ONE FINAL LAX MOMENT
1. My new personal hero is Johns Hopkins senior attack Jake Byrne , and not because he scored four goals in Monday afternoon's 12-11 win over Duke in the D-I men's national championship. It's for his sense of getting what really matters.
See, I've been fortunate enough to attend quite a few national championships this past decade and there's just one thing that leaves me with a sour taste after each one. That is this: the shameless rush each school's sports info. department seems to be in, the very second the game ends, to hand out "National Champions" t-shirts to the members of the team. Why would any player, I've always wondered, rather wear some cheap T-shirt instead of the jersey they wore while achieving one of (if not THE) greatest moments of their young lives? And yet, I always seemed to be alone on an island on this thought.
Until today.
Twenty minutes after the clock expired, while all of Byrne's teammates were wearing the uncomplimentary complimentary T-shirts and snipping off pieces of a lax goal net for themselves, he stood proudly wearing his No. 25 powder-blue jersey. It was sweaty and smelly, of course, but Byrne happily wore it and only it.
I asked him why.
"I just decided," he said--and remember, he's a senior; this was his final game, "that I wanted to wear this jersey as long as I possibly could. Until they made me take it off."
Wouldn't it be nice if every SID in America took Byrne's words to heart and scrapped the entire cheapie -shirt deal? It cheapens a wonderful moment. Thank you, Jake Byrne.
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NBCSports.com's John Walters goes into the world of college sports and well beyond. From Notre Dame to the latest in pop culture, JDub tackles it all.
Man, lacrosse is the anti-MMA of blog-comment incitement. The all-caps nature of your blog headlines had me thinking you'd had a Peter King-caliber LAX moment ("The Chili's To Go in Terminal D has the best salsa of any airport west of O'Hare")
The only thing more troublesome than the "s" in Johns Hopkins is correctly writing the possessive form of St. John's. It's got the apostrophe-S to begin with, so do you write it as "St. John's's women's basketball team won 48-44" (no, of course not) or just hedge it by never giving it a direct possessive -- "the St. John's curriculum includes high-level punctuation courses." And after "West Virgina" had troubles with their celebratory T-shirts, I'd be happy if the Johns Hopkins folks spellchecked.
Finally saw "Wordplay" the other night. Good stuff.
Don't blame the SIDs, John. This is the NCAA's influence, clear and simple. It's their people on the sidelines handing the crap out, and at conference championships it's the conference's people.
You think the SIDs have any control over what happens on the sideline of an NCAA championship? They're lucky if they can get their photographer in the building.
Will somebody please post a new blog entry before I start watching "The View".