The Old Perfessor

I'm a professor of journalism at Wingate University near Charlotte, N.C. I've also written about sports for newspapers and other publications for more than 30 years. This blog's about journalism, sports and whatever else I find interesting on any given Sunday or other day, for that matter.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Governor Sanford and passionate Palmetto politics

Caller to a talk show on S.C. Public Radio on Friday morning, on Gov. Mark Sanford's recent admission of an extramarital affair: "I guess Republicans need to re-define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman and his mistress."

OK, for nearly two years I've tried to keep this a non-partisan blog, so let me quickly add that I make no claims for the moral superiority of Democrats over Republicans (see Bill Clinton and John Edwards). It seems to me that the difference in the two parties is that the Democrats don't make those claims either, but that's for another day. I just thought the comment was funny.

I'm a South Carolina native who also started a long association with newspapers there, so I've been interested in my home state's history and politics for a long time. And the governor's recent escapade, in which he mysteriously disappeared for several days before resurfacing to admit an affair with an Argentinian woman, is just another colorful chapter in the Palmetto State's political annals.

Here's a little history, filled with violence, a little sex and other mischief:

May 22, 1856: South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks brutally beats abolitionist Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner with a cane as Sumner sits at his desk in the U.S. Senate chamber. Brooks was angry about a speech Sumner had given three days earlier in which he had criticized S.C. Senator Andrew Butler, a relative of Brooks. It takes Sumner three years to recover.

When our pols weren't pummeling Yankees, they were also beating or shooting fellow South Carolinians.

Feb. 22, 1902: U.S. Senators Benjamin Tillman and John McLaurin bruised and bloodied each other in a fist fight on the Senate floor. The South Carolina senators were former allies who were at odds about a Phillipine tariff bill. (Sounds like something to fight over, right?) Anyway, the two had exchanged allegations of corruption against each other. The Senate holds both "in contempt," and passes some rules encouraging members to get along.

Jan. 15, 1903: South Carolina Lt. Gov. James Tillman (Ben's brother) fatally shoots Narciso Gonzales, co-founder of The State newspaper, in downtown Columbia in broad daylight. Tillman was angered over the paper's criticism of his brother. A jury acquits him on a shaky self-defense claim.

Of course, all this was a long time ago, when Old South notions of settling personal disputes personally were still in vogue. But tempers do still flare.

I went to work at The Sun News in Myrtle Beach in the summer of 1977, so I just missed the last great South Carolina political brawl that I know of. At the reknowned Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting in Horry County in 1976, State Senator James P. Stevens of Loris ended up rolling around in the dirt with a political rival whose name escapes me. It was the end of an argument over Stevens' record in a re-election campaign that Stevens lost.

And, sadly, I was gone from the area before one of the state's most notorious modern political scandals broke late in 1979, 6th Distict Congressman John Jenrette's involvement in "Abscam." It was a sting operation in which a variety of public officials were videotaped in Washington taking bribes to help out a -- as it turned out -- non-existent Arab sheik.

"I've got larceny in my heart," Jenrette, from North Myrtle Beach, was captured saying on one of the videotapes with the FBI undercover operatives. He had something else in his heart at other times, according to now ex-wife Rita, who recounted in her memoir a night in which they had sex behind a pillar on the Capitol steps.

The sexual behavior of a South Carolina politician made news again early in 2005 when Essie May Washington-Williams, a 78-year-old retired teacher in Los Angeles, revealed something that had been rumored in the state for years --that she was the daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. (The senator died in 2003 at age 100.) Her mother, who was black, was a maid for the Thurmond family in the 1920s, when she became pregnant at age 15 by the future senator.

And now Sanford, who apparently had quite a thing for the woman he met on a business trip to Argentina a few years ago. (His e-mails to her read like a bad romance novel.) Sanford's wife, Jenny, who has been very "Steel Magnolia"-ish in this whole business -- said that he ignored her wishes that he not take the recent trip. See this New York Times story.

There's plenty of analysis of the politics and the psychology of all this elsewhere. I'll just close with a couple of notes on some of the comments I've read at the end of some of the stories I've seen on news websites. There are two strains of media criticism I've seen there that deserve refuting.

(1) "If this had happened to a Democrat, the liberal media would have ignored it." Nope. It's bad for business for media people to ignore news, whether it happens to Republicans or Democrats. This especially goes for political sex scandals. See, well, Bill Clinton and John Edwards, whose dalliances have been well-documented by the mainstream media.

(2) "The media build up Democratic presidential candidates and try to tear down Republican candidates." Most media people I know have a trait that tends to irritate partisans of any kind when there's bad stuff available about the other side -- they try to wait to make sure there's something to it before they print it or air it. (If you believe otherwise, you're wrong.)

Folks on the left have complained for years that former President George H.W. Bush was involved in an affair that the media knew about but wouldn't report. North Carolina papers came in for some criticism from conservative readers for what was seen as their foot-dragging on the Edwards story, and I understand that The State has had the Sanford e-mails for months. If there's a bias in any of that, it seems like it's toward caution.

Anyway, I think the people hurt most by all this are the ones who didn't choose the spotlight -- the Sanfords' four sons. That's why I hope that the Sanfords can play out the purely personal part of all this away from the attention of the news media. The rest is fair game for coverage.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett: an appreciation

NOTE: I was going to weigh in about the Mark Sanford saga today, but the 24/7 news cycle has been going full steam and other events have overtaken that story for the time being. Like his wife, I'm not going to forget it, and I'll return to that still-developing story soon.

I've been following the coverage of Michael Jackson's death with interest this evening, and one of the things that struck me was both how fast the story spread and who got it when. The entertainment website TMZ.com reported the death of the 50-year-old singer an hour before the Los Angeles Times filed the report that the cable news channels viewed as authoritative. (My wife, a more astute media critic than I, said correctly that either TMZ would have the scoop of the year so far, or they'd be spectacularly wrong.)

A Google News check at about 7 p.m. EST revealed that more than 2,000 stories had already appeared on news websites, a figure that has grown to 5,909 as I write this about 3-1/2 hours later.

And a social media check reveals some things that are interesting. I'd say that the majority of my Facebook friends were born after Jackson and his brothers hit it big as the Jackson 5 in the early 1970s. And a significant portion of those probably don't remember when "Thriller" was on the charts.

So I was actually suprised that many of these young people have acknowledged the man and his music in their "status updates," but nearly as many seem to remember Jackson for his later-life weirdness, particularly the child molestation cases and all that plastic surgery. That's too bad for them.

I can't remember the context, but I remember making a comment to a class a few years back -- more in jest than it should have been -- "that there was a time when Michael Jackson was cool." I wasn't giving him enough credit. There was that time in the mid-1980s when he was the coolest. The single white glove, the moonwalk, he was something.

So I hope he's ultimately remembered more for the music, all of which still holds up extremely well. The Jackson 5 stuff is energetic and inventive, far superior to a lot of the teeny-bopper stuff on the pop charts in the early Seventies. One of my favorites is "The Love You Save" which has a wonderful verse that goes:

Isaac said he kissed you
Beneath the apple tree
When Benjy held your hand
He felt electricity

When Alexander called you
He said he rang your chimes
Christopher discovered
You're way ahead of your time.


I dare the Jonas Brothers to top that.

And the "Off the Wall" and "Thriller" albums, under the guiding hand of Quincy Jones, take it to another level. Those songs crackle with adult energy and vocal prowess. As some folks are saying this evening, those albums will be one of the reasons that Jackson will rank up there with Elvis and Sinatra in influence. (I heard a CNN interview this evening with the rapper Ginuwine, who cited him as a reason he went into the music business.)

The hits eventually tapered off -- the last No. 1 was "You Are Not Alone" in 1995 -- and his eccentric, tumultuous personal life eventually replaced the music as the focus of media attention. He was planning a comeback tour for later this year.

On this fast-moving news day there was also another celebrity passing that happened too soon. Actress Farrah Fawcett, 62, died of cancer earlier this morning, and sadly that has already gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle.

I think you have to be of a certain age, and probably male, to appreciate the Farrah phenomenon of the late Seventies. I was working nights on a sports desk and there was no such thing as a VCR when "Charlie's Angels," the TV show that made her famous, was in its heyday. So I never saw it except maybe on TV Land later in life -- I don't think anybody would mistake it for Ibsen or Tennessee Williams. And I never owned "The Poster" (Farrah in a red bathing suit), but certainly visited guys who did.

After "Charlie's Angels," Fawcett earned some critical respect for serious acting roles in TV movies on social issues -- "The Burning Bed," about an abused wife who kills her husband, is the one that comes to mind. But in recent years her public profile had receded -- other than an odd appearance a few years back on the David Letterman show -- before her diagnosis with cancer.

The actresss who built a career on her blonde good looks allowed a film crew to chronicle her struggle against the disease for a documentary. Some of this appeared on NBC in May. (This attracted what I thought was some quite ungracious and unwarranted criticism.)

I suspect that more people will be familiar with Jackson than will remember Fawcett 50 years from now. But both are true pop culture icons because of what they've had the power to do when you hear or see their work -- bring back a time, or even a moment, that meant something to you.

May they both rest in peace.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Reporter's notebook, June 19

"This ain't football. We do this every day."

So said the legendary Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver, and the point was that -- unlike the big-event atmosphere of an NFL schedule, with just 16 chances to get it right -- baseball is a day-to-day grind and one loss is nothing to get excited about. And you have to ride out some ups and downs and roll with some changes. (Contest: how many cliches were in that last paragraph?)

Anyway, the same thing goes for covering a baseball team. I'm not going to as many Charlotte Knights games as I have in the past, and I can tell the difference when I do go to the ballpark. One constant at the Triple A level is change in the roster. Because it's the last stop before the major leagues, players tend to come and go more than they do at the lower levels of the minor leagues. So there are always player moves to catch up on.

The Knights added a couple of players from the Class AA Birmingham Barons to their roster the day before. I always start looking for a possible story angle early on, even before the game starts, knowing of course that that can change. I thought a good "first game in Triple A" from either of the newcomers, pitcher Brian Omogrosso and infielder Brandon Allen might be a possiblity.

I was hoping for an opportunity to write about Buffalo pitcher Lance Broadway, a former Knight recently traded by the Chicago White Sox, Charlotte's parent club, to the New York Mets, Buffalo's parent club. But I learned that he's pitching out of the bullpen for the Bisons. He didn't play in Buffalo's 10-3 victory over the Knights.

Omogrosso, who was second in the Southern League in wins (7) at the time of his call-up, didn't have a great debut. He gave up four runs in two innings of relief pitching. So that left Allen. He's a 23-year-old Texan who has been considered one of the White Sox' top prospects but had had some hitting struggles in his first minor league seasons before finally blossoming a little at Birmingham.

He had a nice first game in Charlotte -- 3-for-4 with two doubles and an RBI, about the only bright spot for the Knights at the plate. I arranged to talk with him after the game.

As I introduced myself, I tried a conversational gambit that I try to teach my students -- do whatever you can to establish a little rapport with the interviewee. I decided on the Texas connection. Allen is from Montgomery, Texas, a little town of about 500 people about 40 miles west of Houston. It's just down Texas Highway 105 from Navasota, a charming little town where Jayne and I both worked for the weekly newspaper when I was in graduate school at Texas A&M. The two high schools have often been in the same district for athletic competition.

I mentioned that connection to him and he took the bait positively. "Oh, yeah? Rattler Country," he said with a smile, mentioning Navasota's nickname. The rest of the interview went well, coincidentally or not.

I must also note that this doesn't always work. I was part of the coverage for the 1994 Major League Baseball All-Star Game at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh for my employer at the time, the North Hills News Record. My previous paper, the Pensacola (Fla.) News-Journal had contacted me to do a story for them about Travis Fryman. The Detroit Tigers' All-Star third baseman had been a Pensacola-area high school baseball star.

I approached Fryman during a media availability the day before the game, told him who I was and that I used to work for the News-Journal and even threw in a reference to Tate High School, his alma mater, for good measure. His reaction to all that was the same as if I had just told him I worked for the newspaper in Wausau, Wisconsin. A blank.

The approach may have fallen flat, but I suppose that's the difference between a young minor-leaguer and a major league veteran. Professional that he was, Fryman was cordial and gave me a good interview anyway.

Labels: , , ,

Monday, June 15, 2009

Wedding bells in The Sunshine State

For most of the last two weeks I -- like my students -- have been focused on keeping my head above water in summer school. Our schedule is a pretty intense Monday-Thursday and each of my classes is a 2-1/2 hour meeting.

But Jayne and I took an extra-long weekend last week to go to a wedding in the Orlando, Fla., area. It was my first trip back to the state since we moved from Pensacola to Pittsburgh just ahead of Hurricane Andrew late in the summer of 1992. (Jayne's last trip was more recent, as she had embarked from Miami on a cruise to Key West and Cancun with her mom late in 2007.)

I'm fond of hot weather and beaches, so I've loved Florida since I first set foot in the state to attend graduate school at the University of Florida in Gainesville in September 1974. (Yes, I decided to go to a school having never set foot on its campus. I can't imagine that happening now -- I spoke on our campus early last week with a nice young lady and her parents from Naples, Fla., visiting colleges in North Carolina and Virginia in anticipation of starting her college career in the fall of NEXT year, standard operating procedure these days.)

And we've always looked back fondly on our time on the Gulf Coast from 1989-1992, living in the Mobile/Pensacola area.

So I enjoyed our brief stay in Florida, a trip which always includes a stop at a Welcome Center for free orange juice. (Jayne broached the possibility that economic hard times might have cut back this visitors' benefit, but I'm glad to say the state has its funding priorities in order.) A Florida welcome in June also includes the blast furnace-like wave of hot air that greets you every time you get out of your car or leave a building. I love it.

We didn't have much time to do any touristy things there, as our purpose was to participate in the wedding festivities of Jenni Thomas and Albert Pavon, two fine young University of Florida graduates, in Apopka. It was the first time we had met the groom, but we've known Jenni since she was an energetic toddler. Her parents, Jim and Elaine Thomas, are long-time friends of my sister-in-law, Cara, and we've also gotten to know them well over the years. Jim is a Methodist minister, having served at several churches in Florida over the past two decades. The wedding took place at his church.

Jim and Elaine, along with their son Jake, were at our wedding in 1985 (before Jenni was born), so it seemed like a neat continuation of the circle that we were there for Jenni's wedding.

I've always felt that couples should have the wedding THEY want, one that reflects their personalities and interests. Jenni and Albert's wedding was in keeping with that, with non-traditional music choices. But it was certainly in keeping with their history as a couple --starting out as "just friends" -- and reflected the importance in their lives of their faith.

I particularly enjoyed the recessional, which was "Somewhere Out There," from the movie "An American Tail," because of a memory it brought back. Elaine, Jake and Jenni spent a few days with us when we lived in Mobile, and one of the things I remember from that visit was little Jenni watching that movie on video -- according to her mom, the first time the 2-1/2 year old had ever gotten engaged in a movie. She urged Fievel, the mouse protagonist, to "Wun, Fievel, wun for your wife" as he was pursued by malevolent cats.

As a result of my cooking efforts on the grill during that visit, I've been known ever since to Jake and Jenni as "The Hamburger Man."

Anyway, it was a beautiful ceremony and grown-up looking Jenni was a lovely bride, and we were pleasantly surprised to be asked to be in some of the wedding pictures.

On the way there and back Jayne and I made stops in Savannah, our first visit to that seaport city in more than 25 years. It's a great place for seafood and we enjoyed meals at The Pirates House (which I remembered from attending a conference there back in 1980) and The River House, right on the waterfront. I wish we had had time to stay longer -- lots of atmosphere in its beautiful Historic District, with its British-style squares.

Labels: , ,

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Chris Brewer is alive and kicking



More than four years after his Wingate University football career ended, Chris Brewer is still kicking.

Brewer, who was a Division II All-American during his four years as a punter and placekicker for the Bulldogs (2001-2004), is a kicker in his second season for the Carolina Speed of the American Indoor Football Association. It's another chapter in a pro football story that's probably more common that the journeys of the guys we see on TV on fall Sunday afternoons.

Brewer, like all players in the AIFA, makes $200 per game -- "$250 if you win" -- playing for the Speed, which is in its first year playing at Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte after playing its initial two seasons in Concord. But the money's not the point for many of the league's players, Brewer said.

Actually, Chris' fiancee, Whitney Walker, explained it well as I talked with the two of them after the Speed's 50-36 loss to the South Carolina Force here last Saturday.

"It's entertainment, or for some of the players it's a way to rehab (from injuries) or it's a next step," she said.

Brewer works in sales for a Charlotte company that manufactures and maintains payroll systems. But on weekends he's handling kickoffs and trying to boot a red, white and blue football through a narrow set of goalposts for the Speed. (As we explained in a previous post, there's no punting in indoor football.)

"I don't think I have the pure athleticism that I had in college, but I think it's going pretty well," Brewer said. "Every game, I've gotten better."




Chris' game last Saturday was a mixed bag, as he connected on one out of two field goal attempts -- the successful one was a 40-yarder that would've been good from 10 yards farther out -- and 2-of-4 extra points. By, say, NFL standards that doesn't sound that impressive, but kicking is a different game in the indoor version. NFL goalposts are 18 feet, 6 inches apart, and the AIFA crossbar is just over half that width, 10 feet.

"It's definitely all about the goalposts," Brewer said. "There's no room for error. If you do anything even a little bit wrong you're probably going to miss."

Brewer didn't miss many in college, hitting 19-of-28 field goals and 67-of-74 extra points in his final two seasons at Wingate. And he may have been an even better punter, booming a school and South Atlantic Conference record 89-yarder in a home game against Lenoir-Rhyne in 2003. It earned him attention from NFL teams, but he ultimately signed with the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League in the spring of 2005.

He played well in one pre-season game, but didn't stick with the team. "They had a veteran kicker and I think they just brought me in for insurance," Brewer said. "They cut me before the season started."

Almost immediately, he caught on with the Macon, Ga., team in af2 (the league is to Arena Football League what the Triple A minor leagues is to Major League Baseball). But after that he was out of football for a while, taking time off to finish his degree in communication studies at Wingate in December 2006 and working in the Philadelphia area.

Back in Charlotte, he found out about the Speed, at that time based in Cabarrus County, contacted the owner and was impressive in a tryout. He finished the 2008 season with them.

"I was really pleased when they moved down here for this season," he said. "It makes it a lot easier to balance football with everything else I have going on."

Labels: ,

Thursday, June 04, 2009

The short, happy Triple A career of Gordon Beckham

I haven't covered as many Charlotte Knights games this season as I usually do, so it was good to get back to the ballpark on Tuesday for the game between the Knights and the Columbus Clippers.

The Knights had recently added the Chicago White Sox' No. 1 draft choice for 2008, former University of Georgia infielder Gordon Beckham, 22, to their roster and I was looking forward to seeing him in action. I figured I'd build the story around him if he did anything at all in the game.

He went 1-for-4 against the Clippers, extending his hitting streak to six games, the same number of games he had played for the Knights since being promoted from Class AA Birmingham on May 28. Click on the link for the story in the Charlotte Observer.

We didn't talk very long, as the paper only needed a fairly brief story, but I was impressed with the young man's poise, and thought he acted like someone who expected to be in the big leagues soon.

Turns out I didn't know how right I was. Beckham, a natural shortstop who had been playing third base for Charlotte, played one more game for the Knights before being called up to Chicago late Wednesday night. He made his major league debut this afternoon, just one day short of a year since he was drafted by the White Sox. (He spent the 2008 season in Kannapolis). After all the hype, his first game was uneventful. Starting at third base, he was 0-for-3 at bat in a 7-0 White Sox loss to Oakland.

The final line for Beckham in Charlotte was seven games, 28 at bats, 13 hits (.464 batting average), 6 doubles, no home runs, 3 RBI. It was nice to meet you, Gordon. I doubt I'll see you again unless it's on TV.

Monday, June 01, 2009

"The 50-yard indoor war"

Because I only got to see one American football game live last fall before leaving for London, it was was good to see some gridiron action again this past weekend -- even if it was indoors.

I watched an American Indoor Football Association game between the Charlotte-based Carolina Speed and the South Carolina Force out of Greenville, S.C. This resulted from a recent Facebook exchange with Speed placekicker Chris Brewer, a former Wingate student of mine. I took him up on his invitation to come out and see a game, and my next blog entry will be an interview I did with him after Saturday night's game, won by the Force 50-36.

I've had some previous experience covering this sport, having written about both of Charlotte's entries in the



I also enjoyed being back at the Bojangles Coliseum, which is the latest incarnation of the original Charlotte Coliseum, a 55-year-old venue that most recently was the home of the ECHL's Charlotte Checkers. The Checkers moved uptown to Time Warner Cable Arena a couple of seasons ago and this is the first time I had been back since. It's a place with good memories, as my dad took my brother and I to see the Lefty Driesell-coached Davidson teams and the Meadowlark Lemon-era Harlem Globetrotters play basketball there back in the early 1960s.

It's hosted the ACC men's basketball tournament, along with NCAA Tournament games. I've seen Michael Jordan, Akeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson play there. Elvis and the Grateful Dead have performed there and I saw a great show by Willie Nelson there in 1980 (wonderful concert except for the drunk who sang off-key and nearly threw up on my shoes).

I'm pleased to hear that with the return of the Southern Conference tournament to Charlotte, some of the games will be played there next March.