The Palpable Masses

R.I.P., David Foster Wallace

2008-09-13T21:19:00.000-07:00

What a mind. What a writer. What a tragedy.

Why Sportswriters Should Stay Away From Historical References, (Forde-Yard Dash edition):

2008-08-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

Sportswriters are not generally deep thinkers. There's a reason many of us got into the business in the first place. We enjoyed watching games, and thinking about them afterwards. We are simple people with simple appetites (but do not underestimate the appetites. Seriously, the things that sportswriters will do for a free meal would chill your soul.)

But sportswriters don't like being thought of as part of the "toy department" of newspapers, so sometimes, you might see them throw a line in one of their stories -- usually a hackneyed simile or metaphor whose raison d'etre (see how I did that?) is basically to show the reader that, "hey! I'm a smart guy! I went to college, and I didn't even take the athlete classes or nothin'!"

Suffice to say, this rarely ends well. Which bring us to Pat Forde, ESPN's resident college football scribe and "Forde-Yard Dash" columnist, who seems a bit out of his element in Beijing:

"There are a lot of problems with China and how it handles its people and how it conducts its business. But, beginning with this show, these Games could be the country's real Great Leap Forward."

In case you missed it the first time, that was Pat Forde, name-checking Mao Zedong's central planning experiment and starvation machine, The Great Leap Forward.

The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1960 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform mainland China from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, industrialized communist society. The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen – both within China and outside – as a major economic failure and great humanitarian disaster with estimates of the number of people who starved to death during this period ranging from 14 to 43 million.

Oh, excuse me. "Forde-three million."

BONUS: "There's a new China Syndrome, and it's called China gold!" -- Al Trautwig, after China's men team clinched gold in the gymnastics competition. What this has to do with a 1979 film about coverups at a nuclear power plant, or nuclear spills, or 1970's films, or anything...well, that secret may stay with Al.

BONUS: TPM's first blind item! Which famed reporter once wrote a story about the changes to the Penn State defense and tried to call Joe Paterno's new product the Nittany Lions' "Final Solution"? Thankfully, a desk editor squashed that one before it hit the press.

Who's to blame for Perrilloux?

2008-05-23T18:18:00.000-07:00

I'm a little late on this one, but now that it seems like all the Ryan Perrilloux drama has finally settled down, I thought I'd take some time to tell some of my own Perrilloux stories, and address a few issues that I haven't seen talked about in this story.

I was a sportswriter for the Austin American-Statesman covering Texas recruiting during the 2004-05 season. Perrilloux was USA Today's High School Offensive Player of the Year, and a "soft commit"* to the Texas Longhorns. This meant that the better part of my days were spent scrambling for any clues into the whims and desires of a 17-year old kid, 500 miles away.

*A "soft commit" is basically a recruit's pledge to a school that he is "committed" to attend, but that he'll still visit other schools. In this way, a soft commit is about as valuable as the paper it's not written on.

The first time I spoke with Perrilloux's high school coach, Larry Dauterive, I asked him to describe the quarterback's play. "Boy, that Ryan Perrilloux," he said. "He got shit in his neck and pepper in his steak." I'm still dumbfounded as to what this means, or what it has to do with football, but if he was trying to warn me that Ryan Perrilloux was full of shit, he was right on target.

I spoke with Perrilloux several times a week that year, and by the end of his recruiting process, it became a silly dance -- he'd say that, you bet, I'm coming to Texas and I'm bringing a whole truckload of recruits with me. I'd listen, knowing that the word throughout Louisiana and Texas was that he was going to the highest bidder, and that Tiger boosters would not be outbid. At one point, he continued to argue that he was going to Texas when I knew he had already texted another recruit, saying, "LSU, holla." I think he enjoyed the lying, knowing that he could say what he wanted and there wasn't much that I or anyone else could do about it.

In the end, his LSU career (including the bar fights, rumors of failed drug tests, and his questioning in a federal check-forging investigation) didn't go exactly as planned. Now that he's finally been kicked out of school, LSU fans and people throughout the state of Louisiana feel betrayed by Ryan Perrilloux. But who betrayed who?

Perrilloux was born into an inner-city, New Orleans-area community -- LaPlace, La. -- where any child's gifts are too rarely nurtured. LaPlace is the kind of town where you can jump out from behind some hedges to scare your sister, as Perrilloux did when he was 14, and get shot in the stomach by the sister's startled boyfriend. In 2004, when Perrilloux was a high school junior, 69 percent of 11th grade students in his hometown parish, St. John the Baptist, failed to attain basic achievement levels on the Louisiana state standardized test in social studies; 65 percent failed to meet basic standards in science, and 57 percent fell short in English and math. (Compared to statewide rates of 67, 58, 39 and 38 percent, respectively. I leave to the reader to determine which set of statistics is the greater scandal.)

Judging by his parish's numbers, Perrilloux most likely arrived at LSU fundamentally unprepared for the rigors of college life. So the school did what it usually does in that situation -- shuttle the kid into as many "gut" classes as possible, maybe toss him some booster cash under the table, and make excuses for his indiscretions in order to keep him eligible. And it worked: Perrilloux came off the bench for an injured Matt Flynn last year and was named MVP of the SEC Championship Game, a victory that put LSU, improbably, into the national championship game. LSU ultimately got its title, Les Miles got his big contract extension, and in the midst of all that success, neither the school nor the coach felt the same need to answer for the kid anymore. So when he started acting up again, all Perrilloux got was a swift kick out the door.

Listen, I'm not in favor of paying players. The idea would open the college game to issues of unionization and free agency among college students that would be impossible to control. But the NCAA is running a billion-dollar business largely on the backs of poor, undereducated African-American kids. Their most important employees are supposed to be compensated only through their college scholarships. So when states allow their public schools to decay so much that most of their students are unprepared for higher education, when colleges and universities steer their athletes through "easy-A" classes and shrug their shoulders when these same athletes leave school with a useless degree (or no degree at all), they are committing outright theft against those players. They become reverse Robin Hoods, taking from the youngest and the poorest to line their own pockets with national TV money.

Ryan Perrilloux is no saint, certainly not when I dealt with him. But he helped bring LSU a national championship, and Les Miles a multi-million dollar coaching contract. What did they give him?

Frank Isola needs to let it go...

2008-05-10T17:00:00.000-07:00

After nearly a decade of misery, there's a new feeling around the New York Knicks -- call it the audacity of hope. Donnie Walsh is running the show, bringing with him a new front office staff. Isiah has his new job, presumably scouting the next great Inuit combo guard in upper Nova Scotia. And today, it was reported that the Knicks have hired Mike D'Antoni, one of the league's most successful and exciting coaches in recent years. Great news, right?

Not if you ask Frank Isola, Knicks beat writer for the New York Daily News.

For the last two years, Isola has been effectively blackballed by the Knicks media relations department for his negative coverage of the team. (I'm guessing they also didn't appreciate his comments in the New York Observer story, "Life in Knicks Hell", one of the most entertaining features of the 2007-08 basketball season.)

I grant you, anyone's who's had to cover the Knicks since The Hedgehog took over probably needs a hug more than anything else. And I give Isola credit for covering an organization that has singled him out and then gone out of its way to make his job difficult.

Still, his coverage of the team has clearly gotten personal, and it's making him sound ridiculous. Let's break this one down, shall we?

Mike D'Antoni averaged 58 wins over his last four seasons with the Phoenix Suns and was the architect of one of the NBA's most exciting offensive teams.

Of course, he also had Steve Nash, Amare Stoudemire, and Shawn Marion executing his game plan. Now, he's presumably got Stephon Marbury, Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph.

Really? The best news to come from the Knicks since they made the conference finals in 2000, and that's your lede? Why not just say what you really want to say? "The Knicks hired a new coach today, but they still suck. No matter what they do, they suck, and they will always suck. Their sucking is the sun and the moon, and inevitable as waves upon a shore."

Donnie Walsh's first and most important hire as Knicks president raises as many questions as it answers.

Yes, it raises questions like, "how the hell did an awful team like the Knicks get a great coach like Mike D'Antoni? Am I dreaming? Is it too late to get my season tickets back?"

Sure, no one really knows how the current personnel is going to handle the "Seven Seconds or Less" offense, but who cares? Does anyone really think there's a system out there that can fuse together all these wildly mismatched parts? Zach Randolph once put the "Jail" in "Jail Blazers" and he's not nearly the biggest liability on this team. Stephon Marbury is waiting to be called back to the Mother Ship and Eddy Curry has a heart defect that may or may not be caused by Curry's subsisting on a diet of cheesesteaks and fried Oreos. (I'll spare the criticism of Jerome James, Jared Jeffries, et al. It's not their fault someone wanted to give them all that money for being bad at basketball.)

But we're supposed to be worried about getting a coach that won't clash with their "styles"? Come on. This team is Chernobyl, and step 1 is decontamination. D'Antoni seems like a good start.

Walsh, who for two days denied that he was preparing to offer D'Antoni a contract, declined to comment. In fact, the Knicks would not even confirm D'Antoni's hiring, which was first reported early Saturday morning by SI.com...

Besides Walsh's credibility taking a hit, the Knicks president also is taking a risk on a coach whose up-tempo style works with only certain types of players.

Point 1: see above. Definitely, let's not hire the guy who's averaged 58 wins over the past four years, because his style might not fit with the roster that's averaged 28 wins over the same period. Good thinking.

Point 2: Stop it, Frank. Just stop. No one cares about what you think about Donnie Walsh's credibility. This is what executives do when they haven't gotten a deal done yet; they feint. They obfuscate. They say stuff that's just not true. The idea that you were shocked, shocked!, that this could happen to you just makes you naive.

Beyond that, it's "inside-baseball" beat writer bullshit that fans don't care about. If you're pissed off that you were misled, find Walsh behind closed doors and tell him so. He's well-known throughout the NBA as being one of the most accessible executives to the media. I'm sure you can find him. But taking a personal dig in your story is petty. This section of your story began in the fifth paragraph. I can guarantee you that the fifth most-important thing to come out of the Mike D'Antoni hiring was not the erosion of Donnie Walsh's credibility with Frank Isola.

Also, D'Antoni has a reputation as coach who does not stress defense.

Also, D'Antoni has a reputation as a coach who's won 58 games a year in the past four years. (I know so, because it was the lede in Isola's story, before he started talking about what a questionable hiring this was.)

"I think it is a terrible match," said one rival head coach. "I don't get it. Two of the biggest problems with the Knicks are that they don't practice and they don't play defense. I don't know if that changes now."

The Knicks' biggest problem is that they are a completely mismatched group of malcontents who have no business playing together on the same team. Hiring a defensive coach does not make this any less true. For more information, contact L. Brown, Charlotte, N.C..

Mark Jackson was perceived to be the frontrunner for the job, but Walsh did not speak to Jackson after their initial interview two weeks ago. According to sources, however, Walsh led Jackson to believe that he was the leading candidate.

A source close to Avery Johnson claims that the former Mavericks head coach also was led to believe that he was the top candidate. On Friday, Walsh was involved in contract negotiations with Johnson's representatives.

In the cases of both Jackson and Johnson, it appears that Walsh was not forthcoming with either candidate. It also raises the possibility that Garden chairman James Dolan was involved in the decision-making process....

It also raises the possibility that the Knicks didn't realize two weeks ago they would have a shot at Mike D'Antoni, who (and I can't stress this enough) averaged 58 WINS A YEAR OVER THE LAST FOUR YEARS.

I don't know what Walsh told Jackson or Avery. I doubt Isola really knows. I suppose it "raises the possibility" that Isola's sources were the candidates' respective agents, each of whom now risk having their guy shut out of the coaching carousel this year. Presumably, they each would want to paint their man as being the Knicks' top, non-D'Antoni choice in order to preserve desirability among other teams. (Granted, I don't know any of this, but it's just as much a "possibility" as Isola's unsourced theory that Dolan was "involved in the decision-making process.")

When Walsh was hired, Dolan vowed that his new president would enjoy complete autonomy and yet Walsh's first move - removing Thomas from the bench but not firing him from the organization - had Dolan's fingerprints all over it.

Yes. Isiah is scouting Eskimo combo guards as we speak. I think we discussed this earlier.

A source close to D'Antoni was "shocked" that D'Antoni would agree to join the Knicks.

"The money is great, so maybe that's the reason he took it," said the source. "If I were advising Mike I would have told him not to take the job."

Finally, a part of this story I can get behind. I also was shocked that D'Antoni would agree to join the Knicks. If I were advising Mike, I also would have told him to resist the lure of The Hedgehog's Cablevision cash.

But I'm not advising Mike. I'm just a Knicks fan who's suffered through several of the most soul-crushing years that a basketball fan can experience. And now here come Donnie Walsh and Mike D'Antoni, who may not bring back a championship but who can at least bring back respectability and a little excitement to rooting for this team.

Today was a great day for the Knicks. No matter what Frank Isola tells you.