Author: Kevin

Sophomore year of high school, we all had to do a job shadow. I kind of wanted to be a sportswriter, but that didn’t sound like a very fun day off school. So since my dad a) worked at the University of Washington and b) had a friend in the basketball office and c) is not shy about such things, he asked said friend if his fifteen-year-old son could follow Lorenzo Romar around for a day. For some strange reason, Romar said yes.

And so it came to be that I spent one late-winter afternoon in 2008—I wanna say it was four or five hours—hanging around Hec Edmundson Pavilion with no particular purpose.

Continue reading “The End Of An Era”

Is it weird to say basketball is our most romantic sport? In the artistic sense, not like it’s all lovey-dovey. I think most votes would go to baseball and its obsessive pastoral nostalgia, and fair enough. But I’ll take basketball any day. I’ll take the pick-and-roll. The give-and-go. The 10-year-old heaving up shots toward a crooked rim at the end of her dusty driveway as the moon rises and day turns to dusk turns to night. I’ll take the opening credits of Hoosiers.

I’ll take Kelsey Plum. And if you want to throw him in, I’ll take Michael Porter Jr., too.

Continue reading “Kelsey Plum, Michael Porter Jr., And Basketball Transcendence”

The human brain has evolved perfectly for wrongness. When presented with a new situation or new data, we make assumptions based on similar things we’ve encountered in the past. Once we make those assumptions, we find it difficult to change our minds. We are herd-like creatures: If the people around us believe something, we’re more likely to believe it too. If someone or something does manage to convince us a belief is wrong, in retrospect, we usually won’t remember it that way. We’ll recall being more correct originally than was actually the case.

These are some of the tools we’ve picked up over the millennia to make sense of reality, to cope with a chaotic universe in which everything from asteroids to poisonous berries is trying to kill us. For the purposes of being smart enough to advance the species another generation, they’re great tools. There’s a reason we’re overwhelming the planet. But when it comes to solving some of humanity’s more complex problems, well, it’s safe to there are sharper ones buried elsewhere in the shed. Continue reading “The Unbearable Wrongness Of Beings”

I read a lot of books in 2016 and liked the vast majority of them. As a bit of a year-end project, I decided to pick ten I thought were the best and tell you why.

So here are those ten, in alphabetical order:

“Astoria,” by Peter Stark

This is history at its finest: An incredible story from a place you’ve known your whole life that you’ve somehow never heard before. Stark’s tale chronicles the birth and death of the Astoria colony at the mouth of the Columbia River, a much-forgotten part of America’s growth during the early nineteenth century. It also taught me more about beaver trapping than I ever thought I’d know.

“Barbarian Days,” by William Finnegan

I have never surfed, and Finnegan’s memoir makes me very sad of that fact. But the Pulitzer Prize winner is about a lot more than waves. In detailing his childhood in California and Hawai’i, his travels through the world, and the way that nothing in life has ever quite equaled the feeling of falling down a wall of water, Finnegan tells a universal and beautiful story about life, aging, and the things and people we remember. Continue reading “Ten books I enjoyed reading in 2016”

The Washington Huskies will play the Alabama Crimson Tide this Saturday in the Peach Bowl. They are currently a sixteen-point underdog. Never in college football history has the point spread been so high in a game with such immediate national championship implications.

As you may have heard, the UW’s coach, Chris Petersen, has some experience with notable upsets. He was the first-year coach at Boise State when the Broncos beat Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, 43-42, in what’s widely considered the greatest game of the millennium. (It’s worth noting, though, that Boise State only entered that contest as just a seven-and-a-half point dog.)

I thought it would be worthwhile (read: a good excuse to watch more football) to re-watch Boise’s classic upset and see what the Broncos did to the Sooners that the Huskies might be able to replicate against the Tide—to see if there was any sort of blueprint to discover. Here are seventeen things I learned:

1. The underdog needs a fast start Continue reading “17 Things A UW Fan Can Learn From The 2007 Fiesta Bowl”

High school basketball has returned after eight-and-a-half hoop-less months. Rejoice! The most enjoyable of all Washington’s prep sports is back.

The following thousand-or-so words are designed to prepare you— ostensibly a person who hasn’t spent large chunks of the past week googling high school kids—for the season ahead. This will focus on the western side of the state, both because that’s where the finest basketball in the state is mostly played and because that’s my area of quasi-expertise. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

About Nathan Hale…

Continue reading “Washington Prep Basketball Preview”

The game itself is cool, but it’s all the other stuff that really makes college football fun: the mascots, the fans, the uniforms, the absurdly jacked strength coaches, and, most especially, the names.

Who could forget LaDainian Tomlinson? Craphonso Thorpe? BenJarvus Green-Ellis? Alge Crumpler and Ndamukong Suh and D’Brickashaw Ferguson? They are the characters in our weekly bacchanals of violence, the collections of syllables announcers blurt out that make us say, “Wait, what’s that guy’s name?”

So without further ado, here are the best of the bunch in the Pac-12 this year.  Continue reading “The 2016 Pac-12 All-Name Team”

The WIAA announced sweeping changes to the high-school state basketball tournament earlier this week. I have some thoughts.

Continue reading “The WIAA Asks: How Complicated Can We Make A 16-Team Tournament?”

Lester, I tell you this, I’ve been all over

Carrier air conditioning in Indianapolis

against my lawyer’s wishes.

Is that OK? Good.

I don’t think General Douglas MacArthur would like that too much.

The buildings that were in question,

everything’s in great shape,

like from a third-world country.

Tremendous beyond belief.

We’ve created a movement.

You don’t know who broke in.

You want to go to Mexico or some other country, good luck.

Continue reading “The Great Anarchist HVAC Break-In of 2016; or, found poetry from the first presidential debate”

The hype machine started churning in May or June, and it hasn’t stopped yet. The Washington football team needed to win its final three games last season just to eke out a winning record; now, the Huskies are widely regarded as one of the favorites to win the conference. Sports Illustrated tabbed the UW its preseason No. 7 team in the country, and prognosticating maestro Phil Steele chose the Dawgs as the No. 8 team in the nation in his preseason issue, predicting they’ll play Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Yes, the Rose Bowl.

It’s all rather heady stuff for anyone who’s watched the Huskies slog through the past fifteen years in metronomic mediocrity. Speckled only with a few of the worst seasons in program history for variety’s sake.

So now, with the opener against Rutgers one day away, the question: Can the UW actually win the Pac-12? I would never call myself an optimist, but in this instance at least, I’m leaning in that direction. Continue reading “Can the Huskies actually win the Pac-12?”