Friday, November 20, 2009

Steve Ellis Will Be Missed

There may be sportswriters around who worked harder than Steve Ellis of the Tallahassee Democrat, but in my 35 years in the business I never met one. Ellis, who covered FSU for the past three decades, was the beat guys’ beat guy. His drive and ability to get to the right people for the right answers were legendary. Even those coaches aghast to see their failures and fallibility splashed across the local paper under Ellis’ byline respected Steve and knew him for what he was.

And they mourned when Ellis died yesterday of a heart attack. So do I.

Steve was 54.

“He was a good writer and very accurate,” Coach Bobby Bowden told the Democrat. “And how in the world he found out everything he found out, I’ll never know. He could find out anything, boy. He had a great knack for that.

“He didn’t play favorites. He told it like he thought it was,” Bowden added. “Of course, I got a lot of grief out of it but still, I knew he was doing a job.”

The only two requisites for being a good sportswriter are to care and to have a clue. Nobody cared about doing his job the right way more than Steve Ellis and nobody had more of a clue about his beat.  Beyond that, he was a joy to be around, always sunny, generous and decent.

Every time I saw Steve, which wasn’t often enough, he would say he was bound and determined to slow down and not let his job dictate his life. I knew better and I imagine so did he.

When he had his massive heart attack on Nov. 10, from which he never recovered, he was working from home. He insisted that his wife email his story to the newspaper before she called 911.

Some might see that as sad. I see that as Steve being Steve.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Tucker Sprains Ankle

One of my favorite WF super fans, Chris King of Baltimore, just wrote to check on the status of Konner Tucker, the sophomore guard who limped off last night against High Point. The good news is the X-rays taken on his ankle were negative, so there’s no serious damage. Greg Collins, the basketball trainer, said Tucker has a sprained ankle, and shouldn’t be sidelined that long.

The Deacons don’t play again until next Tuesday’s game against Winston-Salem State, so I don’t see this being a big issue. But I do know Coach Gaudio would like to have Tucker available as much as possible to see what he can do in these early-season encounters. His stroke looked great against East Carolina, but he missed one pretty badly last night against High Point. The more floor time he gets early the better for him and the Deacons.

Gary Clark missed his third game with mono. He was on the bench last night and looked pretty washed out as he walked by press row. He also looked like he had dropped a pound or two. I haven’t heard when he’s expected back.

The High Point of the Early Season

Thanks High Point.

I imagine Wake Forest needed the kind of first-half performance you gave last night at Joel Coliseum. I know I certainly did. Two games (to use the term loosely) into the season and I was already getting bored with games that were pretty much decided the day the teams signed the contract to play. This is not a knock on Coach Gaudio’s scheduling. The Deacons will have their share of non-conference tests, and any team that plays Purdue and Gonzaga on the road and Xavier at home has nothing to apologize for. But still I was more than ready last night to see how they would respond when some opponent was able to knock them back a step or two.

High Point did just that in the first half, draining six of six 3-point attempts over a dazzling 10-minute stretch that carved a nine-point lead. There was reason to believe, as I wrote in my game story, that the Deacons would pull it together in plenty of time, which they did once Gaudio directed his defenders to quit sloughing off the guards driving to the basket and thus opening up the perimeter for clean looks. It was a good adjustment, made on the fly, that should provide a nice reference point when the Deacons play Duke and other teams that endeavor to spread defenses all over the court.

Though they gave out in the second half, I was impressed with the energy and purpose with which the Panthers played. It’s early, I know, but I liked what I saw from first-year coach Scott Cherry. Like a lot of other coaches, he needs to stay off the playing floor during play, but he is obviously a man with a plan formulated during his time as a walk-on at North Carolina and later as an assistant at George Mason, Western Kentucky and South Carolina. Craig Keilitz, the director of athletics at High Point, had to get past any anti-Carolina bias he might have picked up during his 12 years as assistant and associate AD at Wake Forest. That said, the Panthers have plenty of Wake Forest ties besides Keilitz. Wes Miller, another ex-Tar Heel whose father Ken is one of the most generous benefactors of Deacon athletics, is an assistant on Cherry’s staff and Tripp Pendergast, a Wake Forest graduate who was an intern under Dean Buchan in the Deacons’ media relations department, is the director of basketball operations. Also Evan Lepler, another Wake grad who I’ve gotten to know well these last few years, was a color analyst for the ISP broadcast. So I was surrounded last night by familiar faces.

It would be fun to see the Panthers made some waves this season in the Big South. Based on what I saw last night—I liked their big man, Cruz Daniels and they have three dangerous shooters in Nick Barbour, Eugene Harris and Tehran Cox—I wouldn’t be surprised.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Getting to Know Dave Wojcik

Dave Wojcik came to Wake as advertised, with fire in the belly. He’s intense, perhaps even as intense as the whirling dervish himself, Pat Kelsey, whose departure for his alma mater of Xavier began a chain reaction that resulted in Wojcik coming aboard.

You’ve probably heard that Wojcik wanted the job badly enough to leave Tulsa, where his brother, Doug, is going great guns as the head coach. What you might not know is that while Doug was a point guard at Navy in the mid-80s, he and David Robinson combined for 51 points in an NCAA Tournament game against Michigan. I witnessed the occasion, having been assigned another first-round game at the old Charlotte Coliseum between North Carolina and Penn.

I mentioned the feat to Dave Wojick yesterday after practice. Dave doesn’t know me well yet, but he could sense a punchline was coming.

“Yeah it was really something,‘’ I said. “Robinson scored 50 and Wojcik scored 1.‘’

I was hoping Dave would laugh, and he did.

“But your brother did have six assists,‘’ I mentioned.

The game was actually the last Robinson ever played in college. His performance—22 of 37 from the floor, 13 rebounds—was unforgettable, one of the greatest I’ve ever seen.

Monday, November 16, 2009

The Great Expectations for Ty Walker

The more I study the intriguing case of Ty Walker, the more I’m convinced that his biggest accomplishment as a basketball player is an even bigger curse.

Walker, Wake Forest’s 7-0 sophomore, was a five-star recruit coming out of New Hanover High School ranked as high as the fourth best center in his class. And we’re not talking about the Wilmington Metropolitan area, or even the state of North Carolina. We’re talking about in the whole U.S. of A.

So why, people want to know, is Walker not dominating college centers? Why did he play only 42 minutes as a freshman and why did he get just 14 minutes in two romps past Oral Roberts and East Carolina?

The short answer: There are three other players on the Wake Forest roster 6-10 or taller who Coach Dino Gaudio feels are more physically, mentally and emotionally ready to help the Deacons win basketball games this season. And with Al-Farouq Aminu soaking up some of the minutes at power forward, there’s not even enough to go around for Chas McFarland, Tony Woods and David Weaver.

Gaudio wanted to redshirt Walker last season, but Walker was adament about playing. By this past October, he realized he had made a mistake.

“They offered me a redshirt and I feel as though I should have taken it,‘’ Walker said.

But the longer answer entails Walker’s rate of maturation—both physically and emotionally—and the sometimes staggering expectations put on players who arrive at college far from the finished product. All freshmen have a lot of growing up to do once they reach college, Walker moreso than most. He weighed only 200 pounds, so he he was easy to push off the block.

“Last year I had the skill set, but I just didn’t have the strength so I wasn’t able to show it at all,‘’ Walker said.

But an underdeveloped body wasn’t Walker’s only drawback.

“A lot of things with Ty, it was between the shoulders,‘’ senior L.D. Williams said. “It didn’t have anything to do with not being good enough to play because he could have gone anywhere in the country to play. It was just about how he developed as a player mentally.‘’

Walker strikes me as a intelligent and passionate young man who may be too sensitive for his own good. He didn’t block out Sunday against East Carolina and the Pirates followed in a missed free throw. He immediately pointed to himself in the “my bad’‘ gesture, and at least three times on the way back downcourt he cut his eyes to the bench for any signs of reproachment.

“Ty has been incredibly blessed from here down, Gaudio said, his hand at the level of his shoulder. “When he gets from here up – mentally tougher, which he’s getting – and when he can forget about the last play and worry about the next one he has a chance to be really good.‘’

Which brings me around to his greatest accomplishment—being a five-star recruit—being his great curse. I’ve always had a huge problem with people putting too much stock in recruiting rankings. I’m not saying they’re worthless, but whenever a main component of a ranking is not how good the player is but how good he might turn out to be then mistakes are going to be made. And they’re made all the time. Ty Walker scored 12 points as a senior at New Hanover. To say he was the fourth best center in America that season is far-fetched. He earned his ranking on potential. And truth is, when I watch Walker in practice I see a player who might someday grow up to be a great player. He’s incredibly long and his coordination is improving all the time. His innate sense of timing is as good as I’ve seen from a Wake Forest center. The two qualities make him a force as a shotblocker. And I, like many others following the Deacons this season, love watching him come into the game to see if he’s getting any closer to fulfilling the great promise with which he arrived at Wake.

But he’s having to deal with the realization he has yet to become what so many people expect him to be.

“When I’m on FaceBook, constantly people are on there asking `Why aren’t you playing that much? You deserve to play. You have the skills to play.’ ‘’ Walker said. “It’s something that’s just a patient process. You have to just wait your time. That’s what I’m here to do and hopefully this year I’ll be able to show that maybe it’s my time.

“And then my junior and senior year I can definitely have breakout years.‘’

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Skinner Stands Tall in Defeat

I’ve been impressed with Riley Skinner and who he is for 4 1/2 years now, but perhaps never more than I was yesterday.

And I’m not talking about his performance during Wake’s shattering 41-28 loss to Florida State that dashed any hopes for a winning season and a bowl bid. I’m talking about his performance in the interview room afterward.

Skinner showed up and fielded the first question about the emotions of the loss. Or at least he tried to. He sat there, lip a quivering, clearly holding back the tears, for about 20 or 30 of the most painful seconds I have ever witnessed until Steve Shutt, the Deacons assistant director of athletics for media relations, asked him if he wanted to leave the room to compose himself. Skinner took him up on the offer.

Somebody among the media wondered if he would be back.

I know Riley Skinner, and I knew he would be back.

Riley returned about five minutes later, eyes glistening, and he patiently and without any sign of resentment answered every question he was asked.

And they were tough questions. Someone wondered if his the memories of his career flashed through his mind during his final home game.

“They will probably later on this week and the beginning of next week,‘’ Skinner said. “But right now I’m just thinking about this last game and how we missed a couple of opportunities for sure. I didn’t play the way I wanted to, and it’s tough. It’s tough to end it like this. But there are some good memories going through my head too and I’m trying to pull those out a little more than I am thinking about this game.‘’

I asked a Xs and Os question, why the Deacons didn’t throw downfield more. Skinner completed 28 passes for 227 yards, breaking Rusty LaRue’s school record for yards in a season (2,788), but few of them were for more than 10 yards.

“I guess it was kind of part of our game plan,‘’ Skinner said. “We thought they’d be blitzing a good bit. We wanted to kind of work the edges of the field. There were a couple of opportunities, and we called it going downfield. Unfortunately every time we called it to go downfield they got into a coverage that we didn’t expect. And with two safeties back there it took away a couple of our routes that we wanted to take a shot at.

“We didn’t really get into a really good rhythm and the turnover in the red zone was tough. We tried to take a couple of shots downfield but I guess when that happened we didn’t execute them and sometimes they weren’t there.‘’

We would have understood if Riley had not returned to the interview room. We might have grumbled a bit and regretted not having any quotes from his final home game, but we would have understood.

But Riley Skinner is a stand-up guy who stood up yesterday under perhaps the most crushing loss of his career.

I’ve come to expect nothing less.

Hey Deacs, There’s a Game Going on

About 25 minutes into today’s game with Florida State, I wondered if someone shouldn’t call the Marriott Hotel, where Wake Forest stays on Friday night before home games, and tell the Deacons there was a game going on out at BB&T Field. The defense obviously missed the wake-up call, judging from the way the Seminoles rolled to three touchdowns, a field goal and Greg Reed’s 68-yard punt return for a touchdown and a 31-7 lead.

Skinner wasn’t sharp either, missing wide open receivers in a manner that’s somewhat shocking from a guy who has been so precise over his four years as a starter. He really hasn’t returned fully from his concussion in the fourth quarter of the loss to Miami two weeks ago.

Boo Robinson, who has been nursing a sore back, didn’t start and for a long time we couldn’t find him on the sidelines. Robinson, who did take part with his family in the pregame ceremony honoring the 22 seniors playing their final home game, must have been on a table alongside of the wall, outside of our eyesight from the press box. He did take the field in the third possession and played a fair share of the rest of the first half.

The mood is nasty on the field. The Seminoles are obviously out for vengeance after losing three straight to the Deacons and there’s a lot of yapping going on by both sides. The monster hit by Jarmon Fortson on Cyhl Quarles after Quarles’ interception was hard to watch, and thankfully for all involved the coaches and teammates settled Alex Frye down before he did something he would live to regret. But there’s no room for the mild and meek on the field today.

Wake gets the second-half kickoff, trailing 31-14. With a touchdown, the Deacons could get back in the game. But Defensive Coordinator Brad Lambert and his coaches still have to figure out a way to stock EJ Manuel and the steamrolling Seminoles offense, which amassed 290 yards in the first half.

Stewart and Harris Already Earning Keep

Mark The Dinger Freidinger knows basketball. He knows the game inside and out, as a player, coach, scout and commentator. I don’t get to hear him with Stan on the radio as much as I would like because, sitting courtside, it would take a radio and headphones, and I need what little hearing I have left locked into the sounds of the game. But when we’re talking basketball before the game, I’m hanging on pretty much everything he tells me. And he told last week, before the IUP Exhibition game, that he really liked C.J. Harris, that C.J. Harris knows how to play basketball and how much C.J. Harris reminded him of Delaney Rudd, the tough as a hickory nut Deacon guard from the early 80s. “Because he knows how to play the game,‘’ Dinger explained.

I got wind that tonight Dinger was also comparing him to Danny Young, a contemporary of Rudd’s who could take care of himself among the ACC’s best as well. Both played in the NBA,  Rudd for four years, Young for 12, counting the three with Seattle to start (84-85) and the seven with Milwaukee at the end (94-95). Dinger knows them both well. He helped recruit them to Wake as an assistant for Carl Tacy. To compare anyone to either is a high compliment.

Other than Al-Farouq Aminu’s rally-crushing 10 points in a minute and 56 seconds rampage that effectively settled the game, I’ll best remember the Deacons’ 2009-10 season opening victory over Oral Roberts for the auspicious debut of Harris and classmate Ari Stewart. Both looked like they belonged. Both are quick with long arms, and both can run. Stewart delivered the offense, nailing two of five 3-pointers and scoring 11 points, while Harris was hitting all three of his field-goal attempts in a 8-point performance that was impressive, but not as impressive of his work at the other end.

“Those two freshmen gave us (34) great minutes,‘’ Coach Dino Gaudio said. “I know we can look at the stat sheet and see they scored the ball a little bit. But C.J. did a great job on defense, pressuring the ball. And Ari came in and I think after he missed the first one he got the jitters out a little and made some big shots for us. As a matter of fact, after he hit the first one we went back to him a couple of times and he delivered on those. He had the hot hand and I have all the confidence in the world in him, and he made some big shots for us.‘’

Occasionally you’ll see a play that means absolutely nothing about the outcome of the game but will tell you as much about a player as any stat on a sheet. One of Oral Roberts’ guards lobbed the ball from the top of the key to its pretty impressive big man, Kevin Ford, right of the lane. Harris was out on the perimeter guarding his man, but he dug down in a snap to knock the ball loose out of bounds. A nano-second later and the best he does is foul Ford. He did it like he’s been doing it all his life. Nothing came of it, but I was impressed.

I’m also impressed with both players’ demeanor, who they are. Both are positive, upbeat personalities who seem to be having great fun doing what they’ve been striving to do for many years. I look forward to getting to know them better.

Coach Scott Sutton of Oral Roberts was highly complimentary.

“I like both of those freshmen,‘’ Sutton said. “I thought they played well. I thought Stewart hit some big shots in the second half. It looked like he had a beautiful stroke. He’s going to be an important part of this team if they’re going to be as good as they want to be.‘’

Friday, November 13, 2009

A Wake Fan Steps Up to the Line

The case could be made that Ish Smith’s poor free-throw shooting cost Wake Forest a crack at a couple of victories two years ago—like when he went 0-for-5 from the line and the Deacons lost to Vanderbilt 83-80 and when he was 1-for-6 in an 87-79 overtime loss at Georgia Tech.

But there’s absolutely no debating that Smith’s improved touch—he shot 79 percent last season, as compared to 29 percent the season before—is going to cost Bryan Andrews and his company JBA Benefits some serious coin this season.

Andrews, a long-time Wake Forest fan and supporter, was looking for a creative way to contribute to Coach Dino Gaudio’s fourth annual Basket Ball, an event scheduled for May 8, 2010 to raise funds for the American Cancer Society through the Coaches Vs. Cancer program. So Andrews decided to have his company kick in $10 for every free throw the Deacons make this season. We’re not talking about chump change either, considering that a year ago the Deacons made 572 (out of 804) free throws. And that ranked just ninth in the ACC, so if Wake shows any improvement at all then JBA Benefits could be shelling out more than six grand.

But it’s for a good cause—or two of them, as far as Andrews is concerned. More free throws could mean more Wake victories and more money going to the treatment and hopefully one day, the cure, for cancer.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

The Starters Who Will Get it Started

Barring any unexpected development at practice this afternoon, Wake Forest will start Ish Smith, L.D. Williams, Al-Farouq Aminu, Tony Woods and Chas McFarland in tomorrow night’s basketball opener against Oral Roberts at 8 p.m. at Joel Coliseum. David Weaver started the exhibition game against Indiana, Pa., last week because McFarland had missed three practices with a concussion. Coach Dino Gaudio said he was impressed not just with McFarland’s performance against IUP, but the manner in which he handled his role of coming off the bench.

McFarland told me after the game that starting didn’t matter, and that the only thing he cared about was winning games. I’ve been told that countless times by countless different athletes, but the way he said it made me feel he has come miles and miles from the at-times immature and often misunderstood player from his previous seasons at Wake. Gaudio saw it the same way.

“I think he took a real mature approach to the situation,‘’ Gaudio said.

Gaudio said that the only reason Weaver is not starting is because the rules of basketball allow no more than five teammates on the court at a time.

“This is not Coachspeak,‘’ Gaudio said. “I huddled up the four seniors (Smith, Williams, McFarland and Weaver) and said `In my opinion, right now, we have six starters.‘ And they knew I was talking about the three post guys.‘’

Based on what I was hearing from the earliest days of practice, I half-expected Ari Stewart, a 6-7 freshman from Marietta, Ga., to begin his college career in the starting lineup. He’s the athletic wing with the ability to slash to the basket and help on both backboards that most college teams deploy.

Gaudio said that the more Stewart progresses, the harder it will be to keep him on the bench.

“He’s right on the fringe,‘’ Gaudio said. “We are just really excited about his raw talent. When he starts to figure out defensive positioning—we have a battery of sets and stuff that he’s still trying to get a grip on. When he does that, there’s no question he’ll be playing a lot of minutes for us.‘’