Houston's Clear Thinkers

June 16, 2008

Bill King's story

As Republican presidential nominee John McCain is doing his best to stoke public prejudice against job-creators and wealth builders, longtime Houston lawyer and businessman Bill King is promoting his new book, Saving Face (Somerset 2008), which is King's personal history of the savings & loan crisis of the late 1980's and early 1990's. Ironically, McCain knows quite a bit about the back story to King's book. McCain was one of the Keating Five, the Congressional supporters of former Lincoln Savings & Loan chairman and CEO Charles Keating, who was convicted of various corporate fraud crimes and served four years in prison as a result of highly-stoked but substantively-thin prosecutions that were ultimately overturned on appeal. Keating eventually pled guilty to a single count of bankruptcy fraud to limit further prison time and insulate a family member from prosecution. For a thorough review of the mendacity of the Keating prosecutions, pick up a copy of Dan Fischel's book, Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and his Financial Revolution (HarperCollins 1995).

King's story is the Houston version of Keating's and a precursor of the prosecutorial abuse that the post-Enron criminal prosecutions in Houston generated a decade later. Not only does King do an excellent job of explaining the financial, economic, regulatory and political underpinnings of the S&L crisis, he explores how the government wielded its prosecutorial power indiscriminately to serve up scapegoats to a salivating mainstream media and an ill-informed public. King is thinking about running for Houston mayor in 2009 and, based on the depth and perspective that he exhibits in Saving Face, King would probably be a fine mayor. The following is King's overview of Saving Face, which I recommend highly:

These days I find myself cringing when I hear media accounts that fraudulent and greedy mortgage brokers are responsible for all of the woes of the current housing bubble and the sub-prime defaults. I do so because the recriminations are an all too familiar echo of an earlier debacle. One to which I had a ring-side seat.

Many of you who have known me for some years know that shortly after law school I made the somewhat less-than-fortuitous career decision of joining a law firm that specialized in representing savings and loans. At the time it did not seem like a bad decision. The Houston real estate market was enjoying an unprecedented boom and the savings and loan industry had just been deregulated. Investors were clamoring to get into the business.

Within a few years of joining the law firm, I began investing in savings and loans and related businesses. By 1986, notwithstanding that I had started with barely two nickels to rub together after working my way through law school, I had built a small, but respectable, business empire consisting of savings and loan holdings, title companies, and real estate investments. However, within a couple of years, everything I had built evaporated into thin air.

The Houston market collapsed when the price of oil fell from over $34 per barrel in 1984 to $9 the next year. It did not recover to above $20 until 2002. Manufacturing jobs in the region fell by nearly 50% and for the first time in history Texans' personal income declined.

Bankruptcies in Houston tripled between 1983 and 1987. All but one of Texas' major banking holding companies failed. Harris County's population actually declined from 1985 to 1989. It was the first and only time in Houston's history that it has lost population. If you did not live through these times, the magnitude of melt down is hard to imagine.

It is certainly difficult to lose everything that you have worked for, but the environment that existed in the late 1980s and early 1990s had an even more ominous aspect. As the public became increasingly aware that the savings and loan crisis was going to take a major taxpayer bailout, there were ever more strident cries to hold someone responsible.

The complexity of confluence of interest rates, regulatory policy, oil prices, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and the collapse of large portions of the real estate market that actually explained the collapse was too great to be reduced to sound bites. Politicians and bureaucrats began pointing the finger at those in the industry, and soon, the "S&L crook" was born. And there were enough egregious cases for the politicians and bureaucrats to hold up as "proof" of their argument that the "S&L crooks" caused the crisis.

The proposition that fraud and insider abuse had sunk the savings and loan industry was eventually discredited. In 1993, a National Commission concluded that fraud had caused less than 15% of the total problem. But in the heat of the moment, there was little interest in cool, scholarly reflection on the problems of the industry.

As the 1980s came to a close I watched as many friends, associates and former clients in the S&L industry were swept up in a maelstrom of civil and criminal litigation. Naively, it never occurred to me that I might be caught up in such a dispute as well. But I was.

Eventually, I prevailed in my battle with the regulators, but as you might imagine, it was an experience that left an indelible mark and from which it took me many years to recover. For some time I have been jotting down notes for a book about these experiences. For a couple of reasons, I recently decided to finalize such a book.

First, as many of you know, I am considering a candidacy for mayor of Houston in 2009. We all know too well that "negative campaigning" has become the standard today. Certainly going bankrupt in the savings and loan business will provide potential opponents ready ammunition. So first and foremost, I want to put the issue squarely on the table. If I decide to become a candidate, there will undoubtedly be some voters who will be troubled by these experiences. Some will believe difficult times such as the ones I went through are a crucible that better prepares a person for leadership. Most, I expect, will simply want to be advised of the facts so that they can be weighed with other issues bearing on their decision.

But beyond the potential political implications, the troubling similarities between what I saw in the S&L collapse of the 1980s and the sub-prime crisis playing out before us now demands some consideration. It is a well worn adage, but nonetheless true, that if we do not learn from our history, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes. Perhaps relating what I saw during the saving and loan industry collapse will provide some perspective on the current financial crises.

So for these reasons I have written Saving Face: An Alternative and Personal Account of the Savings and Loan Debacle. I have attempted in the book to tell the story of what I experienced during these times, but at the same time, to place my experiences in a larger, national context. I believe my story has some relevance to anyone experiencing trying times generally, and certainly to those in the Houston real estate industry, many of whom lived through these times as I did.

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May 11, 2008

Nixonland

George Will gives Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland (Scribner 2008), a history lesson.

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April 8, 2008

Enjoying John Adams

My son Cody and I have been thoroughly enjoying each Sunday night episode of the HBO mini-series John Adams, which is based upon David McCullough's brilliant biography of Adams. Given the extraordinary talents, troubling contradictions and fascinating relationships among the pivotal leaders of the American revolutionary era -- Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin and Burr, among others -- I have always wondered why some enterprising filmmaker hadn't made a first-rate movie about the era. John Adams producer Tom Hanks should be commended for pulling it off in a splendid manner. Rebecca Cusey's favorable review of the mini-series is here.

My vote for the book upon which the next movie of this era should be based -- Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press 2004). Two other excellent recent books on this era are Jay Winik's The Great Upheaval (Harper 2007) and Joseph Ellis' American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (Knopf 2007).

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March 26, 2008

Throes of Democracy

One of the best books that I have read over the past several years is Walter A. McDougall's Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828 (HarperCollins 2004), the first book in McDougall's planned trilogy on American history (Gordon Wood's 2004 review of Freedom Just Around the Corner is here).

For anyone interested in the development of the market economy in American society, Freedom Just Around the Corner is essential reading. One of McDougall's central theses is that most of American society's dynamic successes (and also many of its failures) are attributable to the creative entrepreneurial spirit of its citizens, and that the source of a considerable amount of tension within American society are the forces that attempt to contain this spirit. McDougall sums up his viewpoint in the preface to his widely-anticipated and just-published sequel to Freedom Just Around the Corner, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 (HarperCollins 2008):

I believe the United States (so far) is the greatest success story in history. I believe Americans (on balance) are experts at self-deception. And I believe the "creative corruption" born of their pretense goes far to explain their success. The upshot of is that American history is chock-full of cruelty and love, hypocrisy and faith, cowardice and courage, plus not small measure of tongue-in-cheek humor. American history is a tale of human nature set free. So how you, the reader, respond to this book will depend in good part on how you yourself (all pretense aside!) regard human nature.

McDougall has a wonderfully engaging style, which is reflected in the following Freedom Just Around the Corner excerpt about the tragic death of Alexander Hamilton in his duel with Vice-President, Aaron Burr. After the Federalist-but-statesman-first Hamilton undermined the rudderless Burr's Federalist campaign for New York Governor by supporting Burr's Republican opponent, McDougall described what happened next (pp, 395-96):

When in April 1804 Burr gleaned just 40 percent of the tally, he invoked the code duello and called Hamilton to pistols on the green at Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton's son had been killed in such an affair just a year before and he was well aware of Burr's marksmanship. But Hamilton consented in July 1804 to perform one last service for his country. He killed Burr's career by permitting Burr to kill him.

I've just started Throes of Democracy, but I have read enough to know that it is going to be a rollicking good ride. Michael Kazin's somewhat indifferent NY Times review of Throes of Democracy is here.

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February 20, 2008

Born Standing Up

Don't miss this Smithsonian.com excerpt from comedian Steve Martin's new autobiographical book, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (Scribner 2007). Take, for example, Martin's hilarious description of the implementation of his novel theory of comedy in one of his initial shows:

A skillful comedian could coax a laugh with tiny indicators such as a vocal tic (Bob Hope's "But I wanna tell ya") or even a slight body shift. Jack E. Leonard used to punctuate jokes by slapping his stomach with his hand. One night, watching him on "The Tonight Show," I noticed that several of his punch lines had been unintelligible, and the audience had actually laughed at nothing but the cue of his hand slap.

These notions stayed with me until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

To test my idea, I went onstage and began: "I'd like to open up with sort of a 'funny comedy bit.' This has really been a big one for me...it's the one that put me where I am today. I'm sure most of you will recognize the title when I mention it; it's the "Nose on Microphone" routine [pause for imagined applause]. And it's always funny, no matter how many times you see it."

I leaned in and placed my nose on the mike for a few long seconds. Then I stopped and took several bows, saying, "Thank you very much." "That's it?" they thought. Yes, that was it. The laugh came not then, but only after they realized I had already moved on to the next bit.

Now that I had assigned myself to an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing: this is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet. If I wasn't offering punch lines, I'd never be standing there with egg on my face. It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. I would move through my act without pausing for the laugh, as though everything were an aside. Eventually, I thought, the laughs would be playing catch-up to what I was doing. Everything would be either delivered in passing, or the opposite, an elaborate presentation that climaxed in pointlessness. Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn't care if they laughed at all and that this act was going on with or without them.

I was having trouble ending my show. I thought, "Why not make a virtue of it?" I started closing with extended bowing, as though I heard heavy applause. I kept insisting that I needed to "beg off." No, nothing, not even this ovation I am imagining, can make me stay. My goal was to make the audience laugh but leave them unable to describe what it was that had made them laugh. In other words, like the helpless state of giddiness experienced by close friends tuned in to each other's sense of humor, you had to be there.

At least that was the theory. And for the next eight years, I rolled it up a hill like Sisyphus.

My first reviews came in. One said, "This so-called 'comedian' should be told that jokes are supposed to have punch lines." Another said I represented "the most serious booking error in the history of Los Angeles music."

"Wait," I thought, "let me explain my theory!"

Martin also passes along an interesting observation about longtime Tonight Show host, Johnny Carson. It took some time for Martin to earn Carson's professional respect:

I was able to maintain a personal relationship with Johnny over the next 30 years, at least as personal as he or I could make it, and I was flattered that he came to respect my comedy. . . Johnny once joked in his monologue: "I announced that I was going to write my autobiography, and 19 publishers went out and copyrighted the title Cold and Aloof." This was the common perception of him. But Johnny was not aloof; he was polite. He did not presume intimate relationships where there were none; he took time, and with time grew trust. He preserved his dignity by maintaining the personality that was appropriate for him.

The excerpt also includes Martin's chance encounter with Elvis. Classic.

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January 19, 2008

China Road

Clear Thinkers favorite James Fallows, who is currently working in China for The Atlantic, posts a recommendation for China Road (Random House 2007), a new book about China by NPR's long-time China correspondent Rob Gifford. Inasmuch as one of the best books that I read last year was Adrian Goldsworthy's extraordinary biography of Julius Caesar, Caesar: Life of a Colossus (Yale 2006), one passage from Gifford's book that Fallows includes in his blog post intrigued me, particularly given the West's difficulties over the centuries in maintaining normalized political relations with various Chinese governments:

Chairman Mao was just the most recent of a long line of re-unifiers, and if Emperor Qin were to return to China today, he would recognize the mode of government used by the Communist Party. I have to say that I find this idea rather scary, that two thousand years of history might have done nothing to change the political system of a country. Imagine a Europe today where the Roman Empire had never fallen, that still covered an area from England to North Africa and the Middle East and was run by one man based in Rome, backed by a large army. There you have, roughly, ancient and modern China. The fact that this setup has not changed, or been able to change, in two thousand years must also have huge implications for the question Can China ever change its political system.

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September 18, 2007

Until Proven Innocent

Jeffrey Rosen reviews Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson's book on the angry mob that nearly lynched the lives of several young men in the Duke lacrosse team case:

At least “many of the journalists misled by [former DA Mike] Nifong eventually adjusted their views as evidence of innocence” came to light, the authors conclude. That’s more than can be said for Duke’s “activist professors,” 88 of whom signed an inflammatory letter encouraging a rush to judgment by the student protesters who were plastering the campus with wanted posters of the lacrosse team and waving a banner declaring “Castrate.” Even when confronted with DNA evidence of the players’ innocence, these professors refused to apologize and instead incoherently attacked their critics. In the same spirit, the authors charge, the president of Duke, Richard Brodhead, fired the lacrosse coach, canceled the season and condemned the team members for more than eight months. The pandering Brodhead, in this account, is more concerned about placating faculty ideologues than about understanding the realities of student life on his raunchy campus.

Does the foregoing remind you of the actions of another group of self-righteous crusaders?

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November 13, 2006

The Blind Side of big-time college football

Last week, the resignation of my friend, Iowa State head football coach Dan McCarney, prompted this post reflecting on how the pressures of big-time college football prompted a resignation that is quite likely contrary to the long term ability of Iowa State to remain competitive in big-time college football. As if on cue, George Will, in this NY Times book review, provides his view on the new book by Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.

In Moneyball, Lewis explored how the small-market Oakland Athletics were able to remain competitive against far richer clubs in Major League Baseball by emphasizing objective evaluation of players and, in so doing, introduced sabremetric statistical analysis to the general public. As Will notes, Lewis “is advancing a new genre of journalism that shows how market forces and economic reasoning shape the evolution of sports.” Lewis’s latest book involves big-time college football, which -- as noted earlier here -- has long been a means by which universities in the U.S. have compromised academic integrity to rent athletically-gifted young men to serve as cash cows for the institutions. As noted in my earlier post, the National Football League reaps the fruits (as if those teams really needed it) of an effectively free farm system that college football provides, while the vast majority of the universities -- including Iowa State -- either lose money or barely eke out a profit in their football programs.

Moreover, Lewis examines how the winds of change ripple down from the NFL to big-time college football and dictate the course of the college game. One case in point is Lawrence Taylor, who singlehandedly changed the nature of professional football by becoming the prototype of the huge, athletic and extraordinarily fast outside linebacker who could increase the pressure on the quarterback. At about the same time as Taylor was wreaking havoc on QB's, Bill Walsh's West Coast offense was spreading the field, which made it even more important for teams to find agile offensive linemen to block the likes of Taylor. Most important was to protect the QB's blind side, so the position of left offensive tackle increased in importance and, as a result, the position's economic value skyrocketed.

As demand increased in the NFL for the colleges to produce another kind of freak of nature to play what had been an obscure position but now was now one of the most important positions on the field, Lewis explains that the colleges were more than willing to compromise any notion of academic integrity to admit athletes who project to have the physical stature and talent to play the demanding left tackle position. In short, it's not just the star QB or running back who gets the royal treatment from the institutions in this day and age -- potential left tackles are now included, too. Lewis' book describes one of those freaks of nature, a freshman tackle at the University of Mississippi with an I.Q. of 80 who bounced from foster home to foster home as a youth.

Just as we should not be surprised that many folks enjoy betting illegally on college football, neither should we be shocked with the corruption in college football that Lewis examines in his book. One of my uncles who played SEC football during the late 1920's used to tell me how much money he was paid under the table even in those days. Moreover, there is no question that big-time college football -- even as corrupt as it is -- is a pretty darn entertaining form of corruption. As noted in my previous post, there is a model that would likely minimize the corruptive elements while not affecting the entertainment value of college football much, but it's going to take leadership and courage from the top of the educational institutions to promote and implement such reform.

Unfortunately, those considerations were not on the minds of the Iowa State administrators last week as they began figuring out how to replace a very good football coach who had just left one of the most difficult jobs in his profession. Similarly, my sense is University of Miami president Donna Shalala will not be contemplating those matters when she begins her search to replace Larry Coker later this month as head coach of one of the most storied programs in all of big-time college football. That seems to be the tunnel vision that is generated from the sponsorship of professional football by U.S. academic institutions.

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November 10, 2006

A good football coach steps down

Dan McCarney, the "dean" of the Big 12 Conference football coaches, resigned under pressure on Wednesday as head football coach at Iowa State University after 12 seasons. The announcement barely made a blip in the local Houston media, but Coach Mac's resignation highlighted many aspects of the troubling direction of major college football, a topic that has also been touched on here, here, here and here.

I am biased about Coach McCarney, who is called Coach Mac by most everyone. As regular readers of this blog know (see here and here), Coach Mac and I have been friends since growing up together in Iowa City, Iowa, where we played together on City High School's championship football team in 1970. I moved to Houston with my family shortly after finishing high school and Mac went on to play football at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, but we remained in contact over the years as I went to law school and began a legal career in Houston and Mac went on to the Iowa coaching staff after graduating from undergraduate school. When Hayden Fry was hired to revive the downtrodden Iowa program in 1979, Coach Mac was one of the only coaches who Coach Fry retained from the previous coaching staff. As with most of Coach Fry's personnel decisions, retaining Coach Mac was a good one.

For the following decade, Coach Mac was a part of an extraordinary Iowa coaching staff that not only revived Iowa's football fortunes, but also produced such outstanding head coaches as Wisconsin's Barry Alvarez, Oklahoma's Bob Stoops, Kansas State's Bill Snyder, Iowa's Kirk Ferentz and South Florida's Jim Leavitt. In 1990, Coach Mac followed Alvarez to Wisconsin, where they took over a 2-9 Badger program and, by 1993, had the team winning the Big Ten Conference championship with a 10-1-1 record, which included a Rose Bowl victory over UCLA. The next year, Iowa State came calling for Coach Mac and the native Iowan was off to Ames for his first head coaching job.

Over the years, Mac and I have laughed many times about the fact that neither of us really had a clue of what he was getting into at Iowa State. We both knew that the university had long been a coaching graveyard and had eeked out a barely-winning record only a couple of times in the previous 15 years. Ames is nice little college town, but it is in north central Iowa, pretty much in the middle of nowhere in the opinion of most good college football players. As a result, the football program has always struggled to attract good football prospects, who usually have sexier alternatives to living in central Iowa for four years. The physical facilities of Iowa State's football program were poor and the entire football budget at the time was just over $3 million, which was by far the smallest of any public school in the then newly-constituted Big 12 Conference that included such far better-funded programs as Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, just to name a few. To make matters worse, Iowa State was a clear second fiddle in the state of Iowa to the University of Iowa, which has a far superior football tradition and an athletic budget more than twice as large as Iowa State's. Most folks assume that Kansas State was the toughest head coaching job in the United States before Bill Snyder resurrected it in the 1990's, but I think a good case can be made that the Iowa State job was even more difficult before Coach Mac took over.

To Mac and Iowa State's credit, they agreed at the outset that turning Iowa State's program around was going to be a long-term project. As he did at Iowa and Wisconsin, Mac literally threw himself into the job of rebuilding the Cyclone football program, taking on any speaking engagement and going anywhere to promote Iowa State and its athletic teams. An outstanding recruiter, Mac and his coaching staff began to expand Iowa State's traditional Midwestern recruiting base to such football hotbeds as Texas, Florida and California. Mac began to challenge Iowa's traditional toehold on the best recruits in the state of Iowa. The progress was slow, though -- Mac's teams lost 42 or their 57 games during his first five seasons.

However, by the 2000 season, Mac and his staff had built a solid foundation for the program. Behind QB Sage Rosenfels (yes, the Texans' backup QB), Iowa State went 9-3 during that season and won the university's first post-season bowl game in the university's 108-year football history (over Pitt in the Insight.com Bowl in Tucson). That started a 40 game run where Mac's teams were 25-15, a remarkable feat considering that Iowa State was competing in the brutally-tough Big 12 Conference and playing tough Iowa each season (Mac's teams won six of their last nine games against their in-state rival). By the 2004 and 2005 seasons, Coach Mac had his teams on the cusp of the Big 12 North Division title both seasons only to lose them in an excrutiatingly close final game in each season. Nevertheless, after Iowa State had gone to only four bowl games in its history before Coach Mac's tenure, Mac took the Cyclones to five bowl games in six years, winning two of them. Coming into the 2006 season, optimism was high that the Cyclones would again contend for the Big 12 North Division championship and go to yet another bowl game.

Alas, the 2006 season did not turn out as planned. First, the Cyclones faced one of the toughest schedules in the country, including an initial stretch of Big 12 games at Texas, at home against Nebraska, at Oklahoma and at home against Texas Tech. Iowa State lost all four and were battered in the process, losing six senior starters to season-ending injury. Lack of depth is a chronic Achille's Heel at a place such as Iowa State, so a thin and deflated Cyclone team was smoked over the past two weeks by mediocre Kansas State and Kansas teams. That brought out the "what have you done for me lately" crowd in full force, many of whom were calling on Iowa State to fire Coach Mac despite the fact that few of them have any idea how difficult it is to win consistently at the top levels of major college football.

Suddenly, a little over a year after one of Mac's best wins as a coach, Mac concluded it was not right for him to become a divisive issue for the university. Understanding Spike Dykes' advice that "you lose 10% of your support each season" as a college football coach, Mac understood that he was 20% in the hole at Iowa State based on that formula. So, he elected to resign as head football coach at Iowa State, a difficult job that he would have gladly continued to perform for the rest of his coaching days. Take a moment to watch his performance during the press conference (click the video camera icon on the left side of the page) to announce his resignation -- Mac exudes the class and passion with which he handled all of his duties at Iowa State. In this age of cold-hearted and businesslike coaches who are constantly posturing for the "better" job, it is refreshing to watch someone such as Mac, who wears his big heart and humanity on his sleeve.

Thus, 12 years after arriving at Iowa State, Mac leaves the football program in far better shape than he found it. The football budget has quadrupled in size under Mac, but it remains the smallest of any public institution in the Big 12 Conference (Texas and A&M's football budgets are at least 4 to 5 times larger than Iowa State's). Mac worked behind the scenes continually to improve Iowa State's facilities and they have improved substantially during his time there. However, Cyclone athletic department officials are now attempting to raise another $135 million for facilities upgrades in an effort to keep up with the seemingly endless arms race of major college football. In one of the more bizarre aspects of Mac's resignation, that imminent capital funds campaign was one of the key pressure points that prompted the resignation of the best fundraiser in the history of the Cyclone football program. So it goes in trying to keep up with the Joneses in the wacky world of college football.

After coaching the Iowa State team in its final two games this season, Mac will kick back for a few days, but then I suspect that he will back out looking for another opportunity. His motor is always running and he has a passionate love for coaching. Inasmuch as Mac is widely popular among his fellow coaches, I am confident that he will land on his feet.

However, I am not so sure about Iowa State. The institution is caught in the proverbial rat race of attempting to compete with far-better funded programs and the gap between Iowa State's resources and those of programs such as Texas and A&M are likely to get even larger. The pressure of that competition has now prompted Iowa State's administration to take what appears to be a huge risk that the program will decline from the solid foundation that Mac painstakingly built over the past 12 years.

Does Iowa State think that it is going to hire someone who will magically recruit better athletes to Ames than Mac? That's highly doubtful as Mac is one of the best recruiters in the business and Ames is always going to be a difficult sell to all but a few of the best football prospects. Does the institution think that it is going to hire someone who will coach better than Mac? Maybe, but Mac is a pretty darn good coach and how many more wins does Iowa State really believe it can achieve through slightly better coaching methods? And even Iowa State officials readily concede that it is highly unlikely that they will ever be able to find someone who can match Mac's tireless enthusiasm for promoting the institution and the football program.

The bottom line is that seasons such as the one that the Cyclones and Mac are enduring this season are inevitable at a program such as Iowa State's. That is one of the costs of attempting to compete with limited resources at the highest level of major college football. That's not a particularly pleasant reality, but it's dubious decision-making to take big risks based on an emotional reaction to a disappointing result that is inevitable. That appears to be precisely what Iowa State is doing in letting Mac get away. Wouldn't embracing a good coach who understands the institution's limitations and has competed effectively in spite of them be far less risky and much more likely to result in continued success?

Ironically, the Cyclone family now finds itself looking for a new head coach who has the depth and characteristics of . . . well, Dan McCarney. Iowa State will be extremely fortunate if they find one.

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October 9, 2006

The NY Times on James Baker's new book

Former White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of State and Secretary of Treasury James Baker, III, who spends his time these days at the Baker Institute at Rice University, has written a new book entitled “Work Hard, Study . . . and Keep Out of Politics!” Adventures and Lessons From an Unexpected Public Life." The title of the book is the legendary advice of Baker's grandfather, James Addison Baker, who was one of the founders of the venerable Houston law firm, Baker & Botts.

This NY Times review of Baker's new book belittles the current Bush Administration, even though the book does no such thing. That passes for a book review in the NY Times these days.

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October 5, 2006

Runnin' with the Dogs at Texas-OU Weekend

The greatest annual rivalry game in college football is renewed this Saturday in Dallas as the Texas Longhorns and the Oklahoma Sooners strap it on at the Cotton Bowl, and this year's game is highlighted by a new book about the game, Mike Shropshire's Runnin' with the Big Dogs: The True, Unvarnished Story of the Texas-Oklahoma Football Wars (William Morrow 2006).

Shropshire's book is rollicking fun, focusing on the classic 1967 game, which is the first game of the series that he covered. However, the author also vividly develops the culture of the game, which involves a blow-out weekend in Dallas each year during which wild-eyed fans of each team continually confront one another. Legendary coaches such as Darrell Royal, Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer are a big part of the book, as are current stellar coaches, OU's Bob Stoops and UT's Mack Brown. In this recent Wall Street Journal ($) review of the book, Texas Monthly's Skip Hollandsworth observes the following about the game's unique setting:

[T]he atmosphere is so combustible that it really makes no sense to play the game in the hometown of either team. So it's played at a neutral site: the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Which means that on the Friday before the game, Interstate 35 coming south from Oklahoma and north from Austin is jammed with frenzied fans, their cars, SUVs and pickups decorated with either red Boomer Sooner or orange Longhorn flags and their back windows covered with semi-obscene slogans decrying their rival's ineptitude and lack of -- how to put it? -- manhood and legitimate parentage.

By the time these fans hit the city limits, horns are blowing and beer cans are flying out the windows. The fans either check into hotels (which are booked months in advance) or they barge into the homes of friends and relatives who have ill-advisedly agreed to let them stay. Soon they're out again on Dallas's streets, resuming the horn-blowing and can-tossing. I have some Dallas friends who are so determined to avoid the Texas-OU madness that they don't just leave town; they leave the state.

When the game finally begins, few of these fans have had any sleep. They're bellowing at the enemy and clutching the flasks of margaritas that they smuggled into the stadium -- and those are just the grandparents. As Mr. Shropshire writes in his very entertaining history of the rivalry: "You'll find audiences more genteel and reserved at cock fights."

And Hollandsworth passes along one of his favorite anecdotes about the annual rivalry:

In 1976, Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer and Texas coach Darrell Royal were standing with President Gerald Ford right before the pre-game coin toss. An Oklahoma fan, standing nearby, suddenly yelled: "Hey, who are those assholes with Switzer?"

Who can't love a game that has included players named Wahoo McDaniel (who later became popular on the pro wrestling circuit), the appropriately-named Joe Don Looney (what was the name of that remote island where he ended up?) and the majestically-named Duke Carlisle? Kick-off is at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.

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August 5, 2006

The view from the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan

Scottish author and diplomat Rory Stewart has packed a lifetime of fascinating experiences into his 33 years. In this interesting interview tucked into the weekend Wall Street Journal ($), the WSJ's Jeffrey Trachtenberg talks with Stewart, who has become one of the foremost authorities on the day-to-day problems involved in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan after years of brutal totalitarian governments.

Born in Hong Kong, Stewart went on to receive undergraduate and master's degrees in Modern History and Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta and the London Review of Books. After college, Stewart served in the British Army and Foreign Office in a variety of capacities before electing in 2000 to set off on a two-year, 6,000 mile walking journey through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. He chronicled his journey through Afghanistan during the the winter of 2002 in The Places in Between (Picador/Macmillan 2004), which Harcourt Harvest published this past May in paperback.

Stewart returned to public service in late 2003 as Deputy Governorate Coordinator (Amara/Maysan) and Senior Adviser and Deputy Governorate Coordinator (Nasiriyah/Dhi Qar) in which Stewart established the governance structures of Maysan province, resolved tribal disputes to restore security and consolidate the authority of the Iraqi government and the police, set up NGOs and civil society organizations, ran municipal elections, inaugurated a new Provincial Council in Dhi Qar and saw the province through to the transfer of sovereignty in June 2004. Stewart was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by the British Government for his service in Iraq.

Last week, Harcourt published Stewart's second book -- The Prince of the Marshes -- in which Stewart describes his recent experiences in Iraq, including the troubling problem of persuading the Iraqis to embrace the Coalition's mission there and the abject failure of a Coalition military unit from Italy to come to Mr. Stewart's rescue when his compound came under a brutal mortar attack. During the WSJ interview, Stewart provides many insights into the practical problems involved in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, including the following:

Q: Did you expect to find the Afghanistan you describe in your first book -- poor, hungry and feudalistic?

A: No, I was surprised. I wasn't prepared for how poor and remote from the rest of the world Afghanistan turned out to be.

Q: Is Afghanistan going to be a perpetual war zone?

A: For the next generation it will be fragile and unstable. You're unlikely to have much government control of the tribal areas. People have a very strong sense of honor and admiration for courage. Particularly young men can become quite excitable and sympathetic towards violence. The older generation would like peace. But half the population is under 18, and that's where a lot of the trouble is coming from.

Q: Very few people you met [in Afghanistan] seemed opposed to the Taliban. Does this suggest that fundamentalism is part of the country's culture?

A: Rural communities are much more conservative in their Islamic beliefs than we acknowledge. If they had problems with the Taliban it had to do with burning their village, or stealing a donkey. But they were in favor of the social codes. In Kabul, there is a lot of unhappiness that people are allowed to drink alcohol. Outside the urban areas you'll find people are surprisingly xenophobic.

Q: Near the end of book, you describe a mortar and small arms attack on your compound in Nasiriyah. Is Iraq the new Yugoslavia, a country that only a tyrant could govern?

A: I don't know the answer to that question. Certain Iraqis seem to want a more authoritarian government. We were pushing for gentler policing, but a lot of Iraqis were suspicious of that. Iraq probably needs a very firm government to restore security. What it needs above all are good politicians flexible enough to restore a sense of national identity.

Q: In light of the behavior of the Italian Quick Reaction Force when your compound was attacked, what chance is there that a multinational armed force can successfully serve as a buffer between Israel and Lebanon?

A: This is a real problem. I don't believe in multinational armed forces except as a symbol. As a fighting force they are often inadequate militarily. Their strength is political; their presence spreads the blame. A coalition says a broader section of the international community is involved. The interesting thing is that the Nasiriyah province is looking better than some other parts of Iraq. Perhaps the Italian approach of doing very little turned out to have positive consequences, in that the Iraqis sorted themselves out rather than relying on foreigners.

Jonathan Tepperman, deputy managing editor of Foreign Affairs, has more on the folly of relying on a multinational force to resolve the ongoing Hezbollah-Israeli conflict.

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July 18, 2006

"A peep show of utter horror"

On of my favorite books of 2003 was Erik Larson's Devil in the White City (Crown 2003) (website here), the engaging tale of Chicago and the 1893 World's Fair, which has just finished an astounding 124th straight week on the NY Times Bestseller List. A movie is currently being planned for the book, so the Chicago Sun-Times interviewed Larson and several other experts on the "White City" to determine the source of the fascination over the 1893 Fair:

On the one hand, Larson says, the White City was designed and built by the Gilded Age elite "as a way of demonstrating that America could come up with this level of sophistication. They went for drama at a time when architecture had very little relevance for most of the country, paving the way for things to come by inserting into the American psyche an appreciation for architecture. The sheer beauty in that array of buildings in the Court of Honor, ingeniously using the backdrop of the lake to stage the whole thing, was enough to knock anybody flat."

But if the White City was a dream made real, much of the rest of Chicago was a nightmare.

"The fair gripped people," [Chicago Architecture Foundation lecturer Christopher] Multhauf says, "partly because it was a vision of beauty in a place that was so squalid." The streets were a quagmire of mud and manure, the air laced with soot and the rank aroma of stockyards and slaughterhouses. Poverty was widespread; labor unrest simmered and sometimes boiled. Prostitution flourished. Not far from the baronial mansions of Prairie Avenue, there were 31 brothels on Clark Street between Congress and Harrison, all of which were open at the time of the fair. The German writer Paul Lindau called Chicago "a peep show of utter horror, but extraordinarily to the point."

Read the entire article and, if you have not already done so, pick up this fine book.

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March 20, 2006

The Odd Couple -- Ali and Cosell

In this NY Times article, Boxing author Budd Schulberg reviews Dave Kindred's new book about the fascinating relationship between Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell, Sound and Fury : Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship (Free Press 2006). Schulberg gives the book a hearty thumbs up, and notes that Kindred opens by describing the Ali-Cosell relationship in the context of Edith Wharton's famous quotation about light:

"There are two sources of light, / The candle, / And the mirror that reflects it." The homely kid from Brooklyn and the black Adonis from Louisville alter-egoed each other so perfectly that each seems both candle and mirror to the other.

Schulberg also notes in his review two of best lines about Cosell:

[T]the gifted columnist Jimmy Cannon skewered Cosell as the only guy who ever "changed his name and put on a toupee to 'tell it like it is,' " and the boxing historian Bert Randolph Sugar said, "He demonstrated again and again that he knows very little about the game but is not afraid to describe it" . . .

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November 28, 2005

The gift of a good book

If you are looking for a holiday gift idea, check out The New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of the Year 2005, along with its lists for 2004 and 2003. For a time, you can review the Times' notable book lists from 1997 through 2002 here.

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July 18, 2005

Why they hate us

Yaroslav Trofimov is a Wall Street Journal reporter from the Ukraine who is fluent in Arabic. While carrying an Italian passport, Mr. Trofimov traveled through the Middle East recently interviewing Muslims for his new book, Faith at War : A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu (Henry Holt and Co. 2005).

In this NY Times Book Review, reviewer Philip Caputo notes that many of Mr. Trofimov's encounters led him to the conclusion that poverty is not the root cause of Islamic extremism. More often than not, the most radical ideas regarding Western civilization came from the relatively wealthy and privileged who had experience with the West, not the downtrodden who are typically cast as the primary source of Muslim animus toward the West. One anecdotal experience is particularly telling:

On [Mr. Trofimov's] first stop, Cairo, undergraduates dining in a McDonald's a few days after 9/11 demonstrate that it's possible to delight in a Big Mac and in the fiery deaths of 3,000 Americans at the same time. "Everyone celebrated," an 18-year-old university student gushes as she dips her fries into ketchup, "cheering that America finally got what it deserved."

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June 29, 2005

Shelby Foote, R.I.P.

Shelby Foote, the historian whose three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative took him 20 years to write and who became the star of Ken Burns' 11-hour 1990 PBS documentary on the Civil War, died on Monday at a Memphis hospital at the age of 88.

Here is Mr. Foote's description of Gen. Robert E. Lee's slow ride home after surrendering at Appomattox:

Grief brought a sort of mass relaxation that let Traveller [Lee's horse] proceed, and as he moved through the press of soldiers, bearing the gray commander on his back, they reached out to touch both horse and rider, withers and knees, flanks and thighs, in expression of their affection.

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June 17, 2005

Squandered Victory

Over a year ago, this post noted Hoover fellow and former U.S. Iraqi advisor Larry Diamond's reservations the United States' failure to provide adequate security for the Iraqi people who are willing to risk commitment to democratic principles.

Now, Mr. Diamond has written a book on his experiences in Iraq and, according to this New York Times book review, the book harshly criticizes the Bush Administration's adoption of the Rumsfeld Policy of attempting to reconstruct Iraq with a relatively small fighting force:

Mr. Diamond believes that one of the "most ill-fated decisions of the postwar engagement" was President Bush's acceptance of the plan designed by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld - "to go into Iraq with a relatively light force of about 150,000 coalition troops, despite the warnings of the United States Army and outside experts on post-conflict reconstruction that - whatever the needs of the war itself - securing the peace would require a force two to three times that size." Committing more troops than the United States initially did, Mr. Diamond argues, "would have necessitated an immediate mobilization of the military reserves and National Guard (which would come later, in creeping fashion), and might have alarmed the public into questioning the costs and feasibility of the entire operation" - a development that might have slowed the gallop to war.

The lack of sufficient troops, Mr. Diamond goes on, would create a further set of problems: an inability to prevent looting and restore law and order, which would further undermine Iraqis' trust in the United States; and inability to seal the country's borders, which would allow foreign terrorists to enter and help foment further violence. "The first lesson," Mr. Diamond writes, "is that we cannot get to Jefferson and Madison without going through Thomas Hobbes. You can't build a democratic state unless you first have a state, and the essential condition for a state is that it must have an effective monopoly over the means of violence."

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March 20, 2005

More on "Conspiracy of Fools"

Following this earlier excerpt, The New York Sunday Times is running this second excerpt from Kurt Eichenwald's new book on the Enron scandal, Conspiracy of Fools.

I am about halfway through Conspiracy of Fools and it is excellent. With more information and the benefit of more hindsight, Mr. Eichenwald's book will likely replace the earlier Smartest Guys in the Room as the best book on the Enron scandal.

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February 24, 2005

The real economics of Hollywood

This Jonathon V. Last-Daily Standard article reviews Edward Jay Epstein's new book, The Big Picture (Random House 2005), which examines the fascinating and ever-changing economics of moviemaking. To give you an idea of what's going on in Hollywood economics, consider this:

In 1947, Hollywood sold 4.7 billion movie tickets. The studios were hugely profitable movie factories.

Times have changed. . . Television came to compete with the movies, as did home video. And despite a population boom, movie-going fell out of favor. In 2003, only 1.57 billion tickets were sold, a third the number 56 years earlier, while the real cost of making movies increased some 1,600 percent.

It wasn't just production costs that exploded. Today the average movie costs $4.2 million to distribute and nearly $35 million just to advertise. (The comparable 1947 figures, adjusted for inflation, were $550,000 and $300,000.) Such peripheral costs, Epstein explains, have grown so large that "even if the studios had somehow managed to obtain all their movies for free, they would still have lost money on their American releases."

How did Hollywood respond? Epstein observes that Hollywood transformed itself from a factory for making movies into a clearinghouse for intellectual property, which is at least as profitable as making movies used to be. The result?

The truth is that, even with terrible movies, the studios have to try hard not to make money. In this way, today's Hollywood is very much like the studio system of old. The two business models are so favorable that the quality of the product is beside the point. The difference, of course, is that the movies from the studio era were often quite good.

Read the entire review. Hat tip to EconoLog for the link to this review.

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January 31, 2005

Disneywar

First it was the battle to fight off the Comcast bid.

Then, it was the trial of the corporate case of the decade.

Now, it's the book -- Disneywar: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom (Simon & Schuster; 2005) by James B. Stewart, the former Pulitizer Prize winning Wall Street Journal reporter and the author of Den of Thieves, which chronicled the insider trading scandals of the 1980's. According to this NY Times article, Mr. Stewart's new book is not going to be particularly complimentary of Disney CEO, Michael D. Eisner.

Regardless of one's opinion of Mr. Eisner's performance in running Disney from a business standpoint, everyone must concede that he does have a knack for keeping the company in the news.

Alas, yet another epitaph that few CEO's envision: "Kept company in the news."

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January 14, 2005

Galveston's Jack Johnson

In this NY Times Book Review, David Margolick reviews Geoffrey C. Ward's new biography on Galveston's Jack Johnson, who was the first black heavyweight champion of the world. Johnson's story is an enthralling and important tale.

When Johnson first won the heavyweight championship at the relatively advanced age (for a boxer) of 30 in 1908, it was one of the most important dates for African-Americans between Emancipation and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. At the time, the mere idea of a black man being the heavyweight champ sent many people into a panic, including more than a few in the press corps. When retired heavyweight champ Jim Jeffries was persuaded to make an unwise comeback to take on Johnson late in 1908, Johnson's throttling of the over-the-hill Jeffries triggered some of the nation's worst race riots of the early 20th century.

Inasmuch as Johnson endured a substantial risk of being lynched at some of his fights, his prominence and feats staked new ground for many black Americans, who were still just a half century removed from slavery. During this week in which the modern news media has been expressing outrage at Randy Moss' touchdown celebration last Sunday at Green Bay, it is important to remember that such silliness likely would have prompted far worse consequences in America less than a century ago.

Stylistically, Johnson was the precursor of Muhammad Ali. He developed artful footwork and movement to avoid the bull charges of the other heavyweights of the era, which was dominated by brawlers. Although the media of the era acknowledged Johnson's physical strength, standard racial stereotypes of those times held that black fighters lacked substance and would wilt when truly tested. The fearless and provocative Johnson took that stereotype and stood it on its head.

After he lost the title, Johnson -- who died in a car crash in 1946 at the age of 68 -- became a frustrated and embittered man, who in his later years even turned on the American legend, Joe Louis. As a result, Johnson alienated himself from even the generally supportive African-American community of the times, which was much more comfortable with the soothing presence of Mr. Louis. It was not until after Ali took a page from Johnson's free-spirited ways in promoting his boxing career that historians began to reassess the meaning of Johnson's life and societal impact. That process continues with Mr. Ward's new book, as well as Ken Burns' new documentary, The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson: Unforgivable Blackness, which premieres on PBS on January 17 (next Monday).

Check out this fascinating story about a remarkable Houston-area native. You will not be disappointed.

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December 23, 2004

Death in Texas

Sister Helen Prejean is a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille in Louisiana. She is America's leading abolitionist with regard to the death penalty and the author of Dead Man Walking, which was made into one of the best movies about the death penalty.

In the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books, this article is adapted from Sister Prejean's new book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions that Random House is releasing next month. Sister Prejean sharply criticizes then-Governor George Bush's denials of clemency to a large number of Texas death row defendants in Texas, noting that he distanced "himself from his legal and moral responsibility for executions." The entire article is compelling reading, as the following excerpt reflects:

George W. Bush during his six years as governor of Texas presided over 152 executions, more than any other governor in the recent history of the United States. Bush has said: "I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully.... Each case is major because each case is life or death." In his autobiography, A Charge to Keep (1999), he wrote, "For every death penalty case, [legal counsel] brief[s] me thoroughly, reviews the arguments made by the prosecution and the defense, raises any doubts or problems or questions." Bush called this a "fail-safe" method for ensuring "due process" and certainty of guilt.

He might have succeeded in bequeathing to history this image of himself as a scrupulously fair-minded governor if the journalist Alan Berlow had not used the Public Information Act to gain access to fifty-seven confidential death penalty memos that Bush's legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, whom President Bush has recently nominated to be attorney general of the United States, presented to him, usually on the very day of execution.[1] The reports Gonzales presented could not be more cursory. Take, for example, the case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded man of thirty-three with the communication skills of a seven-year-old. Washington's plea for clemency came before Governor Bush on the morning of May 6, 1997. After a thirty-minute briefing by Gonzales, Bush checked "Deny" � just as he had denied twenty-nine other pleas for clemency in his first twenty-eight months as governor.

But Washington's plea for clemency raised substantial issues, which called for thoughtful, fair-minded consideration, not the least of which was the fact that Washington's mental handicap had never been presented to the jury that condemned him to death. Gonzales's legal summary, however, omitted any mention of Washington's mental limitations as well as the fact that his trial lawyer had failed to enlist the help of a mental health expert to testify on his client's behalf. When Washington's postconviction lawyers took on his defense, they researched deeply into his childhood and came up with horrifying evidence of abuse. Terry Washington, along with his ten siblings, had been beaten regularly with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts. This was mitigation of the strongest kind, but Washington's jury never heard it. Nor is there any evidence that Gonzales told Bush about it.

The article concludes with the following observation:

As governor, Bush certainly did not stand apart in his routine refusal to deny clemency to death row petitioners, but what does set him apart is the sheer number of executions over which he has presided. Callous indifference to human suffering may also set Bush apart. He may be the only government official to mock a condemned person's plea for mercy, then lie about it afterward, claiming humane feelings he never felt. On the contrary, it seems that Bush is comfortable with using violent solutions to solve troublesome social and political realities.

Read the entire article.

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December 22, 2004

Sports notes on UH bball, Jackie Sherrill, golf, Mack Brown, Gene Conley and Friday Night Lights, Houston style

The Houston Cougars men's basketball team had a nice win over LSU last night, as new coach Tom Penders continues to make my post on his hiring look bad.

Meanwhile, former Texas A&M, Pittsburgh, and Mississippi State head football coach Jackie Sherrill has teed off on the NCAA in a lawsuit over in Mississippi. The over/under bet on this lawsuit is $1 million.

On a more pleasant note, 55 year old Austin resident Tom Kite -- fresh off an impressive performance in the 2004 U.S. Open -- plans to rejoin the regular PGA Tour next month and become the oldest exempt player in Tour history.

Also on the golf scene, in concrete evidence that securities regulators do not have enough to do, this recent Wall Street Journal ($) article reports that regulators have embarked on sweeping inquiries into Wall Street gift-and-entertainment practices, particularly golf junkets that Wall Street firms provide to mutual-fund executives and other money managers they are trying to woo for trading business:

NASD regulators, for example, have started to examine golf outings that Bank of America Corp. provided to Fidelity Investments' head of stock trading, people familiar with the matter said. As the bank worked in recent years to win trading business from Fidelity, it hosted the executive, Scott DeSano, at the annual AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament several times, allowing him to play alongside the pros competing in the event, which raises money for charity.

What next? Eliot Spitzer to sue?

Also in the combat department, as the University of Texas football team and its supporters prepare for their trip to L.A. for the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day, the Dallas Morning News' Greg Fraley throws down the gauntlet and declares the run for the Roses a make or break game for Longhorn coach Mack Brown:

Texas and Brown must win a game on the main stage for once, or never again demand to play with the big boys.

It will be a real live put-up-or-shut-up game for a team notorious for underachieving in these moments. . .

It will be the Longhorns' highest-profile bowl appearance since they went into the 1978 Cotton Bowl ranked No. 1 but lost to Notre Dame.

This is not the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl, a regular stop off the main bowl draft for the Longhorns. . .

The only way the Longhorns' task could have been easier would have been if Pittsburgh had landed in Pasadena.

Michigan is 13th in the BCS standings. Only Pitt, the Big East co-champion, is worse among the eight schools in BCS bowls at No. 21.

Michigan, which shared the championship of the stodgy Big Ten with Iowa, has the name but not the chops this season.

The Wolverines lost to Notre Dame, which has fired its coach, and to Ohio State (7-4). San Diego State came within three points of the Wolverines, at Michigan.

This is not an opponent of the USC-Oklahoma-Auburn level. Michigan is not even Utah, which may be out of coaches before its bowl game.

The Longhorns must cleanly handle Michigan and prove they belong at this level, . . .

Brown asked for this chance. Now, he must do something with it.

And that would be a first, too.

Brown has been a convenient target of barbs because his teams promise so much and deliver so little under the spotlight.

In 17 seasons at North Carolina and Texas, Brown has never won a conference title. That is somewhat understandable at North Carolina, where basketball is king and Florida State was in the conference for part of his tenure.

An 0-for at Texas, flush with resources and talent, is unfathomable.

The bigger the moment, the worse Brown's Texas teams have played. Look at his big-game resume:

� Five consecutive losses to Oklahoma and uber-coach Bob Stoops.

This is as big a mismatch as there is in the college game. The thought of Stoops throws Brown into a panic. The gap is growing. Texas' dull offense does not even challenge Stoops and his staff.

� An 0-2 record in Big 12 championship games. Texas lost to Nebraska in 1999 and, with a BCS berth at hand, was upset by Colorado in 2001.

� A 3-3 bowl record. Last year's 28-20 loss to Washington State represented a dreadful showing by Brown and his staff. Texas acted as if it had no idea Washington State, which led Division I-A in sacks, would blitz. With the offense collapsing in the face of the heavy blitz pressure, Brown removed the mobile quarterback (Vince Young) for the stationary quarterback (Chance Mock).

Reputations are formed by a body of work. There are lots of wins but no landmark triumphs during Brown's seven seasons with Texas.

A win against Michigan would have substance because of the setting.

A loss to Michigan would make it easy not to take Brown seriously for a long time. . .

Moving to thoughts of Christmas, if you are looking for a gift for a sports-interested family member or friend, this Boston Globe article reviews the new book by Gene Conley, one of the last athletes to play two professional sports (Major League Baseball and the NBA) at the same time for much of his professional career. Conley's is a remarkable story, as reflected by this snippet from the article:

There was the time he struck out Ted Williams in the All-Star Game. Then there was the time he had to separate Tom Heinsohn from Wilt Chamberlain during a heated exchange in an NBA game. . . No one else ever won a championship ring in two major sports. No one else played against Jackie Robinson, Frank Robinson, and Oscar Robertson. No one else played with Carl Yastrzemski during the summer, then joined Bob Cousy for the winter. No one else lockered next to Hank Aaron and Bill Russell in the same calendar year.

Conley also confirms the truth about the legendary story in which he and a teammate got off the Red Sox team bus and Conley was not seen again for 68 hours. Ah, those were the days.

Finally, this Houston Press article provides an interesting analysis of the evolution of the high-powered suburban high school football programs in the Houston metropolitan area. Call it the natural evolution of Friday Night Lights.

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December 15, 2004

A Fight at the Opera

Herbert Breslin became master tenor Luciano Pavarotti's publicist in 1967 and ultimately dumped Placido Domingo from his client list so that he could become Pavarotti's manager. He lasted as Pavarotti's manager for 35 years.

However, now Mr. Breslin is Mr. Pavarotti's ex-manager, and he has written a book about Pavarotti that is the subject of this hilarious NY Times Book Review by Jane and Michael Stein. Here are a couple of delicious snippets:

As Pavarotti got bigger in every way, Breslin's adoration shrank. By the time of the Three Tenors, a pop phenomenon engineered not by Breslin but by the impresario Tibor Rudas, Breslin was miserable. "A big, big, big mistake" is how he describes Pavarotti's original deal to sing with Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras for charity, lamenting that "Once, I had been Luciano's creator. . . . Now I had been reduced to his foil. My role was to act as a buffer and, most important, to get him more money." Finally he bemoans that "managing an artist can be like serving a life sentence in Alcatraz."

And what of Pavarotti's legendary appetite?:

Gluttony is a big theme in Breslin's demystification. "It's not just that he likes to eat," he snipes. "He loves to smell food, to touch food, to prepare food, to think about food, to talk about food. When he comes into a room, he begins sniffing like a dog, and his first question is, 'What smells so good?'" We are treated to scenes of him using a tablespoon to gobble up caviar to the point of nausea and of his "swaying belly flowing over the edge of the chaise longue."

Not only is Pavarotti a pig, but he has bad taste, and his house in Modena "looks like something on Queens Boulevard, crammed with trinkets, tchotchkes, anything and everything." When Pavarotti falls in love with the decor of his suite at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, he makes Breslin buy all the furniture, drapes and bedspread, and ship it to Modena. "It looks like a big blood clot," Breslin observes.

Read the entire review. What a hoot!

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November 24, 2004

The real Oskar Schindler

This NY Times book review examines Holocaust historian David M. Crowe's authoritative new biography of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis during World War II.

Interestingly, Mr. Crowe's book -- Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities and the True Story Behind the List (Westview Press 2004) -- differs sharply with the idealized portrayal of Schindler in the Oscar-winning 1993 Steven Spielberg movie Schindler's List and Thomas Keneally's 1982 historical novel that inspired the movie.

One of the particularly interesting differences between the book and the movie is how Schindler's Jewish workers are depicted as Schindler prepares to flee in the face of the Russian invaders. In the movie, the Jews are depicted as worn down and overwhelmed. Mr. Crowe contends that the Schindler had in fact prepared the Jews to be "an armed guerilla group. "They were armed to the teeth, ready to fight till the death."

Check out the review.

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November 16, 2004

The Godfather Returns

This NY Times book review tells us about The Godfather Returns, the latest book in the Godfather series that the late Mario Puzo began in the 1960's.

Before Mr. Puzo died in 1999, he signed off on the hiring of someone to continue the Godfather saga. So, in 2002, Random House ran a contest to pick the successor to Mr. Puzo, and the winner was Mark Winegardner, who is chairman of the creative writing program at Florida State University.

The review basically says that the book is decent, but lacks the originality of the original book and the first two Godfather films. Stated another way, the book is not as good a story as the first