Woods-Duval match an idea that needs expansion
Today’s quiz, sports fans: What do Fulton Allem, Rocco Mediate, Jim Furyk, Glen Day and Skip Kendall have in common?
They all are linebacker candidates at NFL camps, right? Wrong.
All are preliminary round entries in this fall’s Golden Gloves boxing program, right? Wrong again.
Allem, Mediate, Furyk, Day and Kendall are pro golfers, and, in fact, all five finished in the top 20 of last weekend’s Buick Open, a PGA tour event at Grand Blanc, Mich. Go get ’em, Rocco!
If you’ve never heard of them, don’t feel bad. If you have heard of them, you could be accused of having entirely too much time on your hands.
The point here, is that pro golf has done the same thing as a lot of other pro sports, expanding so much, so soon that a whole bunch of no-names have infiltrated the likes of the well-known attractions in pro golf. That’s one reason why the senior PGA tour often is a bigger attraction than the tour itself these days, because many of the seniors are from the era when fewer top golfers meant better focus on them.
All the dads (and moms) who have wanted their kids to grow up being baseball or football or hockey stars have changed their concept a bit. Now they all want their little tykes to grow up as golfers. The ludicrous millions of pro sports are in golf, as they are in other sports, you just don’t have to get thumped by a 350-pound lineman, buzzed by a 100-mile-per-hour fastball, or cross-checked in the throat to collect it.
So when an event comes along like last week’s Tiger Woods challenge match against David Duval, it can captivate the sporting public. Something like 20 million viewers watched the prime time (in the east and midwest) match-play, 18-hole spectacle, won by Woods. Did you watch it? Some of it?
I tuned in two or three times to watch varying parts of the match. I enjoy golfing, don’t do enough of it to get good enough, but I enjoy playing the game a lot more than watching it. Still, the lure of watching two top golfers go head-to-head in match play, brought me to the TV set that Monday night.
Woods and Duval, by the way, were not present at the Buick Open. That’s another thing that’s happened to the PGA tour — so many of the biggest names skip so many of the tournaments, picking their spots throughout the too-long season where there’s a tournament every weekend, somewhere.
So, under the heading of “nobody asked me, but…” I’m offering a solution.
While the PGA continues to do its thing, ABC-television should gather up the top eight money-winners at, say, August 1, and then put on a tournament, live, prime-time, on the network. They take those top eight money-winners, and pair ’em up, No. 1 against No. 8, Nos. 2-7, 3-6 and 4-5.
They compete in a match-play round, which is different, and far more challenging, because you can’t pace yourself, but you must gamble and take risks to win every hole, because your opponent will be doing the same. Just to eliminate dead-air space while the men walk to their next shots, the first round could consist of two matches one week and two the next, with one starting from the first tee and the other on the 10th, and the next duplicating that the following week.
One week after that, you have the semifinals, also conducted by match play, front nine and back nine. And, of course, the next week, you have the championship.
It would be an attraction golf fans couldn’t resist, and it would lure millions of curious non-golf-fans as well. The Woods-Duvall thing was a very impressive attraction, and to do the same thing with the top eight would be considerably better.
For one thing, four rounds of medal play is fine, for normal tournaments, but it wasn’t until I watched snatches of Woods-Duvall that I realized how much more exciting match play golf is. I hadn’t watched it since covering an occasional tournament a few years ago. The beauty is that if a golfer has one horrendous hole, he loses the hole. Big deal. He can come back snorting on the next hole. Overall scores are meaningless in match play, but with golfers of that caliber, you can bet they’d record some incredible scores in the process of playing their matches.
So it would be enormously beneficial to the PGA and to golf in general, but another intriguing part of this concept is that it could be done with or without the blessing of the PGA. Television money can buy anything, so the PGA undoubtedly would jump in with both feet. But if the PGA wants nothing to do with it, ABC (or some other network) could rake in the profits by itself.
And if it came down to Woods against Duval in the final — excellent. But by then, it wouldn’t matter. The media hype and buildup to the final would be so enormous that the PGA’s outstanding crop of new but obscure golfers could become household words overnight. Literally.
Anybody could play in the final and captivate the whole country. Even if it were Allem against Day, or Furyk against Kendall.
U.S. women’s World Cup hype runneth over
It was the best of soccer, and the worst of soccer. We had the best of media exposure, and the worst of media over-exposure. It was the best of women’s athletics and the worst of women’s athletics.
Unless you were visiting another planet last weekend, you know that the U.S. beat China in the championship game of the women’s World Cup soccer tournament, before 90,000 fans in the Rose Bowl, including President Clinton. You also know that the final score was 5-4. Or was it 1-0? And even if it was 5-4, it should have been 1-0. Something like that.
First off, let’s get a couple things straight. I am a serious and pushy advocate of women’s and girls athletics, and I believe they should get equal coverage in the media for their sports events. All of the world’s previous generations have been devoted to men playing sports and women doing something else, but the emergence of female athletes has been splendid to observe, and when athletes — male or female — do their best to achieve and then over-achieve, they deserve all the coverage they can get.
Secondly, I admire and appreciate soccer. I’ve coached it at the youth level, even experimenting with tactical things that overloaded the offense and won a couple of North Suburban youth championships with boys at the teenage (13-15) level, so I am not one of those who scoffs at the worldwide popularity of soccer. Yes, it is slower-developing than a home run in baseball, or the rhythmic thumping of six seconds of play and 30 seconds of huddle in football, and it lacks the easy scoring of basketball or the speed and flair of hockey.
But all those sports have their downsides, too. Baseball takes hours between exciting plays sometimes, in football only four or five guys out of 40 get to touch the ball and every touch is predictable. Basketball has become a game that only allows extremely tall fellows to excel in. And hockey proves that it can be slowed down purposely too eliminate almost all the offense, and/or excitement. Yet, we appreciate those sports for their good points.
Soccer requires constant teamwork and interaction just to advance the ball cohesively, in hopes of generating scoring chances, and, occasionally, goals. Therefore it also requires great discipline and patience, among both players and fans, especially U.S. fans accustomed to impatience and instant gratification.
It almost seems part of our society that we should put down something that has been late-developing in the U.S. but is the most popular sport, worldwide. The World Cup in soccer puts to shame the World Series in baseball, which is only a U.S. (OK, and Canada) championship, or the Super Bowl in a U.S.-only sport like football, or the North American-only NBA title. Only hockey is similar to soccer’s world-wide participation and competition, but soccer can be played with only a ball and without all the costly equipment that limits hockey among the less-affluent.
Because hockey is played throughout the world, or at least the Northern Hemisphere, the U.S. Olympic team’s stunning Gold Medal in 1980 was the greatest achievement in sports history. Coach Herb Brooks took a herd of diverse, hand-picked college players and defeated the equivalent of the best professional players from the rest of the world, including the Soviet Union, the Finns, Czechs, Swedes and Canadians. The U.S. was not even given hope of making the four-team medal round, and they made it only in the face of considerable scorn.
At that time, of course, the rest of the world admired, respected, and/or feared the Soviet players, which is what made the U.S. victory that much more significant than in 1960, when the second-greatest accomplishment by a U.S. sports team was also a U.S. Olympic hockey gold medal, but against the same countries who had not yet developed even remotely the same skill or respect they had in 1980 or today.
With each passing year, that 1980 hockey Gold Medal gains in significance. In case you haven’t noticed, the NHL is now dominated by star players from Russia, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Finland.
It was wonderful when the U.S. won the women’s Olympic Gold Medal in hockey last winter, beating Canada in the final. Overlooked amid the surrounding hype was that the U.S. and Canada were the only two legitimate powers in the world of women’s hockey, that they were dead-even in a dozen exhibition games leading up to the Olympics, and that it would have been a startling upset if either the U.S. or Canada failed to reach the Gold Medal game.
Now it’s summer, and the U.S. women captured the fancy of the nation’s media, and catapaulted to glory with their World Cup soccer title. They deserve all the congratulations. Naturally, in the media overdose of hyperbole, a few have called it THE defining moment in women’s sports, and some have likened it to the 1980 men’s hockey title, which is what some zealots also called the women’s hockey Gold Medal, which was the most recent previous defining moment in women’s sports.
But let’s look at the facts. In the U.S., while we have been slow in recognizing, developing and showing respect to our top female athletes, we are still decisively ahead of other countries in that regard. The U.S. women beat Brazil in a semifinal, and Brazil is one of the most passionate and advanced soccer countries in the world. Ah, but in Brazil, the women are put down for daring to play a “men’s game.”
The media hype rode a huge wave of stirring up passion for the final against China, and declaring China the favorite, even though, when you look at it, the U.S. and China were clearly the cofavorites to reach the championship game. Both of these teams were powerful and skillful, but neither was an underdog in any of their previous games, to say nothing of being an underdog of the magnitude of the 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team.
So, when the U.S. and China ultimately met for the women’s soccer World Cup final, it was before 90,000 raucus, media-stirred U.S. fans, and they played to a scoreless tie. Zero-zero. Nil-nil. If they had played overtime periods that continued until somebody scored, which would have made it a truly captivating finish, they went to a shootout, five kickers each side.
The shooters have a tremendous advantage, going one-on-one against a goalie, who is not allowed to move until the kick is made at that enormous net. All five U.S. kickers scored; four of the five Chinese kickers scored, but U.S. goalie Brianna Scurry, from the northwestern Twin Cities suburb of Dayton, dashed out about three steps to cut the angle before the fifth shooter shot, and made a superb save.
That meant the U.S. won the shootout 5-4, and the game, by either 5-4 or 1-0, depending on your view of shootouts.
Can you imagine Dallas beating Buffalo in the Stanley Cup final by shootout, rather than by Brett Hull’s overtime goal? If it had, even though the smaller hockey goal would make it a more legitimate one-on-one with the goalie, it would have been an insult to the skill level of the players, and it wouldn’t have reflected the necessary team concept that is the foundation for the game. Just like soccer.
That’s why the women’s World Cup was the best of soccer, with all-out effort and straining team tactics gaining deserved prominence and exposure from the tremendous media coverage, and simultaneously the worst of soccer, with stifling defenses that eliminated scoring chances and all scoring– ultimately requiring a ridiculous shootout arrangement to settle the game when the goalkeeper admitted she cheated by several steps for the only save either goalie made out of 10 shots.
As the best of media coverage, we all were made aware of the magnitude of the game by the flurry of television accounts and newspaper stories; as the worst of media coverage, the hype swept aside the fact that the U.S. should have been the clearcut favorite to win the World Cup, facing an equal foe in a stadium with 90,000 U.S.-boosting fans.
And, as the best of women’s athletics, the game showed how far we in the U.S. have come in backing our female athletes and encouraging them to rise to the top echelon of sports competition; but as the worst of women’s athletics, it also showed that we only seem to acknowledge women’s sports if it can be over-hyped as a novelty.
Francisco leads Minnesotans to U.S. women’s puck camp
Duluth’s Angie Francisco, who emerged from her hard-working team concept to lead Harvard to the national women’s college hockey championship last March, will lead a strong crop of Minnesota skaters into this weekend’s U.S. National women’s hockey camp.
Francisco scored the game-winning goal with one second left in the second period as Harvard beat Brown 5-3 in the national tournament semifinals, then she followed up by scoring a hat trick plus one assist as Harvard overcame New Hampshire in a 6-5 overtime thriller in the final of the tournament, held at Mariucci Arena in Minneapolis.The Crimson finished 33-1 for the season.
With women’s hockey enjoying unprecedented popularity from the crest of the Nagano Olympic gold medal, the U.S. women’s National team tryouts are thrust into an unprecedented spotlight the next two weeks. Similarly, Minnesota participants will command an unprecedented share of attention when the camp begins this weekend at Lake Placid, where a 16-player contingent will participate. U.S. Olympic women’s coach Ben Smith will oversee the camp, which also includes an honor-roll list of coaches.
“It should be fun, and it will be different from last year,” said Francisco, who also attended last year’s camp. “The difference is that last year it was just for college players, and this year it’s for everyone — Olympic players, college, high school, everything.
“The players will be divided up onto four teams, and we’ll practice every day and have five games. Right after this camp, there will be another camp for those age 22 and under. That’s something new, although Canada has done it for several years, and our under-22 team will play there’s in exhibition games.”
Also among the players will be a pair of key players on the upcoming inaugural UMD women’s team — forward Jenny Schmidgall and defenseman Brittny Ralph, both of whom are transfering to UMD from the University of Minnesota.
Schmidgall will join Alana Blahoski as Minnesota’s fellow-pioneers among a half-dozen players from that 1998 U.S. Women’s Olympic championship team who will be at the camp. The other Minnesotans participating in the camp include high school standouts Natalie Darwitz of Eagan, Krissy Wendell of Park Center and Bethany Petersen of Bloomington Jefferson, plus Ronda Curtin of Roseville, Apple Valley sisters Annamarie and Nicolo Holmes, Kris Scholz, Laura Slominski, Winny Brodt, Melissa Heitzman, Jeanine Sobek and goaltender Jackie MacMillan from Buffalo, Minn., who will attend Wisconsin this fall.
If you break down just the Minnesotans, you could put together an exceptional team, with MacMillan in goal, Ralph, Petersen, Brodt, Annamarie Holmes, Wendell and possibly Blahoski or Sobek on defense, and three phenomenal lines from the remaining nine skaters. Typically, however, USA Hockey officials will blend the players from all around the country, and two coaches will handle each team.
“UMD men’s coach Mike Sertich, and my coach, Katie Stone from Harvard, are among the coaches,” said Francisco. “The team I’m on will be coached by Clarkson men’s coach Mark Morris and New Hampshire’s women’s coach, Karen Kay.I know that Krissy Wendell and Bethany Petersen are on my team.
“It’s definitely a lot of fun to see how all the college teams are starting women’s programs, especially in the Midwest. Two or three years ago, you had to go out east if you wanted to play college hockey.”
Francisco, whose dad, Pat Francisco, was a star winger at UMD when the Bulldogs first moved into the WCHA in the 1960s, but there was no such thing as female hockey in those days. Duluth didn’t have any girls high school hockey when Angie was in high school, either, and she decided to give it a try while attending prep school out east.
When Minnesota started its women’s hockey program, Francisco hoped to get recruited, but she wasn’t. She laughs about that now, because obviously she landed on her feet at Harvard. A tenacious forward, she broke the school’s scoring record as a freshman. Last year, as a sophomore, she scored “only” 16 goals and 35 assists for 51 points, while eagerly accepting a different role on the team. At least until the final four, when her scoring became pivotal for Harvard’s victory.
“We should have a real good team again,” said Francisco. “We lost some outstanding seniors, but we’ve gotten some really good recruits.”
Returning to college is, however, almost a month away. The U.S. National team camp is immediate, and Francisco has worked out hard all summer to be ready for the challenge.
Smith’s rise to success hard to slow down
Brady Smith did not make a clean sweep of the Super Stock racing features at Superior, Ashland and Proctor last weekend, for a very good reason. Superior got rained out.
It was natural progression that Brady Smith of Solon Springs would someday try driving a stock car. After all, his dad and three uncles had raced on Up North dirt tracks years ago.
So when Brady wanted to get behind the wheel of his first Street Stock car, he had the perfect pit crew, with his dad, Denny Smith, and those three uncles — Rick, Dewey and Bob. None of them, however, could have anticipated Brady’s instant success.
‘”The first time we strapped him in a race car, he went out and tried to win,” recalled Rick Smith, the crew chief. “Most guys would just be happy to be in the field and stay out of traffic. A week later, he won his first race. About the fourth or fifth week into his first year, I realized that kid was a natural.”
That was three years ago, when Brady was 19. Normal progression might have been to continue learning in Street Stocks for several years, but nothing has been normal about Smith’s progression.
“We got him out of Street Stocks after one year, because we didn’t want him to become a good Street Stock racer,” said Uncle Rick, as he stood on the race car trailer to watch Brady speed around the Proctor race track.
Nothing wrong with the basic Street Stock class, you understand. But Brady Smith was being groomed carefully for bigger and better things, and getting comfortable racing and winning in the novice Street Stock class was not part of the plan. His dad and uncles took care to not move too fast or too soon, but after Brady ended his rookie year by winning three of the last four Street Stock races, finishing second to Scott Lawrence, who is still dominating Street Stocks, in the fourth, it was time.
“After my first year, we bought and old Super Stock chassis and we built a car,” said Brady, who brought the crew instant gratification when he won five features and was named the Wissota National Super Stock rookie of the year two years ago, at age 20. Last year, only his second season in Super Stock, Smith won eight features and was track champion at Ashland.
It made you wonder that if he could do that well with an old, rebuilt car, what could he do with a new one? This season, everyone is finding out. He had several good offers, but he held out and insisted on buying a car from Affordable Chassis in Sauk Rapids, Minn.
“I knew what the other guys were driving, and what were the best cars we raced against,” Smith said. “I thought the Affordable Chassis cars were the best, so that’s what we got .”
To test out the new Chevrolet, the Smith entourage hauled it down to Cedar Lake, Wis., on April 17 and 24, for some early-season special events, and Brady won both features. Coming home to run his usual circuit — Superior on Friday, Ashland on Saturday and Proctor on Sunday — Smith hasn’t slowed down and has dominated in Super Stock races at all three tracks.
How do you define domination? Consider last week. After Superior’s Friday night show was cancelled because of rain, Smith, now 22, won the Super Stock features at Ashland on Saturday and Proctor on Sunday — which runs his total to 16 feature race victories this season. That’s more than he won the past two seasons combined, and this year is only half over.
“My new car works good at Superior, Ashland and Proctor,” Smith said. “It works exceptionally well at Superior, but I’m leading in points at all three tracks.”
The unpredictability of racing can’t always be overcome by preparation and skill, of course. Last week at the Wednesday night Summer Sizzler at Proctor, he was caught up in the midst of a crash that eliminated him before the end of the first lap of the feature. Ryan Aho went on to win. But after winning Saturday night in Ashland, he was back at Proctor Sunday night, where he caught and passed Aho to win another feature.
“I’ve seen him race against 20-year veterans, and he’s always very competitive, but he also stays cool, and is always calm, always a thinker,” said Rick Smith.
His quick success hasn’t affected Brady’s friendly, engaging personality. He’ll stop working on his car between races to greet a stranger, insisting on spreading out the credit for his success to everybody who has ever wiped dirt off a fender.
His dad works on the car at the garage, and only comes to the pits “when I need him,” Brady said. Uncles Rick, Dewey and Bob are supplemented on the crew by Brady’s cousins, Keith and Mark Smith, and good friends, Kurt Larson of Solon Springs, Shawn LaValley of Superior, and Loren Gangness of Hibbing. Larson’s daughter, Ashley, chips in too, and Brady’s girlfriend, Jenni Copp, is usually part of the entourage.
But the pivotal part of the whole procedure is Brady himself, whose aggressive but always smooth and calculating driving style have made winning Super Stock heats and features almost look routine. It’s only a matter of time before he moves up in the racing world.
Smith could be driving a Late Model already, except that his progress is being monitored patiently. But remember, however intense the competition is, Uncle Rick might want to make sure Brady doesn’t become too good a Super Stock racer.
Dukes ride Big Papa’s big shoulders, hot bat
The Duluth-Superior Dukes needed someone to take charge, if they were to make anything out of the second half of the Northern League season. Anthony (Big Papa) Lewis responded.
The result is that the Dukes are still alive and kicking, as they head into a four-game series in St. Paul against the Saints that begins a pivotal road trip.
When the Dukes beat first-place Madison 14-9 on Tuesday, it might have been their biggest victory of the second half. When the Dukes prevailed 10-9 in 12 innings against the same Black Wolf on Wednesday night, it was even bigger.
“But now tomorrow is the biggest game of the year,” said Lewis, after running his incredible hot streak through his second straight 4-hit game, as he looked ahead to Thursday night’s series-finale against Madison.
[INSERT 1-GRAF UPDATE ON DUKES THURSDAY NIGHT GAME…]
That’s what happens with big games. You win them, and they make the next game bigger.
Actually, every game seems pivotal for a team that seemed to be slow-learners. They dug themselves a deep hole with a six-game losing streak early in the first half, then they roared back into contention and lost the first-half title to Schaumberg in the last game. Knowing the problem of being in such a hole, the Dukes repeated the disastrous start, winning the opener of the second half and then plunging into another six-game losing streak.
The difference is that this time, the Madison Black Wolf team that almost willingly finished last in the first half, gathered itself together for a strong start that put them into first place, and left the struggling Dukes a distant last. Things looked pretty bleak when the Dukes came out of the all-star break by lapsing into another four-game losing streak — three at Madison and one at Schaumberg going into last weekend.
And then, suddenly, the formidible figure of Lewis came to life.
At 6-feet, and 215 pounds, Lewis looks like he could play a mean linebacker in pro football if he wasn’t playing first base in baseball. Since joining the Dukes last season, he always looked like a threat. A left-handed hitter, he doesn’t wave his bat around or follow any weird tendencies as he digs into the batter’s box. Instead, he stands ready, with his bat resting motionless on his large left shoulder. His swing is swift, compact, and powerful.
But this season there was some concern because when people refered to him as “around 220,” they were talking about his batting average, not the big man’s weight. He acknowledged that he only hit “.220-something” the first half of this year, and he was reluctant to say he’s never had a hotter streak. It’s one of those one-at-bat-at-a-time things.
If the Dukes make something of this second half, they will be able to trace their woes to a sudden falloff in team hitting, followed by a resurgence ignited almost singlehandedly by their Big Papa.
After going hitless in the last game at Madison, Lewis went 1-for-3 in the first game at Schaumberg last Friday. Not bad, but nobody else hit and the Dukes lost 1-0 in 10 innings. In the second game of that series, Lewis went 2-for-4 with a double and the Dukes won 9-4. On Sunday, he went 3-for-5 with two doubles and the Dukes won 7-1.
The two-game win streak was modest, as the team came back home and the one strong game didn’t foretell what Lewis was about to do. After Monday’s open date, Madison came to Wade Municipal Stadium comfortably in first place with the Dukes’ last-place status and Lewis’ reputation as a dangerous power hitter with limited average still valid.
In Tuesday’s series opener, the Dukes spotted the Black Wolf a grand-slam head start, then rallied from the 4-0 deficit to whip them 14-9. Lewis hit two home runs, two singles and a sacrifice fly in a 4-for-4 performance with five runs batted in.
On Wednesday night, Lewis slashed two singles, two doubles and another sacrifice fly that made him 4-for-4 again. It would have ended that way, except the Dukes blew a 9-5 lead in the ninth and Lewis finally was retired on a fielder’s choice in the 10th. His 4-for-5 night accounted for four more RBIs — and he might have had more, but two of his hits led off innings — and meant that the Dukes were in position to snatch a 10-9 victory in the 12th inning.
As the winning streak reached four games, Lewis had sizzled at a 13-for-18 clip — a .722 average — with two home runs and five doubles in those four games. His sacrifice flies in each of the first two Madison games obviously were assets, because both drove in runs, but they also technically interrupted his eight otherwise-consecutive hits. From his line out at Schaumberg on Sunday until his soft liner was dropped but resulted in a force-out in the last of the 10th on Wednesday, Lewis had gone 8-for-8. And there could have been more.
“When I went 3-for-5 at Schaumberg, I hit a line drive to the left-field wall in my last at-bat, but I was out,” said Lewis, recalling the catch that prevented his streak from being even more impressive. “It feels good up there at the plate right now, and I’ve got to try to kep that feeling going.
“If you have a bad at-bat, you’ve got to try not to carry that with you. We need to keep winning. No matter what it takes, we’ve got to get it done, with no ifs, ands or buts about it. It was especially important to start the ball rolling against Madison.”
Lewis, who hit .260 last year, has ridden the hot streak to vault up to .295 for the overall season. And while “.290-something” has a better ring to it than “.220-something,” Big Papa is focused on not slowing down, while the rest of the Dukes have found it comfortable to ride his broad shoulders.
About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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