AAA Co-Players of the Year - Angelo Gulley, senior, Mission and Garrett Moon, senior, Wallenberg.
First Team
Robert Pollard, senior, Lowell
Tyrone Dickerson, senior, Marshall
Javaughn Shannon, senior, Mission
Brenden Glapion, junior, Washington
Byron Jones, senior, Washington
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Utah The First Cinderella
Led by Arnie Ferrin Jr. and Wat Misaka, the 1943--44 Utes peaked at just the right time and became the unlikeliest of champions
ALEXANDER WOLFF, MICHAEL ATCHISON
As the dying days of the Depression gave way to World War II, LaVell Smuin presented his teenage son, Dick, with an unusual challenge. LaVell worked as a smelter in Utah's Bingham Canyon copper mines and in his spare time busied himself coaching the Kennecott Mining company's AAU basketball team and raising fighting chickens, which wasn't uncommon at the time. The father knew that college could spring his son from a miner's life if Dick could land an athletic scholarship. So LaVell sent him into the chicken pens with orders to catch a fully spurred bird.
Few assignments carry a greater incentive to adopt a perfect defensive stance. "The only way you can catch a fighting chicken without getting hurt is to have your knees bent, your back straight and your palms up," Dick's son, Jim, says today. "You've got to catch the bird coming up, because if you don't, it'll hook you with its spurs or peck you."
Dick Smuin did indeed earn a scholarship, to Utah, where he was a freshman forward on the 1943--44 team. He was the only recruit on the squad. The other players had responded to a notice of tryouts that coach Vadal Peterson had tacked to a bulletin board that fall. World War II had forced the schools in the Utes' Skyline Conference and most other colleges in the region to cancel the season, but Peterson decided that if he could find the players, he'd field a team.
Perhaps if he had known all the obstacles that would confront him, Peterson wouldn't have tried. The Army Specialized Training Program had commandeered the campus gym for use as a barracks, so the Utes practiced 90 minutes a day in the women's gym. For home games they moved to the Deseret Gym in downtown Salt Lake City, where a track overhead ruled out shots from the corners. The Utes, all but one of whom came from within 35 miles of campus, averaged only 181/2 years of age, and as the season wore on, military call-ups depleted their ranks. Graduate manager Keith Brown made up the schedule from week to week, hustling up games with a handful of college teams and military and industrial squads.
The Utes included two Japanese-Americans, one on release from an internment camp outside Delta, 120 miles away. The other, a 5'7" reserve, was thrust into the lineup when the Utes' center—their captain, best athlete and leading scorer—went down with a sprained ankle on the eve of the postseason. And war with Japan be damned, that Nisei, or second-generation Japanese-American, would enchant crowds during tournament play.
Today the NCAA tournament can be counted on to produce a Cinderella team. But there are Cinderellas, and then there is the Original Charwoman of March. The '43--44 Utes, variously known as the Whiz Kids, Blitz Kids, Squeeze Kids, Zoot Utes, Blitz Babies, Kids of Destiny and the Live Five with the Jive Drive, would go on to win the NCAA title in what still stands as one of the biggest upsets in tournament history. That the Utes came together at the right moment in time was the result of a chain of improbabilities, including the starkly contrasting stories of two players, both Utah-born, who lived parallel childhoods in the city of Ogden.
Around noon on Dec. 7, 1941, 17-year-old Wataru (Wat) Misaka was going through his Sunday routine, listening to the radio as he swept and mopped the floor and cleaned the mirrors of the Western Barber Shop, which his family had run for decades.
Wat's father, Fusaichi (who was known as Ben), orphaned in his native Japan, had come to the U.S. in 1902, at age 19, to escape a life of farming. He worked on the railroad, then opened a barbershop on 25th Street, on Ogden's west side. He returned briefly to Japan in 1922 to marry Wat's mother, Tatsuyo, and bring her back to Utah.
A legacy of the railroad culture that built Ogden, 25th Street comprised a notorious gantlet of gambling joints, brothels, opium dens and bars. Nine out of every 10 robberies, knifings and murders in the city took place on Two-Bit Street. As Wat Misaka reached high school age, the street featured 11 whorehouses, including one, the Colorado Rooms, literally overhead. After Ben Misaka died in 1939, Wat's mother suggested that they go back to Hiroshima to live with her brother. "I said no, feeling like I'm a big shot," recalls Wat, the oldest of three children. "I told her, 'You can take [my brothers] and go. I'm staying.'"
The Misakas stayed. Two-Bit Street may have been the devil's own thoroughfare, but angels lurked on its corners. A white barber helped Tatsuyo get her license to cut hair. Other Japanese immigrant families, who ran noodle shops and dry-goods stores, kept an eye on her kids. Despite living in the rear quarters of the barbershop, Wat grew up largely oblivious to the vice around him.
He noticed subtle ethnic slights, to be sure. Moviegoers seemed to sit at a remove from him, and when the Misakas entered a store, they were usually the last to be waited on. But a whirlwind of sports and homework kept Wat too busy to dwell on his apartness.
Then Wat heard the news bulletin from Pearl Harbor that December afternoon. How, Wat wondered aloud to his mother, could the country of her birth do something so terrible to the country of his?
Across town, Chariton Arnold (Arnie) Ferrin Jr. was visiting his girlfriend on that day. The name Chariton came from a river in Missouri that an ancestor forded on his way west with the Mormon pioneer Brigham Young. Arnie's mother, Ellen, had died when he was four, and his father traveled the Rockies as a salesman, so Arnie's paternal grandparents, Chariton and Ida, raised him in a world bounded by church and basketball. In Utah in those days, Arnie recalls, "if you saw a barn without a basketball hoop on it, you'd think the family didn't have any male children."
Ferrin knew of 25th Street—"the toughest street in Utah," he calls it today—even though he grew up on Ogden's leafy east side. But the 14 blocks that separated his home from Wat Misaka's marked off two worlds. Arnie entered Ogden's two-year senior high school just when Wat left it after a fine basketball career to attend two-year Weber College. Arnie knew of Wat only from reading the sports pages, and Wat didn't know Arnie at all.
Upon hearing of the Japanese attack, friends pounded on the door of Ferrin's girlfriend's house to tell him the news. The next day young men all over Utah would visit their recruiting offices. But, only 16, Ferrin was too young to serve, and because of a trick knee, he would eventually be turned down twice for combat service. As for Misaka, he was determined to go to college—and besides, the U.S. military wouldn't accept soldiers of Japanese descent until later in the war.
In time, the lives of Ferrin and Misaka would be permanently intertwined. When the Utah team rode the rails during the 1943--44 season, soldiers and other priority passengers sometimes bumped them from their seats, and the two teammates from Ogden found themselves sleeping side by side in an upper berth. After college, though he had earned a mechanical engineering degree, Misaka would struggle to find a job until Ferrin put in a word for his old teammate at a Salt Lake City firm. (Misaka may have returned the favor three decades later, when he served on the search committee that hired Ferrin as Utah's athletic director.) Sometimes Ferrin would get the assist, sometimes Misaka—but only after the two had left Ogden and, each taking his own path, met that first day of tryouts at the U.
To give colleges a better chance to field teams during the war, the NCAA had suspended its ban on freshman eligibility. Meanwhile Uncle Sam offered deferments to young men who chose to study engineering or medicine or who, like Ferrin, were classified 4-F, unfit for duty. Despite their youth, the Utes were unusually tall for their time. Ferrin, a rangy 6'4", moved easily in and out of the lane to squeeze off his silken one-handed shot. Sophomore center Fred Sheffield, though only 6'1", had won an NCAA high jump title the previous spring and could long-jump 23 feet. Forward Herb Wilkinson, who grew up with a high jump pit in his backyard and would place fourth in that event at the 1945 NCAA championships, stood only 5'2" as a high school sophomore but had sprouted to 6'3" by the time he enrolled at Utah. Bob Lewis, a 6'4" guard, was a fine defender and a good enough tennis player to reach the NCAA doubles semifinals and later in life defeat Pancho Gonzales. Misaka, the sixth man, played with a lunch-bucket spirit, as did Smuin, who had grown up with immigrants' kids in copper-mining country. The two quickly became close.
Utah won 15 of its first 16 games, losing by only two points to Fort Warren, the Army team starring future Harlem Globetrotter Ermer Robinson. The crowds in the Deseret Gym, which numbered in the dozens at the beginning of the season, gradually approached a couple thousand. In February the Utes lost again, to Dow Chemical, an industrial team that featured 6'7" Milo Komenich, an All-America who had led Wyoming to the previous year's NCAA title. "We didn't realize that the teams we were playing were the equivalent now of pro teams," recalls Fred Lewis, Bob's identical twin, who was a reserve guard for the Utes. "We didn't know how good we were."
They did know they were improving. Their only other regular-season loss was by 15 points to Salt Lake Air Base, which featured a diaspora of Big Ten players, including Ed Ehlers, a star at Purdue. Ehlers scored 28 and guarded the Utes' fastest player "by holding me back with a hand in the stomach that the officials couldn't see," Misaka says. Ehlers apologized to Misaka afterward, confessing that he couldn't stay with him otherwise. Three weeks later Utah avenged that loss with a 62--38 home victory to end the regular season.
The Western pedigree of the Utes freed them from the hidebound, earthbound orthodoxies of East Coast basketball. Peterson let his players fend for themselves on offense. "We didn't have plays," recalls Fred Lewis. "We just took advantage of what the opponent gave us. Then, when somebody shot, we went after the ball." At a time when most players still kept both feet on the floor and both hands on the ball, the Utes played the game of the future: slashing, wrist-flicking basketball, with a preference for the pass over the dribble. Peterson would exaggerate only slightly when he wrote for a basketball guide, "If a boy can drop them in blindfolded from the center of the floor, using nothing but his right elbow, we'll gladly accept him."
At the same time, Peterson never tried to bulk up the supple physiques he had to work with. "We were in better condition than most of us would have liked," says Ferrin, who carried only 155 pounds. On defense each Ute would simply pick up the opponent nearest him. "It made us more of a team," Ferrin says. "We weren't sophisticated. We played as hard as we could, and Vadal let us play."
Having finished the regular season with an 18--3 record, the Utes received invitations to both the National Invitation Tournament and the NCAAs. They chose the NIT because the elder event promised to cover expenses, and it would take place entirely in New York City, which only Ferrin and Sheffield had visited before.
No one in the Utes' traveling party knew much about Kentucky, their first-round opponent. College basketball in the '40s consisted of a dozen or so clusters of interest, each in its own information vacuum, so Peterson bought a "scouting report" on the Wildcats from a sidewalk hustler for $25. The Utes were going to have to play with a gimpy Sheffield, who had sprained an ankle during a scrimmage with another NIT entrant, Oklahoma A&M, soon after arriving in New York.
Sheffield jumped center and promptly took a seat. But his injury gave an opening to Misaka, who made a huge impression on the crowd. "[His] spectacular play brought roars of approval," wrote Wilbur Wood in the New York Sun. "One wonders what would be the reaction of a Tokyo crowd at a sports event right now, if one of the players were named Kelly or Doolittle." But Kentucky's Jack Parkinson got loose for 20 points in the Wildcats 46--38 victory. The cigar smoke in the Garden seared the lungs of the innocents from Mormon country, and Fred Lewis remembers a gambler sprinting onto the floor to offer $20 to Misaka, whose late basket, the man said, had beaten the point spread.
The players put the loss on the shelf, for they had a city to see. They'd already taken in the Copacabana and the Empire State Building. When they passed an ocean liner retrofitted into a troop ship, Misaka turned to Ferrin and mused, "If I yelled 'Banzai!' and started running, what do you think would happen?"
The night of the apparent end of Utah's season, Keith Brown, the graduate manager, while strolling along Broadway with assistant coach Pete Couch, kicked a small blue object half hidden in the snow. He reached down to find a pocket Bible, one of thousands given to the troops, with an introductory message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Finding a Bible, Couch declared, was a sign of their good fortune.
A day earlier, unbeknownst to anyone in the Utah party, the Arkansas team had traveled from Fayetteville to Fort Smith for a scrimmage with a military squad to prepare for the NCAA West Regional. Returning to campus that night on a rain-slicked highway, a station wagon carrying several Razorbacks players had a flat tire. A narrow shoulder forced faculty adviser Eugene Norris to leave part of the vehicle exposed to traffic, and as starters Ben Jones and Deno Nichols changed the flat, another car rammed theirs from behind. Norris was killed, and Jones and Nichols critically injured. Only four days before the start of the NCAAs, Arkansas withdrew.
With a hole in the bracket and no time to spare, someone from the NCAA phoned Peterson in his room at the Hotel Belvedere. Would Utah like a second chance to play for a national title? At 2:30 a.m. the Utes' coach woke his players and gave them a choice: spend a few more days sightseeing or hop a train for Kansas City, Mo., first thing in the morning and try to win their way back to New York for the NCAA championship game, set for the Garden the following week. (There was no Final Four in 1944—only two four-team regionals and a title game.)
Ferrin voiced the sentiment of all the players in that meeting: "Let's go to Kansas City and win the [West Regional] title," he said. "Then we can return to New York and prove that our loss [in the NIT] was a fluke."
Because train schedules were held hostage by troop movements, it took nearly three days for the Utes to reach Kansas City. But in their NCAA opener against Missouri, another team of freshmen and 4-F's, Sheffield again jumped center before yielding to Misaka, who whipped the Utes to a faster tempo and a 45--35 victory.
In the regional final the next day Utah faced more formidable Iowa State. The Utes trailed 28--26 midway through the second half as Misaka played through foul trouble with two whistles, he says today, constituting the only time he ever felt discrimination on the court. Utah nonetheless pulled away for a 40--31 victory. The first team ever to play in the NCAAs and the NIT in the same season—a group ushered into the draw "through an undertaker's parlor," as Joe Cummiskey of the New York daily PM put it—then boarded the train back East for the NCAA final.
Awaiting the Utes was a Frankenstein monster of a team, pieces of several collegiate squads stitched together into a terrifying whole. The Navy had converted the Dartmouth campus into a training base, making it home to such basketball stars as Cornell's Bob Gale, Fordham's Walter Mercer and NYU's Harry Leggat, as well as future NBA guard Dick McGuire, who after playing in 16 games as a St. John's freshman received his orders from the Navy and immediately suited up for the Indians. Dartmouth's only loss all season had come to the country's best military team, before McGuire arrived in Hanover. In addition Dartmouth supplied a star of its own, big man Aud Brindley, whose 13 field goals had helped defeat Ohio State in the East Regional final.
The bookies installed Dartmouth as seven-point favorites, and the Indians players boasted that they ought to stage an intrasquad scrimmage to give fans their money's worth, according to Couch, who overheard them in a Manhattan coffee shop. A Dartmouth victory appeared so certain that a funk settled over the organizers of the Red Cross benefit game between the winners of the NCAAs and the NIT, which would be held at the Garden two days after the NCAA final. Word came down that the Navy had ordered Dartmouth's trainees to return to campus as soon as possible, ensuring that Utah, win or lose, would play St. John's, the NIT winner, in the Red Cross game. If the Indians beat the Utes, the benefit would be a meaningless anticlimax.
In the NCAA final, Utah threw double teams at Brindley and Gale, and neither team could build a lead of more than four points. With less than a minute left Utah held the ball and a 36--34 edge, needing only to play keepaway to secure the title. But in the final 10 seconds the Indians knocked the ball loose and found McGuire up the floor. Misaka remembers the shot, which forced the first overtime in an NCAA title game, as "a running lefthanded thing from quite a ways out."
McGuire's conjuring might have broken Utah's spirit. Dartmouth was the more mature and rugged team. But all those practices in the thin Wasatch Range air had given Peterson's regulars stamina to draw on. With the game tied at 40 and less than a minute left in overtime, the Utes found themselves with one last possession.
They worked the ball around the forecourt, from timeline to baseline and back again. "We spaced the floor well," remembers Bob Lewis, who from the right corner found Wilkinson open beyond the top of the key in the final 10 seconds. Wilkinson's set shot traced a high arc, true but short, and struck the front of the rim, bouncing off the backboard and seeming poised to fall away. But on the old newsreel footage it looks as if the front lip of the rim rises up ever so slightly to coax the ball into the basket. "I had a hard time seeing through the smoke," recalls Fred Lewis, who for a moment thought, What the heck happened?
What happened, Misaka says, sent him "about 10 feet in the air," which would be nearly twice his height. The final score was 42--40, Utah, and "the foundlings of postseason play," in the words of Irving Marsh of the New York Herald Tribune, were NCAA champions.
Two nights later the Utes returned to the Garden with a chance to prove themselves college basketball's undisputed best. A year earlier, after winning the NCAA crown, Wyoming had raised the profile of that younger event by winning the first Red Cross game. Now, before a crowd that would donate more than $41,000, the Utes tried to match the Cowboys' feat.
The New York fans might have been expected to favor the local team, St. John's, but the Garden then served as the home floor of several other colleges too, and followers of those teams didn't care to see the Redmen win. More than that, the Utes had won over New Yorkers during the previous two weeks with their fluid, hustling play. Misaka, in particular, "was so well received in New York," Ferrin recalls. "The port was closed, and there were troop ships there, but people responded to how hard he played."
Ferrin, the most valuable player of the NCAA tournament, dropped in several one-handers down the stretch to secure a 43--36 victory. As Peterson took the trophy around the locker room, rubbing it sacramentally on the heads of his players, he yelled at each in turn, "This is it, kid. It's yours—you won it!"
The team had been gone from Utah for 12 days and spent more than half of them on trains. After the Utes pulled out of Denver for the final leg of the trip home, the president of the Rio Grande Railroad, a Utahn, arranged for the players to be feted in his private car with steak and strawberries, rare delicacies in wartime. Meanwhile a welcoming party mustered at the station in Salt Lake City for a rally and parade. Smuin's mother, Helen, got her son's draft board to give him two more days so he could take part in the celebrations. In the flotilla of horn-honking convertibles driven by students was Pat Warshaw, who hoped to meet a basketball player. Alas, Coach Peterson climbed into her car first. But in 2005, after each had lost a longtime spouse, Pat would marry Arnie Ferrin.
Another woman met the team that day. Tatsuyo Misaka came bearing a letter for her son. "My greetings from Uncle Sam," Wat says. He had been drafted into the Army.
In mid-1942 some 120,000 residents of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens, were rounded up and confined in internment camps. Only those living in the three states along the Pacific Coast were affected, so by the grace of the Sierra Nevada the Misakas could continue to go about their lives. But FDR's order instantly altered the way many Americans regarded their neighbors of Japanese extraction and, inevitably, the way Japanese-Americans saw themselves.
Those at the University of Utah flaunted their patriotism, purchasing more war bonds and stamps per capita than the student body as a whole. Reviewing Guadalcanal Diary, a memoir by war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, for an English class, one Japanese-American student wrote, "This book shows how hard we will have to work to kill those Japs."
Some press reports erroneously described Misaka as a Hawaiian of Japanese descent. Misaka thinks Peterson was behind the errors but doesn't fault him. "The coach was very concerned about how I'd be accepted," he says. "Putting out that I was Hawaiian-born was a way to soften the blow." And Misaka believes Peterson never started him during his two seasons at Utah to protect him from fans' hostility: "That's what I choose to think, because he never treated me personally with any animosity."
The experience of the team's other Nisei, Masateru (Tut) Tatsuno, also suggests that Peterson, who died in 1976, was aware of the risk of suiting up Japanese-Americans during wartime. Tatsuno's family, which owned a dry-goods store in San Francisco's Japantown, was assigned to the Topaz camp near Delta, a collection of several hundred wood-frame buildings that opened in September '42. Tut would have been confined there with some 8,100 others if not for the university's pledge to accept up to 150 qualified internees of college age from camps around the West.
Tatsuno occasionally traveled with the Utes during the regular season as their 10th player. But even though he practiced with the team until the day it left for the NIT, the Utah postseason traveling party of 14 included only nine players. He was odd man out.
Peterson phoned Tatsuno during the Utes' journey home to tell him to show up at the station and be sure to wear a suit. Over the following days he took part in the whirl of celebrations and received an inscribed championship watch. After school let out, Misaka visited Tatsuno at the camp in Topaz to present him with a personalized Utah-red commemorative blanket in front of his family.
Tatsuno's older brother, Dave, captured Misaka's visit with an 8-mm movie camera he had smuggled into the camp. In the footage, which appears in the 2009 documentary Transcending: The Wat Misaka Story, the teammates mug for the camera. "It was the first and only time I'd been in camp, and it was a real shock to me," Misaka said last May, speaking to a multigenerational audience after a screening of Transcending in San Jose. "I'd heard stories and seen pictures, but to see the bleak desert environment was very depressing. I smiled a lot in that film, but I felt the injustice of it all."
Tut Tatsuno died in 1997, and today his daughter, Marice Shiozaki, summarizes the jumble of emotions her father felt during that long-ago basketball season and its aftermath: bitterness at being left behind, embarrassed surprise at being showered with trinkets and recognition for accomplishments from which he had been thousands of miles removed, and, over time, a gradual pride at having contributed nonetheless.
Misaka, for his part, spent two years in the Army, including nine months with U.S. occupation forces in Japan, where he interviewed survivors of the atomic-bomb blast in Hiroshima. One day he showed up at the home of his uncle, whose house—the one in which Wat's mother had grown up—had been shielded from the blast by a hill. "A personal no-man's land," Misaka has called the emotional territory he covered during that period. "No matter where I looked, I was a traitor in someone's eyes."
Tatsuno's daughter recalls the red of that commemorative blanket, spread across her parents' bed until it became so threadbare that they finally framed it for the wall. "As time went on, he was able to reconcile all these things," Shiozaki says. "He understood that they had to take Wat, and to take two [Japanese-Americans] probably wasn't a good idea when you had to travel across the country." But over the years those old feelings of unworthiness would rear up. "I tried and tried to get him to come," says Misaka, who helped organize team reunions. But Tatsuno never did attend. There's an old Japanese expression: Shikata ga nai. Accept your lot and go on. Tut Tatsuno's daughter uses it to describe her father's attitude. As he looks back, Misaka invokes it too.
His teammates lived in a different world. "We didn't think it was difficult for Wat," Fred Lewis says today. "[It was like] we didn't know he was Japanese."
Early that season, however, Smuin had made clear to Misaka that he would look out for him. If other teammates were comparatively oblivious to what Misaka was going through, says Bruce Alan Johnson, codirector of Transcending, that was a kind of gift from Misaka himself: "Wat was so able to overlook racial inequality that he made others able to overlook it too."
In the fall of 1946, Misaka, Ferrin and Smuin reunited on the Utah varsity. Rival colleges fielded teams again and packed their gyms when the Utes came to campus. At Utah State, Misaka heard, "Dirty Jap, why don't you go back home?" (I am home, he said to himself.) At Wyoming, where the court was known as Hell's Half-Acre, Ferrin remembers making several trips up and down the floor with only three other Utes. He swears that a couple of roughneck spectators had detained Misaka behind the baseline, an incident Misaka doesn't recall.
That March, with the help of a splendid forward named Vern Gardner, Utah returned to New York to win the NIT. Though he still rarely started, Misaka played virtually the entire final, holding Kentucky's Ralph Beard, the player of the year, to a single point. "You know how Beard scored his one point? I fouled him," Ferrin confesses. The crowd booed when Misaka wasn't named MVP. A few months later New York Knicks general manager Ned Irish, who had now watched Misaka charm the Garden fans in three competitions, made him the team's No. 1 draft pick.
The pro National Basketball League had fielded black players in the 1942--43 season, but Misaka became the first non-Caucasian to play in the Basketball Association of America, the other league that would soon merge with the NBL to form the NBA. Misaka scored seven points in three games, but shortly after the Knicks' first road trip he was let go. He never received an explanation. During a stopover in Chicago on his way home he briefly considered accepting a standing offer from Abe Saperstein to play for the Harlem Globetrotters, but instead he returned to Utah to finish his studies.
Every regular on the 1944 Utah team except Bob Lewis would either play pro basketball or be drafted to do so, and Ferrin would win two NBA titles with the Minneapolis Lakers. But the Zoot Utes' greater successes may have come away from the game. Sheffield and reserve Jim Nance went on to become doctors. Wilkinson became a dentist. Fred Lewis and another backup, T. Ray Kingston, joined Bob Lewis and Misaka as engineers. Smuin left the mines behind, becoming a teacher and coach, while Tatsuno took business classes at Cal and helped reopen the family's store in the Bay Area.
Wilkinson sees all this as a logical outcome of the championship. "Anything like that gives you more confidence to do other things in life," he says. "You think, Gee, if we won the NCAAs and weren't expected to, we could probably do a lot of other things we didn't think we could do."
Today Ferrin agrees, having watched Misaka bowl a 299 at age 80 and having won an all-church golf title in middle age himself. He muses on what once was—and nearly wasn't—as well as what might have been. "Maybe we were just a flash in the pan," he says, "but it would have been nice to have stayed together to find out. We'll never know. So we can say anything we want to."
Dick Smuin, that crouching catcher of fighting chickens, died in 2001, two weeks after Sept. 11. When Jim Smuin visited his father at the hospice on the day of the attacks, Dick was watching the coverage on television. "This is going to be exactly like what Misaka had to go through," Dick said, alluding to what he feared was in store for Arab-Americans.
Two years ago Jim paid a visit to the home in Bountiful, Utah, that Wat Misaka shares with Katie, his wife of 58 years. Wat pulled him aside and said, "Your dad promised me that he'd have my back. That he'd make sure nothing ever happened to me. He did."
Misaka then gestured at a table covered with pictures of his and Smuin's Utah teams. They're evidence that Dick Smuin knew when to get out of his crouch and stand up. "I want you to look at these," Misaka said. "Look who's next to me in every picture."
For historical coverage of other NCAA championships, go to SI.com/vault
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http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1167417/index/index.htm
ALEXANDER WOLFF, MICHAEL ATCHISON
As the dying days of the Depression gave way to World War II, LaVell Smuin presented his teenage son, Dick, with an unusual challenge. LaVell worked as a smelter in Utah's Bingham Canyon copper mines and in his spare time busied himself coaching the Kennecott Mining company's AAU basketball team and raising fighting chickens, which wasn't uncommon at the time. The father knew that college could spring his son from a miner's life if Dick could land an athletic scholarship. So LaVell sent him into the chicken pens with orders to catch a fully spurred bird.
Few assignments carry a greater incentive to adopt a perfect defensive stance. "The only way you can catch a fighting chicken without getting hurt is to have your knees bent, your back straight and your palms up," Dick's son, Jim, says today. "You've got to catch the bird coming up, because if you don't, it'll hook you with its spurs or peck you."
Dick Smuin did indeed earn a scholarship, to Utah, where he was a freshman forward on the 1943--44 team. He was the only recruit on the squad. The other players had responded to a notice of tryouts that coach Vadal Peterson had tacked to a bulletin board that fall. World War II had forced the schools in the Utes' Skyline Conference and most other colleges in the region to cancel the season, but Peterson decided that if he could find the players, he'd field a team.
Perhaps if he had known all the obstacles that would confront him, Peterson wouldn't have tried. The Army Specialized Training Program had commandeered the campus gym for use as a barracks, so the Utes practiced 90 minutes a day in the women's gym. For home games they moved to the Deseret Gym in downtown Salt Lake City, where a track overhead ruled out shots from the corners. The Utes, all but one of whom came from within 35 miles of campus, averaged only 181/2 years of age, and as the season wore on, military call-ups depleted their ranks. Graduate manager Keith Brown made up the schedule from week to week, hustling up games with a handful of college teams and military and industrial squads.
The Utes included two Japanese-Americans, one on release from an internment camp outside Delta, 120 miles away. The other, a 5'7" reserve, was thrust into the lineup when the Utes' center—their captain, best athlete and leading scorer—went down with a sprained ankle on the eve of the postseason. And war with Japan be damned, that Nisei, or second-generation Japanese-American, would enchant crowds during tournament play.
Today the NCAA tournament can be counted on to produce a Cinderella team. But there are Cinderellas, and then there is the Original Charwoman of March. The '43--44 Utes, variously known as the Whiz Kids, Blitz Kids, Squeeze Kids, Zoot Utes, Blitz Babies, Kids of Destiny and the Live Five with the Jive Drive, would go on to win the NCAA title in what still stands as one of the biggest upsets in tournament history. That the Utes came together at the right moment in time was the result of a chain of improbabilities, including the starkly contrasting stories of two players, both Utah-born, who lived parallel childhoods in the city of Ogden.
Around noon on Dec. 7, 1941, 17-year-old Wataru (Wat) Misaka was going through his Sunday routine, listening to the radio as he swept and mopped the floor and cleaned the mirrors of the Western Barber Shop, which his family had run for decades.
Wat's father, Fusaichi (who was known as Ben), orphaned in his native Japan, had come to the U.S. in 1902, at age 19, to escape a life of farming. He worked on the railroad, then opened a barbershop on 25th Street, on Ogden's west side. He returned briefly to Japan in 1922 to marry Wat's mother, Tatsuyo, and bring her back to Utah.
A legacy of the railroad culture that built Ogden, 25th Street comprised a notorious gantlet of gambling joints, brothels, opium dens and bars. Nine out of every 10 robberies, knifings and murders in the city took place on Two-Bit Street. As Wat Misaka reached high school age, the street featured 11 whorehouses, including one, the Colorado Rooms, literally overhead. After Ben Misaka died in 1939, Wat's mother suggested that they go back to Hiroshima to live with her brother. "I said no, feeling like I'm a big shot," recalls Wat, the oldest of three children. "I told her, 'You can take [my brothers] and go. I'm staying.'"
The Misakas stayed. Two-Bit Street may have been the devil's own thoroughfare, but angels lurked on its corners. A white barber helped Tatsuyo get her license to cut hair. Other Japanese immigrant families, who ran noodle shops and dry-goods stores, kept an eye on her kids. Despite living in the rear quarters of the barbershop, Wat grew up largely oblivious to the vice around him.
He noticed subtle ethnic slights, to be sure. Moviegoers seemed to sit at a remove from him, and when the Misakas entered a store, they were usually the last to be waited on. But a whirlwind of sports and homework kept Wat too busy to dwell on his apartness.
Then Wat heard the news bulletin from Pearl Harbor that December afternoon. How, Wat wondered aloud to his mother, could the country of her birth do something so terrible to the country of his?
Across town, Chariton Arnold (Arnie) Ferrin Jr. was visiting his girlfriend on that day. The name Chariton came from a river in Missouri that an ancestor forded on his way west with the Mormon pioneer Brigham Young. Arnie's mother, Ellen, had died when he was four, and his father traveled the Rockies as a salesman, so Arnie's paternal grandparents, Chariton and Ida, raised him in a world bounded by church and basketball. In Utah in those days, Arnie recalls, "if you saw a barn without a basketball hoop on it, you'd think the family didn't have any male children."
Ferrin knew of 25th Street—"the toughest street in Utah," he calls it today—even though he grew up on Ogden's leafy east side. But the 14 blocks that separated his home from Wat Misaka's marked off two worlds. Arnie entered Ogden's two-year senior high school just when Wat left it after a fine basketball career to attend two-year Weber College. Arnie knew of Wat only from reading the sports pages, and Wat didn't know Arnie at all.
Upon hearing of the Japanese attack, friends pounded on the door of Ferrin's girlfriend's house to tell him the news. The next day young men all over Utah would visit their recruiting offices. But, only 16, Ferrin was too young to serve, and because of a trick knee, he would eventually be turned down twice for combat service. As for Misaka, he was determined to go to college—and besides, the U.S. military wouldn't accept soldiers of Japanese descent until later in the war.
In time, the lives of Ferrin and Misaka would be permanently intertwined. When the Utah team rode the rails during the 1943--44 season, soldiers and other priority passengers sometimes bumped them from their seats, and the two teammates from Ogden found themselves sleeping side by side in an upper berth. After college, though he had earned a mechanical engineering degree, Misaka would struggle to find a job until Ferrin put in a word for his old teammate at a Salt Lake City firm. (Misaka may have returned the favor three decades later, when he served on the search committee that hired Ferrin as Utah's athletic director.) Sometimes Ferrin would get the assist, sometimes Misaka—but only after the two had left Ogden and, each taking his own path, met that first day of tryouts at the U.
To give colleges a better chance to field teams during the war, the NCAA had suspended its ban on freshman eligibility. Meanwhile Uncle Sam offered deferments to young men who chose to study engineering or medicine or who, like Ferrin, were classified 4-F, unfit for duty. Despite their youth, the Utes were unusually tall for their time. Ferrin, a rangy 6'4", moved easily in and out of the lane to squeeze off his silken one-handed shot. Sophomore center Fred Sheffield, though only 6'1", had won an NCAA high jump title the previous spring and could long-jump 23 feet. Forward Herb Wilkinson, who grew up with a high jump pit in his backyard and would place fourth in that event at the 1945 NCAA championships, stood only 5'2" as a high school sophomore but had sprouted to 6'3" by the time he enrolled at Utah. Bob Lewis, a 6'4" guard, was a fine defender and a good enough tennis player to reach the NCAA doubles semifinals and later in life defeat Pancho Gonzales. Misaka, the sixth man, played with a lunch-bucket spirit, as did Smuin, who had grown up with immigrants' kids in copper-mining country. The two quickly became close.
Utah won 15 of its first 16 games, losing by only two points to Fort Warren, the Army team starring future Harlem Globetrotter Ermer Robinson. The crowds in the Deseret Gym, which numbered in the dozens at the beginning of the season, gradually approached a couple thousand. In February the Utes lost again, to Dow Chemical, an industrial team that featured 6'7" Milo Komenich, an All-America who had led Wyoming to the previous year's NCAA title. "We didn't realize that the teams we were playing were the equivalent now of pro teams," recalls Fred Lewis, Bob's identical twin, who was a reserve guard for the Utes. "We didn't know how good we were."
They did know they were improving. Their only other regular-season loss was by 15 points to Salt Lake Air Base, which featured a diaspora of Big Ten players, including Ed Ehlers, a star at Purdue. Ehlers scored 28 and guarded the Utes' fastest player "by holding me back with a hand in the stomach that the officials couldn't see," Misaka says. Ehlers apologized to Misaka afterward, confessing that he couldn't stay with him otherwise. Three weeks later Utah avenged that loss with a 62--38 home victory to end the regular season.
The Western pedigree of the Utes freed them from the hidebound, earthbound orthodoxies of East Coast basketball. Peterson let his players fend for themselves on offense. "We didn't have plays," recalls Fred Lewis. "We just took advantage of what the opponent gave us. Then, when somebody shot, we went after the ball." At a time when most players still kept both feet on the floor and both hands on the ball, the Utes played the game of the future: slashing, wrist-flicking basketball, with a preference for the pass over the dribble. Peterson would exaggerate only slightly when he wrote for a basketball guide, "If a boy can drop them in blindfolded from the center of the floor, using nothing but his right elbow, we'll gladly accept him."
At the same time, Peterson never tried to bulk up the supple physiques he had to work with. "We were in better condition than most of us would have liked," says Ferrin, who carried only 155 pounds. On defense each Ute would simply pick up the opponent nearest him. "It made us more of a team," Ferrin says. "We weren't sophisticated. We played as hard as we could, and Vadal let us play."
Having finished the regular season with an 18--3 record, the Utes received invitations to both the National Invitation Tournament and the NCAAs. They chose the NIT because the elder event promised to cover expenses, and it would take place entirely in New York City, which only Ferrin and Sheffield had visited before.
No one in the Utes' traveling party knew much about Kentucky, their first-round opponent. College basketball in the '40s consisted of a dozen or so clusters of interest, each in its own information vacuum, so Peterson bought a "scouting report" on the Wildcats from a sidewalk hustler for $25. The Utes were going to have to play with a gimpy Sheffield, who had sprained an ankle during a scrimmage with another NIT entrant, Oklahoma A&M, soon after arriving in New York.
Sheffield jumped center and promptly took a seat. But his injury gave an opening to Misaka, who made a huge impression on the crowd. "[His] spectacular play brought roars of approval," wrote Wilbur Wood in the New York Sun. "One wonders what would be the reaction of a Tokyo crowd at a sports event right now, if one of the players were named Kelly or Doolittle." But Kentucky's Jack Parkinson got loose for 20 points in the Wildcats 46--38 victory. The cigar smoke in the Garden seared the lungs of the innocents from Mormon country, and Fred Lewis remembers a gambler sprinting onto the floor to offer $20 to Misaka, whose late basket, the man said, had beaten the point spread.
The players put the loss on the shelf, for they had a city to see. They'd already taken in the Copacabana and the Empire State Building. When they passed an ocean liner retrofitted into a troop ship, Misaka turned to Ferrin and mused, "If I yelled 'Banzai!' and started running, what do you think would happen?"
The night of the apparent end of Utah's season, Keith Brown, the graduate manager, while strolling along Broadway with assistant coach Pete Couch, kicked a small blue object half hidden in the snow. He reached down to find a pocket Bible, one of thousands given to the troops, with an introductory message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Finding a Bible, Couch declared, was a sign of their good fortune.
A day earlier, unbeknownst to anyone in the Utah party, the Arkansas team had traveled from Fayetteville to Fort Smith for a scrimmage with a military squad to prepare for the NCAA West Regional. Returning to campus that night on a rain-slicked highway, a station wagon carrying several Razorbacks players had a flat tire. A narrow shoulder forced faculty adviser Eugene Norris to leave part of the vehicle exposed to traffic, and as starters Ben Jones and Deno Nichols changed the flat, another car rammed theirs from behind. Norris was killed, and Jones and Nichols critically injured. Only four days before the start of the NCAAs, Arkansas withdrew.
With a hole in the bracket and no time to spare, someone from the NCAA phoned Peterson in his room at the Hotel Belvedere. Would Utah like a second chance to play for a national title? At 2:30 a.m. the Utes' coach woke his players and gave them a choice: spend a few more days sightseeing or hop a train for Kansas City, Mo., first thing in the morning and try to win their way back to New York for the NCAA championship game, set for the Garden the following week. (There was no Final Four in 1944—only two four-team regionals and a title game.)
Ferrin voiced the sentiment of all the players in that meeting: "Let's go to Kansas City and win the [West Regional] title," he said. "Then we can return to New York and prove that our loss [in the NIT] was a fluke."
Because train schedules were held hostage by troop movements, it took nearly three days for the Utes to reach Kansas City. But in their NCAA opener against Missouri, another team of freshmen and 4-F's, Sheffield again jumped center before yielding to Misaka, who whipped the Utes to a faster tempo and a 45--35 victory.
In the regional final the next day Utah faced more formidable Iowa State. The Utes trailed 28--26 midway through the second half as Misaka played through foul trouble with two whistles, he says today, constituting the only time he ever felt discrimination on the court. Utah nonetheless pulled away for a 40--31 victory. The first team ever to play in the NCAAs and the NIT in the same season—a group ushered into the draw "through an undertaker's parlor," as Joe Cummiskey of the New York daily PM put it—then boarded the train back East for the NCAA final.
Awaiting the Utes was a Frankenstein monster of a team, pieces of several collegiate squads stitched together into a terrifying whole. The Navy had converted the Dartmouth campus into a training base, making it home to such basketball stars as Cornell's Bob Gale, Fordham's Walter Mercer and NYU's Harry Leggat, as well as future NBA guard Dick McGuire, who after playing in 16 games as a St. John's freshman received his orders from the Navy and immediately suited up for the Indians. Dartmouth's only loss all season had come to the country's best military team, before McGuire arrived in Hanover. In addition Dartmouth supplied a star of its own, big man Aud Brindley, whose 13 field goals had helped defeat Ohio State in the East Regional final.
The bookies installed Dartmouth as seven-point favorites, and the Indians players boasted that they ought to stage an intrasquad scrimmage to give fans their money's worth, according to Couch, who overheard them in a Manhattan coffee shop. A Dartmouth victory appeared so certain that a funk settled over the organizers of the Red Cross benefit game between the winners of the NCAAs and the NIT, which would be held at the Garden two days after the NCAA final. Word came down that the Navy had ordered Dartmouth's trainees to return to campus as soon as possible, ensuring that Utah, win or lose, would play St. John's, the NIT winner, in the Red Cross game. If the Indians beat the Utes, the benefit would be a meaningless anticlimax.
In the NCAA final, Utah threw double teams at Brindley and Gale, and neither team could build a lead of more than four points. With less than a minute left Utah held the ball and a 36--34 edge, needing only to play keepaway to secure the title. But in the final 10 seconds the Indians knocked the ball loose and found McGuire up the floor. Misaka remembers the shot, which forced the first overtime in an NCAA title game, as "a running lefthanded thing from quite a ways out."
McGuire's conjuring might have broken Utah's spirit. Dartmouth was the more mature and rugged team. But all those practices in the thin Wasatch Range air had given Peterson's regulars stamina to draw on. With the game tied at 40 and less than a minute left in overtime, the Utes found themselves with one last possession.
They worked the ball around the forecourt, from timeline to baseline and back again. "We spaced the floor well," remembers Bob Lewis, who from the right corner found Wilkinson open beyond the top of the key in the final 10 seconds. Wilkinson's set shot traced a high arc, true but short, and struck the front of the rim, bouncing off the backboard and seeming poised to fall away. But on the old newsreel footage it looks as if the front lip of the rim rises up ever so slightly to coax the ball into the basket. "I had a hard time seeing through the smoke," recalls Fred Lewis, who for a moment thought, What the heck happened?
What happened, Misaka says, sent him "about 10 feet in the air," which would be nearly twice his height. The final score was 42--40, Utah, and "the foundlings of postseason play," in the words of Irving Marsh of the New York Herald Tribune, were NCAA champions.
Two nights later the Utes returned to the Garden with a chance to prove themselves college basketball's undisputed best. A year earlier, after winning the NCAA crown, Wyoming had raised the profile of that younger event by winning the first Red Cross game. Now, before a crowd that would donate more than $41,000, the Utes tried to match the Cowboys' feat.
The New York fans might have been expected to favor the local team, St. John's, but the Garden then served as the home floor of several other colleges too, and followers of those teams didn't care to see the Redmen win. More than that, the Utes had won over New Yorkers during the previous two weeks with their fluid, hustling play. Misaka, in particular, "was so well received in New York," Ferrin recalls. "The port was closed, and there were troop ships there, but people responded to how hard he played."
Ferrin, the most valuable player of the NCAA tournament, dropped in several one-handers down the stretch to secure a 43--36 victory. As Peterson took the trophy around the locker room, rubbing it sacramentally on the heads of his players, he yelled at each in turn, "This is it, kid. It's yours—you won it!"
The team had been gone from Utah for 12 days and spent more than half of them on trains. After the Utes pulled out of Denver for the final leg of the trip home, the president of the Rio Grande Railroad, a Utahn, arranged for the players to be feted in his private car with steak and strawberries, rare delicacies in wartime. Meanwhile a welcoming party mustered at the station in Salt Lake City for a rally and parade. Smuin's mother, Helen, got her son's draft board to give him two more days so he could take part in the celebrations. In the flotilla of horn-honking convertibles driven by students was Pat Warshaw, who hoped to meet a basketball player. Alas, Coach Peterson climbed into her car first. But in 2005, after each had lost a longtime spouse, Pat would marry Arnie Ferrin.
Another woman met the team that day. Tatsuyo Misaka came bearing a letter for her son. "My greetings from Uncle Sam," Wat says. He had been drafted into the Army.
In mid-1942 some 120,000 residents of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens, were rounded up and confined in internment camps. Only those living in the three states along the Pacific Coast were affected, so by the grace of the Sierra Nevada the Misakas could continue to go about their lives. But FDR's order instantly altered the way many Americans regarded their neighbors of Japanese extraction and, inevitably, the way Japanese-Americans saw themselves.
Those at the University of Utah flaunted their patriotism, purchasing more war bonds and stamps per capita than the student body as a whole. Reviewing Guadalcanal Diary, a memoir by war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, for an English class, one Japanese-American student wrote, "This book shows how hard we will have to work to kill those Japs."
Some press reports erroneously described Misaka as a Hawaiian of Japanese descent. Misaka thinks Peterson was behind the errors but doesn't fault him. "The coach was very concerned about how I'd be accepted," he says. "Putting out that I was Hawaiian-born was a way to soften the blow." And Misaka believes Peterson never started him during his two seasons at Utah to protect him from fans' hostility: "That's what I choose to think, because he never treated me personally with any animosity."
The experience of the team's other Nisei, Masateru (Tut) Tatsuno, also suggests that Peterson, who died in 1976, was aware of the risk of suiting up Japanese-Americans during wartime. Tatsuno's family, which owned a dry-goods store in San Francisco's Japantown, was assigned to the Topaz camp near Delta, a collection of several hundred wood-frame buildings that opened in September '42. Tut would have been confined there with some 8,100 others if not for the university's pledge to accept up to 150 qualified internees of college age from camps around the West.
Tatsuno occasionally traveled with the Utes during the regular season as their 10th player. But even though he practiced with the team until the day it left for the NIT, the Utah postseason traveling party of 14 included only nine players. He was odd man out.
Peterson phoned Tatsuno during the Utes' journey home to tell him to show up at the station and be sure to wear a suit. Over the following days he took part in the whirl of celebrations and received an inscribed championship watch. After school let out, Misaka visited Tatsuno at the camp in Topaz to present him with a personalized Utah-red commemorative blanket in front of his family.
Tatsuno's older brother, Dave, captured Misaka's visit with an 8-mm movie camera he had smuggled into the camp. In the footage, which appears in the 2009 documentary Transcending: The Wat Misaka Story, the teammates mug for the camera. "It was the first and only time I'd been in camp, and it was a real shock to me," Misaka said last May, speaking to a multigenerational audience after a screening of Transcending in San Jose. "I'd heard stories and seen pictures, but to see the bleak desert environment was very depressing. I smiled a lot in that film, but I felt the injustice of it all."
Tut Tatsuno died in 1997, and today his daughter, Marice Shiozaki, summarizes the jumble of emotions her father felt during that long-ago basketball season and its aftermath: bitterness at being left behind, embarrassed surprise at being showered with trinkets and recognition for accomplishments from which he had been thousands of miles removed, and, over time, a gradual pride at having contributed nonetheless.
Misaka, for his part, spent two years in the Army, including nine months with U.S. occupation forces in Japan, where he interviewed survivors of the atomic-bomb blast in Hiroshima. One day he showed up at the home of his uncle, whose house—the one in which Wat's mother had grown up—had been shielded from the blast by a hill. "A personal no-man's land," Misaka has called the emotional territory he covered during that period. "No matter where I looked, I was a traitor in someone's eyes."
Tatsuno's daughter recalls the red of that commemorative blanket, spread across her parents' bed until it became so threadbare that they finally framed it for the wall. "As time went on, he was able to reconcile all these things," Shiozaki says. "He understood that they had to take Wat, and to take two [Japanese-Americans] probably wasn't a good idea when you had to travel across the country." But over the years those old feelings of unworthiness would rear up. "I tried and tried to get him to come," says Misaka, who helped organize team reunions. But Tatsuno never did attend. There's an old Japanese expression: Shikata ga nai. Accept your lot and go on. Tut Tatsuno's daughter uses it to describe her father's attitude. As he looks back, Misaka invokes it too.
His teammates lived in a different world. "We didn't think it was difficult for Wat," Fred Lewis says today. "[It was like] we didn't know he was Japanese."
Early that season, however, Smuin had made clear to Misaka that he would look out for him. If other teammates were comparatively oblivious to what Misaka was going through, says Bruce Alan Johnson, codirector of Transcending, that was a kind of gift from Misaka himself: "Wat was so able to overlook racial inequality that he made others able to overlook it too."
In the fall of 1946, Misaka, Ferrin and Smuin reunited on the Utah varsity. Rival colleges fielded teams again and packed their gyms when the Utes came to campus. At Utah State, Misaka heard, "Dirty Jap, why don't you go back home?" (I am home, he said to himself.) At Wyoming, where the court was known as Hell's Half-Acre, Ferrin remembers making several trips up and down the floor with only three other Utes. He swears that a couple of roughneck spectators had detained Misaka behind the baseline, an incident Misaka doesn't recall.
That March, with the help of a splendid forward named Vern Gardner, Utah returned to New York to win the NIT. Though he still rarely started, Misaka played virtually the entire final, holding Kentucky's Ralph Beard, the player of the year, to a single point. "You know how Beard scored his one point? I fouled him," Ferrin confesses. The crowd booed when Misaka wasn't named MVP. A few months later New York Knicks general manager Ned Irish, who had now watched Misaka charm the Garden fans in three competitions, made him the team's No. 1 draft pick.
The pro National Basketball League had fielded black players in the 1942--43 season, but Misaka became the first non-Caucasian to play in the Basketball Association of America, the other league that would soon merge with the NBL to form the NBA. Misaka scored seven points in three games, but shortly after the Knicks' first road trip he was let go. He never received an explanation. During a stopover in Chicago on his way home he briefly considered accepting a standing offer from Abe Saperstein to play for the Harlem Globetrotters, but instead he returned to Utah to finish his studies.
Every regular on the 1944 Utah team except Bob Lewis would either play pro basketball or be drafted to do so, and Ferrin would win two NBA titles with the Minneapolis Lakers. But the Zoot Utes' greater successes may have come away from the game. Sheffield and reserve Jim Nance went on to become doctors. Wilkinson became a dentist. Fred Lewis and another backup, T. Ray Kingston, joined Bob Lewis and Misaka as engineers. Smuin left the mines behind, becoming a teacher and coach, while Tatsuno took business classes at Cal and helped reopen the family's store in the Bay Area.
Wilkinson sees all this as a logical outcome of the championship. "Anything like that gives you more confidence to do other things in life," he says. "You think, Gee, if we won the NCAAs and weren't expected to, we could probably do a lot of other things we didn't think we could do."
Today Ferrin agrees, having watched Misaka bowl a 299 at age 80 and having won an all-church golf title in middle age himself. He muses on what once was—and nearly wasn't—as well as what might have been. "Maybe we were just a flash in the pan," he says, "but it would have been nice to have stayed together to find out. We'll never know. So we can say anything we want to."
Dick Smuin, that crouching catcher of fighting chickens, died in 2001, two weeks after Sept. 11. When Jim Smuin visited his father at the hospice on the day of the attacks, Dick was watching the coverage on television. "This is going to be exactly like what Misaka had to go through," Dick said, alluding to what he feared was in store for Arab-Americans.
Two years ago Jim paid a visit to the home in Bountiful, Utah, that Wat Misaka shares with Katie, his wife of 58 years. Wat pulled him aside and said, "Your dad promised me that he'd have my back. That he'd make sure nothing ever happened to me. He did."
Misaka then gestured at a table covered with pictures of his and Smuin's Utah teams. They're evidence that Dick Smuin knew when to get out of his crouch and stand up. "I want you to look at these," Misaka said. "Look who's next to me in every picture."
For historical coverage of other NCAA championships, go to SI.com/vault
Find this article at:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1167417/index/index.htm
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Giants notebook: Ishikawa sprints toward making the roster
By Andrew Baggarly
abaggarly@mercurynews.com
Posted: 03/18/2010 06:53:18 AM PDT
Updated: 03/18/2010 06:53:19 AM PDT
PHOENIX — Travis Ishikawa's chances of making the Giants roster were enhanced by a factor of two Wednesday.
At the Giants' minor league camp in Scottsdale, Ariz., Ishikawa played on both sides of the ball for the first time this spring. He logged four innings at first base and got four at-bats in a camp game.
Down the road at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, the results favored Ishikawa, too. That's because first baseman Aubrey Huff made a bad decision that turned a force play into an infield single for the A's Ryan Sweeney. Huff roamed too far off the bag in pursuit of Sweeney's grounder, which second baseman Juan Uribe easily fielded.
Every time Huff makes a defensive mistake, and there have been several this spring, it makes Ishikawa's presence on the roster seem all the more vital. Manager Bruce Bochy has said he plans to use a lot of late-inning defensive substitutes this season.
But can Ishikawa be healthy in time?
"Oh yeah, absolutely," said the smooth fielding first baseman, who arrived in camp with a badly sprained left foot. "I'm not far behind these guys. The last couple days, I've caught up."
Ishikawa began playing against minor leaguers Monday, leading off every inning. He was 5 for 11 over his first two games and said his foot responded when he stretched a single into a double.
"I still feel it, but that was a good test," he said.
The Giants are off today, but Ishikawa will play on both sides
in another camp game. He plans to make his Cactus League debut sometime this weekend.
Ishikawa is out of minor league options and could be lost on a waiver claim if he isn't on the opening day roster.
abaggarly@mercurynews.com
Posted: 03/18/2010 06:53:18 AM PDT
Updated: 03/18/2010 06:53:19 AM PDT
PHOENIX — Travis Ishikawa's chances of making the Giants roster were enhanced by a factor of two Wednesday.
At the Giants' minor league camp in Scottsdale, Ariz., Ishikawa played on both sides of the ball for the first time this spring. He logged four innings at first base and got four at-bats in a camp game.
Down the road at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, the results favored Ishikawa, too. That's because first baseman Aubrey Huff made a bad decision that turned a force play into an infield single for the A's Ryan Sweeney. Huff roamed too far off the bag in pursuit of Sweeney's grounder, which second baseman Juan Uribe easily fielded.
Every time Huff makes a defensive mistake, and there have been several this spring, it makes Ishikawa's presence on the roster seem all the more vital. Manager Bruce Bochy has said he plans to use a lot of late-inning defensive substitutes this season.
But can Ishikawa be healthy in time?
"Oh yeah, absolutely," said the smooth fielding first baseman, who arrived in camp with a badly sprained left foot. "I'm not far behind these guys. The last couple days, I've caught up."
Ishikawa began playing against minor leaguers Monday, leading off every inning. He was 5 for 11 over his first two games and said his foot responded when he stretched a single into a double.
"I still feel it, but that was a good test," he said.
The Giants are off today, but Ishikawa will play on both sides
in another camp game. He plans to make his Cactus League debut sometime this weekend.
Ishikawa is out of minor league options and could be lost on a waiver claim if he isn't on the opening day roster.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Doug Kagawa: Scoring Points for Character
This article was originally on Discover Nikkei just click on the title to go to the original post
By Masao Ito Taylor
11 Mar 2010
Since 1977, Doug Kagawa has worked as head coach of varsity basketball at Albany High School in Albany, CA. In speaking with him, I learned a high school coach is motivated by the sport, the students, and the constant quest to create the chemistry that makes a winning team.
Kagawa began playing in the “C” level basketball league in sixth grade, although officially he wasn’t supposed to start until seventh grade. He played basketball all the way through school and played baseball with the [Japanese American] Berkeley Bears. As a kid, he also helped his father coach his younger brother in Little League baseball and basketball.
“My dad is a photographer, but he probably would have been a really good high school football coach until he went into the internment camps, which kind of messed up his career,” Kagawa recalls. “He was an athlete.”
Second to his father, his high school basketball coach helped launch him on his path towards sports. “I never played school ball, but he refereed the Japanese [league] games and so he would see me play, and finally he told me to try out for the high school team. So I tried out my junior year at Berkeley High School and I made the team and it kind of started my career. When I graduated I came back and coached with him.
In the huddle with Coach Kagawa. Photo by Masao Ito Taylor.
“What I tell students is coaching is like being a chef and players are all the different ingredients. The chef has to kind of blend the players together as best you can and come up with a finished product. Sometimes the product rises to the top, and sometimes it just… percolates. I think my style of coaching is very flexible. I don’t have one set style and everybody has to accommodate my style. What I try to do is take an evaluation of what kind of players I have for each season and to try to develop ways to take advantage of each different team’s strengths and weaknesses. So I run all different kinds of set offenses and defenses.”
One of the most important qualities he practices as a coach is restraint.
“The kind of style I would prefer to play would be the really up-tempo running game and full court press. My role models of coaching would be people like John Wooden, where you play real fundamental basketball and you don’t do all the talking and showboating. If you notice the coach on the court more than the players, then something’s wrong. The game is for the players, the coach is just to facilitate and be a coach and not be a pain. So I try to be low-key on the court because if I expect my players to make critical decisions in stressful situations I can’t be going bonkers on the bench.”
A product of the long tradition of JA sports, Kagawa can’t help but make a connection between his Japanese American heritage and his coaching style. “I think it really goes back to the Japanese community.
“To my dad in terms of his work ethic and my mom in terms of supporting the family. In terms of work ethic, you learn it from your parents: Whatever you do you want to do it 100 percent. You never quit, you never give up, and you could be down by 30 or up by 30 but you always give it 100 percent until the final buzzer. The Japanese leagues have exploded. I remember when I used to play and we used to get really excited for one tournament down in Los Angeles, but now there’s like one every weekend.”
That old-fashioned demand for respect in sports makes Kagawa a stickler for detail: the players’ appearance, the way they treat each other on the court. “Even before the rule was brought in that you had to keep your shirttail in, guys would try to play with their jersey tail out and I would say ‘No, you tuck your shirttail in.’ They came sagging and I would say ‘No, I don’t care what the style is, and you don’t sag’. A lot of sports unfortunately are becoming who can outdo each other individually rather than the team emphasis. My basic rule is that you never talk on the court other then talking on defense or complimenting your own teammates. I have a rule that if you get an assist from a player, you had better acknowledge the passer so I can see that you respect the pass, otherwise you are coming out of the game.
“I’ve kept some players that other coaches would have cut because of behavior, but I think I am a teacher first and a coach second, and I believe that sports could show kids a different way to behave. By having a good group of people around, that person could learn a lot.”
For Kagawa, a champion isn’t defined by points scored on the court but by how an athlete accomplishes the game of life. “I think being a successful person has the same attributes and characteristics as being a champion or a winner. A champion in my picture is not judged on your win-loss record. For me, a champion person is a quality person. We had a team one year ago; we were 0-14 in our league. We got blitzed by 30 points regularly each game. But that team, no one ever quit and all nine seniors went on to a four-year college. In my eyes, we did everything we could, and that was a championship season.”
His personal formula for winning is simple. “My philosophy with all of my players and students is: family comes first, school is second, and sports activities come after that. Find something that you really enjoy doing, and maybe you can pursue that thing as a career. I never wanted to have to go to work and everyday wake up and not be excited to go to work. I hear too many stories of people who go to work because they have to pay the bills. I love being paid for this job but I would probably do it without being paid. When I wake up in the morning I’m excited to go to work.”
He does have one confession, however. “Right now with coaching and being a head counselor, I don’t have much head time. But if I did have spare time, I would probably try and play golf."
* This article was originally published in Nikkei Heritage Vol. XVIII, Number 2 (Winter 2006), a journal of the National Japanese American Historical Society .
© 2006 National Japanese American Historical Society
By Masao Ito Taylor
11 Mar 2010
Since 1977, Doug Kagawa has worked as head coach of varsity basketball at Albany High School in Albany, CA. In speaking with him, I learned a high school coach is motivated by the sport, the students, and the constant quest to create the chemistry that makes a winning team.
Kagawa began playing in the “C” level basketball league in sixth grade, although officially he wasn’t supposed to start until seventh grade. He played basketball all the way through school and played baseball with the [Japanese American] Berkeley Bears. As a kid, he also helped his father coach his younger brother in Little League baseball and basketball.
“My dad is a photographer, but he probably would have been a really good high school football coach until he went into the internment camps, which kind of messed up his career,” Kagawa recalls. “He was an athlete.”
Second to his father, his high school basketball coach helped launch him on his path towards sports. “I never played school ball, but he refereed the Japanese [league] games and so he would see me play, and finally he told me to try out for the high school team. So I tried out my junior year at Berkeley High School and I made the team and it kind of started my career. When I graduated I came back and coached with him.
In the huddle with Coach Kagawa. Photo by Masao Ito Taylor.
“What I tell students is coaching is like being a chef and players are all the different ingredients. The chef has to kind of blend the players together as best you can and come up with a finished product. Sometimes the product rises to the top, and sometimes it just… percolates. I think my style of coaching is very flexible. I don’t have one set style and everybody has to accommodate my style. What I try to do is take an evaluation of what kind of players I have for each season and to try to develop ways to take advantage of each different team’s strengths and weaknesses. So I run all different kinds of set offenses and defenses.”
One of the most important qualities he practices as a coach is restraint.
“The kind of style I would prefer to play would be the really up-tempo running game and full court press. My role models of coaching would be people like John Wooden, where you play real fundamental basketball and you don’t do all the talking and showboating. If you notice the coach on the court more than the players, then something’s wrong. The game is for the players, the coach is just to facilitate and be a coach and not be a pain. So I try to be low-key on the court because if I expect my players to make critical decisions in stressful situations I can’t be going bonkers on the bench.”
A product of the long tradition of JA sports, Kagawa can’t help but make a connection between his Japanese American heritage and his coaching style. “I think it really goes back to the Japanese community.
“To my dad in terms of his work ethic and my mom in terms of supporting the family. In terms of work ethic, you learn it from your parents: Whatever you do you want to do it 100 percent. You never quit, you never give up, and you could be down by 30 or up by 30 but you always give it 100 percent until the final buzzer. The Japanese leagues have exploded. I remember when I used to play and we used to get really excited for one tournament down in Los Angeles, but now there’s like one every weekend.”
That old-fashioned demand for respect in sports makes Kagawa a stickler for detail: the players’ appearance, the way they treat each other on the court. “Even before the rule was brought in that you had to keep your shirttail in, guys would try to play with their jersey tail out and I would say ‘No, you tuck your shirttail in.’ They came sagging and I would say ‘No, I don’t care what the style is, and you don’t sag’. A lot of sports unfortunately are becoming who can outdo each other individually rather than the team emphasis. My basic rule is that you never talk on the court other then talking on defense or complimenting your own teammates. I have a rule that if you get an assist from a player, you had better acknowledge the passer so I can see that you respect the pass, otherwise you are coming out of the game.
“I’ve kept some players that other coaches would have cut because of behavior, but I think I am a teacher first and a coach second, and I believe that sports could show kids a different way to behave. By having a good group of people around, that person could learn a lot.”
For Kagawa, a champion isn’t defined by points scored on the court but by how an athlete accomplishes the game of life. “I think being a successful person has the same attributes and characteristics as being a champion or a winner. A champion in my picture is not judged on your win-loss record. For me, a champion person is a quality person. We had a team one year ago; we were 0-14 in our league. We got blitzed by 30 points regularly each game. But that team, no one ever quit and all nine seniors went on to a four-year college. In my eyes, we did everything we could, and that was a championship season.”
His personal formula for winning is simple. “My philosophy with all of my players and students is: family comes first, school is second, and sports activities come after that. Find something that you really enjoy doing, and maybe you can pursue that thing as a career. I never wanted to have to go to work and everyday wake up and not be excited to go to work. I hear too many stories of people who go to work because they have to pay the bills. I love being paid for this job but I would probably do it without being paid. When I wake up in the morning I’m excited to go to work.”
He does have one confession, however. “Right now with coaching and being a head counselor, I don’t have much head time. But if I did have spare time, I would probably try and play golf."
* This article was originally published in Nikkei Heritage Vol. XVIII, Number 2 (Winter 2006), a journal of the National Japanese American Historical Society .
© 2006 National Japanese American Historical Society
Monday, March 8, 2010
ts Scott Fujita a champion for New Orleans, coastal restoration
Scott Fujita a champion for New Orleans, coastal restoration
By Bob Marshall, The Times-Picayune
March 07, 2010, 5:34AM
This column was going to be about why Scott Fujita, New Orleans Saints linebacker, is a great role model for local football fans. But upon further review, I had to change that call.
Michael DeMocker/The Times-PicayuneLinebacker Scott Fujita, holding one of his daughters after the New Orleans Saints' Super Bowl victory, says he and his family felt compelled 'to protect the city we have come to love so much.'Now it's: Scott Fujita, New Orleans resident, is a great role model for all New Orleanians.
The reason I'm putting him on a pedestal is not because of his work on the football field, but because of what he has chosen to do as a citizen with the rewards of that labor.
Fujita has decided to donate half of his $82,000 in NFL playoff earnings to two causes, one of which is coastal restoration.
His reasons?
"The people of this city and region have been so good to me and my family that we just felt strongly about doing something to protect the city we have come to love so much, " Fujita said. "And helping on the coastal issue has been on the back of my mind since I first got here."
Fujita first got here in the spring of 2006 when a mention of New Orleans to those outside the city evoked mostly pity and criticism. Pity, for the suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina. Criticism, from certain quarters that some of us will never forgive, because we were stupid for living here, we were dumb to have been flooded, and this city had no future and should be razed or moved.
Fujita heard it all when he was with the Dallas Cowboys - and he still moved his family here.
"People thought we were crazy when we first signed, " said Fujita, who always speaks of himself as a family collective that includes his wife, Jaclyn and two daughters. "We got a lot of the stuff about the destruction, the uncertain future, the safety issues. You know, the 'Who would want to live there.' stuff. "
But the opportunity to put his notoriety as professional athlete to work on a social struggle had a special appeal to a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. And as it turned out, the chance to be a do-gooder was just lagniappe. Fujita quickly fell in love with the unique flavor and character of the city and its eclectic collection of residents.
"You always hear about southern hospitality, but I experienced it from my first days here, " Fujita recalled. "I was living in a residence hotel for the first few weeks while we looked for a place in town, and spent that time just walking around the city and bar hopping, getting to know the place.
"Well, when people found out I was moving here from another city, I couldn't pay for a drink. They didn't know I was an NFL player. They just knew I was a guy who had come to join them, and that was it - I was a hero. I don't think I paid for a drink for the first three or four weeks."
As the months passed Fujita said his family fell in love with the idea of New Orleans.
"It's just such a unique place, with a unique character and way of life, " he said. "It has a blend of the Old World and the Caribbean.
"My wife and I have traveled extensively, and this is the perfect blend of cultures, great food and great music."
He put his love for the city to work, getting involved in many causes that were asking for help as the city continued rebuilding. Fujita's teammates voted him the Saints Man of The Year for 2008, which honors the player who has done the most for the community.
The love affair hasn't been one-way. The emotional lift the newly winning Saints gave the community has been well documented. And if any corner of the planet wasn't aware of the special bond between the team and the Who Dat Nation, they couldn't escape it after the Super Bowl.
Fujita, who has been among the most vocal Saints about the team's commitment to the city and its sense of mission, had already decided he wanted to do something more than bring back the Lombardi Trophy.
"Jaclyn and I were looking not just for a cause to donate to, but more importantly something we believe in, something we think we could actually make a difference in by using the visibility of the New Orleans Saints, " he said. "And the coastal issue had been in the back of my mind almost since I got here."
The Audubon Institute IMAX film "Hurricane on the Bayou" had awoken Fujita to the problem. Later readings informed him that the crisis was reaching the critical stage on the other sides of the levees, a crisis that imperils the city he has grown to love.
"I read somewhere that we're losing a football field every hour, and for a kid from California, that sounds like a whole lot, " he said. "Then I read somewhere else where a certain amount of vegetated wetlands could reduce storm surge by a foot, and to me that sounds like a lot, too."
So about $20,000 of that $82,000 will go to one or more groups working for that cause.
"This place have given us so much, we feel a responsibility to give something back, " Fujita said.
That last line convinced me Scott Fujita is the proper role model for his fellow New Orleanians. Because he gets it. He not only understands there's a serious problem that threatens the very future of the city and region. He and his family also understand its their responsibility as citizens to do something about it.
Sadly, that decision puts the Fujitas far ahead of most residents who were raised here.
The general level of awareness or concern about the problem just beyond our front doors was on display a few months ago when President Obama held a Town Hall meeting here; he wasn't asked a single question about coastal restoration. And it was evident again in the recent mayoral election; the threat wetlands loss poses to the city were never an issue, nor was it the topic at any of the many candidate forums.
But the Fujitas get it. They get the threat to this place they love, and the responsibility they have as citizens to be involved. So much so, in fact, that Fujita said he will honor his pledge, even if he is lost to the Saints during this free agent period.
"Of course we'll keep the commitment, " he said. "This place has given us too much."
And, in case you're wondering, the Fujitas also take seriously their responsibilities as citizens of the planet: The other half of that gift is going to Haitian relief.
(Coastal groups wishing to contact Scott Fujita can do so through his Web site.
Bob Marshall can be reached at 504.826.3539 or bmarshall@timespicayune.com.
By Bob Marshall, The Times-Picayune
March 07, 2010, 5:34AM
This column was going to be about why Scott Fujita, New Orleans Saints linebacker, is a great role model for local football fans. But upon further review, I had to change that call.
Michael DeMocker/The Times-PicayuneLinebacker Scott Fujita, holding one of his daughters after the New Orleans Saints' Super Bowl victory, says he and his family felt compelled 'to protect the city we have come to love so much.'Now it's: Scott Fujita, New Orleans resident, is a great role model for all New Orleanians.
The reason I'm putting him on a pedestal is not because of his work on the football field, but because of what he has chosen to do as a citizen with the rewards of that labor.
Fujita has decided to donate half of his $82,000 in NFL playoff earnings to two causes, one of which is coastal restoration.
His reasons?
"The people of this city and region have been so good to me and my family that we just felt strongly about doing something to protect the city we have come to love so much, " Fujita said. "And helping on the coastal issue has been on the back of my mind since I first got here."
Fujita first got here in the spring of 2006 when a mention of New Orleans to those outside the city evoked mostly pity and criticism. Pity, for the suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina. Criticism, from certain quarters that some of us will never forgive, because we were stupid for living here, we were dumb to have been flooded, and this city had no future and should be razed or moved.
Fujita heard it all when he was with the Dallas Cowboys - and he still moved his family here.
"People thought we were crazy when we first signed, " said Fujita, who always speaks of himself as a family collective that includes his wife, Jaclyn and two daughters. "We got a lot of the stuff about the destruction, the uncertain future, the safety issues. You know, the 'Who would want to live there.' stuff. "
But the opportunity to put his notoriety as professional athlete to work on a social struggle had a special appeal to a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. And as it turned out, the chance to be a do-gooder was just lagniappe. Fujita quickly fell in love with the unique flavor and character of the city and its eclectic collection of residents.
"You always hear about southern hospitality, but I experienced it from my first days here, " Fujita recalled. "I was living in a residence hotel for the first few weeks while we looked for a place in town, and spent that time just walking around the city and bar hopping, getting to know the place.
"Well, when people found out I was moving here from another city, I couldn't pay for a drink. They didn't know I was an NFL player. They just knew I was a guy who had come to join them, and that was it - I was a hero. I don't think I paid for a drink for the first three or four weeks."
As the months passed Fujita said his family fell in love with the idea of New Orleans.
"It's just such a unique place, with a unique character and way of life, " he said. "It has a blend of the Old World and the Caribbean.
"My wife and I have traveled extensively, and this is the perfect blend of cultures, great food and great music."
He put his love for the city to work, getting involved in many causes that were asking for help as the city continued rebuilding. Fujita's teammates voted him the Saints Man of The Year for 2008, which honors the player who has done the most for the community.
The love affair hasn't been one-way. The emotional lift the newly winning Saints gave the community has been well documented. And if any corner of the planet wasn't aware of the special bond between the team and the Who Dat Nation, they couldn't escape it after the Super Bowl.
Fujita, who has been among the most vocal Saints about the team's commitment to the city and its sense of mission, had already decided he wanted to do something more than bring back the Lombardi Trophy.
"Jaclyn and I were looking not just for a cause to donate to, but more importantly something we believe in, something we think we could actually make a difference in by using the visibility of the New Orleans Saints, " he said. "And the coastal issue had been in the back of my mind almost since I got here."
The Audubon Institute IMAX film "Hurricane on the Bayou" had awoken Fujita to the problem. Later readings informed him that the crisis was reaching the critical stage on the other sides of the levees, a crisis that imperils the city he has grown to love.
"I read somewhere that we're losing a football field every hour, and for a kid from California, that sounds like a whole lot, " he said. "Then I read somewhere else where a certain amount of vegetated wetlands could reduce storm surge by a foot, and to me that sounds like a lot, too."
So about $20,000 of that $82,000 will go to one or more groups working for that cause.
"This place have given us so much, we feel a responsibility to give something back, " Fujita said.
That last line convinced me Scott Fujita is the proper role model for his fellow New Orleanians. Because he gets it. He not only understands there's a serious problem that threatens the very future of the city and region. He and his family also understand its their responsibility as citizens to do something about it.
Sadly, that decision puts the Fujitas far ahead of most residents who were raised here.
The general level of awareness or concern about the problem just beyond our front doors was on display a few months ago when President Obama held a Town Hall meeting here; he wasn't asked a single question about coastal restoration. And it was evident again in the recent mayoral election; the threat wetlands loss poses to the city were never an issue, nor was it the topic at any of the many candidate forums.
But the Fujitas get it. They get the threat to this place they love, and the responsibility they have as citizens to be involved. So much so, in fact, that Fujita said he will honor his pledge, even if he is lost to the Saints during this free agent period.
"Of course we'll keep the commitment, " he said. "This place has given us too much."
And, in case you're wondering, the Fujitas also take seriously their responsibilities as citizens of the planet: The other half of that gift is going to Haitian relief.
(Coastal groups wishing to contact Scott Fujita can do so through his Web site.
Bob Marshall can be reached at 504.826.3539 or bmarshall@timespicayune.com.
Scott Fujita knows the
Scott Fujita knows the right way to leave a city
By MJD
It was heartwarming when the long-downtrodden Saints won the Super Bowl. It didn't get any less heartwarming when Drew Brees(notes) made the media rounds in the weeks after the game, establishing himself as the sweetest and most humble man in America.
Apparently, everyone on the entire team was an absolute ray of sunshine.
Scott Fujita(notes), a somewhat unheralded linebacker on that Super Bowl team, recently signed as a free agent with the Cleveland Browns. Before leaving town, though, Fujita did one more thing for the people of New Orleans: He gave half of his Super Bowl check to charity, half of that going to relief efforts in Haiti, and the other half going to coastal restoration in New Orleans. From nola.com:
"The people of this city and region have been so good to me and my family that we just felt strongly about doing something to protect the city we have come to love so much, " Fujita said. "And helping on the coastal issue has been on the back of my mind since I first got here."
Take note, other free agents. That's how you leave a city. So far, the bar has been set at "hold a tearful press conference" or "thank the fans in a full-page newspaper ad" for a classy exit. Scott Fujita just raised it.
Anyway, he's Cleveland's now, and if he'd like to continue his streak of doing charitable things for cities in which he plays, I'm sure he'll find an option or two in Cleveland.
By MJD
It was heartwarming when the long-downtrodden Saints won the Super Bowl. It didn't get any less heartwarming when Drew Brees(notes) made the media rounds in the weeks after the game, establishing himself as the sweetest and most humble man in America.
Apparently, everyone on the entire team was an absolute ray of sunshine.
Scott Fujita(notes), a somewhat unheralded linebacker on that Super Bowl team, recently signed as a free agent with the Cleveland Browns. Before leaving town, though, Fujita did one more thing for the people of New Orleans: He gave half of his Super Bowl check to charity, half of that going to relief efforts in Haiti, and the other half going to coastal restoration in New Orleans. From nola.com:
"The people of this city and region have been so good to me and my family that we just felt strongly about doing something to protect the city we have come to love so much, " Fujita said. "And helping on the coastal issue has been on the back of my mind since I first got here."
Take note, other free agents. That's how you leave a city. So far, the bar has been set at "hold a tearful press conference" or "thank the fans in a full-page newspaper ad" for a classy exit. Scott Fujita just raised it.
Anyway, he's Cleveland's now, and if he'd like to continue his streak of doing charitable things for cities in which he plays, I'm sure he'll find an option or two in Cleveland.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
McClatchy-Kennedy rivalry galvanizes Asian American community
McClatchy-Kennedy rivalry galvanizes Asian American community
avoisin@sacbee.com
Published Sunday, Mar. 07, 2010
The McClatchy Lions and Kennedy Cougars have tussled for decades, their prep rivalry among the most ferocious in the region. Yet sometimes – especially within Sacramento's Asian American community during tournament time – the dynamics become confusing, confounding, overwhelming.
Imagine cheering against your sister or your son? Shoving an elbow into the abdomen of a best friend? Marrying someone whose letter jacket is McClatchy red when yours is Kennedy green?
"I'm still a Cougar," insisted Julie Ota, a former All-City player at Kennedy. "My husband was All-City at McClatchy and now coaches at McClatchy. And our daughter plays for McClatchy. So as you can imagine, we have some pretty interesting conversations."
What makes this rivalry between schools five miles apart so uniquely fascinating is that its fan base encompasses much of the region's Asian community and, in some respects, traces back to the early 1940s, when an estimated 120,000 residents of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps.
Baseball was far more popular among Asians before World War II, but basketball leagues featuring males and females flourished in the camps. When the final camp closed in 1946 and the Japanese were relocated, they formed leagues throughout the country, with basketball a primary means of furthering traditions and securing cultural and social bonds among families.
"When we relocated, we had to form our own leagues because of segregation," recalled Tsuto Ota, 83, the family patriarch and a native Sacramentan who spent four years at Tule Lake. "We couldn't even join the American Bowling Congress, so we started our own bowling leagues, too.
"At some point, we became more assimilated, and while some still played baseball, basketball became more and more popular among younger generations."
Girls game on the rise
Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation officials estimate 850 to 1,000 area youngsters – many as young as 5 or 6 – compete in Asian church or instructional leagues, or play for club teams and Amateur Athletic Union squads. The number of participants is estimated at more than 10,000 in Southern California and several thousand in the Bay Area.
The advantages of competing extensively in organized basketball programs has benefited the area's boys prep teams for years, but lately, the girls are the ones moving up the rankings, storming the court and packing the stands.
When the Kennedy and McClatchy girls teams were ranked Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, their Jan. 23 meeting at McClatchy's main gym attracted a raucous, sold-out crowd. Another 50 or so partisans – relatives, friends, friends of friends – had to peer through the narrow windows from outside.
The scene inside was a vivid spectacle of sports and community, and except for the sellout part, was repeated Wednesday night, when the teams met in a California Interscholastic Federation Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal at the much larger Pacific facility in Stockton.
The Legion of Lions fan club members occupied sections of bleachers and stood throughout. They painted assorted body parts red, their voices raised to heckle the Cougars and applaud McClatchy. Across the court, members of Kennedy's Green Scream Machine maintained an equally vocal and colorful presence.
"The kids play on other teams at other times of the year, but the epicenter is Kennedy and McClatchy," said Rod Kunisaki, former president of the Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation and father of former Lions star and current assistant Jessica Kunisaki.
"When Jessica lost to Kennedy, some of those other kids were my cousins. But I would tell them: 'You can't come over to the house for three days. (Laugh) Don't even knock on the door.' "
Take a closer look, though, and the audience reflects basketball's increasing significance within the Asian community, with almost everyone related or connected to someone favoring the opponent's color; after awhile, the colors begin to blur.
"Some of us have been playing together since we were in middle school," said Kennedy forward Leslie Leong, "and our parents and grandparents are good friends. And while we're competitive, one of the best things about playing are the socials and the dances afterward.
"I don't want to say basketball is our life, but it's a very big part of our life from the time we're little kids."
Friends become family
When teary Lions senior Tricia Ota limped off the court Wednesday night, her left leg protected by a balky brace, she was embraced by several of her opponents. Having overcome multiple knee surgeries since her freshman season, she rejoined the team only weeks ago to put a glossier finish on her basketball experience and give a close friend a fond farewell.
"When we won the section title three years ago," said Ota, "that was the best moment of my life. I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this.
"It's not just a sport. Ariel and I have been together since freshman year, and she has been so supportive of me through everything. She has become one of my best friends. We're so appreciative that she stayed at McClatchy."
Ariel, of course, is the highly recruited Ariel Thomas, a Bee Player of the Year candidate and future member of Paul Westhead's squad at Oregon. Thomas, who is African American, is everything most of the current Lions are not: quick and athletic, tall enough to excel at the next level, and owner of a major college basketball scholarship.
One of the issues confronting the McClatchy girls team is increasingly common to the boys – Thomas routinely was approached and urged to transfer to a more dominant program such as Sacramento High School or Kennedy.
"We don't have a lot of post players," joked Lions coach Harvey Tahara, who enjoyed previous success coaching the boys. "If we've got a kid who is 5-5 or 5-6, they're automatically in the post. That's probably why the girls have become more dominant.
"Size is more of a factor for boys at the high school level. But we were able to build around Ariel, and the fact she stayed says a lot about her loyalty."
Thomas resisted pressure to transfer from her father, among others. Despite occasional frustrations, she has no regrets.
"Most of the teams we play against are taller," she said, "and other players look down on you, like, 'Wow, your team is so short.'
"But we maximize our strengths, which is a great coach, fundamentals and teamwork. We try to run them (foes) out of the gym. Plus, these are my close friends. McClatchy has become a family to me."
Blurring the lines
The thorniest issue facing the Asian leagues involves the very definition of family, or ethnicity. Through the years, leagues originally restricted to Japanese expanded to include other Asians. As intermarriage and assimilation persists, this has led to other questions regarding ethnicity and eligibility.
"If you look at most of the leagues," said Christina Chin, a UC Davis graduate and UCLA doctoral student who has written about basketball's influence on the Asian community, "the numbers vary a lot. It's very informal. What percentage of you has to be Asian to compete? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?
"These leagues were started because of segregation, so Japanese Americans had their own space and could preserve their culture. But in my research, what I have found is that the rules are changing. The older folks want to keep it the way it was, but the kids say, 'I think everybody should be able to play.' I believe the next generation will change and reflect those views."
In "Crossover," Justin Lin's 2000 documentary about the Japanese American leagues, 7-year-old Tricia Ota appears in one scene, dribbling a basketball. A decade later, after her Lions were routed by the more balanced Cougars, she was asked to look beyond the Northern California tournament that starts this week.
"I don't like the idea of having a league just for Asians," she said. "I like the idea of broadening (the rosters) on the church and club teams. One of the leagues in (the Bay Area) didn't let one of our teammates (St. Francis' Aurora Singh) play in a tournament last summer, so we all decided not to play. We didn't feel it was right.
"Basketball isn't supposed to be about that. It's not just a sport."
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Wallenberg 61, Washington 52
Riding a breakout performance from senior forward Garrett Moon, Wallenberg High School withstood a frantic Washington High School run to prevail over the Eagles 61-52 in the AAA semifinals on Wednesday at Kezar Pavilion.
Wallenberg senior forward Garrett Moon rises above Washington's Brenden Glapion in the Bulldogs' 61-52 win in the AAA semifinals on Wednesday at Kezar Pavilion. (Photo by Devin Chen)
From Sanfranpreps.com
by - Jeremy Balan
Moon had a game-high 31 points and took control of the game when Washington (23-9) erased a 13-point third-quarter deficit, taking its own 45-43 lead with 4:38 remaining in the fourth quarter.
Moon responded, taking back the lead by scoring four consecutive points on driving attacks at the basket.
“He understood we needed him right then,” Wallenberg Head Coach Patrick Mulligan said of Moon’s surge. “We’ve ridden him all year.”
Washington never got the lead back as Wallenberg (21-6) pounded the ball inside, through 6-foot-7 senior center Christopher Fontaine.
Fontaine had eight of his 12 total points in the final quarter, including a thundering dunk to cap the victory with 10 seconds remaining.
Even with the loss, Washington Head Coach Jolinko Lassiter was impressed with the Eagles moxie down the stretch.
“We had eight minutes left in our season and we were able to give all we had,” Lassiter said. “Ultimately their size counteracted our speed in the end. If we play one more quarter, it may have been different.”
Three Washington players scored in double-figures, led by senior guard Byron Jones who had a team-high 15 points. Junior guard Jeremy Jetton added 12 points, despite battling foul trouble in the first half.
Wallenberg senior forward Garrett Moon rises above Washington's Brenden Glapion in the Bulldogs' 61-52 win in the AAA semifinals on Wednesday at Kezar Pavilion. (Photo by Devin Chen)
From Sanfranpreps.com
by - Jeremy Balan
Moon had a game-high 31 points and took control of the game when Washington (23-9) erased a 13-point third-quarter deficit, taking its own 45-43 lead with 4:38 remaining in the fourth quarter.
Moon responded, taking back the lead by scoring four consecutive points on driving attacks at the basket.
“He understood we needed him right then,” Wallenberg Head Coach Patrick Mulligan said of Moon’s surge. “We’ve ridden him all year.”
Washington never got the lead back as Wallenberg (21-6) pounded the ball inside, through 6-foot-7 senior center Christopher Fontaine.
Fontaine had eight of his 12 total points in the final quarter, including a thundering dunk to cap the victory with 10 seconds remaining.
Even with the loss, Washington Head Coach Jolinko Lassiter was impressed with the Eagles moxie down the stretch.
“We had eight minutes left in our season and we were able to give all we had,” Lassiter said. “Ultimately their size counteracted our speed in the end. If we play one more quarter, it may have been different.”
Three Washington players scored in double-figures, led by senior guard Byron Jones who had a team-high 15 points. Junior guard Jeremy Jetton added 12 points, despite battling foul trouble in the first half.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Washington 72, O’Connell 66
Washington senior Byron Jones rised up for a pass between two O'Connell defenders in the Eagles' 72-66 win in the AAA quarterfinals on Friday at Washington High School. (Photo by Devin Chen)From Sanfranpreps.com
by - Jeremy Balan
Washington High School withstood a transcendent performance from O’Connell High School’s Anthony Moody in its 72-66 win in the quarterfinal round of the AAA playoffs on Friday.
Moody had a game-high 38 points, scoring seemingly every way possible, from acrobatic layups to contested fadeaway three-pointers.
“When you have a guy who can shoot like that, especially as deep as he was hitting shots, it makes everyone else on the floor better,” said Washington Head Coach Jolinko Lassiter.
Although Moody, in his final game as a senior, did everything he could to will the Boilermakers (12-16) to victory, Washington prevailed in a game that featured six lead changes and 11 ties.
Washington (23-8) was led by junior point guard Brenden Glapion who scored a team-high 20 points, most on driving layups and on fast-break opportunities.
“He was able to go out and take control of the game when it was on the line,” Lassiter said.
O’Connell led through most of the first three quarters but gave up the lead late in the third and Washington didn’t give it up.
Even with the loss, O’Connell Head Coach Armando Pazos, after his final game for the Boilermakers after eight years of coaching, was happy with his team’s performance.
“They played their asses off,” Pazos said. “Every one of them left all they had on the floor. We just came up a little short.”
- Jeremy Balan
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