Dan Gelston, AP Sports Writer, Mourns Another Villanova Hoops Victory.

Thanks to some personal and professional contacts, I have become something of a Big East fan, especially of the Villanova University Wildcats. I listen to some of the games on the Internet and then read the Yahoo Sports pages and Nova blogs to find out what really happened.

Unfortunately, my basketball reality is being re-shaped by someone named Dan Gelston, who signs his byline “AP Sports Writer” and writes about Villanova basketball. In his case “AP” stands for “Almost Professional.” Dan thinks his job is not to report what actually happens at games, but in Dick Vitale fashion, to offer his personal commentary and interpretation.

Unfortunately, Dan is spoiling the games for anyone who truly loves college basketball. Most times his commentary is dead wrong; most times it is clear that he has an abiding disdain for Villanova and the Big East; most times he is like that mouthy relative who shows up at holiday dinners that you wish would go away and never come back. For Villanova fans, the sad news is that it appears we are stuck with Dan for the rest of the season.

Last night’s game versus Temple was a good example of Dan’s non-reporting at its worst. The game was a “Big Five” Philadelphia match-up — a great Philly college hoops tradition in which Nova, Temple, Penn, St Joe’s, and LaSalle, each play each other for city bragging rights.

Villanova won the game against Temple, which right off meant that Dan was in a bad mood. As a Kansas guy, Dan is still smarting about Nova’s incredible upset over then #2 Kansas in 2005. That was a game Dan got to cover and write about, too. I think he remembers it pretty well. And this year, Kansas is nowhere on the national basketball map, while Villanova is currently ranked #15. So, of course, Dan’s favorite Nova put-down is to belittle their “soft” schedule — and he does this in every story, guaranteed!

In Dan’s latest opinion piece (we can’t really call it reporting — it would give all the legit sports reporters a bad name), this is what he had to say about the first half of the Temple game:

The great games in city history are often billed as “Big 5 Classics.” This one was a big dud in the first half with the Owls and Wildcats shooting like they spent their holiday breaks anywhere but the gym.

Bid dud? That’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it? Not exactly reporting, is it? In fact, Dan forgets that what appeared to him as a “big dud” was in fact an awesome defensive battle between Temple and Villanova. Maybe in Kansas they don’t play defense, but we’re not in Kansas anymore, Dan. In Philly, in the Big East, we play defense.

After the game it was interesting to listen to assistant coach Pat Chambers laud the Nova playyers for their outstanding defense. When you play great defense, the other team doesn’t make baskets — that’s how it works, Dan! A dud? Only if you consider great games to be shooting marathons.

Dan also wise cracks that the players must have been home playing video games instead of getting ready for the game. Again, Dan is wrong. I can’t speak for Temple, but in his radio interview Coach Chambers mentioned that Villanova had its two best practices ever the two days before the Temple game. Those players weren’t home, Dan, like you eating Christmas leftovers, they were in the gym, working hard, shooting hoops, practicing defense.

Now that Villanova is 12-1 overall, Dan inserts another erroneous put-down into his story:

With the Big East season set to tip off, the Wildcats are hoping to avoid a repeat of last season’s early conference slump. Much like this season, Villanova rolled to a 10-1 record and were No. 17 in The Associated Press’ Top 25 thanks to a soft non-conference schedule before it lost six of its first nine Big East games.

Can’t you just feel the energy in Dan’s animus towards the ‘Cats? It must make his day when they lose, which is sad given his professional responsibility to be objective and unbiased in his reporting.

Let’s remember that last year was supposed to be a rebuilding year. Let’s also remember that within that 10 game non-conference winning record before Big East play was a phenomenal 21-point comeback victory against LSU — one of the greatest comebacks in basketball history. Not exactly a pushover.

It should also be noted that within those first nine Big East games, Nova beat then #13 Pitt as well as Syracuse. Some might say that last year was actually one of Nova’s best years ever, given their strong performance down the stretch and a Sweet Sixteen appearance in the NCAA tournament.

Opinions don’t change facts. That’s one of the reasons I like college basketball. The score is the score, the win-loss record is what it is, the stats are the stats. For fans like me and the millions like me who enjoy college hoops, a little partisan commentary is part of our jobs as fans. But it is not Dan’s job. His job is to report the facts.

Instead, he wants to give us his opinion. I don’t give a shit about Dan’s opinion. If he thinks he has earned the right to give it because he sits at games earning a salary, he’s wrong. He’s supposed to be a reporter. If he wants to write sports commentary he should get another job, or at least add the word “Commentator”  to his byline. At least readers will know he has a chip on his shoulders and he’s going to throw it in our direction.

It’s just too bad we have a whole season of Dan Gelston to deal with. Playing in the Big East is tough enough as it is.

Read more about the game here, here, and here.

Are Your Kids Out of Control? Try Tying Them to a Tree!

   

Over the years, one of the most frequently read posts on this blog concerns the physical punishment of children. My position is clear and unambiguous: any physical discipline of children is a form of abuse.

You can read my original post here.

Of course, adults have a way of rationalizing all of their sick behaviors, including beating and humiliating their own children. Several have taken the time to write and defend spanking, hitting, physical abuse. The excuses all fall into certain categories:

“I was spanked and haven’t murdered anyone (yet), so it’s OK to beat my kids.”

“Children need discipline and it it takes a spanking to get their attention, so be it.”

“Spanking really doesn’t do any harm. My children were spanked and they are all good, productive members of society.”

“Spanking has nothing to do with me and my need to control things. I do it for the children.”

“There’s no permanent damage, physically or psychologically, so what’s the big deal?”

Well, for those of you who are fans of corporal punishment, here’s a story from North Carolina about a mother and father who no doubt thought they were doing the right thing. Their 13 year-old was not behaving the way they wanted so they tied him to a tree to spend the night. No doubt the father and stepmother expected a change in perspective in their errant child. Instead, they ended up with a corpse and murder and felony child abuse charges.

According to an Associated Press report:

A 13-year-old left tied to a tree as punishment for 18 hours in June had been badly beaten and likely died from dehydration and heat stroke, an autopsy report showed. The report, made public Monday, also says Tyler McMillan’s body was covered with insect bites and he had bruises caused by a rod-like instrument and flesh missing from his buttocks. Marks on his wrists and ankles show he may have been restrained with plastic ties. Authorities say Tyler McMillan’s parents found him unresponsive on June 12 after he had been tied to a tree overnight as punishment. His father, Brice McMillan, and stepmother, Sandra McMillan, have been charged with murder and felony child abuse.

The report says Tyler McMillan’s body temperature was 105.6 degrees when he arrived at the hospital. Brice McMillan told a deputy the teen was tied to a tree and forced to sleep outside on June 10 because he was being disobedient. Tyler McMillan was released the next morning, but again tied up that night for bad behavior. Both parents are scheduled to appear in an Edgecombe County courtroom on Jan. 13, 2009.

You can read the AP story here.

I know that most of the parents who abuse their children by spanking, hitting, and humiliating them will proclaim that their behavior has nothing in common with what happened to this teen. Let me ask: Do you think the parents in this case thought of themselves as abusers? Killers?

Of course not!

They thought they were doing the right thing and we acting in the best interests of the child. And so, most parents who hit their kids deny any long term consequences and always excuse what they do for the reasons I listed above.

But once you act violently towards your children, you have crossed the line from parent to abuser, from someone focused on helping your child become a self-sufficient, mentally and physically healthy adult, to a tyrant who thinks he has a right to impose his self-will over another, helpless being. Once you  believe you have that right — and that God-given duty — you can easily convince yourself that you have the right to hit harder, more often, more painfully, more destructively.

From there, the path from a “gentle spanking” to murder and felony child abuse charges is a lot shorter than you think.

Rake’s Tips on How to Be a Total Loser on Christmas Day.

For those of you who are new to spending the Christmas holiday alone, I thought I would use my vast exerpience in this area to give you some tips on how to be a totally pathetic loser.

STEP ONE
Sleep late Christmas morning. What’s the hurry anyway? There are no gifts to open and no one to give any to. It’s better if you’ve spent a sleepless night tossing and turning, wracked with guilt over your past life. If that happens, get up, pee, wash down a couple of sedatives with some orange juice, notice the bright moonlight at 3:30 am, then crawl back into bed. Try not to wake up the dog. He’ll only worry.

STEP TWO
Once you are awake, check your email in case anyone managed to find you and send you a Christmas greeting. If no one has, consider yourself lucky. At least you don’t have to send an insincere greeting back. Plus, it would take you most of the day just trying to come up with something that sounds remotely insincere. Instead of writing Christmas greetings that no one will really read, you have something far more important to do.

STEP THREE
Caulk the tub-surround in your bathroom. It’s a fitting Christmas “gift” to yourself. For two weeks you have been taking showers in the upstairs bathroom, freezing your ass off as you run downstairs again to find a towel. The wall above the downstairs tub was rotting away — you’ve spent two years thinking about fixing it. Finally, you saw a movie in which a bath tub crashed through the floor and landed in the house basement. You live alone. That could result in a rotting body in the basement, at least until your dog ate you or the neighbors picked up the scent. So, fixing the tub was your Christmas present to yourself. Your’re a day late but what the hell — no wife here anymore to complain about what a lazy slacker you are. Five minutes later, the caulking is done. It needs 24 hours to cure, then you can shower downstairs again. Merry Christmas, Rake!

STEP FOUR
Be sure to alienate every relative who still knows your phone number or address. Change your email so they cannot send you those intrusive “are you OK?” holiday messages. Don’t answer the telephone. Don’t reply to phone messages. If they write, return the mail unopened. That way, they can’t ask you embarrassing questions about what your plans are for the holidays. You also can avoid worrying them with your suicidal thoughts, your total disdain for pathetically quaint American traditions like goodwill to men and other bullshit, and you don’t have to pretend that they really give a shit about you and your pathetic loser life. Besides, most of them lack the rhetorical skills to truly sound sympathetic. In a way, your AWOL behavior is doing THEM a favor. They don’t have to put up with any of your sullen crap anymore.

STEP FIVE
If you have any friends left, and you probably don’t, be sure to turn them off, too. Most of the detailed instructions in STEP FOUR apply here. The only difference is that you might have fucked or wanted to fuck one or two of them. Clearly, that complicates things. But instead of reverting to your antiquated romantic idealism about women and sex, think like a young person. You were just “hooking up,” or “jumping on someone’s bones.” Yeah, what’s love got to do with it? Deep inside, you know those relationships, if they had progressed, would have ended up on the trash heap with the other two great betrayals in your life. Which brings us to. . . .

STEP SIX
Blame your ex-wives for being alone on Christmas. Matter of fact, blame them for EVERYTHING! Your obesity, flattulence, neuroses, etc. Try to remember those Hallmark Christmas moments with the ex-Mrs. Claus — the raging tirades, the broken dishes, the endless tears, the drunken stupors (hers, not mine!) the sullking withdrawals. Gee, those were the days! Now, you get to spend Christmas alone, loser, fighting with no one. Sad, but that’s just another reason you are a holiday loser — you only have yourself to torture.

STEP SEVEN
Make an exquisite five course Christmas dinner and eat it by yourself. Remind yourself what those ungrategul ex-wives of yours are missing and pretend that they are even thinking of you. This is also a good time to remember your father, caught on videotape, reaming your existence while he opined at the Christmas table about what a total pathetic loser you were. He thought you would never hear what he had to say. But your brother, always eager to share your parents’ distorted feelings about you, taped it all and gave it to you as a present. What swell gents! Father and brother. One curses your existence, the other delivers your psychic carcass in a video. I guess that was HIS Christmas present. And the odd thing is: they were both right!

STEP EIGHT
Watch TV on Christmas Day. Make it a two-star loser movie about a family that reunites for the holidays. To be a total loser, you must become maudlin and sad. While you do so, keep in mind that no one else in the universe is watching a crummy TV movie on Christmas Day — they are all into their wanton togetherness, which will be a long lost memory by Monday morning. Nevertheless, you can still enjoy your melancholy. It’s all you have.

STEP NINE
Drink. Drink lots of fluids. Start with Bloody Marys. Finish a cheap bottle of Chianti with dinner. For desert, eat a piece of that ice cream pie no one else will share and wash it down with some tasty Belvedere vodka on ice. After you’ve washed that small pile of dishes — another advantage of being a total holiday loser — almost no dishes to clean! — have a glass or two of B & B and pretend for a moment you are a sophisticated social drinker. The fact is, there is no one to socialize with, and after the B & B, you will go back to vodka straight up. The real cheap stuff you hide in the back of the closet. Make yourself comfortable on the sofa. Pull over that rancid black throw that you haven’t washed in two years. Fall asleep there with the TV on, sound off, the pulsing TV light fading slowly in your holiday consciousness.

STEP TEN
Write about your cherished Christmas memories in a blog that no one will read. And if anyone does read it, you can be confident that they will only conclude what you already know — that you are a totally pathetic Christmas holiday loser!

(And don’t for a moment fantasize that New Years will be any better!)

– Rake    

 

P.S.  This post was originally written about four years ago. Like an old fruitcake, it doesn’t get better with age, but I take it out and make myself ‘own’ it again because it reminds me how lucky I am to have survived that bleak time in my life.

Safe Socializing: Can You Trust Your Friends’ Friends?

This zinger came totally out of left field this afternoon. . .

A friend calls and wants to know how to spell ‘Tchaikovsky.’ Of course, I think I know how to spell Tchaikovsky, but just to be on the safe side I Google it. While I’m looking, I ask my friend why she just doesn’t look it up herself.

“I don’t have my computer,” she says.

“No? Where’d it go?” I wonder.

“A friend has it. Some guy.”

“What guy? Is it with those tech guys again?” She’s always having hard drive problems so I assume it is with the Paid Geeks Company.

“No, not there,” she says. “It’s a long story.”

As it happens, it really isn’t a long story — she just doesn’t want to tell me what she is doing. Seems she screwed up her copy of Photoshop, which she had “borrowed” from some guy in town. So she took the computer back to this civilian so he could download another unauthorized copy.

“Well, who is this guy?” I ask again.

He is, in fact, just “some guy,” a friend I have never heard of but who likes helping her out with her software (and, I suppose, other things as well).

Besides finding out that I don’t know how to spell Tchaikovsky without help from Google, it dawns on me that some stranger now has possession of my friend’s computer and along with it all the maudlin, sick, depressing, brilliantly humorous (slight exaggeration perhaps) email and other “for her eyes only” stuff that I frequently send her way.

Some of it is about the Center of the Universe (me), some about my ex-wives, friends, relatives, the President-elect (lots of bad stuff about him that I would like to take back now that Hillary is going to be Secretary of State. Sorry, Barack!).

Basically, all the stuff that I trusted her with is now in the hands of someone I don’t know, about whom I can only guess the worst. Is he a closet hacker? Will he be sending me emails loaded with viruses? Will he contact people to tell them the awful things I write when I think no one is reading my stuff? How about that long, detailed email concerning the threesome I had with those big-breasted red-heads in the back seat of my Porsche when I was still a bachelor? (Alright, that one is not entirely true. There was only one red-head. She had normal sized breasts. And it was a Volkswagon, but I was single.)

The point is, my stuff — your stuff — is only as safe as the people our friends call friends. Sure, we have anti-virus software and all that other garbage. We practice safe sex on MySpace. But I think many of us who are normally paranoid (if there is such a thing), think nothing of spilling our guts to long-term, trustworthy friends WHO HAVE LESS COMMON SENSE THAN MY DOG CHANCE!!!!

Do you have friends like that? Only me?

So I am praying that this stranger who is kind enough to pirate a copy of Photoshop and share it with a good friend, is also nice enough not to read the emails I wrote or the copies of friends’ emails that I sent to my friends with one of those ‘Can you believe this?’ introductions.

My friends tell me — actually, after my rant my friend did tell me — I am not that important or interesting enough for people to want to snoop. Under most circumstances that is true, but if he scans her emails and sees stuff with headlines like: ‘The latest from the lesbian room’ or ‘Is this really cheating?’ or ‘Too much sex can be bad for your back,’ my guess is that he is going to read a little further.

My advice? Throw caution to the wind! Tell your friends all your dirty secrets! Live a very public sordid life and invite the world to think you are wickedly interesting!’

One way or another, if there is any dirt about you worth finding, someone will find it because your best friends will show them where it is.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. . .

Dan Gelston: AP Sports Writer or Wannabe College Basketball Coach?

The line between reporting and commentary is getting squeezed even in the world of college basketball news.

Among the most annoying proponents of the “new sports journalism” is someone named Dan Gelston, whose byline suggests that he works for the Associated Press. However, after reading several of his reports from Philadelphia area college games, I get the impression he thinks he should be coaching the games, not writing about them.

In tonight’s report about a game between the University of Pennsylvania and Villanova University, Gelston couldn’t keep himself from making the obvious observation that Penn needs to do a better job at scoring if it wants to do well against future Ivy League opponents:

Once an Ivy League power under former coach Fran Dunphy, the Quakers (1-5) haven’t clicked under Glen Miller and lost their third straight game. They need to find some steady scoring before the conference season opens on Jan. 30.

Do you really think so, Dan? Let’s run that advice right to Coach Miller in case he thinks it’s OK to shoot 33% and lose by 22 points.

Then there’s Gelston’s on-going anti-Villanova rant about how easy their schedule has been prior to the Big East schedule.

(Villanova coach Jay) Wright had little reason to fret over this win or even put a crease in his designer suit.

The Wildcats (7-0) have won every game this season by at least 13 points and have fattened their record against teams that won’t come close to cracking the Top 25. Wright defended Villanova’s soft nonconference schedule by suggesting games against four Philadelphia schools are almost like playing a Big East school.

Connecticut and Pittsburgh will surely prove a stiffer test.

How did Dan figure this out? UConn and Pitt will be tougher than URI or Penn? What a hoops genius!

Of course, if Gelston were running the team, I supposed he would have planned a different schedule for the Wildcats based on his extensive experience coaching college hoops. Never mind that Jay Wright has created an impressive program at ‘Nova and his team is currently ranked 17th nationally. I suppose whoever does the ranking knows far less than Gelston. Based on his evaluation of Villanova’s opponents, the Cats’ RPI should be around 200 and they should not be ranked at all.

In any event, what started me off on this story is realization that know-it-all reporters, those who are supposed to report news, are behaving more like pundits and commentators even when giving us the recap on college basketball games.

My guess is that Dan hopes that someone at ESPN is reading his florid prose and will lure him away from his AP job. On the other hand,  I think another former Philly hoops reporter named Dana O’Neil beat him to it. 

Sorry, Dan.

You can read more about the Villanova-Penn game at the blogs below:

http://villanovanews.blogspot.com/

http://ibleedblueandwhite.blogspot.com/2008/12/villanova-takes-care-of-penn-69-47.html