David Shama's Minnesota Sports Headliners

Big Ten West Division Signals Potential

Posted on May 19, 2020May 19, 2020 by David Shama

It’s looking like the football Gophers could intensify their rivalries with Wisconsin and Iowa in coming years. While it’s unknown when Big Ten football will start its 2020 season, the three programs are having impressive offseason recruiting results after being bunched at the top of the West Division standings in 2019.

Minnesota’s 2021 recruiting class is currently ranked No. 8 nationally by 247Sports, the often quoted college football authority. The Gophers have 16 high school players who have verbally committed to coach P.J. Fleck, including five four-star players.

Iowa’s class is ranked No. 10 and the Hawkeyes have 15 commits, with three of them four-stars. Wisconsin is No. 18 with three four-star commits among its 10 player total.

Recruiting rankings will reshuffle a lot between now and Signing Day in December. Yet the early and impressive ranking of the three programs makes a statement about Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.

The Gophers are expected to have about four or five more scholarships available for the 2021 class. That means about 75 percent of the class is already in place. If things hold, Fleck will have the most four-stars since he came to Minnesota in January of 2017.

With the momentum of 2019’s 11-2 team record and breakthrough season, and the recruiting success of this winter and spring, Minnesota could add more four-star players to its class of 2021. Five-star recruits are rare but a possibility for Minnesota.

The Gophers, Hawkeyes and Badgers are recruiting various states including nearby Illinois. The University of Illinois program has fallen on hard times, causing state players to have reservations about joining the Illini who have heavily turned to the transfer portal for help.

Five of Minnesota’s 15 players in the 2021 recruiting class are from Illinois, including three four-star commits. So far this year Iowa has two players from Illinois, including a four-star offensive tackle, and the Badgers have one Illinois native.

Last season Minnesota had a 7-2 Big Ten record, tied for best in the West Division with the Badgers. Iowa was right behind at 6-3. All three programs were in the top 15 teams in the final Associated Press national rankings. The Gophers had an impressive bowl win over SEC power Auburn, the Hawkeyes beat USC by 25 points and the Badgers had a one-point loss to Pac-12 power Oregon.

Both Wisconsin and Iowa have consistently fielded winning teams for decades. That isn’t likely to change as long as the present leaders of those programs remain in place. It’s up to Fleck and the Gophers to match that consistency and even exceed it on a path to excellence.

There’s still plenty for Minnesota to prove but each of Fleck’s teams have outdone their predecessors. That’s an encouraging sign, along with the 2021 recruiting and how it appears the Gophers are not only upgrading the talent pool, but building roster depth.

There may be no better example of the latter than the vital quarterback position. The bluebloods of college football didn’t want Kentucky native Tanner Morgan when he was in high school, but Fleck saw his potential. Now looking at his redshirt junior season, Morgan is forecast as an early round NFL Draft choice in 2021. Morgan’s replacement could be redshirt sophomore Zack Annexstad who at one time beat out Morgan as the starter. The QB roster also includes two redshirt scholarship freshmen and 2021 pledge Athan Kaliakmanis, who is one of Minnesota’s four-star commits from Illinois.

In the future the Gophers must contend with not only facing Iowa and Wisconsin, but also Northwestern led by Pat Fitzgerald—a master of getting more from less at the Big Ten’s only private school and a place where fan support is sometimes buried in apathy. Nebraska, with perhaps the Big Ten’s most passionate fan-base, could come alive after two disappointing seasons under state native and head coach Scott Frost, who has recruiting ties not only to his home state but also to Florida. Purdue, too, has potential led by offensive guru and head coach Jeff Brohm.

The Big Ten West has long been a step-child to the Big Ten East Division but the gap could be closing. If Minnesota, and say Nebraska, become annual dynamos, and Iowa and Wisconsin stay strong, look out for the “Wild West.”

Worth Noting

Former Gophers basketball player and assistant coach Al Nuness praised the news yesterday that Minneapolis native Jeff Mailhot is joining coach Richard Pitino’s staff at Minnesota. Mailhot has a detailed resume of college and high school coaching including at Hopkins where he worked for head man Ken Novak, who probably has produced more Division I standouts than any coach in state history. Nuness knows both Mailhot and Novak, and said the two have a close relationship. “That’s a great hire,” Nuness said.

Birthdays: Gophers baseball coach John Anderson and 1991 Twins World Series star Jack Morris both turned 65 last Saturday. Jared Nuness, Al’s son and an assistant basketball coach at Baylor, is 41 today (May 19). Bud Grant, who coached the Vikings to four Super Bowls, will be 93 Wednesday.

Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor made a savvy decision in 2014 when he decided to purchase the Star Tribune. The paper filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after struggling with debt and declining advertising revenue but has made a big comeback in recent years shifting part of its business strategy to digital subscriptions.

Ex-Chicago Bulls bad boy Dennis Rodman, who has been receiving plenty of attention in the 10-part ESPN series “The Last Dance,” once kicked cameraman Eugene Amos in the groin at a Target Center game against the Timberwolves. Amos litigated and received a $200,000 settlement.

The series, of course, focuses on Bulls superstar Michael Jordan who has been paid $1.3 billion by Nike since 1984, according to the May 7, Forbes Sports Money Playbook.

Although speculation about it has declined, if MLB begins its season with playing sites only in Arizona, Florida and Texas that will be a tax windfall for players. Arizona has a modest state income tax, while Florida and Texas have none at all.

Comments Welcome

Rod Carew Overcame Abusive Father

Posted on May 14, 2020May 14, 2020 by David Shama

Rod Carew’s new book is on sale and it’s no ordinary tale about a sports hero. In One Tough Out: Fighting Off Life’s Curveballs (Triumph Books), the former Minnesota Twins second baseman describes his remarkable life and the obstacles he overcame to become one of the greatest hitters of the last century and a Cooperstown Hall of Famer.

Early in the book Carew, now 74, talks about his negligent and abusive father Eric. Living in poverty in Panama, Carew’s mother Olga earned $1 per day as a housekeeper. Eric spent much of his modest paycheck on booze.

“Most of my clothes were hand-me-downs,” Carew writes in the book with co-contributor Jaime Aron. “Previous owners wore them for as long as they could. By the time I got them, there wasn’t much left. At one point, my only pair of shoes had soles that flapped against the bottom of my feet when I walked. At school, I walked alongside a wall in hopes that no one would notice. I had to make do until my mother could find me a replacement.”

Eric worked on a tug boat and was a big man at 6-foot-3. Rod was often sick and weak so his father belittled him, calling the child “Sissy.” Carew speculates his father decided in his twisted view of parenting that physically abusing his son would toughen him up.

“Early on, he would shove me into a broom closet and keep me trapped inside for hours,” Carew recalled in the book. “His next step toward making a man out of me involved his fists. Nights when he drank heavily, his fists weren’t enough. His arsenal grew to include a rope, a strip of wood, the knotted cord from an iron, and the wide leather belt around his waist. These weren’t isolated incidents.”

Those beatings and rejections by Carew’s father were traumatic but his mother saved his self-esteem and at an early age put thoughts of success in his head. Olga and Eric had other children but she favored the boy and told him he was special.

“Long before Earl Woods prophesized greatness for the boy he named Tiger, my mother was infusing me with the confidence that I would grow up to make a mark on the world,” Carew said.

Olga, too, was physically abused by Eric. She eventually escaped to New York City and earned enough money in a factory to bring Rod to a new life as a 15-year-old in 1961. It was the beginning of a journey that would document success experienced by few ballplayers. First playing for the Twins and later the Angels, Carew won seven batting titles, played in 18 consecutive All-Star Games and collected 3,053 hits.

During Carew’s life, he has not only overcame a difficult childhood, but endured the tragic loss of a daughter to leukemia. In 2015 Carew fought his own health battle when his heart stopped, but remarkably he received a heart transplant from a 29-year-old he had met years before.

Carew’s life more than earns the title of his autobiography. “There’s no quit in this man,” Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson says on the book’s cover.

Worth Noting

Ross Bernstein, the Golden Gopher hockey mascot from 1989-1991, is a prolific speaker to business groups and has averaged about 120 keynote addresses per year but because of the COVID-19 epidemic is doing virtual presentations this spring. The Twin Cities-based Bernstein has spoken on seven continents and also authored 50 sports books.

Minnesota athletic director Mark Coyle describes second-year men’s hockey coach Bob Motzko as “low ego, high output.” The Big Ten Conference announced Motzko as its men’s hockey Coach of the Year this week.

Motzko has an impressive 11 Academic All-Big Ten honorees this winter, although none has a perfect GPA like Lindsey Kozelsky from the Gopher swimming and diving team. Kozelsky, an elementary education major, is one of 23 Big Ten student-athletes to have such a distinction.

Vikings coach Mike Zimmer joking from home in Kentucky about how he is coping with the disruption of leading his team: “We’re just hoping it’s not my other eye that goes.”

The Gophers’ 37-year-old Richard Pitino ranks No. 7 in a listing of the 40 best under 40 college basketball coaches in the country, per an Espn.com story yesterday.

Zack Johnson, a 2015 Spring Lake Park grad, could play against his hometown Vikings later this year if he can make the Green Bay Packers roster. The 6-6, 301-pound guard signed with the Packers as a rookie free agent this spring after an All-America career at North Dakota State.

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Rambling about 60 Seasons of the “Griffs”

Posted on May 12, 2020May 18, 2020 by David Shama

This year we are supposed to be celebrating the 60th season of the “Minnepaul Griffs.”

“Minnepaul Griffs?” Let’s explain.

The American League’s Washington Senators received permission to relocate to Minnesota in the fall of 1960. In the early weeks of the transition, the Twin Cities “think tank” of media and fans speculated about what to name their new Major League Baseball franchise. It was certainly clear that Senators wasn’t a fit as part of the name in Minnesota.

Minnepaul drew some “votes,” even if it was an awkward way of combining Minneapolis and St. Paul. Griffs was a better offering, nicknaming the club for the Griffith family that owned the franchise moving from its longtime home in the District of Columbia.

Minnesota Twins won out in the name-that-team derby, although an early legal document involving the Griffith’s franchise referred to the Minneapolis baseball club. There was also early memorabilia with the Minneapolis name—not Minnesota.

While the Griffiths were advised not to slight St. Paul, it was Minneapolis powerbrokers who had been trying to tantalize big league franchises like the Cleveland Indians, New York Giants and the Senators to relocate here in the 1950s. Also, the national sports media and fans knew this area from the fame of the five-time NBA champion Minneapolis Lakers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has so far delayed the 2020 MLB season, but it can’t stop this writer from being optimistic the “Boys of Summer” will take the field sometime in the weeks ahead. If so, the Twins will celebrate their 60th season in Minnesota.

I like to be first to a party, so let me offer further history lessons and reminiscing about the baseball franchise that has been entertaining us in the Upper Midwest since 1961.

The arrival of MLB was a big deal, and sadly, much more important to the public than the departure of the Lakers for Los Angeles after the 1959-1960 NBA season. The Vikings, an NFL expansion franchise that also took the field in 1961, were greeted with interest but nothing like the Twins because decades ago it was baseball that was the “national pastime” and not football.

Back in the early 1960s, drawing over 1 million fans through the gate was a financial sign of success in the bigs and a statement that your town supported baseball. The Twins announced total attendance of 1,256,723 fans their first season. Then they cruised through nine more seasons of passing the 1 million mark in attendance, as fans came from near and far including by private airplanes. The financial windfall was important to the Griffith family whose personal wealth would not be confused with the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, or even the Pohlads.

Team president Calvin Griffith was tight with a buck, with at least one player quipping the Twins boss threw nickels around as if they were manhole covers. Griffith found a money machine in Minnesota in the early years, and he seemed to like living here. His lifestyle included fishing near his home on Lake Minnetonka. Lore has it, though, that he didn’t care so much that an exclusive suburban Minneapolis golf club didn’t want him as a member.

Griffith was a character and no one, including Calvin, knew for sure what words might come out of his mouth. I never saw the man smile, although he always treated me with respect. I can’t recall his ever turning me down for an interview. He might waive me into his Metropolitan Stadium office and say, “Shama, sit down.”

Griffith was certainly not a high society elite, but he knew baseball. Even before he moved his franchise to Minnesota, he and his aides were building a promising talent pool that included players from Cuba. American players like Harmon Killebrew, Bob Allison and Jim Kaat, and Cubans Tony Oliva, Zoilo Versalles and Camilo Pascual, formed the core of a Twins team that won the American League pennant in 1965, and then lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.

There was no better way to spend summer days and evenings in the 1960s than at Metropolitan Stadium—and get paid for it. My dad bought primo seats for a dozen or more games per season, but I also was part of the crew that prepared food for the vendors who sold hot dogs, soda and popcorn in the stadium stands. I was paid something like $7 per game but would have worked pro bono (if I knew then what that meant).

There were about eight of us working in one of the stadium’s side rooms used for preparing items for the vendors. We became friends and we were constantly doing what teenage boys do—verbally baiting one another and occasionally exchanging punches. We also found time to experiment with the cuisine including boiling the hot dogs to twice their normal size. Coca Cola found a new partner when we mixed the famous soft drink with orange soda.

Although we had an open invite to drink and eat as much as we liked, my favorite activity was leaving the room to watch the game. No more than a couple of us were supposed to leave at any time and go watch the Twins for a few minutes, but we played fast with the work rules. By the seventh inning we could start putting the food into storage and mopping the floor to close up the facility. The best scenario was for the game to be moving slowly in the late innings so that by the eighth and ninth I could watch the game without being sidetracked by my job.

The Twins played their last game at Metropolitan Stadium September 30, 1981. I had covered the team for a wire service in the 1970s but on that September day I sat in the stands as part of a small gathering of 15,900 fans. The Twins had fallen on hard times at the gate and on the field. The Metrodome awaited with better days coming at the box office and in the standings.

From the time the dome opened until its last season in 2009, the facility was belittled, but legions of Twins fans will insist that without its home field advantage their favorite team never would have been a combined 8-0 in World Series home games that ended in championships in 1987 and 1991. The stadium of the “Homer Hanky” was an inspiring place for the Twins to play and a nightmare for the St. Louis Cardinals and Atlanta Braves.

After the 1970s I didn’t return to covering the Twins as a journalist until 2006. In the old days I found Killebrew to be the most approachable Twin I could imagine. In the 2000s I found players more difficult to talk with, except for Torii Hunter who made you feel like the editor of Sports Illustrated. Among managers and coaches, there have been none more likeable this millennium than Ron Gardenhire and Rick Anderson.

I can’t let this piece go without listing my all-time Twins team. With apologies to Gardy, I have to make Tom Kelly the manager. The man could be a professor of baseball and its managerial situations at an Ivy League institution. Here’s how I fill out T.K.’s batting order for a 60th anniversary season team:

Leading off the second baseman, Rod Carew. Batting second, the catcher Joe Mauer. Hitting third, the center fielder, Kirby Puckett. The cleanup hitter and third baseman? “The Killer,” of course. Batting fifth, right fielder Tony Oliva. Hitting sixth and seventh are first baseman Justin Morneau and left fielder Torii Hunter. Batting eighth is DH Kent Hrbek and ninth is shortstop Zoilo Versalles.

If T.K. has to win one game for the ages I am giving him Jack Morris, the right-handed hero who pitched 10 brilliant innings in the seventh game of the 1991 World Series that made Minnesota the baseball capital of the universe that year. (Morris was 2-0 in the series with a 1.17 ERA). If Jack needed help in the ninth, it’s Joe Nathan to the rescue.

Calling the action on local radio and TV would be the broadcast team of Herb Carneal, Halsey Hall and Ray Scott. They were both reporters and entertainers who charmed these parts decades ago. None more so than Halsey who had so many sidesplitting stories he could make a rain delay better than the ball game.

Hall had been a newspaper man for a long time before the Twins arrived. He loved having a big league ball club in Minnesota. His emotions about the hometown team could go to extreme. Once on the broadcast of a nail-biting game Scott quipped, “Halsey get up off the floor. You’re paid to watch.”

The 2020 Twins have yet to take the field, but for this writer the 60 seasons celebration starts today.

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