He is alone

Just now on Kyle’s Twitter feed: Insider account of NABC meeting yesterday: coaches talking 96-team bracket. “Great idea. Anyone not in favor?” One man stood up: McKillop. More from Kyle.

‘The Document’

So I’m reading Kyle’s latest and nodding.

... they should be functioning time capsules that help us remember when our memory fails us. They allow future generations piece together the meaning for themselves.

There is a feeling that binds George Mason 2006, Davidson 2008 and Butler 2010 together.

... to sell those ahead of us on the idea that this was a really powerful experience for a lot of people.

And then:

I didn’t really like Michael Kruse’s Taking The Shot: when I first read it, I felt it was too esoteric and short, padded with extraneous material and featuring more footnotes than a David Foster Wallace book. But when I was back home for a few days nursing my broken immune system after Vancouver, I went back and re-read it. I “got it” a little more, and I could better see what the author was attempting. There are stories of the other players, and of fans and students, of free buses to Detroit, about the construction of the team, and the old and wise coach’s philosophy. And there is the feeling, in black and white, when the shot didn’t go down, when Davidson couldn't do what Mason did two years earlier, what Butler has done now. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a blueprint and a way forward.

It’s a very fair point. I actually would add a few more fars: far, far, far from perfect. I would change a lot of things about it, if I could go back and try it again, but I can’t. That’s the way it goes. One night at the Brickhouse, not long after it came out, I told William I thought it was flawed but earnest. Fail with some grace and hope to learn from it for later. This is one reason I’m excited about The Davidson Project. More voices, more accessible, and a much, much wider frame: I think ultimately it will be a better version of what Kyle’s talking about here.

The Continuum

Kyle:

Davidson’s continuum was broken this year -- the Wildcats finished 16-15 and lost in the Southern Conference’s first round to Elon. The program couldn’t replicate what happened after the 2005-06 season, when a giant outgoing class of seven seniors peaked with an NCAA appearance. The next year, Curry stepped in, and took the program to higher heights indeed.

It’s an interesting thing to think about. I kind of think it’s more like every season is new, every season is different, every season is hard.

Media guide of destiny

Via Kyle.

Davidson mention in here

Kyle: The Bubble only has use for you if you’re winning, dying or lying.

Game! Of! The! Night!

Kyle:

Davidson (1-5) has struggled to find its bearings since Stephen Curry left early to become a fundamental redundancy for the Golden State Warriors. Nearly a month into the season, all they have to show in the win column is a virtual mulligan against Fredonia State, and have gone oh-fer against Division I. While it’s easy to offer some off-hand analysis and say that Curry would have performed a three-superheroes-in-one act and won a few of those games on his own, the truth is that his absence has thrown some of the existing fissures in bold relief. The other Wildcats had issues shooting and rebounding last season, and even with three seniors with Elite 8 experience (William Archambault, Bryant Barr and Stephen Rossiter), the team has shot 41.2 percent for the season and averages just 31 boards per contest -- both figures in the lower third of D-I.

Good point. But ... a fundamental redundancy?

Why I read Kyle Whelliston

His latest, from Natchitoches, La.: Fans, broadcasters, and we writers generally judge play based on expected end results, which are scores and runs and wins. On the bench, they measure performance against the plans they’ve written up -- it's an important and simple difference that’s nearly always forgotten here on the outside. If their blueprints fail, it’s a matter of accountability, and it’s a question of whether failure was a result of poor planning or bad execution. They live with the consequences on a 24/7 basis, while we have the luxury of disengaged and detached judgment.

Kyle and Damon have a chat

Over at Mid-Majority:

Damon: ... the Butler-Davidson game probably didn’t go as fans expected it to go. Davidson came out swinging...especially McKillop's kid.

Kyle: Davidson, as you noted during the game, got a lot of open shots and were able to answer every Butler basket for the first 30 minutes or so. Even though they’ve lost what’s-his-name, there’s still some real talent there. People shouldn’t forget they’ve got three very experienced seniors!

Damon: For a guy making his first start, Davidson’s Ben Allison impressed me. 13 points and 7 boards in 23 minutes is a great day for any big man. We’ll call him a "stud in the making." Strangely, their three senior starters (Archambault, Barr, Rossiter) were all kind of duds on Saturday.

Kyle: And full agreement on Mr. Allison. If he can produce like that, and if Frank Ben-Eze can recover from his surgeries and get some minutes, Davidson will have a formidable front line by the time SoCon play starts.

I’ll agree to disagree on Rossiter. He was solid. “Rebounded, defended, ran the court,” McKillop told me after the game. “Executed his stuff.”

On emotional investments

Here’s Kyle over at The Mid-Majority:

When I hung up, I sat alone on the couch with an weird feeling in my gut and chest. I didn’t ride the whole ride, so I didn’t get the full high. I didn’t deserve to celebrate at all.

Makes me think of when I met with Brandon Williams in New York in June of ’08 for the book. He said that during those 10 days in March he kept getting asked: Did you EVER think THIS would happen? Maybe most people thought he’d say, No, never, but his answer, he said, was the opposite: Yes, always.

Brandon, Class of ’96, who came to Davidson via rural Louisiana by way of Phillips Exeter, committed to play for Bob McKillop when Bob McKillop was coming off a 4-24 season. By Brandon’s senior year the team went undefeated in the league. And by March of ’08, by that weekend in Detroit, by the night before the game against Kansas, he went to visit his old coach in his room there at the Dearborn Inn, and he knew what his old coach was feeling, he could see it and he could hear it, because he knew what he was feeling, too. Because he knew where they had been.

Did Brandon EVER think THIS would happen?

Yes, he told people. This was the whole point.

Says Kyle:

If you have a true understanding of loss, you’re better equipped to recognize victory -- whether it comes or not.

New season: Kyle’s back

I like The Mid-Majority, a site about college basketball but not, because of paragraphs like this: “I loved and adored my wife. Eventually, though, I finally realized that there were four people in that marriage: two real people, and two fantasy projections. She didn’t break my heart, I broke my own.” Kyle: here, here, here.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis ...

Kyle:

In the Twittercast yesterday, I mentioned that I fastened something to the court underneath the curtain. I can tell you now that it was a small (3 inch-by-2 inch) printed-out picture of Stephen Curry that I taped to the floor while security wasn’t looking, to help the Bison pull off the big upset. It was clear that the tactic worked, as Woodside scored a very Curry-like 37 points on 13-for-23 and hit some fallaway jumpers in the second half that were very very reminiscent of a certain shooter’s form. But unfortunately, it worked so well that a guy on the other team had the game of his life too. The magic was dissipated and unfocused, and for that I apologize.

Either way, let it be said that Stephen Curry was indeed represented at the 2009 NCAA Tournament after all, and that his impact was strongly felt.

(Read this too.)

Taking it

Kyle:

This boldness is also an attitude we all share on this side, because the only other options are mediocrity and failure. I recall something that Davidson head coach Bob McKillop mentioned during the throes of the Wildcats’ February losing streak that ultimately cost the team its chance to follow up its amazing run to the Elite 8.

After the BracketBusters loss to Butler, McKillop said, “Last year we got to the Elite Eight because there was no sense of entitlement. We went after it, we grabbed it, we took it. At this point, in the last 10 days or two weeks, we’ve kind of let it come to us, rather than take it.”

Davidson took again last night -- beating South Carolina on the Gamecocks’ own floor in the NIT. And with superior game plans, coaching ingenuity, heroic performances, solid systems (and yes, ball control), they’ll take more in the future. Those teams that will excel and win over the next several days will do so because they, like the Wildcats in 2008, take what wasn’t readily offered, and wasn’t for sale anyway.

High-major wisdom

Mid-Majority man Kyle Whelliston on Vince Lombardi’s winning-is-everything pap:

Seriously? Are there people out there who believe this garbage to be true, relevant or inspirational? The part that’s missing here is that time doesn’t stop, and there’s no happily-ever-after or The End with a great victory. Nowadays, as Lombardi’s battle-man lies expended, agents will pick his pocket, and sportswriters will demand endless repeats of the performance for the sake of “validity.” Then, some guy’s liable to come long, pull down the hero’s pants, and take a picture of his schwanz for Deadspin.

Number 1 has to come back and defend the title, over and over. Unless this great and noble warrior keeps winning, stays in first place forever, maintains a pure and perfect Johnny Champion image, the story arc always points to the same place: loser. With all due respect to Vince Lombardi, losing is not a habit, it’s the default state of the universe. There is as much room for second place as there is for first, and a whole lot more room below that. To defeat enemies, expectations and the passage of time in equal measure is impossible, and nobody goes undefeated.

Vince Lombardi died of colon cancer several years after giving that speech.

I’m not a great coach, and as famous former colleagues have rightly pointed out, I never played the game. But I do know about losing. I see it every day after every contest, and I get to see the emotions it brings out: flashes of anger, somber regret, numb acceptance. No team that I’ve ever covered won at the end in March, and it always ends in a loss. The true alternate subtitle of this website is A Chronicle Of Loss Management.

Sharpening their knives

Kyle:

While some teams might take the opportunity of an easy walkover regular-season championship as a chance to take the odd night or two off, the Wildcats are using the SoCon slate to sharpen their knives for another March run. The defense keeps getting more and more devastating, and the team’s at the point now that Stephen Curry can be somewhat human (as much as a 29 point performance can be), and can still dominate with a Lovedale-Rossiter double-double one-two punch.

Super Bowl Sunday

Kyle on America and its football:

This sport represents the only true prism that captures what this country is truly all about. Only in American football can you find short bursts of action punctuated by long meetings about how to proceed, a testament to the inactivity that has allowed every other country on earth to surpass us in productivity. This game also teaches important lessons about one’s place in society: everybody has one small job, assigned by body weight and intelligence level, and the thinnest and prettiest employee gets paid the most. Everyone has a preassigned number, and if one is caught doing something that is not in that number-holder’s job description, penalties are assessed.

Game! Of! The! Night!

Kyle:

... the margin for offensive error is being wiped out by the pride of French Canada, William Archambault, who has been a real parlez-vous ass-kicque for opponents of late. The 6-6 junior is putting in 50 percent-or-better shooting nights on a regular basis now, and can reliably be counted on to hit key 3's whenever the team needs them. Now all he needs is his own YouTube video.

Here he comes

More Kyle: CurryCurryBlahBlah, but the most significant development in Davidsonland is William Archambault’s ascent into double-figure scoring (10.0 ppg). He’s been a favorite play in the TMM futures market for a while, and he’s coming around.

No freebies

Kyle:

Part of our job here at TMM is to track Stephen Curry, the most beguiling and enigmatic and talented player we’ve had at the mid-major level since we started doing this. While we stop short of reporting on his meal choices, his iPod or his usual walking paths across the Davidson campus, we do stalk his boxscores. He sure has put together an interesting set during his junior season.

Take, for example, his line from last night’s blowout win over Furman. The Wildcats won by 40 points, and Curry had 30 to keep his national-best scoring average (29.1 ppg) intact. He hit 12 shots of 18 attempted, including 6-of-10 from three, and ... did not attempt a foul shot. It’s the third time this has happened for Curry this year: there was the Patsos game, last week’s Appalachian State tilt in which he battled foul trouble and played only 16 minutes, and last night.

And it’s very hard to score that many points without the benefit of one-pointers. There have been 233 personal performances this year of at least 30 points across Division I this season, and Curry’s was only the fifth that included a 0-for-0 notation for free throws.

The gift

Read this yesterday for the first time. It’s what the Duke Basketball Report wrote after last week’s game at Cameron:

Here’s something to kick around: the more talented you are, the less likely you are to be a great basketball player. The catch, of course, is how you define great.

If greatness is defined by physical ability, then the argument is moot. But if you look at basketball as a series of adaptations to physical challenges, then the less talented player has to make more adaptations to continue competing at a higher level than does the more talented player.

You could argue this case with Bill Russell vs. Wilt Chamberlain, Reggie Miller vs. Michael Jordan, or with Larry Bird or Magic Johnson vs. any number of their contemporaries.

You could, one supposes, start to make that argument about Davidson’s Stephen Curry.

Interesting. It made me think about something I read last summer when I was up in Davidson. Pat Jordan on Tom Seaver in his anthology:

The point is I could bring it faster than Tom. I always could. In Little League. In high school. Tom never had the luxury of my blinding talent in his youth. ‘I never threw hard then,’ he says. ‘I was aware of my physical limitations at fourteen. I had to adjust.’

Pitching became for Tom, at fourteen, not a physical activity, but a mental one. He learned how it felt to be shelled unmercifully one inning and then have to walk out to the mound to begin the next. ‘It’s a terrible feeling,’ he says. ‘You want to quit. You feel it’s hopeless. You have to force yourself to start again. Some guys can’t do that. They’re always fighting things beyond their control.’

Tom Seaver learned, earlier than most, to deal solely within the framework of his limitations. To circumvent those limitations. Unlike me, I raged against my limitations, and in the process, my very real talent suffered.

Which made me think of Stephen.

Lots of people have tried to identify the reasons for his immense appeal -- reasons, obviously, that go beyond points scored.

How he looks is on that list.

If he can do that, well, maybe I can do …

But what I like about this idea here is that it at least starts to demystify. It doesn’t stop at the notion of some nature-and-nurture tonic that makes Stephen able in some extra-special way to do what he does. No.

The suggestion here is that perhaps a gift can be what’s not there.

That it’s up to us how we choose to respond.

Stephen and Queen

Timothy Burke for midmajority.com via YouTube: Watch this now.