On April 19, 1897, John J. McDermott of New York won the first Boston Marathon with a time of 2:55:10.

The Boston Marathon was the brainchild of Boston Athletic Association member and inaugural U.S. Olympic team manager John Graham, who was inspired by the marathon at the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. With the assistance of Boston businessman Herbert H. Holton, various routes were considered, before a measured distance of 24.5 miles from the Irvington Oval in Boston to Metcalf's Mill in Ashland was eventually selected.

Fifteen runners started the race but only 10 made it to the finish line. John J. McDermott, representing the Pastime Athletic Club of New York City, took the lead from Harvard athlete Dick Grant over the hills in Newton. Although he walked several times during the final miles, McDermott still won by a comfortable six-minute, fifty-two-seconds. McDermott had won the only other marathon on U.S. soil the previous October in New York.

The marathon's distance was changed in 1908 in accordance with Olympic standards to its current length of 26 miles 385 yards.

The Boston Marathon was originally held on Patriot's Day, April 19, a regional holiday that commemorates the beginning of the Revolutionary War. In years when the 19th fell on a Sunday, the race was held the following Monday. In 1969, Patriots Day was officially moved to the third Monday in April and the race has been held on that Monday ever since.

Women were not allowed to enter the Boston race officially until 1972, but Roberta "Bobbi" Gibb couldn't wait: In 1966, she became the first woman to run the entire Boston Marathon, but had to hide in the bushes near the start until the race began. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer, who had registered as "K. V. Switzer", was the first woman to run with a race number. Switzer finished even though officials tried to physically remove her from the race after she was identified as a woman.

In the fall of 1971, the Amateur Athletics Union permitted its sanctioned marathons (including Boston) to allow female entry. Nina Kuscsik became the first official female participant to win the Boston Marathon in 1972. Seven other women started and finished that race.

In 1975, the Boston Marathon became the first major marathon to include a wheelchair division competition. Bob Hall won it in two hours, 58 minutes.

PRESS RELEASE – The Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) will launch their All-American Basketball Skills Academy series this June 2011. This will be the first time the largest youth organization in the United States will be offering basketball skill development events nationally to the well-over 300,000 basketball participants and 1.5 million current members in their organization. “The [...]

Memphis will be one of four sites for the new Amateur Athletic Union All American Basketball Skills Academy beginning this June. Former University of Memphis basketball and NBA star Anfernee 'Penny' Hardaway will serve as director of player personnel for the skills academy. AAU, which is the largest youth sports organization in the U.S., has more than 300,000 national participants in its different basketball leagues. In addition to Memphis, Skills Academies will be held in Charlotte, N.C., Hampton,...

As The Guru, HOF sportswriter Mel Greenberg said, Connecticut acted as an eclipse of the basketball world on Tuesday. And rightfully so, setting a NCAA D-I record in winning its 89th consecutive game against No. 22 Florida State. Next up for UConn is a trip west where the Huskies will play Pacific on Dec. 28 and No. 8 Stanford on Dec. 30 to complete their nonconference schedule. The Huskies, which last lost to the Cardinal in 2008, have a chance to get close to the all-time basketball win streak of 131 set by Wayland Baptist University in the 1950s in the Amateur Athletic Union. But there were a few other happenings elsewhere, too. Arizona State defeated No. 16 DePaul while No. 3 Duke handled an impressive No. 4 Xavier team. On the local side, Gonzaga turned a seven-point halftime victory into a 27-point win against BYU, a future West Coast Conference opponent. And while Seattle University couldn't get a good start in a road loss to St. Mary's, Puget Sound coach Loree Payne, a former Washington standout, has the Loggers winning eight consecutive games. Here's a good feature on her start at UPS. *PHOTO CREDIT: UConn star Maya Moore celebrates after breaking NCAA D-I win streak. By the Associated Press

Josiah Turner, having a monster summer on the Amateur Athletic Union travel circuit, has moved up to No. 12 nationally in www.rivals.com's latest top 150 boys basketball player rankings for 2011.

It was a good spring and summer for coach Brian Hamilton's Play Hard, Play Smart Amateur Athletic Union program boys basketball team that competed in several major national showcase events.

Jack Albert Kramer did more than play a mean game of tennis. He initiated a style of play more reminiscent of the serve and volley of John McEnroe than of Pete Sampras––although both games reflect the prowess of Kramer on court.  

Off court, Kramer forced the evolution of the structure of modern tennis. He drove the bus that finally arrived in 1968 when amateur and professional tennis blended into one tour, finally allowing players to gain control over their own careers.

The Beginning:

“Jack” Kramer was born on August 1, 1921 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and died September 12, 2009 at the age of 88.  His father worked for the Union Pacific railroad. Naturally, the family never accumulated the finer things of life as resources were always lacking.

Shortly after Jack was born, the family moved to the Los Angeles area. But young Kramer had natural athletic ability. He soon found his way into tennis after the family moved to the San Bernardino area, where Kramer was privileged to watch a match played by the great Ellsworth Vines. He became inspired by the brilliant play of Vines and dedicated himself to playing tennis.

Amateur Career:

Without much money, Kramer still received excellent tutelage under the supervision of legendary teachers Dick Skeens and Perry T. Jones of the LA Tennis Club. During a successful “junior” career, Kramer, a natural right-hander, became the Boys' National Champion in 1938.  

In 1939, Kramer was selected to team with Joe Hunt in the United States Davis Cup tie with Australia.  Kramer became the youngest player ever to compete in a Davis Cup final––a record he held for 29 years. The U.S. lost that tie, and finished as the runner-up in 1939.

With the outbreak of the second World War, Kramer joined the United States Coast Guard, but still continued to participate in U.S. tennis events, winning prizes for his participation––especially his doubles play ,which earned him a Top 10 ranking in the U.S.

After the war, however, Kramer began his tennis career in earnest.

Kramer played an aggressive serve and volley game, coming in after almost every first serve, especially on grass and cement. He developed the game in the 1940s that John McEnroe played in the late 1970s and 1980s. Kramer moved forward into the court to meet the ball, forever denying his opponent adequate time to react––taking short balls and second serves and punishing the person on the other side of the net with fast-paced play and accurate and deadly groundstrokes.

But aggression was reserved foremost when Kramer was serving.  His rule was that you held your serve at all costs and then played the percentages on your opponent’s serve. It became of matter of efficiency––you saved your energies and used them when your chances to win were the greatest.  These theories he expounded in The Game: My 40 Years in Tennis* where he talks about his “Big Game” strategies, its foundation, growth and practice.*  

Kramer dominated after the War, winning the U.S. National Singles Championship in 1946 and 1947––what we now call the U.S. Open. Kramer won Wimbledon in 1947 as well.  It is widely reported that he should have won the Wimbledon title in 1946 except that he developed blisters on his right hand, which severely hampered his ability to play his game.

He won the equivalent of the U.S. Open Doubles four times in 1940, 1941, 1943, and 1947, as well as Wimbledon doubles in 1946 and 1947. Kramer also won a U.S. National Mixed Double Titles with Sarah Palfry Cooke in 1941.

Add to those impressive results the fact that Kramer won all six singles Davis Cup matches playing for the U.S, leading the U.S. team to victory in 1946 and 1947.

Professional Career:

Before 1968, very few tennis players controlled their own destinies. They were accorded the status of amateurs, in which case they supposedly received no money for participating in tennis tournaments like Wimbledon, the French, the U.S. and Australian Championships, as well as other sanctioned national or state events like the Italian Open or the Canadian Open (now called the Rogers Cup). 

This, of course, was not strictly enforced and players received funding under the table, so to speak, for travel and other expenses, as amateurs they were under the control of national or international federations that could decide not to send them to specific events.  

The problem was that in order to make enough money to live, the best players turned professional, where they generally were under contract to a promoter who arranged their schedule.

Once a player turned pro, he or she could not compete in amateur sanctioned tennis tournaments. They could no longer play, for example, at the Wimbledon Championships or the U.S. Nationals––because they were not allowed and because they had to go where their promoters sent them.

Like many of his contemporaries, Kramer turned professional in 1947 because he needed the money. He could no longer play just for the glory. Like Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and Pancho Gonzales, along with most of the biggest names in tennis––the best players were not competing in the Slams.  

Kramer became the United States Professional Champion in 1948 and led the professional field from 1948 through 1953. He overtook Bobby Riggs and became a main draw on the pro tour. When his arthritic back would no longer allow Kramer to compete, he took on the chore of being a promoter––which he continued for a decade.

The Open Era:

It was obvious to Kramer that the current system in tennis was untenable. He pushed hard to merge the amateur and pro tours so that tennis could flourish. Without the big names, the prestigious tournaments were losing out. Without the prestigious tournaments, the big names in tennis were losing exposure and deserved fame. Kramer could see that and pushed hard. 

He fell short in 1960 but finally succeeded in 1968. The first Grand Slam tournament to go “open” was the 1968 French Open.  It was Kramer’s drive and determination that made this happen.

Kramer was also the person who devised the accumulation of points and year-end championships––initiating a series of variations on this concept from 1970 forward.  Regardless, the point system as devised by Kramer has remained pretty much intact. Additionally, Kramer began the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) which exists yet today.  His contributions to the game of tennis were remarkable, always insightful and forward-looking.

But perhaps most people today remember Kramer as a tennis commentator for the BBC and the U.S. Open Championships.  His television analyses of tennis matches were marked by his easy manner and the depth of his knowledge about the game.

He conveyed the often complex nature of the match to his television audience enlightening and entertaining them at the same time.  He served as a commentator for the BBC for 14 seasons in the 1960s and 1970s until the ATP voted to boycott Wimbledon when tennis colleague Nikki Pilic was suspended by the ITF.

When the All-England Club upheld the suspension and after supporting the boycott as President of the ATP, Kramer became persona-non-gratis at Wimbledon.

Without a doubt, Kramer was the most influential man in tennis in the 20th Century and he is responsible for the huge surge in the sports popularity after 1968.  His influences were so many and so varied, it is hard to do them justice in the limited space this article provides.

 

Much is written about the man and understanding the past in tennis helps mightily in understanding a modern dilemma - why it is impossible to compare present and past players based on their records.  

Jack Kramer remains the Father of Modern Tennis.  

*Excerpt from The Game: My 40 Years in Tennis by Jack Kramer with Frank Deford, 1979, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, NY

[Cliff] Roche's first rule of percentage tennis was to hold your serve... It didn't make any sense to go running all over the court trying to break the other guy's serve, if this left you too tired to hold your own serve. Priorities. Percentages.
    

So what Roche taught me was to play it easy against the other player's serve until he fell behind love-30... Statistics show that on a fast court, a good server will hold serve more than 50 percent of the time even after he is down love-40. So early in a set I let a guy have his serve unless he got behind love-30 or love-40 off his own mistakes. I would just try and keep him honest--go for winners off his serve, try something different--whatever I could do with the least loss of energy. Then when it got to 4-all, I played every point all out (except possibly if he got ahead 30-love or 40-love on his serve.
    

 

...Roche taught me to play it even safer if you were serving the odd games. The guy who serves the even games serves after the break when he is rested and has had a chance to dry his hands.
   

When I won my first Forest Hills [US National Championships] against Tom Brown in 1946, Roche was in the marquee. The first set was a toughie. I won 9-7. Then I went up 5-2 in the next set. Here was a perfect time for a kid to lose his head and go for the break. You're so close to 6-2, two sets to love, you can taste it. But for what purpose: you fail to break him; he's 5-3, you're tired, your hands are sweaty, he's got a good chance to break you, and then he's got a rest and dry hands before his serve. Boom, like that: 5-5.
   

I let Brown have the game for 5-3 without a struggle. Then I looked up and saluted Roche, and he nodded back. It was as if I were saying: "I lost that one for you." And my energy spared, I served out the set at 6-3 and then closed out the match at love.

DeMarcus Cousins visits his old neighborhood in Summerville, Ala., a Mobile suburb. He recently bought his mother a new home after signing his rookie deal with the Kings.

MOBILE, Ala. – Sometimes it takes a mother to see the truth in her child's eyes, to hear the hurt in his voice. • Monique Cousins knows her oldest son, DeMarcus, well. • Even in casual conversation, she is comfortable standing. And she has stood up for her son enough to know the criticism he has heard doesn't fall on deaf ears. • The DeMarcus Cousins Monique knows is the one she sees in a slew of family pictures on the dinner table in her new home in Spanish Fort, a Mobile suburb.

Cousins, whom the Kings drafted No. 5 overall in June out of Kentucky, recently purchased her new home after signing his rookie contract.

There are photographs of Cousins playing with his five siblings – four sisters and a brother. Snapshots of Cousins as a toddler, with the familiar look that is now his game face.

Bad attitude? Lazy? Immature?

The criticism just doesn't mesh with the image she has of her son. And Monique, who raised him without his father in the picture, has watched how he has dealt with being told he has the kind of disruptive personality that can kill a team's chemistry.

Before the draft, pundits talked about him being uncoachable. All along, Cousins said the talk didn't bother him.

But mom usually knows better.

"Sometimes when you hear it so much you don't give yourself enough credit," Monique said. "Not that you act upon it, but it kind of gives you a low self-esteem in a way. So you make yourself OK by not worrying about it. So a lot of times you might hear him say 'I don't care' when he really does. … 'I don't care' is just a Band-Aid on that situation."

Hiding his playful side

Here in his hometown, Cousins isn't a problem child. He's considered quite childlike – a fun-loving kid in a man's 6-foot-11 body. This is where you see glimpses of the off-court persona that is the opposite of what the Kings want to see on the floor as they open training camp this week.

This 20-year-old "teddy bear" will sit on the gym floor at LeFlore High School and laugh when former classmates suggest he now has the money to treat them to McDonald's. He enjoys the banter with former teachers and administrators.

These are the same teachers who smile when discussing how well Cousins works with children, even playing duck, duck, goose with them.

Yes, this is a side of Cousins rarely seen. Perhaps you might call it the real Cousins. Just don't expect him to go out of his way to show you this side. He has grown accustomed to detractors who bring up past incidents while not citing the fact he hasn't had any major problems since he was in the 10th grade.

"It does bother me, but at the same time it really doesn't," Cousins said. "I know what type of person I am. Everybody makes mistakes. Nobody's perfect. But to hold something like that over somebody's head when they was such a young age, that's crazy – that's petty, really. But it really doesn't bother me."

To better understand why Cousins takes this approach, you first have to understand his early high school years.

He wasn't big on the Amateur Athletic Union circuit in middle school. But by the end of his freshman season at Erwin High School in Birmingham, Ala., some were already rating him the top player in his class.

"That was the crazy," Cousins said.

Attitude adjustment

Monique Cousins said the family was private and close-knit. But raising one of the best high school players in the country without his father around changed things.

Cousins said that was the start of adults taking credit for his oncourt success. Some promised to "deliver" him to schools in exchange for favors.

Then during his sophomore year at Erwin, there was an altercation on a school bus with a faculty member. Cousins was suspended for the rest of his sophomore season.

He enrolled at Clay-Chalkville High in Pinson, Ala., as a junior but was ruled ineligible when state school officials said coach Robi Coker recruited Cousins. Coker and Cousins deny any recruitment.

Monique said she was told her son could attend school anywhere in Alabama but couldn't play for Clay.

So Monique moved her family back to Mobile, where Cousins was born and Monique was raised.

And it's where things began to change for Cousins.

"After making my mistakes in Birmingham, I knew I really had to change if I'm trying to make it," Cousins said. "I started listening a lot more, surrounding myself with better people, better role models if you want to say that. Just changed my whole mind-set on life and tried to be a better person."

LeFlore had the right people in the right places to help Cousins begin to change.

Getting on track

Sitting in her office adjacent to the gym, LeFlore physical education teacher and former athletic director Sherry McDade recalled the first time she met Cousins.

It was homecoming, and McDade was in charge of the motorcade. Along the route, the motorcade was blocked by Monique Cousins' truck while she registered Cousins for school.

McDade still smiles when she recalls walking into the school office, where Cousins told her it was his mother's truck that was blocking the path and that he was an incoming junior who wanted to play on the basketball team.

"I said, 'Well, bend down,' " McDade recalled. "And he bent down, and I hit him upside his head and said, 'I'm Sherri McDade, I'm the athletic director here at LeFlore, and we want to welcome you.' "

LeFlore was already a basketball power in Alabama. The school had won a state championship the season before Cousins arrived.

And after the drama in Birmingham, LeFlore proved to be the perfect landing spot.

Eric Lovett was an assistant basketball coach. He was also Cousins' algebra 2 and precalculus/trigonometry teacher.

Lovett had heard plenty of negatives about LeFlore's newest player. And when Cousins ducked his head to enter his math class, Lovett recalled seeing a teenager who had been worn down by the rumors and attacks on his character.

"You only hear so many negative accounts, so it seemed like a situation where they were forcing his back up against the wall," Lovett said. "So it's a 'who can I trust?' kind of thing.

"I don't think people realized you're talking to a 16-year-old kid. He has a talent, and I think they were putting the expectations on him because of his talent and not realizing this is a 16-year-old kid that has to grow up."

So the plan at LeFlore was to treat Cousins like a kid. The coaching staff was cautious not to jump at every rumor and not to hold the past over his head.

"You hear some stories, and you get concerned, but once I met his mom and met him, it didn't reconcile," said then-LeFlore head basketball coach Otis Hughley. "I would have taken him 10 out of 10 times."

Managing his emotions

When he wasn't getting bombarded by allegations off the court, Cousins took a physical beating on it. Smaller players would hit him, and because of his size, officials allowed the rough play.

But instead of fighting back, Cousins learned to let Hughley and the staff fight for him. They dealt with the officials while teaching Cousins how to control his anger.

"If someone inflicts pain on you, what do you do?" Monique said. "So it's also a discipline to feel pain and not to retaliate and put the energy in its right place. No (previous coach) was teaching him that. (They) were like, 'Just suck it up.' … Eventually (his anger has) got to go somewhere."

Cousins wanted the discipline Hughley and his staff provided. He liked the fact Hughley treated him no differently than he did other players.

Hughley will continue to play a major role in Cousins' career. He will join his former star in Sacramento as an assistant coach on Paul Westphal's staff this season.

" 'Marc' is misunderstood in a lot of different ways," Hughley said. "And he's like a lot of good kids. He wants discipline, and he wants a good environment. I think it was just a good fit. He was with someone who was going to care for him as much as the last guy on the bench."

The challenge for Cousins in high school was how to channel his emotions. Hughley's approach helped. No one wanted to see Cousins become meek on the floor. But it wasn't easy for Cousins to manage those emotions in the face of constant criticism.

"We were walking down this hallway," Cousins said, referring to the hallway outside his former driver's education class. "And I said (to assistant coach Dion Lawson), 'Lawson, I'm going to stop playing the way I play. I'm just going to be quiet.' He said, 'Marc, you can't lose that fire. That fire is what's going to get you to the next level. You're going to have to learn how to tame it, but you can't lose that fire because a lot of people don't have it.' "

Cousins showed some of that fire during the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas. He channeled that into an impressive spin move and dunk, not a technical foul.

It's now part of his persona. He didn't lose the fire at Kentucky, where he was the Southeastern Conference Freshman of the Year, and he doesn't plan to lose it with the Kings.

"When I get going, I zone out," Cousins said. "So somebody might start talking trash, and I'll be like, 'Yeah, let's go.' I'm fired up, and I guess you can say that gets me in a little trouble, but I've just got to control it. Then again, anytime I play with no emotion, it feels like I'm going through the motions and I'm just another player on the floor."

Finding motivation

The fire is usually out away from the court.

As he made his way through the hallways of LeFlore earlier this month, Cousins was greeted with hugs by faculty. He shook hands and told jokes to anyone he bumped into.

If not for the uniforms worn by LeFlore students, Cousins would blend in on campus. Dressed in a baseball hat (before a trip to the barber), a white T-shirt and basketball shorts and shoes, Cousins enjoys being part of the crowd.

There were countless stories of how "Big Marc" or "Big Cuz" took time to play or speak with children in his hometown.

It's a contrast to what many have heard about Cousins. And even though she probably knows this side of Cousins as well as anyone, Monique admits that sometimes she has heard so much negativity, the positive stories can catch her off guard.

Cousins calls himself "a family-oriented guy" and says, "I just like kids." It's not something Cousins goes out of his way to disclose, even for his critics.

"I care, but if you just go by what you read, that's not really getting to know a person," Cousins said. "Me going out my way (to show a different side) is pointless because they're not trying to see it anyways. Because the people that want to get to know me, they're going to go the extra mile to get to know me."

Cousins isn't shy about his goals for his NBA rookie season. He wants to play well and be recognized.

Cousins won't beg his detractors to like him. But he won't completely tune them out, either.

They are part of his motivation.

"When I'm on the court, I'm trying to show you – especially the people that doubted my basketball skills," Cousins said. "I want to be the Rookie of the Year. I didn't get a chance to be the Player of the Year in college. I need my own individual award. I want mine."

DeMarcus Cousins gets a haircut from Dervonda Janes at the Blending Endz salon in Mobile, Ala. The salon has photos of the Southeastern Conference Freshman of the Year in action at Kentucky last season.

DeMarcus Cousins, whom the Kings drafted fifth overall in June, hangs out with LeFlore students during a physical education class.

Kings rookie center DeMarcus Cousins has a laugh with his former science teacher, Kenita Robinson, right, at LeFlore High School in Mobile, Ala.

"A lot of times you might hear him say 'I don't care' when he really does. … 'I don't care' is just a Band-Aid on that situation." MONIQUE COUSINS, on her son, DeMarcus Cousins, and the criticism that he has a bad attitude and is immature

The General Mills Foundation , a leader in fostering youth nutrition and fitness, today launched the One Million PALA Challenge in partnership with the President's Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition President's Challenge program, Box Tops for Education and the Amateur Athletic Union.

The documentary film maker Vitaly Mansky has been called an artist who is close to the Kremlin, a person who fights the regime, a successful businessman and a cunning provocateur who can make anyone talk. He is certainly a major director, someone capable of turning ordinary people into heroes, and their lives into works of art. His success lies in his dictum: “During filming the author should be freed from the constraints of morality and concentrate on the legal restrictions.”

Kinotavr is the main festival of Russian cinema, which is held annually in Sochi. Mansky was there not just as a spectator, but as a maitre whose opinion is sought by colleagues and journalists. He took part in the seminars, where money, as well as art of cinema was discussed.  Russian cinema cannot exist without state support.

“Write that down! The state has stopped financing documentary cinema. Completely!” This was how my interview with Vitaly Mansky began on the Sochi beach of the Zhemchuzhina hotel. He was not in the best of mood, having just learned that the Ministry of Culture had no plans for giving money to independent and documentary films in 2010.

Vitaly Mansky doesn’t just make films; he makes things happen. He founded the Artdokfest festival of independent films, and established Russia’s main documentary prize, The Laurel.

Mansky himself broke the barrier between movies and documentaries long ago. “Virginity”, his last documentary was one of the most sensational premieres of the season, and was in competition at the Kinotavr festival two years ago. It was about provincial girls who hit the big time  in Moscow. Before that, Vitaly created a rumpus in 2003 with his scandalous “Anatomy of t.A.T.u.” about two underage girls, pop singers, supposedly lesbians. MTV showed their clips for a whole year, the girls’ concerts were a global sensation. Mansky doesn’t just make films; he makes things happen. He founded the Artdokfest festival of independent films, and established Russia’s main documentary prize, The Laurel.

“What about grants?” I asked, reminding him that before the crisis around 300 documentaries were released in Russia every year.

Vitaly Mansky:

That’s a complete myth. You can’t make a film for $30,000 in Russia, when sound and a good cameraman cost $1,000 per filming day, and flights in Russia are twice as expensive as they are in Europe. So directors film using mini-cameras. They edit on lap-tops,  record their own music and text. But that’s not cinema, it’s amateur art.

Mumin Shakirov:

But some interesting films are being made, and shown at your Artdokfest festival. Critics and viewers really like them.

Vitaly Mansky:

A small group of enthusiasts are prepared to scratch around for extra money (including their own) to top up their budget. They go off and film, then the Ministry of Culture takes the credit. In fact, it’s a massive achievement by the person who made the film, although it’s not clear what money they lived on and how they fed their families. Only five or six people, the big names, get to make real films with a proper budget in Russia: Sergei Loznitsa, Alexander Sokurov, Viktor Kosakovsky, Sergei Dvortsevoi, Alexander Rastorguev, Sergei Miroshnichenko, Pavel Kostomarov, and that’s it. Theirs are the films that are chosen for prestigious film festivals, they’re the ones who find distributors and reach the big screen, thanks to western investors.

If you look back, the history of Russian documentary films divides  roughly into three periods: Soviet, Perestroika and post-Soviet. What was Soviet documentary film making like? What we remember is the tip of the iceberg: Dziga Vertov and his Man with a Movie Camera. Mikhail Romm and Ordinary Fascism. And, probably, Roman Karmen with his Oscar-wining Defeat of the German troops near Moscow. And the war newsreels. These are the films which have risen above sea level, as it were. They were neither particularly Soviet nor anti-Soviet, but they flouted the established rules, which is why they’ve survived. The rest has sunk without trace, interesting only for it tells us about the period.

Mumin Shakirov:

They were the masters. But there were other talented people who told the story of Soviet man.  Gerts Frank from Latvia, for example. His masterpiece The Supreme Court, the psychological portrait of a killer, which aroused both hatred and sympathy. That won’t be forgotten.

“Our mother is a hero”, a film about a hero of socialist labour whose family  paid high price for her achievements. Produced in 1979 the film of Nikolai Obukhovich remained banned until the Soviet regime was over.

Vitaly Mansky:

You’re right, but again, that’s an exception. I’ll give you another example. The director Nikolai Obukhovich made his first film in 1979:  it was about a hero of socialist labour, the weaver Yekaterina Golubeva. The authorities weren’t worried: another meaningless clichéd film about a hero of socialist labour, whose portraits adorned the streets of her native Ivanovo. In fact, Obukhovich pulled a fast one on them. His film shows a child deprived of maternal care, and a father who, because the mother has become such an important figure, takes over from the mother. She’d become this important person, but lost the most valuable thing for every woman – family feeling, love and motherhood etc. When the Soviet authorities saw the finished film, Our mother is a hero, they suddenly realized they’d been had: “What’s all this? We wanted fluff, and we got a film!”  It remained banned until the Soviet regime was over. Now it’s one of the classic models of Soviet documentary film.

Mumin Shakirov:

What about those directors who were considered uncontroversial craftsmen?

Vitaly Mansky:

Soviet fairytales about top workers, Communist Party congresses, collective farms and brigade leaders, pioneers and Komsomol members glossed over reality as much as they could. The paradox was that the most realistic form of art, the documentary, was set the task of mythologising reality.

Then came perestroika. We both studied at the Institute of Cinematography and witnessed the collapse of the Soviet empire. Russian documentary had its finest flowering: it reached the big screen. Millions went to the cinema. For in the late 80’s it was documentaries that told us the truth about ourselves, though sometimes only half truths, as we later learned.  Glasnost and perestroika were just beginning, and there were queues at kiosks for the magazine Ogonyok and the newspaper Moskovskie Novosti. People had been starved of truthful information and they learnt a lot of interesting things about the Stalinist repressions, the Khrushchev thaw, the Brezhnev stagnation etc. This will probably never happen again.

Mumin Shakirov:

The film Is it easy to be young? by Juris Podnieks from Riga was about the young, who no longer thought like the Party, the Komsomol or their parents.  Would you agree that this is the iconic documentary of the period?

Vitaly Mansky:

Yes, I do and I would name a few more: Rock by Alexei Uchitel, and Iya-kkha by Rashid Nugmanov. People suddenly discovered that there had been rock and underground culture in the Soviet Union. It was a shock, a time of absolute cinematographic catharsis.

Interest in documentaries began to die down in the early 1990s. Now, in the Putin era, the authorities no longer value it as an art form or a means of propaganda. This is odd, because it’s a resource they could have used to strengthen the regime. Take sport, for example – the authorities shamelessly take the credit for all international athletic victories. They could also have supported documentary filmmakers and claimed responsibility for their success, too.

Since the documentary has been taken out of public circulation, it no longer has an audience. For example, three years ago Alexander Rastorguev’s film Wild, Wild Beach won the prize at the  prestigious International Documentary Film festival in Amsterdam. And what happened? It got a passing mention on the Culture television channel, and there was a report from the ITAR-TASS news agency. That was it. No flowers at the airport for Rastorguev when he came home. 

Alexander Rastorguev’s film Wild, Wild Beach won the prize at the International Documentary Film festival in Amsterdam

If documentary films were widely shown and discussed, the state could harvest the fruits of their international success.  But that would be problematic too. The film Wild Beach is a unique document of everyday human madness. People get drunk, have sex, cover themselves with mud and torment the poor camel which tourists sit on to have their photo taken. It’s a sort of satire in the style of the great Russian writers Saltykov-Shchedrin or Gogol. For the state to support a Gogol, it  would have to be enlightened, confident and stable, which it isn’t. If the success of the Wild, Wild Beach at a major film festival had been widely trumpeted, the next step would have been to show it to Russian audiences. It’s not a film the authorities would regard as an asset.

 

„Wild Beach” is a sort of satire in the style of the great Russian writers Saltykov-Shchedrin or Gogol

Mumin Shakirov:

Since you’ve mentioned Rastorguev, tell us about the other directors on your list… Is there a common thread running through their films? Do they touch on the real problems of our life?

Vitaly Mansky:

No, what they do is elegantly avoid them. They are all completely different as artists. Sergei Miroshnichenko makes positive films. He tries to avoid controversial topics by delving into the personalities of his characters and making no generalizations. A good example is  Born in the USSR, which follows through two decades the lives of some very charming young people, who were born in the same country and then spread out all over the world.

„Born in the USSR” of Sergei Miroshnichenko follows through two decades the lives of some young people, who were born in the same country and then spread out all over the world.

Then there’s Viktor Kosakovsky. His films take the viewer away, on to another artistic plane. In his film Svyato, you can’t tell where the action is taking place, though it’s an ordinary Petersburg apartment, where the director’s two-year-old first meets his reflection in the mirror, plays with his toys in the room and suddenly realizes that he is not alone. It could be any country.

Rastorguev is the only director who touches on the real problems. One of his best films is Clean Thursday [also Holy Thursday in Russian ed]. He goes to Chechnya and films a bathhouse where the soldiers go; some wash, but at the same time the clothes and personal effects of dead soldiers are being burnt there. There are no war scenes in this film, but in its artistic power it surpasses any of the real horrors of war.

As for Alexander Sokurov, he is perhaps one of the most famous Russian directors. His film Russian Ark will surely be included in all the textbooks on the history of cinema. It’s one and a half hours long and was filmed in one take at the Hermitage Museum. His films actually are shown in cinemas. I have seen their success for myself in Berlin, Paris or Toronto. Sokurov’s secret is in the intonation and his quiet voice. His artistic view is so reduced down to his individual intonation that it’s quite difficult to get into it and a great effort is needed to follow his line of thought. He has his followers. But they’re older people. The younger generation is looking for money and its own style.

(Part Two to follow).

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

www.manski.ru – web site of Vitaly Mansky

Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in our Time (Cambridge Russian Paperbacks), by Anna Lawton, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 304 pages

The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema, by Nancy Condee, Oxford Univerisity Press, USA, 2009, 360 pages

Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film, by Jeremy Hicks, I. B. Tauris, London, 2007, 274 pages

Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. By Dziga Vertov, University of California Press, 1985, 408 pages

Sidebox: 

Vitaly Mansky is a prominent Russian film director and producer. Born in 1963 in Lvov, Mansky entered the VGiK Cinema institute in Moscow in 1982. Over a career beginning in 1989, Mansky has directed more than 30 films, mostly documentaries. His films have participated in more than 400 international film festivals, and won more than 50 major awards. His work has been repeatedly screened on TV in Russia, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Sweden and other countries. Mansky has co-produced more than 200 films. From 1999 to 2003, he headed the Documentary Program Production on Rossia-RTR TV channels. Mansky is also well known for his opposition to fellow director Nikita Mikhailkov, who as head of the official Filmmakers Union has become a tsar-type figure in Russian cinema. Mansky has recently undertaken to create his own, independent film makers association.

Related stories: 

Kinoeye: Russia's reviving film industry

Propaganda or just good business?

Poetry in pictures: a film about Joseph Brodsky

The ‘vertical of power’ grabs Russian cinema

Dissenting blockbusters

Gastarbeiters in kino: Russia's invisible class gets its big break

Russian anti-Nazi film v Kremlin bulldogs

We've covered  Muhammad Ali's venture into proto-MMA, Judo Gene LeBell vs Milo Savage in the 1960s, and Art Jimmerson at UFC 1 plus cruiserweight champ James Warring and Melton Bowen in the early MMA PPV days in the states, plus a review of boxers like Jeremy Williams, Marcus Davis and Chris Lytle who have really adapted to the game, but there have been a few more and I didn't want BE readers to miss a single one.

Note that many of these fights took place in Japan in the proto-MMA era when their worked pro wrestling promotions were moving closer and closer to shoot fights and true MMA. Most of the fighters involved were proteges of Antonio Inoki. Learn more about Japanese Proto MMA here.

Dave Meltzer has a solid round-up. New info to BE readers is:

Matthew Saad Muhammad: A decade after holding the WBC light heavyweight championship, Muhammad, on May 8, 1992, in Yokohama, Japan, faced Kiyoshi Tamura, at the time a popular pro wrestler. Tamura exploded with a takedown and finished Muhammad with a choke in 34 seconds. Tamura would later go on to a solid career as an MMA fighter with wins over Maurice Smith, Renzo Gracie, Minowa-man, Kazushi Sakuraba, Masakatsu Funaki, Pat Miletich and Jeremy Horn and a draw with a prime Frank Shamrock.    

Imamu Mayfield: The former IBF cruiserweight champion fought Japanese wrestler Kazuyuki Fujita on December 31, 2003. To make things more fair for the boxer, the rules were set up so Fujita would get only 20 seconds on the ground before he was stood up. Mayfield never got in a good punch, and was repeatedly taken down by Fujita. Fujita, never a submission specialist, would go for moves but couldn't get them in 20 seconds. Finally, Fujita grabbed an arm triangle choke standing, where time wasn't working against him, and Mayfield submitted at 2:15 of the second round.

Ray Mercer: The former Olympic gold medalist and WBO heavyweight champion, Mercer was the biggest-name heavyweight boxer up to this point to try MMA, although he didn't do it until he was well past his prime. Mercer was 46 when he fought Kimbo Slice on June 23, 2007, under MMA rules in an Atlantic City match that the New Jersey Athletic Control Board labeled as an exhibition. Slice choked Mercer out with a guillotine in 2:00 in what was also Slice's first foray into MMA. Mercer knocked out hideously out-of-shape former UFC heavyweight champion Tim Sylvia in nine seconds on June 13, 2009, in Birmingham.

MMA Scraps has more on Tamura vs Saad Muhammad.

Wikipeida describes the fiasco bout between Trevor Berbick and future PRIDE star Nobohiki Takada in the Japanese UWF pro wrestling promotion in 1991:

Trevor Berbick (August 1, 1954 - October 28, 2006) was a Jamaican - Canadian heavyweight boxer and champion who fought as a professional from 1976 until 2000. He was the victim of a homicide near his hometown of Norwich, Jamaica. Berbick briefly held theWBC heavyweight title in 1986, before losing it to Mike Tyson on November 22, 1986, by a TKO in the second round. He was the last man to fight Muhammad Ali, winning a 10-round unanimous decision in Nassau, Bahamas on December 11, 1981.

...

In 1991, he went to the UWFI in Japan to fight Nobuhiko Takada in a "boxer vs. wrestler" bout. Berbick claimed that he had been double-crossed and that he had expected the fight to be like American kickboxing, but it turned out that the rules allowed Takada to kick Berbick below the belt. Berbick refused to mount any offense, instead repeatedly complaining to the referee as Takada kicked him repeatedly in the legs. Takada claimed victory by default when Berbick exited the ring.    

And MMA Torch has a fine feature on some more boxers who've dabbled in MMA, we'll cover that in the full entry, plus videos from the fights.

 

From MMA Torch:

Francois Botha
Frans Botha, a heavyweight contender in the late-90s, is best known for out-boxing a post-prime Mike Tyson for four rounds in 1999 before getting knocked out in the fifth. The next year, heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis demolished Botha in two rounds. "The White Buffalo" left boxing in 2002 (with a 44-4-2 record) for a career in K-1. His stint as a kickboxer was largely unsuccessful, the notable exception being a stoppage victory over Jerome Le Banner. On December 31, 2004, the then 36-year-old Botha engaged in his first and, to date, only MMA fight. His opponent was debuting judo player and future UFC middleweight contender Yoshihrio Akiyama. Akiyama defeated Botha by armbar submission in under two minutes. Botha has since returned to boxing, most recently suffering a loss to the ancient Evander Holyfield.

Yuri Vaulin
Vaulin was an accomplished amateur boxer for the Soviet Union. As the USSR disintegrated, Vaulin came to America, debuting in 1990 on a card televised nationally by the USA Network. Fighting as a heavyweight, the prospect Vaulin progressed to 9-0 before being upset by the "suspect" John Sargent. Vaulin's loss was marked by the ignoble move of quitting on his feet in the eighth round of a ten rounder without having been knocked down or even having endured any serious punishment. After the Sargent loss, Vaulin's star fell, and he would continue boxing through 1992 without enjoying any particular success or notoriety. Along the way, he compiled a win-loss ledger of 13-3. In 1997, at age 33, Vaulin competed at UFC 14. Perhaps stung by the criticism of the lack of grit he displayed against Sargent, Vaulin fought with heart against jiu-jitsu player Joe Moreira. Ultimately, though, Moreira took the unanimous decision.

Yosuke Nishijima
Nishijima, a Japanese cruiserweight, campaigned primarily in the United States. Though his record stood at 24-2-1, the fact that he failed to make a dent in America's notoriously weak cruiserweight boxing scene says something about his abilities. In 2006, four years after he was stopped in two rounds by journeyman Cecil McKenzie, the 32-year old Nishijima entered MMA. He competed against the much larger Mark Hunt at Pride 31, losing by knock out in the third round of an exciting slugfest. The loss was the most competitive fight of Nishijima's MMA career: he lost each of his remaining four bouts more definitively than he did his match with Hunt. Nishijima most recently popped up in combat sports in 2009, losing twice that year in K-1.

Here's Tamura vs Saad Muhammad:

And here's Nobuhiko Takada vs Trevor Berbick 1991.12.22 UWF international

When did it become fashionable to be friends with everyone you play against?

Immediately after LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh colluded to play in Miami together earlier this summer, much of the post "The Decision" talk was about the tainting of James' legacy and the NBA's looming power imbalance.  What didn't get much attention is a macro trend at work among today's NBA players that might be just as bad as having 27 of the NBA's 30 teams with no prayer of playing in June next year.

Namely, that the NBA's 400 or so active players -- with few exceptions -- seem to like each other more than the teams they play for.

I don't have to explain to old school sports fans why this is bad for the NBA.  The NBA thrives on star players and rivalries.  It's a double bonus when you get star players mixed into a rivalry, like when Magic Johnson's Lakers were going head-to-head with Larry Bird's Celtics for three NBA Finals throughout the 1980s.  But even when an NBA title wasn't on the line, we still cherished watching Michael Jordan's Bulls versus Isiah Thomas' Pistons...and then Patrick Ewing's Knicks.  Even Ewing's Knicks versus Alonzo Mourning's Heat was must-see-TV back in the day.  And of course we all fondly remember Julius Erving's 76ers dueling with Bird's Celtics, the Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant-led Lakers pushed to the limit by Chris Webber's Kings and so on.  

And for two of the last three NBA Finals, NBA fans have been blessed with Bryant's Lakers going up against the Celtics and their "Big Three" of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen (amped up with the emergence of all-star point guard Rajon Rondo thrown into the mix...Rondo, thankfully, has no friends in the NBA and that might even include his own teammates).  Simply put, there's nothing better than watching two teams and two sets of players go head-to-head who genuinely hate each other's guts.

Even James' Cavaliers were forming a mini-rivalry against those same Celtics, having lost to the guys in green twice in the past three Eastern Conference Playoffs.  Since first meeting in 2008, Garnett and Pierce wanted nothing to do with James' friendship and to this day seem to thrive on that mutual dislike.  James, conversely, cowered and then opted for the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy, rather than be put in a position to take down a true rival.  (If only Bryant and his Big Three rivals in Boston were eight or so years younger right now.)  By joining forces with Wade and Bosh, James chose friendship over legacy, loyalty and, frankly, fair play.  A friendship forged from years and years playing with or being around Wade and Bosh that goes back to high school. 

And now, we're hearing rumors of another "Big Three" possibly forming in New York should the Nuggets' Carmelo Anthony and the Hornets' Chris Paul jettison their respective franchises to join up with Amar'e Stoudemire in the Big Apple.  Believe me, Paul didn't publicly pronounce this possibility at Anthony's wedding purely in jest.  After all, if LeBron can play with two of his closest friends, why can't Paul?

I blame two things for this disconcerting trend: AAU basketball and technology.

The AAU (which stands for Amateur Athletic Union) is a 112-year old institution originally created to develop amateur sports, basketball being one them.  It's since grown to include a series of national events and traveling tournaments showcasing the best basketball players of all ages, from elementary through high school.  And it's during these events and tournaments that the athletes -- taken from their families for weeks at a time -- bond on the road while also being wooed by colleges, agents, and so forth.  With so many outsiders wanting something from them, perhaps it's only each other that they have to relate to.

The AAU circuit has been around forever.  But in the days before the advent of the mobile phone, text messaging and Twitter, the bond struck among AAU players would quickly dissipate as they shuttled off to their respective college programs and eventually, NBA teams.  Today, thanks to the prevalence of mobile technology available to kids as young as eight years-old, the friendships among these young athletes continues year round.  Hence why you routinely hear from star NBA players things like: "We've been boys since middle school."

Before the now infamous summer of 2010, the worst after effects of the NBA's newfound "Bromance Culture" were too many pre-game hugs, off-season workouts and in-game yuck-yuck fests among opposing players.  But now they're colluding to decide who plays with whom, where and when.  When two opposing NBA players don't like each other it has become the exception, not the rule.

Never one to complain without offering solutions, I'm at a loss to figure this one out.  One possible solution that could prevent the next superstar collusion could be to give NBA teams the right to "franchise tag" a player a la the NFL.  NBA players will scream of "restraint of trade", but aren't salary caps and maximum contract numbers restraint of trade anyway?  Another option could be to give teams retaining a player's "Bird Rights" (i.e. playing for at least three consecutive seasons for the same franchise) more ammo in terms of salary and guaranteed years versus opposing teams when it comes to re-signing a prized player.  When Miami was essentially able to offer James the same compensation package that Cleveland could, all they needed to trump Cleveland was the Bromance card which Miami president Pat Riley played to disgusting perfection.

Changing the entire culture of the players is a tall order.  But if the NBA were somewhat cognizant of the players' unhealthy obsession with being friends with each other, perhaps they can make institutional changes today to give the fans rivalries worth watching tomorrow.

When it comes to a player's best interests and development, there is a constant tug of war between Amateur Athletic Union coaches and high school coaches.

Sporting traditionalists frequently grumble when chief administrators alter sporting structures as they cater to new fans demands. Traditionalists tend to argue that when sporting rules are changed or athletic skills are abandoned, we are witnessing a commodification of sport that values theater and spectacle over virtuous athleticism (Sewart, 1987).

In the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), the debate is a bit more convoluted, calling for a somewhat technical and academic examination.

Despite MMA's mere 17 year history, supporters and critics have quarreled extensively over the sport's trajectory and the way MMA may symbolize a moral threshold for societal violence. However, in MMA we have seen a public effort to formalize rule structure and secure governmental regulation since the sport's 1993 inception, both before and after Zuffa, LLC took over the UFC in 2001.

Sports theorists (van Bottenburg & Heilbron, 2006) have suggested that as MMA continues to grow (or stagnate), it can follow four overarching pathways, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

Abolition and demise : states or countries may pass or maintain legislation that bans MMA (e.g. , the push back seen in New York State, Vancouver , and Germany ). Demise may also include the folding of MMA organizations due to financial concerns (e.g. , EliteXC).

Underground : abolition and demise may contribute to illegal, unregulated MMA competitions hidden from state officials (though underground competitions can also take place in regions where MMA is legal).

Re-sportization : increased state regulation with stricter rule sets that would focus not only on in-ring/cage competition, but also on refereeing, athlete health prior to and after competition, and fighter-manager-promoter relationships. In contrast with many other sports, MMA (in particular the UFC) has overtly pushed for state regulation in recent years (Smith, 2010).

Spectacularization : "...a shift of attention away from fighting skills to the show and spectacle surrounding the events" (p. 277). The recent match between Cris Santos and Jan Finney stands as an example here. The match was so uneven, some argue it never should have been allowed in the first place, but was scheduled nonetheless so fans could watch Santos' compete at all.

 

While all four pathways are occurring simultaneously across different MMA organizations and in different regions of the world, the modest academic literature published to date on MMA argues re-sportization is the more common trajectory being followed thus far.

Garcia and Malcolm (2010) argue in their essay, "Decivilizing, civilizing or informalizing: The international development of Mixed Martial Arts," that although MMA promoters tend to publicly advertise MMA competitions as dangerous and appear excessively violent in order to draw in more fans, sporting violence in MMA has actually decreased. They suggest that while MMA, like all combat sports, is inherently violent and can be dangerous, the violence now manifests in a highly controlled environment (when properly regulated).

The staunchest defense of MMA, however, has come from Maher's (2010) work, which meticulously details how regulation of MMA has sought to improve athlete safety through improved rules, oversight of performance enhancing drugs, and medical safeguards. Maher also argues MMA organizations have improved in promoting fair contests (as opposed to unfair matches booked to promote a more likely winner), and in restricting conflicts of interest between promoters, managers, and fighters.

Maher's very thorough work, however, focuses too heavily on the UFC. As noted previously, spectacularization still transpires in MMA, which does little to promote fighter safety. The most interesting questions Maher raises are whether or not (1) MMA can secure federalized, standardized regulation across the United States; and (2) fighters can coalesce to form a union that effectively advocates for their rights (questions I will be addressing in my next piece, and related to my last piece, "Marxist Mixed Martial Arts? ").

Notably, all the above referenced work is theoretical or historical. Very little scholarly research has been conducted that relies on empirical research. In fact, the only empirical research conducted thus far relevant to the issue of spectacularization and fan desire has found that invested MMA fans do not want to see lopsided matches.

Kim, Andrew, and Greenwell (2009) surveyed MMA fans attending an amateur card in the American Midwest (N = 208) and an event held in South Korea (N = 229). In both sites, research subjects indicated that their primary motive for attending the event was their interest in the sport (i.e. , they are an MMA fan and care about MMA). "Drama" ranked #2 among South Korean fans and #3 among American fans, meaning fans desired close competitions, not unfair, lopsided fights.

Among the 12 possible motives for attending the event, "violence" ranked #5 for Americans and #11 for South Koreans. These findings are especially important because they tell MMA promoters that fans want to see fights exemplifying high-level MMA skills between evenly matched, prepared opponents, not promotional "freakshows" that decrease fighter safety.

Let's give the fans what they want.

David Mayeda is lead author of Fighting for Acceptance: Mixed Martial Artists and Violence in American Society

References:

Garcia, R. S., & Malcolm, D. (2010). Decivilizing, civilizing or informalizing: The international development of Mixed Martial Arts. International Review of the Sociology of Sport, 45 (1), 39-58.

Maher, B. S. (2010). Understanding and regulating the sport of mixed martial arts. Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal , Winter.

Sewart, J. J. (1987). The commodification of sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 22 (3), 171-191.

Smith, J. T. (2010). Fighting for regulation: mixed martial arts legislation in the United States. Drake Law Review , Winter.

van Bottenburg, M., & Heilbron, J. (2006). De-sportization of fighting contests: the origins and dynamics of no hold barred events and the theory of sportization. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 41 (3/4), 259-281.

Modern day basketball can trace it�s origins to early December 1891 when Dr. James Naismith, a Canadian physical education teacher and a local instructor at Springfield, Massachusetts� YMCA Training School was desperately seeking an indoor game active and fit during cold, snowy New England winters. After trying several different games and finding them too dangerous or not quite suitable for gymnasiums, Naismith wrote down the essential rules of basketball, incorporating some of the rules of a popular children�s game of the era, �Ducks on a Pond,� and then nailed a peach basket on an upraised track, ten feet above the playing surface. Of course, since the peach baskets still had closed bottoms, retrieving a ball after a player scored a basket was terribly inefficient � unbelievably, the game had to be stopped for someone to retrieve the ball with a dowel. And although the first official game was played in January of 1892, at the YMCA gymnasium Naismith�s handwritten diaries at the time indicate that he was extremely nervous about the new game he invented, fearing that his basketball wouldn�t take. Oddly, in that first official game of basketball, there were nine players on a side and the winning team won a close fought 1-0 battle with a 25-foot shot � on a court barely half the size of the modern day court! By 1897 teams of five had become standard. Around the same time, women�s basketball was developed at nearby Smith College when Sandra Berenson, a physical education teacher at the college modified many of the rules for women to play. As it turned out, Berenson was fascinated by the values of teamwork, fair play and vigorous exercise that basketball promoted and began organizing some of the first women�s basketball games by 1893. By 1899 Berenson�s rules for women�s basketball were published and by the turn of the century, she was the editor of A.G. Spaulding�s legendary Women�s Basketball Guide which spread her version of basketball across the country to countless physical education instructors across the country. In fact, with the help of many YMCA instructors, basketball was promoted throughout the United States and Canada, paving the way for the game to be established as a varsity sport at many high schools. Sadly (and perhaps ironically), the YMCA began to discourage basketball by 1905, fearing that rowdy; belligerent crowds and rough play distracted from the organization�s mission. But that didn�t matter much as amateur clubs, colleges, high schools and even several short-lived professional basketball clubs and leagues not only filled in the void but also helped promote the game. Basketball was becoming so popular that the forebear to the NCAA, known as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States and the Amateur Athletic Union fought for control of the game�s rules and of its future. A little known fact is that during those first decades, basketball was primarily played with soccer balls, which were difficult to dribble. Most games consisted of players passing the ball to each other in order to advance it up and down the court. It wasn�t for some time until a ball was specifically designed and made for basketball and frequently basketballs were irregularly made, creating an odd scene for modern basketball fans. It wasn�t until the late 1940s when college basketball was becoming insanely popular and viable enough to pave the way for the National Basketball Association�s popularity that Tony Hinkle developed the orange basketball that fans are so familiar with. Of course, it should not be forgotten that Naismith was also influential in the promotion and creation of men�s college basketball when he became the University of Kansas � first basketball team. And believably, many of Naismith�s first students and disciples became important in the history of college basketball including Amos Alonzo Stagg, Forrest �Phog� Allen, and Adolph Rupp. [url=http://www.vibramfivefingersreview.org:2zvk7zwi][/url:2zvk7zwi], [url=http://www.vibramfivefingersreview.org/vibram-five-fingers-kso-c-181.html:2zvk7zwi][/url:2zvk7zwi]

Modern day basketball can trace it�s origins to early December 1891 when Dr. James Naismith, a Canadian physical education teacher and a local instructor at Springfield, Massachusetts� YMCA Training School was desperately seeking an indoor game active and fit during cold, snowy New England winters. After trying several different games and finding them too dangerous or not quite suitable for gymnasiums, Naismith wrote down the essential rules of basketball, incorporating some of the rules of a popular children�s game of the era, �Ducks on a Pond,� and then nailed a peach basket on an upraised track, ten feet above the playing surface. Of course, since the peach baskets still had closed bottoms, retrieving a ball after a player scored a basket was terribly inefficient � unbelievably, the game had to be stopped for someone to retrieve the ball with a dowel. And although the first official game was played in January of 1892, at the YMCA gymnasium Naismith�s handwritten diaries at the time indicate that he was extremely nervous about the new game he invented, fearing that his basketball wouldn�t take. Oddly, in that first official game of basketball, there were nine players on a side and the winning team won a close fought 1-0 battle with a 25-foot shot � on a court barely half the size of the modern day court! By 1897 teams of five had become standard. Around the same time, women�s basketball was developed at nearby Smith College when Sandra Berenson, a physical education teacher at the college modified many of the rules for women to play. As it turned out, Berenson was fascinated by the values of teamwork, fair play and vigorous exercise that basketball promoted and began organizing some of the first women�s basketball games by 1893. By 1899 Berenson�s rules for women�s basketball were published and by the turn of the century, she was the editor of A.G. Spaulding�s legendary Women�s Basketball Guide which spread her version of basketball across the country to countless physical education instructors across the country. In fact, with the help of many YMCA instructors, basketball was promoted throughout the United States and Canada, paving the way for the game to be established as a varsity sport at many high schools. Sadly (and perhaps ironically), the YMCA began to discourage basketball by 1905, fearing that rowdy; belligerent crowds and rough play distracted from the organization�s mission. But that didn�t matter much as amateur clubs, colleges, high schools and even several short-lived professional basketball clubs and leagues not only filled in the void but also helped promote the game. Basketball was becoming so popular that the forebear to the NCAA, known as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States and the Amateur Athletic Union fought for control of the game�s rules and of its future. A little known fact is that during those first decades, basketball was primarily played with soccer balls, which were difficult to dribble. Most games consisted of players passing the ball to each other in order to advance it up and down the court. It wasn�t for some time until a ball was specifically designed and made for basketball and frequently basketballs were irregularly made, creating an odd scene for modern basketball fans. It wasn�t until the late 1940s when college basketball was becoming insanely popular and viable enough to pave the way for the National Basketball Association�s popularity that Tony Hinkle developed the orange basketball that fans are so familiar with. Of course, it should not be forgotten that Naismith was also influential in the promotion and creation of men�s college basketball when he became the University of Kansas � first basketball team. And believably, many of Naismith�s first students and disciples became important in the history of college basketball including Amos Alonzo Stagg, Forrest �Phog� Allen, and Adolph Rupp. [url=http://www.vibramfivefingersreview.org:1gmm913d][/url:1gmm913d], [url=http://www.vibramfivefingersreview.org/vibram-five-fingers-kso-c-181.html:1gmm913d][/url:1gmm913d]

Fletcher Johnson is amazed that so many area Amateur Athletic Union boys basketball teams continue to compete for a limited pool of top talent each season.

MANNY CRISOSTOMO mcrisostomo@sacbee.com Robert Garrett, right, of Sacramento High competes with Play Hard, Play Smart, one of the area's most successful AAU teams.

Fletcher Johnson is amazed that so many area Amateur Athletic Union boys basketball teams continue to compete for a limited pool of top talent each season.

MANNY CRISOSTOMO mcrisostomo@sacbee.com Robert Garrett, right, of Sacramento High competes with Play Hard, Play Smart, one of the area's most successful AAU teams.

Mark Yost, Wall Street Journal
Many New Yorkers are bummed that LeBron James chose Miami over Manhattan. But there is still a chance to see plenty of LeBron wannabes in summer basketball leagues around the city. Many of these leagues are run by the Amateur Athletic Union and are an integral part of the career track for aspiring college and NBA players. That's because such leagues and tournaments draw the attention of many of top college coaches and scouts.

Josiah Turner and his Oakland Soldiers Amateur Athletic Union teammates have reached today's quarterfinals of the Nike Peach Jam at the Riverview Park Activities Center in North Augusta, S.C.

There are many sports out there. SB Nation's Spencer Hall isn’t good at any of them. Join him as he shows off his athletic anti-prowess while attempting various sporting activities for the first time in the “The Amateur.” In this edition, Hall heads to North Carolina to play rugby sevens with the Charlotte Barbarians.

"A game played by fewer than fifteen a side, at least half of whom should be totally unfit." - Michael Green

I'm headed to Charlotte, and late, very, very late, speeding like I haven't since I was 19 and convinced that an '87 Ford Escort came standard with a cloaking device. It did have one, but like all American cars made between 1980 and 1995 it was a rolling box full of awful and therefore the device, like the radio, had long since burned out and become totally useless.

On the way up, there aren't the usual two to three police cruisers stuffed into nooks and crannies along the interstate. It may be too hot even for the police: it's 97 according to the dash display, and the disturbing part is as I move up north on I-85, it's getting hotter. Either Charlotte is hotter than Atlanta for the first time ever, or I am heading directly into the remnant heat of a freshly detonated nuclear bomb. 

Relevant to the image of getting blown sky-high: I'm going to play rugby, and am going to die. 

Avery plays for the Charlotte Barbarians, a D-III club team at the Matrix level in their region. He used to play for Charlotte's second division rugby team, but being both a functioning adult and functional rugby player at even that level is a near impossibility. The team works out twice a week. They practice two other days. They lift weights after full-contact practices. They spend weekends traveling all over the Eastern seaboard playing matches. There's drinking, and maintaining the clubhouse (which has its own bar), and numerous other obligations keeping you occupied for ever non-paying minute of your day.  

Avery has a girlfriend, a job, and a knee with two ligaments only recently healed from a sideways blindside hit the prior spring.  He plays for the Barbarians now because having one day off a week from rugby wasn't enough to have a life outside of playing rugby. He eyes my gray basketball-length shorts with suspicion. 

"You're gonna need some shorts. Real shorts." 

"Nut-huggers?" 

"Well, no, you're just...yeah, nut-huggers. You'll love them." 

I put on the shorts.

My legs are bioluminescent from the knee up. The shorts stop at mid-thigh, a length unseen on me since elementary school (that's if you don't count that drag party in college, but I'm not. Since I was wearing a skirt over them. Don't judge me.) 

"Do you have cleats?"

This is a great question. I have spent my life trying every athletic pursuit you can do without actually having to embarrass yourself in front of others. I've run. I've lifted weights in the corner of numerous gyms of varying price and quality. I do Crossfit, or more appropriately, Crossfit does me on a regular basis. I'm still fat, but not totally unfit. 

Yet "Do you have cleats?" is a sorting question, a divider of people who play sports from non-sport playing people. If you have cleats, you did, at one time, use them in the pursuit of getting better at a game played with others. The others watched you play the game, and did not laugh out loud at your efforts (too much). You bought these shoes because you thought it would be necessary to gouge out earth in the name of better traction in making a play. The very purchase implies you consider yourself capable of making a play. 

I have not owned a pair of cleats since I was six years old. Even then it may have been a false assumption, and that's when soccer equalled 20 kindergarteners kicking each other in the shins around one untouched soccer ball. 

"No, I don't have cleats." 

"That's fine. As long as you have your mouthpiece." I do have a mouthpiece. It is in a drawer in Atlanta, 240 miles away.  

"In my time, I've had my knee out, broken my collarbone, had my nose smashed, a rib broken, lost a few teeth, and ricked my back; but as soon as I get a bit of bad luck I'm going to quit the game." - J. W. Robinson

Caleb is the player-coach of the Barbarians. He stands about 5'10", and I'm guessing he weighs 230 pounds thanks to a muscular frame and a compact beer belly. A bone-white line runs in a half-circle from one ear to another across his skull. It's a scar meridian cut there by surgeons who peeled back part of his face and inserted a metal plate after a rugby head injury. Caleb wears a padded rugby helmet, a thin plush condom for the head that passes for protection here. 

Avery's got a six inch flesh-zipper over his collarbone, and is putting on a knee brace on the bleachers. I make a mental note that those who play rugby end up getting scars, or what might be more flatteringly called "organic abstract tattoos." The guys who show up for Barbarians practice do inevitably wear quite a bit of organic abstract tattoo work. 

The field is half-shaded by a close treeline. i would notice how hot it is but the sun is setting and Avery is in front of me explaining a litany of basics i assume must be memorized or face the pain of horrible rugby death. Don't leave your feet to tackle. Don't tackle high. Try to pass accurately and communicate. Stay behind your man, around three yards back and three yards out. Space out, and help out a man in the grip of a tackle. Keep a narrow gate.  

I know what none of this means, and pull out the idiot's best friend: nodding. We trot up and down the field, passing the ball back and forth. The one thing about rugby that isn't intimidating is the ball: oval, nubbly to the touch, it has the feel of a perfectly engineered ball for its sport, almost begging to be carried. If an American football is a squirrely piece of leather begging to be fumbled, a rugby ball is a good-tempered snuggler, easy to kick, pass, or carry without fumbling. 

Chris is taking pictures and video. "Man this looks like fun." 

"Wait until he lights me up on a tackle. You might change your mind." 

Avery grins and nods. "Oh, that'll happen." 

I grit my teeth and miss my mouthpiece, which unlike me is in a cool, dry place, and will not be involved in any collisions today. 

"I prefer rugby to soccer. I enjoy the violence in rugby, except when they start biting each other's ears off." - Elizabeth Taylor (1972)

Rugby players come in varying degrees of shape. In full 15-man rugby union games, specialization creates different physiques. Forwards are the hulking guys in the scrum, while backs are the lighter guys not concerned with headbutting en masse with the nasty dudes who like breaking beer bottles over their heads. Rugby league, a faster 13-man variant of the game, whittles down the body a bit more, while rugby sevens--a spread-out, seven-man variation of the game--is generally regarded as one of the most grueling team sports in the world, with conditioning demands that would make an American football player blow out a lung. Think soccer cardio with football contact and basketball's hand-eye coordination, and you are approaching a sense of what rugby sevens involves. 

The Barbarians play rugby sevens, and therefore are all sneakily fit no matter how much beer weight they carry. Drills start, and everyone begins moving and moving fast. We run in diagonal lines up and down the field, passing the ball back and fourth in groups of four. I'm on the end, so the beginning of each run when I start it hiccups to life.

I am a mule running among horses, and have the matching hooves for hands. Several times the line stutters and comes to a complete stop as the very snuggly ball clanks off my hands and onto the grass. Damn your treacherous ass, snuggly rugby ball. I thought we had an agreement. 

"We'll...we'll have to work on ball skills," Avery says. 

I had my fears reversed: I should have been terrified of the running, not the contact. Hitting and getting hit is exhilarating: you either like it or you don't, and I'm firmly in the camp that when given the choice between making an actual skill move (passing the ball, juking someone) or simply trying to clobber someone will always opt for brute force. 

In the tackling drills, Avery lines up on the other side of a line of cones separating us. We run as defender and ball carrier on parallel lines. At one point, I'm supposed to cross the line and "engage" Avery. "Engaging" in my case means lumbering into Avery, who wraps up, plants, and buries me like a somnambulent hog before stripping the ball and running off into the horizon. 

"How was that?" 

"Not bad." Later my elbow would swell up, but it's unfair to blame Avery. It could have happened when I was spun to the ground on a tackle in four-on-fours, or hit in rucking drills, or when I fell on my ass after getting completely flatfooted defending two men at the same time. It could have happened when I played defender on line drills and actually brought someone down, and not just on the pity tackle Avery let me have in return for his potato sack slam earlier.  

The same could be said for the mysterious and painful bruise on my inner right knee, or the weird arthritic pain in my left knee that had me looking up "symptoms of lupus" five days later (it's not and never is lupus). Rugby's pace is relentless. Football players who transition to sevens say it takes a year or two to get up to speed on conditioning. At my current level of fitness, it would take me five years, an army of trainers, massage therapists, steroids, more steroids, endless vials of human growth hormone, several hours of exercise a day, and grafts of fast-twitch muscle fibers onto my body just to get up to speed, much less play a competent, coordinated game. Methamphetamines would be required before the game, and heavy narcotics afterward. 

That might be an impossibility, especially if you take time to think during a game. Thinking is dangerous. Scott, a 30-plus-year-old player who played all-time for both sides and had stunning endurance, watched as I defended a scissors move to perfection, staying put on the rugby equivalent of a reverse, keeping contain, and staying with my man. 

This happened the way good plays happen for terrible athletes: completely by accident, and without thought. Scott stopped the play and explained what I had done, why it was good, and how that move is properly defended, both because he wanted to encourage the new guy, and because I think deep down he suspected I did it completely on accident. 

He was right. On the next play the offense ran the scissors, and I thought about the proper technique, the right angle, the assignment I was supposed to pick up, and the ball ran past me as I overplayed the ball, followed the fake, and with my brain screaming at my body watched the man with the ball streak through the gap. Hitting wasn't a problem, but thinking in rugby evidently was. 

After biting Sean Fitzpatrick's ear: "For an 18-month suspension, I feel I probably should have torn it off. Then at least I could say, 'Look, I've returned to South Africa with the guy's ear.'" - Johan le Roux

Ear removal is part of rugby. They can be ripped off, or bitten, or beaten until they crinkle into scarred cauliflowers on the sides of players heads. Knees can be knocked sideways. Heads can and are split open. Shoulders shatter. Testicles are yanked, squeezed, and occasionally exposed to open air after errant cleats find vulnerable man-purses. John Hopoate, a Tongan winger who played in Australia, once served a suspension after multiple players testified to his amateur proctology in the scrum.

As we run four on fours for ten minutes each, how this happens becomes clear. Different games form different relationships. Baseball is isolating, with each player locked onto their own little island in an irregular circuit the ball bounces around randomly. Football is an organized and violent committee meeting where everyone has specific assigned and highly specialized tasks. Basketball and soccer can be just as much about the players' personal relationships with each other as their individual skills. 

The best way to describe even the beer league rugby I'm playing here: romping. This is pure romp, just a hair above Calvinball in its simple rules, free-flowing, messy, and extremely close and loud at every angle. Toughness aside, you don't notice it because it's simply too fun and hectic to bother with little things like severed limbs and bleeding wounds, and by the time you notice it's time to go to the bar, have a beer, and talk about the awesome severed limb you just lost, and how you're going to have to staple it on later. 

Even after completely flatfooting a play on defense and ass-planting..

...it's go go go because the play picks up even with my dignity sitting in a smoking pile on the field. Avery is in my ear on offense yelling "BALL BALL BALL BALL BALL BALL" like a mantra to my right until I have to pitch it to him. I spin out of one tackle and into another and hear my shirt rip in the process, the tackler fully wrapped around my waist and cantilevering me to the ground. Neither of us wait: the ball is out, the play continues, and we both have to chase the high socks and flickering white ball bouncing between players down the field. 

It's so fun I scarcely notice the heat, or the score of small injuries, nicks, scrapes, and cuts. They end practice with a drill just for me--a pad drill simulating the ruck, ostensibly, but what we find out after practice was Caleb's way of making sure I got enough contact in on the day. (He went up to Chris during the break and said "We got a drill to make sure your boy gets properly hit even though it's practice." He then gave an evil smile, and ran his thumb across his throat like it was a knife.*) 

Perhaps I was a bit tentative on the actual carrying-the-ball-part. At one point you have to drop, and unlike the springy layout of me teammates, I fell to the ground like a corpse dropped from a plane. 

The finishing runs were a bit more graceful, since all I had to do was stand there, hold a pad, and get blasted off my feet into the air. 

A note to Caleb: I can still feel it a week later, so mission accomplished. Note the smile there, though: that's the smile of a man genuinely pleased to hit and be hit, since something deep inside some men requires physical violence to achieve joy. If rugby is a brute's game played by gentlemen, it's because somewhere inside each gentleman is the need to be that brute, if for only 40 minutes at a time. I'll play it again happily just as soon as I get a new set of knees, available from Autozone for $44.95 each and installed on site. 

*He did not actually do this, but he may as well have. 

A very special thanks to the Charlotte Barbarians for allowing a couple of internet writers to invade their practice for this piece. Although we suspect they didn't mind having some fresh meat to tenderize. 

Josiah Turner, having a monster summer on the Amateur Athletic Union travel circuit, has moved up to No. 12 nationally in www.rivals.com's latest top 150 boys basketball player rankings for 2011.

Former Oakmont High School star Tony Gill considers himself a late bloomer, partly because he didn't play high-level Amateur Athletic Union basketball until after his junior season.Gill was a Cal-Hi Sports All-State Division II and Bee All-Metro first team selection this past season in leading the Vikings to the Sac-Joaquin Section D-II championship game. The 6-foot-8 center-forward credits an eye-opening summer last July for helping him have a breakout senior season in which he averaged 18.5 points and 10.5 rebounds.That's when he got his first taste of big-time basketball playing with the Rocklin Warriors (now NorCal Pump N Run) during the July viewing period for college coaches. "To be perfectly honest, it was a slap in the face," Gill said. "Back home I had had a pretty good amount success and was a little cocky."Then I went to Las Vegas and Los Angeles and it was a shock. The amount of athleticism everyone has, and the amount of skills is ridiculous. It made me work a lot harder on my game."

Deion Jackson-Houston, a talented point guard from Duncanville, Texas, was supposed to be headed for a breakout week in many ways. As the leader of Texas Bluechips-Navy, an elite Amateur Athletic Union 17-and-under basketball team, Jackson-Houston was considered the main attraction for college scouts at this week's Great American Shoot-Out, a summer showcase tournament that will start play Friday in Duncanville.

Jackson-Houston, however, will not be among the participating players.

That's because Jackson-Houston, rated as one of the top recruits in the Class of 2012, died over the Fourth of July holiday weekend when a train crashed into a car he was driving in Duncan, Okla.

"I'm still in shock," Duncanville boys basketball coach Eric McDade told the Dallas Morning News. "He was a great kid, the type of kid every parent would love to have. The kids loved him and he was well-liked on our campus. He always had a smile on his face and a joy to be around. He was a good basketball player but even a better person. You don't think about this kind of thing happening and when it does, you just realize how precious life really is."

 

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Several nights a week all spring and most of summer, they are there at the gym practicing: layup and box-out drills, running plays, practicing transition and defense – all to the soundtrack of their own squeaking shoes on the hardwood. Then there are the twice-a-month tournaments, which began in April, that bring out a huge cache of college coaches, as well as hundreds of spectators. A common scenario for high school basketball players? Most definitely. But this is not your mother’s club ball team or club ball era, and these are not casual practices. This is the highly-competitive club ball circuit, and with college scholarships on the line, the stakes could not be higher. Yet, one question remains: has the evolution of club ball hurt the game? Opinions vary. The Rise of Club Ball Long before there were viewing periods and complex rules regulating coach-athlete recruiting calls, there was the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which had basketball leagues for both boys and girls. And for a generation or so, that met the needs of young players just fine. But in the mid-to-late 1990’s, a couple of things happened: two women’s professional basketball leagues formed, and the women’s “Dream Team” won the gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics. Perhaps not coincidentally, interest in girl’s basketball increased. Club ball teams began forming, and many saw explosive growth. A nation of teams was born. Some club teams flourished after one of the major shoe companies – Nike or Adidas – began sponsoring them. Other teams are more grassroots, and have risen due to sheer interest alone. One program that mushroomed after Nike stepped in is Cal Swish. Since beginning as one team after its 1997 founding, Swish has become a group of 10 elite teams stationed around Southern California and the Southwest. Director and head coach Russ Davis, also the head coach at Vanguard University, was originally asked by founder Mike Cherney to come in and help coach. Cherney became involved because he had a daughter who wanted to play. It was not too long before the Swish began winning tournaments, and being invited to more. When Nike offered to sponsor the team, Davis said things really took off. Four of the Swish teams are in Orange County, four are in San Diego and two are in Arizona. Swish won the prestigious Nike Nationals Tournament in Georgia last summer, defeating power team Boo Williams in what many regard as the club ball national championships. Davis is quick to list the numerous other tournaments Swish won. “If you look at our track record, we’ve been successful,” Davis said. Swish alumni include Candice Wiggins, Dymond Simon, Jeanette Pohlen, Kristen Mann, Shay Murphy, Jennifer Lacey and Lindsay Pluimer. Another power house program, the Cy-Fair Shock of Texas, has a similar story. Founded in 1997, the Shock took off three years later with the help of a Nike sponsorship. Founder and director Al Coleman said they’ve been one of the top eight squads in the nation since the year they began. Last year they had 12 teams based out of Houston, and this year they will triple that number as they go outside of that city to other towns. “All the coaches in our organization understand the game of basketball, and they work to develop that basketball mindset in our athletes,” Coleman said. “We do a great job of teaching that at an early age.” Two of the Shock’s most famous former members are sisters Nnemkadi and Chiney Ogwumike, who continue to make names for themselves. Mark Anger’s club, the East Bay Xplosion of Northern California, has gone the opposite route: they began big but have whittled down their teams to five. “We’re more of an elite program now,” he said. The 12-year-old club used to have five teams but now includes two top teams and a team for younger players. They EBX is not affiliated with any particular shoe brand, but like many teams, they draw athletes from all over their area to their Orinda practices. Alumnae from that club include Jayne Appel and Courtney and Ashley Paris. The Long Beach-based Cal Sparks were founded in 1999, but it was in 2005 that the club began to see explosive growth. Director Elbert Kinnebrew does not attribute that to anything in particular other than the continuing growth of the game. “We’ve grown in spite of the recession and the economy,” he said. The seven-team-strong Sparks do not have a shoe sponsor, but they go to numerous major summer tournaments every year and have helped quite a few of their players go on to play college basketball, such as Cierra Warren-Robertson. “We get some support from FILA, but we’re not affiliated with Nike at all,” Kinnebrew said. Nike declined to comment on its sponsorship of club basketball teams. But several club ball coaches said that in exchange for Nike sponsorship of their team, they are expected to participate in a certain number of Nike tournaments each July. Adidas spokesman Paul Jackiewicz said Adidas began sponsoring teams in 2000. “These programs give us the opportunity to connect with our target basketball consumer,” Jackiewicz said. “Our goal is to provide women’s basketball players with events and opportunities to develop their talent and showcase their skills for college coaches.” Jackiewicz added that the relationships Adidas built with club teams has helped the company further develop their brand. But regardless of when they were founded and whether or not they have a sponsor, the goal of club basketball team directors and coaches seems to be the same: get girls into college where they can play ball. And the explosive growth of the club game has changed the way NCAA coaches recruit players. Coaches used to primarily assess athletes while they played with their high school team. Now they mostly do this during the club ball season, from April through July, and especially during the July tournaments. Why? It’s more economical and efficient. “The clubs knew that if they got enough good kids together, that college coaches would come,” said Kathy Richey-Walton, who has coached at the club, high school and college levels for more than 20 years. “It’s a way to save time and money, and for [coaches] to see hundreds of kids at once instead of just a few. There are so many more games and tournaments in the summer now that hardly any college coaches come to high school games anymore.” The first viewing period of the year, where college coaches can see prospects play in club ball tournaments, is the second or third weekend in April. There are tournaments all during the month of July, save for a 4-5-day dead period in the middle of the month where no games are allowed. The club ball season culminates the last few days of July with major tournaments, such as Nike Nationals. This time frame is also useful because the first NCAA signing period is in mid-November, before high school season even starts. “Our goal every year is to have them ready to go by that July viewing period,” Anger said. “We’ve watched them grow up” Many club ball founders, such as Davis of Swish, began their programs as a way to help their own basketball-playing daughters, or the daughters of their co-founders. Such was also the case with Dallas-Forth Worth Elite. Co-Director Irving Butler helped found the team in 2003 with the late Marques Jackson and two other men. Both Butler and Jackson had daughters playing for other club organizations, and Butler said they wanted something new for their kids. “All four of us had kids in college, and we knew that the competition [for scholarships] was difficult,” Butler said. “We wanted to create something else for young ladies. Marques wanted the best competition there is.” Others decided to start programs to fill a need, and Matt Henna fits that category. The former Colorado high school coach founded Mile Hi Magic 11 years ago because he said there “weren’t enough club ball options” for girls in the state. By 2003 his club had 12 teams, but he’s scaled it back to six to keep the quality of the teams high. “We play a lot of tournaments in California and can compete with them,” Henna said. The founders of Seattle-based Tree of Hope did something similar. Thomas James and Damian Young started the program in 2002 not only because they saw a need for more teams, but because they wanted to have lower-cost club ball team opportunities available for girls. “The first and second years we paid for [the girls’ costs] on our own through donations from our church,” said Young, the head coach and assistant director. “We do charge now, but it’s much less than other teams charge.” Still others, such as Boo Williams, Louisiana Select and Chicago Bulls Elite, began their girls programs in the wake of the successes of their boys programs. Whatever the case, parents and athletes now have a wide selection of teams with different philosophies of play from which to choose. Anger said EBX is known for their defense, and especially their presses. Coleman characterized the Shock as being fundamentals-based. “We do a great job of teaching them the basics of the game at an early age,” he said. Boo Williams said he and his coaches emphasize specialty work. “I’m big on the development of skills – I’m really big on that,” he said. DFW Elite’s Butler said that beyond their trademark “suffocation defense,” coaches teach players how to be actively involved in the game. “We don’t just bring them in there and have them run a bunch of plays – we teach them how to make plays,” he said. “Basketball is a language, and if you don’t speak the language, you have a problem.” Team tryouts are usually in March, after the regular high school basketball season ends. Player dues for a club team range from hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending upon how much sponsorship a team has. Families are usually allowed to pay in installments. Some teams conduct fundraisers. Club ball teams originally drew from their immediate areas, but increasingly today, kids commute longer distances to their once- or twice-a-week practices. Last summer, Santa Ana, California-based Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis played for the Tennessee Flight. Perhaps not by coincidence, a few months ago the NCAA began regulating out-of-state players on club teams. Even those who stay in-state have their own tactics. “We don’t actively have tryouts,” Butler said. “We try to select kids. And coaches do call and recommend players to us.” Once players and their families do make a choice for a team, one thing is clear: tight relationships usually form – bonds that maintain long after a player has left a program. Butler said DFW Elite alum-turned Los Angeles Sparks reserve guard Andrea Riley jumps into team scrimmages when she’s in town for a visit. Williams said he would never ask a player to come back and say “thank you,” but many do. Coleman said Shock teams are close-knit. “It’s a real family flavor we have,” Coleman said. “We don’t just say that – we mean it.” Anger started coaching Appel when she was 10 years old, and he said it has been rewarding to witness her transformation into a pro player though hard work. “We’ve watched them grow up,” Anger said of his athletes. “Nothing really compares to that.” The High School vs. Club Ball Debate Though all agree that the rules of the recruiting game have changed, some don’t think those changes are for the good, while others say they’ve seen improvement. Perhaps at the heart of this debate is the relationship between high school and club ball coaches, or lack thereof. At best the two communicate. while at worst there is contention. Cal Sparks Director Kinnebrew regularly communicates with the high school coaches of all of his players, if he doesn’t actively work with them. He calls coaches to tell them if an athlete has missed a practice, or to check on her grades. Over the years, Kinnebrew has hired a handful of high school coaches to coach with the Sparks during the summer. Williams also hires a lot of high school coaches to work with his 85 girls teams. He said he wouldn’t have it any other way. “A club ball coach has got to work with high school coaches,” Williams said. “You’ve got to be on the same page and work together for the kids, because each one of us can do things that the other can’t do.” But Butler and DFW don’t maintain the same close ties with the high school coaches of their players. “We do try to work with high school coaches as much as we can,” he said. “But sometimes you’ll have the tension; they blame us for problems they have with kids, and vice versa.” The Shock’s Coleman has a completely different view. He said he has developed a lot of relationships with college coaches in trying to get his athletes scholarships. “The high school coach becomes irrelevant during the summertime recruiting period because they aren’t as accessible as we are,” he said. “When they’re done with their season, they go back to teaching math, or whatever. We’re working with the kids 365 days a year.” Richey-Walton, who has coached at Southwest Dekalb High School in Georgia for eight years after being a club ball coach, said attitudes like Coleman’s are more prevalent among club ball coaches. And she doesn’t favor the change. “The high school coach now sometimes feels left out,” she said. “I had a situation once where a college coach never made contact with me for one of my kids they were interested in.” Richey-Walton said the situation is indicative of the culture around recruiting now, and she called it short-sighted. “High school coaches are being overlooked, but they should get more respect,” she said. “High school coaches have to be certified, whereas anyone who wants to can start a club team.” Middle Tennessee State Coach Rick Insell, who has also coached club ball, said he and his staff contact the high school coach of an athlete they’re interested in. However, many other schools and coaches don’t have the same philosophy. “We’ll go through the high school coach, but keep the travel coach very much in the loop,” Insell said. “But I’ve noticed that travel team coaches usually don’t pay attention to the high school coach at all.” Oklahoma Coach Sherri Coale shares Insell’s philosophy. She said she is a “firm believer” in speaking to a high school coach about a player. She also likes to see an athlete play at her school. “It’s very important to me to see a girl play at her high school during the high school season,” Coale said. She coached high school for six years at the local Norman High School. Coale also sees detriments in the rise of club ball: primarily over-work and the loss of skill development. Athletes now go right from their high school season into club ball season with no break until August, after the July viewing period. That means that young bodies are playing for almost a year without a break. Coale said that because the goal of club ball teams is to play as many tournaments as possible to get athletes seen by colleges, that basketball fundamentals have taken a dive in recent years. “The greatest problem with young players today is that they don’t work on their game anymore – they don’t have time,” Coale said. “For the sake of volume playing, they’ve given up many of the skills.” Coale said this is evident, for instance, in the number of players she sees now that can’t perform skills with their weak hands. “There has to be a foundation to set the game on,” she said. “The best coaches demand that.” Some coaches like Coleman, however, say they’re enhancing the game. “We have a real sense of pride, because not only do we have a better brand of basketball, we’re sending kids to higher level colleges,” he said. Chicago Bulls Elite Coach Erin Babarskis sees a lot of benefit in the travel her teams do during the summer. “The players get exposed to different types of play,” she said. “For example, the east coast game is very different from the west coast game – west coast play seems to be faster-paced.” Babarskis said last summer, a team from London came to Chicago to play her team, which proved beneficial to both squads. Athletes say there are definite differences between high school and club ball, but that they need both. Kacy Swain, who will be a senior next year at Chaparral High School in Southern California, has already committed to UCLA. She said Chaparral’s league is strong, but still gives the edge to her club team, West Coast Premier, for intensity. “Club ball pace is quicker, faster and a lot more athletic than high school ball,” Swain said. “It’s because the level of competition is higher.” She credits the exposure she got playing for WCP for getting her college offers. And now that she’s made a choice, the pressure is off. “After years of playing hard, I’m learning to focus on just the game,” she said. July 6-15 is the first portion of the July viewing period this year. The dead period is July 16-21, where no games are allowed. July 22-31 marks the second portion of the July viewing period. DFW Elites begins the summer with the Big State Flava Jam, a popular tournament among college coach at Southern Methodist University, July 5-8. Cal Sparks www.calsparks.com California SWISH www.calswish.com EBX http://www.leaguelineup.com/welcome.asp?url=ebx DFW Elite http://dfwelitebasketball.com/modules/content/index.php?id=1 Boo Williams http://www.boowilliamsbball.com/ Mile Hi Magic http://www.milehimagic.com/page/page/5485819.htm Tree of Hope http://www.leaguelineup.com/topsites.asp?url=treeofhope&sid;=230918151 Sue Favor’s Blog: They’re Playing Basketball.

Everyone’s IQ spikes while playing the hindsight game.

 

Little bits and pieces that went unnoticed in the past are suddenly thrust under a 400x magnification microscope.

 

Telling signs we failed to recognize now stand out more than ever.

 

For USC’s football program, the A-List celebrities hovering in the near background at practices, meetings, and media events sent the wrong message.

 

It was cool then. It’s a red flag now.

 

The revolving door, where some of the world’s most recognizable entertainers came and went as they pleased, added to USC’s appeal while the Trojans rattled off record winning streaks, back-to-back national championships, and guaranteed player representation at the annual Heisman Trophy presentation in New York.

 

Whether Snoop Dogg casually strolled the sidelines on game days at the Coliseum or Will Ferrell rubbed elbows with players, lightening the mood at “all business” team meetings, famous faces had their place on the school bandwagon.

 

Nothing too strange from their vantage point, everyone enjoyed the ride.

 

From 2004-08, where the good times never ceased on campus, or on the field, Hollywood’s best and brightest fought over marquee college football tickets, not courtside seats at Lakers games.  What’s more, no one gave them a quizzical look for doing so.

 

Big names and big games created a level of glitz and glamour not seen at any college pigskin factory since lord knows when. 

 

This visible union between football playmakers and box office record breakers made amateur football fun, hip, and a hot ticket every time. A triple shot of entertainment swept through the LA landscape. No harm, just good vibes.

 

Most 18-year-old, red-blooded American males, even five star recruits, would sacrifice everything to don a yellow and scarlet helmet on Saturdays. Toss in a hustle and bustle atmosphere, where powerful stars take time out of their day to seek players out, and the USC pitch sounds all the more delicious.

 

I’d happily spend three hours in line just to snap a quick candid with Snooki. How could a wide-eyed blue chipper turn down national championships and Snoop Dogg?

 

That’s not to say Snoop, Ferrell, or the dozens of other celebrity USC supporters tampered or tinkered with the program in any way.

 

They’re fans, which they have every right to be.

 

Their relationships with Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart, LenDale White, or any other roster player may have been limited to a few quick handshakes and several “How are you doings?” right after a home win.

 

Yet with so much turmoil now surfacing at USC, every past nook and cranny commands attention.

 

What once seemed like a little innocent fun amongst star studded pals and performers is now a telling sign of how much the thriving program enjoyed the rush.

 

The context changed once the sanctions came down.

 

College football coaches pride themselves on strict discipline and tough love. Urban Meyer and Nick Saban crack smiles about once every national championship. It’s a year round job for both coaches and students. There’s no place for fun in such a high stakes atmosphere.

 

Pete Carroll provided a welcome exception. Pete brought the good natured antics to a team that almost forgot how to lose in the process. The work hard, play hard collective mentality his team adopted sat well with local and national football fans alike. That so many entertainers participated in some of the practical jokes and media moments only added to USC’s appeal.

 

Only now, when the happy-go-lucky chuckles and backslaps have quickly evaporated, does their influence seem questionable in its format. It looks like another example where a powerful program developed a big head and lost sight of its core values. It looks like another case of entitled athletes having the world at their feet. It looks like another situation where the athletic department didn’t protect their kids.

 

USC’s players acted properly, they couldn’t avoid the stars anyway. And why would they pass on such a limited opportunity, which could make any teenagers day, or even their week? And again, the rich and famous have every right to care.

 

Carroll, the assistant coaches, and school executives shoulder the blame on this one. They set up these meet-and-greets for their athletes. Critics would ask why they didn’t offer the same unique perks to the water polo team or the pre-health sorority. The answer, of course, is an easy one.

 

The football team brought national attention to the school and executives rewarded their money maker.

 

The jury’s still out on USC’s NCAA punishment. School officials have to wonder where they went wrong. While the constant celebrity presence didn’t shatter the program’s glass, the decision to allow such behavior led to a crack at the very least. 

   

It’s a big bullet point for how USC gradually adopted a self-satisfied persona while the football world applauded.   

AAU basketball is known for its high-powered offense, but the Boston Amateur Basketball Club’s 15-and-under team won the 2010 Boston Shootout yesterday behind a stifling defense in the second half.



Basketball - Amateur Athletic Union - Sport - Boston - United States

AAU basketball is known for its high-powered offense, but the Boston Amateur Basketball Club’s 15-and-under team won the 2010 Boston Shootout yesterday behind a stifling defense in the second half.



Basketball - Amateur Athletic Union - Sport - United States - Seattle Times

AAU basketball is known for its high-powered offense, but the Boston Amateur Basketball Club’s 15-and-under team won the 2010 Boston Shootout yesterday behind a stifling defense in the second half.



Basketball - Amateur Athletic Union - Sport - United States - Seattle Times

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THREE of four coaches the Malaysian Amateur Athletic Union (MAAU) wanted to sack were given a reprieve yesterday as state associations came under criticism for the Pahang Open fiasco involving national athletes.

FIFTEEN national elite athletes thumbed their noses at the Malaysian Amateur Athletic Union (MAAU) by competing in the Pahang Open in Temerloh last weekend at their own expense.

NATIONAL Sports Council director-general Datuk Zolkples Embong's fallout with Karim Ibrahim is reverberating through the corridors of the Malaysian Amateur Athletic Union (MAAU).

WHAT a tangled web the Malaysian Amateur Athletic Union (MAAU) has weaved.

MALAYSIAN Amateur Athletic Union (MAAU) deputy president Karim Ibrahim may have burnt his bridges with the National Sports Council (NSC) after being declared persona non grata by Datuk Zolkples Embong.

It's an expensive dream. But if we never dared to dream, Sam Provitt asked, what kind of world would this be? Provitt is now in his fifth year of coaching an Amateur Athletic Union basketball squad, spending almost every weekend on the road and trying to find sponsors to fund travel throughout the country for his team.

The New England Revolution 's 2010 second-round draft pick midfielder Zak Boggs has been named one of the six 2009 finalists for the prestigious Sullivan Award presented by the Amateur Athletic Union.

A lot was working against Saturday's 33rd Optimist All-Star basketball games.

The girls and boys games, featuring many of the area's top seniors, were going up against the nationally televised men's NCAA Final Four semifinals.

Many schools are out on holiday break, and the games were being played at quaint, off-the-beaten-track Center High School in Antelope. And the event's potentially biggest draw, Stanford-bound Sara James of CIF Division I state champion Oak Ridge, played earlier in the day at an all-star game in San Antonio, Texas.

Still, the 1,000-seat gym was nearly full, and the spectators went away well entertained.

"It was an excellent crowd, great support," said McClatchy's Harvey Tahara, who earned his 500th win of his coaching career in leading the South girls past the North 83-57. "There are a lot of things going on today, and there are a lot of reasons not to be here. But I think this is a tribute to the kids. People want to see all the talent we have in the area."

The story lines included:

• Metro Conference Co-MVPs Ariel Thomas of McClatchy and Brittany Shine of Sacramento High, fierce playmaking foes during league but friends and Amateur Athletic Union teammates otherwise, combined for 39 points to lead the South while Sac High's 6-foot-3 Kyra Dunn earned MVP honors for her shot-blocking and rebounding.

• Roseville's Katie Simon, proving Nebraska may have a steal in the 6-2 center, had a game-high 25 points as the North girls MVP. She muscled for points inside and knocked down three-pointers to keep the overmatched North girls in the game until the fourth quarter.

• Although representing one of the smallest schools in the area, Forest Lake Christian's 6-7 Josh Ritchart put on a big-time performance with 19 points, including four dunks, in leading the North boys to a 119-103 win over the South.

• Franklin's Michael Rosaroso, one of the smallest players on the court at 5-7, hit long-distance threes and fearlessly slashed for layups through the North's timber-topping lineup (five players 6-6 or taller) to earn South MVP honors with 19 points.

Unlike the long-time Optimist's summer football game, which is suffering from declining interest among players and fans, the all-star basketball games are doing better than ever since their move from the summer to the end of the basketball season in 2004.

"We used to have a lot more conflict during the summer," said Center's Ray Gagnon, who coached the North boys and has coached the Optimist girls as a head or assistant coach four times previously. "The kids are in better shape, the interest is stronger."

Only a handful of players from the four teams bowed out and all because of conflicts with other activities or events.

Some went above and beyond to participate.

Jesuit's MacKenzie McCullough cut short a family visit to Florida to fly back Friday so he could play for the North team.

The lanky Ritchart, the North boys MVP who put on a show of explosiveness and fundamentals, said playing in the Optimist game is something he has wanted to do since his freshman season. Although he signed a scholarship before the season with UC Davis, not many people had a chance to see him play for a 13-12 Forest Lake Christian team.

"It was fun to come out and show what I could do," Ritchart said. "Being at a small school, you're kind of under the radar. It's fun to play with all these talented guys."

Simon agreed.

"I had a blast," said Simon, who made 10 of 12 shots from the floor, including a three-pointer. "I expected we'd have a big crowd. Everyone was really excited about the game. They wanted to see the best come out and play against each other."

I'd be more excited about this Atlanta Journal-Constitution story [1] profiling 10-year-old basketball wunderkind Dakota Simms if it wasn't all so depressingly familiar. Headline: 10-year-old trains for NBA while parents really get a workout. He’s a sports brand in the making:  Pint-sized, but powerful. Confident, but not cocky. Fourth-grader Dakota Simms is training for an NBA payday though he has never actually played organized basketball. At 9, he showed off his skills as a mystery shooter during a break at an Atlanta Hawks game that earned him network sports appearances and national headlines [2]. Takvim.com, a Turkish publication, dubbed Dakota "Mini [Michael] Jordan [3]." What's all the fuss about? Dakota's coaches, who volunteer their time because they believe he has natural talent, say he's made 289,000 three-point shots in three years and averages 50 every five minutes during practice. Terence "Coach T" and Yoshi Simms of Norcross say their son, who turned 10 in February, has received offers from talent scouts looking to make him a star, but they don't want him to move too fast, too soon. They say a California casting agent asked them to relocate to be on call for acting and modeling auditions. An Atlanta sports agent has called, as have coaches with the Amateur Athletic Union basketball league. "We were not just totally ready to pick up and move to California," said Dakota's mother. But she is considering signing with a local talent agent for showbiz gigs. The video below, taken from a CNN profile that aired in November 2009, shows that indeed Dakota Simms is a very impressive ball player for his age. However, so is Jaylin Fleming. And so is Jashuan Agosto. And so are scads of other 4- [4], 5- [5], 6- [6], 7- [7], 8- [8] and 9- [9]year-old basketball prodigies. And they're not all boys. In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about Dakota Simms, his father notes that Ellen DeGeneres asked about him, but she does that with all the hot young basketball prospects. Apparently she did the same with Anthony Iglesia [10], already linked to above as a 7-year-old hotshot, shooting with Michael Jordan. This is not to denigrate Dakota Simms. He works hard, loves basketball, and can legitimately talk about the NBA more than the million other 9-year-olds who'll dream they'll play there. Instead, this is about the community that grows around a hotshot when he's barely out of diapers, with people who may or may not have the best interests of the child in mind. In that line from the story about Simms -- "Dakota's coaches, who volunteer their time because they believe he has natural talent" -- in so many cases it's more likely "Player X's coaches, who volunteer their time because they believe they'll get a huge payoff someday as part of his posse." (As an aside, one of his coaches, 6-foot-11 Cheyenne Throckmorton, has started social networks for tall people [11], and people with mohawk haircuts [12].) From the AJC story, it appears Dakota Simms' parents are handling things about as well as possible. They're not forcing the kid at gunpoint into the gym -- he loves to play. They are holding him back a little bit for public consumption, perhaps some wisdom on marketing gleaned from his mother's experience as a public relations professional [13]. (She also is starting a magazine [14] aimed at 10- to 17-year-old girls that promotes itself thusly: "Take the self empowerment from O, The Oprah Magazine, combine it with the eclectic fashion of Vogue and you have one of the greatest publications ever put into circulation." So Dakota isn't the only reach-for-the-stars type in his family.) But the danger is twofold. One is outlined in the excellent biography of Pete Maravich written by Mark Kriegel, Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich, in which your young prodigy grows up to be an alternately dull and weird human being because of obsession with one thing and one thing only. (Kriegel's book, which really is about Pete's father Press, a college basketball coach, is one of the greatest books written about sports parenting [15].) That's best worst-case scenario. The worst worst-case is that the prodigy grows up believing he (or she) is absolutely the greatest, gets fawned over at a tender age, and flames out because it turns out the rest of the sporting world caught up in size and talent -- or that no one around that prodigy ever thought about the possibility there might be 100 more like him right at that moment. I won't judge where Dakota Simms and his parents stand, because I don't know. But this message is as much for the coaches, would-be agents and fanboys and fangirls trying to promote a young talent, and the local media all too willing to do gee-whiz pieces on any 8-year-old who can dribble between his or her legs. And, this message is for anyone who puts up YouTube videos of any young athlete, in any sport, with titles like BEST 7-YEAR-OLD QB EVA!!!!!!! This was a trend that took off in 2007 after video of a 12-year-old (initially hyped as an 8-year-0ld) Los Alamitos, Calif., football prodigy named Cody Paul got tens of millions of views, combining every remixed version. Things happen when your child shows up as a sports prodigy on YouTube, and people notice him or her. One is that you get some oohs and aahs, and maybe you do get a college coach or Ellen DeGeneres calling. Another is that you get tasteless responses in comments and video responses like, simply put, "Better Than Cody Paul." [16] And the other thing -- well, it's an unknown. But how does that hype play on the child athlete, especially if he or she doesn't turn out to be the star that everyone saw on YouTube? If this commenter is to be believed, Cody Paul, now a sophomore, is 5-foot-3, 145 pounds [17]. Maybe he will be the greatest, very small running back the world has ever seen. But even if Cody Paul were 6-foot-3, it's got to be tough to live up to that preteen hype, and you know there are kids gunning for him just for that reason. You know what will really make a great athlete, the next LeBron, one of Dakota's favorite NBA players? What's most incredible about LeBron James is not his amazing 6-foot-8, 250-pound frame, or his basketball IQ. It's that LeBron at an early age was hyped as the next Michael Jordan, and at every step he actually exceeded expectations. There's no book on how to handle that hype, or to know what a child can handle it. But one way everyone surrounding a youth prodigy can handle that hype is not to feed it. [1] http://www.ajc.com/sports/10-year-old-trains-396503.html [2] http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/11/16/teen.sports.prodigies/index.html [3] http://www.takvim.com.tr/Aktuel/2009/11/18/minik_jordana_10_milyon_dolar [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEzXuXzcVhM [5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l144jInETE [6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DawwofidJBQ [7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzhIjpSdQX0 [8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umrMD8J5MI8 [9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Fclfrp3vo [10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utbzMMvQ-KA [11] http://www.thetallstreetjournal.com [12] http://www.mohawksrock.com/ [13] http://www.urbanprofessionals.com/5_member_details.php?mem_id=184 [14] http://www.atlantagirlmagazine.com/ [15] http://www.amazon.com/Pistol-Life-Maravich-Mark-Kriegel/dp/0743284976 [16] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXQhlfBULyI [17] http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:I4n0M8grDxQJ:www.insiderforums.com/forums/archive/index.php%3Ft-24734.html+%22cody+paul%22+%22los+alamitos%22+high+school&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Business of Game Quells Thrill New York Times A more troubling assessment was offered by Russell Smith, the coach of the New York Gauchos, one of the major arteries in New York's Amateur Athletic Union ...

Derek Swafford is sleep deprived as it is. As the dean of students at Sacramento High School, a counselor and teacher at Sacramento City College, and coach of the Dragons' boys basketball team that came within two minutes of reaching the CIF Division III state championship, he doesn't have time to count sheep.

He counts layups, rebounds, free throws.

He tracks grades and attendance.

He even maintains a list of colleges pursuing highly regarded junior Josiah Turner, the latest in an expanding list of talented past and present prospects from Sac High, including San Diego State's Chase Tapley.

So Swafford has no interest in a sales job and even less interest in perfecting a sales pitch. His coaching philosophy is basic and blunt: You're either with me or you're gone.

"If you don't want to be on our team and go to our school, I want you to go somewhere else and be happy," Swafford said after the Dragons fell to Bishop O'Dowd 57-50 in the Northern California finals at Arco Arena. "I'm fine with that. We have a style that we know works, because we get (to the postseason) regularly. We don't back off that."

Despite the loss to a bigger, deeper, more balanced opponent, Swafford was upbeat about the future. He expects sophomore Darius Graham to become a major star, thinks junior center Robert Garrett will improve his rebounding, and believes Turner is as talented as any player he has coached – and deserving of every letter, visit and text message he receives from the recruiters at UCLA, Kansas, Cal or wherever.

And isn't this a relief? Turner says he's sticking with Sac High. End of speculation about a possible transfer. The only people pounding on his door these days should be recruiters with the Bruins, Jayhawks and Bears, etc., not anyone affiliated with prep schools in Nevada or more celebrated high school programs in Southern California.

"No more thoughts of transferring," Turner confirmed Saturday. "This is the team I should be with. This is my home. I should be here. The decision came to me during the season."

Not that he wasn't tempted. He was tempted. He almost became another casualty of the sleazy high school recruiting wars that afflict prep sports like a chronic flu. Sac-Joaquin Section Commissioner Pete Saco is smart to be such a suspicious fellow.

The CIF has plenty of rules and regulations, but as with any tax system, creative, manipulative minds still find the loopholes and change of address forms.

"But you know what?" said Swafford, shaking his head. "I don't even worry about that stuff. I just run my program."

And once again the Dragons were a blast, an energetic, entertaining blur of activity at both ends. They pressured O'Dowd into 25 turnovers and kept the game close despite a 57-28 disadvantage on the boards. Turner's transition layup even nudged Sac High into a 50-49 lead with 2:55 remaining.

That was it for the Dragons, though. No more points. No more scene-stealing plays. No answer for James Thomas' dagger three-pointer from the corner or Anders Haas' surprising, crippling, stutter-step drive.

Turner, a smooth, explosive scorer who has long arms and powerful legs, caught the worst of O'Dowd's wrath. Converting only 5 of 14 field-goal attempts, he was harassed fullcourt, smothered on the perimeter, gang-tackled whenever he approached the basket, virtually tracked wherever he went.

Yet as he lingered in the corridor afterward, there were no regrets, nor any second thoughts about his decision to stay at Sac High, either. The offseason will be spent traveling with his Amateur Athletic Union team, working on his off-ball defense and extending his shooting range and, in essence, preparing for a superb senior season.

"My mid-range game is my strength," Turner said, "and I probably need to get a little bigger. I can get better."

That alone should make Swafford's day.

Baylor did everything it could in its unsuccessful pursuit of John Wall, even going as far as to hire his Amateur Athletic Union coach.

Sara James cruises along the suburban streets of El Dorado Hills, a familiar figure in the 2006 silver Scion with the Stanford sticker on the back. The Oak Ridge High School senior – and last year's Bee Player of the Year – also is known for plotting the most direct route from Point A to Point B.

Math, science, academics.

Yep, she's one of those.

But then there's the basketball, the humanitarian trips to build houses in Mexico, the Saturday mornings spent officiating youth basketball, the afternoons devoted to tending her grandparents' lawn to earn gas money, Amateur Athletic Union travel and occasional trips to the movies.

The silver-spoon-in-mouth approach never applied to James, the multidimensional woman/guard whose prep résumé includes everything except a state title. Even that's listed on the agenda as a possibility, though written in pencil, not pen.

The Trojans must win two more games to reach the state finals, beginning tonight against talented Deer Valley of Antioch in the Northern California regionals at Oak Ridge. Though the challenge is daunting – no Division I girls team from the area has ever won the title – James is stubborn enough to believe her team can break the streak.

Tell her she can't do something, say those close to her, and she will attempt to prove you wrong in her uniquely methodical, analytical way.

"When Sara was a freshman, she wanted to go out for the volleyball team," recalled her mother, Kelly James, a school nurse. "She had never played volleyball before, so she gets on the Internet and researches the different hits, strokes. It's pitch black out. But then she positions a spotlight on the driveway and spends the entire evening practicing the different (techniques). And she made the team.

"I don't know exactly where that drive comes from, but we always felt it was important for our kids to work for what they want."

She rakes, she moves, she refs. In her jeans, gray sweatshirt, Converse sneakers, with a backpack slung over her shoulders, Sara James resembles many of the other kids on campus who flip burgers for a few extra bucks. She is warm and friendly, smiles often, and speaks thoughtfully about her dreams and desires.

But on the court she morphs into a ruggedly intense, relentless competitor. A slender 5-foot-10, with strong, powerful legs, she is daring, driven, persistent. She misses a shot and immediately pursues the rebound. She grabs the ball and pushes it upcourt. She is in constant motion, running, rebounding, shooting, swiping passes, deflecting balls, doing whatever it takes to win.

Trojans coach Steve White knew James was special when, as an eighth-grader, she scrimmaged the varsity players and outplayed some of the starters.

"I told our (junior varsity) coach, 'Don't plan on having Sara on your roster,' " said White, chuckling. "Even back then her skills were apparent."

In the ensuing four years, James virtually rewrote the program's history book. She is averaging 22.2 points, 9.8 rebounds and 3.5 steals in a mere 20 minutes, maintaining a consistency that attracted offers from several major colleges.

There was that. Almost too much of that. Though James seldom gets flustered or overwhelmed, neither she nor her parents miss the recruiting process. Handwritten letters arrived by the hundreds. By the week. Telephone calls were incessant, continuing into the late evenings, sometimes into the wee hours.

"One night, Sara was on the phone, and it was really late," said her mother, "and I asked, 'What are you doing?' These coaches leave messages every day and tell her to call back, and typical Sara, she does what she's told. Sometimes I just had to tell her to hang up and do her schoolwork."

James eventually signed with Stanford because of the campus, the academics, the program's rich history and Tara VanDerveer's coaching. Plus, she can ditch the Scion and get back on her bicycle.

"That car never really fit me," she said, grinning. "I'm looking forward to riding my bike and trying something new."

Leslie Leong, center, and her Kennedy High School teammates celebrate a Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal win over McClatchy on Wednesday night in Stockton.

The McClatchy Lions and Kennedy Cougars have tussled for decades, their prep rivalry among the most ferocious in the region. Yet sometimes – especially within Sacramento's Asian American community during tournament time – the dynamics become confusing, confounding, overwhelming.

Imagine cheering against your sister or your son? Shoving an elbow into the abdomen of a best friend? Marrying someone whose letter jacket is McClatchy red when yours is Kennedy green?

"I'm still a Cougar," insisted Julie Ota, a former All-City player at Kennedy. "My husband was All-City at McClatchy and now coaches at McClatchy. And our daughter plays for McClatchy. So as you can imagine, we have some pretty interesting conversations."

What makes this rivalry between schools five miles apart so uniquely fascinating is that its fan base encompasses much of the region's Asian community and, in some respects, traces back to the early 1940s, when an estimated 120,000 residents of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps.

Baseball was far more popular among Asians before World War II, but basketball leagues featuring males and females flourished in the camps. When the final camp closed in 1946 and the Japanese were relocated, they formed leagues throughout the country, with basketball a primary means of furthering traditions and securing cultural and social bonds among families.

"When we relocated, we had to form our own leagues because of segregation," recalled Tsuto Ota, 83, the family patriarch and a native Sacramentan who spent four years at Tule Lake. "We couldn't even join the American Bowling Congress, so we started our own bowling leagues, too.

"At some point, we became more assimilated, and while some still played baseball, basketball became more and more popular among younger generations."

Girls game on the rise

Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation officials estimate 850 to 1,000 area youngsters – many as young as 5 or 6 – compete in Asian church or instructional leagues, or play for club teams and Amateur Athletic Union squads. The number of participants is estimated at more than 10,000 in Southern California and several thousand in the Bay Area.

The advantages of competing extensively in organized basketball programs has benefited the area's boys prep teams for years, but lately, the girls are the ones moving up the rankings, storming the court and packing the stands.

When the Kennedy and McClatchy girls teams were ranked Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, their Jan. 23 meeting at McClatchy's main gym attracted a raucous, sold-out crowd. Another 50 or so partisans – relatives, friends, friends of friends – had to peer through the narrow windows from outside.

The scene inside was a vivid spectacle of sports and community, and except for the sellout part, was repeated Wednesday night, when the teams met in a California Interscholastic Federation Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal at the much larger Pacific facility in Stockton.

The Legion of Lions fan club members occupied sections of bleachers and stood throughout. They painted assorted body parts red, their voices raised to heckle the Cougars and applaud McClatchy. Across the court, members of Kennedy's Green Scream Machine maintained an equally vocal and colorful presence.

"The kids play on other teams at other times of the year, but the epicenter is Kennedy and McClatchy," said Rod Kunisaki, former president of the Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation and father of former Lions star and current assistant Jessica Kunisaki.

"When Jessica lost to Kennedy, some of those other kids were my cousins. But I would tell them: 'You can't come over to the house for three days. (Laugh) Don't even knock on the door.' "

Take a closer look, though, and the audience reflects basketball's increasing significance within the Asian community, with almost everyone related or connected to someone favoring the opponent's color; after awhile, the colors begin to blur.

"Some of us have been playing together since we were in middle school," said Kennedy forward Leslie Leong, "and our parents and grandparents are good friends. And while we're competitive, one of the best things about playing are the socials and the dances afterward.

"I don't want to say basketball is our life, but it's a very big part of our life from the time we're little kids."

Friends become family

When teary Lions senior Tricia Ota limped off the court Wednesday night, her left leg protected by a balky brace, she was embraced by several of her opponents. Having overcome multiple knee surgeries since her freshman season, she rejoined the team only weeks ago to put a glossier finish on her basketball experience and give a close friend a fond farewell.

"When we won the section title three years ago," said Ota, "that was the best moment of my life. I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this.

"It's not just a sport. Ariel and I have been together since freshman year, and she has been so supportive of me through everything. She has become one of my best friends. We're so appreciative that she stayed at McClatchy."

Ariel, of course, is the highly recruited Ariel Thomas, a Bee Player of the Year candidate and future member of Paul Westhead's squad at Oregon. Thomas, who is African American, is everything most of the current Lions are not: quick and athletic, tall enough to excel at the next level, and owner of a major college basketball scholarship.

One of the issues confronting the McClatchy girls team is increasingly common to the boys – Thomas routinely was approached and urged to transfer to a more dominant program such as Sacramento High School or Kennedy.

"We don't have a lot of post players," joked Lions coach Harvey Tahara, who enjoyed previous success coaching the boys. "If we've got a kid who is 5-5 or 5-6, they're automatically in the post. That's probably why the girls have become more dominant.

"Size is more of a factor for boys at the high school level. But we were able to build around Ariel, and the fact she stayed says a lot about her loyalty."

Thomas resisted pressure to transfer from her father, among others. Despite occasional frustrations, she has no regrets.

"Most of the teams we play against are taller," she said, "and other players look down on you, like, 'Wow, your team is so short.'

"But we maximize our strengths, which is a great coach, fundamentals and teamwork. We try to run them (foes) out of the gym. Plus, these are my close friends. McClatchy has become a family to me."

Blurring the lines

The thorniest issue facing the Asian leagues involves the very definition of family, or ethnicity. Through the years, leagues originally restricted to Japanese expanded to include other Asians. As intermarriage and assimilation persists, this has led to other questions regarding ethnicity and eligibility.

"If you look at most of the leagues," said Christina Chin, a UC Davis graduate and UCLA doctoral student who has written about basketball's influence on the Asian community, "the numbers vary a lot. It's very informal. What percentage of you has to be Asian to compete? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

"These leagues were started because of segregation, so Japanese Americans had their own space and could preserve their culture. But in my research, what I have found is that the rules are changing. The older folks want to keep it the way it was, but the kids say, 'I think everybody should be able to play.' I believe the next generation will change and reflect those views."

In "Crossover," Justin Lin's 2000 documentary about the Japanese American leagues, 7-year-old Tricia Ota appears in one scene, dribbling a basketball. A decade later, after her Lions were routed by the more balanced Cougars, she was asked to look beyond the Northern California tournament that starts this week.

"I don't like the idea of having a league just for Asians," she said. "I like the idea of broadening (the rosters) on the church and club teams. One of the leagues in (the Bay Area) didn't let one of our teammates (St. Francis' Aurora Singh) play in a tournament last summer, so we all decided not to play. We didn't feel it was right.

"Basketball isn't supposed to be about that. It's not just a sport."

Coach Harvey Tahara's emphasis on teamwork has helped the McClatchy High School girls basketball team become a regional power.

McClatchy's Tricia Ota, center, has battled knee injuries, but rejoined the team late in her senior season. "I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this," Ota said.

Leslie Leong, center, and her Kennedy High School teammates celebrate a Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal win over McClatchy on Wednesday night in Stockton.

The McClatchy Lions and Kennedy Cougars have tussled for decades, their prep rivalry among the most ferocious in the region. Yet sometimes – especially within Sacramento's Asian American community during tournament time – the dynamics become confusing, confounding, overwhelming.

Imagine cheering against your sister or your son? Shoving an elbow into the abdomen of a best friend? Marrying someone whose letter jacket is McClatchy red when yours is Kennedy green?

"I'm still a Cougar," insisted Julie Ota, a former All-City player at Kennedy. "My husband was All-City at McClatchy and now coaches at McClatchy. And our daughter plays for McClatchy. So as you can imagine, we have some pretty interesting conversations."

What makes this rivalry between schools five miles apart so uniquely fascinating is that its fan base encompasses much of the region's Asian community and, in some respects, traces back to the early 1940s, when an estimated 120,000 residents of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps.

Baseball was far more popular among Asians before World War II, but basketball leagues featuring males and females flourished in the camps. When the final camp closed in 1946 and the Japanese were relocated, they formed leagues throughout the country, with basketball a primary means of furthering traditions and securing cultural and social bonds among families.

"When we relocated, we had to form our own leagues because of segregation," recalled Tsuto Ota, 83, the family patriarch and a native Sacramentan who spent four years at Tule Lake. "We couldn't even join the American Bowling Congress, so we started our own bowling leagues, too.

"At some point, we became more assimilated, and while some still played baseball, basketball became more and more popular among younger generations."

Girls game on the rise

Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation officials estimate 850 to 1,000 area youngsters – many as young as 5 or 6 – compete in Asian church or instructional leagues, or play for club teams and Amateur Athletic Union squads. The number of participants is estimated at more than 10,000 in Southern California and several thousand in the Bay Area.

The advantages of competing extensively in organized basketball programs has benefited the area's boys prep teams for years, but lately, the girls are the ones moving up the rankings, storming the court and packing the stands.

When the Kennedy and McClatchy girls teams were ranked Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, their Jan. 23 meeting at McClatchy's main gym attracted a raucous, sold-out crowd. Another 50 or so partisans – relatives, friends, friends of friends – had to peer through the narrow windows from outside.

The scene inside was a vivid spectacle of sports and community, and except for the sellout part, was repeated Wednesday night, when the teams met in a California Interscholastic Federation Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal at the much larger Pacific facility in Stockton.

The Legion of Lions fan club members occupied sections of bleachers and stood throughout. They painted assorted body parts red, their voices raised to heckle the Cougars and applaud McClatchy. Across the court, members of Kennedy's Green Scream Machine maintained an equally vocal and colorful presence.

"The kids play on other teams at other times of the year, but the epicenter is Kennedy and McClatchy," said Rod Kunisaki, former president of the Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation and father of former Lions star and current assistant Jessica Kunisaki.

"When Jessica lost to Kennedy, some of those other kids were my cousins. But I would tell them: 'You can't come over to the house for three days. (Laugh) Don't even knock on the door.' "

Take a closer look, though, and the audience reflects basketball's increasing significance within the Asian community, with almost everyone related or connected to someone favoring the opponent's color; after awhile, the colors begin to blur.

"Some of us have been playing together since we were in middle school," said Kennedy forward Leslie Leong, "and our parents and grandparents are good friends. And while we're competitive, one of the best things about playing are the socials and the dances afterward.

"I don't want to say basketball is our life, but it's a very big part of our life from the time we're little kids."

Friends become family

When teary Lions senior Tricia Ota limped off the court Wednesday night, her left leg protected by a balky brace, she was embraced by several of her opponents. Having overcome multiple knee surgeries since her freshman season, she rejoined the team only weeks ago to put a glossier finish on her basketball experience and give a close friend a fond farewell.

"When we won the section title three years ago," said Ota, "that was the best moment of my life. I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this.

"It's not just a sport. Ariel and I have been together since freshman year, and she has been so supportive of me through everything. She has become one of my best friends. We're so appreciative that she stayed at McClatchy."

Ariel, of course, is the highly recruited Ariel Thomas, a Bee Player of the Year candidate and future member of Paul Westhead's squad at Oregon. Thomas, who is African American, is everything most of the current Lions are not: quick and athletic, tall enough to excel at the next level, and owner of a major college basketball scholarship.

One of the issues confronting the McClatchy girls team is increasingly common to the boys – Thomas routinely was approached and urged to transfer to a more dominant program such as Sacramento High School or Kennedy.

"We don't have a lot of post players," joked Lions coach Harvey Tahara, who enjoyed previous success coaching the boys. "If we've got a kid who is 5-5 or 5-6, they're automatically in the post. That's probably why the girls have become more dominant.

"Size is more of a factor for boys at the high school level. But we were able to build around Ariel, and the fact she stayed says a lot about her loyalty."

Thomas resisted pressure to transfer from her father, among others. Despite occasional frustrations, she has no regrets.

"Most of the teams we play against are taller," she said, "and other players look down on you, like, 'Wow, your team is so short.'

"But we maximize our strengths, which is a great coach, fundamentals and teamwork. We try to run them (foes) out of the gym. Plus, these are my close friends. McClatchy has become a family to me."

Blurring the lines

The thorniest issue facing the Asian leagues involves the very definition of family, or ethnicity. Through the years, leagues originally restricted to Japanese expanded to include other Asians. As intermarriage and assimilation persists, this has led to other questions regarding ethnicity and eligibility.

"If you look at most of the leagues," said Christina Chin, a UC Davis graduate and UCLA doctoral student who has written about basketball's influence on the Asian community, "the numbers vary a lot. It's very informal. What percentage of you has to be Asian to compete? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

"These leagues were started because of segregation, so Japanese Americans had their own space and could preserve their culture. But in my research, what I have found is that the rules are changing. The older folks want to keep it the way it was, but the kids say, 'I think everybody should be able to play.' I believe the next generation will change and reflect those views."

In "Crossover," Justin Lin's 2000 documentary about the Japanese American leagues, 7-year-old Tricia Ota appears in one scene, dribbling a basketball. A decade later, after her Lions were routed by the more balanced Cougars, she was asked to look beyond the Northern California tournament that starts this week.

"I don't like the idea of having a league just for Asians," she said. "I like the idea of broadening (the rosters) on the church and club teams. One of the leagues in (the Bay Area) didn't let one of our teammates (St. Francis' Aurora Singh) play in a tournament last summer, so we all decided not to play. We didn't feel it was right.

"Basketball isn't supposed to be about that. It's not just a sport."

Coach Harvey Tahara's emphasis on teamwork has helped the McClatchy High School girls basketball team become a regional power.

McClatchy's Tricia Ota, center, has battled knee injuries, but rejoined the team late in her senior season. "I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this," Ota said.

Leslie Leong, center, and her Kennedy High School teammates celebrate a Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal win over McClatchy on Wednesday night in Stockton.

The McClatchy Lions and Kennedy Cougars have tussled for decades, their prep rivalry among the most ferocious in the region. Yet sometimes – especially within Sacramento's Asian American community during tournament time – the dynamics become confusing, confounding, overwhelming.

Imagine cheering against your sister or your son? Shoving an elbow into the abdomen of a best friend? Marrying someone whose letter jacket is McClatchy red when yours is Kennedy green?

"I'm still a Cougar," insisted Julie Ota, a former All-City player at Kennedy. "My husband was All-City at McClatchy and now coaches at McClatchy. And our daughter plays for McClatchy. So as you can imagine, we have some pretty interesting conversations."

What makes this rivalry between schools five miles apart so uniquely fascinating is that its fan base encompasses much of the region's Asian community and, in some respects, traces back to the early 1940s, when an estimated 120,000 residents of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps.

Baseball was far more popular among Asians before World War II, but basketball leagues featuring males and females flourished in the camps. When the final camp closed in 1946 and the Japanese were relocated, they formed leagues throughout the country, with basketball a primary means of furthering traditions and securing cultural and social bonds among families.

"When we relocated, we had to form our own leagues because of segregation," recalled Tsuto Ota, 83, the family patriarch and a native Sacramentan who spent four years at Tule Lake. "We couldn't even join the American Bowling Congress, so we started our own bowling leagues, too.

"At some point, we became more assimilated, and while some still played baseball, basketball became more and more popular among younger generations."

Girls game on the rise

Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation officials estimate 850 to 1,000 area youngsters – many as young as 5 or 6 – compete in Asian church or instructional leagues, or play for club teams and Amateur Athletic Union squads. The number of participants is estimated at more than 10,000 in Southern California and several thousand in the Bay Area.

The advantages of competing extensively in organized basketball programs has benefited the area's boys prep teams for years, but lately, the girls are the ones moving up the rankings, storming the court and packing the stands.

When the Kennedy and McClatchy girls teams were ranked Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, their Jan. 23 meeting at McClatchy's main gym attracted a raucous, sold-out crowd. Another 50 or so partisans – relatives, friends, friends of friends – had to peer through the narrow windows from outside.

The scene inside was a vivid spectacle of sports and community, and except for the sellout part, was repeated Wednesday night, when the teams met in a California Interscholastic Federation Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal at the much larger Pacific facility in Stockton.

The Legion of Lions fan club members occupied sections of bleachers and stood throughout. They painted assorted body parts red, their voices raised to heckle the Cougars and applaud McClatchy. Across the court, members of Kennedy's Green Scream Machine maintained an equally vocal and colorful presence.

"The kids play on other teams at other times of the year, but the epicenter is Kennedy and McClatchy," said Rod Kunisaki, former president of the Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation and father of former Lions star and current assistant Jessica Kunisaki.

"When Jessica lost to Kennedy, some of those other kids were my cousins. But I would tell them: 'You can't come over to the house for three days. (Laugh) Don't even knock on the door.' "

Take a closer look, though, and the audience reflects basketball's increasing significance within the Asian community, with almost everyone related or connected to someone favoring the opponent's color; after awhile, the colors begin to blur.

"Some of us have been playing together since we were in middle school," said Kennedy forward Leslie Leong, "and our parents and grandparents are good friends. And while we're competitive, one of the best things about playing are the socials and the dances afterward.

"I don't want to say basketball is our life, but it's a very big part of our life from the time we're little kids."

Friends become family

When teary Lions senior Tricia Ota limped off the court Wednesday night, her left leg protected by a balky brace, she was embraced by several of her opponents. Having overcome multiple knee surgeries since her freshman season, she rejoined the team only weeks ago to put a glossier finish on her basketball experience and give a close friend a fond farewell.

"When we won the section title three years ago," said Ota, "that was the best moment of my life. I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this.

"It's not just a sport. Ariel and I have been together since freshman year, and she has been so supportive of me through everything. She has become one of my best friends. We're so appreciative that she stayed at McClatchy."

Ariel, of course, is the highly recruited Ariel Thomas, a Bee Player of the Year candidate and future member of Paul Westhead's squad at Oregon. Thomas, who is African American, is everything most of the current Lions are not: quick and athletic, tall enough to excel at the next level, and owner of a major college basketball scholarship.

One of the issues confronting the McClatchy girls team is increasingly common to the boys – Thomas routinely was approached and urged to transfer to a more dominant program such as Sacramento High School or Kennedy.

"We don't have a lot of post players," joked Lions coach Harvey Tahara, who enjoyed previous success coaching the boys. "If we've got a kid who is 5-5 or 5-6, they're automatically in the post. That's probably why the girls have become more dominant.

"Size is more of a factor for boys at the high school level. But we were able to build around Ariel, and the fact she stayed says a lot about her loyalty."

Thomas resisted pressure to transfer from her father, among others. Despite occasional frustrations, she has no regrets.

"Most of the teams we play against are taller," she said, "and other players look down on you, like, 'Wow, your team is so short.'

"But we maximize our strengths, which is a great coach, fundamentals and teamwork. We try to run them (foes) out of the gym. Plus, these are my close friends. McClatchy has become a family to me."

Blurring the lines

The thorniest issue facing the Asian leagues involves the very definition of family, or ethnicity. Through the years, leagues originally restricted to Japanese expanded to include other Asians. As intermarriage and assimilation persists, this has led to other questions regarding ethnicity and eligibility.

"If you look at most of the leagues," said Christina Chin, a UC Davis graduate and UCLA doctoral student who has written about basketball's influence on the Asian community, "the numbers vary a lot. It's very informal. What percentage of you has to be Asian to compete? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

"These leagues were started because of segregation, so Japanese Americans had their own space and could preserve their culture. But in my research, what I have found is that the rules are changing. The older folks want to keep it the way it was, but the kids say, 'I think everybody should be able to play.' I believe the next generation will change and reflect those views."

In "Crossover," Justin Lin's 2000 documentary about the Japanese American leagues, 7-year-old Tricia Ota appears in one scene, dribbling a basketball. A decade later, after her Lions were routed by the more balanced Cougars, she was asked to look beyond the Northern California tournament that starts this week.

"I don't like the idea of having a league just for Asians," she said. "I like the idea of broadening (the rosters) on the church and club teams. One of the leagues in (the Bay Area) didn't let one of our teammates (St. Francis' Aurora Singh) play in a tournament last summer, so we all decided not to play. We didn't feel it was right.

"Basketball isn't supposed to be about that. It's not just a sport."

Coach Harvey Tahara's emphasis on teamwork has helped the McClatchy High School girls basketball team become a regional power.

McClatchy's Tricia Ota, center, has battled knee injuries, but rejoined the team late in her senior season. "I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this," Ota said.

Carl Landry is a hard worker who brings a good attitude to the Kings. " … This is a good team, a special team," he said.

Carl Landry sneaks up on people. Though he stands 6-foot-8 and carries 248 pounds on a thick, muscular frame, sometimes he stares in the mirror and blinks twice, making sure that even he sees what he sees.

It's me, he tells himself.

It's me.

"I have developed so fast the last two years that it's kind of amazing," Landry said with a grin. "From my rookie year, to today, with people talking about me being a good player in this league. I never thought I would come this far. Who knows where I'll be in another 21/2 years?"

Obtained by the Kings in the trade that sent Kevin Martin to the Houston Rockets, Landry, 26, is one of those players who confound college recruiters and NBA scouts because they come late to the game. He didn't play organized basketball until his freshman year in high school, and then got cut before the season started. He tried out again the following year and made the team, but as he quickly points out, he was never the best player, never the guy projected as an NBA starter.

Those notorious Amateur Athletic Union camps? Recruiters badgering his parents? Agents tracking down his cell phone number? Relatives counting on him to make it big and help pay their bills? That was never his life. The oldest of Mark and Anita Landry's five children, this was the disciplined, responsible son who rushed home after school because he had a paper route, who became the first family member to earn a college degree, and who, even as a grown man, still seems awed by his success.

"When I graduated high school, nobody recruited me except a couple Division III programs," said Landry. "ACT, SAT, I didn't know anything about that stuff. So I decided to go the juco (community college) route and kind of take it from there."

After two seasons at Vincennes University, Landry transferred to Purdue and became the Boilermakers' leading scorer and rebounder. A year later he redshirted because of torn knee ligaments, then returned to lead the Boilermakers in points and rebounds, earning 2006-07 All-Big Ten honors and invitations to pre-draft camps.

Despite his college stats, NBA executives studied his size and position, and wrote a big, fat question mark on the draft board. Was he big enough, long enough, to play power forward at the next level? The Seattle SuperSonics finally plucked him with the first pick of the second round (No. 31) in 2007, then quickly traded him to the Rockets for a future second round pick.

Capitalizing on opportunities presented by the recurring injury absences of Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady, Landry, who has round, cherubic features and playful, thoughtful, expressive eyes, soon emerged as the Rockets' effective and popular sixth man. Diving for loose balls. Scoring in transition. Converting the mid-range jumper. Putting a body on defenders. Giving Rick Adelman a low-post presence, particularly in the fourth quarter.

Landry's accelerated development was slowed, if only briefly, by a shooting that occurred while he was driving home following a trip on March 17, 2009. Recounting the incident in a matter-of-fact, almost detached voice, the third-year veteran tells of being sideswiped by another vehicle. Of exiting the car to assess the damage. Of being shot in the left calf by one of two suspects who have never been identified. Of running for his life.

Though the wound was superficial, Landry continues to wear a protective black sleeve to conceal the scar.

"I wondered if it would be (traumatizing)," he said, "but I was able to put it behind me. Everybody in Houston was really supportive."

While maintaining warm feelings for Houston and the Rockets' organization, Landry has no complaints about the trade. He is excited about becoming a starter and enjoys being surrounded by young, enthusiastic peers. And though he's a subpar rebounder for his position, his offensive versatility and physicality down low already have endeared him to the coaching staff (Coach Paul Westphal was increasingly disturbed by Martin's feeble defense).

"It's getting better every day," said Landry, "and I'm telling you; this is a good team, a special team. We're not having a great season this year, only won 19 games. But for a moment (Friday night against Utah), it felt like a playoff game. There are guys here who want to work hard, who want to be good. And growing up, I learned the value of working hard."

Carl Landry is a hard worker who brings a good attitude to the Kings. " … This is a good team, a special team," he said.

Carl Landry sneaks up on people. Though he stands 6-foot-8 and carries 248 pounds on a thick, muscular frame, sometimes he stares in the mirror and blinks twice, making sure that even he sees what he sees.

It's me, he tells himself.

It's me.

"I have developed so fast the last two years that it's kind of amazing," Landry said with a grin. "From my rookie year, to today, with people talking about me being a good player in this league. I never thought I would come this far. Who knows where I'll be in another 21/2 years?"

Obtained by the Kings in the trade that sent Kevin Martin to the Houston Rockets, Landry, 26, is one of those players who confound college recruiters and NBA scouts because they come late to the game. He didn't play organized basketball until his freshman year in high school, and then got cut before the season started. He tried out again the following year and made the team, but as he quickly points out, he was never the best player, never the guy projected as an NBA starter.

Those notorious Amateur Athletic Union camps? Recruiters badgering his parents? Agents tracking down his cell phone number? Relatives counting on him to make it big and help pay their bills? That was never his life. The oldest of Mark and Anita Landry's five children, this was the disciplined, responsible son who rushed home after school because he had a paper route, who became the first family member to earn a college degree, and who, even as a grown man, still seems awed by his success.

"When I graduated high school, nobody recruited me except a couple Division III programs," said Landry. "ACT, SAT, I didn't know anything about that stuff. So I decided to go the juco (community college) route and kind of take it from there."

After two seasons at Vincennes University, Landry transferred to Purdue and became the Boilermakers' leading scorer and rebounder. A year later he redshirted because of torn knee ligaments, then returned to lead the Boilermakers in points and rebounds, earning 2006-07 All-Big Ten honors and invitations to pre-draft camps.

Despite his college stats, NBA executives studied his size and position, and wrote a big, fat question mark on the draft board. Was he big enough, long enough, to play power forward at the next level? The Seattle SuperSonics finally plucked him with the first pick of the second round (No. 31) in 2007, then quickly traded him to the Rockets for a future second round pick.

Capitalizing on opportunities presented by the recurring injury absences of Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady, Landry, who has round, cherubic features and playful, thoughtful, expressive eyes, soon emerged as the Rockets' effective and popular sixth man. Diving for loose balls. Scoring in transition. Converting the mid-range jumper. Putting a body on defenders. Giving Rick Adelman a low-post presence, particularly in the fourth quarter.

Landry's accelerated development was slowed, if only briefly, by a shooting that occurred while he was driving home following a trip on March 17, 2009. Recounting the incident in a matter-of-fact, almost detached voice, the third-year veteran tells of being sideswiped by another vehicle. Of exiting the car to assess the damage. Of being shot in the left calf by one of two suspects who have never been identified. Of running for his life.

Though the wound was superficial, Landry continues to wear a protective black sleeve to conceal the scar.

"I wondered if it would be (traumatizing)," he said, "but I was able to put it behind me. Everybody in Houston was really supportive."

While maintaining warm feelings for Houston and the Rockets' organization, Landry has no complaints about the trade. He is excited about becoming a starter and enjoys being surrounded by young, enthusiastic peers. And though he's a subpar rebounder for his position, his offensive versatility and physicality down low already have endeared him to the coaching staff (Coach Paul Westphal was increasingly disturbed by Martin's feeble defense).

"It's getting better every day," said Landry, "and I'm telling you; this is a good team, a special team. We're not having a great season this year, only won 19 games. But for a moment (Friday night against Utah), it felt like a playoff game. There are guys here who want to work hard, who want to be good. And growing up, I learned the value of working hard."

Burnel Pinkerton has coached high school boys basketball for nearly three decades.

But he has never had as much fun as this season mentoring a Woodcreek High School bunch playing beyond its years.

And why not?

The Timberwolves, a cohesive mix of juniors and seniors, are playing the kind of fundamentally sound basketball that makes them a favorite to play for the Sac-Joaquin Section Division II championship March 6 at Arco Arena.

Second-seeded Woodcreek put on a clinic Wednesday night in beating 15th-seeded and visiting Folsom 67-44 in the opening round of the D-II playoffs.

Woodcreek (23-5) will host a quarterfinal Friday against No. 10 Inderkum, a 98-86 winner over seventh-seeded Laguna Creek.

Folsom (12-16), the two-time defending D-I section champion, couldn't contend with Woodcreek's defensive prowess and swift ball movement on offense, led by seniors Nik Milani and Michael Kurtz.

Milani had 21 points, including 13 in the third quarter, and the 6-11 Kurtz added 16 points (missing just one shot), 10 rebounds, four blocks and four assists.

"The great thing is that the kids have bought in," Pinkerton said. "We have great chemistry, and they are a family. I like how we're playing, and I like our focus."

Folsom coach Mike Wall agrees.

"They play hard, and they play disciplined," Wall said. "You can see they like playing with each other. They know each other's strengths, and they trust each other in that they have no hesitation about passing the ball to the next guy in line."

Kurtz, who will play at UC Davis on scholarship next season, said most of his teammates have played together since sixth grade.

The seniors have a four-year combined record (freshman, junior varsity and varsity) of 92-10. They also won the title this season in the Sierra Foothill League, deemed the section's toughest.

"It's just a great mix of juniors and seniors," Kurtz said. "We play on the same (Amateur Athletic Union) team, so we know where each other is on the floor, and we find each other."

Playing with cohesion was something the young Bulldogs – they have only one senior – struggled to do. Folsom shot just 30 percent from the field, and star junior guard Kori Babineaux, averaging 19.6 points, was held to eight points in making 4 of 20 shots.

The world was in a state of turmoil. The Cold War was at epic heights between the Soviet Union and the United States.

America was secretly funding the Afghan rebels to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan.

There was no love loss between the two countries whether it was world affairs or on the ice.

The 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York was not just an international athletic competition, but a showing of superpower muscle.

And a band of collegiate hockey players from the Midwest and New England were David trying to take down the Soviet Goliath.

Jim Craig, Mike Eruzione, Dave Silk, and Jack O’Callahan grew up playing hockey on rinks in the Boston area.

Jack O’ Callahan hailed from Charlestown, Mass.

Jim Craig called North Easton home.

Mike Eruzione grew up in Winthrop.

Dave Silk was raised in Scituate.

These four sons from the Bay State all attended Boston University, one of the country’s collegiate hockey powerhouses which was coached by the now legendary Jack Parker.

O’Callahan attended BU from ’75-’79, where he became a leader on the Terriers team. The young defensemen was selected as team captain during his junior year and helped lead Boston University to a National Championship in ’77-’78.  O’Callahan played on a high level by adding six assists. He was named tournament MVP.

O’Callahan also excelled off the ice by being named student-athlete of the year in 1978. He was the type of player that Team USA was looking for, well rounded and a leader.

Goaltender Jim Craig, was also part of the 1978 NCAA championship team along with O’Callahan. He was an All-American goalie for BU between the pipes. In three seasons at BU, Craig posted a 29-4-2 record with a 3.65 GAA.

Forward Dave Silk made an immediate impact as a young player, being one of only ten underclassmen to make the team. As a freshman, he scored 35 goals breaking a ten year old team record and was named New England rookie of the year. He was also teammates with Craig and O’Callahan on the 1978 National championship team.

These three players were leaders and winners. They all excelled at their positions and knew how to play as a team.

And they won as a team.

Olympic coach, Herb Brooks didn’t want the best players, he wanted the right players.

O’ Callahan, Silk, and Craig were the right players.

Mike Eruzione’s journey started a bit earlier than the other three. Eruzione attended Boston University from 1973-1977 where he averaged 20 goals (92 career goals) and served as team captain during his senior year. His defense was also recognized, as he was voted a four time outstanding defensive forward.

After graduation, he joined the Toledo Goaldiggers of the International Hockey League and helped lead the team to a Turner Cup Championship in his first season.

After his second year in Toledo, Eruzione was chosen for the US Olympic Men’s Hockey team.  At the age of 25, he was an elder statesman compared to many of the collegiate players who were still attending school. However, his age and experience helped mold him into a leader and later team captain of Team USA.

Olympic Coach Herb Brooks believed in Eruzione’s skills, winning attitude, and leadership when no one else gave him a shot.

Eruzione was the definition of a captain.

The four Massachusetts natives were mixed in with the top players from New England and the Midwest. A lot of these players faced each other in collegiate play and didn’t, let’s just say didn’t have warm and fuzzy feelings towards one another.

There were rivalries and maybe slight hatred amongst some of the players.

However, Herb Brooks had those players turn their grudges and disdain for another into respect and brotherhood.

All of the players on the 1980 Olympic hockey team knew they had an uphill battle, especially against the juggernaut Soviet Union squad.

The US squad met the USSR in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden prior to the opening to the Olympics. The Soviets throttled the young Americans, 10-3.

Jack O’Callahan would suffer an injury that threatened his participation in the Olympics. He was devastated, but Brooks kept him on the roster with the hopes that O’Callahan would return.

Brooks owed him the chance.

The US team would band together with ties against Sweden and an upset 7-3 victory over Czechoslovakia led by backstop Jim Craig’s play. The Czech team was considered to be the second best team behind the Soviets.

Team USA would then win their next three games with relative ease over Norway, Romania and West Germany to advance to the medal round.

The USA men’s hockey team was a galvanized squad and ready to take on the professional Soviet players.

Not many gave this band of collegiate brothers a chance against the powerful hammer and sickle of the U.S.S.R.

Dave Anderson of the New York Times said , "Unless the ice melts, or unless the United States team or another team performs a miracle, as did the American squad in 1960, the Russians are expected to easily win the Olympic gold medal for the sixth time in the last seven tournaments."

While the Soviet coach rested his players, Brooks continued to put his skaters through grueling drills.  He knew his team had to outskate, outscore, and outwit their opponents.

Nothing was taken for granted.

Brooks and his players knew what they had to do to have a chance.

This game was not just a game but a defining moment in American history.

Good versus Evil.

Democracy versus Communism.

Amateurs versus Professionals.

The Cold War was going to get ice cold.

Charlestown’s Jack O’Callahan made his return to the ice after sustaining an injury against this same Soviet team in New York City.

Craig, Eruzione, Silk, and the rest of the United States team were full strength and ready to challenge the Evil Empire.

O’Callahan was throwing his body around, Silk was skating with passion, Craig was repelling Soviet attack after attack (39 saves on 42 shots), and Captain Mike Eruzione kept his team focused.

The United States kept clawing back and tied up the game 3-3, on a Mark Johnson tally (second of the game).  With 10 minutes remaining, Eruzione scored on a play set up by Mark Pavelich and John Harrington. The image of Mike Eruzione high stepping in celebration then being engulfed by his teammates has been forever etched in American sports history.

It proved to be the game winner as the youthful, underdog Americans upset the battle tested Soviets to advance to the gold medal game.

Sports Illustrated said of Team USA’s win over the Soviet Union;

“It may just be the single most indelible moment in all of U.S. sports history. One that sent an entire nation into frenzy.”

The US hockey team would beat Finland, after coming from behind yet again, 4-2 to complete the “Miracle On Ice.”

The image of Jim Craig wrapped in the Stars and Strips is timeless. It helped rally the nation as did the Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima during World War Two.

As team captain Mike Eruzione was on the podium to accept his gold medal, he waved over his whole team to join him. They played as team, won as team, and were going to be awarded their gold medals as a team. It was just another incredible moment that would bring tears to any American’s eyes.

The miracle men from Massachusetts all went on to other things in their lives, but nothing would outweigh what they did in the tiny little village of Lake Placid.

The sport of hockey reached epic heights of popularity after their gold medal performance in the Winter Games.

The United States was now perceived as hockey powers like Canada, Sweden, and the Soviet Union.

Their achievements as a team, not as individuals, have proven to be an inspiration thirty years later.

The young Americans proved that against all odds you can still achieve your goals.

And exceed them.

 

Check out Joe’s Site: Boston Sports Then And Now