Ballers, Gamers and Scoundrels

Three years ago, I had the privilege of appearing on a panel with Bill Walsh. Fittingly, it was during a conference on diversity at Stanford University, my alma mater. It was also the site of some of Walsh’s greatest triumphs, where he achieved greatness even before he was discovered by the NFL.

The experience prompted an epiphany, the realization that Walsh, perhaps the most influence football icon of my generation, was in fact a true civil-rights pioneer. When it was not de regieur, when there was no Rooney Rule, Walsh quietly (or not so) made a way when others would not.

When black coaches were a looooong way from the Super Bowl triumph of ‘07, 2o years long ago, in fact, Walsh sought to right a wrong by inviting black coached INSIDE his sanctum. He invited hem to sit in on meetings and learn many of the innovative things he was imparting. Among the coaches who participated in what came to be called the Minority Coaching Fellowship were Tyrone Willingham, former Stanford head coach and current head coach at the University of Washington; Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis, Kansas City head coach Herm Edwards and several NFL assistants. The NFL later co-opted the fellowship into a league-wide program. Dennis Green was also a pupil.

So as we mourn him, let’s recognize Bill Walsh as one of the most influential figures in sports when it comes to opening the doors for blacks. In reality, he may be the most influential white man in the history of sports.

RIP, Coach.

The Bill Walsh Coaching Tree: Click here

Click here for a look at the memorial service for Bill Walsh at Stanford.

UPDATE: Last week, the New York Yankees banned alcohol from both the home and visiting clubhouses. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays says they are “reviewing” their policy. 

I was going to write that Josh Hancock was yet another reason why young people should avoid casting athletes as role models at all costs. The St. Louis Cardinals pitcher may have been a great teammate, a great friend and maybe even a few other greats. But he also epitomized the kind of reckless loser we’ve come to know through the likes of Pacman Jones and others.

Harsh? Perhaps. But it’s be best word I think of in light of the police findings regarding Hancock’s fatal crash earlier this week. On Friday, local officials said Hancock was drunk (his blood alcohol was twice the legal limit), talking on a cell phone and speeding when he slammed into the back of a flat bed truck.

Talk about a trifecta. Officials said Hancock - who refused a cab at the bar he’d just left - was dead within seconds.

My prayers are with this family and others who loved or cared for him.

I was going to write that he’s not a role model. But that is not true. Like others who’ve gone before him while impaired behind the wheel of a car we can learn a lot from Josh Hancock. Trouble is, we should all know by now that drinking then driving is a volatile (and too often deadly) mix. Unfortunately we don’t. Especially young people, those who truly believe they’ll live forever.

John Hancock, at 29, was one of them. He was a hard-playin’ playa who lived dancing on the edge. (I forgot to mention the cops also found weed in the car, along with a pipe.) He fell hard.

Maybe it won’t help at all. Young people tend to wear It won’t happen to me like their favorite T-shirt. But it’s already had a major effect that should save some life in the future. In a city built on beer, Hancock’s death forced everyone is St, Louis to reconsider the way in which it bows to the local business benfactor: Anheiser-Busch.

The founding family once owned the team and the company’s products flow like water from just about every place of business in the city. It also flowed in the home and visiting locker rooms at the Cardinals’s home stadium - just as it does in all but three stadiums in major-league baseball.

Until now. Remarkably, the Cardinals announced yesterday - not long after the police findings were made public - that they would no longer offer beer in the locker-rooms at the stadium. They said the team was also considering banning beer from the team plane.

Bravo. Here’s hoping St. Louis will not be the last team to see the follow of sending young, athletic men int to the night with a buzz. Young men who think they’ll live forever.

Football took another hit today with news of the death of Darryl Stingley, whose own legacy was defined by a crushing blow that ended his NFL career and left him paralyzed.

Stingley was a wide receiver for he New England Patriots when, during a meaningless pre-season game against the Oakland Raiders, he was felled by a vicious (but legal) hit from defensive back Jack Tatum, one of the most notorious defenders in the history of the game. The hit broke Stingley’s neck and left him a quadriplegic. He had played for five seasons.

From that moment, Stingley became the embodiment of the risk NFL players confront each week, a living symbol of the downside of the mayhem that is pro football.

Stingley was only 26 years old at the time. It took him time to come to grips with his condition, but in time he did. In a 1988 interview with AP, he said: “I have relived that moment over and over again. I was 26 years old at the time and I remember thinking, ‘What’s going to happen to me? If I live, what am I going to be like?’ And then there were all those whys, whys, whys?

“It was only after I stopped asking why, that I was able to regroup and go on my with my life.”

The travesty in the wake of the tragedy is that Stingley and Tatum never reconciled.

Stingley was found unresponsive in his Chicago home today and was later pronounced dead at a local hospital. No immediate cause of death was revealed.

He was 55.

After a long battle with Alzheimer’s, Eddie Robinson, one of the most influential coaches in football history, went home last night.

For African Americans, the former, long-time Grambling coach is the most significant figure in football history - and perhaps second only to Jackie Robinson as the most influential black sports figure ever. (Muhammad Ali is certainly there, too. By any measure, it’s heady company.)

He won 408 games during his coaching tenure, between 1941 (six years before Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier) and 1997. He had 45 winning seasons, won nine National Black College championships and 17 Southwestern Athletic Conference titles. “I’m no better than any other coach,” he said prior to his final season. “But I’ve heard the best coaches in America and learned from them for close to 60 years.”

The list of Grambling players who were drafted into the NFL is staggering, the most among any historically black college. Four former Tigers - Buck Buchanan, Willie Davis, Willie Brown and Charlie Joiner - are in pro football’s Hall of Fame.

No doubt the most celebrated among his pupils, Doug Williams, will someday join them.

Robinson believed in “the system,” even as it worked against him, denying him opportunities beyond Grambling. “The framers of this Constitution, now they did some things,” Robinson said. “If you aren’t lazy, they fixed it for you. You’ve got to understand the system. It’s just like in football, if you don’t understand the system, you haven’t got a chance.”

Amen. R.I.P., Coach

ESPN Tribute: Click here.

AUDIO:Remembering Eddie Robinson

Photos/AP

The last time I saw Dennis Johnson it was as if we were long lost brothers. I was a reporter covering the NBA for Sports Illustrated and the New York Times when i chronicled his journey with the Seattle SuperSonics and Boston Celtics. We hadn’t seen each other in years. He was an assistant with the Los Angeles Clippers. But he smiled that big Redbone smile and offered a friendly laugh. It was as if he was saying. “We’re both survivors. Good to see you’re still doing your thing.”

DJ was doing his thing then. After three NBA champiosnships, 5 All-Star appearances and a legacy as one of the most tenacious, but well-rounded guards ever, he was trying to work his way back to a head coaching opportunity in the NBA.

On Thursday, he was doing his thing again - still trying to work his way back, this time as coach of a developmental league team in Austin, Tx. He was coaching when he collapsed. Paramedics tried for 23 minutes to revive him. They could not. Dennis Johnson was just 52.

“I hate to lose,” he once said. “I accept it when it comes, but I still hate it. That’s the way I am.”

Count each day a blessing.

Gump Worsley, one of the last goal tenders to play without a mask, was a Hall of Famer who won four Stanley Cups as a member of the Montreal Canadiens. Instead of beating any man in the house, Bernie (Schoolboy) Friedkin, a former boxer who once used his big brothers’s I.D. to get into a boxing gym, could have said, “I can draw any man in the house.” And he did, 16 times, more times than he lost to an opponent.

Gump and Bernie died over the weekend and their deaths were dutifully chronicled in the New York Times today. But when Barbaro was euthanized this morning after a long battle to recover from an injury suffered at The Preakness last summer, it was breaking news that will undoubtedly be heralded on the Gray Lady’s front page on Tuesday morning.

Why did Barbaro touch us so? Why did a horse - a horse - cause to many to toss and turn, fret and now mourn?

Maybe it’s because they cannot speak to us. They cannot share their egos, insecurities or weaknesses with us. When they’re stubborn and irritable, we simply let them be. When they’re downright nasty, we don’t hold a grudge.

We marvel at their performances, embrace their fawning owners and send them gently into their twilight while awaiting their descendants to run again. When they hurt we hurt more. And when they die, especially the champions, our hearts sink as if we’d lost a loved one.

I get it, but I don’t. RIP, Barbaro. you, too, Gump and Bernie.

Darrent Williams/ Thanks to The Denver Post/Glenn Asakawa)

Darrent Williams was one of the NFL’s anonymous cats. There are dozens of them, players who toil each week under the helmet at relatively unglamourous positions. In pro football, it’s all about the team. It’s all abut uniformity. It’s all about being a cog in the machine. Standing out is verboten - except for a chosen few, typically QBs, running backs or the occasional loud-mouthed wide-receiver. Standing out is particularly unwise for defensive players, who often gain notoriety only when they screw up or get scorched on coverage.

Otherwise, we watch the games each week with relatively little knowledge of most of the men under the helmets, even those who play for our home team. Darrent Williams, a cornerback for the Denver Broncos, came from beneath the helmet in tragic fashion in the first hours of the new year. Just hours after the Broncos suffered an overtime loss to San Francisco that eliminated them from playoff contention, Williams was shot and killed outside a Denver nightclub when a fusillade of bullets showered the Hummer limo in which he was riding. Two other passengers were injured in the drive-by attack, which occurred about 2 a.m.

Williams, a second-year player from Oklahoma State, had three tackles in the game and returned two punts for 50 yards. He was a young man who wasn’t supposed to make it - not as a 5-foot-8-inch second-round pick with a penchant for biting on play fakes, and not the son of a single mom raised in a dangerous ‘hood in Forth Worth, Texas. Among his best friends were local Crips gang members. “When he was younger, he always gravitated to the wrong crowd,” Anthony Criss, his high-school coach, told the Denver Post. ”I remember he went to church and the minister was talking to him about needing to pray and stop hanging around with the wrong people, and he started straightening up and doing the right thing.”

It seemed Williams had found the better path and was eager to share his journey with others who needed it. In December, he told friends and teammates of his desire to return to his hometown this off-season to talk to youngsters about staying out of gangs. He has two young children in Fort Worth and recently told Williams Criss he wanted to start a free football camp for youth players.

“I believed in myself and stayed at it,” Williams once told the Post. “A lot of people didn’t believe in me, but I kept believing in myself. I always told everybody since I was 8 years old that I was going to play in the NFL. I just stayed focused and stayed positive. … A lot of times, Mom had two jobs. So I was left to hang around friends or cousins. I was running the streets, getting into trouble. I was going down the wrong way for awhile.”

As of this writing, police have no motive or suspects in the attack.

One more thing: Take note, Tank Johnson.

Could not let this go by without notice. Sports connection? He performed at halftime of Super Bowl XXXI in 1997. Luther Vandross was the headliner, long before Nipplegate. My favorite JB groove: “Please, Please, Please”

Red Auerbach died tonight.

May he be remembered not just as a winner, but as one of the true, quiet champions of racial equality to ever grace our space. To him starting five black players - in Boston, no less - when no one else would was simple: They were the five best cats on the team, so they were the starters. Period. To Red it was never about anything more or anything less. God Bless him. Hope I get his humidor.

NBA Tribute video: clicking here

Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle was killed when his small plane - a Cirrus SR20 - crashed into a high-rise condominium this afternoon on Manhattan’s East Side. Also killed was his flight instructor. Several firefighters and policemen were injured in the blaze, as was the resident of the condominium into which the plane crashed.

Lidle had taken off from Teteboro Airport in New Jersey arounf 2:30 p.m., circled around the Statue of Liberty and was heading up the East River when the aircraft, which was owned by Lidle, appeared to veer out of control, according to witnessess. Lidle had been flying for more than a year.
He joined the Yankees two months ago and 4-3 in 9 starts. The Yankees were his seventh team in nine major-league seasons. His impact was minimal but I will recall him as one of the few Yankees who offered an honest assessment of the team’s upset loss to the Tigers in the first round of the NLDS.

“We got taken by surprise,” he said. “We got matched up with a team that was a little bit more ready to play than we were. We were all pretty surprised how not ready we were for that series. I don’t think we took the Tigers for granted, I just think they were up for it a little more than we were. They were fighting tooth and nail down to the last game of the season. We clinched pretty early. Maybe we were in cruise control a little bit too much.”

Some were critical of his comments. But I thought Lidle had every right to speak his piece and that he offered us a rare inside view of a team whose “corporate” tenor typically offers nothing enlightening. What he said took guts.

I was in Manhattan this afternoon and watched a parade of police cars speed down 42d street, to what I did not know then. Yes, 9/11 briefly crossed my mind. But as other New Yorkers went about their day, I allowed the moment to pass.

Prayers and thoughts to Cory Lidle and his family - his wife nd six-year-old son live in California - as well as the family of the instructor who also died in that plane today.