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Cheryl says …
Well, Mom can pick some football games.
Without knowing much about high school football, and without knowing anything about any of the high school football teams in the Twin Counties, she tabbed a winner for each of the five games during the first week and - surprise, surprise - she actually picked a couple of games correctly.
But this week will provide new challenges. Not only will all eight Twin Counties teams play Friday night, but five college football teams will kick off their seasons this week, too. Thirteen football games. How will Mom fare? Read on. And use her prognostications if you dare.
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Catching up with … Hakeem Nicks
Hakeem Nicks is a North Carolina kind of guy. He was raised in North Carolina, played high school football at national power Charlotte Independence and has started at wide receiver during each of his two seasons with the Tar Heels.
So it should arrive as no surprise that Nicks, 20 years old and a junior who will start again Saturday night when North Carolina kicks off its season against McNeese State, plays with his favorite team on college football video games.
In a conversation prior to practice earlier this week, Nicks shared his opinions on the high expectations that surround the Tar Heels this season, Coach Butch Davis and, yes, video games.
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Mudcats close in on division crown
The regular season is winding down for all the players and coaches and managers in the Southern League and, with seven games remaining on the schedule, the Carolina Mudcats are in a peck of trouble. They cannot seem to win. Of course, they cannot seem to lose, either.
In fact, the Mudcats, who are 38-24, who lead the rest of the North Division by 5.5 games with those seven games to play and whose magic number to secure a berth in the postseason is all the way down to two, cannot seem to stay on the field.
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The weekend (and the week ahead) in sports
This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a definitive list of what has happened in the world of sports during the last couple of days or what will happen between now and, say, Thursday. I just want to clear that up right now, words and sentences and paragraphs before one of my (three or four) loyal readers reaches the end of the post and starts to say something along the lines of, “Well, he wrote about the Olympics and high school football and college football and NASCAR and Grady Sizemore, but not one word about the Jelena Jankovic-CoCo Vandeweghe match in the first round of the U.S. Open. Crummy list. Last time I read him.”
But there will be a fair share of information on the other side of the jump, including the new weekly schedule for this blog. And I might just write a sentence or two about Jankovic and the wonderfully named Vandeweghe.
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Cheryl says …
When my Mom posted a comment on this blog late last week, she said she figured she was being nice and, perhaps, charitable. After all, if your parents don’t bother to pay attention to your work, who will?
But I figured I would have some fun with the fact that my Mom, who posted here again Saturday, seems to want to be an active part of this Web site. So I called her up Thursday afternoon and asked her, on the spot, to pick high school football games. She knows nothing about the teams in the Twin Counties or across North Carolina. For that matter, she knows nothing about high school football. I don’t know the last high school football game she attended. I don’t think she knows the last high school football game she attended.
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Friday night with the Vikings and around the Twin Counties
Tarboro running back Brandon Richardson should have been on the football field on Friday night, part of an impressive group of backs that shouldered the load and helped carry the Vikings to a thorough 50-7 home win over the Nash Central Bulldogs during the season opener for both teams. Richardson should have pounded up the middle and juked from side to side around defenders and sprinted down both sidelines. And considering that the Vikings scored seven touchdowns during the win, including six on the ground, he should have crossed the goal line for the first time this season, too.
But Richardson was not on the field, or even on a bench on the sideline, on Friday night. Rather, he was sprawled across the fourth row of bleachers, surrounded by friends, a large cast plastered over his right ankle. Richardson, who was projected to start again for the Vikings this season, fractured that ankle last Friday during the last play of the last scrimmage at the annual Tarboro Jamboree. Richardson cried then, his ankle twisted and turned in directions that should not be geometrically possible.
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Golden Girls, on the television and at the beach
This is a short story about four women. Two of the four women have had a tremendous affect on my life. The other two women, I would hope, are at least celebrities in the margins of the United States. They are all, to one extent or another, golden girls.
And yes, all of this does manage to ring back around to the world of sports, though it is a personal essay and it does ramble and I will not be offended if you skip this one.
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Forty years after the first running boom, Phelps is pulling people to the pool
During the late 1950s, Bill Bowerman, the legendary and revolutionary track coach at the University of Oregon, traveled to New Zealand to visit with Arthur Lydiard. At the time, Bowerman was a young coach who had put behind him a military career with the Army and had returned to Oregon to teach and coach football at his alma mater. Within a couple of years, Bowerman would change the way people run so much that he remains a top figure in the sport today, almost a decade after his death. But when he crossed the Atlantic to visit with Lydiard, he was not a distance runner.
Lydiard changed all that.
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The perfect storm
If you like to watch sports, play sports, read about sports, speculate about what might happen in the myriad world of sports, play fantasy sports, talk about sports with your friends or just pull the Sports section out of the newspaper that is sitting, wrapped up in a rubber band or a plastic bag, on your front porch, these late weeks of August can be a wonderful time.
Consider that Major League Baseball is deep in its proverbial dog days of summer and that most minor league baseball is winding down its regular season and heading toward the playoffs. The NFL is in the middle of its schedule of meaningless preseason games, weeks from kickoffs that matter, and many college and high school football teams are counting down the days, too. The PGA Tour has few big tournaments remaining on its schedule, but thousands of courses are open for weekend hackers around the nation. The U.S. Open (on the tennis courts, that is) is weeks away. NASCAR is nearing its own postseason, the Chase for the championship. And then you have MLS, MMA and, in a month or two, the NBA.
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I want to believe. But can I?
I want to believe that Usain Bolt is clean.
I want to believe that Bolt, that impressive, 6-foot-5 sprinter who burst out to the international scene a little more than a year ago and has since lowered the world record in the 100-meter dash to 9.69 seconds, has nothing in his body other than bones and blood and well-developed muscles.
I want to believe that Bolt, who glided so effortlessly from the blocks to the finish line on Saturday at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, who slowed up as he approached the line and appeared to jog the last six or seven steps, who looked left and right and behind him, who thumped his chest and celebrated and still managed to set a world record, is the greatest sprinter off all time, nothing else.
I want to believe that. I do.
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Buckle in, Edgecombe County
A season ago, each of the three high school football teams in Edgecombe County qualified for a berth in the NCHSAA state playoffs. The SouthWest Edgecombe Cougars finished what was supposed to be a regular season filled with new players and a fair share of lumps with an 8-2 record, then almost beat Bertie in the first round of the 3-A playoffs. The Tarboro Vikings finished the regular season with a 7-4 record, then lost at North Brunswick by a field goal in the first round of the 2-A playoffs. And North Edgecombe, one of the more surprising stories in the Twin Counties during recent seasons, won four of their last six games to finish the regular season with a 4-6 record, then shut out Manteo in the first round of the 1-A playoffs.
For a season, high school football, good high school football, returned to all corners of Edgecombe County.
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High school football jamborees mean a big night and a new season
For a sports writer, a high school football jamboree means about as much as a cross country practice or a basketball shootaround. After weeks (or months) of drills and sprints and nights with the playbook, a couple hundred teenagers are on the field, at last, but are running around and, from time to time, hitting some other teenager in a different jersey. Rarely do you learn too much about a team that you had not already learned. If you are lucky, you walk away with a roster for every team.
But for a fan or a player or a coach, a high school jamboree means so much more. Coaches are able to watch their teams line up across from another team, any other team, for the first time since last season. Finally, they have some sense of how their players will compare to other players, even if they do not have any sort of definitive idea about how good those other players might be. And players are happy (or they will at least tell you they are happy) to hit someone in a different jersey for, yes, the first time since last season.
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A lap through history with David Maraniss
The Olympics are on television again, and Bruce Springsteen is wailing away in the background, and my wife is at home, curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn or a glass of wine or the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly. But the only thing I want to do is finish laying out the Sports section so I can read more of “Rome 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World,” the new book by David Maraniss about, well, the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, the Olympics that changed the world.
I started to read anything I could find by Maraniss about a decade ago. I was in high school and had figured out that I wanted to write for the rest of my life. Maraniss, who still writes for The Washington Post, had recently published “When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.” I rolled through the book, all 544 pages of it, in a week or so. And I was hooked. A couple of years later, I picked up “They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967,” an expertly constructed story that casts scenes from Vietnam against simultaneous scenes from Madison, Wisconsin, during the early height of the Vietnam War. And then I read “Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero,” a book about a great man and a great baseball player but, admittedly, not a book I would read if it had not been written by Maraniss.
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Olympics meet high expectations, at least on television
Funny story. Thunder roared and lightning crackled and the electricity in the Telegram newsroom disappeared for almost a minute on Sunday night. The power outage cost copy editors Trevor Seibert, Eugene Tinklepaugh and me only a couple of minutes on the way to designing the newspaper and signing out page proofs, but it has rendered me all but useless on this blog.
See, somehow, and I have no idea about the details of what happened in the wires and cords and cables that transmit more information in a minute than I could ingest in a year, the power knocked out my computer here at the Telegram like Mike Tyson might have knocked out some poor sap back in the 1980s, back when he was Kid Dynamite. Now, I cannot turn on my computer, a slim Apple desktop with impressive cinema display. Which means I cannot log on to the Internet. (And I cannot log on to the Internet at home, either, because I pinch pennies and I do not have Internet access at home. Why bother, I always figured, when I can log on when I visit a friend or hang out at the newsroom? Besides, I read a lot of books and magazines at home. The Internet is a distraction. So is cable television. And, yes, I am cheap.) Which means I cannot post at all. These have been a rough couple of days.
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Rocky Mount High star Goodwin is a national MVP. But what does that mean?
As Saturday afternoon drifted closer and closer toward Saturday night, Rocky Mount High baseball coach Pat Smith wanted to hop in his truck and drive to Five County Stadium in Zebulon to watch one of his former players star in a minor league baseball game. But Smith could not grab his keys, let alone walk out the front door. He could not turn his eyes away from his television. He could not look away from what one of his current players was doing in front of a national audience.
Smith was among the folks in Rocky Mount who were transfixed by Gryphons center fielder Brian Goodwin at the Aflac High School All-America Game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Goodwin slapped two doubles, and finished with one run scored, two RBI and a steal. His last hit, a two-run double to shallow left field with two outs in the top of the ninth inning, provided the East with their first lead of the afternoon on their way to a 4-2 win.
Less than an hour later, he smiled in the California sun and hoisted the game’s Most Valuable Player trophy high over his head.
“This,” Goodwin said in a telephone conversation, “is overwhelming.”
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Catching up with … Ozzie Smith
Almost a dozen years have passed since Ozzie Smith played his last game at shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals, and more than six years have gone by since The Wizard was inducted to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Now, Smith thinks less about ground balls and back flips, and more about promoting the sport at its grassroots levels.
Smith, 53, will serve as the honorary chairman of the Aflac High School All-American Game, which will be played at 3 p.m. Saturday at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and broadcast live on Fox Sports Net. Among the 38 players on the field in that game is Rocky Mount High center fielder Brian Goodwin, now a nationally-recognized prospect.
In a telephone interview Friday from the West Coast, Smith talked about the game, the sport he loves, division races and cartoons.
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The Mudcats keep winning … and winning … and winning
Their center fielder is an old high school star out of Asheville who landed a big contract and bigger bucks. Their left fielder is an old college star from North Carolina-Wilmington who somehow slipped far enough through the cracks to fall to the ninth round of the draft. Their old ace is in the Major Leagues. Their new ace, in terms of performance if not on paper, is a 30-year-old veteran who pitched three seasons for an independent team in Indiana. And now, with the regular season winding down, they are all in first place.
Yes, the Carolina Mudcats are good.
After a 2-0 win Thursday night over the Mobile Baybears at Five County Stadium in Zebulon, the Mudcats are cemented in first place in the Southern League North Division during the second half of the regular season. They have won six straight games overall and 13 of their last 14. They are six games ahead with 23 games to play. And if they can hold on and win the division, they would play the West Tenn Diamond Jaxx - the first-half champion that is now mired in fourth place in the division - in the first round of the playoffs.
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I am not Michael Phelps. Thank goodness
I have a lot in common with Jerry Seinfeld. No, I did not, of course, write the bulk of one of the more memorable television shows in history, and I am not a retired millionaire, and I am not an intrepid New York Mets fan, and I am not obsessed with Superman, and I am not inherently funny. But I do love the Olympics. And so does Seinfeld.
“I enjoy any sporting event where nations are involved,” Seinfeld said years ago in his famous HBO performance, ‘I’m Telling You for the Last Time.’ “The Olympics are my favorite.”
There is something special about the Olympics. The stories about the top athletes in the world who train for four years, eight years, a lifetime, to be able to compete in one event. The ideal that all wars are, or at least should be, set aside for two weeks as sports takes center stage around the globe. The fact that these events, these sports, these Olympics, occur only one time every four years, that so much life is poured into a minute or two of effort. And the truth that the global world we live in today - where every product can be purchased, every person can be reached, with the click of a button - can thank the Olympics for laying down the groundwork that has changed our lives.
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Thank goodness for high school football
The days and the months and the years on the calendar change, from one page to the next, but so much about life remains routine. Each year, you file your taxes in late March or early April. Unless you happen to be, say, a Jehovah’s Witness, you exchange gifts in December. And, no matter where you live - Texas or California or Florida or Ohio or North Carolina or somewhere else entirely - you will be able to watch the early days of a high school football season unfold in early August. Coaches scheme. Players scream. Fans dream.
The high school football season started for most teams in the Twin Counties on Friday.
The days and the months and the years on the calendar change, from one page to the next, but so much about life remains routine. Each year, you file your taxes in late March or early April. Unless you happen to be, say, a Jehovah’s Witness, you exchange gifts in December. And, no matter where you live - Texas or California or Florida or Ohio or North Carolina or somewhere else entirely - you will be able to watch the early days of a high school football season unfold in early August. Coaches scheme. Players scream. Fans dream.
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A different kind of summer job
There was a time, an era, a couple of eras, really, when the top high school athletes from coast to coast remained at home during the summer. They worked at the grocery store, maybe, or pulled on a red swimsuit and a whistle and climbed to the top of the watch chair at the municipal pool to earn a little money as a lifeguard. Though they were not top high school athletes, my parents both worked their shares of summer jobs. And, though I will never so much as pretend to be a former top high school athlete, on the national, state or county level, I worked my share of summer jobs, too. I cleaned up after puppies for a while at a pet store, and bagged groceries at a locally owned supermarket, and chased after a couple of dozen kids as a camp counselor. I loved it.
But at least a handful of top high school athletes in the Twin Counties, relatively big names in Rocky Mount and Nashville and Red Oak, are punching their time card at far more exotic locations than, say, the local Food Lion. You might be able to watch one of them soon in your family room.
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A new buzz word in Durham
A little more than five years ago, a young man with a shock of brown hair that sprayed out in all directions and a curled black leather notebook that seldom parted from the crook under his arm arrived in tiny Athens, Ohio. The man had previously worked far away from Ohio as a volunteer in the Peace Corps, but he showed up in southeastern Ohio as a volleyball coach. His name was Geoff Carlston. People still talk about him in Athens because, almost as soon as he hit the court, he started to win.
During his five seasons on the bench with the Bobcats, Carlston guided the team from the middle of the Mid-American Conference to 144 wins. During those five seasons, he coached the team to a 92-3 conference record and four conference tournament championships. One season, with next to no attention and almost no expectations from folks outside the state, he guided the Bobcats to within a handful of points of the Elite Eight. Now, he coaches at Ohio State, a perennially strong team that will only be better with Carlston calling the shots.
All that success started with one word.
Culture.
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Latest comments
Nice!
... read the full comment by Ghost of Dick Crum | Comment on Catching up with ... Hakeem Nicks Read Catching up with ... Hakeem Nicks
Hi Matt, Loved reading the write up on the SWE Varsity team, and how they are coming along the season. You know who else is doing great, SWE’s JV team. They had a realy good scrimage the other night. I look forward to seeing some articles on them
... read the full comment by Proud SWE JV parent | Comment on Cheryl says ... Read Cheryl says ...
Matt:
Your Mom’s method strikes me as as good as most (and better than many) of the more “scientific” approaches to what is, after all is said and done, a GAME being played by KIDS.
A BIG THANK YOU FOR THE GREAT QUALITY
... read the full comment by Ernie Murray | Comment on Cheryl says ... Read Cheryl says ...
Thanks, Ben. That postscript to your earlier blog (which I had seen before the PS was added)reporting Brian’s showing in the Under Armour game was exactly what I was looking for, and like you, I was having trouble finding any coverage of the event
... read the full comment by Ernie Murray | Comment on Forty years after the first running boom, Phelps is pulling people to the pool Read Forty years after the first running boom, Phelps is pulling people to the pool