AOS Celebrity Encounter Tuesday: Lorenzo Romar Wants You to Give it Your All

In light of Saint Louis University's recent firing of head men's basketball coach Brad Sodberg, I thought it would be relevant to tell of the time I met former men's basketball coach and current University of Washington head coach, Lorenzo Romar.

On Saturday mornings, while a senior in high school, I checked ID's at a local gym. The job was pretty easy: pick up towels, change the water cooler, sweep the floor, make sure nobody blew out their knee, etc. Most of the time I read or studied biology (Probably the reason I remember that Mitochondria = powerhouse of the cell).

Anyway, from 9-12 the gym was reserved for pick-up basketball games. The demographic of this gym was mostly middle age doctors and business man, some local celebrities that your parents would be excited about meeting, and every now and then a former collegiate player--Troy Robertson, Scott Highmark, even Anthony Bonner showed up, until my buddy gave him a hard foul and jeopardized his ten day contract with the Knicks.

On the particular Saturday in question, Highmark showed up accompanied by Romar. For those of you who don't know, Highmark played basketball at SLU in the mid 90s and with Erwin Clagget, H. Waldman, Donnie Dobbs, led SLU to back to back NCAA tournaments.

Now I didn't know much about Lorenzo Romar, but I knew he had played in the NBA. A quick look at Wikipedia confirms that he did indeed play five years for the Warriors. So the field of participants was an All-Conference USA forward, a former NBA player, and a bunch of doctors who had no cartilege in their knees. Bone on bone.



Romar started the game being very defferential. Doing the little things that made him the perfect teammate. Fighting down low for rebounds, solid entry passes and off-the-ball screens. Soon though, his team started to fall behind and that's when Romar morphed into Teen Wolf. Not Jason Bateman Teen Wolf II either. No, we're talking Michael J. Fox, i'm taking this game over Teen Wolf. I mean he was grabbing rebounds at one end, dribbling down the court, pulling up and sinking the shots in another guy's face. Romar was putting on a clinic and brought his team back within one.



But much like the premise of Teen Wolf, the other players became disenchanted with just winning, they wanted to share in the glory. Next time down the court, the ball made its way into the hands of another player. The guy, I believe he was a dentist, was wearing a brace for every appendage, and decided to take a three, which clanked off the rim. Romar was not pleased with the shot selection and decided to let him know about. Romar goes off on this guy at half court explaining the situation, how he has the hot hand, and basically the shot wasn't needed. The dentist tried to defend himself, but Romar would have none of it, telling him next time down the ball had to go through Romar's hands.

Lorenzo Romar: In it to win it

You Lose Everything You Love

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

It is difficult for me to see the tragedy in the college basketball coaching carousel. Over the past few weeks, Bill Donovan's stayed. Billy Gillispie's left. Bobby Huggins has slithered. Dana Altman has changed his mind. And a slew of mid major coaches have mortgaged their careers for a chance at glory. Amidst it all Gillispie and Huggins have caused the most

Fans at Texas A&M and Kansas State are in an uproar over the perceived betrayal by the two former basketball coaches. Both of whom spent the past week trying to assuage the doubt by saying that they left for their dream job.


Kentucky will always be on the same plain as Duke, North Carolina, UConn, and UCLA as the preeminent basketball schools in the country. Texas A&M was coming off a magical season and losing its top player, Acie Law IV. People justify Gillispie's decision by saying that you can't turn Kentucky down, it's a chance of a life time

Booby Huggins graduated from West Virginia But with Huggins, this seems like another Bill Simmons type revelation. Haven't we been watching Huggins for decades? Are we really surprised that he acted in a way that a reasonable, upstanding person would not?

A joke that will never get old: With Bobby Huggins at WVU, get use to incorrect spelling

In the end I suppose that's what the real tragedy. This is not just self preservation. It's more than the Big XII conference suffering. The real tragedy is that these coaches bolted for what they perceived as a better opportunity.

Basically, what I'm saying is should you always answer the door when a better opportunity knocks? Isn't there an inherent pride in building something and sticking with it. I should stop writing about OJ Mayo, but I find his story fascinating. He said the onyl reason he is going to USC is that he wanted to be remembered as the greatest player to ever play for USC. If USC didn't take him, he said he would have gone to an all black college and attempted to achieve the same recogniton. Many people see this as haughty, and when he invariably jumps to the NBA after one year, I suppose you could say the same thing as I'm saying here. But in some respects you can argue that what Mayo is doing is noble. He does not want to pick up where some else left off, he wants to build himself. Sure you could pay someone to cut your grass, but sometimes it makes you feel good to stare out on a lawn and know that you accomplished something.

In the long run, as usual, the lyrical stylings of Ludacris give us guidance on what most likely is the best way for K-State and A&M fans to handle the situation.

"We didn't take no money from Chingy/Thought I was cool with him/I wish his ass well, but I don't want nothing to do with him...Don't trust nobody but your goddamn self." --Ludacris,

In the Thesaurus, I'm Next to Illest

I was all set to do a post comparing Talib Kweli and Greg Oden to Mos Def and Kevin Durant. Basically, I read this quote from Kweli: "Ain't nobody making music to not be heard and the easiest way to be heard is to be on the radio, but you should never compromise who you are, your values or your morals." And I thought that was kind of like Oden. Common sense says he should declare himself eligible for the NBA Draft next year, start playing and as soon as possible sign that max extension. But, reports continue to filter out about how much he enjoys school. How in high school Calculus he argued over one point, how he calls old high school teachers to talk about what he's learning, not mentioning basketball once. The goal of any college basketball player is to one day play in the NBA, but you should never compromise who you are. Maybe Oden enjoys being a kid, maybe he will put off today what he can do tomorrow. And in that way I thought he was like Kweli someone who, sure has some beats from Kayne West and Pharrell, but was always seemingly more interested in his lyrics, and not in catering his music to the masses.

Conversely, Mos Def was always much more commercially successful than his Black Star counterpart. Mos Def's single "Umi Says" was a Nike commercial, he has stared in movies with Bruce Willis, Halle Berry, Mark Whalberg, and Damon Wayans. Kevin Durant is Mos Def to Oden's Kweli. Durant was the AP and Big XII player of the year. There are already estimations that his deal with Nike will be between $35-$70 million. It is almost a foregone conclusion he will declare for the NBA Draft and there is no dcoubt he will be one of the first two picks. College was a stepping stone and he's ready to make the leap.

I started off by saying that I was wanted to post about the comparisons between Blackstar and the two most impressive players in the country. I wanted to argue that Kweli was more lyrically talented than Mos Def and that his resistence to the limelight has enhanced the quality of his music. I wanted to argue just as Kweli is superior, so is Oden. Even though his team in the Final Four because of his implacable block against Tennessee and rancorous play in the second half versus Memphis, Oden, himself has conceded that he's not ready for the NBA. His humility and openness to learn, I felt, made him that more impressive a player. I was going to write all of this, until I read about this guy:



His name is Ben Kweller and he wrote a song entitled, "In Other Words." The song was sampled in Talib Kweli's song, "Ms. Hill," off his lastest album "Right About Now." According to Kweller, Kweli did not have permission to use the song, and made no effort to point out that the music was Kweller's. In his defense, Kweli starts off the song by answering a phone and over the beat saying, "Yo who's this? Yeah, I heard it. I mean it's fire." So maybe he didn't know it was someone else's music. Maybe.

Finding out Kweli took that song made me rethink my view on Oden, whether right or wrong. Maybe Oden was just like Kweli in that these stories coming out about how much he loves school and that the NBA can wait, are just illusions. That maybe in the end, he's just like the rest of us, hindred by the rationale of Saturn, as discussed below. In the end, we do what we have to do. It's sort of like something else Kweli said, "Well if somebody's giving me a script, I'll consider it. But it's not something I'm chasing."

Pain Means Nothing, Fame Everything

photo from:http://www.holycross.edu/departments/classics/jhamilton/mythology/aeneas.gif

"Arma virumque cano..."--Virgil, The Aenid

Hyperbole and nostalgia saturate the NCAA tournamnet. But when viewed in the context of the theme conveyed, that of the athlete as hero, such hyperbole and nostalgia seem appropriate, not out of place. In the course of one month, legend status is bestowed on a handful of players, who rise from the ranks of relative unknown to deliverer. From year to year, players are interchanged, new stories replacing the faces we have just recently become accustomed to. Each year this occurs, the story becoming as familiar to us as the quick tale we would hear before we fell asleep and our parents returned downstairs to finish watching Cheers.

The elevation to demigod (or demagogue) status deviates slightly from the path of the classic hero. Players rarely, if ever, sacrifice themselves for something bigger. Instead, they perform a deed which sets them apart from all others. Some act which causes destiny to be as not as far fetched as we have been lead to believe. It is these acts which write the hagiography before our eyes and cause us to sing ballads of praise in rememberance of their struggles. Ballads which immortalize their names, so that someday in front of television sets or in smoky sports bars remembering them will elicit raucous toasts, rivalving that of only Bill Brasky. For there is no dignity in anonymity.

Someday, remembering this will be a pleasure. It was always around this time of year that I regretted attending a D-III university. Although we did have a very solid basketball team, and I was able to pester a referee into a five second call one Tuesday evening, outside of the players on our squad, there were no stories. When an opposing team came to play, we had to invent our own background--there were no Bobby Knights, no Larry Eustachys, not even a Coach K to harass with incessant chants. The players were just as faceless--for all we knew the opponents were nothing more than a mixture of guys who were all-county acadmeic and those who Mike Miller once dunked over in the Corn Palace. Our jeers devolving into analogies, "Hey! No. 24 looks like the guy from 'Blue Lagoon.' Blue Lagoon! Blue Lagoon! Blue Lagoon!" But D-I basketball subsists on stories. The tournament gives us the unknown, and in the process of a week, they make them known. It is this evolution that the hero arises. The tournament is the vehicle through which, we are able to connect with these players devoted to a mission, players who have wandered for years before finally achieving destiny. They are a kindred spirit--a person passed over, unnoticed, finally garnering praise. That is why we sit with front row seats, we don't so much watch as we accompany. We are a part of the journey. We were there when they were in the process of becoming.

Man is something to be surpassed. The classic hero is the proof of this. Man is frail, man fails in the face of adversity. Man is susceptible to hubris and other flaws that make us common. But the true hero is the one who surpasses these vices. And the torunament gives this to us--players who constantly walk the rope across the abyss; players who are the lightning which follows the cloud. The tournament reminds us of our mortality, but allows us the glimpse of that which has surpassed us.
"I sing of warfare and man..."