South Beach Hoosier: IU alum Jason Whitlock wins Scripps Howard Foundation's "Commentary" award

Monday, March 17, 2008

IU alum Jason Whitlock wins Scripps Howard Foundation's "Commentary" award

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

0 comments:

South Beach Hoosier's New Favorite "Good Government" Watchdog: Ashley Alexandra Dupré

Single-handedly managed to accomplish what a legion of voters, reporters, Special Prosecutors, White Papers, The New York Times and curious DA's with unlimited resources, COULDN'T! She cleaned up Albany! And, in the process, permanently eliminates a poster boy for the dis-connected, high-living, condescending hypocrites among the American political class. Already the early South Beach Hoosier favorite for TIME Magazine's "Person of the Year." Only surprising (mildly disappointing?) aspect of this whole Spitzer story is that it wasn't accomplished in South Florida. C'est la guerre!

Dave's Intentions for South Beach Hoosier

South Beach Hoosier will offer commentary on popular culture, public policy and national politics -largely from a Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) p.o.v., with some policy differences-advertising & marketing news and innovations; the business side of Show Biz, especially the film industry; as well as insight on international trade, financial services and U.S. foreign policy, where from 1988-2003, I had a front-row seat for these and many other contentious and implacable issues on Capitol Hill, and their resultant fallout at DC-area think tanks and policy groups.

Fortunately for me, besides being blessed with a great memory for details, I also took copious contemporaneous notes of what I observed first-hand at Capitol Hill hearings -inc. important Congressional mark-ups- as well as at myriad events with policy makers, journalists and news makers at Brookings, SAIS, AEI, the Wilson Center, the Goethe Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the IMF and The World Bank -BEST wine!-the Economic Strategy Institute, et al. Stories that, for whatever reason, NEVER saw the light of day in the pages of the New York Times, the WSJ or the Washington Post. Which naturally had the entirely predictable ripple effect of insuring that these stories and issues NEVER made the airwaves of the TV networks, cablenets or, even NPR.

South Beach Hoosier will also examine the latest amusing or not-so-amusing scandals, cover-ups, controversies, contretemps and mis-adventures bedeviling South Florida, something I became used to while growing up in North Miami Beach in the late 1960's and the 70's.
Fortunately, because of my news-junkie DNA and myriad magazine subscriptions, and long-standing relationships with media types in Miami, I was able to keep up pretty well with the South Florida area while living in Bloomington, Chicago, Evanston, Wilmette and Washington, D.C./Arlington, VA.
Communities where sensible civic activism and high standards of journalism were the norm and not the exception.

Due to my own personal/business/political interests and experiences in those cities, as well as my good fortune to have a large number of well-informed and well-connected friends and former housemates while living there, many but not all of whom are or were reporters, columnists, editors, TV/film producers, along with a few who are now well-placed in Statehouses and legal circles across the country, I'll have a deep bench of facts, opinions, point-of-views and fact-checkers to work with. That's the goal for South Beach Hoosier.

It's my hope that this'll help me offer up pinpoint criticism, whether of national and South Florida pols, media organizations and sports or show biz personalities, that have heretofore evaded public scrutiny, transparency or accountability -as well as well-aimed brickbats. To examine the proverbial case of the latest dog that doesn't bark, or analyze why the latest case of media conventional wisdom has -again- been proven wrong, and why.

This is especially true of The Miami Herald, the morning newspaper I grew-up with and have suffered with since first leaving North Miami Beach for Bloomington in the fall of '79, as its most talented people jumped ship and the paper become evermore a shell of what it once was: an excellent newspaper with talented and respected reporters and editors telling compelling and intriguing stories of intrinsic value to its readers throughout polyglot and transient South Florida.

Television news-wise, when I'd return to South Florida from school or work in Bloomington, Evanston, and DC, whether for Christmas vacation, Baltimore Oriole spring training games or visits for weddings, I could still see that Miami had the kind of scrappy and innately curious reporters who make a tangible difference in a community.
The sorts of enterprising reporters that so many of my friends at Ernie Pyle at IU, and Medill at Northwestern were already well on their way to becoming. http://www.idsnews.com/ ,
http://journalism.indiana.edu/news/erniepyle/ , http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/

Reporters who might have the talent and ability to convey to the waves of newcomers and visitors to the area, a nuanced sense of South Florida's decidedly mixed historical past, by writing with the proper amount of factual research, balanced perspective and sense of disbelief, to describe the events unfolding around them. Then, ending the piece by dropping the hammer on whichever local corrupt/incompetent miscreant, pol or agency hack was the target of their ire, for attempting to perpetrate yet another in a long of of dubious acts against the people of South Florida.

Sadly for the people of South Florida, things have gotten so bad now that The Herald's numerous flaws are as much for what they don't publish, as much as for the self-evident mediocre quality of its writing and reporting, lack of thorough fact-checking, and inadequate search for conflicts of interest.
For all the talk of improving the paper by the new McClatchy management, it shows no tangible signs of changing for the better any time soon, a great disappointment to its readers.

It's common knowledge within the industry that The Herald's website is a joke compared to the efforts of many smaller circulation newspapers. www.miamiherald.com
Frankly, the website itself remains a constant source of embarrassment for Herald reporters and columnists, who are constantly besieged by readers and told yet another horror story about not being able to find recent Herald stories that should be on the paper's website but aren't.
The reporters can do little more than shrug their shoulders in response.

Even in the year 2008, The Herald still DOESN'T have a permanent Public Ombudsman to represent the interests of both its readers and basic fairness, like many newspapers with much smaller circulation numbers!
Meanwhile, with much more to fear and lose, The New York Times has an independent Public Editor, currently Clark Hoyt, who weekly takes the Times' policy, owners, editors, reporters and columnists to task publicly, even providing links back to the original story or column in question, unlike the once-in-a-while effort at the Herald.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/thepubliceditor/index.html?8qa

Meanwhile The Herald's Sunday attempt at high-minded opinion-shaping and public policy, Issues & Ideas, is so embarrassing and muddled on so many different levels that it's all one can do to not laugh from crying, so feeble is its effort, so low is its aim, so puny the actual result.

Yet rather than seeking the creative input of bright and knowledgeable new faces who familiar with the real problems of South Florida, The Herald still regularly farms-out the Guest Op-Ed space in the paper to people living outside of the area, more than any other newspaper in America I've ever read. They continually run long excerpts in their editorial space from parochial interest groups whose political sentiments echo that of the the Herald's own Editorial Board.
Even worse, if possible, in many cases these particular guest editorial tangents have already appeared in other forums or publications! And speaking of the Herald's Editorial Board, who's on that exactly, anyway?
It's a great mystery that nobody seems able to fully explain away, yet The New York Times, under the guidance of Andy Rosenthal, has an entire webpage specifically devoted to detailing the background and credentials of its Editorial Board. http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/editorial-board.html
Hmmm... call me old-fashioned, but SouthBeachHoosier prefers transparency!

With more news coming out of South Florida than once ever seemed possible, and with the area's annual dance with hurricanes always fraught with danger, this area desperately needs an All-News radio station more than ever before, yet there's NO sign of one on the horizon to replicate the crucial role once served by CBS Radio affiliate, WINZ-AM 940.
Even worse, if possible, there's no LOCAL 24 hour cable news channel to replicate the important role played by a NewsChannel 8 in Washington, D.C., http://www.news8.net/
which gives a depth of coverage to D.C. and the VA/MD suburbs that people in South Florida can only dream about with envy: LIVE call-in TV programs with tough reporters who weekly or monthly grill the DC Mayor, Virginia and Maryland governors, as well as the VA and MD County Managers or Supervisors, the REAL powers in the area. But then it's not like COMCAST is stepping up to the plate, either!

If there's one constant gripe in South Florida, regardless of your age, race, nationality or political persuasion, it's about the fundamental lack of PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY here among Florida's state, regional and local govt./agency officials.
South Beach Hoosier aims to be a small step towards regaining some of that needed accountability, whether it's thru simple public scrutiny, or requires a degree of investigation and follow-up public exposure of incompetency, cronyism or negligence -South Florida's usual "Perfect Storm."
In other words, a catalyst for positive change.

"And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on the head and he fell to the ground. Amen."
-Preacher Purl encouraging the Hickory basketball team before the title game against South Bend Central in Hoosiers, 1986 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091217/

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...

The Enigma of Ashley Judd

Beautiful and beguiling, thoughtful and talented, Ashley is THE thinking-man's Phi Beta Kappa 'parallel universe' wife, the Wildcat yang to my Hoosier-by-choice ying. South Beach Hoosier wants SO badly for Ashley's enormous potential in Victor Nuñez's wonderful 1993 film, "Ruby in Paradise," to be fully realized and appreciated. Though I like Kate Bosworth as an actress, is there anyone who saw "Superman Returns" who doesn't agree that casting Ashley as Lois Lane would've made that a MUCH more nuanced film, and given the audience a reason to think it was at all logical for Clark/Superman to STILL be in love with her, even after his return and finding her married and with a kid? Backstory on this great photo, LONG one of my favorites, at www.ukhockey.com/posters.shtml

South Beach Hoosier Sports Coverage

South Beach Hoosier will also offer up analysis of the Indiana University Hoosiers, the University of Miami Hurricanes, the Miami Dolphins, the Baltimore Orioles, and the Florida Marlins, as well as the media that covers and critiques them.

In the future, besides commenting on current Hoosier teams, I'll try to offer some anecdote-filled thoughts and observations on the myriad Hoosier teams I observed while in Bloomington from 1979-83, where I was close to the action on the court, gridiron, cross-country fields, gymnastics mats and even the swimming and diving pools at Royer, due to friendships with many IU athletes and administrators.

That long list -a subject for future posts- includes, among others, #20, Fort Lauderdale Nova's James (Jim) Thomas, a member of IU's 1981 NCAA basketball championship team and the 1981 NCAA All-Final Four Team, and the 1978-79 Mr. Florida Basketball. A forensics major who was self-less and generous to a fault, Jim was also one of my very first friends at IU, and a very talented and thoughtful guy who possessed a tireless work ethic and a sense of dedication that was palpable at all times.

Those qualities weren't just on display at Assembly Hall during IU's games and practices, but at many other times and places over the years, with yours truly as a witness, when there were no cheering crowds around. For instance, on those cold days and nights when I'd meet Jim over at the HPER track, and we'd go up to the upstairs basketball court, where for about an hour, I'd help Jim with various skill drills by throwing or passing him basketballs and watch him go thru his paces: shooting, rebounding, passing and free throw shooting.
It was just Jim and his desire to be the sort of IU student & player who made his family, friends and teammates proud to be around him -and Hoosier Nation proud that he chose to wear the Hoosier cream and crimson with so much grace and dignity;

IU track & marathon star Cyndie Brown, from Kettering, OH. My friend Cyndie was not only one of the most-talented and driven women I've ever met in my life, but also, clearly one of THE most beautiful.
(Think a young Deborah Norville as a perpetually-tanned Danish SAS flight attendant with a killer smile, but with the athletic ability to run MUCH faster than you can possibly think of a good metaphor or simile!)
As if all that and her great outgoing personality weren't enough, Cyndie was also a wonderful cook, known by her friends for her insanely good cheeseburgers! In fact, I was eating one that ill-fated night of Dec. 8th, 1980, when the Dolphins played the Patriots in a Monday Night Football game. That was the night that Howard Cosell delivered the shocking news to the nation that John Lennon had been murdered on his way home in New York, and I think Cyndie was probably the first person I spoke to about it.

Those cool Saturday mornings in the Fall that I'd spend watching Cyndie and the rest of the track team run over at the IU golf course, off of S.R. 46, when the leaves and beautiful hills surrounding us were morphing into golden colors, rank among my most cherished of all IU memories, because they're moments I STILL see so clearly when I close my eyes.
Cheering Cyndie on at the start of a race -sometimes, alongside her VERY proud parents!- and then rushing to the midway point and then finish line to be in position to see Cyndie and root her on, as she came charging by in a rush in her crimson-colored IU kit, a crazy combination of amazing talent, resolve, grace & beauty all in one, well, it was nothing less than AMAZING! It literally took my breath away.

Hypotheticallly speaking, IF I'd ever had anything to do with it, post-IU, Cyndie would've become one of those rare and ubiquitous media presences in our life that we come to believe have always been there with us, by becoming one of the stable of track experts at one of the TV networks or ESPN -when she wasn't competing- covering big national and international events. But she also could've become the famous face of any number of upscale, sophisticated products of the sort that you regularly see advertised in Vanity Fair or Conde Nast Traveler magazines by Uma Thurman. Why? Because Cyndie possessed the rare kind of radiant, All-American good looks and dynamic personality that puts a smile on your face the moment you see her-and keeps it there. You simply can't help liking her. Trends and fads may come and go, but THAT is an intangible quality that never goes out of style!;

Hoosier swim captain Dave Whitmore -aka David C. Whitmore, Jr.- from Overland Park, KS, now of Bethel, CT. Dave was a wonderful friend blessed with great personal warmth, charm, insight and intelligence, and was a terrific swimmer, yet remained remarkably modest about his many talents and accomplishments. I was fortunate, indeed, that Dave lived in a Briscoe dorm room just a few feet away from mine our first two years at IU, because we never ever seemed to run out of things to do or subjects to discuss. (I still recall the look of satisfaction on his face the night he showed me his Shawnee Mission H.S. yearbook, in an effort to prove his prior claim that a ridiculously high number of girls from his high school -friends no less!- were so talented and attractive that they were members of the popular cheerleaders for the Kansas City Chiefs, the Chiefettes. Well, those photos didn't lie -Dave was 100% right!)

Later, after we'd both moved off-campus, when Dave was the IU Swim team captain, those activities of ours included brainstorming clever stategies on our drives up Old State Road 37 to the airport in Indy, to pick up talented HS swim recruits in for a weekend visit, so we could structure their limited time in Bloomington so they'd fall in love with the school -as Dave and I had- and become one of legendary swim coach James "Doc" Counsilman's newest prodigies. That is to say, both a productive IU student AND teammate. One who'd soon wear the ubiquitous gray IU swim team t-shirts that cleverly combined Bugs Bunny's sense of humor and the proper Doc Counsilman swim technique: "What's Up, Doc?"

Our routine always included taking the recruit to see a screening of Breaking Away at the Indiana Theatre, right where much of the movie was filmed downtown, since Dave and I knew from experience that the film was our secret weapon. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078902/
The film was the dynamic intangible that could usually break a tie in IU's favor, because it so thoroughly showed the full scope of the natural beauty of Bloomington and IU's campus. We knew that no matter what other colleges the recruit might later visit, the images of that great film would remain front-and-center when it came time for them to make a final decision about what school to attend.
Dave and I knew from experience that after seeing the film, our most important task was to merely show the recruit a large-enough slice of the incredible diversity of life in Bloomington, since the self-evident beauty and great lifestyle of the area sold itself. That explains why so many Hoosiers never leave Bloomington after graduating, just as is true in Austin, Madison, Chapel Hill or Charlottesville.

Dave's effect on my life at IU would be hard to overestimate, due to the thousands of hours we must've spent together over the years: over meals, at ballgames, seeing films at local theatres like the Indiana or Von Lee or at the Whittenberger Auditorium at the IMU, and later, once he moved into his great apt. over at Lantern House on 7th Street near Dunn Meadow, the thousands of hours I spent over there watching ballgames on TV, listening to music, talking about current events or what was going on in our lives. And that's not to forget going to the legendary Bruce's Cafe, festooned with genuine Hoosier memorabilia, for breakfast b/w 2-4 a.m., after a late night out, where we often ran into other friends and IU athletes. This was especially the case if we'd gone there after another legendary -but true!- IU Swimmer party, where you came to expect the unexpected -and were NEVER ever disappointed.
Another rather obvious positive effect of spending so much time together with Dave was that so many of my friends and classmates eventually became friends of his -and vice versa.
Naturally, that was especially true with IU's talented divers and swimmers, like the unflappable Robby Bollinger from Rockford (IL), the 1982 NCAA 1-Meter Springboard Diving champion, and Laura Seitz from Pittsburgh, my wonderful and thoughtful friend whom I was fortunate enough to meet and hit-it-off with during her very first week at IU -yet another Briscoe Quad alum!
That chance meeting with Laura lead the way to our spending countless hours together over the years, whether at IU soccer games or over movies and meals at the IMU or parties, plus the odd tennis game thrown in for good measure. Always ready with a hearty laugh, a beautiful smile and a clever comeback remark, Laura never looked anything less than radiant when wearing her trademark: a shiny red IU warm-up jacket.

A dear friend who'd play a very important part in both my life and Dave's was the beautiful, brilliant and beguiling Tab-drinking, Wall Street dynamo, Linda Sobosan, from Huntington, Long Island, who was already my friend when the three of us lived our freshman year at Briscoe Quad, before she ever met Dave.
In some ways, besides our complementary personalities, I suppose my deep friendship with Linda was destined to be strong, given my natural affinity for both New Yorkers and all things NYC, having grown-up surrounded by SO MANY friends from there in North Miami Beach, and being so steeped in the political and cultural history of New York.
(Linda was as wonderful and thoughtful a friend as you'd ever hope for, blessed with charm, wit, intelligence in abundance -and common sense to spare!- along with the natural ability to always cheer you up when you were down.)

One very cold winter Friday night in 1980, I made the conscious choice to see Dave's swim meet against Michigan over at Royer, thereby depriving myself of the opportunity to see the historic telecast of the U.S. Olympic Men's hockey team game against the Russians. But I always knew I'd made the right choice!
You have to support your friends when they need you.

Space limitations here at SBH prevent me from naming all my friends who were players on IU's 7-time NCAA Soccer champions, whose many exploits & comebacks at Armstrong Stadium under coach Jerry Yeagley I recall like they were yesterday. None of those soccer triumphs were more memorable or deserved than the 1982 NCAA eight-overtime title game victory over Duke, which I witnessed in person over Christmas break at Ft. Lauderdale's Lockhart Stadium, in what remains THE longest game in the history of college soccer. Afterwards, jubilant Hoosier players, coaches, families and supporters -like me- partied all-night in the hallways of the Ft. Lauderdale Sheraton Yankee Trader.

The IU sports administrator most responsible for helping me make sense of all things Cream & Crimson, was IU's do-it-all, 24/7 Renaissance man, Chuck Crabb. See http://iufoundation.iu.edu/News/Chuck_Crabb_Biograph.html
and http://www.indiana.edu/~bands/crabb.html

With equal amounts of enthusiasm, hard work and patience, Chuck lovingly and masterfully managed IU's Student Athletic Board, an organization to which I devoted many thousands of hours to -and loved every minute.
http://iuhoosiers.cstv.com/school-bio/ind-sab-index.html

Both the more difficult times, like trying to manage things and stay dry during downpours at IU soccer games at Bill Armstrong Stadium, and those that were more fun, like helping out with the logistics of running the lengthy IU cheerleader and pom squad tryouts, up on the HPER's beautiful second floor wooden gym, with very precise routines all set to Prince's genius music, circa 1982, which was blaring out of the speakers. Fun and hard work!
After all those hours and hours of watching those carefully choreographed routines to his music -routines that I can STILL see in my head- I could never hear Prince's songs again without thinking of those tryouts and smiling. And of all those eager but flushed and exhausted Hoosier faces, anxious to help project Hoosier Pride to Hoosier Nation.

And then, because it often seemed like I lived at the IU Student Union, the IMU, the largest in the world, http://www.imu.indiana.edu/ where all IU student groups then had their offices, I'd run off and do some more work on behalf of my other important interest, IU's Student Alumni Council, now SAA, http://alumni.indiana.edu/saa/ , also located in the beautiful IU Castle!
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Cyndie (Brown) Welte Winning the 1988 Honolulu Marathon

Honolulu Advertiser, Dec. 12, 1988 "In a somewhat ironic turn of events, Cyndie Welte of Ohio, who had come to Honolulu as a spectator, won the $10,000 first prize for women. She led the women's field all the way, finishing 38th overall in 2:41:52. "I really didn't plan to run the race until about 10 days ago," Welte said. "I've been training for the Houston Marathon in February. But when I heard that Carla Beurskens (the defending champion and record-holder) wasn't going to run, I thought I might have a chance to win and decided to give it a try." Race officials reported that entries reached the 10,000 mark on Saturday afternoon, but, allowing for the usual number of no-shows, it was estimated that around 9,000 lined up near Aloha Tower for the 5:30 a.m. start." http://www.honolulumarathon.org/l/Facts___Figures/history/Historybyyear/1988.htm; Prior to her victory in Honolulu, Cyndie had won the 1987 Pittsburgh Marathon with a time of 2:34:09, and had been on the cover of Runner's World magazine, which I will try to include here in the not-too-distant future. Obviously, Cyndie was greatly disappointed that when the 1988 Olympic Marathon Trials were held in Pittsburgh, on the same course that she'd won on the previous year, while running well and confidently through most of the race, injuries eventually caught up to her, and in the end, she didn't qualify for the U.S. Olympic team that'd compete in Seoul. My own personal bias towards Cyndie notwithstanding, there's no doubt in my mind that if things had gone differently, and she'd made the Olympic team, regardless of how she fared in the race itself, with her great talent and appealing personality, that Cyndie would've become a hugely popular media star in the U.S. Not to mention, would've created tremendous interest and momentum for U.S. Track & Field for years, so that average American sports fans would know the names of their best track stars, even in years when there was no Olympics, unlike the current sad reality.

South Beach Hoosier Soccer

Soccer-wise, I hope to offer the occasional insightful thought on developments in the English Premier League, which I've followed closely since my days at J.F.K Jr. High in N.M.B., and continue to watch now on Fox Soccer Channel.

Of course, back then, the local Miami PBS affiliate, WPBT, Channel 2, in nearby North Miami, actually showed some initiative and tried to please their viewers -which they don't now- which is how it was that I was able to watch Channel 2 and see tape of a recent German Bundesliga games with play-by-play by announcer Tony Charles. And highlights of other games!

That fantastic bit of inspired programming early on Sunday nights resulted in all my friends and I becoming devout fans of Bundesliga players and teams few of us had ever seen in person. It also resulted in our constantly doing our own unique impressions of Charles' very unique broadcasting style, often during our own North Miami Beach Optimist soccer games. The equalizer!!!
The young American International has done it again!

http://www.premierleague.com/page/Home/0,,12306,00.html
and http://msn.foxsports.com/foxsoccer

In Bloomington I'd listen to British soccer games on my short-wave radio in my dorm room in Briscoe Quad, Room 427-A, or, if the weather was nice, I'd listen outside on the grass field just north of the tennis courts across Fee Lane from Briscoe, one of my favorite places, where I spent so much time throwing a frisbee, baseball or football around with friends, while talking about everything under the sun.

If the weather was too cold or overcast that particular Saturday or Sunday, as it tends to be from December thru March, I'd bring my short-wave down into the Briscoe Quad cafeteria for lunch. On those occasions, the area near my table would quickly fill up with soccer fan friends from around Briscoe, as well as those I'd invited from around campus, and become, for a short while at least, Little Brittania.

There, in between bites and swigs of burgers, pizza and Coke, we'd listen intently to the exploits of the best soccer players in the world, imagining ourselves transported to the stands of some of THE most famous sports stadiums in all the world.

See my comments at bottom right about the Miami Toros and Ft. Lauderdale Strikers.

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. 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 unsatisatisfactory 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/

The Original Notre Dame Legend

Knute Rockne, November 7, 1927; Sixteen months after his cover appearance, Rockne perished in an airline crash over Kansas on a business trip to California. "Knute Rockne, All-American," the wonderful 1940 film about Rockne's life, starring Pat O'Brien, with Ronald Reagan as ill-fated Irish football legend George Gipp, is a film I've seen at least two-dozen times. Like the best of films, every new viewing of it makes me appreciate some aspect I'd never noticed before, even though I know it by heart. Just like 1942's "The Pride of the Yankees" starring Gary Cooper as Yankee legend Lou Gehrig.

1972 Miami Dolphins team photo at The Orange Bowl

The same color photo of the 17-0 Undefeated Team that for six years, rested in a frame on top of my bedroom dresser at my home in North Miami Beach. There it stayed 'till that fateful day in August of 1979, when I began packing for my new life in Bloomington. The photo made the trip to Bloomington intact, where it remained on my desk in Briscoe Quad 427-A for two very eventful years at IU, the latter being the year we beat North Carolina for the NCAA title. I placed it right below my 8' x 11' b&w glossies of the Miami Herald's All-County Gymnastics team. That was a tremendous team that featured many friends from all around Dade County, as well as my own talented friends and classmates at North Miami Beach High.

Recordings of IU songs to psyche yourself up before a ballgame!

Recordings of IU songs to psyche yourself up before a ballgame!

"The IU Fanfare" and "Indiana, Our Indiana"
"IU Fanfare" - composed by Scott Davison

"Indiana, Our Indiana" - composed by Karl L. King, adapted by Russell Harker, arranged for the Hundred by Ray Cramer and Dave Woodley

"Indiana Fight!"
"Indiana Fight!" - composed by Leroy Hinkle, arranged for the Hundred by Ray Cramer

"Hail to Old IU"
"Hail to Old IU" - composed by J.F. Giles, arranged for the Hundred by Ray Cramer

"Chimes of Indiana"
"Chimes of Indiana" - composed by Hoagy Carmichael, arranged for the Hundred by Ray Cramer

All recordings are in .mp3 format and are property of Indiana University. Use of these recordings (for non-personal use) without the express written consent of the Indiana University Department of Bands and the Indiana University office of Licensing and Trademarks is prohibited.

All recordings performed by the IU Marching Hundred during annual indoor concerts in Assembly Hall.

From: http://www.indiana.edu/~bands/recordin.html

Photos by Dr. M.T. Hallock Morris

Wanted to call your attention to these terrific photos on flickr.com of the 2008 Insight Bowl game between IU and Oklahoma State at Sun Devil Stadium, Tempe, AZ by Dr. M.T. Hallock Morris, assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville.

Her photostream includes lots of interesting shots of the ballgame, Sun Devil Stadium, the IU Red Steppers, the Marching 100 Band, some pre-game and post-game activities, plus trips to the desert of various ruin sites.

http://flickr.com/photos/swampgoddess/sets/72157603576048962/

It's All About "The U"

South Beach Hoosier's first U-M football game at the Orange Bowl was in 1972, age 11, against Tulane in the infamous "Fifth Down" game. In order to drum up support and attendance for the U-M at the Orange Bowl, that game had a promotion whereby South Florida kids who were school safety patrols could get in for free IF they wore their sash. I did. Clearly they knew that it was better to let kids in for free, knowing their parents would give them money to buy food and souvenirs, perhaps become a fan and want to return for future games. The ballgame made an interesting impression on The New York Times, resulting in this gem from the "View of Sport" column of Oct, 14, 1990, labeled 'Fifth Down or Not, It's Over When It's Over.' -"In 1972, aided by a fifth-down officiating gift in the last moments of the game, Miami of Florida defeated Tulane, 24-21. The country and the world was a much different place that fall because The New York Times took time and space to editorialize on the subject. ''Is it right for sportsmen, particularly young athletes, to be penalized or deprived of the goals for which they earnestly competed because responsible officials make mistakes? The ideal of true sportsmanship would be better served if Miami forfeited last week's game.' South Beach Hoosier hardly needs to tell you that this was YET another New York Times editoral that was completely ignored!

Sebastian the Ibis, the Spirited Mascot of the University of Miami Hurricanes

Before going to my first U-M game at the Orange Bowl in 1972, a friend's father often would bring me home an extra 'Canes game program. That's how I came to have the Alabama at U-M game program from Nov. 16, 1968, which was the first nationally-televised college football night game in color. (A 14-6 loss to the Crimson Tide.) After that first ballgame against Tulane, as l often did for Dolphin games if my father wasn't going, I'd get dropped off at the Levitz parking lot near the 836 & I-95 Cloverleaf in NMB, and catch a Dade County Park & Ride bus, going straight to the Orange Bowl. Onboard, I'd get next to the window and listen to WIOD's pre-game show on my Radio Shack transistor radio. A few times, I was just about the only person onboard besides the bus driver, which was alright by me. Once at the Orange Bowl, if I didn't already have a ticket, I'd buy a game program for myself and one or two for friends or teachers before heading to the ticket window, since you usually couldn't find a program vendor once inside. I probaly had a friend or my father with me for just under 40% of the U-M games I ever went to, but you have to remember that the team, though blessed with several talented players, like Chuck Foreman and Burgess Owens, was just so-so to average at best, and the games were usually played on Friday nights, so it wasn't exactly high on everyone's list of things to do. Depending upon the opponent, if I was alone, I'd often have entire areas of the Orange Bowl to myself. (Wish I had photos of that now!) For instance, I had a good portion of the East (open) End Zone to myself against Oklahoma in the mid-70's, when the Boomer Schooner and the Schooner Crew went out on the field after an Oklahoma TD, and the Schooner received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty from the refs, as would happen years later in an Orangle Bowl Classic game. (Against FSU?) I was there for the wins and losses under Pete Elliott, Carl Selmer & Lou Saban, and the huge on-field fight in '73 when under eventual national champion Notre Dame (under Ara Parseghian), they called a time-out with less than a minute to go, and already up 37-0. Their rationale? To score another TD and impress the AP football writers; final score 44-0. Well, they got their wish and beat Alabama 24-23 for the title at the Sugar Bowl. A year later, thanks to my Mom's boss, she and I saw Ara's last game as head coach of the Irish in the Orange Bowl Game from the East End Zone -in front of the Alabama cheerleaders!!!- in an exciting 13-11 Notre Dame win over Alabama and Bear Bryant, a rematch of the '73 national title game. I was also present for the U-M's huge 20-15 win under Pete Elliott against Darrel Royal's Texas Longhorns, the week Sports Illustrated's College Football preview issue came out with Texas on the cover, below. I was also present for lots of wins against schools called College of the Pacific, UNLV and Cal-Poly San Luis Obsispo, which I'd then never heard of before.

"Indiana University Memorial Stadium" circa mid-1960's

"I.U. stadium, dedicated October 22, 1960, provides 48,344 fans with finest spectator facilities and convenience for greatest intercollegiate football, as played by the famed Big Ten. Stadium lots accommodate 12,000 autos within easy walking distance and Autumn season presents a nature sideshow of brilliant foliage. Indiana's Fighting' Hoosiers meet the best of the nation here each season." SouthBeachHoosier's very first Hoosier football game at Memorial Stadium was Sept. 15, 1979, a 44-13 win over the Vanderbilt Commodores.

IU Cheerleaders Megan Martz & Kara Stewart named sioncampus.com Cheerleader of the Week

Kara Stewart of Seymour was the si.oncampus.com Cheerleader of the Week for March 15, 2007. See stories and photos at:
http://iuhoosiers.cstv.com/sports/c-spirit/spec-rel/032107aaa.html and http://iuhoosiers.cstv.com/sports/c-spirit/spec-rel/032107aaa.html

Megan Martz of Fishers was the si.oncampus.com Cheerleader of the Week for January 25, 2007. See stories and photos at: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/0701/campus.cheer.indiana/content.1.html
and http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/sioncampus/01/24/cheer.indiana/index.html
and http://iuhoosiers.cstv.com/sports/c-spirit/spec-rel/092006aab.html

Friday Night Lights blog/show tracker of the Los Angeles Times, your best source for all things FNL.
Here you'll find lots of great TV industry and fan insight and analysis about this South Beach Hoosier favorite, along
with wonderful photos you can't find anywhere else.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/friday_night_lights/index.html

NBC's official Friday Night Lights homepage:
http://www.nbc.com/Friday_Night_Lights/

TV Guide's Friday Night Lights homepage:
http://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/friday-night-lights/281133

University of Alabama cheerleaders, 1976

Longtime South Beach Hoosier favorite Sela Ward is in the middle; I attended the January 1975 Orange Bowl Game between Bear Bryant's Crimson Tide and Ara Parseghian's Notre Dame Fighting Irish, in Ara's last game. Alongside my Mom, who got the tickets from her boss, I sat in the East end zone of the Orange Bowl, in the row directly in front of the Crimson Tide cheerleaders and the Alabama marching band, known as the Million Dolar Band. (In those days, Sela dated future Dolphin 'Killer B' defensive star Bob Baumhower.) The romantic in me likes to imagine that Sela was sitting there, somewhere, in that row behind me, where the cheerleaders' animated and honey-sweet accents were like heaven to the then-13-year old South Beach Hoosier! So, I'd like to think that it was actually at that game where I first heard and saw the wonderful Sela, whom I've admired and adored since first seeing her on the big screen in Chicago in 1986's "Nothing in Common," starring Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason. (Ironically, a film set in Chicago.) Over the years, I've closely followed Sela's career, watching every TV show, Made-for-TV movie and regular feature film she's appeared in. My favorites have been NBC's "Sisters" -which featured that other longtime SBH favorite and Kappa Kappa Gamma Ashley Judd- ABC's amazing "Once and Again." Sela won a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award for the first and a second Emmy for the latter. More recently, she's been spot-on funny and believable in her guest starring role as the hospital's attorney and put-upon former wife of the ever-combustible Dr. Gregory House in FOX-TV's must-see "House." Back in October of 2002, I attended her book-signing at the downtown Washington, D.C. Olsson's bookstore next to The Lansburgh, home of the Sheakespeare Theatre. To beat the crowds I got to the bookstore about thirty minutes early, yet it was already starting to feel claustrophobic when I got there, jam-packed as it was with other men and women from around the National Capitol area who loved Sela as much as I do. When she finally walked in -no joke- a hush literally fell over the place. Then, the flash from a 1,001 cameras went off everywhere, and everyone started smiling the same silly grin that I always got whenever I saw her on TV or caught a glimpse of her in a magazine. I was definitely among friends. Sela's book, "Homesick: A Memoir" is a great look at the sort of life and family that's too often belittled in pop culture today, but it seems to me to have produced in Sela, someone who's incredibly admired for her talent, hard work and compassion, her well-rounded sense of humor and propriety, grounded in the sort of principles that her parents taught her in Meridian, Mississippi. Principles we ought to try harder to instill and imprint on younger kids today. Let there never be any doubt, South Beach Hoosier positively adores Sela Ward! At http://www.selawardtv.com/bama.html, you can read Sela's first-hand account of her life in Tuscaloosa, as a popular and well-liked Chi O who was admired and adored even then.

Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders, April 28, 2007 at Dolphins NFL Draft Party at Dolphin HQ, Davie, FL

(Photo by Mario J. Bermudez) Given South Florida's unique version of the melting pot -con salsa- demographics and mindset, these women 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 themself 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 sexiness of Hoosier cheerleader Julie Bymaster, from Brownsburg; or, the adorable girl-next-door appeal of former Hoosier Pom squader Jennifer Grimes, of Louisville, always such a 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, 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 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 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.

Coincidence of birth? Message: Don't Mess with Texas!

The week I was born in San Antonio, the cover subject of TIME magazine (dated Feb. 10, 1961) was Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas, who held that title for 17 years. As Speaker, Rayburn won a reputation for fairness and integrity -and toughness. He was also a longtime personal friend and advocate for Lyndon Johnson in Washington when LBJ was the Senate Majority Leader. JFK's election as president three months before this issue, with LBJ as Vice President, and Rayburn as Speaker, started the tradition of a Boston-Austin axis within the Democratic Party that has existed ever since, witness Dukakis-Bentsen. See http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,967986,00.html Nine months after appearing on this cover, Rayburn died of inoperable pancreatic cancer. The largest and most prestigious of all the House buildings on Capitol Hill is named after him. Over the 15 years I lived in the Washington, D.C. area, I spent literally thousands of hours in this amazing building: at congressional hearings of both great and little importance, and in speaking/persuading/cajoling Members and Staff. That also includes lots of hours spent transfixed by the great annual party thrown in the Rayburn courtyard by the late Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez of my hometown of San Antonio, where it was packed cheek-by-jowl with great Mexican food, cold beer flown in from Texas, a kick-ass Mariachi band dressed in costumes with cute dancers, and tons of great looking women from Texas and those who were Texans-for a-Day every year at Henry B.'s party! Whatever his views on issues and policies, in person, he was a warm and gracious gentleman whom we could use a LOT MORE of on Capitol Hill. See the Rayburn cover story at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,872094,00.html

U.S.P.S.'s 1995 Texas Statehood Sesquicentennial Stamp

I was born in San Antonio, the Home of the Alamo, at the Lackland Air Force Base Hospital during the first month of the JFK presidency. At the time, my parents worked at next door Kelly AFB, my mother for Kelly's base commander, my father in the Flight Surgeon's office. (They each saw President and Mrs. Kennedy the day before he was killed, when they Air Force One flew into Kelly and went thru the official receiving line. Our family has a photograph of them at the base that day that I've never seen published anywhere else in the myriad books and film footage of that time frame.) My maternal ancestors were Poles from a region of Prussian-controlled Upper Silesia, in what is now southwestern Poland, not far from the present day Poland-Czech Republic border. Overnight, those ancestors became Texas Hill Country pioneers, whose proud descendents have lived in Bandera ever since 1855. Due in large part to its large number of Polish, German and Czech immigrants, Bandera County was one of only a handful of Texas counties that voted AGAINST seceding from the Union at the state convention in Austin in 1861. A book I HIGHLY recommend on Texas' complicated history is "Lone Star Nation: The Epic Story of the Battle for Texas Independence" by H.W. Brands (2004), www.hwbrands.com

Dr. King Is Slain By Sniper headline in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 6, 1968

My family moved from San Antonio to Memphis on Easter weekend 1965, when I was four-years old. We lived in Memphis 'till July of 1968, just weeks after Dr. King was assassinated there. Having lived thru all the chaotic and frightening tumult that took place there in the aftermath of the riots, even remembering the night I watched with my friends and their parents from the sidewalk -during curfew- as fully loaded Army troop transports and tanks rolled past my suburban apt. complex from the nearby Armory on their way downtown, when the opportunity presented itself, my father happily accepted a job offer in Miami. (We flew into MIA the day after Larry Csonka had signed his first contract with the Dolphins, as his face was the one I saw in the Miami Herald vending machines at the airport as we walked -and walked!- to pick up our luggage, me wondering who this guy with the unusual name was.) Because I was a very precocious reader, and was easily bored with kids books, The Memphis Commercial Appeal was the newspaper that helped me learn to read and make sense of the wider world.

1993 Elvis Presley Stamp -Watercolor of Elvis by Mark Stutzmamn

It was in Memphis specifically, and the Mid-South in general, on our weekend family drives around Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, where I first developed my deep and enduring love and preference for many things: the Mississippi River; rhythm 'n' blues; Al Green; The Andy Griffith Show; Dusty Springfield; Petula Clark; St. Louis Cardinals baseball in the summertime; smoky sweet Memphis-style barbecue ribs; cornbread, and, of course, The King - Elvis. To a devout Elvis fan like me, who knows just about everything there is to know about him, the good and the bad, the best books ever written on Elvis -by far- are Peter Guralnick's masterful "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley" and the follow-up, "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley." Each is written with honesty and empathy, free of the judgmental cant and analysis that doomed other books that purport to tell the tale. It was also while living in The Mid-South, that I first became greatly interested in the American Civil War, following a summer day-trip to Shiloh, the site of the bloody April 1862 battle. It was on that summer day trip that I had a chance meeting with a VERY old man on the battlefield itself. A man whose own father had actually fought in the battle. And lived to tell the tale! For more info on Shiloh, see http://www.nps.gov/shil/ Spending a day there is an awesome experience and really puts things into their proper perspective, just as my later trips to Gettysburg, Harper's Ferry, Winchester, Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania did as well.

1992 Bill Clinton for President buttons

As my friends and family can attest, I was for Bill Clinton YEARS before he ever announced he was running for president -much as I'd been for Gary Hart in 1983- and was even considering running as a Clinton delegate from northern Virginia to the DNC as early as 1990. Still, IF I'd had a vote in the U.S. Senate, I'd have voted to impeach him and remove him from office. You DON"T commit perjury by lying to a federal judge and suborning the perjury of underlings. PERIOD! And you certainly don't countenance your former aides stealing classified materials from The National Archives before their testimony to the 9/11 Commission, a la Sandy Berger. As for the sordid story of one of Hillary's brothers being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby for a presidential pardon from his brother-in-law for a felon client, and nobody from his White House intervening to put the kibosh to that, consider the cast of no-talents left running things in those last few years at the White House after the good people had bailed earlier: lots and lots of Hillary loyalists. As the sign on the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to The National Archives reads, "The past is prologue." Don't say you weren't warned.

9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta's Florida Driver's License

I followed the 9/11 Commission hearings very closely, more than just about anyone I knew, watching or taping many of them off of C-SPAN, and, consequently, often staying-up late at night to catch up on their activities. Though it seems obvious now, while I'd heard from many sources that some of the hijackers had used Broward County Library computers to access the internet to send messages -and book their flights- it never dawned on me to think about where they lived in South Florida. As it turns out, Atta lived in Hollywood, 4.67 miles from my father's home in Hallandale Beach, FL.

Thoughts on The Pentagon and the 9/11 Attacks

Let me relate a 9/11 anecdote that gives you some sort of insight into me, and informs my posts here. I lived for about 15 years in Washington, D.C., and while there, worked on behalf of some of the top law firms and business groups in town, doing all sorts of things on both Capitol Hill and along the K Street corridor. While doing so, I was fortunate to meet and befriend lots of very talented, committed and impressive people, including many from the media, think tank and public policy sectors, as well as the diplomatic community.

On 9/11, I was working on a project for Crowell & Moring, in an office in their DC office right across the street from the FBI & DOJ, and next to the Naval Memorial. After the initial reports of the attack in New York City and on The Pentagon, from our vantage point on the large patio overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, we could see past the Old Post Office across the street, and could clearly see the smoke rising up from The Pentagon to our southwest.

Being equidistant to both The White House and the U.S. Capitol -and thus, in a direct position to have seen any attack on either- once we received word to evacuate the building because a plane within range of DC still hadn't been accounted for -what we would all later all know as United 93-I decided to forego playing the role of a sardine in a can on the Metro, and decided instead to walk the 7-plus miles to my home in north Arlington: via K Street, M Street in Georgetown, and finally Lee Highway in Arlington.

When I got a few blocks away from the office and was near Metro Center, whom do you suppose I walked right into, but the one man, whom, IF things had fallen differently, might've played a much larger role that tragic day?

(As I walked and walked, it was while listening on my Sony AM/FM/TV portable radio, via ABC News' Good Morning America -the same program that had informed my entire floor for 90 minutes before when we gathered en masse around my radio in our floor lobby area- that I first learned that some of the planes involved in the attacks had departed out of Boston's Logan Airport.

That news made my heart sink, and made the walk home seem far longer than it normally would, since one of my former housemates in Arlington, Jennifer Dugan, a wonderfully sweet, thoughtful and immensely adorable University of Rhode Island grad, was, in fact, a flight attendant for US Airways, working out of Logan.)

That man I'm referring to was George Terwilliger, then of the DC office of McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe LLP, whom I knew from 1627 Eye Street, the location of the New York Times' DC bureau, who's now at WhiteCase, http://www.whitecase.com/gterwilliger/

Mr. Terwilliger was the man that much of the Washington press corps and Beltway Crowd thought was the likely first choice for President George W. Bush to be FBI Director, and a person that many of my friends at 1627 had an enormous amount of respect and admiration for, even if they disagreed with him politically.
When I saw him in passing on the sidewalk, with a pensive look on his face, like everyone passing us on both sides and spilling out onto the roads, all I could think to myself was, "Be careful what you wish for."

Courtyard Los Angeles Century City/Beverly Hills

Courtyard Los Angeles Century City/Beverly Hills

Instead, though, I usually stay at the very nice Courtyard by Marriott Century City/Beverly Hills, which I highly recommend due to its GREAT location: near the Fox Studios lot, 2 miles from Westwood & UCLA, 5 miles from the Santa Monica beach -and across the street from a great Ralph's. Avoid rooms facing Olympic Blvd. and DO try to book one facing the pool! You won't be disappointed.
http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/laxce-courtyard-los-angeles-century-city-beverly-hills/

So THAT'S what fuscia looks like? Elizabeth Hurley to the rescue once again!

The Amazing Liz Hurley NEVER Disappoints! I've absolutely adored her since I first saw her 16 years ago in 1992, in an episode of "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," set in London, May 1916, playing suffragette Vicky Prentiss. And yes, continued to adore her even when she played a terrorist-loving flight attendant baddie in "Passenger 57," where she flashed that killer smile. Above, Fuschia bikini, £35, and cuffs as before, from Mango; http://www.mango.com/ , For amazing photography, see the people responsible for this shot at http://www.mertandmarcus.com/

Actress Erica Durrance (as Lois Lane) in The CW's Smallville, in Season 6's "Noir"

For roughly seven or so years, dating back to my days living in Arlington, VA, from the first moment I saw Erica Durrance on the small screen, I've had a very strong intuitive feeling towards casting Erica in the lead role in a screenplay idea I've had in my head for years. The story concerns the not-so-happy life of a Hollywood actress who was quite popular in the 1940's and '50's, someone equally popular with both men and women, which wasn't always the case with some stars. My own feelings about this Hollywood star from the Golden Era are quite simple: I've absolutely adored her in everthing she did, from the very first film of hers I ever saw, as a young boy in Memphis watching a Late Night TV movie. I was instantly smitten and enchanted! No point in identifying the actress now -perhaps in the future- but her true life story is one of whom it can truly be said, she had more ups-and-downs than the total of all the fictional characters she ever played on the silver screen. It's a role that's tailor-made for Erica for a number of reasons, not the least of which is her -to me, at least- great physical resemblance to this sweet-yet-sultry actress. That's especially true when seen thru the prism of this wonderful noir-ish photo by Michael Courtney/CW, which only makes the idea in my head seem more logical and plausible all the time. For years, prior to my ever having heard of Erica Durrance, the current actress I'd always envisioned playing this character was the wonderful Ashley Judd. In fact, I never really considered anyone else for the role, especially when everyone I spoke to about it always said said that it would be "perfect casting," too. So I wasn't on an island by myself with my ideas. But over the past ten years, with everything that's happened to Ashley, it seems increasinly clear to me that Ashley wants to play characters of a very different sort than I have in mind here. Or, as Variety or The Hollywood Reporter might characterize it, as they often do when projects don't come together, "Judd is going in a different direction." For real fans of Ashley's, like me, who've seen "Ruby in Paradise" a dozen times, and who've recommended it to everyone we knew to the point that people were tired of hearing her name, her film choices have been extremely disappointing. We want to see Ashley in films that offer her the kind of meaty role that'd let her talent and personality run with abandon. In the meantime, we consciously ignore her new films cause it hurts to think about 'em, knowing they'll be available on TNT Cable sooner rather than later. When and if she plays the sort of role we know will let her show her stuff, we'll be there at the theatre box office the day her film opens. So, we bide our time and see other actresses get roles that Ashley'd run circles around. Meanwhile, Erica Durrance walks into the picture... Let's see what develops...

Kari Matchett as Dr. Mariel Underlay in ABC-TV's sci-fi drama "Invasion," 2005-06

Her co-starring role as smart, clever and drop-dead-gorgeous Dr. Mariel Underlay from Homestead made me a fan of "Invasion" from Pilot 'till untimely cancellation. Though my views run more towards FAIR's than the DLC's on immigration, she was the only South Florida "alien" South Beach Hoosier would ever be happy to roll the red carpet out for. I loved this show! Obviously, I wasn't the only one to take notice, witness her terrific work in succession in great roles on 24, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and E.R.

Comparing PLAYBOY and The Princeton Review's List of the Top 20 Party Schools

Comparing PLAYBOY and The Princeton Review's List of the Top 20 Party Schools

Still somewhat mystified by the August 2007 results of The Princeton's Review's annual list of the Top 20 party schools. Hmmm... Biggest surprise? IU only ranking 8th or U-M not on the list at all?
This list reads somewhat suspect to South Beach Hoosier, since the University of Virginia, and University of Wisconsin aren't listed. Anyone who's ever been to either campus knows they both belong in that élite company.

The Princeton Review 2007 List:

1. West Virginia University
2. University of Mississippi
3. University of Texas, Austin
4. University of Florida
5. University of Georgia
6. Penn State University
7. University of New Hampshire
8. Indiana University, Bloomington
9. Ohio University, Athens
10. University of California, Santa Barbara
11. Randolph-Macon College, Va.
12. University of Iowa
13. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
14. University of Maryland, College Park
15. University of Tennessee, Knoxville
16. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
17. Arizona State University
18. Florida State University
19. University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
20. State University of New York, Albany

PLAYBOY'S MUCH more accurate 2006 List:
http://www.playboy.com/girls/coeds/features/top10partyschools/collegeguide.html

1. University of Wisconsin, Madison
2. University of California, Santa Barbara
3. Arizona State University, Tempe
4. Indiana University, Bloomington
5. San Diego State University
6. Florida State University
7. Ohio University, Athens
8. University of Georgia, Athens
9. University of Tennessee, Knoxville
10. McGill University, Montreal, Québec

Herman B. Wells on Campus Freedom

Herman B. Wells on Campus Freedom

"For me, there really was no question about support of Kinsey's research. I had early made up my mind that a university that bows to the wishes of a person, group or segment of society is not free and that a state university in particular cannot expect to command the support of the public if it is captive to any group. It must be a free agent to deserve the support of all the public.. and the only way to keep it free is to be willing to fight when necessary...

Observers of the American academic scene have called Indiana University's winning of its battle to protect Kinsey's Insititute for Sex Research from those would have eliminated it a landmark victory for academic freedom."

Being Lucky: Reminiscences and Reflections, Indiana University Press, 1980. (p.178-179)

From http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/about/hwells.html

South Beach Hoosier Hall of Fame: Jacquie Cherbocq

South Beach Hoosier Hall of Fame: Jacquie Cherbocq

South Beach Hoosier will always have a special place in his heart for one truly thoughtful Hoosier named Jacquie Cherbocq.
A friend and fellow Briscoe Quad resident, Jacqui helped make it possible for me to see all of IU's home basketball games to begin my life as a Hoosier.

For two years in a row, 1979-80 and 1980-81, she graciously lent me her pink fee receipt, so I could use it to purchase both the "A" and "B" schedule tickets at the IU Fieldhouse during class registration, back when the ticket packages were split up, supposedly, so more students could attend games.

One package always contained the Purdue home game, while the other was either the Kentucky game if we had UK in Bloomington, or, the best opponent not named Purdue if we were playing UK in Lexington that year.

I've never forgotten Jacquie's thoughtful kindness to me, especially since she brought me such amazing luck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Hoosiers

That first year, 1979-80, it made it possible for me to have seats in the third row behind the north basket in the regular season's last game, where Butch Carter sank clutch free throws to give us a 52-50 victory over Ohio State for the Big Ten Championship -my first time ever rushing the court.

My second year, 1980-81, a source for many future posts, was a year that was full of magic and wonder since it ended with our winning the NCAA basketball championship, beating North Carolina 63-50 in Philadelphia.

Bloomington and IU in Postcards

Bloomington and IU in Postcards

I only wish that when I first arrived in Bloomington in the fall of 1979, I'd thought to visit some of the Mom-and-Pop type shops that were still in town, near the Courthouse and along College and Walnut Avenues, and bought some of these sort of old-fashioned iconic postcards. The sort that continually get placed behind the newer post cards on the metal rack near the front counter, until there are only a few left. Wow, I could kick myself now!

http://www.cardcow.com/c/66005/us-state-town-views-indiana-bloomington/

IU Visitors Center E-cards:
https://www.indiana.edu/~iuvis/cards/

Indiana University in the News!

Indiana University Gateway page in Japanese:
このページを訳す BETA

Newsweek recognizes the campus for its unique blend of tradition and technology.
ニューズウィークキャンパスを認識し、独自の伝統と技術を融合した。

10 Ways IU is RED HOT 10 IUをとりつける方法は、レッドホット

Visit IU 訪問IUをとりつける

-----------------------------
Audio & video clips of

IU events: http://broadcast.iu.edu/

News on IU faculty & staff projects and research:
http://www.homepages.indiana.edu/2007/10-05/

IU Events Calendar: http://events.iu.edu/

IU Bloomington varsity athletics news: http://iuhoosiers.collegesports.com/

For more information on Indiana University, to arrange a tour or get a map, go to: http://www.indiana.edu/~iuvis/

Visiting beautiful Bloomington? Info you need for a great trip is at the Bloomington Convention & Visitors Bureau: http://www.visitbloomington.com/

Indiana, we're all for you!

*Just a reminder about South Beach Hoosier

South Beach Hoosier occasionally uses copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is being made available for purposes of education, discussion and commentary.
In case anyone asks you, Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 is a law we can live with.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond “fair use,” you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement by South Beach Hoosier of the views or privacy policies contained therein.

As alway, the comments below represent the opinions and "facts" of the individual who posted them -everyone speaks for themself!

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

Blog Archive

Welcome to Indiana Coach Crean!

Back Home Again in Indiana!

South Beach Hoosier's New Favorite "Good Government" Watchdog: Ashley Alexandra Dupré

South Beach Hoosier's all-time favorite film: MGM's 1952 The Bad and The Beautiful

The Enigma of Ashley Judd

Cyndie (Brown) Welte Winning the 1988 Honolulu Marathon

Hallandale Beach's iconic beachball-colored Water Tower, between beach and A1A/South Ocean Drive

The Original Notre Dame Legend

The Sport of the '60's

Building For The Super Bowl

Vince Lombardi Championship Trophies; April 2007 photo by Mario J. Bermudez

1972 Miami Dolphins team photo at The Orange Bowl

Recordings of IU songs to psyche yourself up before a ballgame!

"Taliaferro -Breaking Barriers from the NFL Draft to the Ivory Tower" by Dawn Knight

College Football Hall of Fame Hoosier George Taliaferro

Old-style "Obie" the Orange Bowl Committee mascot

Miami Dolphins

It's All About "The U"

Sebastian the Ibis, the Spirited Mascot of the University of Miami Hurricanes

The issue I took with me the night of U-M's 20-15 upset of #1 Texas at the Orange Bowl

The Orange Bowl, Miami, FL

"The Orange Bowl Stadium, Scene of the Annual Orange Bowl Game, Miami, Fla."

"Half Time Pageantry At The Famous Miami Orange Bowl"

"Indiana University Memorial Stadium" circa mid-1960's

Something to cheer about! NBC's Friday Night Lights

University of Alabama cheerleaders, 1976

Sela Ward

Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Texas Monthly, October, 2005

Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders, April 28, 2007 at Dolphins NFL Draft Party at Dolphin HQ, Davie, FL

Coincidence of birth? Message: Don't Mess with Texas!

U.S.P.S.'s 1995 Texas Statehood Sesquicentennial Stamp

Bandera, Texas -Cowboy Capital of the World

Dr. King Is Slain By Sniper headline in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 6, 1968

1993 Elvis Presley Stamp -Watercolor of Elvis by Mark Stutzmamn

My "license" to talk about Arkansas, which I first saw in 1965

1992 Bill Clinton for President buttons

The Democrats' New Generation

IU is for Lovers -Virginia, too!

Arlington Baseball Coalition

"Not Just Buildings" by Kenneth M. Wyner

U.S. Flag over the Pentagon

2001 Heroes Stamp

9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta's Florida Driver's License

Looking south towards The White House at dawn from Lafayette Park

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

Beverly Hills Hotel, Home of the Polo Lounge.

Courtyard Los Angeles Century City/Beverly Hills

So THAT'S what fuscia looks like? Elizabeth Hurley to the rescue once again!

Ashley Judd

Ashley Judd

Ashley Judd in South Africa

Actress Erica Durrance (as Lois Lane) in The CW's Smallville, in Season 6's "Noir"

Kari Matchett as Dr. Mariel Underlay in ABC-TV's sci-fi drama "Invasion," 2005-06

Kelly Brook -The British Amanda Righetti?

Why you should always look at ADVO's "Have you seen me?" fliers:

Best News Websites/Links for Madeleine McCann

SkyNews and The Sun Website/Links for Madeleine McCann

Comparing PLAYBOY and The Princeton Review's List of the Top 20 Party Schools

Herman B. Wells on Campus Freedom

Dr. David Starr Jordan, June 8, 1931

South Beach Hoosier Hall of Fame: Jacquie Cherbocq

Bloomington and IU in Postcards

Indiana University in the News!

Maps for the Hoosier on the Go!

Politics aside, there's no denying she's one of the most talented Americans of the past 100 years.