Nothing But Iron: Losing a Lot, By a Little by Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. January 31, 2009 Sorry for my neglect of your sports reading needs, I was busy helping Chief Justice John Roberts practice giving the Oath of Office. We had to cut our last practice session short because I had to play tennis. I hurt my back playing tennis. It hurt to sit, so I avoided my desk for a week. My web site got hacked, which is just the third true thing I have said so far (I really did hurt my back playing tennis). Somebody replaced my index page with a picture of a burning flag and profane anti-Israel commentary. It only took a phone call to fix, but it was unsettling to think somebody could break into my password protected site and change it to something nasty. Guess I should have been a little more creative than 123456. My new password is so good that I have trouble remembering it, but I know it’s something like 654321. Remember when you first subscribed to NBI and read the Terms of Agreement and clicked the box that said "I agree" even though you were in a hurry and probably actually did not fully agree or even read the Terms of Agreement? Of course you don’t remember, but my lawyers assure me that you did click the box. In that agreement, a copy of which is available in 6-8 weeks for a $104.99 processing fee, you agreed that if there was ever something I wanted to buy, but wasn’t sure it was any good that you would buy it first and tell me how you liked it (paragraph vii, lines 14-201). Well, I found something. A guy from AT&T stopped by the other day to see if I wanted to subscribe to his company’s fiberoptic version of cable television. My gut reaction was, no, I already have a television provider that makes me nuts, so why would I want a new one. He said that AT&T’s U-verse has more HD channels (89 I think) and that its DVR can record 4 shows at once and play them back on any television in my home. As a dumfounded Dish DVR detractor the purported DVR features intrigued me. In my current state I can’t even record two shows simultaneously. More annoyingly, I can’t watch one show while recording another. Like the other companies, AT&T offers bundles that also include phone, internet, laundry service, blood pressure screening and life insurance, all for a price that sounds really low if you don’t know about the other stuff they charge you for like the fee for not printing your monthly bill in Portuguese. The AT&T guy claimed that his internet was faster than Charter’s and that because of the fiberoptic cable AT&T’s service was not prone to periodic local slow-downs when everyone in the neighborhood is surfing at the same time, which is probably every time every one in the neighborhood is home. For sure, it sounds too good to be true. That’s where you come in. I need several readers to sign up for the AT&T U-verse and tell me if U-verse is good enough to be Me-Verse. Thank you in advance for this consideration. I could report on Purdue or Minnesota or Iowa or Illinois or Purdue again, but the last game is pretty much how the season has gone. It is pretty much how the year has gone: Packers, football Badgers, and now this. Losing a lot, by a little, as Kelly calls it. With an unprecedented five-game losing streak this UW basketball season is pretty much over. I have actually stopped going to games, and if I do go, because I can’t find anyone to take my tickets I plan to just sit there with a big frown on my face and think of what was and what might have been. Afterward I will call the radio show and say things like Angry Dave did after the Purdue game: "I don’t care what Bo Ryan did in the last seven years . . ." I think you know the rest. O.K., now that we have waddled a bit in our misery, how about we take deep breaths, adjust our big boy and big girl underpants and try to realize that even a downpour does not mean the sky is falling. Let’s try these perspective enhancing facts: The Badgers are one or two plays away from being as good as Texas, Minnesota and Purdue. The Badgers beat the team that beat Duke. They hammered the team that beat MSU at East Lansing. The Badgers are a great–respectful, friendly, hard working and funny–bunch of hard working kids who share, who don’t whine, who give their best efforts on almost every play. Among conference rivals they may not be the best shooters, and this year, they may not even be the best defenders, but I am finding it difficult not to like them. Or maybe I am not trying to not like them. On the other hand, I find no difficulty whatsoever not liking the Angry Daves of the world. People like Angry Dave think loyalty is only for the good times. Do any of them remember that Wisconsin won the Big Ten last year. And you don’t have to remind me that last year was a down year in the Big 10, because I already know you are small minded. I learned things from the Purdue game. I learned that the Boilermakers are really really good, with enough talent and basketball savvy that they should almost never lose. I cannot get over how well they shoot, and I assume from their season field goal percentage, this is not simply a function of UW’s sloppy defense, which, save for an occasional Trevon Hughes pseudo-challenge, is not that sloppy. I also learned how to beat Purdue. Actually there are two ways: 1) The first is to be Duke or North Carolina or some other team with its own Golden Arches and a noteworthy national pedigree, but few teams have that option. 2) The second method is a more elusive, but the Badgers almost pulled it off. Purdue loves to attack the basket, so logic might dictate that a defense focus all its efforts on stopping penetration: guard in gaps, help out, rotate, double down hard in the paint. But that’s not what you do at all. You instead defend the perimeter relentlessly, taking away as many three-point opportunities as possible. You guard basket attacks as well as you can, understanding that they are going to make most of their pull-ups, runners, fade-away jumpers and lay-ups anyway. If not, they will draw fouls. This is O.K. On the other end, you beat them with threes, trading baskets, but your baskets are worth more. And thanks to a career shooting day for Keaton Nankivil it almost played out that way, but we were a handful kick-out-three-attempts short of what it would have taken to be ahead at the end. In short, the game was decided, not on Purdue’s proliferative inside scoring, but on two open looks that Chris Kramer and Robbie Hummel got late in the game. And because they are Kramer and Hummel, they cashed in. You kinda have to respect that, or at least I do. So now what? Now what is that the Badgers, for the first time in many years, are a bubble team. They have a bulging portfolio of so-called quality losses, but they have yet to record a quality win, at least of the variety that will make them worthy in the eyes of the selection committee. Beating Michigan State or (and?) Minnesota on the road may be the only hope for a bid to the NCAAs. Even more pressing, with a record of 12-8, is the urgency to get any win at all. In other words it is probably more accurate to say that Wisconsin aspires to be a bubble team. In any case the stage is set for ultimate come-from-behind drama. I don’t know that the script will earn thumbs up from Badges fans, but something in my head or my heart warns me not to bet against Bo Ryan-coached teams. And if the Badgers do make it, I predict it will be a blast. By the way, if you think for one minute I would waste my time at an NIT game, well, you are absolutely right I would. No discussion of loyalty would be complete without my latest assessment of the Kohl Center crowd. I want to give it an F for its pathetic effort at Tuesday night’s game, but I know that is just frustration stealing from fair mindedness. So I’ll be fair minded about it: D-. If the place had been filled with students, it might have been loud enough to make the difference, but Kohl Center crowds continue to be curious, and the old people were dead silent at the very times the team needed them most. During one time out I wondered if someone had dropped a neutron bomb in our first-balcony section, but no, my section mates were just as alive as I was, with their fat assets stuck in their chairs, staring out into space in their usual states of catatonia. Of course I am not being critical of you, because I know you stood and cheered and clapped and supported your team, even when it was emotionally inconvenient to do so. For everyone else it’s time to ask this question: Am I a fan or am I a watcher? If you’re a fan, you have a job to do. If you’re a watcher, stay home and watch it on TV. Whoa. I think I broke a sweat on that paragraph. Or maybe it was a blood vessel. The Badgers and Packers are not the only show around. I have invested far more time since last November following the progress of my two sons and their high school basketball teammates, some of whom I coached in days and years past. My work schedule has been kind, stealing me from just one JV game; I haven’t missed any varsity events. High school basketball may be the best value in all of athletics. It’s intense. It’s up close. It’s emotionally charged. It’s fast. So fast that I am certain I never possessed such speed in my youth. (My plodding brothers will claim that they did, but I never saw it.) If your kid is on the floor it fills you with hope and anxiety, sometimes sadness, sometimes anger and sometimes utter joy. Little separates fans from the squeak of Nikes, the rhythmic thump of the ball on wood, the smell of sweat towels, the bark of a coach’s urgent pleas or the pierce of the ref’s whistle, which on occasion, from my behind-the-basket vantage point as team photographer, fires pain fibers in the temporal lobe of my brain. In the span of several seconds or in the span of distance separating the home and the visitor’s section of the bleachers, that whistle can signify attentiveness and good judgment or an enemy’s egregious character flaw. And you would never mistake these fans for the imposters that overpopulate the Kohl Center. These fans are true fans. They care like they have a stake in the outcome, which some of them do. Win or lose, they love their players like they were flesh and blood, which some of them are. Patrick is a senior this year. Connor a sophomore. I watch breathlessly as the opportunities to see them play flash by like frames in a movie. I remind myself to savor and celebrate every detail. The Packers cleaned house, at least on the defensive coaches side. That made perfect sense to me. Not as much sense as focusing all efforts getting the best on-field personnel possible, but a lot of sense nonetheless. It was important to fire a bunch of coaches because that way we think something is being done, and we were not about to stand for something not being done. Never mind that the offense had as many opportunities to win close games as the defense this past season. Of course we can always fire the offensive coaches next year. I suppose we could have just kept the same coaching staff that got us to the NFC title game in 2008, but I don’t really know enough about football for my opinion to register. I heard a rumor the Packers had first considered not firing anybody and instead issuing an Orange Alert (caution: threat of losing is high), but former president George Bush already used colored alerts and it got to a point where nobody believed that they really meant anything, so the Packers fired coaches instead. I have reentered the youth coaching arena. I got a gig helping my friend coach his fourth grade basketball team. None of his players can even dunk, so we have things to work on. Like dribbling. I told my friend, who is new to coaching, that he will spend the first three years teaching the kids to dribble and the next three teaching them not to dribble. The kids are great. I am going to teach them some tricks to make the other kids cry. O.K. not really. It is a pure fun teaching them about basketball. They have so much that they could learn, and the trick after having coached my kids into the high school years, is trying not to teach too much. And this time around I think I will yell at the refs a lot less. It’s Super Bowl weekend. I missed a lot of it because of hoops, but I am enthralled with the whole process. Playoffs leading to a meaningful, undisputable championship game? What a concept. Who, or what BS computer, would have predicted a Steelers-Cardinals Super Bowl? I don’t care about either of those teams, but I will watch, or at least while I am not eating nachos, cheese curds and little barbecued weiners on toothpicks. I will watch for the possibility that one more series of twisty turny of events awaits us. I will watch for the possibility that someone will throw an impossible throw or catch an impossible catch or make unexpectable sports history right before my high-definitioned eyes. And even if the Steelers win by a lot, like most people predict, I will watch to see the world champions of football celebrate on the pinnacle of their profession, and wonder if some day I myself might hoist the Lombardi Trophy. O.K. not really that last part. Our country got a new president last week. I was not able to make it to any of the inauguration parties, which is good because I wasn’t invited to any. A lot of people said that President Obama is the first black president, but he’s not really black. He is a hybrid. I am partial to hybrids because I am one myself. It is my personal view that hybridization is the ultimate answer to racism. If more people are of Irish-German-African-Korean-Italian-Israeli descent, it will be harder for them to hate people, such as their own cousins, for stupid reasons, and we will have to spend a lot more time finding sensible reasons to hate people, like, for example, if they cheer for the Dallas Cowboys (that’s just a joke, Scott and Lewis!) or Michigan State fans (that’s not a joke rat-faced MSU fans!). More importantly than Obama’s skin color or his political views is that he plays basketball. Someone told me he is installing a court in the White House. If you ask me, that’s a good start. Sometimes you lose a lot by a lot, as is the case with Dallas Academy, a Texas girls high school team that lost 100-0 to a team called Convenant, a Christian school which spreads the word of Christianity with scoring and high-pressure defense against learning-disabled opponents. Most likely you heard about how Covenant’s administrators offered a retroactive forfeit as a form of apology or how Covenant’s coach, who felt he did nothing wrong, got fired. Brother Bruce, knowing that I don’t think like everyone else, sought my opinion. I would have welcomed the opportunity to coach in a 100-0 game–but only on the loser’s bench. Getting shut-out in a basketball game may not seem an opportunity, but it is. In the context of big losses–defined as well-battled heartbreak losses to fellow contenders or lopsided losses to anyone–I have told my players that it is not my job to shield them from adversity. It is my job to help them manage it, because knowing how to manage adversity will make them stronger on the court, but more importantly off the court, where more than points or trophies or bragging rights are at stake. A basketball game, as almost all sporting events are, is adversity without significant consequence. That, my friends, is an opportunity. Had I coached the losers, I would have immediately implemented APT and WTP modes. APT stands for any positive thing. In that mode we celebrate any accomplishment no matter how small. In this game it might have been a completed in-bound pass, a tipped ball, a shot that hits something metal, one girl helping another up from the floor. I suppose in this game the APT might have been a shoe lace that stayed tied or good hair control, but you get my point. Positive things plentiful if you know how to look. WTP stand for win this play. I don’t want my players distracted by the last play or the next play or the missed call or the 11-point deficit or the "fact" that they should be winning more impressively. I want focus on this pass, this shot, this defensive instant. Come to think of it, I believe WTP mode should be in effect in all games, at all times, but it is a particularly useful mindset when playing from behind. Other thoughts about 100 (as it will be called when it is released as a gory feature-length epic prequel in October of 2010): 1) Please don’t waste my time and that of my players and parents with an opponent that I can hold scoreless and beat by 100. My eighth grade teams could not possibly have improved against second graders. I guess that’s why we never once scrimmaged the second graders. The fact that beatings of eye-brow-raising magnitude are routine for Academy, is a testament to the lack of creative thinking by its schools officials. 2) As a coach I was not in the habit of running up scores. Though I had no problem being the recipient of a run-up–my team was once held scoreless for an entire quarter–such self-aggrandizing exercises are not necessary or logical. Why run the risk that my arrogance might motivate the opponents get better and beat us next time? And yes, perhaps pathetically, I do want people to think I am a nice guy or a class act because that makes me feel good. 3) Is there really a difference between 100-0 and 63-16 and 72-41? Would a score of 200-100 been better tolerated? Could it be that the difference is just an arbitrary perception of well meaning grown ups? 4) In games with out-of-reach scores, we would often have designated shooters (DS)–the reserves who almost never made baskets. Nobody else was authorized to shoot and this rule was never violated. My starters begged to be in the game to help the DS’s score and they cheered wildly when it happened. In the process, the starters honed their assist skills. 5) I remind players that a lopsided loss can and should motivate them. If you don’t like it, I would say, then get your butt in the gym and make yourself better. Many of them did. 6) A coaching friend of mine (Kurt Rongstad, I think, but apologies if I misdirect the credit) told me of a novel solution to a youth basketball mismatch of years past. The game was stopped and two new teams were formed, mixing players from the original two. The new game was competitive, the kids had a blast with their new friends and people of all ages, sizes and skill level learned stuff. 7) As a child I had a mild (or who knows if it had not been recognized early) from of dyslexia. Letters and numbers looked backwards to me, and I had special assignments to complete in order to correct my skewed perception of the world. Empowered by this history my brother wondered if the dyslexic kids on the losing team actually thought the score was 100-0 in their own favor. That is insensitive, unless of course you have a sense of humor, which I do. 8) I offer one final embellishment that would take tremendous strength of mind to live by. I would consider teaching it, even though it might be one of those careful-what-you-wish-for wishes. It could even be modified and used as the pre-game prayer for teams that have that: I ask, as my respectful opponent, that you do not deny me the chance to prove myself, that you do not withhold my opportunity to grow stronger and that you do not dishonor me with an effort that is anything less than your best. I did not block all of Patrick’s shots when he was five, but I blocked a lot of them. After awhile I couldn’t block any of them. Office Max sent me a paper bag. The bag said I could get 15% off anything I could fit in the bag. Instead I got 100% off everything I didn’t buy at Office Max, a savings of over $3,000,000.  I also got a free bag, which I filled with other waste paper that I never wanted in the first place. Yeah, sometimes I suddenly shift into second gear at 70 mph. _____________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column dedicated to the pursuit of sportswriting excellence, defined as the art of not knowing a damn thing, but articulating it well. For more basketball pictures visit the author's Picasa sites: varsity , junior varsity . ©2009 DrTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.