Giving it away and other topics

A few years ago, I was listening to a sports talk radio show -- maybe it was Dan Patrick, as I have a limited tolerance for most of the others -- and legendary sports journalist Frank Deford was the guest.

He was asked what he thought about sports bloggers -- this was back before everyone with a computer had at least one blog -- and his response was interesting. "I'm not sure I get the point of blogging," he said. "Why would you want to give it away?"

Referring, of course, to the end product which results from the writer's research and creative activity. Of course that's easy for Frank Deford to say, as he could at this point in his career find a paid outlet for just about any random musing he might have.

But for many writers, the blog may be the only market available. And a couple of years down the road, it's noteworthy that even already-published writers are giving away free content in a blog or some other form to simply build an audience or create buzz.

I'm going to be doing just that this weekend, as for the first time in a long time, I'm on an assignment that won't appear in a newspaper. Exclusive to The Old Perfessor, I'm going to an American Indoor Football Association (AIFA) game tonight between the Charlotte-based Carolina Speed and the South Carolina Force of Greenville, S.C., at Bojangles Coliseum.

I'm going to be visiting with and talking to the Speed's placekicker, a former Wingate student of mine named Chris Brewer, who has had an interesting career in a variety of professional football settings since graduating in 2005.

I should have the story up at some point tomorrow. As they say, don't miss it!

A couple of other quick notes:

-- The Charlotte Eagles, the professional soccer team I cover here, have been off to one of their roughest starts in all the years I've followed them. But they looked good in a 5-1 victory over Pittsburgh last night. I've developed good professional relationships with several of their players over the years, but it's always good to talk to someone new, and I enjoyed a chat I had with a young man named Amaury Nunes, who scored two goals.

-- I wrote recently about our visit to Coors Field for a Colorado Rockies game on our Denver vacation. The Rockies fired their manager, Clint Hurdle, yesterday, less than two years after he led them to the 2007 World Series against the Boston Red Sox.

"Baseball's a tough business, isn't it?" Jayne asked me as I told her about this story.

Yes it is.

--- Coaching in any sport can be a tough business. Just ask former Lander University basketball coach Bruce Evans, whom we wrote about in the blog back on Feb. 7, when my brother and I made our annual visit to his alma mater for a game. Evans resigned his position about a month later after the season ended, after a 68-78 record in five years, which included a conference championship and a couple of NCAA Division II tournament berths.

He's a likeable guy with a good basketball background and I was glad to see that he's landed another coaching job, as an assistant in one of the newest Division I men's basketball programs at the Unversity of North Florida in Jacksonville (ironically, a former Peach Belt Conference opponent of Lander's before moving up from D-II a couple of years ago). Apropos of nothing, they have one of college sports' more unusual nicknames, the Ospreys -- look it up.

Wyoming state of mind

Why Wyoming? Because it was there.

We spent the first night of our vacation in Cheyenne, the capital of Wyoming, and also visited Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming, before returning to Denver for the rest of our holiday. And we had a couple of people who have visited Wyoming wondering why we did it. The part of Wyoming you want to see is the northwestern part of the state, in Yellowstone National Park, we were told.

But we didn't have enough time to take any long side trips and the main attraction was to add another name to the list of states we've visited. (Our plan was to add two, as the Nebraska state line was easily accessible from I-80 in southeastern Wyoming, but it didn't work out. There wouldn't have been much there, but we could have at least said we had been there.)

We didn't know a great deal about Wyoming, except that it's the home state of Dick Cheney, former Vice President and current Obama Basher No. 1. (Feel free to make your favorite joke about shooting someone in the face. We did.)

Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed this part of our trip. I've always thought that beauty manifests itself in a lot of different ways and we found the flat, wide open spaces of this part of the state to be quite appealing. Jayne took this picture on the way to Cheyenne and, not to brag, but it reminds me of the Western landscapes of Ansel Adams.




Our long-time association with newspapers also means that we share a mutual fascination with capital cities, where the news really begins in any given state. So we enjoyed our overnight in Cheyenne. Its "Old West" vibe reminded us of a town from our past, a charming little place called Navasota, Texas, near College Station. Jayne worked for the Examiner, the weekly newspaper there, while I was a graduate student at Texas A&M.

Here's a picture of part of the downtown area.


We found a really fun restaurant called Sanford's Pub and Grub, for dinner. (I had a hamburger with cream cheese on it -- interesting.) The next morning we left for Laramie.

Our visit got off to an inauspicious start as our rental car was rear-ended in downtown Laramie by a gigantic truck (also a rental) driven by a nice young man from Calgary, Alberta, who had just graduated from the University of Wyoming the previous weekend. He was very apologetic and the car ended up being driveable, but we couldn't close the trunk.

Jayne was amused by the fact that the police officer who handled our fender-bender was named J. Senior, according to his name tag. She was tempted to ask him if J. stood for Junior. LOL.

A final twist to this tale was that the reason we were at this intersection was to go to a restaurant that had been recommended to us by a friend who had eaten there a few years ago. When we finally arrived at that address, we found that the restaurant was out of business.

We found another good place for lunch, which had been recommended to us by the police officer, and then headed for the university campus. We made the obligatory stop at the campus bookstore, located in this building called the Wyoming Union. Built in 1939 largely by student labor -- now there's an idea, college administrators -- the building featured a Western-style architecture different from anything we've seen back home.



The university is the alma mater of Dick Cheney. (Again, insert your favorite joke about shooting someone in the face here.) And there's also a "degrees of separation" sports connection with this school for me. Larry Shyatt, who was basketball coach at Clemson for five years and now is an assistant at the University of Florida, was the head coach of the Cowboys during the 1997-98 season.

(By the way, the women's athletic teams here are called the Cowgirls, a nice touch as far as I'm concerned.)

From Laramie, it was back down I-25 to Denver. Again, some good photo opportunities. I took this one of one of the few "trees" we saw on the return trip.



And that's all for now.

A baseball night in Denver

The prodigal blogger has returned, and will be posting a few notes on our recent vacation. Jayne and I spent eight days out West, mostly in Colorado with a brief sojourn in Wyoming. We spent some time with our friend Joey Bunch, a reporter for The Denver Post, and enjoyed some time in a part of the country that's totally different from our Charlotte home.

I'll divide this into a couple of different entries, but given my interest in sports, I thought I'd start with our trip to Coors Field for a Colorado Rockies game.

The Rockies' home, built for Colorado's expansion entry into the National League in 1993, is one of those first-generation "nouvelle retro" ballparks (my term, maybe it'll catch on) built around the same time as Cleveland's Progressive Field (formerly Jacobs) and the Texas Rangers' Ballpark at Arlington.

It was a beautiful night in a very hospitable environment for baseball -- good sightlines, wide aisles and easily accessible restrooms. (When you're my age, things like the latter two factors become important.)


It's a very hospitable environment for spectators, but not for pitchers. The mile-high altitude combined with hitter-friendly dimensions of the field have historically led to high-scoring games ("arena baseball," one columnist once called it). And consequently Rockies pitchers frequently have earned run averages that look like the price of steak. The game we saw, against the Houston Astros on a Wednesday night, ran true to form. The Rockies trailed Houston 13-3 late, but came back to make it a game before losing, 15-11. Good story line if I had been writing the game -- Mike Hampton, who was a high-priced failure for Colorado when he signed as a free agent in the early part of this decade, was the winning pitcher for the Astros.

The only negative aspect of the evening for us was the price tag. Having been a baseball fan for a long time, I was sort of prepared. But it had been four years since I had been to a major league baseball game, longer than that for Jayne. And the difference between major league and minor league prices is staggering. (If you're near a minor league baseball team, you should not take for granted that value-priced entertainment.)


Here's a partial accounting: parking $20, but it was across the street from the ballpark; tickets, $40 each for midway up in the lower level, right field line. That was partially offset by a $10 concession stands credit for each ticket -- which goes a long way when you don't buy the $6.50 beer and the $6 hot dog. Biggest bargain was the $1.50 scorecard, which is mandatory for this blogger.

A modest crowd of 19,226 saw the game between two struggling sub-.500 teams, and the Rockies certainly weren't the biggest sports news in town while we were there. The NBA Denver Nuggets finished off a contentious playoff series with the Dallas Mavericks during our visit, and the NHL Avalanche, even though they're out of the playoffs, were in the news with a rumored coaching change -- goaltending legend Patrick Roy for current coach Tony Granato. (Still hasn't happened.)

But on this night, for us, it was baseball that really mattered.