Roger Staubach stood at the rostrum at his Hall of Fame induction in Canton, Ohio in 1985 and addressed the crowd. He was barking out signals one last time.
But this was no football huddle, and the play that Staubach was calling moved him to tears.
Staubach, the legendary Dallas Cowboys QB, found his voice quaking and his lower lip trembling when his list of thank yous finally came down to his coach.
“That man in the funny hat,” Staubach managed, before emotions overwhelmed him and he had to pause to regain composure.
Tom Landry, the man in the funny hat, was the only NFL coach Staubach had. Heck, Landry was the only coach any Dallas Cowboy had, if that player’s career spanned any period from 1960 to 1988.
The relationship between quarterback and coach in the NFL, if allowed to progress for any longer than a couple of years, is not unlike that of husband and wife. There’s arguing, rolling of eyes, tears and ecstasy. There’s name-calling, yelling and hugs.
Then, eventually, there’s often divorce.
Staubach and Landry experienced all of the above, including divorce, albeit retirement-induced. Landry continued to coach the Cowboys for nine more years after Staubach hung up his right arm following the 1979 season.
After Staubach, Landry was married to Danny White. Before Staubach, the coach was hitched to Dandy Don Meredith. Before Meredith, Landry’s football spouse was tiny Eddie LeBaron, all of 5’7”, who needed a step ladder in order to read defenses.
The Cowboys’ continued success, after their growing pains of the early-1960s passed, was because of remarkable consistency in their organizational chart.
The Cowboys operated for nearly three decades with Tex Schramm running the show from the top of the chart, Gil Brandt manning the scouting department, and Tom Landry coaching the players afforded him by the first two.
The Cowboys didn’t change anything when that trio formed the team’s football pyramid.
The helmets didn’t change; the blue Lone Star on silver was the same helmet worn from Meredith to Hogeboom, from Lilly to Jeffcoat, from Hayes to Pearson.
The white jerseys didn’t change. The fact that the Cowboys were the only team to wear white for every home game didn’t change.
The philosophy on both sides of the football didn’t change. Landry’s famously intricate defenses especially didn’t change.
Yet all of that consistency met its match with the Green Bay Packers of the 1960s.
Landry’s Cowboys went up against Vince Lombardi’s Packers twice in the NFL Championship Game (1966 and ’67) and came up short both times. The latter came during the famous Ice Bowl game on New Year’s Eve, 1967.
The Packers had their own consistency going; Lombardi and QB Bart Starr formed another famous married couple, another relationship filled with head butting and challenges and respectful disdain.
In the AFL, the Oakland Raiders, in the latter part of the ’60s, were forming their own powerhouse platoon, led by their irascible, bombastic owner Al Davis.
Quarterback Daryle Lamonica, a discard of the Buffalo Bills, came to Oakland and Davis, through his coaches, turned Lamonica loose with an offense that was a precursor to the video games of today: have Lamonica fade back five steps and heave the football as far as he could. It was an offense that earned the quarterback the moniker of The Mad Bomber.
John Madden took over as coach in 1969 and he and Lamonica, then he and Kenny Stabler, provided the coach-and-quarterback consistency so vital to NFL success.
Davis, the Raiders’ common denominator all by himself, presided over one AFL Championship and four Super Bowl titles.
The cause and effect of franchise consistency can be found all over the history of the NFL.
The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s had one coach (Chuck Noll) and one quarterback (Terry Bradshaw). The San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s had one coach (Bill Walsh, though George Seifert coached the 1989 team) and one QB (Joe Montana). The Cowboys returned to glory in the 1990s with one quarterback (Troy Aikman).
It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of research to ascertain that NFL teams who are changing quarterbacks and/or coaches like socks, are likely teams finding themselves at or near the bottom of the standings every year.
The NFL’s dynasties, starting in the 1950s with the Cleveland Browns, can be neatly divided into decades and further identified by coach and quarterback. Cleveland had Paul Brown coaching and Otto Graham quarterbacking. The Packers had Lombardi and Starr. The Steelers had Noll and Bradshaw. The 49ers had Walsh and Montana. The Cowboys had Jimmy Johnson and Aikman (Barry Switzer coached the team to its third Super Bowl win of the 1990s in 1995-96).
All this talk of consistency within a franchise’s org chart is probably making Lions fans’ eyes glaze over, like I’m writing of the components of nuclear physics.
Yet it shouldn’t, because something fascinating is happening with the Lions right now.
The team that couldn’t shoot straight when it came to coaching and quarterback hires now has both of those positions locked up as tight as a drum.
The 2012 season will be the fourth straight for Jim Schwartz as coach and Matthew Stafford as quarterback. You have to go so far back into the team’s history books to find such a streak that you’d need to blow the dust off before reading about it.
Four years in a row might not sound like a lot, but not since the Lions of the 1950s have they had the same coach and unquestioned starting QB for four straight years (Buddy Parker and Bobby Layne).
While the Packers ruled the 1960s, the Lions were shuffling quarterbacks and coaches. When the Steelers ruled the 1970s, the Lions were shuffling quarterbacks and coaches. When the 49ers ruled the 1980s, the Lions were…well, you get the idea.
It’s both pathetic and amazing to write this, but it’s been almost 60 years since the Lions have been so well set at coach and quarterback, at the same time, as they are now with Schwartz and Stafford.
Schwartz enters 2012 in the last year of his four-year contract, signed in January 2009, just weeks after the Lions finished the first 0-16 season in NFL history.
Since then, Schwartz has led the Lions from zero wins to two, two wins to six, and six wins to ten (and a playoff berth). The progress the team has made in terms of wins and losses has been like a checker moving across the board.
Stafford missed large portions of his first two seasons due to injury, but he was still here and he was still the unquestioned no. 1 QB, hurt or not.
The consistency doesn’t end with Schwartz and Stafford.
The Lions will begin 2012 also in their fourth straight year with Martin Mayhew as GM, Scott Linehan as offensive coordinator and Gunther Cunningham as defensive coordinator.
That’s consistency not found in every NFL city, just so you know.
So far, the lack of football heads rolling in Detroit since 2008 seems to be working. The Lions seem to be getting better. Schwartz is on the last year of his contract, but that will soon be ripped up and an extension signed, I would imagine.
All of a sudden, the Lions are a model of consistency in today’s NFL. An improved won/lost record has been concurrent with that consistency.
Funny how that works.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Hometown Hero Hearns Lifted Detroiters In the Nick of Time
To the cynical, Joe Louis Arena is aptly named.
Name a hockey arena after a boxer?
Well, you’ve heard the old joke. “I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out.”
It’s thought of with a smirk to the old-timer—that the Red Wings play in a building with a prizefighter as its namesake.
Appropriate, also, for a city that has stood from its seats for Howie Young, Dennis Polonich, Dan Maloney, Bobby Probert, Joey Kocur and Darren McCarty. Fighters, all of them, and some of the best who ever laced on gloves—and skates.
And, Joe Louis, of course. Sans the skates.
But on August 2, 1980, they actually held a boxing match in the arena named for a boxer. That was the night that Tommy Hearns got ‘em off their feet.
Detroit roared that evening.
There wasn’t much to cheer about in Detroit sports from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, save the Tigers’ 1984 World Championship. It was mostly a dead decade. Playoffs were either not qualified for or experienced very briefly.
Starting in 1975, the Lions were perpetually .500 or worse. The Tigers were beginning a painful rebuilding project. The Red Wings were awful. The Pistons weren’t much better.
Then along came Tommy Hearns, and finally, there was something to cheer about.
Nothing like a guy with a lethal right hand to bring the city together.
On Sunday, they’re putting Tommy into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, NY. It’s about damn time.
Hearns was a Tennessee kid, born in 1958, the youngest of three children, the product of his mom’s first marriage. Then, she remarried and it was like the Brady Bunch—six more children joined the first three as a result.
Tommy was five when Mrs. Hearns left Grand Junction, TN, and migrated north to Detroit. Note there's no mention here of Tommy’s biological dad.
Growing up in Detroit as an adolescent, Tommy started using his fists—but in the boxing ring. Fortunately, that ring was run by Emanuel Steward of Kronk Gym.
If I had a dime for every time boxing manager/trainer Steward has been referred to by his fighters as a father figure, I could buy Joe Louis Arena and put some money down on Comerica Park.
But it’s true. Emanuel Steward doesn’t just train boxers. He raises them, in some instances. He’s referred to as a father figure in the literal sense; it’s not really a metaphor.
I’ve been to the Steward home, and when I was there, it was the usual: young boxers coming in and out, house guests as well as trainees. Steward has opened his home to more pugilists than a juvenile detention facility.
Tommy Hearns became ensnared, as a teen, by Kronk and its prospects of fame and fortune as a professional fighter. And guess how Tommy describes Steward?
"Emanuel—he’s been like a father to me,” Tommy told Mike Brudenell of the Free Press this week.
“Emanuel to me is the next best thing to a daddy. He taught me everything I know about boxing and living right."
Correction: Emanuel wasn’t the next best thing to Tommy’s daddy—he was, in many respects, Tommy’s daddy.
Mrs. Hearns was a remarkable mom, but it’s too often when kids from the inner city who don’t have that father figure, go sideways. Hearns might have been one of them, if it wasn’t for Steward and Kronk.
"The Kronk has been my life for over 40 years," Tommy told Brudenell. "I have to say, if I wouldn't have got involved with the Kronk, I don't know what I would have done.”
It’s nice not to wonder that, and instead talk about what Tommy did do.
Hearns rose through the ranks as a teen fighting in Kronk’s basement gym with its air as stale as a week-old cigar.
Hearns kept sparring in that gym, slicing his lightning-quick arms through that thick, stale air, eventually capturing the the National Amateur Athletic Union Light Welterweight Championship in 1977. That same year, Tommy also won the National Golden Gloves Light Welterweight Championship.
All this while Detroit’s pro sports teams tripped over themselves, trying to be the worst of the four.
Joe Louis Arena opened in December 1979. A college basketball game featuring the University of Detroit was the initial event. The Red Wings christened it for hockey on December 27. They lost.
A tad over seven months later, on 8/2/80 inside “the Joe,” Tommy Hearns, with Steward providing support in his corner, took on Pipino Cuevas for the WBA World Welterweight belt.
Cuevas was only 22 years old, but he was already the 10-time defending champion in that weight class for the WBA. Cuevas won the belt as an 18-year-old in 1976 and then started making a habit of demolishing any and all challengers. Most of the bouts were so short, you could have bought an ice cream cone and still had some left over when Cuevas’s opponent was being counted out.
Until the night of August 2, 1980.
Hearns, fighting in his adopted hometown, with a full house shrieking their lungs out in JLA, had five inches of height on Cuevas (6’1” to 5’8”). And the extended reach of Hearns’ famously long arms proved fatal to the champ.
Hearns laid a right hand on Cuevas’s jaw that turned the champ’s legs to cooked spaghetti. Cuevas looked like one of those Weeble toys. As soon as the crowd saw what was happening, the roar was deafening.
Then, Tommy finished him off, dropping Cuevas to the canvas with a series of punches. It was only the second round.
Detroit finally had a champion! Not since 1968’s Tigers, some 12 years prior, had the city been able to boast a hometown champion.
Tommy Hearns gave them one, destroying the 10-time defending welterweight champion Cuevas.
That was the beginning, really, of Hearns’s hold on Detroiters, a fanbase that had finally been energized by the Motor City Cobra.
Hearns gave the good folks of Detroit—and by Detroit I mean the city proper and the surrounding suburbs—something to crow about and to stick their chest out about.
I mean, he was the Motor City Cobra.
Later, Hearns would be known as The Hit Man, as he captivated the boxing world on the national stage as well.
Hearns fought all the big names: Sugar Ray Leonard (twice), Roberto Duran, Wilfred Benitez and Marvin Hagler. The opponents were always the best that boxing had to offer at the time. Tommy didn’t always win, but even in defeat, he fought a hell of a fight. The Hagler bout is legendary for its fury.
He did all this mostly in the first half of the 1980s, at a time when Detroit needed a champion and a figure of respect in the worst way. The 1979 depression, which hit the Big Three automakers hard, had sapped a lot of the spirit out of Detroiters.
But then came Tommy Hearns with his long arms and his wicked right, and in a way, when Tommy kicked the ass of Duran (in 1984 with the hardest punch I’ve ever seen thrown, by the way), we felt like we were kicking ass, too. And when Tommy lost, most famously to Leonard and Hagler, we felt like we got slugged in the gut as well.
Tommy Hearns was more than a boxer. He bridged some of the gap between team champions (1968 to 1984) and made Detroiters proud again.
For that alone, he should be in the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Name a hockey arena after a boxer?
Well, you’ve heard the old joke. “I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out.”
It’s thought of with a smirk to the old-timer—that the Red Wings play in a building with a prizefighter as its namesake.
Appropriate, also, for a city that has stood from its seats for Howie Young, Dennis Polonich, Dan Maloney, Bobby Probert, Joey Kocur and Darren McCarty. Fighters, all of them, and some of the best who ever laced on gloves—and skates.
And, Joe Louis, of course. Sans the skates.
But on August 2, 1980, they actually held a boxing match in the arena named for a boxer. That was the night that Tommy Hearns got ‘em off their feet.
Detroit roared that evening.
There wasn’t much to cheer about in Detroit sports from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, save the Tigers’ 1984 World Championship. It was mostly a dead decade. Playoffs were either not qualified for or experienced very briefly.
Starting in 1975, the Lions were perpetually .500 or worse. The Tigers were beginning a painful rebuilding project. The Red Wings were awful. The Pistons weren’t much better.
Then along came Tommy Hearns, and finally, there was something to cheer about.
Nothing like a guy with a lethal right hand to bring the city together.
On Sunday, they’re putting Tommy into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, NY. It’s about damn time.
Hearns was a Tennessee kid, born in 1958, the youngest of three children, the product of his mom’s first marriage. Then, she remarried and it was like the Brady Bunch—six more children joined the first three as a result.
Tommy was five when Mrs. Hearns left Grand Junction, TN, and migrated north to Detroit. Note there's no mention here of Tommy’s biological dad.
Growing up in Detroit as an adolescent, Tommy started using his fists—but in the boxing ring. Fortunately, that ring was run by Emanuel Steward of Kronk Gym.
If I had a dime for every time boxing manager/trainer Steward has been referred to by his fighters as a father figure, I could buy Joe Louis Arena and put some money down on Comerica Park.
But it’s true. Emanuel Steward doesn’t just train boxers. He raises them, in some instances. He’s referred to as a father figure in the literal sense; it’s not really a metaphor.
I’ve been to the Steward home, and when I was there, it was the usual: young boxers coming in and out, house guests as well as trainees. Steward has opened his home to more pugilists than a juvenile detention facility.
Tommy Hearns became ensnared, as a teen, by Kronk and its prospects of fame and fortune as a professional fighter. And guess how Tommy describes Steward?
"Emanuel—he’s been like a father to me,” Tommy told Mike Brudenell of the Free Press this week.
“Emanuel to me is the next best thing to a daddy. He taught me everything I know about boxing and living right."
Correction: Emanuel wasn’t the next best thing to Tommy’s daddy—he was, in many respects, Tommy’s daddy.
Mrs. Hearns was a remarkable mom, but it’s too often when kids from the inner city who don’t have that father figure, go sideways. Hearns might have been one of them, if it wasn’t for Steward and Kronk.
"The Kronk has been my life for over 40 years," Tommy told Brudenell. "I have to say, if I wouldn't have got involved with the Kronk, I don't know what I would have done.”
It’s nice not to wonder that, and instead talk about what Tommy did do.
Hearns rose through the ranks as a teen fighting in Kronk’s basement gym with its air as stale as a week-old cigar.
Hearns kept sparring in that gym, slicing his lightning-quick arms through that thick, stale air, eventually capturing the the National Amateur Athletic Union Light Welterweight Championship in 1977. That same year, Tommy also won the National Golden Gloves Light Welterweight Championship.
All this while Detroit’s pro sports teams tripped over themselves, trying to be the worst of the four.
Joe Louis Arena opened in December 1979. A college basketball game featuring the University of Detroit was the initial event. The Red Wings christened it for hockey on December 27. They lost.
A tad over seven months later, on 8/2/80 inside “the Joe,” Tommy Hearns, with Steward providing support in his corner, took on Pipino Cuevas for the WBA World Welterweight belt.
Cuevas was only 22 years old, but he was already the 10-time defending champion in that weight class for the WBA. Cuevas won the belt as an 18-year-old in 1976 and then started making a habit of demolishing any and all challengers. Most of the bouts were so short, you could have bought an ice cream cone and still had some left over when Cuevas’s opponent was being counted out.
Until the night of August 2, 1980.
Hearns, fighting in his adopted hometown, with a full house shrieking their lungs out in JLA, had five inches of height on Cuevas (6’1” to 5’8”). And the extended reach of Hearns’ famously long arms proved fatal to the champ.
Hearns laid a right hand on Cuevas’s jaw that turned the champ’s legs to cooked spaghetti. Cuevas looked like one of those Weeble toys. As soon as the crowd saw what was happening, the roar was deafening.
Then, Tommy finished him off, dropping Cuevas to the canvas with a series of punches. It was only the second round.
Detroit finally had a champion! Not since 1968’s Tigers, some 12 years prior, had the city been able to boast a hometown champion.
Tommy Hearns gave them one, destroying the 10-time defending welterweight champion Cuevas.
That was the beginning, really, of Hearns’s hold on Detroiters, a fanbase that had finally been energized by the Motor City Cobra.
Hearns gave the good folks of Detroit—and by Detroit I mean the city proper and the surrounding suburbs—something to crow about and to stick their chest out about.
I mean, he was the Motor City Cobra.
Later, Hearns would be known as The Hit Man, as he captivated the boxing world on the national stage as well.
Hearns fought all the big names: Sugar Ray Leonard (twice), Roberto Duran, Wilfred Benitez and Marvin Hagler. The opponents were always the best that boxing had to offer at the time. Tommy didn’t always win, but even in defeat, he fought a hell of a fight. The Hagler bout is legendary for its fury.
He did all this mostly in the first half of the 1980s, at a time when Detroit needed a champion and a figure of respect in the worst way. The 1979 depression, which hit the Big Three automakers hard, had sapped a lot of the spirit out of Detroiters.
But then came Tommy Hearns with his long arms and his wicked right, and in a way, when Tommy kicked the ass of Duran (in 1984 with the hardest punch I’ve ever seen thrown, by the way), we felt like we were kicking ass, too. And when Tommy lost, most famously to Leonard and Hagler, we felt like we got slugged in the gut as well.
Tommy Hearns was more than a boxer. He bridged some of the gap between team champions (1968 to 1984) and made Detroiters proud again.
For that alone, he should be in the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Lidstrom's Stealth Perfection Irreplaceable
When Nick Lidstrom first suited up for the Red Wings in 1991, George Bush was president---the first Bush. The Tigers' first baseman was Fielder---the first Fielder. Joe Dumars was hard at work at the Palace---as a player. The Lions were having a season that would find them in the NFC Championship Game.
It was a long time ago.
In 1991, we had no idea that this Swedish defenseman, an NHL rookie, would grow up to be the greatest blueliner of his time---and maybe of all time.
It wasn't like when Bobby Orr burst onto the scene in the 1960s. With Orr, greatness seemed inevitable. Orr was unlike anything we'd seen before. Before Orr, no defenseman made an end-to-end rush. No defenseman could skate like Orr. No defenseman could pass like Orr.
NHL defensemen before Bobby Orr treated the rink as if there was a force field beyond the center red line. They were among the worst skaters and were often placed on defense because of that lack of ability. Being a defenseman was like being the kid deposited into right field during a game of pickup baseball. Or the street football player who was told on every play to "go long."
The NHL defensemen of the Original Six era scored exactly one goal each, every season. They had more bruises on their body from blocking shots than they had points. They had names like Doug Harvey and Leo Boivin and Moose Vasko. They were so heavy on their skates they created divots on the ice.
So when Orr arrived, it was like when the electric guitar first screeched on the nation's 45s.
A guitar can do that?
A defenseman can skate? Shoot? Pass?
Nick Lidstrom snuck up on us. He didn't do anything in a flashy way. He didn't wow us. He didn't reinvent the position, like Orr did.
All he did was play it perfectly---for 20 seasons.
That's the irony of Lidstrom's career, which came to an end in one of those press conferences in the bowels of an arena where the athlete toiled. The end came, as it always does, with the athlete wearing Armani instead of Nike and speaking into a single microphone instead of the cluster that is thrust at him in the locker room after the game.
When the news broke yesterday that there was a press conference called for today involving Lidstrom and GM Ken Holland, didn't we all feel like we were told that the coach wanted to see us, and that we'd better bring our playbook?
We all knew. We tried to theorize that there was some reason, any other reason, for the presser.
But we all knew.
The irony is that Lidstrom was the Perfect Defenseman yet he managed to do so in a manner that rarely stood out.
When you ask a hockey person about what they liked most about Orr there is quite a menu.
When you ask a football fan about Barry Sanders and what they liked most, you might as well have a seat.
Back to the Red Wings: ask someone who watched Steve Yzerman play in Detroit for 22 years about Stevie's characteristics and the superlatives will flow: toughness; determined; focused; warrior; leader; heart and soul.
But ask the same folks about Lidstrom and there'll be yammering and stammering before the person finally blurts out "Perfect!"
Yes, that sums it up, but how can someone play his position perfectly yet leave so few words for us to use to describe the perfection?
It was clear that when we paid to see Barry Sanders, we paid to see him juke, twist, stop and start and split into two in order to avoid a tackle.
We paid to see Cecil Fielder hit a baseball over the left field roof of Tiger Stadium---or strike out mightily trying.
We paid to see Yzerman play on one leg, gut through a horrific eye injury, and grind his way over, around and past the Colorado Avalanche.
But what did we pay to see Lidstrom do?
Using a hockey stick like a skilled surgeon would wield a scalpel? Never being out of position? Seeing the rink like Bobby Fischer would see a chess board? Playing the angles like Minnesota Fats played the cushions?
Lidstrom did all of that, but it wasn't "pay to see it" stuff.
Perfect isn't exciting. We're more enthralled by the imperfect with style and panache.
Lidstrom had neither style nor panache. He appeared to blend in, until you bothered to stop and recall a time when he made a mistake---and couldn't think of one.
So what now, with the announcement of Lidstrom's retirement this morning?
Well, the Red Wings can go out and sign free agent Ryan Suter. But frankly, they could sign three Suters and I'm not sure it would be an upgrade. And that's no knock on Suter, any more than saying three Ford Mustangs aren't an upgrade over a Lamborghini.
First, when discussing the Red Wings without Lidstrom, please refrain from using the R-word.
Replace.
You don't replace Nick Lidstrom. Let's get that straight right now.
All the Red Wings can do is cobble together as much talent as they can on defense and hope for the best, really. They're a much worse team now than they were yesterday, no question.
But all is not lost. Plenty of teams have won the Stanley Cup without the greatest defenseman in NHL history on their roster. I mean, look who's playing for the Cup right now.
The sun will rise tomorrow. It's just hard to imagine that it will, after it set on Nick Lidstrom's career today.
It was a long time ago.
In 1991, we had no idea that this Swedish defenseman, an NHL rookie, would grow up to be the greatest blueliner of his time---and maybe of all time.
It wasn't like when Bobby Orr burst onto the scene in the 1960s. With Orr, greatness seemed inevitable. Orr was unlike anything we'd seen before. Before Orr, no defenseman made an end-to-end rush. No defenseman could skate like Orr. No defenseman could pass like Orr.
NHL defensemen before Bobby Orr treated the rink as if there was a force field beyond the center red line. They were among the worst skaters and were often placed on defense because of that lack of ability. Being a defenseman was like being the kid deposited into right field during a game of pickup baseball. Or the street football player who was told on every play to "go long."
The NHL defensemen of the Original Six era scored exactly one goal each, every season. They had more bruises on their body from blocking shots than they had points. They had names like Doug Harvey and Leo Boivin and Moose Vasko. They were so heavy on their skates they created divots on the ice.
So when Orr arrived, it was like when the electric guitar first screeched on the nation's 45s.
A guitar can do that?
A defenseman can skate? Shoot? Pass?
Nick Lidstrom snuck up on us. He didn't do anything in a flashy way. He didn't wow us. He didn't reinvent the position, like Orr did.
All he did was play it perfectly---for 20 seasons.
That's the irony of Lidstrom's career, which came to an end in one of those press conferences in the bowels of an arena where the athlete toiled. The end came, as it always does, with the athlete wearing Armani instead of Nike and speaking into a single microphone instead of the cluster that is thrust at him in the locker room after the game.
When the news broke yesterday that there was a press conference called for today involving Lidstrom and GM Ken Holland, didn't we all feel like we were told that the coach wanted to see us, and that we'd better bring our playbook?
We all knew. We tried to theorize that there was some reason, any other reason, for the presser.
But we all knew.
The irony is that Lidstrom was the Perfect Defenseman yet he managed to do so in a manner that rarely stood out.
When you ask a hockey person about what they liked most about Orr there is quite a menu.
When you ask a football fan about Barry Sanders and what they liked most, you might as well have a seat.
Back to the Red Wings: ask someone who watched Steve Yzerman play in Detroit for 22 years about Stevie's characteristics and the superlatives will flow: toughness; determined; focused; warrior; leader; heart and soul.
But ask the same folks about Lidstrom and there'll be yammering and stammering before the person finally blurts out "Perfect!"
Yes, that sums it up, but how can someone play his position perfectly yet leave so few words for us to use to describe the perfection?
It was clear that when we paid to see Barry Sanders, we paid to see him juke, twist, stop and start and split into two in order to avoid a tackle.
We paid to see Cecil Fielder hit a baseball over the left field roof of Tiger Stadium---or strike out mightily trying.
We paid to see Yzerman play on one leg, gut through a horrific eye injury, and grind his way over, around and past the Colorado Avalanche.
But what did we pay to see Lidstrom do?
Using a hockey stick like a skilled surgeon would wield a scalpel? Never being out of position? Seeing the rink like Bobby Fischer would see a chess board? Playing the angles like Minnesota Fats played the cushions?
Lidstrom did all of that, but it wasn't "pay to see it" stuff.
Perfect isn't exciting. We're more enthralled by the imperfect with style and panache.
Lidstrom had neither style nor panache. He appeared to blend in, until you bothered to stop and recall a time when he made a mistake---and couldn't think of one.
So what now, with the announcement of Lidstrom's retirement this morning?
Well, the Red Wings can go out and sign free agent Ryan Suter. But frankly, they could sign three Suters and I'm not sure it would be an upgrade. And that's no knock on Suter, any more than saying three Ford Mustangs aren't an upgrade over a Lamborghini.
First, when discussing the Red Wings without Lidstrom, please refrain from using the R-word.
Replace.
You don't replace Nick Lidstrom. Let's get that straight right now.
All the Red Wings can do is cobble together as much talent as they can on defense and hope for the best, really. They're a much worse team now than they were yesterday, no question.
But all is not lost. Plenty of teams have won the Stanley Cup without the greatest defenseman in NHL history on their roster. I mean, look who's playing for the Cup right now.
The sun will rise tomorrow. It's just hard to imagine that it will, after it set on Nick Lidstrom's career today.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Pistons' Monroe Reminds Detroit's Basketball Yoda of Reed, Lanier
Under normal circumstances, I would dismiss the comparisons of a second-year NBA big man to the likes of Hall of Famers Bob Lanier and Willis Reed as so much horsepucky, figuring it to be spewed by an over-exuberant fan who might never have seen Lanier or Reed play a single minute.
I might roll my eyes and lightly smirk at the notion of the Pistons’ Greg Monroe, after just two NBA seasons, having anything more in common with Lanier and Reed other than all three of them are left-handed.
Unless the one making the comparison is Ray Scott.
If you’d ever like to go NBA brain-picking, you could do a whole lot worse than to talk to Scott, who some around town remember as a one time NBA Coach of the Year with the Pistons, but who fewer remember as being one of the best and most consistent big men of his time, playing for the Pistons in the 1960s. Today Scott, 73, is as close to a basketball Yoda as you’ll find in this town.
Scott was a leaping, rebounding, and scoring big man out of Portland University, but he was really a Philadelphia kid. The Pistons nabbed him fourth overall in the 1961 draft, and for most of the decade Scott produced double-doubles (points and rebounds) every night like a Pez dispenser.
One year for the Pistons, Scott averaged 13.5 boards a game, snatching basketballs away from the likes of Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Jerry Lucas while the rest of his teammates fought gamely but usually ended up on the wrong side of the scoreboard.
That was Pistons basketball in Scott’s day—the losses piled up like dishes in the kitchen of a diner during the lunch rush.
So when Ray Scott says Greg Monroe reminds him of Willis Reed and Bob Lanier, you ought to listen, because Ray played against the former and coached the latter.
Ray was waxing the art of big man play in the NBA last week on “The Knee Jerks,” the weekly podcast I co-host with Big Al Beaton. Ray, always the gentleman, was on hand to help us celebrate our third anniversary of doing the show.
It was then when Scott said something that would have caused me to bop the speaker in the mouth—had the speaker not been Ray Scott.
“With Greg Monroe, we finally have a big man in Detroit who we can throw the ball into for all four quarters and make something happen and we haven’t had that since Bob Lanier,” Scott said of the kid from Georgetown who just finished his second season for a bad Pistons team, which Scott and Lanier know all about.
For full disclosure, Ray wanted us to know that he serves on the board of Monroe’s charity foundation. That’s OK; what he said didn’t smack of shilling. Ray doesn’t roll like that.
Monroe, to hear Scott say it, might become the best NBA center from Georgetown since Patrick Ewing. No less.
It was already galling to hear Ray make the comparisons to Reed and Lanier—until you thought of how many nights Scott and Reed jostled under the boards at Cobo Arena or Madison Square Garden, leaning against one another, waving a hand in each other’s face. And then you just had to think of all the practice sessions with Scott the coach and Lanier the player from 1972-76, when Ray coached the Pistons and Lanier was depositing those 10-foot hook shots over the likes of Kareem and Nate Thurmond and Dave Cowens.
Monroe survived a drama-filled rookie season with the Pistons in 2010-11 under the disrespected coach John Kuester. The 6’10” center/power forward didn’t get off the bench much in the first couple weeks of the season, but by the end of it, Monroe was starting and showing the tender skills that made him attractive to president Joe Dumars.
Year two was when Monroe took his giant leap for mankind.
The numbers shot up, from 9.4 points/7.5 rebounds per game to 15.4/9.7. Even the free throw percentage went way up, from .622 to .739. The confidence soared with the numbers. The team didn’t exactly soar with Monroe, but a 21-21 finish after a 4-20 start was something to build on for next season.
Entering Year three, it’s not crazy talk to call Greg Monroe one of the Pistons’ leaders—on and off the court.
Ah, but there is one area in which Monroe gets dogged a little—a criticism that has followed him like a piece of toilet paper stuck to a shoe.
It’s whispered that he’s not as tough as an NBA big man should be. That there’s a mean streak that Monroe simply doesn’t possess.
Scott, on our show, said that Reed was “as mean as a snake.” Lanier, the coach said, had a toughness that was different than Reed’s but manifested itself in how Bob played through pain and through the turmoil that sometimes beset the Pistons in the 1970s.
It’s unclear, this early in Monroe’s career, whether he’ll develop that nasty edge that is required to be a beast to play against on a nightly basis. Scott, for example, used “easy going” in describing Monroe.
But the strides made in Year Two, combined with the flashes that rookie point guard Brandon Knight showed, makes one wonder if the Pistons have themselves an inside-outside combo in the making not seen since—dare we say it—Scott was coaching Dave Bing and Bob Lanier.
“I like the way (Monroe) goes about his business,” Scott told us this week. “He is easy going but he works very hard and that’s how you show great improvement, as he did this past season.”
Reed’s watershed moment was in Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals, when he limped onto the Madison Square Garden floor on one leg thanks to a torn thigh muscle, gamely starting against the Los Angeles Lakers and nailing a couple of mid-range jumpers. He only played a few minutes, but his mere presence inspired his teammates to a blowout win for the championship.
Lanier came into the NBA on one leg as well. The St. Bonaventure grad had his leg in traction when the Pistons drafted him in the first round in 1970, the after effects of a nasty knee injury suffered in the 1970 NCAA Tournament.
“Bob had to work hard on a day-to-day basis just on conditioning alone,” Scott recalled.
For 10 seasons Lanier battled his brittle knees, Pistons upheaval and bemusing coaches before being liberated via a trade to the Milwaukee Bucks in 1980. Unlike Reed, however, Lanier never achieved his ultimate goal of an NBA championship, though he came close with the Bucks a couple of times.
Greg Monroe’s greatest moment as a Piston has yet to be realized. Wondering what it might be is enough to warm the cockles of a fan’s heart.
So there you have it. Greg Monroe, just two years into his NBA career, reminds Detroit’s basketball Yoda of a pair of Hall of Fame centers.
Ray Scott is about the only fellow in town who can get away with such hogwash.
Because he’s probably right.
I might roll my eyes and lightly smirk at the notion of the Pistons’ Greg Monroe, after just two NBA seasons, having anything more in common with Lanier and Reed other than all three of them are left-handed.
Unless the one making the comparison is Ray Scott.
If you’d ever like to go NBA brain-picking, you could do a whole lot worse than to talk to Scott, who some around town remember as a one time NBA Coach of the Year with the Pistons, but who fewer remember as being one of the best and most consistent big men of his time, playing for the Pistons in the 1960s. Today Scott, 73, is as close to a basketball Yoda as you’ll find in this town.
Scott was a leaping, rebounding, and scoring big man out of Portland University, but he was really a Philadelphia kid. The Pistons nabbed him fourth overall in the 1961 draft, and for most of the decade Scott produced double-doubles (points and rebounds) every night like a Pez dispenser.
One year for the Pistons, Scott averaged 13.5 boards a game, snatching basketballs away from the likes of Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Jerry Lucas while the rest of his teammates fought gamely but usually ended up on the wrong side of the scoreboard.
That was Pistons basketball in Scott’s day—the losses piled up like dishes in the kitchen of a diner during the lunch rush.
So when Ray Scott says Greg Monroe reminds him of Willis Reed and Bob Lanier, you ought to listen, because Ray played against the former and coached the latter.
Ray was waxing the art of big man play in the NBA last week on “The Knee Jerks,” the weekly podcast I co-host with Big Al Beaton. Ray, always the gentleman, was on hand to help us celebrate our third anniversary of doing the show.
It was then when Scott said something that would have caused me to bop the speaker in the mouth—had the speaker not been Ray Scott.
“With Greg Monroe, we finally have a big man in Detroit who we can throw the ball into for all four quarters and make something happen and we haven’t had that since Bob Lanier,” Scott said of the kid from Georgetown who just finished his second season for a bad Pistons team, which Scott and Lanier know all about.
For full disclosure, Ray wanted us to know that he serves on the board of Monroe’s charity foundation. That’s OK; what he said didn’t smack of shilling. Ray doesn’t roll like that.
Monroe, to hear Scott say it, might become the best NBA center from Georgetown since Patrick Ewing. No less.
It was already galling to hear Ray make the comparisons to Reed and Lanier—until you thought of how many nights Scott and Reed jostled under the boards at Cobo Arena or Madison Square Garden, leaning against one another, waving a hand in each other’s face. And then you just had to think of all the practice sessions with Scott the coach and Lanier the player from 1972-76, when Ray coached the Pistons and Lanier was depositing those 10-foot hook shots over the likes of Kareem and Nate Thurmond and Dave Cowens.
Monroe survived a drama-filled rookie season with the Pistons in 2010-11 under the disrespected coach John Kuester. The 6’10” center/power forward didn’t get off the bench much in the first couple weeks of the season, but by the end of it, Monroe was starting and showing the tender skills that made him attractive to president Joe Dumars.
Year two was when Monroe took his giant leap for mankind.
The numbers shot up, from 9.4 points/7.5 rebounds per game to 15.4/9.7. Even the free throw percentage went way up, from .622 to .739. The confidence soared with the numbers. The team didn’t exactly soar with Monroe, but a 21-21 finish after a 4-20 start was something to build on for next season.
Entering Year three, it’s not crazy talk to call Greg Monroe one of the Pistons’ leaders—on and off the court.
Ah, but there is one area in which Monroe gets dogged a little—a criticism that has followed him like a piece of toilet paper stuck to a shoe.
It’s whispered that he’s not as tough as an NBA big man should be. That there’s a mean streak that Monroe simply doesn’t possess.
Scott, on our show, said that Reed was “as mean as a snake.” Lanier, the coach said, had a toughness that was different than Reed’s but manifested itself in how Bob played through pain and through the turmoil that sometimes beset the Pistons in the 1970s.
It’s unclear, this early in Monroe’s career, whether he’ll develop that nasty edge that is required to be a beast to play against on a nightly basis. Scott, for example, used “easy going” in describing Monroe.
But the strides made in Year Two, combined with the flashes that rookie point guard Brandon Knight showed, makes one wonder if the Pistons have themselves an inside-outside combo in the making not seen since—dare we say it—Scott was coaching Dave Bing and Bob Lanier.
“I like the way (Monroe) goes about his business,” Scott told us this week. “He is easy going but he works very hard and that’s how you show great improvement, as he did this past season.”
Reed’s watershed moment was in Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals, when he limped onto the Madison Square Garden floor on one leg thanks to a torn thigh muscle, gamely starting against the Los Angeles Lakers and nailing a couple of mid-range jumpers. He only played a few minutes, but his mere presence inspired his teammates to a blowout win for the championship.
Lanier came into the NBA on one leg as well. The St. Bonaventure grad had his leg in traction when the Pistons drafted him in the first round in 1970, the after effects of a nasty knee injury suffered in the 1970 NCAA Tournament.
“Bob had to work hard on a day-to-day basis just on conditioning alone,” Scott recalled.
For 10 seasons Lanier battled his brittle knees, Pistons upheaval and bemusing coaches before being liberated via a trade to the Milwaukee Bucks in 1980. Unlike Reed, however, Lanier never achieved his ultimate goal of an NBA championship, though he came close with the Bucks a couple of times.
Greg Monroe’s greatest moment as a Piston has yet to be realized. Wondering what it might be is enough to warm the cockles of a fan’s heart.
So there you have it. Greg Monroe, just two years into his NBA career, reminds Detroit’s basketball Yoda of a pair of Hall of Fame centers.
Ray Scott is about the only fellow in town who can get away with such hogwash.
Because he’s probably right.
Sunday, May 06, 2012
Brodeur Still Chasing the Cup at Age 40
In your world or mine, a 40-year-old goalie nine
years removed from his last Stanley Cup is probably wearing a suit and gabbing
in between periods for one of the TV networks.Or he might be coaching kid netminders somewhere, imparting words of wisdom about how positioning is everything and teaching the art of being stingy with rebounds.
Not in Martin Brodeur’s world.
In Marty’s World, the 40-year-old goalie is leading in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs and already being credited with saving not only pucks, but his team’s bacon.
OK, so Marty Brodeur isn’t 40—yet. He turns it on Sunday.
Not that you’d know it with the way he’s playing these days.
Brodeur has his New Jersey Devils in front of the favored Philadelphia Flyers, 2-1, in their Eastern Conference semifinal series.
The latest win was an overtime thriller on Thursday night in Jersey. Brodeur was key in killing off two Flyers power plays in the extra session, enabling the Devils to stay alive long enough to pop in the winning goal with less than three minutes to play in the fourth period.
Brodeur is 17 years removed from the first of his three Cups, which he won over the heavily favored Red Wings in a four-game sweep—a series in which New Jersey employed their infamous trap, and Brodeur’s goaltending allowed the mighty Wings just seven goals scored in four games.
Marty was 23 back then, and at the time, he was almost more recognized for being the son of Denis Brodeur, a world-class hockey photographer whose work—mostly shot at the Montreal Forum—can be found in coffee table books the world over.
You know how many goalies have come and gone from the NHL since 1995?
I don’t, either, but it’s too many to keep track of.
Brodeur is closing in on playing in his 200th playoff game. Through Thursday’s contest, he’s logged close to 12,000 minutes between the pipes in the postseason alone. That’s 200 hours, or over eight full days of kicking, sprawling, butterflying, stretching, reaching and smothering—when the stakes have been the highest.
And here’s the thing: Marty Brodeur looks, pretty much, the same today as he did when he broke into the NHL in the 1991-92 season as a 19-year-old.
Still has the boyish, baby face. Still has the bright eyes. Still has most of his hair.
And judging by his numbers for this season, Brodeur still has the cat-like quickness, the reliable glove and the uncanny knack for placing his body between the shooter and the net, just in time.
Brodeur had 31 wins, a 2.41 GAA, three shutouts and a fine .908 save percentage in his 19th NHL season.
Oh, and about those shutouts.
There was a time, when talking about the seemingly unbreakable records in pro sports, you tossed Terry Sawchuk’s 103 shutouts into the mix. Given the relatively short careers of the modern-day goalie, Sawchuk’s shutout mark appeared untouchable.
For a while.
Then this baby-faced kid from Montreal won another Stanley Cup in 2000, then another in 2003, and all of a sudden, it was like you blinked and the 23-year-old, first-time Cup winner was a grizzled, three-time champion hoarding shutouts like a squirrel does nuts.
Closer and closer, Brodeur edged toward Sawchuk, who was widely regarded as the greatest goalie in NHL history.
For a while.
Then Brodeur passed Sawchuk, in 2009, and now, it’s Marty who may never be caught when it comes to pitching shutouts.
Sawchuk was once in a class all his own, in many people’s eyes, when it came to NHL goaltending excellence. Today, it’s maybe even money: Sawchuk or Brodeur? Brodeur or Sawchuk?
This will hit a nerve in Detroit.
It’s a double whammy because Red Wings fans—if you talk to them about it—are still stinging from the Devils’ sweep of their team in the ’95 finals. I think they rue that series more than the seven-game loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2009.
So you have that image of the 1995 Devils. Then you suggest that Marty Brodeur is, overall, a better goalie than Red Wings great Sawchuk, and you might as well be telling a six-year-old that there is no Santa Claus.
Yet here Brodeur is, playing some of his best hockey, leading another playoff series that his team is not even supposed to be competitive in, and you start to scurry to the record books.
What is the longest gap between first and last Stanley Cups won by a goalie?
If Brodeur’s Devils survive the Flyers and two more series after that, it will be 17 years between Cup No. 1 and this one for Marty.
I know that’s one too many "ifs" for some people’s liking, but would you feel comfortable betting against Brodeur right now?
And I’ll save you the scurrying; the 17 years would set an NHL record.
The New Jersey Devils, when Brodeur joined them, were, as Wayne Gretzky once famously called them, a Mickey Mouse organization.
The Devils have a lineage laced with infamy. While other franchises were taking slap shots, the Devils’ forefathers were engaging in slapstick.
The family tree begins in 1974 with the advent of the expansion Kansas City Scouts. They were awful, as most expansion teams of the 1970s were. The Scouts lasted two seasons before moving to Colorado and calling themselves the Rockies—some 17 years before the baseball team swiped that name.
The Colorado Rockies were lousy, too. Even the bombastic Don Cherry was brought in to coach them, and it was like Mike Ditka coaching the New Orleans Saints.
The Rockies moved east to New Jersey in 1982.
The New Jersey Devils were about as bad as the Scouts and the Rockies. They tripped over themselves for over 10 years before finally getting it right, personnel-wise.
Just about the same time that Marty Brodeur arrived to be the Devils’ goalie.
Funny, but in the 19 years that Brodeur has manned the net for Jersey, the Devils have missed the playoffs only twice.
If you think that’s a coincidence, then I have some swamp land in—where else—New Jersey to sell you.
The high-scoring Flyers, who play a video-game style of hockey and win games by scores like 8-3, were supposed to run roughshod over the 2012 Devils in this series—even in the playoffs, where if goal-scoring were a commodity, it’d be gold.
But, the Devils are leading the Flyers. They have another game in New Jersey to play before the series shifts to Philadelphia. By that time, the Flyers might trail, three games to one.
And Marty Brodeur will be a little closer to another Stanley Cup.
Not bad for 40 years old, eh?
Marty is no longer known as Denis’ kid; rather, Denis is Marty’s dad.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)