Sports Then and Now

Babe Didrikson Zaharias was the most successful female athlete of her generation.

The LPGA will crown its 2011 champion later today, but it was on this date 100 years ago that one of the catalysts for the LPGA and the greatest female athlete of all-time was born.

Though there have been many great female athletes, none has ever been able to duplicate the athletic prowess or cross into the world of men’s sports with quite as much success as Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

Whether competing in basketball, baseball track and field or golf, Zaharias wasn’t just considered to be “pretty good for a girl”, she was generally recognized as being a special athlete.

While Zaharias first enjoyed success in basketball, leading her team to a 1931 AAU Championship, it was track and field where she initially gained a larger following.

In the Spring of 1932 she entered the Amateur Track and Field Championships in Evanston, Illinois as the lone team member for the Employers Casualty Insurance Company of Dallas, Texas. Competing against teams that included as many as 22 women, the “one-woman track team” dominated the competition.

Zaharias won five events (broad jump, shot-put, javelin, 80-meter hurdles and the baseball throw) and tied for first in the high jump. She earned 30 total points in the team competition to finish well in front of the second place Illinois Women’s Athletic Club, which had 22 athletes and scored 22 points.

As a result of her amazing one-woman performance, Zaharias qualified for three events at the 1932 Summer Olympics, which were held in Los Angeles. She won the Olympic Gold Medal in the 80-meter hurdles and javelin and finished second in the high jump. Read the rest of this entry →

By the end of the 1960’s the West Indies, under the inspired leadership of the game’s greatest ever player, Sir Garfield Sobers, had established themselves as the dominant cricket team in the world. Fifty years later they are almost nowhere to be seen!

The decline of cricket in the West Indies probably began in the mid 1980s but only became truly noticeable ten years or so later. At that time they still had the basis of a very strong bowling attack with Courtney Walsh and Curtley Ambrose assuming the mantle from the formidable quicks of the past. Bowlers such as Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Gardner and Andy Roberts to name but just a few who were all capable of putting the fear of the God’s into any batsman brave enough to face them at the crease, never failing to take wickets in the process.

In the 90s they also had Brian Lara, who arguably was the best batsman on the planet at that time, although Sachin Tendulkar fans would argue vehemently to the contrary. Lara came off the same conveyor belt of batsman as those before him, players who would play with ferocity, flair, style, timing and always with golden smiles on their relaxed faces. Who could possibly forget the contributions made at the crease by the likes of Sobers, Sir Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd, Desmond Haynes, Gordon Greenidge and Alvin Kallicharan?

From 1976 until 1991, the West Indies won 59 of 122 tests played, losing only 16 and were easily the best test team in the world. They soon became the best one day team in the world too, particularly once that version of the game began to flourish worldwide. Had T20 been around during those days, the other countries simply would not have turned up for the T20 World Cup, it would have been totally unfair.

Throughout the last century, each generation of West Indies cricket teams spawned their successors, cricket was the only game in those beautiful islands that anyone wanted to play. The stadium’s were crammed every match with the most colourful and musical crowds seen anywhere in the game. They were usually royally entertained by one or two outstanding innings played by one or two of their many outstanding batsmen. They relished too the cowering opposing batsman who had the temerity to stand up to their bowlers, before either having their wickets smashed or their fingers broken. It was often said that the short balls bowled by a West Indies bowler broke more hearts than it did digits!

Those halcyon days of West Indies cricket however seem to be over, other influences have arrived in the islands, mostly from their near neighbours, the USA. The extremely talented sportsmen the islands have always boasted are being tempted to try their hands at American sports while others take advantage of the educational facilities that become available to them from the States. Olympic Games 100 metre sprint champion, Usain Bolt, is a typical example of what outstanding athleticism can earn. He is already a multi-millionaire which is something that would have been impossible for him to achieve had he taken up his first sporting love, cricket, as his sport.

Many others are finding themselves involved in professional baseball and basketball, where money is the incentive and cricket is the forgotten. TV audiences in the country switch on to American TV these days dragging them further away from their sporting heritage and their potential future players further away from the game.

As it stands currently, the West Indies are ranked as the number seven of nine test playing teams in the world and are at number eight in the ODI rankings. Some are even suggesting that they may have to qualify to be involved in the next ODI World Cup, with teams like Zimbabwe, the Netherlands and Ireland threatening their position. All in all, it is a very sad demise and one as Michael Holding once said that they will never recover from.

Their current performances on in the series against India is evidence of just how far behind the West Indies have fall behind the game’s elite.

There hasn't been a lot for Portland Trail Blazer fans to smile about since the selection of Greg Oden in the 2007 NBA Draft.

The announcement this week that Portland Trail Blazer center Greg Oden is out for the year while undergoing microfracture surgery for the second time in four years is simply the equivalent of tossing more salt into an old wound for Trail Blazer fans.

When Portland management made the decision in the spring of 2007 to bypass Texas forward Kevin Durant and choose Ohio State center Greg Oden with the first pick in the NBA Draft, fans hoped the move would work out better than a similar decision 23 years earlier.

In 1984, the Trail Blazers passed on selecting a young guard from North Carolina with the second pick in the NBA Draft to instead shore up their frontcourt with Kentucky big man Sam Bowie.

Over the next five seasons, Bowie would average 10.5 points per contest while playing in a grand total of 139 games for the Trail Blazers. Conversely, during those same five seasons, Michael Jordan claimed three of what would ultimately be 10 NBA scoring titles while building the Chicago Bulls into a franchise that would claim six NBA titles in the 1990s.

The reasoning at the time was that Jordan played a similar position to that of Clyde Drexler, who Portland had drafted the previous season out of the University of Houston. Drexler would go on to make eight All-Star appearances with the Trail Blazers and twice lead the team into the NBA Championship Series (including once against Jordan’s Bulls), but would never lead Portland to the title.

Similarly, when Portland approached the 2007 NBA Draft they felt second year swingman Brandon Roy was comparable in position and ability to Durant and instead needed to use the draft choice to enhance their frontcourt. Ironically, it was Roy who had represented the team at the NBA Lottery when they had received the top selection. Read the rest of this entry →

The damage had been done.

Whether through insensitivity, ignorance, or just plain incompetence, an athlete was victimized in one of sport’s most embarrassing atrocities.

South African 800-meter world champion Caster Semenya was publicly stripped (of her dignity), raped (of her privacy), and disemboweled (of her physiology) by medical experts, governing sports entities, and news media.

Semenya was effectively banned from competition after her stunning 2009 victory in Berlin’s World Championships. Her rapid week-to-week improvement and her impressive world-leading time in the finals (1:55.45) prompted an intrusive gender verification process which left no piece of the champion’s persona hidden.

During the eleven-month ordeal, the black cloud of suspicion and controversy which fell first on Semenya, suddenly moved to cast its shadow on the various governing powers whose charge it was to protect the athlete.

Still, the damage had been done.

But as it is said, “…every dark cloud has its silver lining.”

Yes, after an excruciating delay, Semenya was finally cleared by Track and Field’s governing body (IAAF) to compete as a woman. Read the rest of this entry →

Billy Mills is the only American to win a gold medal in the 10,000 meter run.

“You have to look deeper, way below the anger, the hurt, the hate, the jealousy, the self-pity; way down deeper, where the dreams lie, son. Find your dream. It’s the pursuit of the dream that heals you.”

These are the words of a Lakota (Sioux) father to his young son struggling with the whys of poverty, adversity, and racism in 1940s America.

When the young Oglala Lakota brave was 12 years old his father died, leaving him an orphan. Wisely, he took his father’s advice and pursued sports in his quest to find that dream.

Football and boxing filled the void for a time, but the young lad discovered a special connection to his inner dream when he took up distance running.

“All I had was the pursuit of a dream: I wanted to be an Olympian,” the boy would later say.

He was a natural. He found success in high school, setting numerous school records. Bill Easton, the track coach at the University of Kansas, was impressed with the gangly youngster and offered him a track scholarship.

Opportunity knocked…and Billy Mills opened the door.

Read the rest of this entry →