I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: sports

  • O say can you TELL by the dawn’s early light?


    I find I have been quick to judge our American swimmer Ryan Lochte for his behavior away from the pool in Rio de Janeiro during the Olympic games, and I had a few minutes to sit in my favorite chair this morning to ponder his trials and tribulations while I was waiting for T’s physical therapist to arrive. I love to ponder – particularly when the house is quiet, and today was no exception.

    I read moments ago that Speedo and Ralph Lauren  severed their endorsement relationships with Mr. Lochte which led me down the meandering  pondering  quite smug path of See there, I told you so. When you play, you pay…an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Why didn’t you stick to pool parties…I went on and on with this conversation in my mind because it’s a replay of how I’ve felt since the bizarre incident occurred in Rio. Really, Ryan, how stupid could you be. You’re thirty-two years old, for crying out loud. You’re old enough to know better.

    Whoa, Nellie…hold your horses. Old enough to know better – that stopped me in my instant replay.  Hm.  Now what was I doing when I was thirty-two years old…that would have been 1978. Hm….meander, meander some more… I was living in Columbia by then and had met the person that would become my lifelong friend but was at the time my best drinking buddy Millie Miller who was happy to spend many evenings with me at local bars until they closed in the wee hours of the morning.  We weren’t always in the best shape when they closed, either. Really, then, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones, although admittedly my glass house wasn’t part of an international Olympic Games and I wasn’t representing my country at the time. Not to split hairs, of course. The two similarities of this story were thirty-two years old and intoxicated, as I rambled along in my mind. Don’t try to make more of it than that.

    So it wasn’t the drunken public exhibition by a member of Team USA in a foreign country that continued to nag at me in the Lochte saga although that would have been enough to keep the story churning. I could finagle that around in my mind to somehow relate to his wanting to celebrate with his teammates after the medals were handed out. Something to be ashamed of when he sobered up, but mistakes are surely made by us all – usually not in front of a gazillion people but hey, nobody’s perfect.

    No, that wasn’t the nagging current flowing through my stream of consciousness this morning. It was the lying – an amazingly creative lie to be sure – but a lie nonetheless… followed by his inability to say Hey, I lied about it, and I’m sorry.  Instead, the lie became his “over-exaggeration” of the truth which sounds strangely similar to the acceptable “little white lie.” Ding, ding, ding goes the alarm bell. Don’t tell that to the Brazilians.

    Somewhere in my mind there is a disconnect between what used to be known as the truth and what now has become an inability on a grand scale to define. Lying is a way of life in our family relationships, business dealings, political discourse, religious institutions, collegiate locker rooms, football weights, beauty pageants and just about anything else you can think of. You name it – we can lie about it with gusto and embellishment.

    I am beyond weary of lies and liars.

    But this is clearly not a new problem of the 21st. century.  The major religions of today have all weighed in against lying thousands of years ago via stone tablets and whatever else they could find to write on plus probably on cave walls before that. The universal consensus was that lying is fundamentally wrong but truth is subject to interpretation. My truth might not be your truth, and vice versa.  Clearly Ryan Lochte subscribed to that theory when he invented his own elaborate version of the truth and then tried to redefine it.

    I should never have gotten started on this mind meandering today. I feel like I’m digging myself deeper and deeper into a meaningless hole and I hear the voices of my Texas heroines Molly Ivins and Ann Richards hollering from their graves to admonish me that when I find myself in a hole this big, I need to stop digging.

    And so I shall. Team USA won forty-seven gold medals at the 2016 Olympics in Rio;T and I heard the Star-Spangled Banner played for many of those medal ceremonies from her hospital room following her successful knee replacement surgery last week and from our bedroom where she continues to recover this week.  Each time we heard it was special with the expressions of the champions ranging from smiles of happiness to tears of joy to thoughtful reflections of awe and wonder…they were moments of truth we shared with them. At least, that’s how my mind meanderings like to think about it. Somebody stop me.

  • The Dreams Came True!


    011

    Cinderella Coastal Carolina Celebrates...

    The “sugar” game in the College World Series that was scheduled for the night of June 29th. had to be re-scheduled for the following day due to inclement weather, and the crowd that was able to stay for the game the next day at noon was much smaller than the ones on hand for the two previous night games.  But what a treat for baseball fans whether in the TD Ameritrade Park or watching from their living rooms via the magic of ESPN!

    Coastal relied on three pitchers throughout the nine innings to throw strikes that left the Arizona Wildcats stranded on bases  when the chips were down. An unexpected bonus was a  young man named G.K. Young, a local boy from the little town of Conway down the road from the Coastal campus, who hit a two-run homer that made the final score 4 – 3. The game was a barn-burner, as my daddy would have called it.

    017

    G. K. Young a Hero

    During a post-game interview with the slugger, G. K. Young said he had dreamed of one day hitting a game-winning home run but that hitting one in the College World Series was more than a dream come true.

    013

    As for Coach Gilmore, his tears of joy spoke for him. Twenty-one years of keeping on keeping on and believing in himself and his program, his coaches and his players…big dreams of one day taking a team to Omaha and playing in the World Series had already been fulfilled. But to actually win…unbelievable…a miracle. His only regret was that his father wasn’t there to share the moment with him. His father had died two years earlier, and the coach pointed skyward as he said he knew his father was watching.

    When the team returned home the next day, more than 8,000 people greeted them as the conquering heroes, and Coach Gilmore again was near tears. “I came here twenty-one years ago and spent the first six months in a trailer with no indoor plumbing”, he said. “And these guys behind me have made my dreams come true.” They also helped him be recognized as the national coach of the year.

    And so we say good-bye to the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers and to college baseball one more time. Theirs was a Cinderella story with a Hollywood ending. Thank goodness Wimbledon dreams are still alive for another week of drama and underdogs like Sam Querry who defeated Novak Djokovic, the #1 player in the world, move on to the next round. Casa de Canterbury will be tuned in.

    As the Fourth of July approaches, I am reminded of another group of unlikely young men who became heroes as they fought and won our independence to establish a great nation that continues to grant me life, liberty and my personal pursuit of happiness two hundred and forty years later.  I am indebted to those early freedom fighters – flawed as we all are – who never lost faith in their dreams.

  • The Smiles Have It!


    From the Williams Sisters to the Italian Sisters, the US Open tennis tournament for 2015 was an unforgettable one. The tales of not one, but two, underdogs rising to the top of their game in a twenty-four hour period inspired prime time tennis-crazed New York City on one side of the Pond and the entire country of Italy on the other.  Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, the youngest Italian PM ever, and his entourage, made a whirl-wind trip  to Flushing Meadows and the Billie Jean King Tennis Center on Saturday to watch the Women’s Championship match which was the first all-Italian Grand Slam final in the Open Era.  Awesome.

    002

    Prime Minister Renzi is lower front…

    and couldn’t be happier

    Roberta Vinci and Flavia Pennetta were long shots to win the Grand Slam title, and why wouldn’t they be? Vinci had lost in the first round of 23 of the 44 matches she’d played in the US Open before the 2015 tournament, and Pennetta had lost 48 times playing singles in the tournament prior to this year’s Open. They had been beaten a combined total of 92 times in their previous attempts, and neither had high hopes for stronger finishes this year.

    Yet, they showed up. They brought their finesse games to the hard courts that in recent years have belonged to the big power hitters who dominated the US Open as well as the other Grand Slams in Melbourne, Paris and London. They showed up.

    They came, they played, they conquered; and then they smiled with real joy in their moment of triumph.

    008

    Roberta Vinci (l) and Flavia Pennetta at the trophy presentation ceremony

    The two thirty-three-year-old women who played against each other in this final have known each other since they were nine years old. They started playing tennis together as children and later shared a home for four years when they began playing on the professional tour. They successfully played doubles together and with other partners for more than fifteen years, but neither was a singles star…until the 2015 US Open when Vinci defeated the number one American singles player Serena Williams and Pennetta dismissed the number two seed Simona Halep.

    Miraculously, they stood together with their trophies at the awards presentation ceremony following the championship match.

    011

    The ecstasy of victory

    In her trophy acceptance speech, Flavia Pennetta stunned the tennis world by announcing her retirement at the end of this year. She said she made the decision a month before the US Open and that she never dreamed she would win the tournament but was thrilled to be able to leave the professional arena with a Grand Slam title. A Cinderella ending to years of hard work and determination.

    When someone from the press asked her afterwards about why she was leaving, she replied, “The moon is going up and down, no?” It is, indeed, and Flavia will now have a view of it from somewhere other than a tennis court. We wish her well.

    006

     In the past fifteen years, many of the tennis champions have won more than one major title – Serena has twenty-one, Roger Federer has seventeen, for example – and while their happiness is apparent in every victory, there is something magical about a ceremony with a first-time champion who has loved the sport and persevered in following her dream all over the world from Italy to New York City and will go home carrying a Grand Slam trophy.

    Wrap this one up for the history books. It’s a memory-maker. Do you remember when…at the 2015 US Open…those Italians…

    The End.

  • Turn Out the Lights…


    …the party’s over.

    Serena Williams’s search for the ultimate prize of the Calendar Grand Slam in 2015 ended Friday afternoon with high drama in the third set of her US Open semi-final match against Roberta Vinci on the courts of Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows, New York. Roberta Who??

    Exactly. Roberta Vinci, an unseeded player from Italy, was a very long shot to win. The odds makers had her at 200:1 or thereabouts – depending on your bookie. Now that’s an underdog.Think David and Goliath, the first recorded upset in a match that was crucial to a lot of folks in days of yore. In the biblical account David the little shepherd boy goes up against the great Philistine warrior giant Goliath and manages to take him down with a single  stone from a  slingshot. Score David 1, Goliath 0.

    In her press conference following the loss, Serena looked like a giant who had been slain by a barrage of unbelievable shots from an opponent comparable in rank to the little shepherd boy. Surely Goliath must have had a similar shocked expression on his face as he tried to figure out what hit him before he fell to the ground.

    The tennis world reeled from the results of both semi-finals in which the top two players lost, and the widely anticipated match-up between Serena and Simona in the final was not to be. The media scrambled to find a new story line, and the ticket-holders for the final were disappointed in the lost opportunity to watch an American sports icon make history in her country’s most prestigious tournament.

    The Serena Saga came to an unceremonious end with much doom and gloom in the atmosphere at the Arthur Ashe arena, but as the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote: The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.

    Tom Rinaldi’s interview with Roberta Vinci after her match with Serena introduced an Italian tennis player with a great smile and sense of humor to go along with her slingshot.  She was the beginning of a new story that captivated tennis fans and gave the world an unprecedented opportunity to witness a magical moment in sports in an American tennis final that belonged to Italy.

    It’s why they play the game.

    To be continued.

  • Both Have Prevailed


    004

    Venus Williams and her little sister Serena

    005

    For the past seventeen years the Williams sisters have carried the heavy burden of American tennis on their shoulders, and the load has never been an easy one. Their two-person dynasty has been controversial, but their attitudes about the sport they represent have matured as their games have become more powerful. Their popularity increased as they became more comfortable with their celebrity and confident in their games. They grew up in front of a nation and, eventually, the world.

    Never in their 27 professional matches have the theater and drama been more exciting than last night in the quarterfinals of the US Open under the lights in New York City.  Approximately 23,000 fans came to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows to watch a match that was more than a game, and the Williams sisters delivered another thrilling exhibition of tennis at the highest level. As the ESPN commentators noted before the match, this was a big-time American sporting event with all the bells and whistles we love in our fascination with sports.

    Tom Rinaldi who has replaced Dick Enberg as the TV tennis philosopher who adds the stories to evoke our emotional attachment to an event, made these remarks prior to the match: “In an individual sport, their stories will always be linked…in our view of the Williams sisters, we see champions sharing a court, a desire to win, and a name. True, one will win –  but both have prevailed.”

    008

    Serena Williams is now two matches shy of her goals of a Calendar Grand Slam in 2015 and a total of 22 Slam titles to tie Steffi Graf’s record in the Open Era. Two matches…and counting.

    To be continued.