the other saw the result. Neither saw the full story.

The previous night, I was flipping channels and stumbled upon the finals of the NCAA hockey tournament, just in time to see Miami (Ohio) take a 3-1 lead over Boston University with about five minutes left in the third period. I don’t know a thing about college hockey, but I soon learned that I was witnessing a huge upset, with Miami one of the lowest-seeded teams in the field, and BU standing as the nation’s top-ranked squad. Cameras scanned Miami’s bench, where players bubbled with enthusiasm and anticipation, and their baby faced coach pensively chewed his lip. History was happening. The Terriers pulled their goalie with three and half minutes left, hoping to spark an improbable comeback. And it continued to look improbable until just 59.5 seconds remained, when one of BU’s forwards flipped a blind shot backwards and the puck slipped through the keyhole between the goalie’s arm and chest. At the next faceoff, BU’s odds remained long, but with less than twenty seconds left, a deft move led to a touch pass and then to a puck being buried in the net. On to overtime, where a screened goaltender and a tricky bounce gave Boston University a sudden-death title. I was amazed, Miami’s players were shattered, and the Terriers were disbelieving and euphoric. What happened? Depends on who you ask.

It made me think of The Night of the Gun, the harrowing and brilliant memoir that currently has me in its grip. David Carr, a world-class junkie turned top-flight journalist, details two decades of darkness, but instead of relying solely on the cocaine haze of his own memory, he interviews others who were there – girlfriends, dealers, buddies, users, co-workers – and finds that truth is elusive. Memory can be like a cocoon, reshaped by our minds to preserve our sense of self against the worst of our own nature. For years, Carr swore that he never pointed a pistol at a friend because he had a lifelong aversion to guns and never would have owned one. When, in his reporting, he discovered that he did have a gun, he began to doubt all that he thought he knew.

I saw the elusiveness of truth when I practiced law. During investigations, I would hear various versions of stories, all honestly told, that could not possibly have been true, or at least not wholly true. Some witnesses stood at the tee box, some at the green.

Truth was never more elusive than in one of my first cases out of law school. A man with mental retardation sat in prison, convicted of the ghastly murder of an elderly woman. The police said he did it, and at one desperate moment, he even agreed, but almost all of the facts said otherwise. Later, a drifter serving time for another crime claimed that he had killed the woman with the help of a friend. The facts supporting the tale of the lifelong criminal were ambiguous, and the alleged accomplice disappeared into the shadows. My client eventually was released. No one else was ever arrested. Who killed that elderly woman? As far as the law is concerned, no one. That’s one truth that’s hard to fathom.

Bonus Outrage

2009-03-16T15:00:00.002-05:00

I was in a McDonald’s earlier today with my kids, and a silent TV was tuned to Fox News. I wasn’t paying it any real attention – there was a talking head in studio and two scrolls going across the bottom of the screen, plus three images cascading down the right side. As I glanced up, I saw an angry mob shouting and shaking fists under a headline that said “Bonus Outrage,” and I imagined for a moment that in addition to their normal dose of outrage, the folks at Fox were giving us a little extra for free. Then I noticed that the “Bonus Outrage” was paired with an “AIG” graphic just above as part of a story on executive compensation, rather than reaction to a Pakistani bombing just below. What I briefly mistook as a breakthrough for honesty in journalism was no more than my inability to process the many images on the screen.

My Talk with A.C. Newman

2009-03-10T18:48:00.003-05:00

A.C. Newman is one of the great songwriters working today. As the leader of The New Pornographers, and on two solo albums, he has produced dozens of power pop gems chock-full of melodies, harmonies and epiphanies. I recently interviewed him for The Providence Phoenix. Read the results here. In a few weeks, I'll post a much longer transcript of our talk.

Facing the Past

2009-03-03T13:56:00.003-06:00

With its monumental acclaim (Time ranks it among the 100 best novels since 1923) and forthcoming film adaptation (out Friday), I recently decided it was time to read Watchmen, a long-form comic book that puts a modern twist on the superhero stories I loved as a kid. In so doing, I discovered that one of the protagonists is a scientist who was disintegrated in a nuclear mishap, only to be reconstituted into a god-like figure who lives outside of conventional time, able to experience the past, present and future simultaneously. And by that, of course, I mean that Dr. Manhattan uses Facebook.

I jumped on the Facebook bandwagon a few months back, and I’ve been in a vortex of temporal disorientation since. One minute, it’s 1976 and a long-lost friend is reminding me of the day in second grade when we were sent to see the principal, who, as cruel fate would have it, was also her father. The next, it’s 1990, and I’m having a virtual beer with folks I haven’t seen since college, only to be interrupted by my wife, in 2009 and in the next room, mocking me for playing this adult version of Webkinz.

For a guy who moved around as a kid, the effect is particularly discombobulating. Until age 13, I lived in a small town in central Illinois, somewhere idealized in memory as the perfect place to grow up. Except that, in my mind, none of those people ever did grow up. They’re frozen in early adolescence, not having changed since that day in 1981 when we packed up our lives and moved a thousand miles away. But now it appears that they have their own adolescents. One note from history’s dark recesses asked if I was the guy from Mrs. Gaskill’s fifth grade class, which, I suppose, among other things, I am. And it struck me that, for them, the last 28 years of my life never happened. I’m a kid on a bike, teeth too big for his face, who is maybe a little too excited by the latest Queen album. Maybe things haven’t changed all that much.

The next two years on Facebook are like the next two years of my life, a void. Brief stops in a tiny town in Nebraska and a considerably larger one in Kentucky yielded nothing more permanent than a few marks on report cards. It’s almost like those years never happened, and to date, no one on Facebook has popped up to suggest that they did.

Then comes the tricky part. Another cross-country move to a small Missouri town where I would spend my last three years of high school. I was a walking contradiction then, fearful and brash, compliant and defiant. I tried to fit in a place that wasn’t my home, but I walked around with a chip on my shoulder. It’s hard for me to make sense of it – how do you make sense of a 16-year-old mind? And it’s not like I was a complete outcast – I had friends, did well in school – but I have this lingering sense that I spent too much time masking insecurity with contrarian arrogance. I’m sure that I probably remember my behavior as worse than it was, but I’m also sure that reasonable minds would differ. In short, I wasn’t always as good a guy as I should have been, and I’ve regretted that sporadically since, though the feeling waned over time.

That is until I started bumping into old classmates on the internet. When I went off to college, I left high school behind, and all those relationships withered. Now they’re coming back to life, at least a little, and it’s nice. A little weird, but mostly good. Reconnecting with people from the past has a way of putting the past in its place. It’s a subtle form of apology for offenses I can barely remember.

Still, it all adds to the way Facebook compresses the times of my life. In the span of a day, I revisit an idealized relationship from 1978, a complicated one from 1985, and the full-on joy of my collegiate years, and it makes me wonder: Which guy am I? All of them, I suppose. But even as I write down the thought, I’m shocked back to now, by a convalescing five-year-old who is geeked up on orapred and shouting rapid-fire questions and demands, showing me all the shapes a pretzel makes as it’s devoured a little at a time, fracturing every thought, and sabotaging every effort to finish this entry. There's no time like the present.

The reports of my demise . . .

2009-02-19T10:49:00.002-06:00

To those who are stumbling on to this page by Googling "Michael Atchison dies," I am pleased to report that I remain among the living. But I am saddened to learn that a man with whom I shared a name, and who appears to have been much beloved, has shuffled off this mortal coil.

Rest in peace, Michael Atchison.

Same as it Ever Was

2009-01-26T18:00:00.004-06:00

(originally published in The Providence Phoenix, November 28, 2008)

David Byrne is back – back working with Brian Eno, back scoring film, and back where it all began

Thirty-four years after forming the legendary band Talking Heads with fellow Rhode Island School of Design students Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz, David Byrne returns to the area on Sunday, November 30, at New Bedford’s Zeiterion Theatre, to perform The Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno. Inspired by the duo’s 2008 release Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the concert also features music from four previous landmark collaborations, including three Talking Heads albums produced by Eno between 1978 and 1980, and 1981’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an aural collage of found sounds, stacked rhythms and samples that blurred the line between popular and experimental music.

After not working together for a quarter century, Eno recently provided Byrne with some unfinished instrumental tracks and asked him to complete them. The result is Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, a lush song cycle that only hints at the duo’s previous work. Byrne has been playing those songs to enthusiastic audiences this fall.

In 1986, Time magazine put Byrne on the cover and dubbed him “Rock’s Renaissance Man.” The tag still sticks. In addition to the tour and the collaboration with Eno, Byrne recently released his score for the second season of the HBO series Big Love, and his whimsically-designed bike racks (shaped like dogs, dollar signs, and high-heeled pumps) have sprung up all over New York City. I recently talked to Mr. Byrne by phone.

Michael Atchison: You collaborated on four albums with Brian Eno between 1978 and 1981, but then you didn’t work together for more than 25 years. Did you find it hard to get back into sync with one another?

David Byrne: It was very easy. I think that the time and the distance between us – the fact that we worked transatlantic – I think all of that helped, too. In the time that’s passed, both of us have done a lot, and we both have lots of projects going simultaneously, so the fact that we could still keep our other projects while working on this, and keep our own schedules, made it really easy for us. Whether we were still in sync? We kind of put our toes in the water slowly at first. When we were working on the Bush of Ghosts re-release [in 2005], we had a lot more social contact, coordinating the website and that sort of thing. We found that that went pretty smoothly. So that was a good start.

MA: You mentioned working transatlantically. For the most part he was in the UK working up tracks that he would send to you, and you would do your own thing on top of them in New York.

DB: Yes, although, to be honest he didn’t work on the tracks that much. These were mostly tracks that he already had, and he just wasn’t happy with how he had tried to finish them, or he hadn’t even tried to finish them.

MA: So he sort of accidentally walked into a Byrne and Eno album.

DB: Yeah, I remember one time we were there, he started playing me some of the stuff that he had, and somehow the conversation came around to “if you want me to try to help you and write words and melodies on top . . . .” By the time we did the Bush of Ghosts thing, we were kind of hanging out more, we worked together a little bit more, we found out that we do still get along, we enjoy one another’s company, and we see eye-to-eye on most of the kinds of the aesthetic stuff on records and packaging. It wasn’t that much of a big step to say “you have some tracks that you don’t know how to finish. I might be the guy to help you finish those.”

MA: You both have such strong points of view that, from the outside, it seems like it might be hard to get your ideas to coexist peacefully, but you seem to have a natural sympathy as collaborators.

DB: I really respect the stuff that he does. I’m a fan. That really helps a lot. You kind of give someone the benefit of the doubt. If you don’t like something one hundred percent right away, you cut them a little bit of slack, and you go “he’s going somewhere with this. I’m not sure I see it yet, but I’ve got to let him take it where he sees it going.” I think Brian probably feels the same way about me. That makes it really easy, and I think the artificial separation that we made, where I tried to stay on my side of the fence and just do words and vocal melodies, and I didn’t go like “oh, I’m going to overdub a whole bunch of guitars on here.” Occasionally, I couldn’t help myself, and I’d add something somewhere, but for the most part, I really stayed on my side of the fence. And he did, too. Occasionally, he’d give me a track and it would have the remnants of some vocal attempt that he’d begun but didn’t finish. So sometimes I would ignore that, and sometimes I thought that if there was something worth following up, I’d take a line or I’d take part of his melody and take it further. But for the most part, he never came back to me and said “here’s a different vocal melody, or here’s some other words for this.” He stayed on his side of the fence. That really helped, too. We didn’t get in each other’s business that way.

MA: Your previous collaborations featured lots of dense layers of rhythm, and in places, a real palpable sense of darkness. You could feel the walls closing in. The new album sounds so different. There are wide open spaces. It takes off in completely different directions.

DB: I agree, except for a couple of songs, like “Poor Boy” and “I Feel My Stuff” are reminiscent of the stuff we’ve done in a way. I can see the connections between some of the Talking Heads tracks and the Bush of Ghosts stuff that we did before.

MA: I was going to note that “I Feel My Stuff” would fit right in on Bush of Ghosts. Play it back-to-back with the song “Regiment” from that album, and the connection is obvious. But on so much of the rest of the new album, your voice opens up, it gets big and expansive. And instead of the focus being as heavily on rhythm as it was on those previous records, it’s really lush and melodic.

DB: That’s kind of what I heard in a lot of Brian’s tracks. I sat with them for a long time, because they were so different, and I thought “how do I connect to this?” So I sat with it for a long time before I wrote back to him and said “I’m kind of hearing a spiritual, gospel, open kind of thing happening, that’s almost kind of some uplifting gospel-folk approach, as opposed to the dark, funky approach.” And he said “OK, show me. What exactly do you mean by that?”

MA: At first, the album was available only as a download through your website, and it’s now being released in physical form. You’ve been on a big label, you’ve even run your own label, but now we’re in this world where you don’t necessarily need a label. You can even make a recording without spending a dime on manufacturing or packaging. As an artist, there must be benefits to having such full control, but are you comfortable with this model? And is this the new model?

DB: I’m comfortable with it. In a way, it’s experimental. There are certain things we’re figuring out as we go. By nature, we’re not going to sell as much as the U2 or Coldplay records that Brian works on. So he’s not going to get that kind of income.

MA: But at the same time, you don’t have to share it with as many people.

DB: That’s true. So you can sell a lot less and pay your rent. So in a certain way, that model, for us, seems to be working. We’re still trying to figure out things as we go along. There have been no ads. Usually, if there’s a record company, there are ads in the magazines or newspapers. There’s been nothing.

MA: It’s been sort of a viral internet campaign, where the first single was posted, and every web magazine or blog picked it up, and then people start talking about it to their friends and on message boards.

DB: We’re lucky. That didn’t cost us a cent. I mean it cost us to set up our own little marketing thing and hire some marketing people and set up the website and credit card accounts and all that kind of stuff. And that cost a considerable amount of money, more than a starting-out band could afford. That’s really important, because a lot of starting-out bands are thinking “I could do this.” You need a little bit of money to do this. And we have the advantage of having some money in our pockets to fund that, and we have the names, so that if we say that we did a record together, people are automatically going to be curious. We knew that we’d get some attention. So we have a little bit of an advantage that allowed us to think that we weren’t taking too much of a risk. It’s a little bit unfair that way, but that’s the way things are right now with everything kind of up in the air. Everyone is kind of figuring out, well, this kind of approach will work for this project, but it’s not going to work for this project. Everything’s still up in the air. But the major thing is, I think, especially with being able to sell things online yourself, or dealing directly with iTunes, Amazon and all that kind of stuff, it’s pretty hard after you’ve done that to go back to a record company – “Wait a minute. You’re going to take seventy-five percent of everything? For what? What are you doing for that?”

MA: Everything That Happens isn’t the only album you’ve released this year. You also scored the second season of the HBO series Big Love, and that music has been released as Big Love: Hymnal. It’s nothing like the music most people associate you with.

DB: Yeah, the guy at the New York Times thought there was a connection. He thought that they both had kind of vaguely spiritual, gospelly kinds of harmonies.

MA: My guess is that if he had been given the disc without your name on it, he wouldn’t have made the connection.

DB: [laughs] That’s probably true. Maybe he was looking for an angle for his story.

MA: You have frequently created music that has been used as part of some broader project, like The Catherine Wheel [a Twyla Tharp dance production] or True Stories [Byrne’s own film]. What do you enjoy about that process?

DB: When it works, with something that has a visual element, be it dance or TV show or movie, it’s one of those things where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The music benefits in a way that it couldn’t if you just had it by itself. You get this whole mood and connection and story, movement, space. All this stuff can really bring the music to a different level for a listener when it works. It doesn’t always work. That’s the temptation. You get all that to work, and it’s really great. And you get thrown all these little challenges. There’s the puzzle-solving aspect of scoring that’s kind of fun. Someone else is telling you “I need it to be this long, and to have this mood, and for something to happen here.”

MA: I want to talk about the tour, but first I should note that you’ve recently become New York City’s most prominent designer of bicycle racks.

DB: [laughs] Yeah, okay.

MA: I’ve seen them, and I’m sure it’s an idea that has made a lot of people slap their heads, like “of course. Why couldn’t you make those things both functional and whimsical?” What has the reaction been?

DB: It’s been like that, people going “oh, this is such a great thing for you to do.” And there’s a bunch of hidden bicycle advocates all over the city who have come out of the woodwork. The sad part is that mine are sort of “one of” things because of the complicated shapes that some of them are, and they’re for specific neighborhoods. They’re kind of “one of” and they’re expensive to make. They don’t solve the specific problem of having enough bike racks in enough places in the city.

MA: They work as pieces of art.

DB: Yeah, and they also do what you said. They kind of say, look, this doesn’t have to be boring and serious. It can still be functional and be fun and light, and it can say the superstructure of the city doesn’t have to be boring. It can reflect the excitement and wackiness and unexpectedness of life in this city. Because it’s utilitarian doesn’t mean it has to be boring. It was kind of a way of saying that, too. Civic stuff doesn’t have to put you to sleep.

MA: OK, the tour. One question everyone asks: Why couldn’t Brian Eno be coaxed out on the road?

DB: I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.

MA: He’s sort of notoriously reticent.

DB: Yeah, I think he does actually go and perform in very, very out of the way places like Dubai or Moscow or someplace like that where no one is going to see him. I’ve heard that he’s stage shy, but I also can see all the reasons. He can make a lot more money working with U2 or Coldplay [whose most recent album Eno produced], and put a lot less effort in. It’s a lot of work going on the road. And there’s not going to be much to see. You’re going to see a bald guy sitting behind some gear, twiddling knobs and shit. That’s about it.

MA: I saw the show a few weeks back. I noted before how different the new album sounds than your previous collaborations, and you play most of the new songs in the show. Still, they seem to fit perfectly with songs that are more than twenty-five years old now. Was it hard to make it so seamless?

DB: No. I’m lucky I have quite a backlog of material to draw from. I could kind of rewrite my own history every time I go out, and say “if I do this song and this song and this song, it’s gonna fit with the current stuff.” And if I do “The Great Curve” or some of these other songs, the singers that I have to do the new stuff, they’re going to sound incredible doing the old stuff. To have a big vocal kind of choir doing the older stuff, that’s going to tie it all together.

MA: Despite the fact that many of the songs in the set come from deep in your past, the show doesn’t seem nostalgic in the least. The songs are so vibrant. What’s it like for you to revisit an early stage of your career in such depth?

DB: It’s been fun because I haven’t done it in a while. I’ve done some of those songs. There’s some that I’ve done quite often on tour, but there are other ones that I haven’t done for thirty years. So it’s kind of fun, with this band, to pull them out, and go “wow, that’s a pretty great song or a wacky song” and see what you have.

MA: The audience is clearly hungry for those songs. You play “Crosseyed and Painless” or “Houses in Motion,” and the place explodes, and you seemed genuinely gratified on stage by the response.

DB: Uh-huh.

MA: It’s good to be loved I suppose.

DB: [laughs] Yes, it’s a pretty nice response.

MA: I don’t want to give too much away for people who haven’t seen the show, but it features dancers, and some of the choreography includes you. The staging is simple, but the production is inventive. I think that’s a recurring theme for you, perhaps most famously presented in [the film] Stop Making Sense – that is, the ability to get big impact out of simple lighting or movement.

DB: Where’s the question there?

MA: I guess what I’m getting at is that there’s an immense amount of work put into it, and I don’t think the audience realizes it until you’re about halfway into the show, and you see how all these things fit together without explosions or fire or effects. I assume that there were some choreographers involved in putting it together.

DB: Yes, three different ones. That was a relief that that all worked together. That was a big relief. I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and then bringing in the choreographers, auditioning the dancers, and we spent a really solid month creating and rehearsing that stuff before putting it in front of any audience. I thought this is either going to fall flat on its face and people are going to say “What the fuck? This is the most pretentious piece of bullshit I’ve ever seen,” or they’re going to love it. And thank God, for the most part everyone seems to like it.

MA: I think it takes them a song or two to adjust, to kind of figure out what they’re seeing.

DB: Yeah, yeah, I can sense that – that the first time the dancers come out, they go “oh, yeah, that was kind of cool, but is that it? Is that what we’re gonna see?” And then it takes at least one or two more songs before people go “oh, it’s gonna be slightly different all the time, they’re gonna do different kinds of things,” and then they go “ohhhhh,” and you can kind of sense that moment where the audience goes “this is what we’re gonna get.”

MA: You’ll be playing in New Bedford, Massachusetts on November 30, just outside of Providence. People normally associate you with New York of course, but folks in and around Providence have a provincial feeling about you. Enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design was an unconventional path to rock and roll immortality. Does it feel at all different to go to a place you’re connected to so deeply in your past?

DB: I’m aware that there’s that perception that I have that connection there, and I did live there for a couple of years at least. I kind of know the town from that time, and it’s changed a lot. The town has opened up a lot. It was a really weird place then. The river was pretty much completely paved over. There were a couple of little spots in the concrete where you could look, little slots, and go “there’s the river down there. That’s the river. That’s the reason for this town’s existence. There it is, down there.” Now they’ve opened it up. Lots of cities are having hard times, but at least they’re trying.

MA: I’ve saved this question for last, but I am compelled to ask. It is deeply rooted in local lore that the forearm-chopping movement immortalized in the “Once in a Lifetime” video is, in fact, a nod to your days working in a Providence wiener joint.

DB: [laughs] Well, I did work in a wiener joint, but if you look at the video, the source of the movement is right there in the video. It’s from Yoyogi Park in Tokyo. They had all these street dancers – they still have street dancers – in the park, and I videotaped some of them. And there’s a whole group that does kind of rockabilly stuff, and there’s other ones that do this kind of weird, spacey stuff, and that’s what I gravitated to. And some of them were doing that movement and other movements, and I just thought “where the hell did that come from? What is that? That’s completely unrelated to any kind of movement that I’ve seen before.” But yeah, I did work in a hot dog place where you’d put hot dogs up your arm. You’d kind of extend your arm and stack, like, eight hot dogs up. And then drip hot chili sauce all over them. Pretty disgusting.

The Songs of Byrne and Eno

The David Byrne concert on November 30 at Zeiterion Theatre in New Bedford will feature songs from five collaborations with Brian Eno, a musician and producer who has been at the forefront of delivering experimental, electronic, ambient and African music to the masses since the early 1970s, when he was a founding member of the band Roxy Music.

Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978). The duo’s first encounter came when Eno produced Talking Heads’ second album. While largely an extension of the jittery geek-chic anthems from the band’s debut, it also features a simmering, funky cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” hinting at things to come.

Talking Heads, Fear of Music (1979). Here’s where it all changes. Though much of the album features muscular takes on songs that could have fit on the previous recordings (“Cities,” “Memories Can’t Wait”), it also introduces elements that give the band new direction. The African polyrhythms of the album-opening “I Zimbra” provide the underpinning of a new sound, and the mantra of “Life During Wartime” – “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around” – became the band’s first great chant-along chorus.

Talking Heads, Remain in Light (1980). A masterpiece in a catalog of great albums, Remain in Light takes elements introduced on Fear of Music and forges them into a brooding, bracing, hypnotic tour de force, full of dense rhythms and impressionistic, paranoid lyrics. “Once in a Lifetime” became one of the band’s signature songs, and the video, featuring Byrne at his absolute twitchiest, established Talking Heads as leaders of the new visual age.

Brian Eno and David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). Deconstructing ideas explored on Remain in Light, and reassembling them in disorienting and disquieting ways, Bush of Ghosts manages to coalesce into a funky, fascinating collage of samples, stray sounds, and disembodied voices that served as a template for later works by artists like Beck, the Beastie Boys and Moby.

David Byrne and Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008). The duo’s most recent collaboration stands as a sharp departure from previous work. While some knotty layers of rhythm remain, the album is marked by lush melodies and Byrne’s plaintive croon. Still, there are wry nods to the past, like in “Strange Overtones,” the album’s first single, where Byrne sings “this groove is out of fashion/these beats are twenty years old.”

Towns On the Edge of Darkness

2009-01-16T09:26:00.003-06:00

(originally published in The Providence Phoenix, July 11, 2008)

The Hold Steady explore the shadows on their tentative and terrific fourth album.

The Hold Steady, Stay Positive (Vagrant Records)

What do you do on the mornings after the massive nights, when exhilaration turns to exhaustion, when faith gives way to doubt, when you’re faced with burning out or growing up? Indie rock heroes The Hold Steady provide the answer in the title to their fourth (sensational) album. You gotta Stay Positive.

Craig Finn, the band’s principal songwriter, crafts hard-rocking novellas full of poets, pushers, users, barflies and strangely uninhibited Catholic girls, with words that fly like bullets in the rat-tat-tat of his Gatling gun delivery. From the moment Youtube captured him erupting into joyful spasms while singing “Rosalita” next to The Boss himself, Finn’s reputation as Bruce Springsteen’s spiritual heir was cemented. And though the comparisons aren’t entirely apt, they’re hard to ignore, right down to the conceptual and aesthetic arc of The Hold Steady’s recorded output. After two albums of blazing songs and wild wordplay earned critical praise but minimal sales, the third disc changed the game by streamlining the sound and syllables on anthems brimming with confidence and hope. Sound familiar? And if 2006’s Boys and Girls in America was The Hold Steady’s Born to Run, Stay Positive is Darkness on the Edge of Town, where the cocksure auteur grows older and less certain of his place in the world, questioning himself and his beliefs like never before. The echoes are evident from the opening track, “Constructive Summer,” where friends in a dead-end town drink on top of water towers and dare to dream of something better. Keep pushin’ till these badlands start treating us good.

But dreams come with eyes wide open on an album of hard truths and harsh consequences. From the beginning, The Hold Steady’s songs have swelled with tales of excess, but on Stay Positive, the stories are less celebratory, more cautionary. Instead of participating in parties in Finn’s native Minneapolis, we fan out across the country to observe people in the shadowy margins of small towns, facing frailty, fate and faith.

Religion has always been a linchpin of The Hold Steady’s songs, with Catholic kids rebelling against social constraints. On Stay Positive, though, faith is personal, complicated and even compromised, like in “Yeah Sapphire,” where Finn asks “if I cross myself when I come would you maybe receive me,” leaping from sacred to profane in a jaw-dropping instant. But Finn has never wrestled with religion more reverently than on the melodically elegant and lyrically bruising “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” one of the band’s most arresting songs yet. When drugs ravage the girl he wants but can’t have, the narrator confesses his doubt directly to God, before finally surrendering. “I know it’s unlikely she’ll ever be mine, so I mostly just pray she don’t die,” he says, belief hanging by a thread.

When that thread snaps, Finn finds faith in rock and roll. “Our psalms are sing-along songs,” he declares in the album’s very first verse, and the belief in those sacred texts is reaffirmed seven tracks later when he shouts “the sing-along songs will be our scriptures.” Music also serves as a proxy for formal education. “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer/I think he might have been our only decent teacher,” Finn sings in a line that recalls Springsteen’s “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.”

But while Finn walks along E Street, his right hand, guitarist Tad Kubler, wields the hammer of the gods. Led Zeppelin has long been implicit in The Hold Steady’s music, and Finn even name-checks a handful of the band’s tunes on “Joke About Jamaica.” But it’s Kubler who brings the influence front-and-center on Stay Positive, unleashing titanic riffs, like on “Navy Sheets,” which marries Houses of the Holy-style thunder with a keyboard straight out of the Cars’ playbook. “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” though, is where Kubler glows hottest and channels Jimmy Page to the fullest. As the song begins, Kubler’s electric twelve-string chimes, setting the mournful tone. But the solo is where he takes true flight. Tad lies in wait while Finn nails the rock bottom of addiction – “She says that she’s sick but she won’t get specific/The sutures and bruises are none of my business/This guy from the north side comes down to visit/His visits they only take five or six minutes.” And before Finn’s voice can tail off, Kubler begins to soar in an elegy that’s logical, lyrical, spiritual and mystical, every bit as resonant as Finn’s devastating words.

Producer John Agnello returns for the second straight album, and the band – toughened and tightened by relentless touring - sticks close to the bar band fury of Boys and Girls in America, with horns and strings adding punch and texture. But twice the sound strays in ways that are as disquieting as Finn’s darker moods. On “One for the Cutters,” a harpsichord, baroque and eerie, cuts through the twin guitar clatter to frame the tale of a girl who comes home from college with a crank habit, a far-away stare, and a penchant for partying in the woods with townies. And on the droning “Both Crosses,” a banjo, vibraphone and theremin lend to the gauzy haze of religious and sexual reverie, where visions of crucifixions mesh with the merging of bodies, and “transverberation” means more than the piercing of hearts.

As dark as it can be, though, the record has moments of sparkling light, like “Sequestered in Memphis,” the scorching and comic first single, anchored by Bobby Drake’s stalwart drumming, where a credulous bar-hopping business traveler hooks up with the wrong woman, and winds up on the wrong side of the law. But more than tragedy, comedy, or even spiritual longing, the album’s lingering note is hope.

If ever a song epitomized The Hold Steady, it’s the full-throttle title track, an autobiographical anthem propelled by Kubler’s steady riffing and Franz Nicolay’s whiplash organ. A wet kiss to the band’s fiercely devoted fans, it’s relentlessly self-referential, a Where’s Waldo of lyrics from all three previous albums, and a tip of the hat to those who have supported them along the way: “We couldn’t have even done this if it wasn’t for you!” But the song is also a call to – and an acceptance of – responsibility. Finn knows what it is for a scene to disintegrate in a cloud of drugs and dissension, and he implores himself and the fans not to let that happen, urging everyone on in his own fervently optimistic fashion: “Whoah-hoah-hoah! Whoah-hoah-hoah! We gotta stay positive!”

Despite Finn’s linguistic brilliance, nothing evokes The Hold Steady’s essence more than the wordless choruses that punctuate “Stay Positive” and so many of the band’s sing-along songs. “Whoah-hoah-hoah” is ripe with meaning in the band’s hands, a joyful and communal cathartic shout. So it’s no surprise that the band returns to the sing-along scripture on “Slapped Actress,” the album’s closing song. It begins with the band locked in to a locomotive groove, revisiting Ybor City, Florida, site of some near-fatal parties. But they return home alive, and take control of their fate with a cinematic sweep. “We’re the directors,” Finn sings, “our hands will hold steady/I’ll be John Cassavetes/Let me know when you’re ready.” Then, as the song fades, the hope-filled chorus rises – “Whoah-hoah! Whoah-hoah-hoah-hoah! Whoah-hoah-hoah-hoah-hoah!” – capping Stay Positive and an epic four-album run that secures The Hold Steady’s spot in the pantheon of great American bands.

Whoah-hoah-hoah, indeed.

Real Conversation with a Five Year Old

2009-01-05T14:30:00.000-06:00

“Dad, why are they called the Cleveland Browns?”

“Because they were named after their first coach and his name was Paul Brown.”

“Did he die?”

“Yes, a very long time ago. Now his son Mike runs the Cincinnati Bengals.”

“I’m glad he didn’t die.”

“Sure, me too.”

“It’s sad when people die.”

“Yes it is.”

“Like Elvis.”

“Uh huh.”

“And Lindsay Lohan.”

The Sporting Life

2008-12-29T08:43:00.000-06:00

I did not want this life for him.

I did not want it because I know it will lead to episodic emotional pain and periodic social conflict. It will cause him to turn inwards at times, to grow angry and detached. There will be some joy, certainly, but mostly it will be very, very hard. But he’s my son and I love him and I will support him, because, ultimately, it’s his choice. Though I shouldn’t even call it a choice. It’s clear that this is who he is, something that was there at birth.

Evan is a sports fan.

He’s just shy of his fifth birthday, but not shy about his love of games. He has always been reticent around strangers, even refusing to sit on Santa’s lap. But recently he rushed to St. Nick’s side to beg for a Kansas City Chiefs locker and a Green Bay Packers uniform. He sits in front of the computer, calls up the Worldwide Leader, and reads scores from last night’s college hoops games and last week’s NFL contests. He asks, once a week, when baseball will start, and is always a little crushed when I say not until April.

A normal kid his age asks hundreds of questions a day. But his questions aren’t normal. Dad, what is Arkansas-Pine Bluff’s mascot? I don’t know. Who is number 20 on Syracuse? I don’t know. Why are Boise State, Western Michigan and Denver all called the Broncos? Buddy, I know I’m failing you as a father, but I really don’t know.

Every morning, he asks who plays today? and he doesn’t mean who plays on Monday Night Football or on TNT’s NBA Thursday Night. He means who plays all the games in all the sports today? Sometimes, though, the question is more about predation than information, an opportunity to give the old man the needle. On the Saturday before Christmas, he asked what college football games were on TV. I went to the newspaper and told him that Wake Forest would play Army in the Congressional Bowl. No, dad, it’s Navy. No, I reply, it says right here it’s Army. No, dad, The Man – he means ESPN’s disembodied voice – said “Wake Forest battles Navy.” Sure enough, Wake Forest did battle Navy, proving Evan to be more reliable than the Kansas City Star, and prompting him to repeat his three favorite words all day long: You were wrong.

Most of all, the boy likes collecting teams, and he’s ecumenical in his approach. We live in Kansas City, Missouri, the front line of a fierce collegiate rivalry, and our family’s allegiance is printed clearly on several diplomas: The University of Missouri. But to appease a preschool buddy of dubious extraction, my boy recently acquired a little toy Jayhawk, and proclaimed Kansas his second-favorite team (imagine Romeo proclaiming Tybalt his second-favorite Capulet). He has also declared his allegiance to Boston College despite having never been to Boston. Or to college.

As much as the games, he loves the names. He loves the Crimson Tide and the Golden Hurricane, the Badgers and the Beavers, the Trojans and the Spartans, the Bulldogs and Horned Frogs. The discovery of each new team sparks the same two questions: What’s their mascot? and Does it eat people?

Evan is vexed when Tom Brady plays for the Michigan Wolverines on ESPN Classic, and I’m perplexed when he sits transfixed before PBA Bowling reruns on that same channel. He’s delighted when the San Jose Sharks (which eat people) play the Pittsburgh Penguins (which rarely do), and I’m excited when I discover that they’ve eliminated the two-line pass.

We have ourselves to blame. After Evan was born, we bought extra Missouri football season tickets, thinking it would be good family time. Evan’s sister Grace thinks it’s torture. Evan, though, thinks Faurot Field is the center of the universe. It was there, at age three, where he became a roster-mastering Rain Man. Who’s number 22? Tony Temple. Number 81? Danario Alexander. Number 1? Trick question. It’s Jimmy Jackson AND William Moore. He could go on, and he did.

That season, 2007, was the good stuff, the one free sample that starts you down a dark path of addiction. The 12-2 record, the Cotton Bowl victory, the number four ranking – he thinks that’s normal. But the boy doesn’t know the trouble I’ve seen. Perhaps if he’d been born in Boston, where championships rattle around like loose change, the fun and games would seem like fun and games. But here, fun and games are heartache and pain. We’ve endured Colorado’s fifth down, Nebraska’s kicked ball, and Tyus Edney’s 4.8 second drive. Ronald Reagan wasn’t just alive the last time our hometown baseball team made the playoffs. He was President.

But Evan doesn’t care, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that the safety is going to bite on the play fake. He doesn’t know that the second baseman is going to fail to cover first. He doesn’t know the point guard is going to dribble it off his foot. He just doesn’t know.

And because he doesn’t know, he has hope. And because he has hope, he wants to be fully immersed in this sporting life. And so he keeps on asking thousands of suffocating, mind-bending questions. What was the score when the Raiders played the Falcons? Who’s going to win when the Lakers play the Celtics? Why are Peyton Manning and Eli Manning brothers?

Still, of all the many maddening questions, one has yet to get old. Daddy, what is Noodle Dave’s team called?

Noodle Dave is the Fighting Irish, buddy. And, no, they don’t eat people.