"Don't Be Forced to Transfer to Amherst"

Williams College Libraries (Go Ephs!) have produced a nifty homage to those cable tv ads (you know the ones -- they are like a shaggy dog tale meeting a Rube Goldberg Device, culminating in "don't sell your hair to a wig shop.") This one culminates in a fate in which the living envy the dead.

A Williams Soccer Player in Afghanistan

It is hardly news when a Williams alum takes a corporate job. It is news but not astounding to see a Williams alum play professional soccer. It is astounding news when just about any American not in the armed services takes a job in Afghanistan.

So it is especially amazing news to see the story of Nick Pugliese, a 2012 Williams grad who took a job in Afghanistan and then took advantage of the opportunity to play professional soccer for Ferozi FC of the Kabul Premier League. The telecommunications company for which he worked demanded that he choose between them and Ferozi FC. He chose to continue playing. You can see his story recounted here.  

I Want You Back/Tonight

A musical interlude.

Come Fill Your Glasses Up, To Williams! To Williams! To Williams!

The latest issue of Sports Illustrated has a fine article on Mike Reilly, a Williams football star from the early 1960s who tragically succumbed to Hodgkins disease just weeks after he graduated in 1964. Thus during the Homecoming game against Amherst Williams will honor Reilly, whose #50, while never officially retired, has never been worn since. (Williams has never retired a player's number.)

I'll be at Homecoming this weekend, so if you'll be there let me know, and we'll check out the new Purple Pub.

We're Number One! (Work Hard, Play Hard Edition)

Well, dcat's alma maters have been on a roll lately. A hard working, hard drinking roll.

Forbes just released its college rankings list, which rates all colleges and universities in America irrespective of classification (ie: liberal arts, research university, Masters comprehensive, etc.) and the number one college in all of the land? That would be Williams College. Suck it Amherst (and Harvard, and Princeton, and Yale, and UT Austin!)

Meanwhile, Princeton Review has released its list of the top 20 party schools. Number One? Ohio University. Court Street is going to drink like, well, like it's a Friday night on Court Street.

Have a Purple Cow, Man!

The Williams Purple Cow will be joining a number of more heralded (but not better!) college mascots in an ESPN commercial soon to appear near you!

Yeay Williams!

The methodology might be stupid (RateMyProfessor is actually a factor in assessment, which is fucking retarded) but another college rating system has Williams ranked #1 (Princeton is second, Amherst third, Harvard eighth).

Hat Tip.

Williams National Championship Game Liveblog

I'll be liveblogging the Williams v. Wisconsin-Stevens Point DIII men's championship game over at Ephblog. The game starts at 1:00 eastern time, noon from where I'm sitting.

Alma Mater Hoops Update

Good weekend so far for the alma mater men's hoop teams.

Yesterday Ohio smacked Georgetown around as if their seeds were reversed, running away with a 97-83 victory. Georgetown only managed to come as close as 7 at about the five-minute mark of the second, but OU responded with a three and controlled the game the whole time. I don't want to count chickens, but there is a better-than-outside chance that OU could end up facing Ohio State, which might well qualify as the biggest sporting event in OU history. The Bobcats beat Kentucky in the tournament in 1964, but given that Ohio State is the big in-state bully, and given how much bigger the NCAA's are now, a Sweet Sixteen matchup with the Buckeyes would surpass anything I know about in Athens.

Closer to my heart, Williams defeated Guilford today in the DIII national semis 97-88 in a game that was a nailbiter until the end. Williams was actually down eight at the half but shot the lights out in the second half. Williams won the national championship in 2003 and has gone to one other championship game. The Ephs will face the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point tomorrow.

Alma Mater Hoops Watch

We are about to embark on one of the great weekends in all of sports with the tipoff of the NCAA tournament. Each year my loyalties fluctuate. Unlike in professional sports, where my loyalties are firmly based in Boston, my college sports loyalties fluctuate. I grew up in a state without any real Division I presence in football or basketball (though UNH hockey is a perennial contender, albeit one that has yet to scale the top of the NCAA mountain). By default I have always been a Boston College fan as a result.

Going to college did not make a lot of difference on this front. I bleed purple and gold for Williams athletics, but Williams is a Division III athletic program, and while we have the greatest athletic program in all of DIII, it is simply not the same as the spectacle of major-level DI sports. I pursued my MA work at UNC-Charlotte (which now goes simply by "Charlotte" for athletic branding purposes). Charlotte has a respectable basketball program, once made a Final Four, and had a run in the period from the mid 90s to the middle of the decade just past when an NCAA run was the norm. Nonetheless, Charlotte straddles that line between major and midmajor-level program. For my PhD I attended Ohio University in the Mid-America Conference, for which the term "mid-major" was pretty much coined.

Otherwise my loyalties come and go. I have been a fellow at both Virginia and South Carolina, so I have tried with middling levels of success to appropriate those schools. I teach in the UT system and my paycheck (and tenure decision) come from Austin, so I gravitate toward the Horns. Duke was the most prominent and persistent college to recruit me for track out of high school, so I am not only not a Duke hater, I actually like to see them do well. Despite the appeal of being a free agent, it's a lousy way to go through life as a college fan, and I have always said that if I were to get a job at a college with big-time sports I would engage in full immersion and would write a book called "Becoming a Fan" based on that first year of overcompensation.

In any case, as usual, my alma maters are experiencing various levels of involvement with the Madness of March. Williams is ranked second in the country and has made the DIII Final Four, which is played every year in Salem. Williams has been there before, having won once, and has a good shot again this year. The Ephs will take on Guilford College on Friday for the right to play for the national championship. Guilford was the alma mater of one of my (late) college track coaches and is a Quaker school in North Carolina which will come into the national semifinal with a 30-2 record (Williams is 29-1) and that made the national semis last year as well.

Ohio University made an improbable run through the MAC tournament, its only shot at going to the Big Dance. Their prize? A trip to Providence (freakin' sweet!) and a meeting with historical powerhouse and #3 seed Georgetown. OU took a really good Florida team to the wire a few years back, though, and while far from a national power, OU has been to a dozen NCAA tournaments and will hopefully give the Hoyas a game. I'll proudly wear my OU green and am looking forward to the game on Thursday.

The news is not so good in Charlotte. The university inexplicably (to my mind) fired Bobby Lutz, the winningest coach in program history. In a dozen seasons Lutz compiled a 218-158 record. The team had its worst record in a long time last season, but was in a position for an NCAA berth this year until a collapse toward the end of the year and in the first game of the A-10 tournament scuttled any hope to make the field of 65. I have no idea what AD Judy Rose, the university administration, and the trustees want from the basketball program, but if the next dozen years look anything like the dozen just passed, it seems to me that it will be a rousing success and Lutz should have categroically been part of the program going forward. Lutz has been at least arguably the best coach in the history of the program, is a Charlotte alum, is one of the truly good guys in the profession and the community, and had weathered the toughest storm he was likely to face after last season. He had some of his best recruits on campus and had in the past turned down opportunities to move up in order to remain at his alma mater. I will continue to root for Charlotte to do well, but this is a lousy, knee-jerk decision no matter what rationalization comes from the athletic department.

In the meantime: Go Bobcats! And, above all, Go Ephs!!!

Coach Brooks

My friend and former Williams track teammate Ethan Brooks is using the knowledge and experience he gained in nearly a decade in the NFL to coach high school players in Connecticut. His older brother Fletcher is the head track and field coach at Williams and his sister Rebecca was a multi-sport athlete at Williams and now coaches basketball at the school where Ethan has begun what I hope will be a long coaching career.

Hat tip.

Williams Keeps Kicking Ass

For the eleventh year in a row (and the 13th time in the 14 years of the competition) Williams College reigns supreme in the world of Division III college athletics. Williams has won the Directors Cup, which tabulates results across college athletic programs, yet again. Tellingly, the top three were Williams, Middlebury, and Amherst (BOO!), all NESCAC schools, all elite academic institutions. Brains and brawn go hand-in-hand at these schools. Perennially number one in the national liberal arts college rankings (the best at academics), number one in athletics (the best at sports), and number one in our hearts. Come fill your glasses up, to Williams! To Williams! To Williams!

Billsville Bound

I am bound for Homecoming at Williams this weekend, so posting may continue to be light. Somehow I'm sure you'll get by.

Hamstrung (Big Time Self Indulgence Edition)

I know from hamstring injuries. Although my track career also saw its share of knee problems -- I stopped high jumping after my sophomore year because of my left knee -- my hamstrings were my bete noir. At the NESCAC track championships at Tufts my junior year, when I was seeded first in the triple jump, I tore my right hamstring during the long jump. Almost upon takeoff I simultaneously felt and heard a brutal popping sound, and that was it.

I spent the summer rehabbing, mostly in Michigan, where I spent an unlikely summer working as a bartender at a dude ranch. In July of that summer Michigan held a giant sports festival, the Great Lake State Games (for those of you from the east it was very much akin to the Bay State Games -- I competed in those twice -- or the Empire State Games). My goal was to be well enough to long jump in the track meet in East Lansing. I did so, placed second, and ther than having my car engine blow up on me, recovered pretty well.

Paranoid my senior year about that hamstring I was extra careful. My only real injury problem my senior year came with a minor but excruciating partial tear of my left patella tendon, which eventually sidelined me during one event at NESCACs outdoors, but otherwise I was able to work through. We returned to Tufts for the All New England Championships where we got to face off against the big boys in New England track and dield (and where we always did very well). I had qualified in the long jump as well as the triple, and on the Friday evening long jump finals I knew something was awry. I had a knot in the area where the hamstring and glute meets on my left leg. My steps were awry and my speed was off, and so I did not qualify for finals, which was a bummer, but the real prize for me was the triple jump. I was in good health, I felt good, and I believed that if I pulled it all together I would qualify for nationals. Qualify for nationals, have a good day, maybe a litle luck, and All American is not an impossibility.

It did not take long the next day for those plans to go to hell. During warmups I felt the tightness again, and should have gone to the trainer for a massage, but I was in the first flight and was among the early jumpers in the random draw. I took off down the runway, exploded a huge hop phase, and drove my left leg up for the crucial step phase. That's when I felt the familiar tug and heard the familiar sound, this time in my left leg. Somehow I finished off the jump, though pretty much by collapsing into the pit. In a way I wish I had not -- the jump was decent as it was, and would have been exceptional had I not torn the hamstring before finishing the final two phases of the jump. That was the one. Athletes at a peak of performance are the ones most vulnerable to tearing the hamstrings. I was so close.

And torn it was, pretty much a full rupture. My college track career ended with me face down on the infield at Tufts University for the second year in a row. It was, suffice it to say, devastating.

Gretchen Reynolds' piece Hamstrung Results from a recent issue of the New York Times' sports magazine Play thus spoke to me. I I excerpt the article in its entirety since I received it via their email newsletter and cannot seem to track down an independent link to it:

It’s been quite an Olympics for the hamstrings. They’ve determined the outcome of more events than Michael Phelps’s freakishly long arms. Sanya Richards blamed a “grabbing” hamstring for her loss in the 400 meters; sprinter Tyson Gay’s hamstring pull at the U.S. Olympic Trials reduced him to a non-factor in Beijing; and Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang’s heartbreaking exit from the Games, while directly caused by a sore Achilles tendon, “almost certainly was related” to a severe hamstring injury he suffered a few months back, says Dr. Bryan Heiderscheit, an assistant professor of physical therapy at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and an expert on hamstring injuries.

Injured hamstrings, Heiderscheit says, are especially common in sports that involve fast, hard spurts of running, such as the track and field sprints, but also football and soccer. “The million dollar question is why,” he says. Despite reams of research, there’s no answer.

What is known, though, is that a hamstring injury is self-perpetuating. An athlete who’s suffered one is at an enormously increased risk of another. Again, researchers don’t know why that is, although a new study by Heiderscheit and his colleagues is suggestive. In the work, 11 athletes hobbled by hamstrings underwent a M.R.I. examination. In all but two of them, the hamstrings showed “substantial changes in the tissue,” even a year and a half after the injury, Heiderscheit says. Some sections of tissue were enlarged and scarred; others atrophied. The whole was, in effect, remodeled. How that metamorphosis contributes to later injury and, more important, how to use the M.R.I. findings to avoid re-injury “will require a lot more study,” Heiderscheit says.

In the meantime, the hamstrings will have plenty more chances to affect the medal counts in Beijing. “I hope no one else goes down,” Heiderscheit says. “But I won’t be surprised if they do.”

That's not quite where my tale ends. I rehabbed again, though with nowhere near the same enthusiasm. I tried to compete a bit later that summer, with very mixed results, and I jumped the next year for the Greater Boston Track Club while I coached in Concord, Massachusetts, again with fairly mixed outcomes. I was never the same, but then again divorced from the context of track at Williams, it never would have felt the same anyhow.

Three years later I had my last bit of sporting glory, playing rugby for Rhodes University in South Africa. I had lost a lot of speed but could still get around well enough to start at wing. Every so often that haphazardly rehabiltated left hamstring would catch on me, but it was not until the last game of the season, a humiliating defeat to a club based at a police base (university boys in the Eastern Cape taking on Afrikaner policemen is a recipe for an asskicking, and we got flambeed). Towrd the end of the game I had the ball around midfield and felt the familiar sensation once again. this time the hamstring was as much scar tissue as muscle, and predictably I went down, though for reasons that still baffle me (we were shorthanded, I do know that) I stayed in the game and hobbled around utterly uselessly for the remainder of the game. I got caught at the bottom of a maul and some big bastard "mountain climbed" me, stomping directly on the hamstring.

For a month my leg was night-black from ass to calf, my last real sporting scar. Today I can run around, if I warm up right I'm still faster than most guys even though I was never really fast per se, but before long I'll feel a little hitch and will know that either my day or at least my ability to go all out are done.

I regret nothing, despite the creaky knees and worthless hamstrings and cranky back that sports left me with. I'll be one of those guys who gets his knee replaced at 50, both by 55, working on hip replacement before retirement. It was all worth it. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, working harder, smarter, better. But I'm always sympathetic to the guy with the hamstring injury. Their pain takes me back to moments of pain, but also to days of joy.

The 100 Meter Dash

Marcus Hayes of the Philadelphia Daily News sums up a good deal of what I feel about Usain Bolt's incredible race for history vis a vis Michael Phelps -- not that it is a zero-sum game -- in this column. A sample:

Everybody runs.
Not everybody swims.

It's that simple.

You marvel at Michael Phelps, Mr. Olympics 2008, Mr. Olympics for all time.

You identify with Usain Bolt, the Fastest Man Ever.

Phelps, an American, obliterated records in five solo swims here. His eight gold medals, a probability achieved, made him a safe and simple face with which to brand these Games, the new Mark Spitz. His 14 career golds vaporized the old mark by five.

But not everybody swims. Certainly, not everybody swims well, and virtually nobody swims more than one stroke, maybe two.

But everybody runs.

Bolt, a Jamaican, on Saturday morning ran the most significant race in Olympic history.

He lowered the 100-meter world record he unexpectedly set in May by 0.03 seconds.

Everybody has run. You start when you're about a year old. Eventually, everybody runs 100 yards or meters: in gym class, training for some sport, from parents or the boogeyman.

Because everybody runs, the case can quite easily be made that Usain Bolt categorically won the singular sporting event, running faster than anyone else ever has (without the aid of wind), that every other person on earth with the physical capability has tried. He won the most competitive sporting endeavor there is. He ran the single event that is elemental to nearly all (land-based) sports.

I'm reminded again of a Farleyism I am sure I have shared with you in the past. Dick Farley was the college football hall of fame football coach at Williams. Before he took the head gridiron job, he was the Williams head track coach, and after that he became an assistant with the team, a position he still holds. Farley was legendary for his witticisms, most notably for his bon mots, his "Farleyisms" (so dubbed by us, not by him). My favorite probably was his constant rejoinder to us, and especially to his football players, "you're only here because there is no division 4." One time at a meet at UMass he was coaching me up between triple jumps. The 5000 meter runners were huffing their way through that race and he simply asked me, rhetorically of course, "would any of these guys be doing this if they could run the hundred?" That sums it up in a nutshell.

Come Fill Your Glasses Up!

Williams has a new head track and field coach. My old head coach, Pete Farwell, who some time ago stepped down from head track coaching duties to focus on his championship cross country teams and coaching the distance runners on the track team, took the program over again this year after some controversy caused his successor to step down. After a national search, one-time Williams assistant coach Fletcher Brooks has been hired to take over the program. A former All American shot putter and football letterman at Allegheny College, Fletcher is also the brother of my friend and former teammate Ethan Brooks, who had a nice career in the NFL, including a couple of years as a starter for the Baltimore Ravens. Fletcher will be leaving MIT, where he has been head coach of the women's team and has worked with the men and women throwers.

I have no doubt that Fletcher Brooks will lead the Ephs to more glory in the years to come. As an alumnus not only of the school, but also of the program, I have high expectations for him to have a long and successful tenure at the head of the Williams College track and field program. All he has to do every year is beat Amherst, win Little Three, ECAC, and DIII New Englands and contest at the All New England meet, produce All Americans, and make noise nationally. Basically, all of the things that Williams track has been accomplishing just about every year since 1990 or so.

[Gratuitous and self indulgent shot of the winning long jump at the 1993 Williams Relays.]

Go Ephs!

Quick Hits

A lot of different stories and arguments have caught my eye these days that I've wanted to write about. but rather than do that, I'll just give you a full onslaught to keep you occupied for a while.

Taylor Branch, whose three-volume biography of King/history of "The King Years" will be a go-to work for many years despite its flaws published a lengthy reflection on MLK and his legacy in the New York Times earlier this week. His article is taken from a speech he gave at the National Cathedral on Monday.

Another week, another work of nonfiction revealed as fraudulent? That seems to be the trend. The latest culprit appears to be Ben Mezrich's bestseller from a few years ago, Bringing Down the House, which provides the source material for the movie 21, which is probably playing in a multiplex near you. Every time this sort of story emerges I feel as if I make the same lamentation, but writing nonfiction is hard, and is all the more so because its biggest requirement is a fealty to the evidence. I don't think the reaction from we lesser-known writers every time one of these stories breaks is merely a mix of resentment and schadenfreude even if we may be entitled to a little bit of resentment and schadenfreude.

If that news is not depressing enough, The Boston Globe also has another seemingly recurring story, this one about the plight of bookstores. It ends on a somewhat optimistic note, however, so maybe the sky is not falling after all.

Do you know when the first intercollegiate baseball game was played? It was 1859. The participants? Williams and Amherst. Despite what you might read or hear, it is my understanding that the result of that contest is actually lost to history. That first game was played in Pittsfield, which baseball historians have also argued to be the home of the first known baseball game in the 18th century. With representatives from the College Baseball Hall of Fame (based not far from my home in the Petroplex in Lubbock) in attendance, the two teams will meet again in Pittsfield next week. Go Ephs! (And, oh yes, Amherst Sucks! Lousy, dastardly Defectors.)

Over at Real Clear politics Steve Chapman argues that when it comes to Iraq, "patience is not a policy." he makes a pretty compelling case. nonetheless, it is also true that in an ironic sense, the administration has fucked this war up so badly that they probably are correct that we now have to stay, without any sense of the fact that this really ought not to redound to their benefit.

At The Washington Post David Broder steps away from politics for a minute and thinks that he has discovered a singularly grim period in the world of sports. He's wrong, of course. Sports have always reflected society's tumult, and sometimes has fueled it. If there are problems with sports that is simply because there are problems with society. Take a deep breath and go watch a few games. Do so for a week and somewhere on a field, court, track, pit, pitch, course, or what have you, something wonderful will happen that will remind you of what sports are about.

Finally, and self indulgently, I've been busy at both the Africa Blog and the South Africa Blog, and I hope you'll check both of them out now and regularly.

James McGregor Burns and the Supremes

The historian and political scientist (and Williams College professor emeritus) James McGregor Burns is turning his attentions toward the Supreme Court. I suspect that this book will make an important contribution as most of Burns' works have.

Gameday at Williams

Donnie Baseball asked for it, and I responded. Here is an expanded version of my views on ESPN's Gameday spending their Saturday in Williamstown for the Williams-Amherst game (which Williams won 20-0).

The True Scholar-Athletes

This week ESPN.com's ESPNU has been running a four-ppart series on college sports at the Division II and III levels. Naturally my alma mater, Williams, features prominently given that it is both the nation's best Division III athletic program and more importantly is among the very finest colleges in America. The first installment discusses how the best DII-III programs sustain excellence in the face of tight budgets and lesser status than Division I programs. The rest of the week's coverage looks at boosters and alumni support, fan support and internet coverage, and how smaller schools count on academic reputation more than sports. Chris Preston of the Shelburne News in Vermont is the author of the series.

Hat tip to Ephblog.