Ken Griffey Jr., a Seattle sports icon, announced his retirement tonight. I’ll never forget the moment in 1995 when he scored the winning run against the Yankees in the divisional series, saving baseball in Seattle. We actually didn’t have TV in The Daily’s newsroom back then, and I had to drive a fellow staff member home after a really long night at the paper. We walked outside the Communications Building, and as we passed McMahon Hall the entire dormitory exploded in celebration. We yelled at students on the balconies and they screamed that we had won. So, yes, I actually missed the moment on television, but I experienced it as a moment of pure public joy.
Things were looking so great on Montlake. Romar has his best team since Nate Robinson and Brandon Roy were balling on the floor (and this 2009 group is arguably better). UW is coming off its first outright Pac 10 championship in a couple of generations. Sure, we lost Jon Brockman and Justin Dentmon, but we got one of the best high schoolers in the country in Abdul Gaddy. Isaiah Thomas was the Pac 10 Freshman of the Year. Venoy Overton is the Pac 10s most suffocating defensive player. Quincy Pondexter is the only senior, but he’s come of age and is approaching B-Roy territory in terms of talent and experience. And UW is so deep that pretty much every player could start at any other school in the conference.
I spent Saturday evening watching the Arizona and Washington game on television, and it wasn’t pretty. Despite a solid first half, the Huskies came out misfiring on offense and special teams in the third quarter, and the defense was the epitome of bend-don’t-break. Arizona went up by 12 with four minutes left and it looked hopeless. Yet I still kept watching. Then, Jake Locker lead a touchdown drive in less than two minutes. Suddenly, it’s a five point game but the problem is that Arizona’s offense had been eating up the clock like crazy. They hadn’t punted the entire second half. They were killing us with the bubble screen. We couldn’t do much about it because our defense, which was already full of freshmen and backups, was even more depleted this week with the loss of a couple of starters. Game over, right? But then this happened.
I think my exact words at the time were: HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD. I mean, seriously, a deflection off the shoe???? This had to be a makeup from Touchdown Jesus, who stiffed us last week at Notre Dame with a couple of absolutely rotten replay calls that gave the Irish a win. Suddenly, we had the lead, and everyone in Husky Stadium went nuts, including my kid brother who was there. I would have killed to be there with him. So now instead of being 2-4, we’re 3-3 halfway through the season, and our bowl hopes are still alive. To go to a bowl a year after going 0-12 would be the greatest thing ever. This saved our season. I’m not kidding in that I was up till about 2 a.m. watching and rewatching this play. It’s absolutely freak.
Ouch, you’re in trouble when the offensive and defensive lines don’t show up. Meanwhile, Locker looked flustered for the first time in years and kept throwing picks, special teams broke down, and the problems just kept cascading. With that said, as bad as the D and the O played, if we don’t throw the pick at the goal line, or fumble on the third down early, it’s a totally different game. Gotta take care of the football.
On the good side, absolutely perfect night for football, and Stanford Stadium is very nice; I like how it feels like it’s in the middle of a forest. Even the parking lots are heavily wooded.
Man, Fox College Sports needs to really put a few dollars into the marketing team, because it has the exclusive on a pretty big Pac 10 game featuring a ranked team and this is the best it could do? Seriously? Seriously?
The newsroom of The Daily of the University of Washington is a wild place. The floors look like they haven’t been mopped in decades, so there’s a layer of grime around the desks. There’s a ratty old couch that has served as a bed many a night. And the place looks like a hurricane hit.
When you work on The Daily you sink your soul into it; I spent more hours in the Communications Building than most Communications majors even though I was a History major. As a reporter I’d be in the newsroom until eight or nine each night; after I became an editor and editor-in-chief I’d be there till 1 or 2 in the morning. The newsroom becomes more of a home than your home, and the people there your family, even if you spend most of your time getting into screaming arguments about politics and sex and music and movies and whatever college kids have an opinion on, which is pretty much everything. And you love every minute of it. Then, suddenly, you graduate and it’s over. But you leave your mark on the walls, which are covered with graffiti that consists mainly of double entendres, witty turns of phrases, and hilarious put downs from the many talented people who have come through The Daily.
The sports department occupied a corner of the newsroom, and in that fiefdom some of the best writers I’ve ever known held court, trading insults with the grunge slackers who ran the Arts section next to them. They even looked like sports guys, from the backwards-worn baseball hats to the constant need to stick chewing tobacco in their mouths and spit it into empty aluminum soda cans. The kicker is that the guys never quite threw those cans out, so you had to be extra careful when you were writing a story and reaching for your drink. Somehow, that situation kept going for months until the women on staff held a hilarious open revolt during a weekly staff meeting and the sports guys finally cleaned up their act.
I mention all this because the sports corner was painted green with white hash marks, much like a football field, and legend has it that Jim Caple was behind it. Caple is now a senior writer with ESPN.com and he is one of the very best sports writers in the business, which makes him even more of a legend in The Daily. He also maintains a deep love for UW to this day, and he was in Husky Stadium on Saturday and wrote this brilliant column that captures what I think all Husky fans felt.
I cried like a baby as soon as the game clock ran out and the students rushed the field. The pain of the past decade, and especially last year, has weighed heavily on me. I was at the USC game in LA in October and we got smoked 56-0. I had the bad luck of sitting in middle of the USC fans and was ashamed by the utter lack of heart on UW’s part. Then I went to the Cal game in Berkeley, the final game of the season, and saw an even more despondent UW team show up and lay down as roadkill to finish an 0-12 year. As someone who remembers UW’s national championship, I felt like I was witness to the extremes of UW football history. We were at absolute rock bottom.
I was happy with Willingham getting canned and Sarkisian being hired, but it was hard to hope after so many disappointments. So I watched today’s game trying desperately not to jinx things as UW hanged tough against the #3 team in the country. But we were 21-point underdogs, and if not for the Idaho win last week we would have been riding a 16-game losing streak stretching back to November of 2007. I wanted this win more than anything, but I dared not to hope too much, less defeat was snapped from the jaws of victory. And then we won, and suddenly everything was better and the tears flowed.
