Recent Podcast & Blogs
The crew is at it again!! During one of the busiest time in sports, the Filling the Lanes crew return and holla. Avengers Assemble!! Listen to us debate the NBA playoffs and ask the age old question, “If a glass breaks in south beach, does anyone hear?” How many people fell asleep during the Clips/Grizzles game? Rick gives props to Kwame Brown’s tutelage of Andrew Bynum. Trill loves the Spurs?? We discuss all the injuries affecting the playoffs. Are the Bulls toast? Nike vs Adidas? It’s all Lebron’s fault, right? The crew has a lively discussion on social media and how it relates to our beloved sports. Elliott Ness aka Big Chee gives us an American history lesson about the players union versus Derek Fisher.
“And in the 188th round of the NFL draft, the crew select a punter from Holy Cross….” Oh wait, never mind. Is the draft still on? We kick around the winners and losers of the draft. Who am I kidding? Only sick people with no lives sit in front of a television for numerous hours and watch the draft. Isn’t that right JHen?
Can you name the worst sports commercials of all time? We sure can!! Journey with the crew as we take you down a trip to memory lane as we discuss our favorite worst commercials.
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**Editor’s Note: 8 months ago Nick NoHeart did a parting take on Pat Summitt. The text from that piece at the bottom of this column, and the audio can be found at the end of the podcast posted below – right at the 59:00 mark. If you have the time, take the two minutes and listen to it. **
There will be a million tributes written to her, and every single one of them is deserved. With infinite time, resources, and access – I still couldn’t pen a piece worthy of representing her and her impact on college sports. But until eight months ago – even as the progressive sports fan that I am – I couldn’t say she resonated with my life.
But my grandmother – my mother’s mother – is the strongest woman I know. She’s survived Wars, Depressions, Natural Disasters, Communism, Space Races, Terror Threats, the death of her siblings, the death of a child, the death of her husband… you name it. She’s 95 years old, and in the last 5 years or so, her dementia has collectively taken over our lives.
It didn’t all happen at once – as I look back at it, it’s more an ocean of moments than a single giant wave. Little bits of forgetfulness here, momentary wafts of confusion there – and then she took a spill. Trying to take the two steps into our living room too fucking fast, like she always does – without any help, like she always does. She broke her arm, cracked her pelvis, cut her head open, and scared the shit out of my mom. Her arm healed, her pelvis healed, but she’s 95 and you just don’t make it all the way back.
She lives with my family, down the hall from my childhood bedroom. I go home as often as I can to visit her, and sit with her – but it isn’t often enough. I talk with her as the nurse does her hair. There’s somebody with her every hour of every day, now – because she needs a lot of help. She wears the oxygen tube under her nose, and in her more lucid moments, refers to it as her jewelry. She’s still funny. She used to be really funny, I think living with us actually gave her a better sense of humor. But I suppose as an octogenarian moving in with a bunch of teenagers, the first thing you learn is how to laugh off the small stuff. The bad manners, the noise, the fact that nobody ever wears their winter coat… and the impossibly foul language. Man, she used to get really offended by bad words. Six or seven years ago, she probably wouldn’t have let anybody read this out loud in front of her. But then she started laughing with us, and eventually she started swearing, herself.
Secretly, I think she always wanted to talk like a 20 year old boy. My mom doesn’t. We’ve agreed to disagree. Grammina loves Jesus, dearly. And privately I know she believes my brothers and I are all going to hell, but she’ll never say it out loud for fear of hurting our feelings. She went from not approving of any of our shows, to watching them with us, to watching shows we don’t approve of (“2 and a Half Men”?) But now she watches mainly church on TV, or sitcom reruns, and every once in a while Celtic Thunder. She loves their voices.
See I don’t know Pat Summitt, but I know Mina Kennedy, formerly Mina Chisolm. Her uncles were war heroes. In the 30′s she’d go dancing with her friends in Manhattan – she doesn’t call it “The City.” She met her sweetheart, decided they were going to get married – and then kissed him and sent him off to war. They had to wait months for his next furlough so they could actually tie the knot. A lifetime later, when Alzheimer’s began to take him – she cared for him much longer than she should have. She didn’t want to give him up. She was tough, she raised four kids – buried one. In her late 80′s she had a stroke and fought through it for about half a day before telling us something was wrong. Over the phone. She was still living by herself in Edgewater, New Jersey. She’s been living with my family ever since, and every day we’re more lucky to have her with us.
But as – I’m sure – both The Summitt family, and the University of Tennessee have learned, it isn’t easy. Because, what good are 7 Coach of the Year awards, when you can’t remember what you left the house for, or who you’re talking to, or why you’re in the kitchen? She’s won a thousand games, and deserves to win a thousand more – but her diagnosis tells us one day she’ll struggle to remember any of them. Or that she was even a coach at all.
Grammina gets embarrassed when she forgets somebody’s name, or where she is, or what day, month, season, or year we’re in. She gets frustrated when she’s really lucid, and irritable when she’s not.
Sometimes we sit on the deck together, and she asks me about my job, and my girlfriend, and my life – and makes me want to run away and cry. And sometimes she calls me Kevin, and asks when Frank is coming to pick her up, or how she got “here.” And it makes me want to run away and cry. I have to remind her that Kevin was her son, and I’m her grandson. That he died a long time ago, and that her husband Frank didn’t just leave her at our house. She moved in with us a few years after he died. Sometimes she gets mad at my mother for something her sister did 40 years ago. Sometimes she gets mad at us for something that didn’t happen at all. Sometimes she’s so happy to see me she randomly starts weeping, or she’s so sad I’ve left she won’t talk to anyone.
I think the toughest part for all of us, is that she really does remember us. Sometimes the recognition is vague or out of date. Sometimes it’s still really sharp. And it’s so different in the morning and afternoon, than it is in the early evening. And it’s different if she’s had a good night sleep from when she’s up all night. The randomness of the whole thing is the real tragedy. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re pushing 60 or 100, if you’ve lived happily or horribly, if you’re with family or alone. You have no power, you always succumb, and everyone in your life watches. For somebody like Pat Summitt, who so many look up to like a mother – I’m not sure I even fully grasp the weight of that reality. I imagine that’s what crushed her team and her assistants (specifically Holly Warlick) in their post-game interviews after losing to Baylor this year. That’s what brought them to tears, that pain is real.
Mina and her Great-Grandchildren
I imagine that the inevitability of mental illness, of dementia, of bi-polarism, or Alzheimer’s – is why the cone of silence has been placed around it. Nobody wants to see a movie when they know how it ends. So I guess my only message to the Summitts – and to anybody else out there living with a similar situation is this: The curse – knowing the ending, is also the gift. Every holiday in my family is treated like it might be our last “together.” All of those small moments that I have with my grandmother – with my Grammina – I collect them. I experience them now in a way I never could have understood before. In this life, you don’t often learn how much a person means to you without losing them. In losing her piece by piece, I’ve had a chance to cherish what’s left.
The sadness is real. Knowing we’re on borrowed time – that feeling, that chill – doesn’t ever go away. And on her bad days, it sits over us and blocks out the sun. But on the good days, when we’re on the deck working on our tans, and I’m making borderline-innappropriate jokes about the flocks of men showing up to take her out dancing, and she’s giggling and smacking me on my arm telling me to cut it out, and she’s taking little bites of her sandwich and asking me about work, and I’m telling her stories and making her laugh and sneaking her a Sprite, and I realize that she’s been on this planet since 1917, and we can still do this – those are the pieces I’ll hold on to.
This was the text I wrote 8 months ago for one of our podcast’s “Money Shots.” It starts at 59:00
Pat Summitt has been coaching since 1974
She’s won 8 national championships, and she’s as synonymous with The Tennessee Volunteers as any athlete, coach, or personality on the planet.
And today she let the world know that she’s losing her mind.
I don’t mean to be pejorative – I’m just speaking from experience.
Because my grandmother, Mina Kennedy – has been losing to dementia for the better part of the last five or so years… and that’s the thing, this isn’t cancer – you don’t battle it.
It starts off harmless:
Like giving me two cards on my birthday, and responding with surprise – “Oh, you got two presents! That’s good, that’s good.”
Or asking for breakfast during dinner, and then laughing with us as we cooked pancakes because… I mean, sometimes you just want pancakes.
But one night I was up way to late and she came out in her Sunday best – I’m talking all Scotch-plaid everything – ready to go to church, it was 4 AM.
We started taking the knobs off of the oven, because she started getting up at 4 or 5 in the morning – and making herself some tea.
Pat Summitt’s got more than a thousand victories – and if the world were fair – she’d get to coach to 2 thousand, to 3 thousand.
But the world isn’t a fair place.
A few weeks ago I was sitting on the deck with Grammina, and she asked me about work – and I swear on my life the sky lit up.
Then she asked me about my girlfriend – by name – and I thought I’d never stop smiling…
And at the end of the conversation she thanked me for having her over, called me Kevin, and wished me a merry christmas…. And I wanted to cry.
I’ve come to grips with the fact that Grammina probably isn’t going to be there to stand by me at my wedding, but she’s 95.
Pat Summitt is 59.
And she’s stood up for women’s basketball when NOBODY was standing up for the sport. She’s been a pillar of COLLEGE basketball, not just the women’s game.
She’s one of the greatest minds the game has ever had….
And she deserves to be able to REMEMBER how great she’s been – and eventually she won’t – and it’s a goddamn crime… and it kills me.
Because I know what it’s like to watch one of your pillars start to crumble.
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It’s happened to all of us. Yanno…you try to make a quick, off-the-cuff quip to garner some laughs. Unfortunately, at times, the mouth moves faster than your brain. We’ve seen it time and time, again. They can lead to dismissals, divorce…but usually, just the awkward and hilarious moments.
Which leads us to the video below. Rick Barry, never one to hold his tongue, and his cohort decide to surprise the often-surly Bill Russell with some photos sent in from a fan. Innocuous enough, right? It doesn’t get far before Barry offers up his ‘watermelon grin’ line when describing Russell’s demeanor in said pic. Now, Russell isn’t one for the ol shuck & jive and his reactions say as much.
Awkward, but HILARIOUS!!!
Btw…his 1st mistake was starting the sentence with ‘some fool over there…’ Did he REALLY think Bill would be amused?
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My Filling The Lanes teammate Nick forwarded a column to me the other day about Trayvon Martin, the hot button news story of the past week-and-change. Touré – a somewhat polarizing pundit/writer among blacks – wrote what seemed a largely sympathetic (and even sharp in places) piece about the potentially fatal condition of being black. Built into what was, essentially, a survival guide for young black boys were a couple of weird phrasings (“making allowances for racism” was one that leaped off the page) and ideas (profiling profilers, a harebrained who dat say who dat, when I say who dat? routine) that undermined his sympathy and sharpness.
Touré has been a guest on our podcast, and he was gracious, affable, and generous with his time. I don’t believe I’m qualified to critique his character, his motives, or his blackness (something his detractors do with an eagerness that betrays their own warped sensibilities). What I do glean from his musings on race, and his frequent forays into public discourse is that he is as a racial provocateur/analyst what Roy Williams is as a coach: well-meaning; solid but not quite as excellent as his resume would have you believe; a bit too eager to be liked by everyone; and, as Roy might say, dadgum corny.
The main fault I found with Touré’s response to Trayvon Martin’s murder is he had a hard time taking a position. I noted a strange and cringe-inducing similarity between reading his piece and watching Roy Williams show up to root on Kansas in the 2008 title game, just days after they’d eliminated North Carolina. There are times when a contrived stab at balance and all-inclusive sympathy is awkward if not downright inappropriate; in the quest to win points with different groups, you can end up sacrificing credibility among all of them. The best perspectivism doesn’t privilege all perspectives; it encourages the accumulation and dissection of as many perspectives as possible, so one can distill something closer to truth from them all. The ultimate goal is to make sense of an issue or idea, not to make concessions.
His initial points about the very real and historically-based paranoia felt by every American black male over a certain age without a brain injury is strong, and correct. I used to compare that paranoia to the absolute fear women feel walking alone at night in dimly lit areas. I can do that and not think twice. The bulk of men I know can too. A woman might pretend she’s not too worried, for fear of being thought weak, but the facts inform her that men rape and beat women with notable frequency, and often get away with it. Worldwide, there’s so much violence and injustice against women that when a male columnist called on us, a couple years ago, to acknowledge how much men hate women, my then-girlfriend – who is judicious as shit, even-tempered, smart as can be – adamantly thrust it into my face and said “at least someone is talking about it.”
I have – not always, but often enough – felt that same justified paranoia since age 12. The myriad instances of black males framed for crimes, detained without any cause, beaten for being in the wrong neighborhood or conversing with a white female of similar age… they leave a trail of psychological trauma behind. Among other shitty things, I’ve been detained, ticketed, made to feel unwelcome, and had a big, stupid white jock demand my ID at the door of a house party – at a house a good friend lived in, a house the stupid jock didn’t live in. And I do in certain situations receive crushing reminders that there are people who hate me – fucking hate me – for reasons beyond my control, ugly reasons that follow a logic I can’t make sense of regardless of my grasp of human psychology. Such an illogical hatred wears on a person, gives him pause, beats him down a bit over the course of life. If you’ve felt this gradual wear and tear of the soul, but you’re fortunate enough to have a good heart and a good mind, you realize the futility and antithetical folly of indicting a wide swath of people for the sins of a select group.
Still, when you hear discussion of a 17-years-old kid with a pack of Skittles in his pocket stalked by another citizen, then shot in cold blood, without his assailant having been charged, that cruel and paralyzing paranoia returns to remind you how little value your individual life carries in society. Not just among crude caricatures of backwoods racists, but among people who matter in your day-to-day existence, people who are in charge of institutions and investigations and responsible for making very serious determinations in your immediate world.
The days of “making allowances” for racism are long gone, dead days. The onus is decidedly not on the victims who are being triple-victimized in such an equation: first by the actual racism and criminal behavior committed against them; then by the psychological scars left by said crimes and racism; finally by the humiliation of having to be the one to make “allowances” in the face of sickness, evil, and injustice. That’s not turning the other cheek, it’s burying the whole head in the sand. It’s wanting the basic right to be left alone and finding the only way to achieve it is to not leave your home. A life of “allowances” to racism becomes an ignoble series of concessions in a nation that claims to encourage – at least on the surface – individuality, daring, and boldness. It’s 2012, and allowances for racists cannot be made and should not be suggested. I expect – I really hope – Touré didn’t really mean to intimate as much. Since what he writes about race sometimes strikes me as intentionally ambiguous, it’s hard to be certain. In this case, he’s straddling a very tenuous line, and that sort of straddling eventually leads to a clumsy fall.
As I get older and more situated in the world – which means, often, more lost – I feel increasingly sympathetic to my ex-girlfriend’s near-macabre enthusiasm for an open discussion of hatred. Ask a group of men if they agree that worldwide evidence confirms a pathological contempt for women among men, and you’ll be met with overwhelming indignation. Ask a group of women the same and the responses might surprise you. Similarly, when I talk to my white friends about the outright contempt so many whites feel for blacks, I get hemming and hawing, and a skepticism that has more to do with personal defensiveness than reality. When I mention the same notion to blacks I know, a significant number give weary smirks that say “tell me something I don’t know.” I’m not willing to declare that whites in general, whether by nature or nurture, hate blacks. However, in a country where plenty of people are more than willing to base theories, policies, and behaviors on black criminology and cultural pathology we can, at the very least, start to discuss this bullet-riddled and beaten elephant in the room.
Though we recently elected a black president, we’re still awash in unthinkable stories of Trayvon Martins and Ramarley Grahams, still reading and then quickly forgetting about blacks being hunted and shot like wild game by suburban militias and police officials in New Orleans, still being ambushed by tales of young black college students in Seattle told by a policeman – brazenly enough, on camera – that they’ll be framed if they don’t shut up and take their harassment like compliant second class citizens.
We need to acknowledge and discuss our nation’s dogged dedication to indecency, and the warped process that allows unfounded opinion and flimsy belief systems to dictate experience and slant observation rather than have experience and observation inform conclusions. We can’t call ourselves decent when we rationalize the murder of a candy-carrying teen, and quixotically demand those who protest such injustice proceed with diligence, thoughtfulness, and only after sorting through all the possible scenarios and facts when that’s precisely what George Zimmerman failed to do before tailing and then murdering Trayvon Martin.
W.E.B. DuBois believed the unique experience of blacks in America imbued them with a sophisticated grasp of the human condition, a stronger moral compass, and a cultural and emotional depth that American whites lacked. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent bent wasn’t an attempt to civilize the savage, it wasn’t his way of encouraging unruly masses of blacks to behave and earn their seats at the table – it was a brilliant method of juxtaposing decency and inhumanity, restraint and aggression, righteousness and hypocrisy. It was a clear and shameful framing of American indecency.
Years ago I cringed in reluctant agreement as I read Derrick Bell lament that blacks had ceded the moral high ground in America. Which is to say that upon being (somewhat) incorporated into mainstream America, blacks went from being invisible victims to visible degenerates – performing a hideous exaggeration of mainstream, majority culture in warped proportion to their exclusion from it. What began to pass for “black culture” was really no more than American culture writ large. Mainstream America wasn’t self-aware enough to recognize its own grotesque reflection, instead mistaking popular, unflattering images of blacks as authentic proof of a distinctly black pathology.
Nelly’s “Tip Drill” video on BET Uncut, for instance, wasn’t so different from the overseas expense account romps I’d heard about from former white classmates who entered the corporate realm. My friend’s garish rims and his diamond–encrusted Jesus pendant didn’t seem so out of step with the lavish kitchen floor I’d encountered in a Connecticut suburban home: beautiful wood in which a craftsman had cut the shapes of each leaf indigenous to the state. Both were versions of flossing, though one was coded so as to escape common ridicule; even though the floor, of course, was far more expensive than the chain and rims, while no less tacky in its way. Both are the products of the same peculiarities of American culture and values. Still, it seems to me that the more visible blacks have become over the decades – on television, in sports, in public schools and on campuses alongside white children – the more a significant number of whites have felt justification for their contempt. See?! I told you how they are! Yes, they are like… you. They are American. Terribly, honestly American.
The cruel irony is that black invisibility affirmed black humanity among the general populace, while black visibility might just have undercut it. As if by some sick alchemy, the more visible we are to many whites, the more we begin to look the same, the more we all begin to take the form of whatever white fear, insecurity and scapegoating projects upon us. Incorporation into mainstream society brought many of the benefits of citizenry, but it also blanched blacks with a new stigma. It gave whites new images to selectively manipulate, and made – by virtue of a commodity and image driven society – blacks complicit in their own stereotyping and vilification.
Which brings us to this point in our modern, supposedly post-racial society: black boys – not men, but boys – are being gunned down by real and pretend cops alike. In too many instances charges are never brought against the perpetrators of these cold-hearted crimes, but impassioned attacks on black criminal tendencies, sick overestimation of black teenage athleticism, and (comically, depressingly) the indictment of hoodies are flooding comment sections, call-in shows, and seeping into mainstream discourse.
To paraphrase John Cheever, what do you do with a society like this? There is no magical root to pick up and use to bash the figurative Tifties in the media and society-at-large. But we absolutely can and must point out contempt when we see it, challenge twisted ethical systems that rationalize the killing of innocent youth, and shout down the demagogues and ideologues among us who view neighborhood burglaries and darker skin as grist for propaganda mills and justification for atrocities. This is a time for accountability, not allowances. There aren’t two sides to irrational, aggressive contempt and racism, no balance to strike by profiling the stupid and overzealous profilers in our midst, and no nuance to the psychological hell we tacitly approve when we encourage victims to make allowances, whether in style, gait, or response to stalkers. There is no balance to strike precisely because there aren’t two tenable sides to this fence. There’s solid ground on one side, and a cliff’s edge on the other. To make allowances and to be Socratic in this case is to plunge to a certain death.
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