The high school football playoffs did not exist when I was a young person. We had a coach who I interviewed in his retirement years. This was Stan Kent. He did not believe in the football playoffs. He said the teams should just play for their conference title. Sufficient incentive.
Also, he pointed out that nearly all teams would lose their last game of the season. Such is the nature with playoffs. A loss at the end is kind of a downer. Well that's what our MACA Tigers experienced on Tuesday night.
People during the day must have figured it was going to be a downer night for football. I mean with the weather. Of course the temps are cooling off now. That wasn't the problem. The problem was the cotton pickin' wind. It can be a scourge on the prairie.
I considered walking over to the field for at least a part of the game. But I was too much of a softie. Or, getting older makes me more reluctant to walk or ride bike. I do walk for recreational purposes. Somehow I feel the enthusiasm for that. Walking to town feels like more of a chore.
Of course we have YouTube for high school sports. Talk about something that didn't exist when I was a young person! Try explaining YouTube to someone from my young years and it would come off like something out of the "Jetsons." Even after YouTube was created, we could not have imagined how far it was going to go. Live telecasts of local high school sports.
Not only that, it has gotten so sophisticated, just like the regular TV coverage. It will only get better. We see the score at the bottom of the screen. The announcers are pretty sharp. And with time we'll take it for granted.
There is a novelty aspect to all the new stuff we discover on this thing called the Internet. One by one these things become developed and then you know what? They become old hat. The novelty fades. We'll start becoming picky about how the telecast is handled. The advances are so steady, we hardly recognize them as advances.
Looks like the high schools are getting $ from sponsorships of the telecasts. We'll get ads and "plugs" just like the big boys do. A polished telecast is no longer the province of Division I or pro football. It's everywhere. High schools can "ape" how the established sports systems have been functioning for a long time. Just like ESPN?
ESPN has been taking slings and arrows for being "woke." All around us we sense this political schism. I remember when ESPN itself was a tremendous novelty! All sports all the time. I'm 70 years old and so I'm aware of the long breadth of media history, e.g. being able to watch live Atlanta Braves baseball on TV in the mid-1970s! Believe it or not, fans could be awestruck. I'm serious.
Prior to those days, we'd see an occasional Twins road game on TV, very often without even the benefit of the center field camera position, and it would be sponsored in yawning fashion by "Midwest Federal."
They ran the same commercials all game - yawn again. And there sat their patriarchal spokesman, Harold W. Greenwood! He would honor various people for helping build community.
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| Harold W. Greenwood |
And then in the end, wasn't old Harold convicted of a serious crime or two? I thought he had such a bland persona, frankly dim-witted.
Cable TV was going to come along to revolutionize sports media. And that was surely not the end of it. Through each stage of media evolution, for example Web 1.0, we as a society might have felt we had reached the apex. I caught myself thinking that a few times. You've heard the old phrase "you ain't seen nuthin' yet."
One and done
The football playoffs did not last long for our Tigers this year. Where was our regular quarterback? I did not watch the whole game so I probably missed the explanation. Ozzy Jerome hurt? So common in football. Whenever I hear of a high school football injury, my first thought is to hope the injury does not have long-lasting effects.
The fans can assume sometimes that when a player is "activated" again, he can spring right back is if nothing happened. The player himself would want to look "game" about his return. This would follow the old "manly" model for being tough. Sports is not equated with manliness anymore. Girls and women went from being discriminated against in sports to where today, they actually have it better than men.
Women's sports is totally established and respected now, but there's no football or wrestling with their downsides for health of the participants. Football is self-evident and with wrestling it's unreasonable weight loss - always bothered me greatly.
I think wrestling grew as the alternative to basketball mainly because it was a cheap sport to offer. Wrestling became a haven for a lot of the "troubled" young men frankly. Another haven for such boys was in "industrial arts" classes. And what the heck happened to industrial arts in high schools? When I was in high school, industrial arts was a whole sub-culture: boys wearing denim jackets and pants and with thumbtacks on the bottom of their cowboy boots. We had to admire their sheer talent with making things. I wonder what has taken over now in the absence of the sub-culture. My how times change.
The Tigers lost to Thief River Falls last night 21-7 at Big Cat field. Must have been kind of a dreary night for fans. My, what a long trip home in the night for the Thief River Falls fans. Too long IMHO.
I hear Hancock won, that's nice. Minnewaska won big. The Minnewaska school district is getting ready for the big referendum. It takes a lot for me to endorse a school referendum. I just don't trust most of the people promoting these things. Give schools more $ and the teachers will just end up demanding more. So I would vote "no." I hope that is the outcome at 'Waska.
Last week gave us more drama than we'd care to handle, regarding our "jewel in the crown" UMM. Forget the jewel, we ought to just think survival now. I'm not sure we'll survive. Below is an email I shared with my fellow UMN-Morris benefactor Jim Morrison of the high-profile Morrison family. Would he listen to me? Well I give money and so anyone ought to.
Jim - Weird week last week for people associated with UMM. Seems there's no way to spin things in a positive way. All of sudden Janet is simply out as chancellor. I assume this was announced as a resignation because it wouldn't be cool to announce it as a firing. But I sure heard from a good source that it was a firing. I'm taking this as fact.
On Sunday morning [name withheld] said the following to me at Caribou Coffee: "We all know something big is coming, and it's not good."
So the story is this: Cunningham told Janet about cuts that will have to be made and Janet responded "No, I can't do that." Maybe Janet's intent was to just "protest" a little or to hesitate, but you know how it is when you get marching orders. So then maybe Cunningham started breathing fire and said "well, you're dismissed."
Janet had a good gig: chancellor of a college within the prestigious U of M. Even if she was being asked to do some uncomfortable things, I wouldn't think she'd want to walk away from that. Well, the cuts will be made one way or the other, so what difference does it make if Janet announces them? So Janet is leaving in middle of school year with no explanation of reasons for this irregularity. If it was health or family reasons, that could have been reported. I have actually lost some respect for Janet.
Looks to me like the new guy is going to move in here without any of the usual pomp or fanfare. He'll just move into an office and go to work. That's what it sounds like.
People at the Twin Cities offices were flummoxed I'm sure by the recent Star Trib article on UMM with such a large headline and blunt language. It was embarrassing for them. What happens in Morris reflects on the Twin Cities campus. Morris has lost a lot of its pretense for being such an elite place. Maybe that's all gone now. Hey, no "search" for the new chancellor? Well no. Isn't that interesting.
If you have any information that is more positive than what I am typing here, please communicate to me. But I'm afraid my sources are pretty good.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly74@yahoo.com
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