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BACK ISSUES - JAN & FEB 2000

February 29- "Fame is fleeting. I planned to stay at West Virginia the rest of my life until I saw how people treated me when we were losing. If you get a better opportunity, take it." Bobby Bowden

Question Number One: Any coaches with a birthday today? Question Number Two: What Gilbert and Sullivan operetta was based on a story about a young man who, now that he is 21 rejoices because he is freed from a bondage contract. Not so fast, his masters tell him. Since he was born on Leap Year Day, he's "only five - and a little bit over?"

The Arena League, which provided amusement for fans who enjoyed that sort of thing, and part-time employment for a couple hundred young football players - not to mention a shot at repeating the Kurt Warner story - has voted to cancel its season this year. Faced with a lawsuit by a group of six players claiming that the League restricts their salaries and their ability to offer their services to competitors, the league owners decided against going ahead with their already-risky venture. It is amazing that a handful of players, given an opportunity to make a few bucks continuing to play a game, plus a chance - admittedly a slim one - of moving up the pro ladder, would risk everything by trying to put the squeeze on their employers. Why can't I picture many NFL owners taking a chance on any of these guys? Well, now that they will have some spare time, maybe they can do some reading - I recommend The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs.

Last week's Sports Illustrated - the one with Vince Carter jammin' on the cover- ends with the usual great Rick Reilly column on the back page. This one deals with the youth sports folks in Jupiter, Florida, trying to stem outrageous conduct by adults by insisting that all parents agree to abide by a code of ethics before their kids can play a sport. Parents must sign a paper that states such things as, "I will remember that the game is for youth - not adults," and "I will do my very best to make youth sports fun for my child." If they violate the code, they'll be banned for a year. (We'll see.) Reilly would expand the code to include such things as curbing their wild ambitions for their kids: "I'll keep in mind, in case I hadn't noticed, my kid isn't related to the Griffeys." You'll have to read his suggestions for yourself, but my favorite is, "I won't dump my kid out of the Lexus 20 minutes late to practice and then honk the horn when I pick him up 20 minutes early, as though the coach is some kind of hourly nanny service. If my kid has to miss a game, I'll call the day before. It doesn't cost any more to be decent."

The next town to the west of us is Vancouver, Washington. I lived and coached there for years and our kids all went to high school there. Last Friday, one of my favorite people was in Vancouver - and I missed him! Jimmy Dean, sausage tycoon and former country singer, was in town for the chistening of his yacht, built right in Vancouver. Twenty-six months in the building, the 165-foot long "Big Bad John" (named for Dean's megahit song of the early 1960's), will depart tomorrow for Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where it will be delivered to Dean and his wife, country singer Donna Mead. A little partying followed the christening, including a rendition of "Big Bad John" by the man himself, with his wife accompanying him on the grand piano in the boat's main salon. Although a fillup will be costly - the yacht's fuel tanks hold 10,000 gallons of diesel - Dean refused to say how much the boat cost. But he wasn't lordly about it like J. P. Morgan, who once said, "If you have to ask how much it costs... you can't afford one." Dean, the cowboy, was much more matter-of-fact. "I didn't get this boat to be braggadocious," he said. "I got this boat 'cause I love the water."

This is a story about human dignity. We hear a lot these days about respect, but rarely about dignity. Pity the poor word respect - it sometimes seems as if it's only used in connection with a drive-by shooting in which the victim "dissed" (disrespected) somebody, or with a professional athlete's holdout, because he hasn't been given his "props" (he wants more money). The word respect itself is in danger of being trashed. Maybe what we should be talking about a lot more is "dignity" - nobility, bearing, self-respect. Dignity isn't conferred by others. Dignity comes from within. (Take a look at the antics of most professional athletes and ask yourself how often the word "dignity" comes to mind.) What's a man's dignity worth, anyhow? In the case of a man named Preston King - a lot. Back in 1961, Mr. King,, thanks to a draft deferment, was studying for his master's degree at the London School of Economics. But when he applied for a continuation of his deferment so he could get his doctorate, his draft board back in Albany, Georgia, said "nothing doing." So he decided to appeal in person. That, he told columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., of the Miami Herald, was his mistake. From the moment the draft board saw him and realized he was black (not, in view of the fact that he had been studying abroad, something that would have occured to a group of small-town southerners in 1961), their treatment of him changed. First of all, he was ordered to report immediately for his army physical. But of far more significance to Mr. King, he was no longer referred to as "Mr. King," as he had been in all his correspondence up to then. Instead, they began calling him "Preston." Now today, when perfect strangers routinely assume they have the right to address you by your first name, it may be hard for people to understand the problem. But this was the South of the 1960's, where black people were constantly reminded, in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that they were worth less than whites. And one way in which blacks were reminded of "their place" in the South of that time was by being denied terms of dignity and respect - Mr., or Mrs., or even Dr. - and being called, no matter their age or station in life, by their first names. But Preston King had been living in London, and he wasn't about to accept second-class treatment back in America. He told his draft board that unless he was addressed properly, he would refuse to report. "If I'm good enough to be called Private King, Sergeant King, Corporal King," he told them, "then I'm good enough to be called Mister King." When the board did not bend, Mr. King did not report. Convicted of draft evasion, he was sentenced to 18 months in jail. Instead, he escaped to Europe, where he has lived ever since. Now 63, he was pardoned last Monday by President Clinton so he could return to Georgia, after nearly 40 years in exile, to attend the funeral of a relative. His request for the pardon was supported by the judge who originally sentenced him. Said the judge, now in his nineties, "He has paid a high price." He has, indeed. He paid it because he knew what his dignity was worth.

People been trying to hook you with e-mail about their "Millinium Giveaway?" With all the fuss over it, you'd have thought that they'd know the spelling of "Millennium" by now. (Two L's, two M's, two N's)

February 28- "You can go out with a good passing game and an average running game and you can upset anybody, but we believe it is hard to win nine, ten or eleven games with the greatest part of your emphasis on the passing game unless you have very superior personnel to the people you are playing." Tom Osborne

Boy, am I steamed! Anybody who lives on the wrong side of the river across from a bigger city - in Brooklyn, or Camden, New Jersey, or East St. Louis, Illinois - will understand. I live in Camas, WASHINGTON, across the river from Portland, Oregon in a state that seldom even exists, judging by Portland television or the Portland newspaper (which is even called "The Oregonian"). Most of the time, I grit my teeth and take it. But now I have to dig in. Tonya Harding was arrested last week. In MY town. She was hauled into police headquarters. In MY town. And do you know what USA Today reported? Tonya Harding was arrested in Camas, OREGON.

"The first thing we start out trying to do is to get some type of philosophy or general theory of offense. I think this is something that we may neglect a little bit. I think a head coach assumes that his line coach and his backfield coach, his receivers coach or whatever coaches he has to work with, think exactly as he does. Especially in terms of how we are going to move the football. But when you sit down and begin to talk and analyze and try to put a few things down in writing, you may find the line coach wants to run the football, the receivers coach wants to throw the football and the head coach wants to use gimmick plays, etc. I think it is really important for the staff to spend time in developing a particular philosophy you are going to follow. From that philosophy should spring the type of offense you decide to use and the type of plays you select and how you go about the whole thing." Tom Osborne, 1976

Fr. Jim Sinnerud, a football coach in Omaha who happens also to be a Jesuit priest, sent me a copy of a political cartoon: In caption one, a priest kneels in prayer and says, "All this technology has made us feel so remote, so disconnected, so devoid of human contact. Life seems so impersonal lately..." In caption two comes his response from above: "If you want to report a sinner, press 1. If you've had trouble with an angel, press 2. If your scripture is garbled, press 3. If you want absolution, press 4..."

Sent to me by my old buddy, Don Capaldo, in Keokuk, Iowa: One day in heaven, the Lord decided He would visit the earth and take a stroll. Walking down the road, He encountered a man who was crying. The Lord asked the man, "Why are you crying, my son?" The man said that he was blind and had never seen a sunset. The Lord touched the man who could then see and was happy. As the Lord walked further, He met another man crying and asked, "Why are you crying, my son?" The man was born a cripple and was never able to walk. The Lord touched him and he could walk and he was happy. Farther down the road, the Lord met another man who was crying and asked, "Why are you crying, my son?" The man said, "Lord, I work for the school system." .....and the Lord sat down and cried with him.

Wow! Coach John Torres in LA passes along some info that I hadn't seen: "As I was on the flight back home I read where the recently deceased Defensive End Derrick Thomas, of the Kansas City Chiefs did not have a will and his mother is fighting to control his estate. The problem ,you see, is that he has 6 children with 5 different mothers! Like the lovely Mrs. T said, the poor lady will end up with nothing after taxes and the "mothers" get their share."

February 26- "It will steady the boys to know that I am with them." Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., insisting, against his commander's wishes, on landing with his men in the first wave of invading U.S. troops on Utah Beach, June 6, 1944 (D-Day). He was subsequently awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor in the D-Day invasion.

Teammates Eldredge Recasner and Derrick Coleman of the Charlotte Hornets were in an automobile accident back in October. Coleman, who was driving, escaped serious injury, but Recasner suffered a concussion, a collapsed lung, and a fractured shoulder, causing But he should have been found guilty of something - he never visited his teammate in the hospital, and didn't even so much as call him for more than a week after the accident. Coleman still insists that he's waiting to talk with Recasner until the time and place are right. Recasner says it's too late. "If I gave you a ride somewhere," he told the Winston-Salem Journal, "and, bam, you're in the hospital with a collapsed lung, broken collarbone, concussion, I'd want to say, 'Man, I'm sorry, man, are you going to be all right? Is there anything I can do?'"

Used to be you had to die first. Or at least retire. But today, the University of Arizona will officially name the basketball floor in McKale Center the Lute Olson Court. Coach Lute Olson, highly deserving of whatever honors the University chooses to bestow on him, is nevertheless very much alive, and, I'm sure, has every intention coaching the Wildcats Saturday, on that very floor.

"I didn't think it was that big of a deal." St. Louis Cardinal Ray Lankford, on showing up a day late for spring practice.

Here was the question: in 1964, Tom Landry was given a 10-year contract. Over the next eight years, five other NFL head coaches would be given contracts at least as long as Coach Landry's. Yet of the six given such lengthy contracts, only Coach Landry made it to the end. In fact, all of the other five were gone before five years were up on their contracts. One of them lasted less than two seasons. Can you name the other five coaches besides Tom Landry, if I spot you their teams? (Eagles, Giants, Broncos, Oilers, Chiefs).

Here is the answer: Eagles- Joe Kuharich - given 15 years by owner Jerry Wolman, he was let go after four years when Leonard Tose bought the team from Wolman, even though Tose had to pay off the remaining 11 years....Giants - Allie Sherman - given a 10-year contract, but fired during training camp before the start of his fifth year; Broncos - Lou Saban - given 10 years as head coach and GM; quit part way through his fifth season....Oilers - Bill Peterson - given 10 years; fired part way into his second year.... Chiefs - Hank Stram - given 10 years; fired after three.

Our town park used to have a great slide, which my grandkids loved. It was solid metal with a stainless steel slide, and it had to be 12 feet to the top of the ladder. It sometimes took a little coaxing the first time, but they all learned to overcome their initial wariness and climb to the top. Then they'd come down a hellin', squealing with delight. And immediately race around to the bottom of the ladder to climb up again. Not any more, though. The town fathers have seen to that. They're going to protect my grandchildren. They've torn down that nasty dangerous ole metal thing, and replaced it with one of those goofy red, blue and yellow plastic deals with a corkscrew slide that might start five feet off the ground. Check it out where you live. It's happening to playgrounds all over America. And we all know why. Look around every corner, and there's somebody else just itching to protect us from life; in this "Nanny Nation" of ours, there's no telling which direction the opposition is going to come at us from. That's why it's great to get a scouting report. There's a cool web site - www.guestchoice.com - that does the scouting for us, keeping track of all the nannies in our culture who want to make sure we finish all our vegetables and dress warmly. They even give a "Nanny of the Year" Award, which in 1999 went to Neal Barnard, head of the Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine, who has been demanding a federal lawsuit against the meat industry and fast-food restaurants, similar to the one against "Big Tobacco". In 1998 it went to Yale professor Kelly Brownell, who has been calling for a special tax on high-calorie food (ridiculed as the "twinkie tax"). Others mentioned were Robert Cohen, who has urged kids on the Internet to dump milk on the cafeteria floor and spray paint "Not milk!" on buildings; the South Dakota House of Representatives, which considered a bill that would have made it felony child abuse for a pregnant woman to order a glass of wine in a restaurant without a doctor's prescription; The National Institute of Health , which by redefining the "Body Mass Index," instantly made 33 million Americans "overweight"; The U.S. Department of Transportation, which ordered commercial airlines to create "peanut-free buffer zones" to protect peanut-allergy sufferers, even though it acknowledged that a person must actually eat a peanut in order to suffer an allergic reaction; The Dallas Morning News, which warned Americans about the dangers of generous portions in restaurants: "When eating out, resist the temptation to eat everything on your plate. Restaurants are notorious for serving too much food"; The Nation Magazine, which ran an exposé of the "soda barons" who are trying to hook our young people on "the new drug of choice" &emdash; caffeine; the Arizona legislature, which made it illegal for anyone - even an adult - to possess tobacco in any form, at any time, on any school campus; Carnival Cruise Lines, which actually threw a passenger off their smoke-free ship "Paradise" (presumably it was docked at the time) merely for possessing tobacco; Action on Smoking and Health, which ran a "Halloween body count" campaign claiming - without any evidence - that "smoking parents kill their own children" with second-hand smoke, and predicting that 15 kids would die on Halloween night - and every other night as well, "including Thanksgiving and Christmas"; MADD Board Member Ralph Hingson, who claimed that a lower drunk-driving arrest threshold would save 500 lives a year, a claim that the entire U.S. Department of Transportation has been unable to prove despite 15 years of research; the Rolling Meadows, Illinois Health Department, which required its 22,000 citizens to place vehicle registration stickers with an anti-smoking message on their windshields, regardless of whether they agreed with the message; Mothers Against Drunk Driving again, this time taking their fight from the highways to the golf course, by attempting to ban beer at a new golf club in Arlington, Texas; Elliot Katz , who has been promoting the "legal rights for animals movement," and the concept of granting human rights to animals (better watch what you say to your dog when you tell him to get off the couch). There's more. Check it out. Good site.

February 25 - "When the other fellow has a thousand dollars and you have a dime is the time to gamble." Fritz Crisler, of Michigan

A coach happened to mention something about needing to get hold of a college coach somewhere, and I started to look in my Blue Book when it occured to me - why don't I just tell him to click on the Blue Book ad at the top of my page? If you've never seen it, the Blue Book of College Athletics is the directory - it lists essential data about every college and junior college in the US, every conference, every coaches' association. Under each college and juco are listed the names of the coaches of every sport, their addresses and their office phone numbers. It could be very useful to you when you have a kid you're trying to place. In fact, in this day and age of aggressive parents wanting to market their own kids, it might take some unnecessary and unwanted heat off of you if you were to tell them about the Blue Book and how they they can get their own copy!

Two NFL players are charged with murder, and an NHL hockey player narrowly missed becoming an axe murderer; Darryl Strawberry has tested negative for cocaine, demonstrating once again what a powerful hold a narcotic drug can have, even on a person with every reason not to use it; you can't read an article about an athlete without wondering when you'll get to the part about the five-year-old that he fathered back in high school. Or junior high. Or pre-school. Talk about the degeneracy of our culture. And now, of all things, at the University of Colorado, the basketball players are - praying! At the end of every practice! Now, we may not be able to stop the murders,, the assaults, the drug abuse or the illegitimacy, but we just may be able to stop those prayers, because - thank the Lord - the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, is on guard against them. The ACLU's Boulder, Colorado chapter (can there be a more liberal organization in the world than the Boulder chapter of the ACLU?) is up in arms over coach Ricardo Patton's kneeling in prayer with his players and assistants when practice is over. Colorado is a tough university and Boulder is a tough town when it comes to prayer. Back in 1984, disturbed by the openly-religious conduct of football coach Bill McCartney - who has since gone on to work with Promise Keepers, a Christian organization which he started - the ACLU extracted from the University a set of guidelines within which its coaches are expected to operate. Coach Patton, in the opinion of the ACLU, has strayed from those guidelines, one of which stipulates, "Coaches should not organize or conduct religious activities, including promotion of prayer or Bible readings by players or coaches." Patton denies that he has promoted prayer or Bible readings, emphasizing that the prayer is voluntary. Football coach Gary Barnett admits that his team prays, too: "A team has needs, and a team needs prayer," Coach Barnett told the Denver Post. "It's been my experience that players are spiritual people because of the extreme lives they lead. But I have never seen a coach lead a prayer. It's like a study table. Not everybody has to participate and not everybody does." Coach Patton , meanwhile, sounds unrepentant. "I think it's a sad world when a person wants some discipline taken against someone who chooses to pray," he told the Post. "I will always pray for what I believe in." This is not the first time that Coach Patton has come to the attention of the ACLU. The first time was almost three years ago, in March 1997, when someone's sharp eyes picked up a mention of the team's religious activities in a school publication. This most recent complaint came after the ACLU was notified by an unidentified person who regularly watched practices. No doubt waiting for the praying to start.

Two kids were shot and killed at a high school basketball game in Washington, DC a couple of weeks ago. Since then, while police search for the murderers, spectators at high school games in the District have been limited to students of the schools involved and parents of the players.

Coach Homer Smith, considered to be one of the finest offensive minds in the game, is normally thought of in connection with the passing game. But a few questions that have come up since I mentioned the Wishbone a few days ago brought him to mind. That's because, back when I decided that it might be fun to run the 'bone, my two main resources were Darrell Royal's 16mm film, which did a great job of making the concepts clear, and a book entitled "Installing Football's Wishbone T Attack," by Pepper Rogers and Homer Smith. Coach Rogers was head coach at Georgia Tech at the time, and Coach Smith was head coach at Army, but it was while they worked together at UCLA - coach Smith as coach Rogers' offensive coordinator - that they developed their high-powered version of the Wishbone that inspired the book. If you want to learn enough about the Wishbone tobe able to run it or defend it, or if you just want a great book for your library, I highly recommend it. By the way, their most famous Wishbone QB at UCLA - and he was a very, very good one - was Mark Harmon, much better known now as an actor. (He came by his athletic and acting talent naturally: his dad, the late Tom Harmon, earned All-America fame as "Harmon of Michigan" or "Old Number 98," one of the greatest single-wing tailbacks in the history of the game; his mom, Elise, was an actress before marrying Tom. His sister, Kristin, was married to the late rock star Ricky Nelson, one of the children of the famous "Ozzie and Harriet." And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. )

I quoted Coach Glenn Killinger yesterday. Coach Killinger, an All-American at Penn State, was a great football coach at West Chester. There, at a school which has long been known for its PE program, Coach Killinger sent as many young men out to become coaches themselves as anyone I'm aware of. Eaastern Pennsylvania has always been loaded with high school coaches who got their training at West Chester. One who got away was Pete Smolin, now head coach at Glendale, California - where this year's LA Double-Wing Clinic will be held - and after seeing Coach Killinger's quote, he wrote to tell me about some of the West Chster guys in the pros right now. \ In return, mentioned Joe Senser, but Pete had only vaguely heard of him. Joe played tight end for the Vikings. He was a good one. He must have been a good person, too, because he was Minnesota's entry on one of those NFL-United Way ads - and you can be sure they're not going to pick a guy for one of those spots who could later wind up embarrassing the league and the charity it supports. Joe Senser went to West Chester from the Milton S. Hershey School, a free instituion established by the estate of the chocolate baron to take care of young Pennsylvanians who either have no family, or no family capable of taking care of them.

February 24 - "Success in the game of football depends primarily on skill in handling the ball, and skill in handling the body." Glenn Killinger, long-time football and baseball coach at West Chester (Pennsylvania) State Teachers College, now West Chester University.

Do I live in a great town or what? Fellow Camas resident Tonya Harding (actually, she lives in the sticks outside of town, but there goes the neighborhood all the same) was arrested by Camas police yesterday when they responded to complaints from her live-in boyfriend that she assaulted him by, among other things, throwing a hub cap at him. I suspect he may be a wimp. Stay tuned. Maybe I'll go over to the police station to see her arraigned this morning. And ask for her autograph.

Thank God there are no more sick kids. Just joking, unfortunately. But it used to be that when word got out in a community that a child was seriously ill and the parents couldn't afford to pay the medical bills, people pitched in to help. They threw their change into large jars on the counters at local businesses. Maybe held a benefit basketball game. It pulled a community closer, as people realized that there but for the grace of God went their child or grandchild - their little brother or sister. But evidently we've taken care of all those sick kids, because now what we get is pleas for money so that members of elite travelling teams - soccer, hockey, basketball usually - can go to Russia, or China, or some exotic place most members of the community will never visit - courtesy of a generous community. The fund raising approaches begging in its shamelessness. A local paper ran a picture recently of a little kid who has been "invited" (why do I think the "invitation" came from a tour promoter?) to play in a tournament in a faraway land. We're told that the kid is going to be an "ambassador." Sure. Maybe get the Israelis and Palestinians together. Oh, yes. I almost forgot - It's going to cost $4,500 to send this ambassador to the tournament, and the kid and the parents are asking for "community support." I'm thinking of holding a bake sale myself. (Do the math here. According to the article, there are 35 other US teams going. To this one tournament. Hmm. That's 35 teams, times some 10-15 players per team, times $4500 a kid. My hat is certainly off to those tour promoters!) I know, I know. The community could do a lot of good locally with that kind of money. We're talking about more money than most football coaches get to spend in a year - equipping an entire team. Yes, it's a lot of money for just one kid. But, hey - this is America - our kids can have everything they want! And this kid wants to go! Now, then - how much shall I put you down for?

I read an article recently about the way males still dominate the coaching ranks in girls' high school basketball. One great difference in the way the two sexes can approach coaching was described by a female coach: early in the season, she came to the conclusion that her girls just weren't tough enough. So that afternoon at practice, she told the girls that to develop toughness, they were going to wrestle one another. With that, she singled out one girl and took her to the floor, where they wrestled as the team watched. "I don't think a man could get away with doing something like that," she said, in the understatement of the year. Not with a girl - or with a boy, either.

"Ban negative political ads? They ought to ban all the positive ads. That's where all the lies are." My favorite comedian, Mark Russell

"We used to wear heavy woolen jerseys that would shrink when you perspired. The sleeves would tighten up on your arms so that you could almost feel your circulation getting strangled. I didn't have the freedom with my elbows and wrists that I wanted. In one game, I got so angry at those doggoned sleeves that I tore 'em off. Then everybody followed suit, especially the centers, and, yes, that's how short-sleeved jerseys came into football." Alex Wojciechowicz (Pronounced "Waw-ja-HOE-wix" by the radio announcers of my youth) who was the center on Fordham's famed Seven Blocks of Granite, with guard Vince Lombardi to his right. From Fordham, "Wojie" went on to become an All-Pro center with the Philadelphia Eagles. (From "The Game That Was," by Myron Cope, 1970, World Publishing Company)

From time to time, I go off on the inequities that are practiced against males in order to correct perceived inequities against women. Somebody has to and the politicians certainly won't. By now, you know the old line - every couple of months you'll read in the paper that your state university still has not achieved gender equity. And while a well-meaning but ignorant public gasps in disbelief that in this day and age colleges could still be relegating women to second-class status, few read on to find out what's actually being said: if 51.3 per cent of the student body is female, then a school won't have achieved full "gender equity", the feminists tell us, until 51.3 per cent of its athletes are female. And that's scholarship athletes - regardless of their interests, regardless of their skills, regardless of the revenues or goodwill they generate for their institution. After all, this is America, and Title IX is the law, so we're going to achieve gender equity even if it means having to go to Sweden or Canada to find the female athletes to achieve it. (Somehow, I wasn't aware that American colleges had been practicing discrimination against Swedish women.) And if we can't find enough interested females, or we don't have the money to provide another sport - no problem. King Solomon himself, who once proposed settling a child custody battle by cutting the baby in half, couldn't have done any better than those schools that have evened up athletic opportunities, not by adding women's sports, but by eliminating men's sports. I am opposed to requiring schools to automatically pay the women's basketball coach (male or female) the same as the men's basketball coach until the pressures on them are equal - Tennessee and UConn sound like possibilities. I believe that all school sports can be valuable to their participants, but it is obvious that some sports have a value to the school and the community far beyond their value just to the participants. Football comes immediately to mind, and so I do not believe that when the entire student body fills a gymnasium for a pep rally on the day of a football game, it should be necessary for the school to provide equal time for a pep rally for a girls' sport. I am tired of gender equity being practiced on the sports page, where it seems to me a sport should be covered at least somewhat in proportion to the interest people show by attending its games. It 's fair to say that if there aren't many people at a game, there probably aren't a whole lot more who are going to want to grab the sports section and read about it. Okay, okay. It took me a long time to get around to it, but having said all that, I don't question the need or desireability of strong women's sports programs. Women's sports are beneficial, and I'm glad that girls nowadays have a chance to participate in a wide variety of athletic activities. My wife played tennis and field hockey, and our three daughters participated, at various times, in basketball, gymnastics, volleyball and track. Their coaches made lasting impressions on them that few classroom teachers did. Their athletic experiences no doubt have influenced the way they raise their own sons and daughters. And so I was kind of shocked to read that in the year 2000, somebody is still trying to make money with a blatant appeal to the dumb blonde, boy crazy stereotype that girls' sports have done so much to eradicate. If you've got young daughters, be on the lookout for a new line of trading cards, called "Boy Crazy!" The cards - 363 for a full set, $3 for a pack of nine - feature photos of young men, aged 12 to 22, who were "discovered" by "scouts" at malls around the country (Malls! Wouldn't you know it? Wonder why they didn't try athletic fields or gyms?). The boys' "stats" include such things as their sign of the zodiac, their age (I'm sure if I had a 13-year-old daughter I'd really want her drooling over some 22-year-old mall rat),, and, of course, what they look for in a girl. There is also a web site that goes with the cards (www.boycrazy.com - I have NO intentions of visiting it) where girls will be encouraged to vote for a "Boy of the Week." The Boy Crazy! people claim 47,000 girls visited the site in its first month, even before the cards were released.

February 23 - "To win consistently you must run the football and run it well." Barry Switzer

CLINIC NEWS: For the second year in a row, Coach Pete Smolin at Glendale High will host the Los Angeles Double-Wing clinic, to be held on Saturday, May 6.

The hockey world - the entire sports world - is aghast at the vicious, cowardly slashing attack by the Boston Bruins' Marty McSorley on the Vancouver Canucks' Donald Brashear. I personally think that criminal charges are called for when a player deliberately attacks another with a weapon. If it's something that just happens, and players simply can't restrain themselves, then I have to wonder why we don't see more football players kicking guys who are down. Meanwhile, a Pee Wee Goodwill Tournament held in Portland this past weekend was drained of much of its goodwill by a Seattle youngstr's two-handed swinging stick attack that temporarily paralyzed a young Russian skater. Before a great game is ruined, maybe somebody should try rubber sticks.

Wide Receiver Andre Rison was arrested in Kansas City and charged with theft of $1,100 of audio equipment, which he rented and allegedly failed to return. Personally, I'm inclined to believe that the guy's innocent. Why would anyone making what he makes engage in such petty theft? Knowing the average professional athlete's sense of entitlement, I'm betting Rison truly believed that the equipment was actually a gift from the store owners, grateful little people overcome by the thrill of being used by a real pro football player.

At the heart of the abortion controversy is the question in some peoples' minds as to whether an unborn child is, in fact, a living human being. But there can be hardly be any such debate over a newborn baby. Yet young people seem to be increasingly willing to abandon or destroy children that they brought into this world, rather than let the responsibility of raising it interfere with their lifestyle, such as it is. So great is the stealth with which such babies are dispensed with that it is impossible to say how many newborns are murdered every year, or how many others are abandoned by "parents" unwilling to take responsibility for their creations; but according to a US News and World Report article, in one 10-month period in the Houston area alone, 13 babies were abandoned. And since none of our leaders seems willing to step up and take on the alley-cat morals of certain young Americans of breeding age, and since dispensing of condoms in public schools seems not to be the answer, state legislatures are taking steps to make it easier for young women to leave their newborns at hospitals - no questions asked. Presumably, they will be free to continue breeding. Texas has even gone so far as to erect billboards directed at unmarried pregnant girls, urging them, "DON'T ABANDON YOUR BABY!" How about "IF ALL HE WANTS TO DO IS MAKE A CHILD --- ADANDON HIM!"

Coach John Chaney of Temple has his usual tough basketball team this year. In case nobody has heard, Temple beat Number One Cincinnati on Sunday. One of Temple's stars is 6-5, 220-pound forward Mark Karcher. A junior, Karcher may "come out" - declare himself eligible for the NBA draft - after this season. He needs the money. Does he ever. "He comes with a lot of baggage in terms of problems that he has," says Coach Chaney. Problems? He fathered two kids by two different women during his freshman year. (Can you say "Ray Lewis?") Now one of the children, his 17-month-old daughter, Aria, has been diagnosed as suffering from sickle-cell anemia. Sickle-cell anemia affects an estimated 50,000 Americans, most of them of African descent, and it can have dire consequences: roughly half of the people who suffer from it will not live to see their 40th birthday. "It's hard not to paint a bleak picture," says Dr. Jim Casella, of Johns Hopkins University, "because this is a significant illness." So Mark Karcher tries to be the best father he can be, while playing big-time basketball and taking a full class load. Although not married to his daughter's mother, he has not abandoned his child: he stays as close to her as he can, visiting her at least every other day. He knows that entering the NBA draft will help defray the costs of her medical problems; but he also knows that leaving school without his degree will disappoint his grandmother, who raised him.

Most state athletic associations find that cities are interested enough in state championship events - and the competitors and spectators that bring business to hotels and restaurants - that they will bid competively to host them. Not so in Wyoming, where the reverse is true. There, distances are great and cities with sufficient facilities are few, so the Wyoming High School Activities Association actually pays the city of Casper - relatively centrally-located - $16,000 per event and 15 per cent of gate receipts to host its major events.

February 22 - "It is never a disgrace to lose a game, but it is a disgrace to be out-desired, out-fought, and out-hit." Forest Evashevski and Dave Nelson, from "Scoring Power With the Winged T"

Two more clinic sites have been finalized. The Birmingham clinic on March 11 will be held once again at the Clarion Hotel Airport, the same location as the previous two clinics; the Philadelphia clinic on April 8 will be held in Fort Washington again, but this year it will be held at the Best Western Inn - not the Holiday Inn. Detailed directions to both locations will be published on this site soon. (see CLINICS page)

Coach John Torres, from Los Angeles, told me he had the pleasure of attending a clinic this past weekend and listening to Coach Gordie Gillespie. Those of you who have seen my "Dynamics of the Double Wing" tape know that I mention the resemblance of our slot formation to the unique Double Wing that Coach Gillespie ran at College of St. Francis, in Joliet, Illinois. Back in 1995, while I was still working on the video, Coach Gillespie, who was in Portland to speak at a baseball clinic, was our guest for dinner. We had never corresponded or spoken, but the resemblance between our two offenses was uncanny. Coach Gillespie is a legend in the Chicago area, where he built a program at Joliet Catholic High that has won six state titles, and went on to start the football program at St. Francis (wisely choosing as assistants retired high school coaches from around Chicago). He was also the head baseball coach at St. Francis, and, now in his seventies, continues in baseball as head coach at Ripon College, in Wisconsin, where one of his sons, Bob, is head basketball coach. (Coach Gillespie is the winningest coach in college baseball history, with well over 1000 wins.) The influence of Gordie Gillespie's football coaching is evident in the number of Chicago-area teams running his offense or a variation of it, and he kept his hand in the game by assisting at Joliet Catholic this past year, driving 400 miles round-trip to practices and games. (He still has the touch - Joliet Catholic won a state title.)

Thanks to a story sent me by Coach Bruce Eien, in LA, I have come across a riddle posed by Howard Beck, in the Long Beach Press-Telegram: "If a defender shuts down Allen Iverson, also known as The Answer, does that make him the answer to the Answer, or the question that The Answer can't answer?" Beck was writing about the job Kobe Bryant did Sunday afternoon, holding Iverson, the NBA's scoring leader who had been averaging30.9 points a game, without a point in the entire second half. Bryant blocked four of Iverson's shots as "The Answer" Iverson went 0 for 11, and finished with 16 points. But the significant thing was that despite his outstanding individual play, Bryant was more excited about the Lakers' win over the 76ers in Phladelphia, his home town, where the Lakers hadn't won since November 1996. "I really wasn't thinking about (defending Iverson), to tell you the truth, " he told reporters. "It's like I told you guys, I really don't care. I just go out there and do the job and try to win the basketball game." If you haven't seen it, I recommend Coach Eien's web site. (Coach Eien is unique in that he is one coach who has attended a Double-Wing clinic primarily to learn how to defend against it. Even so, don't believe him when he tries to tell you he has a way of stopping it. But you might want to take a look at his "Left Guard Special" article,)

When I was a kid growing up in Philadelphia, everybody had a nickname. It was unimaginable that anybody would not have a full given name - it shocked us, for example, listening to football games on the radio, to learn of southerners whose full given names were actually "Dickie," or "Tommy" or "Bobby Joe" - and equally unimaginable that anybody would go by his full given name in everyday life - we couldn't believe that other southern football players actually went by just "Robert" or "James." It all seemed so exotic to us. To us, living in an area where everybody had a "full name," to have someone call you by a nickname - usually formed by adding "-ie" or "-y" to the end of your name - signified a friendly familiarity. You knew where you stood with somebody by the form of your name that they used. "Robert," or "Francis" or "Vincent" were the names you went by at church, or when your mother was upset (if she was really upset, she might even add your middle name for emphasis); "Bob" or "Frank" or "Vince" were the names for people who had just met you; "Bobby," or "Frankie" or "Vinnie" were terms of endearment. It meant that you were already friends, or potential friends. One thing you never did, unless you were ready to get after it, was call a guy by his last name - "Hey, Wilson!" - that was a sure sign that you and he had some sort of difference to settle. Now, though, in these days of trendy first names and soccer moms who insist that little "Andrew" never, ever be called "Andy," the old informal, unstated rules of my boyhood have flown the coop. Sometimes, it seems the only place they still hold up is in the North Jersey of HBO's "The Sopranos." I was thinking about this the other day when I read an excerpt from an Australian novel called "My Brother Jack". The author, George Johnston, writes, "It was then, and to a large degree still is, an inviolate Australian practice to make contractions of all personal names longer than one syllable and to expand those that are monosyllabic. So that, for example, while John almost invariably became 'Johno' and Jack 'Jackie,' names like Minnie, David, Gertrude, Emma and Elizabeth were only used in their shortened forms of Min, Dave, Gert, Em and Lizzie. Every relative I had as a child was an Ern, Marj, Dot, Steve, Tom, Stell, Fan, Bert, Gin, Alf or Bill. "

Chuck Raykovich, head coach at Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, has put together a couple of fantastic years there. Playing in the Badger State's largest classification, his Double-Wing has averaged over 40 points a game over the last two years. But poor Chuck - he's not even the best-known person in his own home! In fact, right now, he's about number three: his dad, a retired coach, is a member of the Wisconsin Coaches Hall of Fame. And his wife, Roxie, a country singer who performs professionally as Roxie Barton (www.roxiebarton.com), has just released her first CD. Chuck is so proud of Roxie that he doesn't even mind being Number Three!

February 21 - "It is through drill and only drill that the coach can be reasonably sure of good performance under game pressure." George Allen

Checking in last week on my pal Joe Gardi, head coach at Hofstra University, he told me he had just returned from the Lambert Awards, the annual dinner honoring the top teams in the East. Hofstra, which finished its regular season 10-1, was awarded the Lambert Cup for 1999, given annualy to the East's top Division I-AA team. (Virginia Tech was named the East's top I-A team, while Indiana University of Pennsylvania was tops in Division II.) Hofstra's QB, Giovanni Carmazzi - watch him in the NFL draft - was named ECAC Player of the Year.  

Coach Tom Hensch of Staten Island, New York was first to guess the answer to Saturday's question. It's Dick Nolan, a native of White Plains, New York who played at Maryland and played nine seasons in the NFL with the Giants, Cardinals, Giants again, and Cowboys. After six seasons as an assistant to Coach Landry in Dallas, he was head coach of the 49ers for eight seasons from 1968 through 1975, taking them to three straight first-place division finishes (1970-71-72). His son, Mike, who played at Oregon under Rich Brooks (himself a former Dick Nolan assistant at San Francisco), was recently named defensive coordinator of the New York Jets.

Here's a toughie that involves Tom Landry: in 1964, Coach Landry was given a 10-year contract. Nowadays, no owner would tie himself down like that, but over the next eight years, five other NFL head coaches would be given contracts at least as long as Coach Landry's. Yet of the six given such lengthy contracts, only Coach Landry made it to the end of his without being fired. In fact, all of the other five were gone before five years were up on their contracts. One of them lasted less than two seasons. Can you name the other five coaches besides Tom Landry, if I spot you their teams? (Eagles, Giants, Broncos, Oilers, Chiefs).

The name Greasy Neale is now a part of the faded past, but he was once famed for being as much a character as he was a coach. And he was a pretty decent coach, leading the Philadelphia Eagles, in 1948 and 1949, to two of the only three NFL titles they have ever won. What few people know is that in his early years of coaching, he was involved in one of the most improbable college games of all time. In 1922, he took little Washington and Jefferson, a school in Washington, Pennsylvania whose enrollment was fewer than 250 students - some of them female - to the Rose Bowl, where the Presidents held mighty Cal to a 0-0 tie. Using only 11 men the entire game, W & J held the Golden Bears to only two first downs, and had a touchdown brought back on a call that they still dispute back in Western Pennsylvania. From W & J he went on to Virginia, where before being hired he was asked by one of the interviewers how he was able to manage to take such a small school to the Rose Bowl and almost beat Cal. His answer showed how far ahead of his time he was. "That's easy," he recalled saying. "We went out and got 'em. We brought the players in. Didn't make any difference how many people were in the rest of the school!"

Just in case you wondered what they did with your union dues: a recent poll shows that nationwide, teachers are undecided on a presidential nominee. Only 11 percent of them support Al Gore. Doesn't matter. The NEA - the National Education Association, largest single contributor to the Democratic Party (wonder where they get their money?) - endorsed him. In October.

February 19 - "Whenever you have success and you have a good feeling about what you're doing, and you like it, you go on to coaching after that...but if you go into a situation where you're always losing, have a lot of rift, that's something you don't want to continue as your life's work. When you do something good, though, it just becomes a part of you. And you continue in that atmosphere." Tom Landry

The local TV sports shows, given only three or four minutes to squeeze in everything that happens in the World of Sports, gave us a tiny glimpse at footage from the memorial service for Coach Landry. What we got mostly was excerpts of a speech by Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, a guy who was to Tom Landry as William Jefferson Clinton is to Norman Schwarzkopf. Like a star-struck movie fan outside the Academy Awards, what I wanted to see more of was all those great old Cowboys - Bob Lilly, Mel Renfro, Lee Roy Jordan, Roger Staubach, Calvin Hill, Harvey Martin, Walt Garrison, Dan Reeves, Tony Dorsett and others - getting together with their old coach one last time.

Another Landry question - he played for Tom Landry, served as an assistant under him, and was an NFL coach himself; now his son is an NFL defensive coordinator. Who is he?

At the close of today's Washington State wrestling tournament, Charlie Hinds will wrap things up as head wrestling coach at Camas High School, in the town where I live. It's been 34 years since Charlie first came to Camas, right out of college at the University of Idaho. Charlie was hired as an English teacher and eighth-grade basketball coach, but he was a wrestling guy at heart, and he set out to start a high school wrestling program. He wound up spending so much time raising funds that the school had to hustle to find a replacement for him as basketball coach. Now, as retirement nears, championship banners from 34 years of Camas wrestling drape the walls of the gym that, in a school not distinguished by much else in the way of athletics, would otherwise be bare. Charlie is just as competitive now as when he started. "The tendency when we start out," he told the Vancouver Columbian, "is to make coaching a real competitive thing. We get into coaching because we're competitors. We like to compete, and we find a way to continue that." But he does admit that his outlook has changed over the years. Now, he sees coaching as something artistic. "When I send Micaiah Watkins (state 119-pound contender) out there and I see him do something I taught him, that's my art. I take that raw material, work with it and try to create something." Charlie is a firm believer in the role of sports in educating young people. "In sports," he says, "you have the athlete's attention. You can teach them things in sports that you can't teach them in the classroom. You can teach them better about how to treat other people and how to deal with winning and losing."

The Arizona Cardinals' Simeon Rice, a heck of a football player, has not been sounding lately like the kind of guy you'd want on your team - which seems to be fine with him. Perhaps in an effort to get himself traded, he has had negative things to say - loudly and publicly - about virtually every aspect of the Cardinals' organization, including ownership, coaching, teammates - even the city of Phoenix. His recent conduct does not seem to reflect the things he learned at Mount Carmel High, in Chicago, where Coach Frank Lenti - whose teams have won eight state championships - takes pride in teaching his players to be humble. "If and when he does come to Chicago," Coach Lenti told the Chicago Tribune, " I'd hope to see a lot more action and a lot less trash-talking, We always say, anyone can talk the talk. The great ones have to walk the walk. I know one thing--he didn't learn any of that stuff at Mount Carmel."

A public opinion survey taken by an organization called Public Agenda reveals that Americans strongly oppose "social promotion" - passing kids along to the next grade even though they may be doing poorly or even failing, and may not be capable of doing the work at the next level. A full 78 per cent of parents surveyed favor "retaining" students rather than passing them on without the necessary skills. Right. If you would like to find out who the other 22 per cent are, just suggest holding some kid back this spring.

When I was in seventh grade, my PE teacher was the high school basketball coach, a guy named Jack McCloskey. He would leave school right after practice several days a week, and drive a couple of hours upstate to some place like Sunbury or Shamokin to play in something called the Eastern League, a forerunner of today's Continental Basketball League. Jack would go on from there to big things, as coach at Penn, then Wake Forest, then the Portland Trail Blazers. He finished his NBA career as GM of the Detroit Pistons during the "Bad Boys" days of Isaiah Thomas-Joe Dumars-Bill Laimbeer- and, yes Dennis Rodman. There were several other young coaches in the Philadelphia area just like Jack McCloskey - real basketball nuts - men like Jack Ramsay, who went on to win Portland's only NBA championship. One Philly guy did them even better. His name was Howie Dallmar, and somehow, he managed to coach the University of Pennsylvania and play for the NBA Philadelphia Warriors at the same time, before moving west to coach Stanford, his alma mater. Bob Davies did the same thing for a season, coaching Seton Hall while playing for the NBA Rochester Royals. Those guys weren't doing it for the money; they had an absolute passion for the game of basketball, a mindset that could never imagine a Scottie Pippen refusing to go back into a game. I was reminded of guys like this when I read an article about Jennifer Rizzotti, a former UConn star who plays for the WNBA Houston Comets, but also coaches the University of Hartford's women's team. She is a certified basketball nut. Her coaching contract permits her to play professionally, and since the WNBA plays its games in the summer, it's likely she will continue to do so. But there's no question where her future lies, because she can coach: Hartford, picked in the pre-season to finish last in the 10-team America East Conference, was in fifth place as of last weekend, 6-6 in league play and 11-10 overall.

February 18 - "We knew we were something special in New York. The city was just on fire. It was amazing the way they supported the Giants." Tom Landry, talking of his days as Giants' defensive coordinator

Tom Landry recalled Giants' head coach Jim Lee Howell's unprecedented action of turning over complete control of his offense and defense to two key assistants (the word "coordinator" had not yet been used in football): "Jim Lee was willing to let Vince (Lombardi) take over the offense and me take over the defense. None of this could have happened unless Jim was willing to let it, and it worked. In fact, it probably never would again with any combination of three men. But it worked out well then." In another sense, this separation of powers - this division of responsibility - was a key to the Dallas Cowboys' great run of success, with Tex Schramm running the business end, Gil Brandt handling player personnel, and Coach Landry left unhampered to run the football team. Coach Landry might also have mentioned the fact that those were the days when owners generally sat back and left things to the experts - the days when only foolish owners meddled, and they did so at their own risk. Only George Halas in Chicago and Paul Brown in Cincinnati - great coaches in their own right - ever managed to achieve any success combining owning a team with coaching a team. There is a lesson somewhere in there for certain modern-day owners.

Answer to yesterday's quiz (which no one got): The three linebackers in Coach Landry's first 4-3 defense were Sam Huff in the middle, Harland Svare and Bill Svoboda on the outside.

The near-empty classrooms were the first sign that something fishy was going on. When they dug a little deeper, educators at Oregon City (Oregon) High School discovered that 236 seniors had bailed out of their required senior health class, taking advantage of a law which allows students to have the requirement waived for "religious reasons." And then, shortly after that news, came a letter to the Portland newspaper in which a mother of a student at another area high school described the AIDS unit of her son's health class: a visiting instructor told the coed class about the way certain diseases are contracted, "describing with great detail, every different possible way that mucous membrances and body fluids could come together," and capping off the presentation by instructing the class on how to apply a female condom. And all the while public school administrations fiddle, American public education burns, as the private schools and home schooling continue to skim off the very families that the public schools need so desperately to keep.

Maybe you've seen the ads for the latest sports atrocity, Ultimatebid.com. Actually, it ought to be called Ultimategreed.com. When I first heard of it, I immediately thought of geishas. Geishas have long been a part of Japanese culture. Geishas are young women trained from the time they are girls to please men, who in turn pay well for the geishas' company. Ultimatebid.com has signed up the likes of Tiger Woods, Joe Montana and figure skater Tara Lipinski, in the belief that Americans will pay well for their company. How about $350,000 for a round of golf with Mr. Woods? How much would you pay to eat dinner with Brett Hull, or attend the NFL draft with likely first-round pick Chad Pennington? Or hang out with the Yankees' Derek Jeter during spring training? Hey - if you've got the money, you can party with the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Models! Maybe you could even arrange for Dennis Rodman to babysit your kids. This - dare I say whorish? - venture got its start in a most innocent way, when one of its founders happened to attend a fund-raiser for his son's school at which a camp to be conducted by Joe Montana was auctioned off for $18,000. That money, though, went entirely to charity. And although Ultimatebid.com claims that some charities will "benefit" in some way from your stupidity, let's not kid ourselves - the bulk of the money from this glorified escort service is going to further enrich already-stupendously-rich athletes. The company-keeping-for-money will be done, of course, on the athletes' otherwise free time - the same free time that so many of them say they need so desperately - because of their great desire "to spend time with my family." Can these be the same rich celebrities who whine about people pestering them for autographs while they're eating in a restaurant? They won't shake your hand for free but, they'll hit ground balls to your kid for half a mill. I'm reminded of an old story - a man approaches a woman and asks, "would you go to bed with me for a million dollars?" "A million dollars? Sure," she replies. "Well, would you go to bed with me for ten bucks?" he asks."Of course not!" she says, indignantly. "What do you think I am, a common whore?" "Madam," he says, " we've already established that. All we're doing now is negotiating the price."

I had some business recently with a young man named Joe Magee, who after he heard that I was a football coach told me a story from his high school football days at Philadelphia's Northeast High. Now, on every team, it seems there is that one real hitter - one guy who just stands above the rest. He not only likes to hit, but he knows how to do get there and how to do it. At Northeast, that special player was Charles Way, who would go on to play at the University of Virginia and now, at 6-foot, 250 pounds, is an outstanding blocking fullback for the New York Giants. Joe remembers in particular one "fumble prevention" drill that his coach really seemed to like; it consisted of having a ball carrier run head-on into a tackler, with the object of holding onto the ball no matter how hard the collision. Joe, a wingback who never weighed more than 150 pounds, remembers always looking across at the line of tacklers, asking himself "Where's Charles?" as he counted the people in the other line. Somehow - he didn't say how - he always managed to avoid the big hitter. Always, that is, until one day, when his mind was on something else, he was suddenly jarred back to reality by the words everyone dreaded: one of the other running backs said to him, "Hey, man - you got Charles!" He counted. Sure enough, he got Charles. He saw his life passing before his eyes as he moved closer to the front of the line. When his turn finally came, "I just decided I was going to close my eyes and go as hard as I could and not worry about what happened," he told me. What happened, of course, was that he got drilled. And as he fell to the ground, with Charles Way on top of him, the ball flew out in another direction. When he staggered home that night, he took off his shirt and looked at himself in the mirror: on his upper arm was a fiery-red cross-hatch design - the pattern of his mesh scrimmage jersey, imprinted there by the force of Charles Way's hit.

As a result of pressure from various victims' rights groups, Sears has tossed out the Bennetton line of clothing. But Bennetton, the Italian clothing manufacturer which somehow thought it was really being socially responsible by running ads that showed us the "human side" of some of the animals on Death Row (see my story, Jan. 24) is unrepentant, claiming that it has the right to espouse social causes, no matter how unpopular. Sure you do. Just realize that there may be consequences. Don't praise the Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in your ads and then expect African-Americans to stand by.

February 17 - "He'd tell his players what to do and one would say, 'Well, what are you gonna do if they try this?' And Tom would say, very quietly, 'Well, we'll just take care of it.' " Jim Lee Howell, Head Coach of the New York Giants, under whom Tom Landry served as defensive coordinator

How many of you know that Tom Landry gave football the term "Red Dog", a name he gave to a defensive tactic, prepared especially for a game against Buddy Parker's Pittsburgh Steelers, in which his three linebackers (in the 4-3 which he is credited with inventing) all rushed the passer. (Q: Can you name the three Giants' linebackers?)

If February's here, spring ball can't be far behind. In the South, that is. Spring football is a phenomenon concentrated in the states along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts from South Carolina around to Texas, and stretching inland to include Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. In many cases, spring football is limited to the larger classifications of schools, and regulations regarding contact vary from state to state. Some states also permit schools the option of having spring ball or starting a week earlier in August, while others offer the choice of playing a spring game or playing an extra regular-season game. Regardless of how it is administered, spring football really does afford an athlete a great additional opportunity to develop as a player. Figure it out: using Texas as an example, its 5A, and (this year for the first time) 4A schools are allowed 18 practices somewhere within a 30 calendar-day period. Assuming a player plays three years of high school ball, he will take part in at least two springs' worth of practices, or 36 practices more than a player in a state without spring practice. Think about it a minute - those 36 additional practices give a player the equivalent of an extra season of high school football! (Just one of the reasons why southern states produce a disproportionate number of college football players per capita.)

Did anybody else read about Vladimir Malakhov, the Montreal Canadiens' defenseman who, although he had been sitting out the entire season with a bad knee - drawing full pay, of course - was seen last Thursday enjoying a skiing outing with his son? When threatened by the team with suspension without pay, he experienced a miraculous cure the likes of which Oral Roberts would have been proud of, and made it to the next practice. He didn't seem to see anything wrong with his particular form of welfare fraud, though: "I have a right to a private life, don't I?" he asked.

In 1995, Bill Casagrande started the Mid-Atlantic Unlimited Youth Football Association with only one team -- a 35-player squad made up of middle school kids too big to play in most youth leagues, which typically have weight restrictions. "Watching kids do unsafe and unhealthy things to make weight was frustrating," Casagrande told the Baltimore Sun, citing such weight-loss practices as taking diuretics, laxatives and over-the-counter diet pills, sitting in steaming-hot bathtubs the night before a game, or not eating or drinking all day before a weigh-in. "After a while," he said, "a lot of the bigger kids would give up, not play or try other sports."

His first team started out playing anybody it could schedule - mostly private school frosh-soph teams. It didn't win a game. Now, five years later, there are eight such teams with more than 200 players throughout eastern Maryland.

Casagrande has run into some opposition in his appeals to youth leagues to field unlimited teams. The first argument he encounters is that there aren't that many big kids, anyhow; but Casagrande says that's leagues don't advertise for bigger boys, and so they don't bother turning out. A second reason is that there isn't enough equipment for the bigger kids. That means money, and that's always a problem, but not necessarily an insurmountable one for the kind of people who keep our youth sports going through their diligent fundraising. Finally, there's an argument based on safety: weight-limit advocates say that it's unsafe for a 120-pounder to play against a 200-pounder. But Casagrande has an answer for that: minimum weights for the "big kids." For 10-11-year-olds it's 130 pounds; for 12-13-year-olds, it's 150 pounds; and, for 14-year-olds, it's 175. The maximum age is 14 as of July 31, and no ninth-graders are allowed.

Casagrande has received help from one important supporter, Biff Poggi, coach of The Gilman School, a private school with one of the Baltimore area's leading football programs. Coach Poggi was so impressed by Casagrande's efforts that since 1997 he has allowed him to use the Gilman facilities for practices and games. The relationship has proved to be symbiotic: six of Gilman's 1999 starters came out of Casagrande's program.

In Maryland, middle-school football is rare-to-nonexistent. There, recreation league teams have traditionally served as the feeder programs for high school teams in lacrosse, baseball, basketball, soccer - and football. "You look at the USA Today national high school rankings," Casagrande said, "and the top teams come from the states where the bigger kids get a chance to play in middle school," referring to states such as California, Florida, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. "It's critical to football, because football is generally a big man's game, and all of us big guys never got to play until we got to high school," Gilman's Coach Poggi told the Sun.

Casagrande understands only too well: he was too big himself to play youth football, and didn't play the sport until he was a 6-2, 240-pound high school sophomore. "All we want to do is let the big guys play and develop their skills," he says.

February 16 - "The primary challenge of coaching in the National Football League can be boiled down to a one-sentence job description: to get people to do what they don't want to do in order to achieve what they want to achieve." Tom Landry

"You know, I never really thought of myself as a coach - even when I was coaching with New York. I planned to be in business. That's why I took my industrial management degree. I was in business in Houston during the off-season. I was constantly preparing for business while I was finishing up what I thought was just going to be an assistant coaching job. Then, about the time I was ready to step down as coach and go into business, that's when the Dallas job opened up. I was living in Texas anyway. It was a natural transition. But I hadn't even thought about it before." Tom Landry, quoted in "There Were Giants in Those Days," by Gerald Eskenazi, Grosset & Dunlap, 1976

The Internet has made it a snap for "students" to "write" papers, merely by lifting other peoples' work and passing it off as their own. In academic circles, that's called plagiarism, and college instructors and high school teachers have noted an increase in it, thanks to the ease of cutting and pasting directly from the Web. But not so fast - leave it to Americans to spot an opportunity in there. Now, the very Internet that has made plagiarism so easy for students is about to be turned against them - a new service, http://www.plagiarism.org, is being marketed to colleges and individual professors to help expose cheaters. It offers - for a fee - to check papers for originality, not only catching the obvious cases of work lifted in its entirety from someplace else, but also detecting papers made by pasting together bits and pieces of unattributed work. Using the top 20 search engines, papers are checked against material on the Web. Unquestionably, the new service fills a need - a test of the system last spring on 300 papers submitted in a class at Cal-Berkeley turned up 15 per cent that contained "less than original" material - even after students had been warned that their papers would be checked! Apart from the academic dishonesty involved, plagiarism is not in the student's long-term best interest, says Jeanne Wilson of the Center for Academic Integrity, who calls it "incredibly self-destructive." Employers, she says, are looking for "transferrable things... skills like writing and thinking and analysis. Those are the kinds of things that get taught by having to write a paper yourself." (Anybody who ever saw Fox's special on Jerry Tarkanian's basketball program at Fresno State would have to wonder what Ms. Wilson would call it when a basketball player lounges indolently in a chair while his "tutor" sits at a computer keyboard, trying to coax words out of him so she can turn them into "his" paper.)

There was an interesting article in last Wednesday's Philadelphia Inquirer about the University of Pennsylvania's wrestling program. Penn, like many other schools, should probably be happy even to have a wrestling program, since wrestling often seems to be the male sport of choice to be dumped overboard in the pursuit of gender equity. (Time to play "Title IX Compliance Time!" Can't afford to even things up by adding a women's sport? No problem - just drop a men's sport. The guys won't mind. After all, the've had it their way for 100 years. Now it's their turn to suffer.) At Penn, it was ice hockey and men's golf that got the axe. Wrestling survived, mainly because some prominent wrestling alumni rallied to its support. But Penn wrestling didn't merely survive - it has prospered. The Quakers finished 11th in last year's NCAA tournament, and last week were ranked 14th in the nation, with a win over perennial power Penn State to their credit. They are even beginning to draw decent crowds. But even with strong alumni support - one former Penn wrestler, David Pottruck, is President and CEO of Charles Schwab, Inc. and the brand-new Pottruck Center, named for him, gives Penn a wrestling facility second to none - it hasn't been easy. Penn is, after all, an Ivy League school, with high academic standards; and, as with all the other Ivy Schools, Penn offers no athletic scholarships. (Admittedly, with fewer college wrestling programs offering fewer wrestling scholarships, the Quakers are not at the recruiting disadvantage they would be in big-time football or basketball - they already have two commitments from high schoolers currently ranked number one nationally in their weight classes.) But Penn's coach, Roger Reina, says that because of the nature of his sport, he isn't obsessed with recruiting blue-chip athletes. "Many sports at the elite levels are driven by talent, size or speed," he told the Inquirer. "At some point, the work and sacrifice stop paying results for the average athlete. But in a sport like wrestling, even an average athlete is capable of phenomenal things if they are willing to work hard." Well said, Coach Reina. And you can add football to your list.

Aw, c'mon! This is America! Everybody gets a second chance! Even convicted murderers can appeal! Maybe - but in sports, there are still consequences. Try this one on those weenie parents who think it's unfair that you failed their kid, just because he hasn't turned in his work all semester and he flunked the final; or the mom and dad who don't understand why their son isn't going to play, when all he did was miss a practice: A local high school wrestler, a former student of mine and the son of a guy I once coached with, failed to make weight at the district tournament, in effect disqualifying him from further competition the rest of the season. He was two pounds over the limit. He is a senior. He was a defending state champion.

A Texas high school basketball player who elbowed an opponent in the face was given a five-year prison term after pleading no contest to a charge of aggravated assault with serious bodily injury. The incident took place in a basketball game in January 1999, between two San Antonio high schools. As the ball moved down court, the player in question, Tony Limon, smashed opponent Brent Holmes in the face. Holmes received a concussion and a compound fracture of his nose. No foul was called at the time, but after viewing a home video of the incident, Holmes' parents filed a criminal complaint. Prosecutors agreed that the incident went well beyond aggressive play. "It was a deliberate act of violence," said Assistant District Attorney Mary Green. "The Holmes kid didn't have the ball. They were nowhere near the ball. This was like a street mugging. It was just on a basketball court." James Rodriguez, who defended Limon, argues that kids all too often don't know where the line is between rough play and criminal conduct. "It's regrettable that we put our children into athletic competition in schools and encourage them to be aggressive, then don't set the right limits," he said. "In this instance, things went too far. The referees failed. The coaches failed. And the schools failed. But Tony's the one going to prison." While I can't say I go along with Mr. Rodriguez' attempts to pass off the blame to others, he does bring up an interesting point. "If we're going to start prosecuting for elbows thrown in a game," he asks, "are we going to have to start looking at the coaches as co-conspirators?"

February 15 - "If you weren't willing to sacrifice - you know, sacrifice the ability to make a big play by yourself, then you couldn't work in our system. You had to be willing to work with other people, and everybody would receive the success together." Tom Landry, discussing the philosophy behind the defense he built with the New York Giants

University of Arizona President Peter Likins publicly affirmed his support for Wildcats' football coach Dick Tomey last week. For those of us who believe that Coach Tomey is a good man, it's nice to hear that his job is secure, at least for the time being. But if I were a friend of President Likins - whom I don't even know - I think I'd worry about his job security, after some of the things he said. "The purpose of our athletic department," he told a radio audience, "isn't to make money or entertain the fans." Wow, I thought, when I heard that. He's come up with something even more important to an athletic department than that. In a day and age when Michigan fires its AD, partly over a $3.5 million deficit, what could it possibly be? President Likins went on to say, "The development and character of our young men and women, our student-athletes, is the fundamental purpose of our athletic department." That's what he actually said. Now, if President Likins truly believes this, then when the athletic department ceases to entertain fans (by winning, presumably), I think he had better be prepared to write some awfully large personal checks to the University. Because Arizona's athletic program really is the biggest show in Tucson, and the flow of money from donors is going to stop as soon as the "entertainment" does. See, those people have been persuaded, perhaps by the creative marketing of the athletic department itself, that its purpose is to entertain them. And if the good president really thinks he can run an athletic department without money, developing character in its young men and women while they get whacked regularly by Arizona State, just up the road, he is either dreadfully naive about big-time college athletics (which, considering that he is a college president, is highly likely) or he knows something nobody else does (unlikely). Or he has a job offer in his pocket from Swarthmore or Reed, or some such haven of athletic deemphasis, and is ready to bolt. I think that Coach Tomey and his assistants should of course adhere to the wishes of the president, and work hard on developing character in their young men - but just to be on the safe side, they might want to concentrate their character-building on the biggest, fastest, strongest athletes they can find.

I was talking last week with a teacher/coach who is retired now, but teaches part-time. But he said he's not sure he'll even finish out the school year. It's the spoiled kids. "They think you're their servants," he told me.......which set me to reflecting on several things I'd read recently about today's crop of spoiled youngsters, many of whom have little respect for the dignity of work, and even less for the people who have to do it. And then, the very next day, there appeared in the Wall Street Journal a letter from a man named Robert W. Rynerson of Denver, who wrote that in the 1980's he was transportation supervisor for a big-city school system. He said that he kept getting complaints about drivers on one particular bus route in an affluent neighborhood, yet when that same driver was transferred to a route through a low-income neighborhood, one made up of "recent immigrants from Eastern Europe," complaints about him ceased. On the other hand, complaints about the new driver immediately began coming in from parents of kids on the affluent bus run. Maybe it's best to let Mr. Rynerson tell what happened from there: "I went for a trip on the affluent kids' bus, dressed like a trainee driver, and the sixth-graders told me that they would run me out when my turn came to drive, and they were quite proud of having run off a number of other drivers. It was kind of a hobby. On the immigrants' bus, the parents responded to complaints from their kids with a directive to pay attention to their studies, and told them that the driver was the captain of the ship, and they had better cooperate. On the affluent kids' bus, some parents were sure that their sweet children were still too innocent to concoct false or overstated complaints. But as smart as these children were, it never occured to them that someone from the administration building would turn up in sub-zero weather in the early morning to ride the bus with them, and so they were distressingly candid with me as to what my "future" would be as a bus driver. I was careful not to tell them I was a bus driver - they jumped to that conclusion because I was not dressed like a school administrator. Inner-city kids likely would have been more cautious, but this group had no concerns, because their parents could fix anything. They also knew their busy parents would never take the time to figure out what was really going on with this bus. Perhaps they had even learned their negative attitude toward the drivers from their parents. In lower middle class families, the next-door neighbor or a schoolmate's parent is likely to be in one of the service jobs, so it's not difficult to relate to them."

Now that Jerry Sandusky has retired as Joe Paterno's defensive coordinator at Penn State, Coach Paterno, who just signed a brand-new 5-year contract, has redesigned his staff. Tom Bradley, a relative newcomer on the staff with "just" 20 years' seniority, will take over the defense, and Fran Ganter, who started working on Joe Pa's staff as a graduate assistant in 1972, has just been named "Assistant Head Coach." Coach Paterno appears to be preparing for a smooth transition after he retires - as smooth as the one provided for him by his predecessor, Rip Engle, who in 1964 named Coach Paterno "Associate Head Coach." Interestingly, though, Coach Paterno took pains to note that with this recent staff realignment, there would be no "coordinators". "I've always hated that term," he said. "They assume when he's the coordinator, it's 'his' offense or 'his' defense. It's gotten to the point where it takes away from the unity of your staff." (Think about that a minute, the next time you or someone on your staff think titles are that important.)

"One of our goals should be to have star teachers paid at the same level as major league umpires. You don't expect them to get paid as much as 20-game winning pitchers or an NFL running back, but you'd like to get them up to the umpires. That would change the whole nature of modern education. It would change the dynamic of teaching overnight." Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich

I was talking recently with Bruce Weber, publisher of Scholastic Coach and Athletic Director Magazine, and somehow the quote at the top of my home page came up. It turns out that Bruce is a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and he went on to tell me some amazing things about his alma mater. Basketball great Billy Cunningham was a classmate, and Bruce said he occasionally teases Billy, who probably would have been the most illustrious alumnus of most other high schools, with the fact that at Erasmus Hall he barely finishes in the top five - in his own graduating class! That's because he graduated with the likes of Neil Diamond... Barbra Streisand... (chess champ) Bobby Fisher... Lainie Kazan. Opera star Beverly Sills, actor Jeff Chandler and author Mickey Spillane also graduated from Erasmus Hall. Sports? How's this for football alums: Erasmus' football field is named for Hall of Fame quarterback Sid Luckman, its gym for Oakland Raiders' owner Al Davis. Former NFL coach Sam Rutigliano is also an Erasmus Hall grad. In fact, when Sports Illustrated did its "Top 50" athletes of the twentieth century from each of the 50 states, four of New York's 50 - Cunningham, Luckman, Davis, and Gertrude Ederle (first woman to swim the English Channel) - were from Erasmus Hall!

February 14 - "I guess they'll forget me pretty quick."Tom Landry, after being let go by Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones

With the passing of Tom Landry, football lost a great man, and the Dallas Cowboys lost one more link to the days when they were once synonymous with class. Tom Landry's major flaw in the eyes of the sports media, who seem to have a way of needing to decide for us what we ought to be able to decide for ourselves, was his absolute stoicism on game days. He simply would not perform for the TV cameras, nor would he tolerate idiotic antics among his players. But that stoicism may have been his strongest point as a coach, because it reflected his total dedication to displaying calm under pressure. "My players had to believe I was under control," he said. "It would have hurt the team for them to see me losing it." Where do you start with Coach Landry? In World War II, a war which claimed the life of his brother? Tom Landry flew 30 bombing missions, and survived a crash landing in his B-17 (amazing how many men lost their lives in B-17's), an experience Coach Landry once compared with coaching a pro football team. "It's about the same," he told writer Denne Freeman. "If you lose your cool in either situation, it's a disaster." How many people know that he was a great football player at the University of Texas, and an All-Pro defensive back with the New York Giants? How many know that at age 29, he was a player-coach, in charge of the Giants' defense? That he coached the defense while another young genius, Vince Lombardi, coached the Giants' offense? That he is given credit for the invention of the 4-deep "umbrella defense" that finally shut down the wide-open passing game of Paul Brown and the Cleveland Browns, when they first entered the league and ran roughshod over the rest of the NFL? That he was principal designer of the "Pro 4-3" defense, making use of a talented West Virginian named Sam Huff at middle linebacker? Do we start with the fact that he was the first coach of the Cowboys, who managed to endure a winless (0-11-1) first season, and didn't have a winning seasom until his seventh year? Or that he was only 13-38-3 with one year left on his first contract, when the Cowboys' owner, Clint Murchison, gave him ten more years? (Cheers for Mr. Murchison. Nowadays, you're lucky if you get three years from the big money guys.) Or that he paid Mr. Murchison back with 20 straight winning seasons, finishing first in the NFC 13 of the next 16 years, and going to five Super Bowls? Or that he was a man of deep faith, who made no secret of it yet made no big show of it either; who let his light shine before men, and showed the rest of us that a man of deep beliefs need not leave his faith in the locker room? You certainly don't finish with the way he was unceremoniously dumped, without warning, in mid-February as he prepared for his 30th season, by present owner Jerry Jones, then replaced by Jimmy Johnson. Maybe it's best to remember him as a man who dignified our profession - who represented us at our very best, and made us all stand a little taller because we were football coaches, too. Like Tom Landry.

Today is V-Day. No, not St. Valentine's Day, you sexist pig! V-Day. V-Day stand for - I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP! - Vagina Day (or Violence against Women Day, whichever you prefer). Actually, I prefer neither, since it does happen also to be Valentine's Day, but Karen Obel, a "national director" (whatever that is) of V-Day, explained why its founders chose to "celebrate" it today. "Someone's intinctive reaction to Valentine's Day is romance, hearts, love, all of the gentler things about relationships...unfortunately, it's not all romance and flowers and chocolate." V-Day, you see, deals with what beasts men are, and, when you get right down to it, how inessential they really are. V-Day "celebrations" will be held at more than 145 colleges. Hide this next one from your kids, and if you have a daughter at Brown University, bring her home - part of Brown's V-Day "celebration" will be something called "Sex for One," in which female students will be offered instructions - I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP, EITHER - on how to achieve sexual fulfillment on their own (you know - without having to bother with all those useless males). V-Day organizers are complaining about a lack of sponsors to help them get the word out. I personally can't imagine why an American company wouldn't want to pay good money to show its support of such a worthy cause, but according to V-Day founder Eve Ensler, the answer is, of course, sexism - she says that if this were all about men and penises, there would be plenty of sponsors. Somehow, I doubt it. Anyhow, if you're a married coach, thank your wife for being a coach's wife. And keep your daughters and little sisters away from these V-Day idiots. (How, by the way, did we ever get to this point?)

"I am not concerned with what they bench when we recruit them, but I am very concerned that they have an appreciation for weight lifting. We have the ability to develop strength, but only if the kid sincerely wants to become strong." Jack Bicknell, Doug Flutie's coach at Boston College

What would happen if you took your best football players and taught them how to play soccer? Read on: "Florence Eagles are in the state CHAMPIONSHIP game! We won against Pearl High School 1-0. We have shut out all our play-off opponents. Guess what? My entire defense is made up of football players.14 of 24 team members are football players. I look forward to the clinic again this year and the opportunity learn more about the offense. By the way my son who played wingback signed with Delta State of the Gulf South Conference. See you soon." Steve Jones, Florence, Mississippi

"I think what frustrates me the most is that not only is the military short handed, but we also get some of the poorest quality recruits... and we don't really beat it out of them any more. In my own branch of service, the Coast Guard, a few years ago we had what were called "training time outs". Essentially, some bleeding heart decided that Coast Guard training was too rigorous for a little darling to endure, so the recruit could at any time call for a training time out if they felt they couldn't complete the evolution in progress. And the result? During Search and Rescues for the next FIVE YEARS these recruits, many of them now petty officers, would call for a "time out" during the search. Thankfully they eliminated the system, but even when I went through basic we could only be "cranked" for five minutes out of every hour. Know any football coaches who only drill their teams for ten minutes in a two hour practice? I sure don't! Basically, we have a situation where American children have no self-discipline, enter a service that REQUIRES discipline to function- or somebody dies- and we can't impose discipline upon them. Quite the condundrum." Coach Derek Wade, USCG, Alaska

Talk about the impression our game of football makes on people: last Sunday night, on CBS 60 Minutes, Morley Safer was in Bhutan, one of the most remote countries in the world, high in the Himalayas between China and India. Much of the show was devoted to an interview with a high government official whose name and title I missed, but whose English was, to say the least, impressive. Turns out he went to college in the U.S. When Safer asked him where, he said, "Penn State - I root for the Nittany Lions!"

February 12 - "Be careful about changing because of a bad game." Doug Dickey, former coach, University of Florida, currently AD at Tennessee

Now that it's all over - why do those pro running backs wear gloves? Even the ones that never get thrown to? Are they receiving money from the glovemakers? No doubt influenced by the pros, one of our running backs wore gloves this year. I'm pretty old-school about what I consider to be fancy stuff, and he's the first player I've ever had who wore gloves, and against my better judgment, I decided not to make an issue of it. He's a good kid, so I just let it go. Now, we didn't lose too many fumbles this past season - just six, to be exact, and two of those were bad center-QB exchanges - but this one player , even though he was a backup wingback and didn't carry the ball that often, lost two of them. I can't help thinking that the gloves were a contributing factor. I believe it is possible that players become lulled into a false sense of security by the gloves' stickiness, and neglect to squeeze the ball. Considering that Nebraska's only weakness seemed to be the fact that it led the nation in fumbles lost this year (with 25), I believe that if it were ever my good fortune to help out with their backs, they would lose a lot fewer than fumbles once I convinced the equipment managers to take all their gloves and burn them.

While American TV and movies allow us to export aspects of our culture all over the world, (you wouldn't believe how proficient some foreign teenagers have become with the use of the F--- word), it is interesting to see how European we are becoming in one regard - cohabitation. When I coached in Finland, I found it interesting to note how open young, unmarried, cohabiting couples were about living together. Unlike in America, it was evidently not considered a big deal. More and more, though, that seems to be the case in America. In Oregon, for example, in 1970 about 13 per cent of marriage licenses showed identical addresses for the two partners; in 1980, the figure was 53 per cent, and in 1990 it was 70 per cent. According to Patricia Gwaltney, a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, those figures correspond to studies conducted in other parts of the country. Although she says the meaning of the trend is not clear, she doesn't see it as anti-marriage. Instead, she speculates, "It's become one more stage in the process of getting married. It's one more seemingly natural step for young people as they move into adulthood." 

From a speech entitled "Why I Like Marines," given by Admiral Jonathan Stark, USN, on the occasion of the Marine Corps' birthday in 1995: "The first reason I like Marines, they set high standards for themselves and those around them and will accept nothing less... I like the idea that Marines cultivate an ethos conducive of producing hard people in a soft age... It occurred to me that the services could be characterized by different breeds of dogs...The Airforce reminded me of a French Poodle. The poodle always looks perfect, sometimes seems a bit pampered, and always travels first class. But don't ever forget that the poodle was bred as a hunting dog and in a fight is very dangerous... The Army is kind of like a St. Bernard. It's big and heavy and sometimes seems a bit clumsy. But it's very powerful and has lots of stamina. So you want it for the long haul... The Navy, God bless us, is a Golden Retriever. They're good natured and great around the house. The kids love'em. Sometimes their hair is a bit long, they go wandering off for long periods of time, and they love water...Marines I see as two breeds, Rottweilers or Dobermans, because Marines come in two varieties, big and mean and skinny and mean. They're aggressive on the attack and tenacious on the defense. They've got really short hair and they always go for the throat. That sounds like a Marine to me ..." (Courtesy of Scott Barnes, USMC)

Amid all the talk about how much Michael Jordan missed the game, blah, blah, blah - there is something else to consider: sales of Michael Jordan-licensed merchandise - shoes, underwear, cologne, etc - were down 42 per cent since he retired as a player. By the way - how smart is the owner of the Washington Wizards? Two of the highest-paid players on the generously-paid Wizards team are Rod Strickland and Juwan Howard. They have not been coming close to earning their pay this season - although actually, considering what they're making, you could say this about every player in the NBA - and logic says to unload them, right? Not so fast. Their agent, David Falk, happens to be Michael Jordan's agent, too. Hmmm.

The Bills cut Bruce Smith. Heartless! Do you know what they asked him to do? They asked him to take a cut in pay, all the way down to $2.2 million. $2.2 million. Hey - when you're used to getting by on $4.5 million, it's not easy to make that kind of adjustment.

I heard a dog trainer on TV the other night talking about working with bird dogs, and he sounded as if he could just as easily have been a teacher or a coach. "A dog basically wants to please," he said. "Nine times out of 10 if he's disobedient it's because he didn't know what you wanted." Substitute the word "kid" for "dog" and, although I realize it sounds very cold and insensitive, it makes every bit as much sense. I do believe that kids bascially want to please, and I know that all too often, coaches (and teachers) don't adequately communicate to their kids exactly what they want. (I show a video to our kids explaining the rules at the start of every season.) Woody Hayes used to say, "Discipline is 90 per cent anticipation." I think he said he learned it as an officer in the Navy.

February 11 - "If you are going against a team and can handle their best plays, I feel you can beat them." Eddie Robinson (surely you've heard of Coach Robinson, who won more games - at one school (Grambling) - than any other college coach

Back in 1977, following my first year of high school coaching, I attended a clinic at which University of Washington Coach Don James spoke. Afterward, I hit him with a question that puzzled me - still does. "How," I asked Coach James, "do you control well-meaning alumni who don't even know the NCAA regulations, and have the rescources and the desire to anything they want - even if it's illegal - to help the Huskies win?" He shrugged. Tough job, he admitted. Almost 20 years later, a well-meaning alum made a large "loan" to a Husky QB, the Washington administration overreacted, and Coach James, disgusted with the lack of support for a program he had fought to keep clean, resigned. And now, I read that two of the country's premier programs are undergoing overhaul. Notre Dame's athletic director, having just served out a five-year contract, is not going to be retained, as part of a "restructuring" of the ND athletic department. And at Michigan, where things began to unravel a couple of years ago when a visiting recruit was in an accident while riding in a nice, new car given to a Michigan basketball player by, uh, a "relative," the AD seems to be on his way out (maybe gone by the time you read this). The Detroit Free Press' Mitch Albom notes that at Michigan, Fritz Crisler was AD for 27 years, followed by Don Canham, who held the job for 20 years. But that was before the days when they began blaming recruiting, eleigibility and legal problems on the AD. Presidents like to do that. Since Canham retired 10 years ago, Michigan has had four AD's - hardly, Albom points out, "what we call stability". The problem, former Michigan coach and AD Bo Schembechler told Albom, lies with the administration. (Tell me.) "All you do is send a letter to the Adminsitration," he told Albom, "and they get scared. Some of these people are very bright, but they know very little about collegiate athletics."

The Secretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, has sent up a trial balloon designed to see what people think about women serving - in submarines. Guys, courtesy of my son-in-law Rob Tiffany, I was privileged to tour the USS Alaska, a "boomer" (nuclear missile submarine) at its home base in Bangor, Washington. That sucker is huge - it's the length of two football fields (stood on end, it would be taller than the Washington Monument) and has four or five decks - I forget. But inside, it is tight. The corridors are narrow - every time a submariner would pass a woman, he'd risk a sexual harrassment charge. Nine sailors are packed into a compartment about the size of the room in which I now sit typing - about 10 x 15 - with three sets of bunks stacked three-deep. Each man has about 18 inches of head room in his bunk. Bathrooms are small, scarce, and in demand. From a practical standpoint, it will be difficult, to say the least, to accomodate women. Then there is the matter of, uh, healthy young males and females in close quarters. These subs can go on underwater "cruises" - and stay underwater - for months at a time. Admiral Hyman Rickover, "Father of the Nuclear Navy" so highly prized harmony and teamwork among the crew of a submarine that he insisted on personally interviewing - and selecting - every submariner. Sexual tensions - no fault of either male or female, just fact - have a way of threatening the tightest group. It will be interesting to hear what Senator John McCain, whose father made admiral in the submarine service, has to say about this proposal.

My wife, who labors lovingly and enthusiastically as an elementary school teacher, came home and told me that a parent had told a fellow teacher "you're nothing but an overpaid blue-collar worker." It was intended as an insult. Neither my wife or I, however, would be insulted by being called blue-collar workers. Blue-collar workers built our country, fought our wars, sired our football players, and, until NAFTA started sending our jobs south, provided us with many of our values. One of the problems with our society today, I fear, is the loss of blue-collar jobs to lower-paying parts of the world, and with it the blue-collar mentality - a day's work for a day's pay. Instead, too many Americans (including, I suspect, the parent who insulted the teacher) are content to sit on their duffs waiting for their boat to come in or, more specifically, the winning lottery ticket. As for the "overpaid" part - that one strikes a nerve. I have taught, and although I observed a few people who needed to get out of teaching and seek their fortune in some other profession, I didn't know any teachers who were overpaid. Actually, other than a few CEO's, a lot of professional athletes and practically every pencil-pushing bureaucratic administrator, I have a hard time thinking of anybody I'd call overpaid.

The Philly radio sports-talk guys say that they've seen NFL Films' Super Bowl production and it is fantastic (their words). It's due to air on ESPN at 10 AM Saturday.

The University of Arizona has a pretty good basketball program. Just a few years ago the Wildcats won the national title, and this year they're running neck-and-neck with Stanford atop the Pac-10. But they're young, and they sure could use some senior leadership. Too bad Eugene Edgerson isn't playing. He was a mainstay for the last three years, and he would have helped. Coach Lute Olson was counting on him, but the 6-6 Edgerson had other things to do. No, he didn't turn pro, and no, he didn't drop out of school. He's still in Tucson, but he's - he's student teaching! In kindergarten! Ken Goe wrote a great article in the Portland Oregonian last week about this remarkable young man who had to choose between his senior year of basketball and his student teaching, and made the choice no one would have predicted for a college basketball player. He does have another year of eligibility left, since he never red-shirted, and he very well may return to the Cats' basketball team next year, but it was important to Euegene Edgerson to do his student teaching first. Maybe his own family circumstances had something to do with his decision. He grew up in New Orleans, raised by a single mother. He never knew his father. "I was always sad that my dad wasn't around for me," he told Goe. "He didn't spend time with me. I had kids in my class who had both parents. They would tell me about everything they did. I couldn't share those things." His basketball talent got him to Arizona, where, he told Goe, two things happened to convince him to become a teacher. The first was a freak injury a couple of seasons ago to teammate (and football quarterback) Ortege Jenkins, who was just driving in for a layup in practice one day when his knee went out on him. "Just like that," Edgerson said. "He tore his ACL. That made me sad. I was like, 'Gene, you need to check your priorities and get some things straight.'" He determined to change his ways academically, from doing "just enough schoolwork to get by" to concentrating on graduating from college, "because one day the ball will stop bouncing." The second thing that convinced him to become a teacher was a call. Not on the phone. From above. "I was raised in the Catholic religion," he told Ken Goe, "and I always remember priests saying that God called them. I felt the same way. I felt God was calling me to become a teacher." So now, big Eugene Edgerson is surrounded by 17 kindergartners at El Salon de Tortuga, loving the kids and loved by them. "A lot of kids these days need male role models," he says. "There aren't any. A lot of people have questioned why I want to teach on the primary level. I say, it's just something I need to do. If I don't do it, who else is going to step in?"

February 10 - "I don't believe you can tell a player how bad he is all week and expect him to play good on Saturday." John Cooper

Win one, lose one. Noted team man Dennis Rodman has joined the Dallas Mavericks, lured by a cool million to play the final 38 games of the season, and by a pledge that he can arive late to practices, which he won't have to participate in fully, anyhow. But it is a zero-sum game in Big D, because another team man, one Deion Sanders, has announced that he wants out of Dallas. He said he wants to land on a team with a chance to win the Super Bowl. (Rodman's contract probably has an escape clause allowing him to play in the XFL.)   

300 members of the student body at Sedro-Wooley (Washington) High School walked out of classes last Wednesday in peaceful protest of the "resignation" of head football coach Dave Williams, who took over a program that was 5-31 over the previous four seasons, and built a 12-15 record in his three years there Clearly, he made progress on the field. And according to senior football player Troy Hanson, quoted in The Skagit Valley Herald, " He taught the team more than just football. He taught us sportsmanship, class. He also taught us the meaning of hard work and to always expect excellence."

Didn't matter. That wasn't enough for the people who make the decisions, so for whatever reason, Coach Williams was given what amounted to a Hobson's Choice (a choice that's really no choice at all): resign or have his contract "non-renewed."

In Washington state, regardless of a coach's record, regardless of his previous evaluations, there is no "expectation of continued employment," A coach works on a one-year contract that can be "non-renewed" for any reason. Or for no reason - they don't have to give him a reason, just tell him "we're not renewing your contract." No matter that most classroom teachers have tenure; most high school coaches, regardless of their record and their years of service, work year-to-year, one-year contract after one-year contract. But think about this, folks: it's one thing to hang one isolated coach in a tiny little town out to dry. But think about this minute - I've never been a huge union man, although I once belonged to the Teamsters when I was in college, but what if all the coaches in a state were to band together? What if they were to insist on multi-year contracts - tenure even? What if it were as hard to fire a good coach as it is to fire an incompetent teacher? What if coaches were to unite in support of a wronged brother, and refuse to play his school? Remember where you first heard this: one of these days, coaches are going to pull out of the weenie teacher's unions, which care mostly about gun control and gay rights and other social issues and couldn't care less about coaches, anyhow, and put themselves in the hands of somebody like the Teamsters. Don't laugh. At least hold your laughter until the first time a district tries to dump (excuse me - "non-renew") a dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers just because a few parents are unhappy over their kids' playing time. Can't you just see some glad-handing, "win-win" administrator-type, caught in the middle between a handful of irate parents demanding that he fire the coach, and a strong union promising a boycott of the school's games if he does?

The St. Louis Rams (motto: A Super Bowl is Not Enough), evidently not satisfied with selling a Rams jersey to every little kid within a three-hour drive of St. Louis - not to mention thousands of Kurt Warner jerseys on kids and grownups all over the country - are going to make those old jerseys obsolete. They're going to "lighten" the blue "a bit." Does this mean that with a couple of minor color changes, one every year for the next three or four years, the Rams will eventually be another one of those teams wearing gag-me teal? (Wonder if it ever occured to those teams - what do they do when teal goes out of fashion - if it hasn't already?)

The little town of Gueydan (pronounced "GAYE-dahn"), in the bayou country of south-central Louisiana, calls itself The Duck Capital of the USA. It's also the home of Gueydan High School, whose football team over the years has not been a point of special community pride. Not until this past season, that is, when Coach Ward Courville's Gueydan Bears broke all sorts of school records. Most significant, perhaps, was winning five games for the first time in school history; but the Bears didn't stop there, finishing with the first winning season and the first post-season playoff spot in school history. Coach Courville was kind enough to send me a tape not only of the Bears' highlights, but also of some of the treatment Gueydan's great season received from local TV stations. The Bears did a nice job in their first year of running the Double-Wing, and Coach Courville is already excited about next season.

Note from a certain Ed Wyatt, writing from Australia: "In reading your NFL stuff on the website and watching Fox Sports News every night, I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to live in a nation where most of the problems with sports figures revolve around too many beers and the occasional urinating in public."

February 9 - "There are three things that everybody can do better than anybody else: Build a fire; run a hotel; and quarterback a football team." Biggie Munn, longtime Michigan State coach

Today is the 14th annual National Girls and Women in Sports Day. Hey - that reminds me - our Women's soccer team - you know, the one that just got a raise in pay to $60,000 - had a game this past weekend. Why didn't I see anything abut it on the front pages of my newspapers? Why weren't they on TV? We didn't have to watch the NHL All-Star game. How'd they do, anyhow? Somebody told me they lost . To Norway. But I find that hard to believe, since we pay our girls more than we pay our schoolteachers and soldiers and cops, just to play "amateur" soccer, and Norway, after all, is a country with about as many people as Washington state.

What can I say - what can anyone say? - about the tragic death of Derrick Thomas?

You may remember my quoting Coach Mark Reeve, of Plano Texas, and his article in last November's Texas Coach on the influence Coach Mike Honeycutt, veteran Texas high school coach, had on him ("a good coach always carries his keys."). How about this bit of wisdom? "When I was at Pearsall, Texas, I met my wife, and before we got married, Coach Honeycutt took my wife aside and told her, 'more good coaches get fired because of their wives than because of their coaching ability.' My wife has never forgotten that speech, and has allowed me to be in this profession for the last 25 years. Coach was one of the last to go to two-platoon football because he felt it separated the coaches' wives into offense and defense."

Coach Wyatt: Been meaning to write since our season was over. Just finished my 29th year. We were an 11 man team for 23 of those years, but the last 6 we've been 9-man. Purchased your original playbook & video last year, modified it for the 9-man game and implemented the offense this past season. Worked great. We went 8-3 with a very young team and made it as far as the quarter-finals of the state touorney. Just recently reviewed your upgrades, I like this stuff a lot. Your Tight Rip 88 Power and Super Power becomes, for us, Tight 66 Power and Super Power. Stan Olson, LeRoy-Ostrander High School, LeRoy, Minnesota

During 1997, the most recent year for which figures are available, 12.4 per cent of Mississippi's school children were paddled, leading the nation.

Do you suppose they check their math more carefully as they check their spelling? I received a bit of Spam in my e-mail the other day, offering "home improvent loans --- free mortgae quotes!"

We all know by now that it is best not to be drinking and lose one's temper. Even after looking in your Taco Bell bag and suspecting that the people at the drive-through window have shorted you a chalupa. But after all the laughs over the big lineman from the University of Kansas who lost it over a missing chalupa, it is only fair to set the story straight: there is no truth to the part that had him getting stuck in the window while trying to crawl in after the treat - or the person who cheated him. It just did not happen. So say the Taco Bell people, the Lawrence, Kansas police and the player himself. I believe he would like everybody to know that. He has hopes of playing in the NFL, and I'm sure he is tired of being known to pro scouts as The Chalupa Man.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week on the firing by the New York Times of several workers at its Norfolk, Virginia news bureau. Their offenses? They were sending - and receiving - and forwarding raunchy, inappropriate e-mails, on company computers, on company time. This is becoming a big issue in corporations and, one would expect, schools as the potential for sexual harassment suits, not to mention John Rocker-style insults, frightens employers. It also should frighten employees to learn that no matter how much you erase, trash, cancel, delete, etc., there is likely to be a permanent record - somewhere on the server - of every e-mail you send and receive. Consider this, the next time you receive an e-mail that strikes you as particularly hilarious, if somewhat off-color: people at the Norfolk bureau who received the objectionable e-mail but did not forward it received reprimands - but they kept their jobs.

February 8- "High school coaches do a great job of giving the kicking game lip service. A lot of people talk about working on the kicking game, but very few people really do." Jerry Glanville

Politics again - this time with a lesson for football coaches. Sandy Grady, Washington, D.C. columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News (who got his start as a sports writer), writing about Senator John McCain's spectacular New Hampshire primary win, suggests that Governor Bush got hit with Super-Power - or a Wedge - or something else straight out of the Double-Wing playbook: "How did McCain do it? " Grady asks. "First, the Naval Academy grad applied the military axiom: Send maximum force against your enemy's weakest point. Meaning, he gambled by skipping Iowa (where Bush won handily) and spent 74 days crisscrossing (hey - another one of our plays) New Hampshire."

It is very fashionable in education circles these days to incorporate something in the elementary school curriculum called "problem-solving." (For some reason, that must sound more pretentious than calling it "solving problems.") While thinking this past weekend about the article that the Australian writer, Phil Dye, wrote about kids' not learning how to lose, I happened at the same time to be sneaking a quick look at the "Winter X Games", when it hit me: kids don't learn how to lose because they don't play enough games! So much of what they are into is individual stuff. X games, snowboarding, skateboarding, rollerblading, BMX, Nintendo - they're all individual things - no socialization required. With the exception of inner-city kids on the playgrounds, the only time most kids play games is when they're adult-directed and pre-organized. Everything is done for them by well-meaning grownups. At risk of sounding too much like an old fart, when I was a kid, adults couldn't have cared less what games we played or what rules we used. We never needed some adult telling us that we were engaging in "problem-solving activities," much less doing the problem-solving for us. We just wantd to get on with the game, and we had to get a few details - minor disagreements - out of the way first; the desire to play was so great that we resolved them as expeditiously as possible. Whether it was football, baseball or just tag, we were the ones who decided what, when and where we were going to play. We chose up the sides. Maybe it did damage somebody's self esteem, but the best kid always got picked first, and the worst - or, more commonly the youngest and smallest - wasn't even chosen, but assigned ("you guys got Arnie"). If we didn't have enough players, we decided whether a ball hit to right field was a foul or an out. We decided whether to play tackle or touch. We decided whether a kid who showed up with cleats would be allowed to wear them when nobody else had them, and we decided who got the next guy - or girl - to show up. We decided when we had made a mistake in chosing sides - when one team did, in fact, have "the sides" - and we decided what we had to make the sides more even. Cheating didn't take place because it was not tolerated and everybody knew it. Everybody knew what a good sport was and what a poor sport was. A kid would only get away with taking his ball and going home once. If a guy was a cheat or a poor sport, we weren't fraid to tell him that he couldn't play. (Talk about intolerant! Talk about judgmental!) We solved a heck of a lot of problems, though - because we had to. If we wanted to play, that is. Time was wasting. And nobody was going to do it for us. We were totally on our own. Now, my wife tells me, whenever the kids at her elementary school try to get a game of their own going at recess, it often comes to a halt, stalemated by a dispute - until an adult has to step in to resolve it.

Now that Mike Martz, offensive coordinator of the Rams, has been promoted to succeed Dick Vermeil, I wonder if John Ramsdell will be named offensive coordinator. Coach Ramsdell, a native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is a Springfield (Mass.) College grad whom I first met when he was on Rich Brooks' staff at Oregon. He came to St. Louis with Coach Brooks, and stayed on when Dick Vermeil took ove, and has been working as the Rams' quarterback coach. John Ramsdell is a good football man and a good person, and it's got to be quite a line on his resume to be able to say that he played a role in the Kurt Warner story.

Dick Leonard, Double-Winger from Salinas, California called me a couple of nights ago with some exciting news- after "I don't know how many " years as an assistant in the Monterey Bay area, he has just been named to his first head coaching job. It's at Alisal High School, a school of about 1500 kids in Salinas, and it won't be easy - Alisal has won just three games in the last seven years. But Dick knows that. He also knows a lot of the kids, and likes them, so the record doesn't deter him. He is a good man, and he is up to the job. Dick has been an assistant the last four years at Alvarez High, where he helped open the school and launch the program. He said he is going to have a good core of assistants, but he plans on interviewing to fill a few more spots, and he told me he could use a good questionnaire to use in interviewing assistants. If you happen to have one, please do Dick Leonard a favor and e-mail it to me, or to him directly < dick@ultimanet.com > hey, even if you don't have a form, e-mail him and congratulate him! You must remember how you felt when you got your first job - and you probably didn't have to wait as long as Dick Leonard did!

For more information than you ever thought possible on last week's college football signings, take a look at "Bobby Burton's Rivals 100" at www.rivals100.com

I am happy for the fans of St. Louis and Nashville, two neat cities, but if there is one thing they should learn from the fans of Los Angeles and Houston, it's this: enjoy the team's success all you like, but don't kid yourselves for one minute - it ain't "your" team. It belongs to the owner, and it will be gone in a heartbeat the instant an owner thinks he (or she) can break a lease and go make a couple more bucks someplace else.

February 7 - "The way to play against an offense is to get familiar with it." John McKay

Sounds like he's talking about the Super-Power and the Double-Wing philosophy of attack: "A well-designed play should improve with use, As the coaches and players become more familiar with the important details and eliminate any bugs in it, the play should be increasingly productive from game to game and from year to year until the defense has to overconcentrate against it, and thereby open up some other point of attack. A play will generally be designed to start like several other plays, and if one play is stopped, another running play or forward pass from the same action should have an added chance of success." Lynn "Pappy" Waldorf, who took the California Golden Bears to three consecutive Rose Bowls (1949-50-51)

Top ten newspaper sites ranked by number of visitors: (1) USAToday.com (2) nytimes.com (3) washingtonpost.com (4) latimes.com (5) boston.com (6) WSJ.com (7) mercurycenter.com (8) chicagotribune.com (9) detnews.com (10) seattletimes.com . In 1999, the Washington Post lost $68 million on its web site, spending $85 million on it, and taking in only $17 million in revenue. The problem facing the newspapers - none of whose sites is yet profitable - is the fear that if they pull out and cut their losses, they will leave the field wide open to their Internet-only news competitors, who might then find the Net profitable once they have it to themselves.

"When it comes to all the confusing junk the computer industry emits, there are are no dumb questions, only i