Making a Point...

            The best part of traveling for a living is all the stories you get to hear from others who travel as well.

            Oh sure, you see a lot of neat places. You meet people, work in interesting situations and build up those frequent flier miles and hotel points. If you fly, you need to drive rental cars and sometimes you get to wheel around in something nice.

            If you really know what you’re doing, you can plan side trips and do something really fun to break up the tedium of working away from home.

            So, yeah, that’s all great. But it’s the stories you hear or events you experience that make the whole thing worthwhile. You’ll be telling and re-telling some of these stories for years, even if they aren’t yours.

            Food fights in airports are memorable, if you happen to see one. Seems like everyone has slept in an airport (some of us more than once). Bar stories come up a lot, as do barstool stories. Bad radio stations, bad food, bad roads and bad manners all get their due. You hear a lot of stories about bad service.

            A minor offering is displayed here. It is named, justly, Making a Point at San Francisco International Airport.

            In the mid 1990s I was working for NASCAR and traveling a fair amount, though mostly by car. We had a race at Redwood Acres Raceway in Eureka, California. Eureka is very close to the California-Oregon border and I was supposed to fly to that event. The plan was to fly through San Francisco changing to a small plane for the hop to an airport near Eureka.

            The plan was wrecked when I arrived in San Francisco and was told the pilots were on strike and there would be no flight to Eureka. The only option was to drive, so I rented a car and made a quick six-hour drive to Eureka.

            The next morning was race day and I overheard the news on the radio that the strike was over. I contacted the airline to be sure my flight was a go only to learn that, as I had left San Francisco voluntarily and not flown on to Eureka, I could not fly back to San Francisco. I’d have to drive the six hours back to the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area.

            And be there in time for my 8 a.m. flight.

            The race ended around 11 p.m. and I had my NASCAR work done around 1 a.m. I returned to the hotel, showered, packed and paid for the room. Then I began driving.

            Had to stop in a tree-line area of the highway to avoid a doe and three little fawns that were standing on the road, you know, with nothing better to do. I finally had to get out of the car and yell, “Bambi, get the kids out of here!” in order to get them to make room on the highway for me and my rental car.

            It was a struggle to stay awake, but I did make it to the exciting confusion that is the SF International Airport in time for my flight. Of course, getting on the plane was another matter entirely.

            Does anybody remember the Unabomber? He blew some stuff up in those years. Had folks on edge, especially here in California and, yep, especially in the luxurious San Francisco International Airport.

            Enter Mr. Lucky.

            Keep in mind I was then working on my 27^th hour without sleep. My state of mind was a little irritated to begin with because of the pilots strike. And top it off with the fact that I was a Southern Californian dealing with Northern Californians who had done me wrong.

            So when an overly obnoxious airport guy told me I would not be allowed to take two bags on the plane, due to the Unabomber scare, I got a little heated. The conversation was not going well, from my side. I argued that other airports were not making that rule and he said, I’ll never forget it because he opened up the most favorite line I’ve ever come up with, he said, “This is San Francisco, We do not operate like other airports.”

            To which I replied, “I see you allow women to carry a purse along with their carry-on baggage. Well, certainly in this town, a man is entitled to carry a purse. This,” I said gesturing to my briefcase, “is my purse.”

            And he let me on the plane with both my computer bag and my purse.

            In closing, let me say that I actually get along well with airport and airline folks. They have a hard job and they mostly do it well. But I was right, he was wrong, and he knew it.

            For once.

            Thanks for reading.

Drastic problems call for simple solutions

                During the run-up to the National Football League’s labor impasse last spring the owners put out for public consumption the idea that the league might increase the regular season schedule from 16 games to 18 games. There would be a corresponding decrease of pre-season games from four to two.

            The idea of extending the season probably came from one or more of the television networks that carry NFL games. Greed feeds itself.

            Nobody loves football more than I do, as my wife will tell you, but even I know extending the season is a bad idea. In fact, the season really should be trimmed back to 14 games.

            The NFL has finally agreed publically that injuries occur in professional football. Head injuries. I’m talking about concussions. They happen and the league admits it now.

I believe the league would like to find a way to cut down on the frequency of concussions. I believe the owners are concerned enough about the investment each team makes in its players that the teams are willing to spend the money to investigate ways to cut down on concussions. I believe that, in the interest of good public relations, the NFL will eventually find ways to improve helmets and other equipment to help the players.

I believe the players union shares responsibility in this situation as well. The union should spend the money to investigate ways to cut down on the number of concussions we see each week and it should recommend a treatment protocol on the sideline to improve recognition processes. It is time that the union looked into ways to protect its members.

The most obvious way to slow the seasonal concussion rate is to trim the number of games. Obviously this idea would never get past the first sentence in an NFL board room, but there is a way to mollify the TV networks. This is another of my ideas that are too simple to ever see the light of day. It needs more complications in order to earn consideration from the powers that be.

My idea is to have a 14-game regular season schedule with two off weeks per season for each team. Each team would have an off week in the first and second halves of the season. Eliminate Thursday games, except on Thanksgiving. That makes for a 16-week regular season (14 games, plus two off weeks equals 16 weeks). Disallow practice sessions during the off weeks and force mandatory brain scans for each player during the off weeks.

I’d also recommend mandatory brain scans for all bloggers, but for a different reason.

The teams would want to trim their rosters because there would be less income with fewer games (due to less attendance), but I think the roster size should remain as is for a 14-game schedule. There might be slightly less need to return a player from a concussion if the teams have large rosters from which to find replacements.

I know, I know. Too simple. It would never work.

But I remember the story about the 18-wheel truck that was stuck in the opening of a tunnel because the truck was too tall. There was a traffic snarl as the engineers, mechanics and lawyers stood around looking at the problem, looking for someone to blame, looking for someone to file suit against and looking for the lunch wagon that was due.

Finally a five-year-old girl stuck her head out of the window of a car that slowly rolled by. The girl shouted, “Hey, just let the air out of the tires and put that thing in reverse!!”

It was a simple solution. It worked. And the girl got in trouble with her parents for sticking her head out of the car window.

You can’t win ‘em all.

Thanks for reading.

The Kurt Busch I know

It seems like a very long time ago now, but when Kurt Busch was making his way through the formative NASCAR ranks, I worked with him a little.

The same Kurt Busch who has made headlines recently after he was released by Penske Racing drove for two seasons in the NASCAR Featherlite Southwest Tour. I was the Media Coordinator for the Tour in those days and I had plenty of opportunities to interview him. He won races and was the Rookie of the Year in 1998 and our champion in 1999.

Kurt was great to work with, from my perspective. He was a good and willing interview. He has a good sense of humor. I enjoyed talking to him. I still see him infrequently because our paths sometimes cross in the course of a racing season and he always makes it a point to say hello. In my experience, Kurt Busch is a great guy.

I’ve seen the clips of Kurt’s recent flare-ups on You Tube, like many other people have, and I do not write this to make excuses. There have been other incidents through the years, too. But until you’ve been in the pressure cooker that is NASCAR Cup racing, you can’t begin to understand the stress those drivers are under. It is an intense world.

In eras gone by, promising race drivers had to work their way through the stock car step ladder. They’d progress from one lower-rung series to another, from local racing to regional competition and then on to national competition. Finally, if everything worked out, a talented driver might get a chance to race in the Cup series.

The really talented, connected and sponsored drivers made it to Cup by the time they were 25 or 26. Thus, they got to stock car racing’s highest levels with a bit of maturity simply due to their age.

Nowadays Cup teams pluck drivers out of the local ranks while the drivers are still in their teens, still learning to shave. A year in the NASCAR Trucks or maybe the Nationwide Series and these youngsters are thrown into the Cup arena. Swim or become chum.

Kurt Busch started his Cup career at a young age and now, a Cup champion, he is a proven commodity behind the wheel. Nobody doubts his talent or his drive to be a winner. Let’s not forget that when he won his Cup title, he had a wheel break off early in the final race. With his championship hopes hanging by a thread, he was able to jerk his three-wheeled car onto pit road to have the thing re-fitted. He resumed the race and won the title.

That talent was evident when he was racing on the Southwest Tour. I enjoyed watching him drive. And I’ll enjoy watching him drive again next year.

Thanks for reading.

You keep a picture of WHAT above your desk?

I keep a large, framed photograph of the RMS Titanic above my desk.

There are a lot of reasons for that. I’ve always been interested in the Titanic story. It’s a great people story. There are lessons to be learned from the history. There was really no reason for the accident to happen, so there is the angst about what could have been.

The biggest reason for keeping the photo where I can see it is that the story is proof of the fact that none of us is too big, too smart or too rich to fail. And that includes me.

Every once in a while I announce to the family that I have just hatched my latest brilliant plan. I never add the bit about it being a plan which cannot fail. I know better. In fact, since very few of my brilliant plans ever work, my wife and kids have learned to seek cover anytime I announce my latest red hot idea.

The Titanic started out as someone’s latest brilliant design. It was a heckuva ship, well equipped. But it was operated by over-confident humans who turned someone’s brilliant idea into a really big anchor. The ship’s captain, James Smith, was quoted as saying that modern shipbuilding had advanced beyond the point where ships sank. I’m sure he believed what he said.

History tells us that Smith was wrong and that’s my point here: There is no such thing as a plan which cannot fail. Ask the talent-laden Miami Heat or Philadelphia Eagles about fail-proof ideas. Ask the unbeatable Baltimore Colts about their game plan against the New York Jets before the third Super Bowl. Ask Hall of Fame relief pitcher Dennis Eckersley about over confidence against gimpy-legged home run hitters.

Ask real estate speculators about all the land they bought eight years ago. Ouch.

The human ego frequently leads us to ignore human history. Eventually, it leads us to supremely human failures. If you glance at history, you’ll find we really don’t stop making the same mistakes. The biggest mistake we keep making is the one Captain Smith made all those years ago and that is believing that we have advanced too far as humans to fail on a large scale.

We can fail. We do fail. And we will fail. But, if we study history with an eye toward learning from it, we can learn to contain the scope of our failures.

So I keep looking at my photograph of the Titanic and, sooner or later, I hope to learn something from it.

Thanks for reading.

LSU and Alabama have a date

            This is not the news the people in charge of the Bowl Championship Series wanted to hear, but the two best teams in college football have already played once, went into overtime and are currently ranked first and second.

            In the Western Division of the Southeastern Conference.

            They are Louisiana State University and the University of Alabama. LSU beat Alabama in overtime a few weeks ago in a game played on Alabama’s home field.

            The BCS title game is designed to generate massive television ratings. It is the ultimate college football game, created for television. Don’t allow the nonsense that the game was created to determine the champion of college football confuse you. It was created to use college football to create a revenue stream.

When Alabama plays LSU for the title, which is what should happen, there is a concern among the BCS bosses that the ratings will slip because the teams have already played once.

Alabama and LSU are the best teams in the country. There just isn’t any doubt. They should play again. But the BCS championship game is not about what’s right. It is about the money the game will generate for a television network and all the others with a hand in the cookie jar.

LSU will play Georgia for the SEC championship in December. LSU could lose the SEC title game and still be ranked high enough to get a berth in the national championship game. Thus, two teams who did not win their conference championship could play for the national championship. Crazy? Sure.

But LSU and Alabama are the best teams in the country and nothing is going to change that.

If all of the above sounds like a plea for a playoff among college football’s best teams and conferences, it should not. A playoff system is wrong for the NCAA’s Division I. That subject is best for another blog at another time.

If the BCS does nothing else, it gets all of us talking about college football. We rant, we rave, we get confused. And we talk about college football.

            Some of us write about it.

            Thanks for reading.

Stewart's winning pass...one week early

            Tony Stewart’s championship-winning drive at Homestead-Miami over the weekend was one for the ages. One of the best one-race performances I’ve seen.

            Stewart’s talent and experience were on display for the world to see Sunday. He had to cut through the field twice to get to the front and he did that. He had to out-run championship leader Carl Edwards over the final 37 laps and he did that.

            But, as every racing reporter writes this week about the stunning performance Smoke turned in to win the title in the last race of the season, there is one pass Stewart made that nobody will write about that was actually the key to the championship.

            And it didn’t happen in Florida. Heck, the move wasn’t even Stewart’s.

            Stewart was running fourth with a few laps remaining in the season’s penultimate race two weeks ago in Phoenix, Arizona. He was not in contention to win that late in the going, but he had a solid finish going.

            Driving a Chevrolet, Stewart drew close to another Chevy driver, Jeff Burton. Now, Stewart and Burton do not drive for the same team. Their respective teams do not have a technical alliance. Stewart’s team buys chassis and engines from the Rick Hendricks team and Burton drives for Richard Childress.

            But Stewart and Burton both drive Chevrolets. Edwards drives a Ford.

            Burton, who is among the most respected drivers of the era, did not have a chance to win the Sprint Cup championship this season. But in the closing laps at Phoenix, Burton gave Stewart plenty of room to pass Burton and gain one final position before the end of the race.

            That one position was the difference between Stewart winning the title and Edwards winning the title. The championship ended in a tie and Stewart won it because he won more races during NASCAR’s season-ending Chase than Edwards did.

            Had Burton stubbornly kept Stewart behind him at Phoenix and had the race at Homestead-Miami gone exactly as it did Sunday, Carl Edwards would be celebrating his first championship and Stewart’s drive of a lifetime would have been noted as a great effort, albeit a losing one, by pundits.

            Thanks for reading.

What will the next great one-liner be?

Writers are always on the listen for the next great one-liner. You never know when it might come or who might roll it out. Circumstances sometimes play a part, but frequently they come from out of nowhere.

Babe Ruth, the legendary baseball player, was asked if he felt it was appropriate for him to make more money than the President of the United States. Babe answered in the affirmative and said, “I had a better year.”

But that was Babe Ruth, one of the great quote machines of his age. You would expect Ruth to get off a good one now and again.

Former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, another media-friendly baseball Hall of Famer, had some tirades during his years as the Dodgers skipper that have reached legendary status. He was once asked his opinion of Dave Kingman’s performance when the Cubs outfielder beat the Dodgers with three home runs in one game. The answer is long and unprintable, but you can find it on You Tube. Search for Lasorda Audio Stew.

“You ask me my opinion?” the stunned Lasorda replies. “What (in the world) do you think my opinion of it was? I think it was (absolutely very terrible).”

Sometimes, great lines come from unexpected sources. I was working with a student at California Lutheran University two basketball seasons ago, calling a basketball game on the school’s live streaming site. The subject matter was the athletic teams at the California Institute of Technology. My color commentator, a CLU senior named Greg Gelber, said Cal Tech was not a school noted for its athletic prowess.

“It’s more of a mental institution,” Gelber said.

Obviously, great lines are sometimes found in movie scripts. Lauren Bacall’s line from To Have and Have Not, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? Just put your lips together and blow,” is a classic. So are two Clint Eastwood lines from his Dirty Harry films: “Do you feel lucky, punk?” and “Go ahead. Make my day.”

And I’ll never forget John Wayne’s “Fill yer hands you sonuva (gun),” from the original True Grit.

Bum Phillips, the former football coach, had a terrific line about the greatest football coach, Paul Bryant. Phillips was an assistant to Bryant when the two coached at Texas A&M.

Phillips said, “Bear Bryant could take his’n and beat your’n or he could take your’n and beat his’n.”

I invite you to improve upon that.

Another football coach, John Heisman, after whom the trophy was named, is credited with a great piece of advice: “When in doubt, punt.” Heisman, who was a little stern, is also widely quoted as telling his team, “Gentlemen, it is better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.”

Then there is drag racing champion Jason Line, who was asked this week if his team would be racing Pontiacs next season. Line’s line was, “We need to race a brand that’s a little more relevant, or at least one that exists.”

Few people ever communicated better than Ronald Reagan. His invitation to the leader of the USSR (I can’t spell his name) to, “Tear down this wall,” is a classic. So was his response during a Republican presidential candidate debate, when someone threatened to turn off Reagan’s microphone: “I paid for this microphone.”

But my favorite Reagan line came during a debate with then-President Jimmy Carter. Carter said something candidate Reagan disagreed with, allowing Reagan to reply, “Well, there you go again.”

You never know when the next great line is going to pop up. That’s why they are so fun.

Thanks for reading.