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
http://www.southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/
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