Christensen is a former Miami Herald reporter, who saw newspapers cut their staffs four years ago, and in the process lose some of their investigative ability. He decided to fill that void and has been supported by a number of prominent ex-newsmen. His board of directors includes Gene Cryer (Sun-Sentinel), Doug Clifton (The Miami Herald) and Kevin Boyd (all of the above, plus the long gone Hollywood Sun-Tattler). And the editorial contributors are all experienced and trusted reporters. Financial support comes from contributions, notably by popular crime novelist Michael Connelly, a former Sun-Sentinel reporter.
Broward Bulldog has more than fulfilled its stated mission: “We believe journalism is a public service that is essential to a free and democratic society. We are committed to bridging the gap by delivering more of the original, local, issue-oriented news and information our community needs.”
Much of Broward Bulldog’s content is online, but some stories are important enough to be picked up by major papers. Just recently, for example, was the report that Gov. Rick Scott’s “blind trust” can see pretty well. Although it is designed to detach a public figure from his or her investments, it was reported that Scott’s trust is run by a former crony and that Scott has made millions during his term as governor.
An even more recent example is today’s news that U.S. District Judge William Zloch of Fort Lauderdale ruled yesterday against the FBI’s attempt to throw out a lawsuit filed by Broward Bulldog and others seeking the bureau’s records on a mysterious Saudi figure who left the country in a great hurry shortly before Sept. 11.
This is a story that reaches far beyond the Broward borders. It was originally broken in 2011 by Christensen and Anthony Summers, an Irish reporter whose work includes a much admired book on the Kennedy assassination. They discovered that the highly connected Saudi man was visited at his Sarasota area home by some of the Sept. 11 hijackers. Just before the World Trade Center attack, he and his family left Sarasota in such a hurry that they left behind cars and household furnishings. Initially, the FBI denied having any pertinent information on the Saudi man, but after Broward Bulldog’s Freedom of Information lawsuit, it produced documents showing the opposite. The documents revealed numerous contacts between the Saudi and the terrorists. But pages were excised or blacked out.
This greatly disturbed former governor and senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the Sept. 11 Commission, who accused the FBI of impeding the commission’s investigation by withholding such important information – information that established a link between the Saudi Arabian government and the terrorists.
This is investigative reporting at its best and next week a very funny guy will help keep it going.
When he invented the game, Dr. James Naismith was looking for a sport that could be played indoor during cold weather (he was in Massachusetts). He also wanted one that wasn't as rough as outdoor sports, but still had more aerobic value than, say, chess. Presumably, to avoid injuries, he slowed the game down by making players bounce the ball before they took a shot. We suspect that rules against fouling were an afterthought, to make sure players did not grab an opponent as they shot.
We wonder if the man would recognize basketball today? While he would probably be satisfied that his little winter diversion has turned into March Madness, keeping bookies in shoes, we think it would blow his whistle to see the perversions that have altered the game over the years – many of them in the last few decades. A few changes he would likely applaud, such as the 3-point shot that rewards long distance accuracy, and the rule against giants camping out under the basket. He might actually find dunking exciting, because it is, and because it's something he probably thought was impossible living in a time when anybody more than six feet was considered tall.
And we are confident he would blow his whistle 10 times as often as the refs do today. It seems to get worse every year. Ball handlers routinely do what used to be illegal "palming" the ball, as they swing wildly from side to side, and "discontinue" as they hesitate in their dribble while navigating the court. But the thing that would probably pain him the most is players speeding up the floor, almost passing the ball to themselves and then forgetting the bounce altogether as they drive to the basket. Back in the '50s and '60s you were allowed one step after picking up your dribble. Today, it is routine to take at least two steps, and more often three and four – including a jump step – and knocking over anybody who happens to be in the way.
We used to call it traveling, but not once during the many NCAA tournament games have we seen it called on a player racing to the basket. There were a few calls against big guys posted up who moved their pivot foot, which hardly seems as serious an infraction as a guy taking multiple steps to build speed for a slam dunk. What would surely appall Naismith is the amount of contact permitted in his game, especially on the offense. For decades after its invention, offensive players had to go around defenders, not through them. This point is especially offensive, pun intended, because one of the Philly teams we root for lost a game after its best big man fouled out, simply because he did not get out of the way of a man blasting through him toward the basket. At one time, that call was an obvious charge. Today, unless the defensive man has been absolutely still for at least a week, the call usually favors the offense. That type of contact ought to be either charging or a no-call. It must be exactly the opposite of what Naismith conceived as fouling.
Even announcers recognize contact as the God-given right of offensive players. They note when a player driving to the basket fails to make sufficient contact to draw a foul. It has gotten so bad that we have seen defensive players in the tournament step aside, literally giving their man a free shot rather than risk a foul. We can almost hear the man who designed a “safe” winter game watching its current version,with the best player of our times wearing a protective face mask, and mumbling, “Madness. Madness.”
On such an interesting news day there are several options for comment. The first: the landmark Rustic Inn in Fort Lauderdale has new ownership, leaving control of the Oreal family estate. The famous crab place dates to 1955, one of only a handful of restaurants with such longevity. We will save that story, and others like it, for our 50th anniversary issue next winter.
Then, there is the latest wrinkle in the polo enthusiast’s DUI retrial, in which the judge denied a request to drop the case because the wrecked, expensive car had been destroyed after it was turned over to an insurance company, after numerous requests to have it turned over. It turns out that those requests may have come not from the insurance company, but from unknown sources. The state suspects those sources were the defense team, by way of setting up grounds for an appeal. Since there are lawyers involved, the state deserves sympathy. This is the one where the first trial, which resulted in a guilty verdict, was nixed because of juror misconduct, and is being delayed right now with an argument of the validity of the blood tests. The fatal accident happened four years ago. Maybe it is time to change lawyers (for the second time) in order to buy more time, or perhaps argue that this is a case of identity theft and the defendant is not the defendant. Does a multimillionaire shop at Target?
However, these stories fail to meet the standard of The Miami Herald’s Fred Grimm, who has today’s winning entry with a column detailing the imminent demise of a North Florida town called Hampton, known as the champion of speed traps on U.S. 301. Grimm reports that the town of less than 500 people (and 17 cops at one time) took in $616,960 in fines in two years. That involved 12,698 tickets. The money, incidentally, seems to be missing. The town made the mistake of giving a ticket to a state legislator, who is leading the charge to exterminate it.
Hampton is one of three speed traps in the area, the others being Lawtey and Waldo. Therein lies the reason for today’s priority coverage. Flash back to 1994. We were coming back from the mother-in-law’s funeral in Philadelphia. Having battled I-95 fast traffic for a thousand miles, we decided to take a slower, more relaxed route from Jacksonville. We cruised an uncrowded U.S. 301, and were doing 55 mph on speed control when we saw a red light in the distance. We tapped the brake and cruised to the light, where a cop with radar hit us with a ticket. The speed limit had dropped dramatically in a short distance. Classic speed trap. The wife complained, playing for sympathy that we had just come from her mother’s funeral. The cop did not care. Speed trappers never do. Having gone out of our way to choose a slower, safer ride, we were instead victimized.
We wrote about Lawtey, calling the police state there a form of organized crime that should be illegal. We contacted Attorney General Bob Butterworth’s office and, probably because we were writing about it, were treated with respect. A spokesman said the state knew about these towns and their deplorable speed traps, and would like to do something about them. That was 20 years ago and despite considerable national publicity, they still exist. Although, Hampton’s appears doomed.
The 1994 incident led to complications. We protested the ticket and wound up with a suspended license, which we did not know until after the fact. We called Lawtey one day and a clerk in the police station (about the size of a phone booth) had to get off the call because of an altercation that we could hear over the phone. Somebody was shouting. Likely an irate driver threatening to kill someone. We understand. We did not keep records of everything involved in the incident. But we sure kept a grudge. Consider Hampton partial retribution. But it’s not enough. It’s not even close.
It was a crazy dream, as most dreams are. Jimmy Breslin was there and I had just read something he had written. I told him I did not understand a word of it, but I had to do some work of my own. I awoke. It was 4:30 a.m. The work I had to do was now obvious. Tuesday is the day this blog goes out, and it was on my dreaming mind. I went to the computer and Googled Jimmy Breslin. No news there. Then, I went to Philly.com to see what the Philadelphia college basketball teams were up to. I read that Joe McGinniss had died, and then, I saw myself quoted. The Holy Spirit works in strange ways.
The quotes were from a 1983 piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine. One of the quotes was a retread of something from a prior article for Philadelphia magazine, written when McGinniss hit the big time with The Selling of the President 1968. I had followed him around New York, including a radio interview and lunch with the highly quotable sports journalist, Howard Cosell.
McGinniss was barely out of college (Holy Cross). He had given up a great job as an Inquirer columnist, in which he slavishly but effectively imitated Jimmy Breslin's style, to follow Richard Nixon's presidential campaign. His best seller savaged Nixon's cynical campaign, which carefully protected the candidate from serious reporters. It also put Roger Ailes on the map. He was a key player for the Nixon election team, and McGinniss manipulated the hell out of Ailes with candid behind-the-scenes quotes, which Ailes never expected to see in print. Nixon won, however, and hired Ailes – a big step toward Ailes’ current position as chairman of Fox News. And Joe McGinniss, at 26, was famous.
Today’s Philadelphia Daily News story took quotes from something written when Joe McGinniss' other big book, Fatal Vision, was hitting bookstores. McGinniss had several disappointing books after his first success. One of them was embarrassing. It was filled with personal confessions and self-pity about a sad childhood with heavy drinking parents, the breakup of his marriage and guilt over leaving his family, etc. Another book, about Alaska, was a good read, but had the bad luck to appear shortly after John McPhee’s classic Coming into the Country on the same subject. Fatal Vision promised to restore McGinniss’s reputation. It was a behind-the-scenes report on the sensational trial of Army Capt. Jeffrey MacDonald, found guilty of murdering his pregnant wife and two children. McGinniss had been approached by MacDonald to write the book, and McGinniss pretended to sympathize with an officer who was unjustly accused. He was given extraordinary access to MacDonald’s personal records, and an insider’s view of the defense team, which was wildly over-confident. But he soon was convinced the man was guilty, and so he wrote. It was big-time stuff and a perfect subject for Philadelphia, where he had first won fame. That was the point of “rising from the ashes of fame.” Joe McGinniss was back.
I had been given a chance to read the pre-publication proofs in New York and had spent a day with McGinniss at his home in Massachusetts. He emphasized how personally painful the book had been to write. At first, I did not realize why, but I would learn soon enough. My story appeared to be well-received. The Inquirer’s editors liked it, and the reaction from other newspaper people was excellent. I sent a copy to McGinniss, confident he would appreciate the great publicity in an important market. The book got good reviews and was quickly on the best-seller list. But the controversy surrounding the book continued for years. It involved highly publicized legal action and resulted in some condemnation of McGinniss for journalistically unethical conduct. But that was down the road.
What happened quickly was a near-frantic phone call from an Inquirer editor that interrupted a Saturday night dinner party. The paper had received a furious, rambling letter from McGinniss. It was crudely fashioned, as if the work of a madman, or a drunk. He accused me of multiple factual errors, particularly with regard to his personal life, including the drinking problems of his parents. It sounded like the prelude to a lawsuit. The editor needed to see me as soon as possible. Early the next Monday morning I was at the newspaper office, bringing the books that McGinniss himself had written that said so much of the stuff that now seemed to upset him. The editor was much relieved, and added, “What’s wrong with this man?”
What was wrong with him was that I had recognized what made the book so “painful” for him. He had identified with the man who murdered his family. I had written:
“At the time of the killings, MacDonald and McGinniss were almost the same age, married for about the same time. Both had two daughters, who were very close in age. MacDonald’s wife was recently pregnant with, the autopsy revealed, a boy. February 1970, the month of the crime, was the time McGinniss’s wife became pregnant with his son. It was also the month that McGinniss realized that he must leave his wife and children.”
McGinniss never said that was what set him off, but he calmed down, probably when Philadelphia turned out to be the only market where his book was a No. 1 best-seller. A few weeks after publication, he did a book signing in Philadelphia. My aunt attended, identified herself and said how much she enjoyed my Inquirer article.
“Great,” Joe McGinniss said cheerfully. “Say hello to Bernie.”
Money changes everything. And the Holy Spirit works in strange ways.
A few years ago we did a profile for Gold
Coast magazine on Ted Bell, a Palm Beach writer of adventure novels. It was a second career for Bell, who had previously been president of the giant Leo Burnett advertising agency, and later vice chairman and Worldwide creative director at Young & Rubicam. He was doing well with his series of Alexander Hawke spy novels, and had made The New York Times best seller list. But it was apparent during our interview and research of his background that Ted Bell was more than a successful advertising executive with a flair for writing.
Coast magazine on Ted Bell, a Palm Beach writer of adventure novels. It was a second career for Bell, who had previously been president of the giant Leo Burnett advertising agency, and later vice chairman and Worldwide creative director at Young & Rubicam. He was doing well with his series of Alexander Hawke spy novels, and had made The New York Times best seller list. But it was apparent during our interview and research of his background that Ted Bell was more than a successful advertising executive with a flair for writing.He had studied international matters in England, and had extensive experience in foreign affairs, serving on various U.S. defense committees and as an advisor to the U.S. State Department. One of his books dealt with the rise of the “new Russia” and the return of the KGB.
In the course of our conversation, he said much of interest, including the fact that he was a great F. Scott Fitzgerald fan. He had even visited Fitzgerald's childhood home in St. Paul, Minn. He said whenever he wanted to relax he would read something by Fitzgerald. It did not matter what. Our kind of guy.
He also cited his background as a source for some of his fiction. All those European and U.S. government contacts gave him a rare perception into the geopolitical world. It occurred to us at the time that he likely had CIA contacts, knowingly or unknowingly, and may well have been a source for the agency. We did not mention that hunch in the piece, but we did mention a startling observation he made about Russia. He said his sources seemed certain that Russia would soon attempt to rebuild its former Soviet Union, dominating the countries adjacent to it in eastern Europe. He said the first target would be Estonia.
We say startling, because at the time it appeared the Cold War was history, and that the satellite nations once controlled by Russia had taken a decided lean toward western democracy. The new power man, Vladimir Putin, was viewed with suspicion, because of his KGB background and indications that he did not tolerate dissent. But nobody thought he would go back to the days when Russia cracked down brutally on Hungary in the 1950s. Nobody but Ted Bell.
It turns out he had the right information, just the wrong country.
Out of habit, we generally ease off the throttle when we see a red light a block away. This infuriates drivers behind us who often pass, often recklessly, making obscene gestures, even though they see the same light ahead. We also usually stop at traffic lights a few feet before we have to, allowing enough room, given the time of day (and the time of this event was early morning, still more dark than light) to monitor the green light for traffic going the other way. When it turns yellow, we ease forward, knowing in a second or two our light will be green. Also, out of habit, and an instinct for survival, we glance to the left to make sure nobody is busting the light.
Thus, it came about last week that such habits may have been a life saver. Our light had just gone green, and as we began to hit the gas we saw a car coming like a bat out of hell. It went through the intersection accelerating, as light busters usually are, going at least 50 mph in a 30-mph zone. Had we been in the same kind of hurry as the light buster, bolting forward in anticipation of a green light when we saw the other guy’s yellow, we would have been hit on the driver’s side door by a speeding car. An acquaintance of ours, a highly respected citizen, was killed in exactly that fashion a few years ago.
One’s primitive instinct at such an intersection of modern madness is to chase down the car who could have killed you and shoot the driver before he (or she) kills somebody. Under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, this should be acceptable. Why not shoot somebody who is trying to kill you? Fortunately, we do not have a gun. Instead, our thirst for revenge is what you are reading.
Let us join the chorus of those attacking those who would get rid of red light cameras. Especially the politicians, who look at studies that show a serious reduction in fatal, red light collisions but still insist the law does not work. They say it only increases rear-end collisions when cars stop suddenly. That just proves the value of the cameras. The cars behind the cars that stop were obviously planning not to stop. And they bitterly resent the driver ahead who impedes their mindless pursuit of whatever they were pursuing by as much as two minutes.
Those advocating repeal of the cameras seem to resent the fact that they generate money for communities. So what? If you can improve safety and generate revenue, so much the better. We think that rather than eliminate cameras, Florida should expand the concept by using similar technology to curtail speeding. Those signs that tell you your speed at special locations, such as entrances to airports, should also have a “gotcha” pop-up advising that a ticket has been earned. Repeat offenders should get increasingly higher fines. Chronic offenders, those who get 10 or more tickets a day (and some would), should suffer the fate of William Wallace in the film “Braveheart,” who, for the crime of wanting freedom for Scotland, was gruesomely executed by an English king. And he wasn’t even speeding.
Compounding the red light camera debate, some politicians have suggested raising the speed limit on interstates, which would only encourage those who routinely go 85 mph in 70 mph zones to speed up to 95, or even faster. We once asked a European woman who was a notoriously fast driver how fast she drove. “As vast as zee car vill go,” she said. We get the impression she is not alone. One enterprising reporter took the time to check the driving record of a legislator advocating higher speed limits, and found he had a record of speeding tickets.
One wonders if further enterprise would reveal conflicts (think campaign contributions) on the part of legislators who oppose red light cameras and push for higher speed limits on roads already dangerous because of wild drivers. But it is uncharitable to think they might be on the take. The charitable view is that they are just morons.
There have not been passenger trains on the Florida East Coast Railway for 50 years, but if all the ideas being planned for that historic transportation corridor come to fruition, in a few years it could become one of the busiest passenger railroads in the country. Which is already creating some anxiety as deep thinkers foresee a clash of transportation interests. Land vs. water.
The FEC tracks have not been seriously modernized since Henry Flagler brought them along Florida’s east coast in the 1890s. On northern railroads, the appearance of the automobile 100 years ago prompted an extensive rebuilding of the railroad rights of way, either by elevating tracks or lowering them in ditches to avoid the inconvenience and danger of grade crossings. That was a 20th century solution.
The FEC has many such crossings, dozens in Broward County alone, and they include a number of increasingly busy waterways. Therein lies the problem. Marine interests line the rivers and canals near the drawbridges of the railroad. Every time a bridge goes down to permit a train to cross, traffic on the river comes to a halt. It has been bad enough for years as long, slow moving freight trains take minutes to traverse waterways. But now the marine industry, a very big part of Florida’s economy, faces the prospect of many more trains obstructing rivers and canals. The bridge lowerings will not be as lengthy, for passenger trains can pass in seconds, but there will be many, many more of them. And just getting the old bridges open and closed takes minutes, presenting a challenge for boats stalled in strong currents.
All Aboard Florida, the planned train from Miami to Orlando, will have 32 trains a day. That is twice the traffic currently on the railroad. And when Tri-Rail and possibly Amtrak switch trains to the FEC corridor, where they should have been all along, the impact on the boat people will be considerable, and it has them worried.
The Palm Beach Post and Sun-Sentinel recently carried reports about the concerns of the marine industry, but the collision of interests will not be so bad to the north, for Tri-Rail will mostly use the FEC tracks in Broward County, where a connecting track between the two railroads already exists in Deerfield Beach. But from that point south, look out. Downtown Fort Lauderdale is the most obvious problem. The New River is busy with marinas surrounding the railroad lift bridge and many facilities lie to the west. And imagine Broward Boulevard, just two blocks from the river, if three rail services all begin using the same tracks. Crossing gates will be popping up and down like jumping jacks.
The problem has been somewhat foreseen. Recently the CSX, which now carries both Tri-Rail and Amtrak trains, and the FEC announced plans to switch some freight traffic to the more westerly CSX, where many grade crossings were eliminated when I-95 was built years ago. The CSX tracks also have a recently built bridge which takes passenger trains high over the New River, but the grades involved are too steep for long freight trains.
A solution similar to the high bridge for Tri-Rail on the CSX tracks will be required. Either a bridge, or, ideally but expensively, a tunnel going under both the river and Broward Boulevard. Tunnels are rare in Florida because of the water table, but one is now under construction at the port of Miami. A complication in Fort Lauderdale would be the location of a new station near Broward Boulevard, which would obviously require underground platforms. On the other hand, envision the opportunity for office and residential construction if blocks of the railroad were underground. Think downtown Manhattan or Philadelphia where tracks were lowered years ago and and shining cities rose above them.
The use of the FEC for passenger service is a great idea, but it presents great problems. Welcome to the 20th century.
For starters, 1 percent seems kind of silly. It makes it sound as if everybody else is broke. Why don’t we see more stats on the top 25 or 30 percent, because those numbers will tell what happened to the middle class. It moved. Up. A little family history. Our mother had eight great grandparents, which is normal. Four of them died at the time of the Irish famine between 1845 and 1850, which is not normal, except that in that age life expectancy was far lower than today. People worked hard in often dangerous jobs. Many expected to be semi-invalids before they reached the age of Social Security, which did not exist then anyway. Our mother died living with a son in tony Rye, N.Y. Would that not be a step up from her great grandparents?
Our father’s family history is somewhat vague. They may have lost people in the famine as well, but we can only trace the family to the 1860s. His father was a stone mason, and Dad dropped out of high school to help support the large family. That family became a lot smaller when three of them died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Our father had three sons. Two of them were Ph.D.s. with careers in engineering and economics. They surely were better off than those relatives who died in their 20s.
Even though he went to work as a teenager, our father probably qualified as middle class for that era. Not only were iPads unheard of, many people did not even have telephones. Yet in the 1930s he did surprisingly well with a large company at a time of depression. When cars were a status symbol, he owned one in 1929. He was by then solidly middle class, or perhaps even upper middle class. That changed when Dad lost his job at the beginning of World War II. Nobody kept such records, but we may have slipped back a rank, possibly to upper lower middle class. Dad did not have a car from 1942 (you couldn’t get gas during the war; aircraft carriers hoarded it all) until the mid-1950s. During much of that time he went to work by bus from one side of the city to the other. Mother also worked part-time, doing market research surveys. All of us went to college, two on scholarships, one by working at night while taking classes by day. It is safe to say that by normal measures, all have escaped middle class, and at worst are lower uppers today. And given prudent estate planning, our progeny are not likely to go down, nor should their grandchildren.
It was that way with just about all our friends. Most came from row house or duplex neighborhoods. Today they entertain grandchildren at vacation homes on the Jersey shore. It is hard to think of any among dozens of childhood acquaintances who are not living well above their parents’ status. They surely are in the top 30 percent. That’s what happened to the middle class.
Now we hear that those in the lower classes are stuck there. And we read of poor souls raising grandchildren (where are the mothers?) without help from husbands, if they exist, who are in jail. How can any family upgrade itself in those conditions? And when we hear horror stories of those who can’t afford a house, we wonder if they can afford nice cars, fancy TVs, myriad electronic gadgets (updated annually) and all the modern conveniences without which life is not worth living. None of those necessities were necessary for our previous generations, for they didn’t exist.
What did exist was a wish to take advantage of opportunity, to stay in school and go as far as one could, to do without things that weren’t essential. Mostly, it was the desire for a better life than those who came before you, and to do what it took to get there.
We were working on a story on Larry King for the Sun-Sentinel’s now departed Sunshine, the Sunday magazine. After his TV show King crossed the Potomac into Arlington and did a two-hour radio show that ran until after midnight. It was mostly about sports. During one of the commercial breaks he asked where we went to school. We barely got the word “La Salle” out when he said, “I can see Tom Gola in the Garden now. La Salle had sleeves on their uniforms. What a ball player.”
They are telling stories like that today – at least those who remember college ball from the 1950s – in the memory of Tom Gola who died Sunday after a long illness. John Wooden, the great UCLA coach, called him the greatest all-round player he ever saw. Wilt Chamberlain once said he wasn’t Philadelphia’s best basketball player; Tom Gola was.
The man put La Salle on the map. Gola led La Salle to an NIT championship, at the time more important than the NCAA tournament. Two years later his team won the NCAA, the first championship game televised, and the following year La Salle was runner-up to San Francisco, which had Bill Russell and K.C. Jones. Gola was an All-American four straight years. He still holds the NCAA record for rebounds. As a student sports writer at La Salle, we advanced his height every year, whether he grew or not. We maxed him out at 6 feet, 8 iches. In fact, he was slightly under 6 feet, 6 inches, and that got him in the Army when the height limit was exactly that. Gola just seemed like a giant on the court, and his true height makes his rebounding feat all the more remarkable.
It was his speed that created the illusion. He was flat out fast – Philadelphia 440 champion in high school (Wilt Chamberlain was the same a few years later), and won the state 880. His hands were just as quick. Think Larry Bird when it comes to passing.
Some of us had the chance to see Tom Gola play in both high school at La Salle High, La Salle College and in the NBA - also as a La Salle coach for a team that went 23-1, but was not eligible for post-season play. He was an emergency coach, when the previous coach got us in NCAA trouble. Gola had a day job and just showed up for practice. He had a wonderful team that included Larry Cannon and Ken Durrett. Asked about his success, Gola said: "I had the horses. All I did was hand them the ball.
Larry Cannon, who lives in Florida, met with our La Salle alumni board a few years ago. Asked about Gola as a coach, Larry said: "He knew not to over coach us."
In 1957, just after Gola graduated, our ROTC camp was in Oklahoma. We were with fellows from all over - Stanford, the Big 10 schools, Auburn, NC state, VMI, Princeton - and they all seemed impressed that we had gone to La Salle. None of them knew our campus at the time was barely more than a large square block, and that our enrollment was fewer than 2,000. It is hard to imagine anyone who did more for any school than Tom Gola did for La Salle. Maybe John Harvard or Cornelius Vanderbilt, or Knute Rockne - but none of them could go to their left, and rebound.
There was a good piece on Philly.com about how Tom Gola revived basketball in New York after the point shaving scandals of the early 50s. They hurt the NY college programs, among the country's best at the time. Then came Gola, who played in the Garden and was a great hit with NY fans and the press.
It is often forgotten, but there was another all-round player in the Gola college era. Maurice Stokes at St. Francis did not get as much attention, but he was in the same class as Gola, and was a great pro for three seasons before a head injury ended his career. Ironically, it was the kind of injury Tom Gola suffered much later in life. Stokes died in 1970.
In his later years, Tom Gola vacationed in Palm Beach. He loved golf, and few pros at our country clubs would not recall him.
Another little story. At La Salle we had an English prof, who was a nerd’s nerd. In his senior year, when Tom Gola was player of the year, Gola stood up to answer a question in Dr. App’s class. Dr. App was from Lawrence Welk territory, where people sounded foreign born.
“Vista Gola,” Dr. App said. “You’re such a big vellla. You should be on zee basketball team.”
We were on the way up to Notre Dame to see a game. This was maybe 20 years ago. She was reading a book and something came up about football.
“Is a punt a kick?” she said. We answered politely.
“And is the second half as long as the first half?”
“Actually, in most sports it is longer. In football they have all kinds of time-outs and substitutions and stuff. Lots of incomplete passes. Players run out of bounds. Fake injuries. Anything to stop the clock. Basketball’s the same.”
“Why do they do that?” she asked.
“Gives them more time for commercials. Advertisers sell more stuff. Teams raise rates. Players make a few million more.”
The years have passed. Most things age, but not her grasp of the fundamentals of economics. It was late during the recent season of the NFL and a game was on.
“What’s the line of scrimmage?” she asked.
“That’s just the line where they scrimmage. Three hundred pounders line up and butt heads, to make sure they are all punchy by the time they retire.”
“Who’s that yelling all the time?”
“It’s the quarterback. He’s calling signals.”
“What are signals?”
“That’s telling them when the play begins. And they also change the plays all the time.”
“Why?” she asked.
“The quarterback looks over the defense, and sometimes he sees something he doesn’t like, or something he does, so he changes the play. It’s called profiling. If he’s right and throws a touchdown pass, the coach is pleased and he makes a few million more the next year.”
“Is that Peyton Manning you can hear yelling?
“It’s not Winston Churchill. Don’t you recognize his accent?”
“He’s just going hup, yup, dub, tub. How do they know what he means?”
“It’s a secret language. It was invented by the Navajo Indians. All the players have to learn it.”
“Does he keep it up the whole game?” she asked.
“He better not go home. But he only does it when he’s on the field. Notice Tom Brady is not doing it on the sidelines.
The camera was on Tom Brady. He had his helmet off.
“Brady’s good looking,” she said, perceptively.
“You ought to see his girlfriend. Actually, all quarterbacks are good looking. That’s one of the requirements for the job. At the beginning of the season the coach looks over his team and picks the best looking guy and hands him the ball and says, “Sweetie, go play quarterback.’ It’s a tradition. They have to be handsome because they get on magazine covers all the time. Goes way back. Johnny Lujack, Paul Hornung, Daryle Lamonica, Craig Morton, Roger Staubach, Bob Griese, Dan Marino – and in this century, Troy Aikman, Kurt Warner, Joe Flacco, Steve Young, John Elway – they’re all cute as a bug’s ear.”
“Who are you rooting for?” she asked.
“Nobody really. We don’t have a dog in this fight. I usually go with the best uniforms. In this case San Francisco. I like gold helmets.”
“Is this the championship?”
“ One of them. You asked the same thing last week, and the week before that. But this isn’t the big championship.”
“When will it be over?”
“It’s hard to say. They begin playing in July and they just keep playing until Dan Marino is in assisted living. Or they run out of advertisers. Their goal is to be like the NBA – start next season before the current one ends.”
The game finally ended. Somebody won. But she couldn’t figure out who. She felt sorry for the quarterback who was crying.
