This is my real time review of Real Sports on that originally aired Monday night, March 10, 2008 at 10 p.m. ET. I am watching a recording off my DVD. I’ll review the show as if I’m watching it for the first time (which I am).
This segment is reported by Andrea Kremer. Bruce Pearl is a successful basketball coach at the University of Tennessee. His team is expected to be a #1 seed in the upcoming NCAA Tournament. As Andrea’s report begins, we see that Pearl was introduced to Tennessee during a Midnight Madness season opening practice in 2005 when Pearl came out in a sumo wrestling costume and allowed a fan out of the stands to wrestle him. Pearl looked at the fan who was a student and told him, “You’re going down.” Not only did Pearl bodyslam the kid, but he also jumped on top of him. Pearl said he had a ball. I bet he did.
Since taking over the Volunteer program, Pearl has led Tennessee to two NCAA Tournament apparances and top 5 ranking this season, even ranked at #1 for a week. But he’s known for not only wearing that sumo wrestling costume at Midnight Madness 2005, but for wearing loud orange blazers on the sidelines and wearing body paint to show his support for women’s coach Pat Summit. He’s been criticized for drawing attention to himself, but he’s done it to bring a face to the men’s basketball program.
Pearl says when you think of Tennessee women’s basketball, you think of Pat Summit. When you think of Tennessee football, you think of Philip Fulmer. Pearl wanted to bring an identity to the men’s basketball program. He’s virtually a salesman for the team fanning out in the campus and the community to bring the program across the state. And it’s brought fans to games bringing sellouts this season.
His team plays a hellish defense and a fast break offense, matching the intensity of their coach on the sidelines. After beating #1 Memphis earlier this season, Pearl was the show as the Vols were greeted in Knoxville at 3 a.m.
It’s probably the most unlikilest of love affairs. A Jewish coach who has an ardent following in the Bible Belt. He’s the first Jewish coach of any sport at Tennessee. From Sharon, MA, Pearl is making it in the South. Pearl has had family members who have survived the Holocaust. He’s undergone anti-Semetism. He wears his religion on his sleeve and exposes it to his players. He says it’s something that Christians admire.
Senior guard Jordan Howell says Pearl uses religion in a way that doesn’t turn people off. Howell says Pearl is knelt in prayer before every game and so is he. He says there’s a mutual respect there because they both have faith. And Coach Pearl brought his team to a Nazi concentration camp during a basketball tour of Eastern Europe last summer. Pearl says every time he sees the names of those who parished having the same surnames of his family, he wonders what did they so wrong that got them to the camps. He says they have to visit places like that to know, never again. Howell says going to the camp helped bring the team together.
Pearl went to a Catholic school , Boston College because he wanted to break down stereotypes. A knee injury at age 15 prevented him from playing basketball so he tried to become BC’s mascot, the Eagle, but failed. So he became the basketball team’s manager instead. And he did fill in as the mascot during the 1981 NCAA Tournament during which he distracted one of Ball State’s players into missing two free throws and the NCAA wanted to throw Pearl out of the tournament.
Upon graduation, Pearl was ready to become a salesman, but coach Dr. Tom Davis was impressed with his work ethic that he gave him a chance to join his coaching staff at Stanford and again in Iowa. In 1988, Pearl was named by Basketball America as one of the Top 20 assistant coaches in America. But as fast he ascended the coaching ladder, he quickly became known as an assistant who ratted someone out.
In 1989, Pearl secretly recorded a conversation between he and recruit Deion Thomas who eventually went to Illinois. Pearl says Thomas admitted to him that Illinois paid him $80,000 and gave him a car. Pearl handed over the tape to the NCAA and says the allegations were true. Pearl says he secretly taped the conversation to right a wrong that happened in the recruiting process. But Pearl found out the hard way that fans and university presidents don’t want to know the truth and they wanted problems like these to go away. Thomas and llinois denied those allegations and were cleared by the NCAA of any wrongdoing. Illinois was found guilty of other improprieties and Pearl became a pariah in the coaching community. ESPN’s Dick Vitale said before a game that what Pearl did was wrong and unethical and Pearl committed “coaching suicide”. Pearl says those words stung and had a big effect on him and his children. But Pearl says he would do it again.
To get his first coaching job, Pearl went to a Division II school, Southern Indiana where he won a National Championship. He then went to a mid-major Division I school, UW-Milwaukeee where he guided the school to a Sweet 16 appearance. Finally, he made his way to Tennessee where he knows he under a big microscope. And he knows 19 years later, other coaches are watching him to make sure he runs a clean program. Pearl says he’s passed the test.
Women’s coach Pat Summit heads up one of the few programs that overshadow the men. She says she knows real people and fake people and she knows Pearl is genuine. She’s won 7 National Championships and seen 7 coaches come and go in her tenure. Summit says Pearl has brought an atmosphere at men’s games that now matches the women’s games. She says she never thought it would happen at Tennessee.
Even though he brought the school its first outright SEC title this season, he fights the perception that he’s more style than substance. He says he doesn’t care what other people think, he cares about what the students think, what the presidents think, those are who he serves and are those he cares about the most.
In the closing comments, Andrea says the coaches are criticizing him more for his antics than the incident that occured 19 years ago, but as Summit told her, the coaches are critical because he’s won in the SEC so quickly.
And Andrea said that Pearl expects to be contacted by Indiana University about its opening, but he says he’s not interested and wants to stay in Tennessee. We’ll see.
Grade – A. Very good segment and one worthy of leading off Real Sports.
Segment #2 – The Marshall Plan
Bryant Gumbel reports on Dr. Mike Marshall, the former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher who was a successful reliever, who says he’s developed a pain-free pitching motion that Marshall says is shunned by Major League Baseball. In Zephyr Hills, FL, about 30 miles outside of Tampa, there’s the Pitching Research & Training Center. The 65 year old Dr. Marshall runs the center where he preaches his gospel on the pain-free pitching motion.
Arm injuries are the scourge of Major League Baseball where pitchers constantly break down. Year after year, pitchers dot the Disabled List with one injury or another due to pitching motions that put enormous stress on arms. Dr. Marshall says he’s not surprised because the motion destroys pitching arms. He says Major League Baseball refuses to acknowledge that the pitching motion developed 100 years ago is at the heart of the problem. And it’s rather costly as star pitchers at the top of rotations get injured and have to miss time.
Dr. Marshall holds everyone accountable from those at the top of MLB to the pitching coaches like Dave Duncan of the St. Louis Cardinals, Leo Mazzone of the Baltimor
e Orioles and Rick Petersen of the Mets. There’s not a single pitching coach that Dr. Marshall likes. And he says you look at the injuries of the pitchers they train and he says they don’t know what they’re doing.
Marshall was one of the best relievers in baseball in the 1970’s, helping the Dodgers to a National League pennant in 1974 and becomeing the first reliever ever to win the Cy Young Award. Marshall did have his own arm problems, noticing that he had trouble shaving, bending or straightening his arm. So he started to research his own pitching motion. He earned a Ph.D. at Michigan State University in Exercise Physiology and mastered the physics of how the body moved. Using high speed cameras, he found that the pitching motion that he had been taught was destroying his arm. Dr. Marshall developed a new motion that not only was pain-free, but saved his arm and gave him plenty of velocity.
The motion basically has the pitcher face home plate instead of looking at it from the side and throwing off his back foot, the motion uses the other foot to maximize force and velocity. Dr. Marshall has lower level college players who pay $20 a day in hopes of getting a college scholarship or a minor league tryout. They throw 72 pitches a day. They throw footballs to get the proper spin. Garbage can lids to get the pronation. Iron balls to strengthen their shoulders. And use wrist weights to give power to the entire arm.
Marshall says he doesn’t know why his motion hadn’t been developed over 130 years of playing baseball. And he went on to coach at several schools after his playing career was over in 1981 before settling at West Texas State University in 1993.
Ther, he met Jeff Sparks, a pitching prospect who had a good arm, but lots of pain. Sparks made the adjustment to Marshall’s pitching motion within five years and actually made it to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays throwing the Marshall way. He was able to improve his fastball from 79 mph to 96 mph. In 1999 with the Devil Rays, Sparks pitched 30.1 innings, gathered 41 strikeouts and got the team’s best earned run average. But one bad outing of 16 pitches, only 2 for strikes and an argument with his catcher basically cost him and Marshall’s chance of legitimizing the arm motion. Sparks was out of the league after that season.
Devil Rays TV color analyst Joe Magrane says baseball is resistant to anything new. A former pitcher with the St. Louis Cardinals and other teams for 10 years, Magrane walked away after 3 elbow surgeries. Magrane does wonder if his career would have been different had he used Marshall’s motion and met with him last year. But he would have had to totally shun the motion he had been taught and the notion that pitching is an art, not a science.
While MLB has not warmed to the idea of Marshall’s message, some think it’s the messenger who’s the problem here. Even Marshall’s supporters call him nasty, acerbic and condescending. His relationship with MLB insiders as Gumbel calls it, is basically mutual contempt. Marshall says MLB “is not the intellectual capital of the world.”
Real Sports contacted over 20 GM’s and former players to talk about Marshall’s ideas, but none would take it up on the offer. Joe Magrane says the real challege is getting someone to throw Marshall’s way. And Sparks says if the program is brought in and is successful, pitching coaches around the league would either be out of work or would have to learn a new system and that isn’t going to happen.
In the meantime, Marshall offers his training video for free and answers questions from pitching hopefuls through his website. He’s still on the outside looking in and still hopes to find that one pitcher who will be able to prove that his system works. But Marshall says it’s doubtful with the talent that comes to his institute that that will happen. But he feels blessed to have been able to share his system with players everywhere.
In the closing comments, Bryant notes that the World Champion Red Sox saw 8 of their pitchers on the Disabled List last season.
Grade – A for content. F for Marshall’s arrogance. But I give it an A overall because Marshall actually makes sense.
Reported by Bernard Goldberg, this is a story on the former Mets and Phillies outfielder Lenny Dykstra. In his playing career, Dykstra was known as an intense player. During his career, he got one World Series with the Mets in 1986 and went to another World Series with the Phillies in 1993. A three-time All Star, Dykstra got the nickname “Nails” for his intensity and his no-nonsense play. But no one could have predicted his second career. When Dykstra retired from baseball ten years ago, he got into the financial world. In addition, he’s gone into publishing and he’s been most successful in a car wash business.
Dykstra is now respected. His predictions on stock and businesses have become true. One prediction on Compania de Minas, a Peruvian company, was correct, the stock tripling in value within three years.
Dykstra began his financial journey after he retired when he gave his stockbroker $2 million to invest. That money went into $400,000. Dykstra confronted his stockbroker asking, “What the fuck happened to my money?” Lenny says he made all types of excuses and didn’t know what he was talking about. Lenny says he was humiliated and vowed that he would never allow that to happen again. So he used the same skills that he learned in studying opponent’s pitchers into the financial world. He ordered every financial newsletter he could get his hands on. Dykstra admits he’s not a good reader so he bought CD’s and DVD’s and said he would take one year to learn everything.
Not only did he learn, he’s now very successful. To get to places where he has to fly, Dykstra takes private jets. He lives outside Los Angeles with his family in a home he bought from Wayne Gretzky for $17.5 million. And to get around town, he has a Maybach car that cost$400,000. To say Dykstra is living the high life is an understatement.
Dykstra’s philosophy on picking stocks is so complex that reporter Goldberg just could not understand it. But one person who knows finance is CNBC’s Jim Cramer. His Mad Money show is widely respected on Wall Street and Cramer says Dykstra is one of the great ones in the business. Cramer went to Harvard, worked at Goldman-Sachs, started his own hedge fund and made a fortune. One day, he got an e-mail from someone claiming to be Lenny Dykstra. After being skeptical, Cramer says Dykstra gave him some ideas and after reading them, Cramer said they were brilliant. Cramer says there are four or five people in the world he would take seriously on a stock and Dykstra is one of them.
But Lenny didn’t make his money in stocks at first. It came through his car washes. For his first car wash, an old woman’s house was sitting on property that Dykstra wanted. So he drew up a large check, like the one they have for Publisher’s Clearning House, in the amount of $1,000,000 and knocked on the door. The woman almost fainted. Lenny said, “Don’t die on me, I need that property!” And it worked. He opened his first car wash and two others followed. And he called his car wash, the “Taj Mahal” of car washes. Lenny says he really doesn’t know what the Taj Mahal is, someone called it that so he ran with it. But don’t think Lenny doesn’t make money on his car washes because he just recently sold them for $55 million.
Lenny says money is not a game to him. He takes it very seriously just like he did with baseball. Len
ny got into a fight with Dodger catcher Rick Dempsey because he was joking with the umpire.
Now, Dykstra is taking his intensity to publishing for a magazine called “Players Club”. It will be a money magazine for pro athletes.
When he was a kid and said he would be a Major League Baseball player, people laughed at Dykstra. It would not be the last time people would underestimate him. He says “We’ll see who’s laughing when you need a loan, motherfucker.” The man has not lost his intensity.
In the transition, even Gumbel could not believe that Dykstra could do this, but let him ask for a loan, motherfucker. Goldberg says it’s no act and just as he studied pitchers, he studies investing and does a great job at it. But Gumbel remains skeptical. Go ahead, Bryant. But Dykstra’s the one who has more money than you.
One thing that was also broached was the Mitchell Report in which Dykstra was named three times. Goldberg asked him about it and Dykstra’s response was “absolutely not,” he never took steroids. But afterwards, according to Goldberg, he said to Dykstra, “I hope you understand why I asked you that question.” And Goldberg says the response back was, “I hope you understand why I lied to you.” Goldberg says he had to reconcile what was said and called him later and Dykstra says, “I was only joking when I said I lied to you. I never used steroids.” Goldberg says his head is spinning and wants no more part of the story.
Other than that, the story gets an A+.
Segment #4 – C. Vivian Stringer
Now let’s move to a story first reported in 2001 on a coach who was on 800 games, gone to the Women’s Final Four three times with three different schools and has been respected in her profession. But most likely, people only got to hear about Vivian Stringer, the coach at Rutgers University when Don Imus made his comments last year. We join the story reported by Mary Carillo on Senior Night 2008 which is a bittersweet night for both coach and player. It marks the last home game for the seniors on the team. It’s not only a sad time, it also marks the fact that the coach and her players have been through a lot. Stringer says she’s the type of person who gets attached to her players. She never says goodbye, just see you later.
Last season, the team made it to the championship game, only losing to Tennessee. It marked the second time that Stringer guided a team to the final game. While the season should have been a celebration, they were overshadowed by the comments by Don Imus on his nationally syndicated radio show. Stringer called them vicious and vile, vindictive, hateful, racist, sexist and an assault on her team, on all women, blacks, it was an assault the game that women work so hard to play.
The comments stunned her and being the nurturer to her team, Stringer extended her role off the court to her team. the incident gave Stringer the opportunity to teach her team about adversity.
Stringer was born in Edinbourne, PA to a coal miner. Her father lost both legs in an accident when was 44 years old.
She began coaching at Cheney State in the 1970’s. She teamed up with legendary Temple coach John Cheney to conduct joint practices. Both the men’s and women’s teams would practice together. Cheney said he would be screaming in one corner while Stringer would be screaming in another. He said no one would be learning anything so by combining the practices, both teams got to learn from each other. And it worked. The men became a Division II power. However, the women became the real attraction as the crowds went to see Stringer’s team, then leave as Cheney’s team came out to play.
In 1982, Stringer’s Cheney State team played in the first NCAA Women’s Championship, but during that time, her 2 year old daughter, Nina got sick and no one knew what was wrong. Eventually, she was diagnosed with spinal menigitis and spent several months fighting for her life. She survived but suffered massive brain damage. She’s never spoken or walked.
Looking for better care, Stringer and her husband went to Iowa where she took on the women’s program there. She turned around a losing program, then in her 10th year at Iowa, she knew she had a special team. But the night before Thanksgiving, Stringer’s husband suddenly died of a heart attack. All of a sudden, she was widow with three young children, two sons ages 13 and 8, and her daughter was 12. Stringer had to get used to doing things on her own. She said it was important to have people care about you, people that support you and that are going in the same direction.
With the team in mourning, the Lady Hawkeyes went on a run without their coach. Stringer said she was close to quitting. She said sports was a celebration of life. Death was the end of it. How could she coach, but she found that she had to. Four months later, Iowa made it to the Final Four. But after two more years at Iowa, the memories of her husband were too painful so she went to Rutgers to start anew.
Desperate to upgrade its program, Rutgers made Stringer the highest paid coach at the school. By 2000, Stringer proved her worth taking Rutgers to the Final Four. It was the first time that a coach had taken three different schools that far. But unknown to many, Stringer was hiding that she was fighting cancer. When asked why, Stringer said she felt it would have been too much for her family. She said she only told her mother about it a month ago. She said she told her sons three years ago. But she said the idea behind it was to let them know she was ok. Stringer said while she was undergoing radiation, she didn’t have much energy and would not talk to the media after practices gaining her the wrath of reporters. She said she wanted to scream at them, but she chose not to.
When Imus made his comments last season, a media firestorm swelled. But this time, Stringer could not remain silent. She said as the team’s surrogate mom, she felt she had to protect her players and make sure people knew who her team was. But she found out her players were ready to speak for themselves. You’ll remember the press conference in which players spoke out about how hurt they were. It was apparent that girls like Essence Carson paid attention to Stringer’s lessons about adversity. Stringer said Essence became a leader that day and she was very proud of her. Essense, self-described shy by nature, says she had to step up and speak out.
Stringer said she wanted the team to learn that they have to have their own measurement. That they measure their own success and their worth by who they think they are, not by what others think. Imus met with the team to make amends. The team accepted his apology and by that time, he lost his job at both WFAN and MSNBC. But he resurfaced on both WABC and RFD-TV in December.
Stringer says Imus has a right to make a living. She says she wishes he were more communicative perhaps sending a card to the team, saying you might not want to hear from me, but I was thinking about you. She says that would have been the right thing to do.
But even though she and her team went down the bumpy road, Stringer says her team taught her a lot. That the girls made more impact on her than any basketball game could.
At the end, Bryant informs us that Vivian’s daughter still needs assistance 24/7 and Stringer’s autobiography, “Standing Tall: A Memoir of Tragedy and Triumph” is now on sale.
Grade – A.
Due to time constraints, there were no closing words by Bryant Gumbel.
Overall grade for this edition of Real Sports, A. Another excellent edition of Real Sports.
