USA Track & Field To Replace Livestrong?

I'm a former track guy.  I ran track during all four years of high school. I barely missed qualifying for the state meet during my sophomore year in the triple jump, but qualified in my last two years and was named all-state during my senior year.  I used to watch meets on television, and I always tuned in during the Olympics.

I was reading a recent copy of the Sports Business Journal and I noticed an article highlighting some soon-to-be released limited-edition shoes geared toward increasing revenue for USA Track & Field (USATF).  According to the article, the shoe will commemorate 30 years since USATF's initial organization.

There will be approximately 800 (500 men's and 300 women's) pair available online for $95, and USATF wants to sell them all.

The director of operations says they want to release one or two per year over the next couple of years n order to increase revenue.  Merchandise revenue has already expanded from about $30000 in 2002 to over $1 million in 2009, which is expected to double this year.  It is estimated that revenue should swell to $10 million by 2016.

I'm also a sneaker fiend.  Though I don't get to satisfy my thirst like I used to, I can at least admire the style and technology of a great pair of kicks.  These shoes seem to employ some pretty bright colors, which I'm not such a huge fan of, but the simple and classic styling
is pretty hot.

I'm sure these will be big sellers. This initiative could do wonders for American track and field athletes.  Bringing track and field into the mainstream and blending it with pop culture is sure to take some of the pressure off Lance Armstrong.  If he is discovered to have been cheating, Nike and the Livestrong campaign will undoubtedly part ways.

May Is Nearly Over. It Might Be Time To Panic.

Cardinals Baseball means different things to different people.  Some St. Louisans just want to be able to be seen at the stadium or at Hrabosky's Saloon.  These are your socialite fans. Going to a game is more of a social outing with red, white and navy blue coordinated outfits.  They don't care how Carp's pitching, how Yadi is hitting, or what the record is as long as there's a game to dress up for...

Some of us slightly rabid fans that simply want the Cardinals to win because Cardinals Baseball is an endearing part of your childhood, and you admire the history and prestige of the franchise, the abundance of great ball players that have graced this city, the skill it takes to play the game, and the bragging rights over every other so-called "baseball town" in America.  The way the game is played now is much different from the days of Ozzie Smith, Vince Coleman and Willie McGee (who deserves to have his #51 retired, by the way), and you've come to accept it.

Today's game is more about power, and less about speed and base-running prowess.  This shift is the reason that Matt Holliday was re-signed (and overpaid) for seven years and $120 million.  Let's look at this year's numbers for Holliday:

	G	AB	R	H	TB	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB		SO	SB		AVG
	45	172	25	48	76	13	0	5	18	14		30	3		.279

These numbers aren't totally rotten... if you don't make $17 million a year... with the St. Louis Cardinals.  I realize that these guys are human, with human tendencies and lives outside of baseball.  However, contracts of that size, from this franchise come with tremendous expectations.  One home run every nine games is not the production that this lineup requires for success.  But it's not all his fault.

We've all gotten used to Albert Pujols being Albert Pujols. His numbers don't stink either, but over the past 10 games, Phat Albert has 0 home runs and 0 RBIs in 34 at-bats.  He has been the picture of consistency over the past nine or 10 seasons, so he's allowed to slump a bit.  My concern is that there's an injury that he's hiding while playing through pain and discomfort.

We're about to reach June.  Most of the time, I don't panic about where our team is at this time of the season... most of the time.  This season is different.  Given the aforementioned Holliday contract, and the fact that we've got a starting pitcher going on the DL and the fact that Pujols's contract will be an issue at the season's end, and the fact that the team is under-performing concerns me.  In fact, if the Cardinals don't win the series this weekend against the Cubs, I'll be in full-blown panic.

My fear is that this team will fall far-short of its own goals and the expectations of its fans, and have to endure a bidding war for a possibly-injured, possibly-declining Pujols while over-paying for a possibly-declining Holliday.  


And lost in all of this mess is the fact that Mark McGuire has re-joined the organization in a coaching capacity. I'm not sure how good of a hitting coach he is, but he seems to be a good scapegoat at this point.


Regardless of who's at fault, or what needs to be fixed, or tweaked, or whatever, they'd better start winning.  Now.

A Spirituality Check

I have experienced an incredible run of divine blessings recently, and I feel like my spiritual relationship with the Almighty is growing exponentially each day.  In light of the blessings I've received, I have made (and am still making) a conscious effort to release ill will and residual grudges against those that have wronged me in the past. 

I called a friend to apologize for my role in a recent disagreement that left us not speaking for months. He didn't answer, so I left a message.  I'm not professing any new found holiness, just that I'm trying to walk the talk.  I hope that my sincere apology helps to heal a fractured friendship.  I felt good to make such an effort.  I decided to move down to the number two item on my list...

The Bible says that we should pray for our enemies, so I decided to take some time to speak to God about my worst sworn enemy.  Just as I'm sure there were people that prayed for Jack the Ripper, I would pray for the IRS.  Instead of simply asking to have my year-long issue resolved, I would ask for a fair and just decision from those responsible for evaluating every nook and cranny of my 2006 earnings.  I definitely wouldn't pray any harm upon them.

As I readied my words, I thought of the unambiguousness of The Good Book and how good it felt to be at such spiritual peace.  But I thought more... God's Word is unambiguous, but the IRS is quite ambiguous.  Hmmm... A government agency that's existence alone is unconstitutional.  So if I pray for an agency, its employees and the directives of said agency, would I then be praying against the Constitution? 

What a can of worms... By praying for the IRS and the binding amendments of the Constitution, wouldn't I be somehow praying for the demise of the IRS?  After all, I would also pray to be the last American to feel bullied and pillaged by Doug Shulman and the other thieves IRS staff.

(IRS Commissioner, Doug Shulman likes likes poetry, long walks and legal racketeering)

I felt conflicted.  I suppose I have more growing to do.  I clearly haven't healed of my negative feelings regarding the aftermath of being audited.  I am definitely in need of a lot more grace as well as some (more) patience.

X's and O's, Or Jons and Joes?

You all know that I'm a sports fan(atic).  Now that I am an intern at a sports talk station, it feels like my habit is being encouraged!  It's like giving an alcoholic a job at a brewery - I get to be around it, but I don't get to interact with it.

For the few hours I'm there, I get to listen to the personalities give their take on various issues.  I don't get to help write any of the material. I don't help edit.  I just listen.  Even when one of them is dead wrong, I just have to sit and take it.  The beauty of my blog is that I get to voice my opinion.  Unfortunately, I don't have the audience that the station gets.

After a week of listening to Kevin Slaten bash Tony LaRussa, I've got to question the validity of his finger-pointing.  I don't believe that coaches at the professional level do that much coaching.  At the pro level, I think it's less about schemes and game plans and more about leadership and focus. 

Seriously think about that for a minute...  In pro baseball, they don't even call them coaches. They are called "managers."  Why?  Because that's what professional coaches do - they manage the egos of their millionaire athletes, they manage the media, they manage the pressure of expectations on players and organizations. Joe Torre is and has been one of the best at this, but even he has had Derek Jeter, Roger Clemens, Mariano Rivera and the New York Yankee payroll.

Vince Lombardi, who might be the greatest motivator in the history of pro football, had Paul Hornung and Bart Starr develop into offensive juggernauts and put all three of them in the Hall of Fame. Before Lombardi came to Green Bay, the Packers were a collection of lazy losers. By the time he left, any man on roster would've run through a brick wall if Lombardi said so. 


In the NBA, Phil Jackson has had Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille Oneal on his championship rosters.  Phil also had assistant coach Tex Winter and his version of triangle offense, so maybe he's the one-in-ten instance that refutes my argument.  The NBA-adaptation of the triangle offense helped take Michael Jordan from a perennial playoff threat to a six-time World Champion.  The funny thing is that Jackson (head coach) gets the credit for Winter's (assistant coach) system.

(The triangle offense has produced 10 NBA Championships)

However, by and large professional sports is about finding the right personality to manage the athletes on and off the court.  For the most part, pro athletes need to be saved from complacency. I'm not saying that professional players don't need to be coached at all; they just don't need to be coached as much.  They would not be professional athletes if they weren't already exceptional at their sport.  Every great coach has had great players to coach. There isn't a single "great" coach that hasn't had an All-Star, All-American or Hall of Famer on a championship roster.

You'll notice that the few coaches that are considered great haven't reached their elevated status by employing inconsistent talent or repeat felons.  When players don't perform to expectations, the coaches get fired. Like it's anyone else's fault that the players miss free throws, strike out, commit penalties or any other in-game gaffs. The coaches get too much credit and too much blame for what happens during competition.

Foregone Conclusion

Why?  Why?  Why?  Mike Anderson, Mizzou's head basketball coach recently announced that he would not be accepting a job offer from the University of Oregon to be their head coach.  This past weekend, Coach Anderson met with officials from UO, but made a statement today that he would remain in Columbia.  C'mon, MA! How could you even consider taking over a program you beat by 37 points on December 5th?!

Aside from the money, it is hard to determine why it would be worth the time.  Currently, Coach Anderson makes around $1.5 million per year, but could earn over $2 mil based on the incentives in his contract (he'll make about $1.7 mil based on this past season).  Oregon reportedly offered about $800,000 more as a base salary.  I realize that a figure like that is nothing to sneeze at, but Oregon?  Really?!  Oregon basketball is about as hopeless as the Chicago Cubs.

Over the past two seasons, Anderson's teams have won 54 games with four wins in the Big Dance. That is impressive.  The current recruiting class is ranked as high as 11th by many scouting experts.  Clearly, Mike Anderson knows what he's doing.  He and his coaching style have made a good program even better, so I certainly don't fault any other program for approaching our coach.  But MA is building something here.  Entertaining an offer from a lesser program sends the wrong message.  It gives me the impression that when Alabama (Anderson is from the state of Alabama. In fact, Mizzou hired him away from University of Alabama-Birmingham) fires its coach next year, MA will be gone.  I wonder if next year's crop of recruits think the same thing...

The Mizzou Men's Basketball program is a program that is coming off two straight years in the tournament, and an Elite Eight run a season ago, and overachieving in 09-10 resulted in close loss in the second round of the Big Dance.

This program appears to approaching a level that many programs strive for, and I realize that a raise is a raise, and $800k is a huge raise by any measure.   But who likes to start a difficult project over from scratch before the initial task is even completed?  That's what he would've been doing if he'd taken the job at Oregon - starting over.  He would've been hitting the reset button and taking a step backward.  Although Mizzou loses the Battle of Rich Alumni, Oregon's basketball program is nowhere near the prestige that Missouri holds.

(Even Phil Knight's Nike money doesn't compete.)

Ultimately, I think he would've just been getting paid to lose.  $2.5 million to recruit against (and lose to) Arizona, Cal, UCLA and Washington. It's hard to recruit good players to play basketball at Oregon.

The Pac-10 is a lesser conference than the Big 12.  The Pac-10 had only two teams make it to the NCAA Tournament last month.  The Big 12 had seven.  That means that the Big 12 had six times as many teams earn a chance to compete for a National Championship.  Mizzou is a better team in a better conference.

Oregon basketball averages 7800 fans, while Mizzou brings about 13800 to each home game.  A bigger fan base means that more games will be televised. More exposure means more revenue and better recruits.

                                                                           OR







There just is no comparison.

Duck! Duck! Goose!

Let me start by apologizing for my unsanctioned absence from the blogosphere.  Though I've been unemployed for exactly one month, I've been unusually busy. On to today's entry...

A day or so ago, Faith and I decided that it would be fun to visit our favorite spot to feed fish.  There's a man-made pond in Glen Carbon that is home to some of the largest Koi I've ever seen.  We make a handful of trips each year to this spot.  We like to relax and feel the breeze and watch the fish wrangle food from each other. This week has some rather uncharacteristic scheduling conflicts, so my little princess and I decided that today after school would give us a great opportunity to hang out and do some fish-feeding.  So this morning as I prepared her breakfast and packed her lunch, I also gathered a sack of unwanted bread-type items from the cabinet: old dinner rolls, the last few Cheez-Its, the end pieces of a couple of loaves of bread, etc.

We both were excited about what we had planned since it had been seven or so months since we'd last been to the pond.  I was happy that the middle of my day had passed so quickly, and that it was time to pick her up from school.

As the school bell rang, Faith ran out of the doors, and grabbed my hand to head to the car.  She double-checked with me that I had brought the bag of soon-to-be-fish-food because she wanted to go straight there. I answered yes, and she began gabbing about some of the things that had happened during her day.  We hopped in the car, let the windows down, and continued to talk as we rode.  Little did we know that our innocent plans were about to be derailed by a team of rogue birds.

I noticed as we got close to the pond that there were more ducks and geese milling around than usual. They were strutting around, nibbling at the grass, and waiting...

As I parked, I noticed a few of them noticing me.  Something felt weird. I hurried around the car to open Faith's door, and we moseyed down the ramp toward the dock.  As we strolled, so did a few ducks... accompanied by a few geese. As Faith and I walked hand-in-hand, we noticed a few geese up ahead.  They stood there like tough-guy gate-keepers.  I felt like I was in a dark alley somewhere. Conflict was brewing...

(I was NOT feeling lucky today.) 

About 15 feathered bullies closed in on us, eyeing my bag of goodies, and my heart began to race.  Faith looked up at me with an intimidated and concerned look. She hugged my waist tightly. I made eye contact with a rebel mallard. It felt like High Noon at the OK Corral, but I wouldn't be calling any bluffs.

As we slowly and cautiously turned to head back to the car, I yelled "Run!  Get to the car!" Faith took off to the car and reached safety as I bolted to the other side and got in too.

They followed us to the car!  Honking and quacking, they had us surrounded. There had to be more than 20 geese and ducks honking, quacking and flapping their wings in anticipation. It was like a twisted horror movie.  Here we are, in the middle of the afternoon, trapped in my car at a pond by a posse of poultry.  And beside ourselves with fear.  Never have I been so afraid of a toothless animal as I was with that pack of grissled geese overly aggressive ducks.

In a last gasp of desperation, Faith suggested a diversion.  She advised me to toss some crumbs across the street in order to clear a path to the pond.  These birds were hip to our game.  As I tossed bits of old dinner roll, one at a time, the ducks and geese took turns retrieving the morsels.  This gaggle of roughians weren't letting us out of that car.

I concluded that I wasn't in the mood to get punked by a team of roughbeaks.

Spelling, Bees and Birds

We try to limit Faith's daily television intake. Partly because there's a lot of trash on television and partly because my wife believes television will rot her brain and partly because Faith has an insane amount of bring-home activities at her school.  This kid has a reading assignment every day.  I think I was only reading at home once a week when I was in first grade.

For those that know the dynamics of our marriage, you know that I'm more laid-back than the more-beautiful half of our lovely union.  So long as she has her school work done, I'll let Faith watch as much TV as she wants. After all, I can't park myself in front of an episode of SportsCenter but deny my daughter her Disney Channel. That's like grabbing a cookie out of the cupboard and enjoying it right in her face while she is forced to finish her veggies.

I was one of those kids that did nothing but watch TV and play video games when it was too cold to play outside. I went to public school, as opposed to my privileged offspring, and had no educational obligations outside of school in first grade so I indulged myself on hours upon hours of uninterrupted inactivity after school. I admit to being a pretty lazy kid, so I have sort of bought into my wife's program.  Plus, I was a fat, fat kid.  Thanks to hours of couch potatoing and ridiculous amounts of Kool Aid (there will be no visual proof of my obesity, you'll just have to take my word for it).

Last Monday after her bath, Faith and I decided to surf the channels for some good ol' animated entertainment. Upon realizing that cartoons are quite scarce at 8 pm, I happened to flip past a movie I'd heard about.  Akeelah and the Bee. I never had much interest in this movie. Despite the buzz when it came out on dvd, Faith was too young to understand much of it and I had no interest in a movie about the National Spelling Bee. However, something about the scene made me want to stop and watch, but I was met with opposition from a diminutive voice seated next to me. 

When I asked her why she didn't want to watch, Faith was unable to provide an answer, simply offering 'Because.' Well, I don't accept that from children. I'm a taxpayer, and half the reason this kid even exists. If this kid wants to disagree with me, it better be for more than just because. So I respond, "'Because' isn't a reason."  We played that game for a couple of rounds before I finally laid down the Trump Card, and let her know that if she couldn't give me a real reason that this movie wouldn't be adequate entertainment, we'd watch it until she could.

I realized that I seemed like a remote-bully. I didn't taunt her so much as I wasn't willing to consider any other viewing options until she could verbalize an adequate reason to not watch.  Trust me, my intentions were good. I promise. Plus, there was nothing else on.

As the scene unfolded, I determined that this was a movie that Faith needed to see.  I needed her to see another little girl having a tough time with something.  She needed to see a real, flesh and blood human girl fight through adversity.  Not a computer-generated Barbie with her talking bird, or pencil-drawn perfection from Disney.  There was a real, human lesson to be learned here, and I'd be doggone if she didn't learn it.

Part of the beauty of this movie is that the star and major co-stars are black.  We don't get a lot of that in my house.  It's important to me that Faith isn't too sheltered from diversity.  I'll admit that I initially thought that she didn't want to watch because the little girl on the screen didn't have blonde hair.

I resolved to have my first discussion about race...  with my seven year-old...  I felt a boiling confidence that I would pass a milestone by having a deep, heart-to-heart with my little princess.  I was confident that we would bond further through this impartment of knowledge from lion to cub.  I eagerly sent her off to brush her teeth as I readied my words and planned the course of the upcoming talk.

As a man, I can talk sports with the best of them.  I can negotiate a car deal all day long. I can talk music, shoes, religion, barbecue recipies - articulating the differences in skin color to my kid's innocent little mind was like explaining to Julie why I didn't take the trash out yesterday before I left for work... my words made sense to me, but I still saw that what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about look on her face.

I tried to be strategic.  I began by asking a few exploratory questions that lead us down the path to the societal construct of race. I tried to soften the entry by mentioning the fact that none of her dolls have dark skin and none of her favorite movies have many dark-skinned characters. When I asked Faith if she didn't want to watch the movie because of the girl's brown skin, she answered no. She sort of got defensive about it. She said, "Daddy, Grandma has brown skin. And so does Nick (my nephew). And Uncle (cousin) Jon....." After she rattled of a few more names of friends and family, I felt silly. My child was basically reminding me that many of the people she loves and interacts with looked just like the people on television. She let me know that yes, she sees the differences in people and their physical features but doesn't care.

I was beaten.  I anticipated being able to empart some knowledge.  I wanted to be able to explain away any conceived notions that she may have had.  Despite my initial disappointment at a potentially missed opportunity to establish open lines of communication between father and daughter, I found myself somewhat relieved that she hasn't learned how to stereotype yet, and that her innocence is still intact.

It's kind of endearing that she calls black people 'brown'  because the actual skin color is brown.  She doesn't know that daddy is supposed to jump higher and run faster than her friends' dads because I'm darker than they are, she just thinks I'm awesome.  Evidently, I'm awesome at everything except sit-down, heart-to-heart talks.  I stumbled and stammered through a conversation about a spelling bee.  What am I going to do when the conversation is about the birds and the bees?