Handstands and Splits—Just Another Day in the Classroom

“Mr. K, want to see me do a handstand?” asked fifth grader Stephanie at the start of the day. She had respectfully waited until after the morning announcements and flag salute to make the offer. Poised at the rear of the classroom, she was eager to demonstrate her acrobatic prowess.

Not right now, Steph, I told her. We have to get started on literacy.

“How about a split then?” And before I could respond, she had dropped to the floor, effortlessly scissoring out her legs. “Try it,” she said, encouragingly.

Maybe later, I lied. Let’s get started on our lesson.

Not just yet. Emboldened perhaps by the floor exercise, Carly approached my desk. “Did you know, Mr. K, that I want to be a Rockette?”

I assured her that I was unaware of that.

“I saw the Rockettes at the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall,” she said. “I really liked it. So I think I’d like to be one of them when I grow up. I'm taking ballet lessons now.”

I told her that I did not know anyone who was a Rockette, and that she would be the first if she realized her dream.

“Yeah, but if I don’t make it, I’ll be a teacher,” she said.

Always good to have a backup plan in place.

Special

“Mr. K, you come to my house for dinner tonight?” asked an ever-cheerful fourth grader.
I don’t know where you live, I told him.
“Park Ridge. You come.”
O.K., I’ll see. What’s for dinner? I asked.
“Taco Bell. You like Taco Bell?”
No, I told him.
“You're funny, Mr. K.”

One of his classmates approached me somewhat guardedly, requesting privacy from the other children and their aides in the classroom. “Can we talk, Mr. K?” he asked, gently steering me away from his desk. He put his arm around me and had me bend low so he could whisper in my ear.

What’s wrong? I asked. How can I help?
“Can I have some chocolate milk?” 

Cliff Hagan and Kentucky’s Undefeated (But Not Championship) Team

Tonight’s Sweet 16 game in Indianapolis features a head-to-head match between the last two NCAA champions:  Louisville (31-5), which won last season, vs. in-state rival Kentucky (26-10), the 2012 title holder.

Louisville advanced last Saturday after defeating Saint Louis. A day later, Kentucky knocked off Wichita State, which had won all 35 of its games and had hoped to become the first undefeated college basketball champion since Indiana in 1976. In all, there have been just three other schools (San Francisco, 1956; North Carolina, 1957; and UCLA, 1964, ’67, ’72, and ’73) to go through the season and tournament without a single loss.

Kentucky’s total of seven national championships is second only to UCLA’s 11. (Louisville has two). Sixty years ago, Kentucky went 25-0 but did not win an NCAA title. Here is the background—and my story from Street & Smith’s 100 Greatest College Basketball Players—on that season for the Wildcats and their leader, Cliff Hagan.

High in the firmament of Kentucky basketball stars is Cliff Hagan, one of just three Wildcats in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. (The others are Frank Ramsey and Dan Issel.) Hagan was inducted in 1978 after a stellar amateur and professional career.

Born Dec. 9, 1931, in Owensboro, Ky., Hagan was a three-time all-state player at Owensboro Senior High, which he led to a state title in 1949 after scoring a then-record 41 points in the championship game.

“Cliff had probably the greatest hook shot that the good Lord ever saw,” said Ralph Beard, who preceded Hagan at the university. “He was only 6-4 ½ at most, but he’d take the big dudes in and his extension of his arms would prevent any of them from blocking his shots. He could lay it on the floor and he could score on anybody. Obviously he carried that into college.”

Happily for UK fans and coach Adolph Rupp, the college Hagan carried his game into was Kentucky. He led the Wildcats to 86 victories in 91 games, which included a 32-2 mark in his 1951 sophomore year, an eighth straight Southeastern Conference crown for UK, and the school’s third NCAA championship in four years (68-58 over Kansas State).

A year later, Hagan earned the first of his two consensus All-America honors. The Wildcats went 29-3 but were denied the opportunity to defend their title when they lost in the regional final.

In 1953 the NCAA imposed the death penalty on the school, banning it from competition for recruiting violations. Kentucky returned to the court the following season in a memorable game that saw Hagan score 51 points in a blowout win over Temple. He averaged 24 points and 13.5 rebounds, and again was named a consensus All-America, leading the Wildcats to a 25-0 record. Kentucky elected not to participate in the NCAA tournament after the NCAA ruled that Hagan and teammates Ramsey and Lou Tsioropoulos, as graduate students, were ineligible.

In 1974, Hagan was named to the Southeastern Conference all-time team and enshrined in the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame. In 2002, in recognition of 100 years of Kentucky basketball, the Lexington Herald-Journal polled a panel of writers, broadcasters, and former university coaches and personnel to determine the top players in school history. Only Issel and Beard received more votes than Hagan.

Jim Fregosi

Word came that former Major League Baseball player and manager Jim Fregosi, 71, suffered a series of strokes while on a cruise in the Caribbean with other MLB alumni. He passed away on Friday. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to his family.

A six-time All-Star, Fregosi was famously traded to the New York Mets in 1971 for Nolan Ryan. After his 18-year playing career came to an end in 1978, he managed Ryan for two years on the California Angels. Fregosi also managed the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1990s. It was during his tenure with the Phillies that Fregosi was reunited with New York Post sportswriter Maury Allen, who covered the Mets in the 1960s and ’70s and wrote the National League East preview for Street & Smith's Baseball magazine for several years in the early ’90s.

Prior to the start of an early-season game between the Phillies and the Mets in 1993, Allen was hanging around the batting cage at Shea Stadium when catcher Darren Daulton approached him. “Fregosi wants to see you,” Daulton told him.

“Jim and I go way back,” Allen thought. “I’ve known him since he was a 19-year-old shortstop with the Angels. Probably just wants to say hello.”

When Allen walked into the Phillies clubhouse, he was met by Fregosi and half a dozen of his players, including Curt Schilling and John Kruk. “There he is, boys,” Fregosi said. “There’s the guy who picked us for last.”

Tiger at the Super Bowl Gates

“The Trojan War will not take place.” The noble, sensible Trojan chieftain Hector says this repeatedly throughout Jean Giraudoux’s sublime play Tiger at the Gates. With his wife, Andromache, pregnant, Hector is determined to preserve the peace between his country and Greece after the willful Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, has taken up with the Trojan Paris. Ultimately, though, Hector’s insistent plea (wishful thinking, really), spoken inside the gates of Troy, goes unheeded in an inexorable and fateful rush to battle.

As the snow fell and the temperature in the New York metropolitan area remained below freezing in late January, the day for the National Football League’s final skirmish approached. As surely everyone from Pershing Square to Persia knows by now, this Sunday will be the first time that the Super Bowl will be staged—and no sporting event is more staged than this game—outdoors (about 30 miles from New Jersey chieftain Chris Christie’s Sparta) in a cold-weather stadium.

And as I thought of the impending spectacle, and of all things bloated and self-important connected to the event, I was reminded of Hector’s futile words. Could they signify a contemporary football parallel? Where was the voice of reason during the original discussion over the site of this year’s Super Bowl? Was there no level-headed Hector in the NFL conference room when the debate took place? No one with the common sense to prevail over the lunatic consensus willing to risk leaving pro football’s championship to be determined by the vagaries of winter weather in the northeast?

Hector’s Greek counterpart Ulysses, dubious over the prospects of peaceful co-existence, is nevertheless persuaded by the steadfastness of Hector. Still, he offers a clear-eyed and damning conclusion about the inevitability of war. “One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophe from a terrace,” he tells Hector. For despite Hector’s brave insistence, because of a lie, the Greeks would eventually launch a thousand ships against Troy.

Could those words from Ulysses also help explain why and where the Super Bowl this weekend would take place? I picture NFL executives and their corporate business and media partners rolling in comfort and stylish charm in the sheltered, climate-controlled terrace of Met Life stadium’s luxury boxes, safely witnessing what could be a weather-affected catastrophe on the field.

And I wonder if the misguided decision to play the Super Bowl in a cold-weather stadium might have been different had the principals involved in the discussion been apprised that they would have to sit, Bowie Kuhn-style (sans overcoat and long underwear), among the non-privileged out in the uncomfortably bitter winter air.