Hard court

Awhile since I blogged y'all up so here's a quick rambling to make it at least appear as though I'm still making a college try at this thing.

A few hits from around the internet.

• Phil Jackson's legacy is somewhat questioned in this column from ESPN's Mark Kreidler.
> Indeed Jackson's latest foray into coaching, back again with Kobe and the Lake Show, seems to be a curious choice and greater and smarter men than me haven't come up with an answer as to why he's doing it. The Lakers are destined to be a team begging for a playoff spot at the end of the season and that sort of "success" doesn't exactly play into the track record the Zen Master has laid out for himself. If it helps the Lakers get just 10 more wins this season, however, I'm down for whatever.

• A couple of things from the pages of the Brandon Sun.

First, this story about a proposed home for troubled youth to be located in downtown BranCentral. I'm whole-heartedly behind a plan from the Youth For Christ to reach out and attempt to assist kids who are seemingly on the wrong path. But at the risk of sounding elitist, not in my 'hood.

This is a city that's downtown core has practically become gangland with random beatings and extortions, an Indian Posse problem that continues to lurk and streets that most citizens in the area don't feel safe walking on. Now you're offering to bring another 30 troubled teens into the area. Certainly it can be argued that this idea is best served in another region of the city, one that is not already battling with overrunning violence and widespread fear from its constituents.

And then, this story which has always been something that has drawn my ire. Brandonites want the city to fog as the threat of West Nile becomes ... well it's no longer just a threat, people.

In Winnipeg, hippies in various regions have shut down fogging activities by protesting — invariably just looking like children as they do it — the use of malathion to rid the city of the insects. A small minority has essentially decided what is best for the rest of the city despite the fact that there has been very little documented evidence that malathion is deleterious to humans, at least in the amounts and methods it is used when spraying.

These people have now put the entire population in jeopardy of a critical disease in their quest to curb the use of a substance that has yet to even be proven dangerous.

• Jason Whitlock, is an African-American columnist from the Kansas City Star newspaper and a frequent contributor to ESPN.com's Page 2. His column is decidedly Afro-American and he usually finds ways to twist a hot topic into an issue of race even when most people wouldn't see it there. However, it's not always what you'd think.

In this piece, for instance he discusses the firing of Cincinnati men's basketball coach Bob Huggins.

Whitlock's arguments aren't entirely without merit. Truthfully, the idea that NCAA programs are using black athletes for their own gain, despite the consequences, isn't new. Still, to charge that the black community itself needs to stand up and recognize that places like Cinci are not where they should be going, is misguided.

This story is eerily similar to the firing of Jerry Hemmings from Brandon University in the spring of 2004. Hemmings was dismisssed as men's coach after 30 years of service because the university wanted to clean up its image. The image being that the men's program recruited players who were more interested in the ball and the groupies than they were in the studies they were also there for. And for all the sympathizers that Hemmings has in Brandon, the university was right. You can't ignore the fact that there was a track record of delinquency at BU during his time there, even though I fully believe Hemmings was well-intentioned when he brought them in. I agree with his stance that he tried to give players a chance, and I even wrote about it in a column around that time. Brandon University later issued a mantra of what would guide the types of players that get recruited to the school. Much like Zimpher did.

Huggins, however, is different. By all accounts, there is very little that is likable about Huggins. And I think his dismissal was a long time coming. I mean, the guy got caught on tape drunk off his ass and driving around the city. The university gave him a small reprimand and he was back coaching in 2004-05. That move is unjustifiable.

Now he's bought out, surely to find work again — likely at a smaller mid-major — if he should desire, and we're discussing the racism of the NCAA. I don't disagree with Whitlock that the issue here is racially-charged, but I disagree that "black athletes participating in Division I sports graduate at an alarmingly low rate because the people running the institutions don't view the athletes as capable of being truly educated, and the institutions are ill-equipped to educate the black underclass."

Perhaps because I've never been a black student at a Div1 school, but that is passing the buck on what is really going on. It is with a very wide brush that you paint over a student's failures in school or society simply by saying "well they're black and the school just doesn't know how to deal with them." At some point why shouldn't an individual be accountable for the fact they flunk out of school or hook up a felony record that rivals Robert Downey, Jr?

The argument that Whitlock provides could be applied to some schools, some times, in some situations. But to say that the history that Cincy had with troubled players is the institution's fault for not "getting" black players, is letting anyone that fails or does a crime while at school off the hook.

Fact of the matter is Huggins dismissal was what it was: Ridding a post-secondary institution of a man whose only interests at heart were his own and who was a cancer to higher education and athletics.