South Beach Hoosier had meant to share this bit of news with you last Saturday, but is still nonetheless pleased to tell you the great news that IU grad Jason Whitlock, the Kansas City Star sports columnist and FOX Sports commentator, who wrote the definitive columns last year on the murder of former U-M Hurricane and Washington Redskin Sean Taylor in his Miami home -and its aftermath- was named the winner of the Scripps Howard Foundation Award for Commentary.
These are two links you want to bookmark:
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/columnists/jason_whitlock/index.html and http://msn.foxsports.com/writer/archive?authorId=310
Jason Whitlock earned the award "the old-fashioned way," he earned it, as actor John Houseman used to say to great effect in his popular iconic commercials for brokerage firm Smith Barney, following his great critical and popular success as Prof. Kingsfield in the Paper Chase feature film and CBS and Showtime TV series.
COMMENTARYJason Whitlock of The Kansas City (Mo.) Star receives $10,000 and a trophy for his ability to seamlessly integrate sports commentary with social commentary and to challenge widely held assumptions along the racial divide.
http://foundation.scripps.com/foundation/news/releases/08march07.html
Previous mentions of Jason on South Beach Hoosier blog are these two, plus my mopst recent post:
SouthBeachHoosier's take on THE biggest Kansas-Missouri game ever
http://southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/2007/11/southbeachhoosiers-take-on-biggest.html
and Washington Post's eternal problem with female sportswriers
http://southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/2007/06/golden-oldie-about-sportswriters.html
To give you some sense of how well Jason takes the measure of a situation, consider this great column on the Mizzou Tigers getting dumped in the first round of the Big 12 basketball tourney:
Anderson has mess on his hands
By Jason Whitlock
March 13, 2008
It’s difficult to discern what Mike Anderson believes in, though it’s certainly not his current collection of players.
Anderson, Missouri’s basketball coach, described the Tigers’ 61-56 loss to Nebraska in the first round of the Big 12 tournament on Thursday as a “synopsis” of Mizzou’s 16-16 season.
If that’s the case, I don’t feel bad having skipped the Tigers’ entire campaign.
True confession: With Michael Beasley and Bill Walker in Manhattan, I never mustered the enthusiasm to travel east to watch hoops this college season. All the relevant action was in Kansas, so forgive me for being unfamiliar with Anderson’s tolerate-hate relationship with his basketball team.
Rest of column at:
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/story/530850.html
Reader comments to the above column are at:
http://pod01.prospero.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?msg=18358.43&nav=messages&webtag=kr-kctm
Wow!
It's no wonder that the Kansas City Star has one of the top sports departments in the country.
Kansas City Star
Sports Daily honored again
By Jeffrey Flanagan
February 28, 2008
It was a special week for The Kansas City Star sports department. Sports Daily once again captured the coveted Triple Crown — a top-10 ranking in daily section, Sunday section and special section — in judging by The Associated Press Sports Editors completed Wednesday in Orlando, Fla.
Rest of story at: http://www.kansascity.com/sports/story/510843.html
This news only serves to make the Miami Herald's sports department's efforts to seem relevant all the more feeble and laughable.
(As I mentioned in my recent post decrying the two-week delay of the telecast of the Miami Norland-Boyd Anderson Florida 6A basketball title game, into the area that both teams call home, the Herald's sports department's many failings will be a topic for another day.
Trust me, I've kept copious contemporaneous notes for the four years I've been down here about their myriad screw-ups and crimes, ones that I've been saving for exactly this sort of purpose -a rainy day.
And in the not-too-distant future, it'll be pouring so hard that somebody there better check the roof for leaks! )
Given what he can see in front of his eyes, Jason thinks the Kansas Jayhawks have what it takes to go far in this year's NCAA tourney:
Jayhawks have what it takes for a long NCAA run
By Jason Whitlock
March 16, 2008
You have to look awfully hard to find a flaw. The Kansas Jayhawks are a lot like the Big 12 tournament at the Sprint Center, nearly impossible to dislike in March.
Sure, Bill Self’s Jayhawks have done this before — capped the conference season by throttling Texas in the championship game — and bailed on the Big Dance before the music really started jamming. No one will forget Bucknell and Bradley. The loss to UCLA in the Elite Eight still stings.
This time it feels different, doesn’t it? These Jayhawks, winners of the Big 12 championship 84-74 over Texas on Sunday, have experienced depth, a handful of NBA players and a collective chemistry that previous Self editions lacked. They also have a sense of urgency.
“This is the year,” said Brandon Rush, the tournament’s MVP. “This is the year we’ve got to do it. We’ve got five seniors leaving. Some people might be leaving early. We’ve got to make it happen. We’re not ever going to have a team like this again.”
You can call that pressure. Or you can call it an acceptance of KU’s reality.
Rest of column at:
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/columnists/jason_whitlock/story/534353.html
This is Jason's most recent column on Sean Taylor and the enormous amount of criticism he's personally received since writing those initial columns last year.
Taylor's death a grim reminder for us all
By Jason Whitlock
March 2, 2008
There's a reason I call them the Black KKK. The pain, the fear and the destruction are all the same.
Someone who loved Sean Taylor is crying right now. The life they knew has been destroyed, an 18-month-old baby lost her father, and, if you're a black man living in America, you've been reminded once again that your life is in constant jeopardy of violent death.
The Black KKK claimed another victim, a high-profile professional football player with a checkered past this time.
No, we don't know for certain the circumstances surrounding Taylor's death. I could very well be proven wrong for engaging in this sort of aggressive speculation. But it's no different than if you saw a fat man fall to the ground clutching his chest. You'd assume a heart attack, and you'd know, no matter the cause, the man needed to lose weight.
Well, when shots are fired and a black man hits the pavement, there's every statistical reason to believe another black man pulled the trigger. That's not some negative, unfair stereotype. It's a reality we've been living with, tolerating and rationalizing for far too long.
Rest of column at:
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/7499442/Taylor's-death-a-grim-reminder-for-us-all#
Reader comments to this column at:
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/7499442/Taylor's-death-a-grim-reminder-for-us-all#tb
Jason's particular take on the Kelvin Sampson situation at IU is very interesting, given his personal knowledge of the history of IU and the place that basketball holds in the state's psyche.
Everyone's dirty, Sampson is just foolish too
By Jason Whitlock
February 21, 2008
There is this great myth in my home state among basketball fans that Bobby Knight won three national championships, 11 Big Ten titles and 902 games with an NCAA rulebook clutched firmly in his right hand the way a preacher holds a Bible.
It's just not true. Bobby Knight has too much intelligence to have any respect for the NCAA and its outdated regulations. I've never met a coach with a modicum of intellect who had any real regard for the NCAA and its laws.
You do what you think is fair and what you think won't get caught.
I mention this because there's great hysteria in the Hoosier state. The NCAA declared in a recent report that Kelvin Sampson, the man who replaced the man who replaced Bob Knight at Indiana, lied to NCAA investigators and school compliance administrators about phone calls to recruits.
Rest of column at:
http://msn.foxsports.com/cbk/story/7801934/Everyone's-dirty,-Sampson-is-just-foolish-too
Monday, March 17, 2008
IU alum Jason Whitlock wins Scripps Howard Foundation's "Commentary" award
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In the Heart of a Great Country, Beats the Soul of Hoosier Nation
The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpts from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987, Simon & Schuster:
In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country, el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the Floridas, thought I," John James Audobon wrote to the editor of The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administations now have found South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.
At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accomodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accomodated...
Hallandale Beach Blog
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change. http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.
Sadly for its residents, Hallandale Beach is where even the easily-solved or entirely predictable quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and the unsatisfactory management and coordination of resources and personnel.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change. http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hollywood in Cartoons, The New Yorker
Hollywood in Cartoons, The New Yorker
Hollywood in cartoons, 10-21-06 Non-Sequitur by Wiley, www-NON-SEQUITUR.COM
Miami Dolphins
Sebastian the Ibis, the Spirited Mascot of the University of Miami Hurricanes
Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders, April 28, 2007
Of cheerleaders past and present
Given South Florida's unique version of the melting pot -con salsa- demographics and mindset, these women in the photo above are surely what most South Floridians would consider attractive women. But for this observer, who's spent hours & hours at IU cheerleader tryouts and who has known dozens of cheerleaders -and wannabes- in North Miami Beach, Bloomington, Evanston and Washington, D.C., the whole time I was watching these members of the Dolphins' squad perform, I couldn't help but compare them and their routines to those of some IU friends of mine who ALWAYS showed true Hoosier spirit & enthusiasm.
Sitting at my table right near the stage and still later, while watching the long lines of Dolphin fans of all ages waiting to snap photos of themselves with the cheerleaders, I couldn't help but think about those friends who always left me and other Hoosier fans feeling positive & optimistic.
Was there anyone I saw in Davie who possessed these valuable intangibles: the dancing precision of IU Red Stepper -and Captain- Gail Amster, my talented and spirited Phi Beta Kappa pal from Deerfield (IL), who always sat next to me in our Telecom. classes as we took turns entertaining the other; the ebullient spirit & energy of two Hoosier cheerleaders -and captains- from Bloomington, Wendy (Mulholland) Moyle & Sara Cox; the hypnotic, Midwestern, girl-next-door sexiness of Hoosier cheerleader Julie Bymaster, from Brownsburg; or, the adorable Southern girl-next-door appeal of former Hoosier Pom squader Jennifer Grimes, of Louisville, always such a clear distraction while sitting underneath the basket?
Nope, not that I could see. But then they were VERY tough acts to follow!!!
And that's not to mention my talented & spirited friends like Denise Andrews of Portage, Jody Kosanovich of Hammond & Linda Ahlbrand of Chesterton, all of whom were dynamic cheerleaders -and captains- at very large Hoosier high schools that were always in the championship mix, with Denise's team winning the Ind. football championship her senior year when she was captain -just like in a movie. That Denise, Jody & Linda all lived on the same dorm floor, just three stories above me at Briscoe Quad our freshman year, was one of the greatest coincidences -and strokes of luck for me!- that I could've ever hoped for.
You could hardly ask for better ambassadors of IU than THESE very smart, sweet and talented women. In a future SBH post, I'll tell the story of one of the greatest Hoosiers I ever met, the aforementioned Wendy Mulholland, the Bloomington-born captain and emotional heart of the great early '80's IU cheerleading squads, and the daughter of Jack Mulholland, IU's former longtime Treasurer. The acorn doesn't fall far from a tree built on a foundation of integrity & community service!
(After he retired, Mr. Mulholland was the first executive director of the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County. I used to joke with Wendy that her dad's name was the one that was permanently affixed to the bottom of my work-study checks for years, while I worked at the Dept. of Political Science's Library, first, at the Student Building in the old part of campus, and then later, after it was refurbished, in magnificent Woodburn Hall, my favorite building on campus.)
In that future post, I'll share some reflections on Wendy's great strength of character and personality; my intentions of returning to Bloomington a few weeks before Fall '82 classes started, so I could help Wendy train and work-out to rehab her knee, so she'd feel confident in trying-out for the squad again, following a bad knee injury that'd left her physically-unable to try-out for the squad the previous spring, a big disappointment to those of us who cared about both Wendy and the team; my incredulity at, quite literally, running into Wendy while walking down a sidewalk one afternoon a few years later in Evanston, IL, when we were astonished to discover we were both living there, with me trying to hook on with a Windy City advertising agency, and Wendy then-attending Kellogg (KGSM) at Northwestern, right when the WSJ had named Kellogg the #1 Business School in the country.
I'll also share a story about Wendy performing a true act of kindness towards me in 1982, when I was having a real emergency, and she went above-and-beyond what I had any logical reason to expect. Yet, Wendy, along with her very helpful dad, Jack, came through for me when I was in a very bad time crunch. I've never forgotten Wendy's kindness towards me, and her true Hoosier spirit.
There's NOTHING I wouldn't do for Wendy Mulholland.
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