I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: sports

  • It’s Raining 3’s, Hallelujah!


    The basketball leaves Kaela Davis’s hands as she stands behind the line that separates the mundane from the magical; it seems to be suspended at the top of a long slow arc toward the rafters and then swish! comes down cleanly through the rim with the sweetest sound in basketball, the ball passing through the hoop with nothing but the grace of the shooter surrounding it.

    Wow – Davis was on fire yesterday for Coach Staley’s USC Lady Gamecocks as she was responsible for six 3-pointers to lead the 3-point parade of a Dawn Staley – era record of 16 during the Gamecocks win over Minnesota at home in the Colonial Life Arena. Allisha Gray had four more, and Ty Harris added three to help erase our memory of last week’s performance against Duke at their storied Cameron Indoor Stadium. We were six of twenty-three from the 3-point range in that less-than-stellar loss.

    Ugh. Pretty and I traveled to the Duke game last weekend and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves on our first visit to Duke University – loved the campus.

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    We Believe in Diversity

    What’s not to like about a school that embraces diversity?

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    Morris Williams Stadium

    Or what’s not to like about a university that names a stadium after me and Pretty? Have mercy – our first stadium namesake.

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    Cameron Indoor Stadium

    Or a major university that refuses to cave to commercialism and leaves its basketball court just like it was when the pilgrims played on it?

    spike-and-charly-on-the-sofa-very-bored-4-001

    The smiles of our selfie were before that game when we were still having fun “oohing and aahing” over the bleachers inside Cameron blissfully unaware of the dangers of another “away” game for us. Our record is not good with our favorite Lady G’s when we take to the road with them.

    Our first road trip was to the Final Four in Tampa Bay, Florida in 2015 where we played Notre Dame…and lost.

    Our second road trip was earlier this year to Sioux Falls, South Dakota for the Round of 16 game against Syracuse…and lost. That was a LONG ride home.

    Which brings us to last weekend’s shorter trip to Durham, North Carolina for the Duke game that, as I said earlier, we lost.

    Three road trips…three losses…we were talking yesterday about going to Savannah, Georgia next week for the game against Savannah State, and our Basketball Buddy Garner threatened to take away our car keys. Please don’t go, he said. I just can’t take it any more.

    Hm. Something to mull over.

    In the meantime, It’s Raining 3’s, Hallelujah!

     

  • P.S. Stan the Man


    Stan Wawrinka won the 2016 Men’s Final at the US Open today in four sets after losing the first set in a tie-breaker. He appeared to get stronger each set as the match continued for nearly four hours. At 31 years and five months, he is the oldest man to win the US Open since Ken Rosewall in 1970. Congratulations to Stan for a thrilling match and a remarkable example of courage and determination!

  • Closer to the End Than the Beginning


    During his interview with the ESPN team following a four-set victory over Kei Nishikori in the men’s semi-finals of the 2016 US Open tennis tournament, Stan Wawrinka was asked if he had an explanation for his winning ways in recent years – a victory over Rafael Nadal to win the 2014 Australian Open, a win over Novak Djokovic in the 2015 French Open final and now another opportunity as a finalist in this year’s US Open against Djokovic who is also the number one player on the tour.

    “I believe I am closer to the end than I am to the beginning,” the 31-year-old Wawrinka responded and implied that he understood the limits of playing professional tennis into his thirties like the Williams sisters and Roger Federer who are apparently the equivalent of the proverbial Energizer bunny in their tennis careers.  The reality of the finite nature of his capabilities had inspired him to prepare to play his very best on the biggest stages at the Grand Slam venues in Melbourne, Paris, London and New York City. Stan played to win.

    I resemble that remark, I thought, when I heard the Swiss player make it.  Closer to the end than the beginning – part of the largest generation ever, a generation gradually passing into what? The twilight years, the golden years, the days of wine and roses? The days of fixed incomes and variable costs of living…the days of eye floaters and arthritis…of grandchildren that bring joy and hope… and parents with special needs…the days of loss of friends and family…the days of disbelief in news headlines…you know he didn’t, but he did.

    We are living on the short side of time and if we share Stan’s spirit, we also have an opportunity to play our best games in the championship matches that challenge us to reach beyond what we can see and hear and touch in our everyday lives – a call to dig deeper and continue to contribute our abilities that will make a positive difference in a world we helped to create, in the families we choose to love.

    And so Stan Wawrinka will play tomorrow in the final with an outcome to be determined on the Arthur Ashe Court of the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. He will bring his best game and when he needs encouragement, it won’t come from the fans who watch but from within himself. He has a tattoo on his left arm in Italic script by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett:

    “Ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better.” 

    Good luck to Stan and to Novak, too – and to all of us a good night.

     

     

  • 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!


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    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.

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    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.

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    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.