By Kevin Dowd

Note: This is the first of a five-part Pac-12 preview I’ll be pushing out this week. Check back tomorrow (Tuesday) for a look at the conference’s Heisman hopefuls.

The Pac-12’s teams will play a total of 36 nonconference games during the regular season, the vast majority of them during the first four weeks of the year. Some of them will be tight, some blowouts; some will have potential national-title implications, and some will be Oregon State vs. Idaho State. This is a ranking of the eleven that will be the most enjoyable to watch.

11. Sept. 1: Oregon State at Minnesota, 6 p.m.

The action on the field is secondary here: This is the contest mascot aficionados and tooth obsessives have been waiting for their entire lives. Benny the Beaver vs. Goldy Gopher. Rivers vs. dry land. Dams vs. tunnels. Only one rodent can survive.

Continue reading “The Top 11 Nonconference Games of the Pac-12 Season”

There were no laughably flamboyant suits or diamond-studded loafers at last week’s NBA Draft, nor any random player from Brazil popping out of the stands or a Czech lottery pick consummating his selection with a passionate make-out session. So instead the comedy from one of the most consistently comedic nights on the sporting calendar came from elsewhere.

Thon Maker is a 7-footer who represents the truly global nature of the game in 2016. Born in Sudan before immigrating to Australia, Maker eventually made pit stops at high schools in Louisiana, Virginia and Ontario. He burst into the basketball consciousness a little more than two years ago, when mixtapes of Maker looking like a young Kevin Durant began to pop up on YouTube, describing him as “REVOLUTIONARY” and an “incredible sophomore.” He handled the ball like a point guard, shot it like wing, and blocked shots like the 7-foot stringbean he was and is.

Continue reading “The Funniest Part Of The 2016 NBA Draft”

Pitchers generally try to throw the baseball hard. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they do the exact opposite. Sometimes they throw the eephus pitch.

You can keep your home runs and stolen bases, your hundred mile-an-hour fastballs and your picturesque 6-4-3 double plays. The single best play in baseball is the eephus — the lob, the rainbow pitch, the moon ball, the Bugs Bunny curve, a big swooping beauty and a statement of pure chutzpah.

History credits Rip Sewell, the former Pittsburgh Pirate, as the first to throw the eephus in the big leagues, but surely it’s been a part of the game ever since they spelled it “base ball.” It’s a natural progression. Pretty much every pitcher throws a changeup, intentionally slow in order to catch the batter off guard and make ensuing fastballs appear all the faster. So why not slow a changeup down even more? Why not toss the ball up there at fifty miles an hour, arcing fifteen feet in the air before it plummets down through the zone like you’re playing slow-pitch softball?

Well, aside from the off chance the pitch doesn’t catch the batter off guard, in which case it ends up 475 feet away in the upper deck instead of snugly in the catcher’s glove, and you’re left standing on the mound looking like quite the schmuck.

It takes some cojones to throw an eephus, is what I’m saying. Continue reading “An Ode To The Eephus”

The thought hit me sometime during the backstretch of the men’s 1,500 meter final at the Pac-12 Championships last Sunday at Husky Track, as Washington’s Izaic Yorks began to inexorably pull away from the rest of a world-class field of middle-distance runners, his legs churning, the afro atop his head resting impossibly still, the murmur that had pulsed through the crowd for the opening three laps starting to approach a roar. The thought being this: Why on earth isn’t this sport more popular?

It used to be. During the first half of the twentieth century (and again for a brief resurgence during the 1970s), track and field was among the country’s most popular pastimes — right up there with boxing, horse racing and baseball, to give you an idea of how much things change. For a brief moment in time during the early 1950s, it even surged to the forefront of the global sporting consciousness, buoyed by one event in particular that captured the world’s imagination: the mile. And three men in particular were responsible for that race’s rapid rise.

Those men were England’s Roger Bannister, Australia’s John Landy and America’s Wes Santee, the three milers who during 1953 and 1954 dueled to determine who would be the first human being in the millennia of our existence to cover 5,280 feet of ground on foot in fewer than four minutes. They were front-page fixtures and national heroes. Their chase is the subject of Neal Bascomb’s excellent 2004 book “The Perfect Mile,” a rip-roaring chronicle of the three men’s disparate backgrounds, their chase of the four-minute barrier, and Bannister’s ultimate triumph. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to go find a track and run as fast as you can. It was one of the two recent reads that sent me down this rabbit hole. Continue reading “Running In Circles”

The summer when I was twelve years old, I was the second best pitcher on my Little League all-star team. The best was a kid named Blake Snell. Yesterday, I watched him make his major league debut for the Tampa Bay Rays on the mound at Yankee Stadium. It’s safe to say I never quite caught up, skill-wise.

Blake was always the best baseball player in our little suburb, ever since we were nine years old. His dad, Dave, was a former minor league pitcher in the Mariners system, a hulking guy who constantly wore the ultra-reflective Oakley sunglasses that baseball players seem to favor. He always coached our all-star teams and taught us words that ten year olds probably shouldn’t know. I lived in constant fear of muffing a grounder and incurring his verbal wrath. But he was a great coach, and Blake was his prize pupil. Dave ran a training center out of a warehouse where Blake and his twin brother Tyler spent much of their time. I remember going there one time in high school with Tyler and some other friends to play Wiffle ball at 10 o’clock at night. It was their home away from home. Baseball was what just what the Snell kids did.

Continue reading “Watching Your Friend Make His MLB Debut Is Cool”

 

Kobe Bryant played his final game last week. You might have heard. Bit of a to-do.

With the end of Bryant’s career comes the end of something else, too, something that probably had just as big an impact on the NBA as the Mamba’s twenty-year career: the era of players who entered the league straight out of high school.

The population of preps-to-pros players drafted between 1995, when Kevin Garnett revived the trend, and 2005, the final year before the NBA implemented its current age minimum, is a relatively small one, well below 100 men. But the group has had an outsized impact on the league. From Garnett to Bryant, from Tracy McGrady to LeBron James to Dwight Howard, so many of the league’s marquee names from the past two decades never went to college.

With Bryant’s departure, it’s an apt time to reflect on this transformative generation of players, which is exactly what Jonathan Abrams does in his still-relatively-new book, “Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution.” Abrams, a former newspaper reporter and Grantland longform ace, tells the full breadth of the prep-to-pros story, beginning with Moses Malone in 1974 and continuing to the present, as the final high-school draftees (guys like Martell Webster and J.R. Smith) enter the second decades of their careers. The book is a piece of NBA sociology, using the stories of individual players as a lens through which to examine the history of the league’s age limit.

Continue reading ““Boys Among Men” And The Prep-To-Pros Question”

I am decidedly late to this party.

“The Boys In The Boat,” by Daniel James Brown, and “Unbroken,” by Laura Hillenbrand, are two of the more popular nonfiction books of the past few years. “The Boys In The Boat” is still hanging around the NYT bestseller list three years after its release. If you haven’t read either of the books, you’ve probably at least heard of them. Maybe you saw the film version of “Unbroken,” written by the Coen brothers and directed by Angelina Jolie; in the future, maybe you’ll catch the “TBITB” movie, too, which is currently in production. Point being, these two tomes are as widely read and widely applauded as books about history can be. I’m not breaking any new ground by telling you to read them. They’re both well paced, tightly written and highly entertaining, the sorts of books you can read in a couple long sittings, if you’re into that sort of thing.

What jumped out to me the most, though, was their similarities. “Unbroken” tells the truly unbelievable story of Louie Zamperini, a kleptomaniacal California kid who turned into an Olympic distance runner before the age of 20. Then World War II begins, and Zamperini enlists and is sent to the Pacific theater, where his plane goes down over the open ocean. What follows is a cavalcade of gnar, including six weeks floating at sea in a six-foot raft, shark attacks, capture by the Japanese, and an ensuing marathon of torture as a POW, of both the physical and mental varieties. When the war finally ends in August 1945, Zamperini and his fellow POWs are a week away from being massacred by their captors. It’s no surprise his readjustment to civilian life afterward was a bit of an adventure.

Continue reading “Belated Book Reviews: “Unbroken” And “The Boys In The Boat””

 

For the first time in the history of the program, the University of Washington women’s basketball team is going to the Final Four. That’s a fun sentence to type.

The Huskies defeated Stanford on Sunday morning to complete a semi-miraculous run through the Lexington Regional, one that included true road wins over No. 2 seed Maryland and No. 3 seed Kentucky before toppling the Cardinal. A group that finished fifth in the Pac-12 and was unranked in the final AP poll of the regular season is now one of the last four teams alive in the country, thanks to the play of its big three and the sideline wizardry of coach Mike Neighbors. In retrospect, replacing Tia Jackson with Kevin McGuff, who brought Neighbors with him to the UW as an assistant, might be the best thing Scott Woodward ever did as AD.

In case you spent the morning hunting for Easter eggs, here are the ten best things that happened in the UW’s wire-to-wire win.

Continue reading “Cinderella Wears Plum: The Ten Best Things From Washington 85, Stanford 76”

For both the men’s and women’s basketball programs at the University of Washington, this season has been among the more entertaining in recent memory. They’ve been entertaining for different reasons, though, and Monday, March 21 marked the clearest divergence yet.

The women, seeded seventh in the Lexington Regional of the NCAA tournament, started the day off in the afternoon with a stunning 74-65 upset over No. 2 Maryland, a team widely regarded as a Final Four contender. The two keys were the UW’s play during the third quarter — the Huskies outscored the Terrapins by a 20-8 margin — and, as always, the presence of junior guard Kelsey Plum. The nation’s third-leading scorer (at 26.2 points per game) poured in 32 and dished out seven assists, helping the Huskies advance to the Sweet Sixteen for the first time since 2001, where they’ll face third-seeded Kentucky on the Wildcats’ home floor this Friday at 4 p.m. PDT.

A few hours later, the men fell 93-78 to San Diego St. during the second round of the NIT, finishing the season with a record of 19-15. It was a contest that featured all the hallmarks of this particular group of Huskies: Spectacular plays in transition, a bevy of blocked shots, and superb individual offense mixed unpleasantly with disastrous foul trouble, an ineffective defense, and the inability to collect defensive rebounds.

It’s that first set of traits — the highlight-reel plays and the jaw-dropping talent — that have made Lorenzo Romar’s team such a treat to follow. All year long, the Huskies flew around at a breakneck pace; win or lose, they always put on a show. It was truly a unique roster, including one of the greatest scorers in school history (Andrew Andrews, who moved onto third on the school’s all-time list in his final game), the UW’s single-season record-holder for blocked shots (Malik Dime), plus DeJounte Murray and Marquese Chriss, two transformative talents who will be NBA lottery picks whenever they so choose.

Continue reading “Purple Monday: The Agony And The Ecstasy Of UW Hoops”

As a connoisseur of names good, bad, and in between, this is my annual favorite thing. NameOfTheYear.com has released its yearly bracket of the 64 best names that popped up in the news during 2016, with voting underway to determine who will follow in a line of past winners including Tanqueray Beavers, Vanilla Dong, Crescent Dragonwagon and Princess Nocandy.

Here’s the full bracket in all it’s glory:

As an excuse to marvel further at these wonderful examples of human ingenuity, I picked a Sweet Sixteen and Final Four and made some bad jokes along the way. I thought about researching who all these people actually are and what they do, but it’s much more fun to use your imagination.

Continue reading “The Ever-Glorious Name Of The Year Bracket”