Category: Columns (Page 2 of 4)

The most underrated U.S. Olympic moment (and why we should take a moment to remember it today)

23 April, 2015 / Kat

Every person who ever considers a career in sports media has those moments that steer them down that path. I talk often about the one that sent me full steam ahead in that direction – Super Bowl XXIX, with Steve Young finally lifting “the monkey off his back” and leading the San Francisco 49ers to their fifth Super Bowl win – but there was a moment three years prior that made me take the initial step.

It was February 1992. Ten year old me was deep in the throws of the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. It was that wonderful first Saturday of February school vacation, day one of my being able to watch as much of the Olympics as I could find without school, dance or Girl Scouts getting in the way.

I was over at my aunt’s split level ranch in East Irondequoit, NY, walking through the kitchen when I caught the 6pm news sports report on her tiny TV in the corner.

“A major shocker in the men’s figure skating tonight,” said the anchor. “If you don’t want to be spoiled, turn away from the TV now.” A way of life of an Olympic obsessed child in the pre-internet age, I would cover my eyes in an effort to convince others I wasn’t watching the TV flash the results, but spread my fingers apart on my right hand so I could see the screen.

Through the fingers on my right hand, I saw that Paul Wylie had won the silver medal. I broke rule #1: I admitted I saw the results. “MOM! The U.S. won the silver medal!”

“Don’t spoil us!” someone yelled.

“Which one?” my mom asked.

“Paul Wylie!” I exclaimed.

“Who?” my aunt asked.

“The third guy!” I explained.

“The third guy?” my mom said in amazement. “He wasn’t even supposed to be on the team!”

Later that night, we gathered around my aunt’s TV in the den and watched Wylie’s long program earn him an Olympic silver medal. Scott Hamilton commentated, and during the wait for Wylie’s scores, he deemed the performance “one of the biggest surprises in figure skating history.”

Wylie had skated on the senior level since the early 1980s. After winning the World Junior title in 1981, he placed fifth four times on the senior level until leaping to second in 1988 and making the 1988 Olympic team. In Calgary, he finished tenth. He earned the journeyman moniker soon after, making three World Championships and finishing 9th, 10th and 11th, all while attending Harvard.

As the 1992 Olympics neared and younger skaters (like Todd Eldredge, who would turn out really defining the term journeyman) began to threaten, Wylie seemed to be the odd man out for a second Olympic team. He finished second at Nationals that year and made the team by placement, but critics called for him to be booted for the younger Mark Mitchell or for reigning World bronze medalist Eldredge, who was petitioning onto the team after being unable to compete at Nationals.

Wylie, Eldredge and Christopher Bowman (a two-time World medalist) ended up making the U.S. squad in Albertville’s men’s figure skating event. Of the three, Bowman and Eldredge looked to be the medal contenders, and Wylie was largely forgotten about. He was so disregarded that he was preliminarily left off the post-Olympics World Championships team in the place of Mitchell.

And then Wylie finished third in the Olympic original (now called short) program. Bowman was seventh, Eldredge ninth.

Wylie skated second to last in the long program and delivered a fantastic performance that had the audience on their feet. He turned out of two jumps, but otherwise skated cleanly and with better spins and edge work than the skater immediately preceding him, the Unified Team’s Viktor Petrenko. The judges marks for Wylie varied greatly, with the Czech judge handing him marks only good enough for fifth and the Unified judge placing him fourth. The remainder of the judging panel had Wylie on the medal stand. Petr Barna, the last skater in the competition, represented Czechoslovakia, and it was clear that his home country’s judge was saving room to keep him on the medal stand by scoring Wylie extremely low.

Political shimmying may have torpedoed some of Wylie’s marks, but at the end of the night of February 15, 1992, he won the silver medal, a shocking finish to an Olympics some within the U.S. skating community didn’t think he should compete at.

Watching the entire story unfold on CBS’ Olympic coverage that evening had young me enamored, and it was one of the first times I thought, “There are people who get to tell about this amazing story. Wouldn’t it be neat to be one of them?”

Twenty-three years later, Wylie’s Olympic story is largely forgotten by the general public, which is a shame. As news broke Wednesday that the now 50 year old Wylie had been hospitalized with a heart issue, those in figure skating shared on social media how impactful his ’92 performance and career has been. The incredible Wylie story has been grossly underrated over the past two decades, and it’s time again to remind the general sports community of one of the most remarkable U.S. Olympic moments of the last fifty years.

When lack of familiarity isn’t an obstacle

7 December, 2014 / Kat

I spent part of Sunday evening geeking out over a video of new Canadian pair Lubov Iliushechkina and Dylan Moscovitch. Moscovitch represented Canada in the 2014 Sochi Olympics with former partner Kirsten Moore-Towers, placing fifth. He teamed up with former Russian World Junior champion Iliushechkina three months later, and they haven’t let their lack of experience together become an obstacle. They won the final qualifying event for the Canadian National Championships this weekend with the free program I’ve embedded below.

Pairs skaters who are relatively young in their partnerships – and unfortunately, some several years in – lack the comfort with each other to work on aspects of skating outside of not falling on each other. In a new couple, that’s totally understandable. I, too, would not be focusing so much on pointing my toes, leg extension and hit positions if someone I just started working with was tossing me several feet above their head and then catching me.

The difference with Iliushechkina and Moscovitch is that the attention to detail is there even when the familiarity with each other isn’t, particularly on her part. She extends her limbs, points her toes and follows every arm movement with her eyes (which helps give it purpose instead of looking like you’re flailing about in rushing water.) Despite being together mere months, they have the confidence to perform intricate spins and lifts that would look messy if not hit precisely.

What sold me was their pairs spin halfway through their long program (approximately at the 2:15 mark). Her free leg placement on the camel part of the spin – wrapped around his leg – is so neat. Even between positions, they don’t rush to set up the next part of the spin and throw away the movement. They both extend their free legs.

Are they perfect? Oh, far from it. Those early side-by-side jumps are iffy, and there is a odd catch-foot lift in the program’s second half that made me cringe. But is this some of the most inspiring pairs skating I’ve watched since started watching figure skating hardcore again? Definitely.

Luba Illyusheshkina / Dylan Moscovitch – Senior… by skatecanada

Family geography could put end to Thanksgiving football rivalries

12 November, 2014 / Kat

Salem visits Beverly on Thanksgiving Day in 2012. Photo by Kat Hasenauer Cornetta

Witches and Panthers are two things you don’t quite equate with Thanksgiving, but since becoming a high school sports writer for the Boston Herald four years ago, they have become as much a part of the holiday as cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.

I’ve experienced three years of the legendary Thanksgiving Day football rivalry that is Beverly High School versus Salem High School. I’ve covered meetings 113, 114 and 115, and depending on what my editor decides in the coming weeks, I may be back for 116 on Thanksgiving morning.

Watching the Panthers take on the Witches has become my favorite part of Thanksgiving, a holiday that I’ve struggled with in these ten years of living seven hours away from my family. Since diving into sports writing as a side career, I’ve found a group of friends like none other I’ve ever had – a second family. Therefore, spending Thanksgiving writing about football and taking box scores in the office just feels right.

But my experience is a reason why I don’t expect the Thanksgiving Day high school football games to last much longer in Massachusetts.

These games have become a huge discussion point given the MIAA’s two year old football playoff system. Most games held on Thanksgiving Eve or morning now have no bearing on standings or titles. And if they do, one or both of the teams could be juggling how many players to put on the line, given that they have a championship game the very next weekend at Gillette Stadium. Given all of that, many are asking why they exist.

But when I look at the games’ future, I’m not looking at the playoff system and its impact. I’m looking at the more spread-out nature of the American family. In the past 25 years, more and more families have become geographically spread out. My own family is the perfect example. I made the move away from my family in Western New York a decade ago. I was the first of my 23 cousins to leave the state, but have since been joined by my next youngest cousin, who is moving South for her husband’s job this month. I have another seriously considering a similar move. My sister and brother are on career paths that may also end up taking them away from our hometown of Rochester.

The Hasenauers are behind the times when it comes to this. Families are now spread all over the country and globe. If you’re playing, coaching or administrating high school football in the Commonwealth, Thanksgiving Day games cement you in place, making your family either come to you for the holiday or not allowing you to get together at all. How much longer can schools honestly ask players and coaches to make that sacrifice?

Look at it this way: say I eventually have a child, and they decide to play high school football for Salem, Beverly, or wherever I end up (and given my tiny height, their playing football will probably be limited to being a Steve Tasker-esque kick returner, but that’s more than okay with special teams-adoring me.) My parents – their grandparents – will have a difficult choice. Do they come up to Massachusetts for the holiday, or do they go to wherever my siblings are? My hands would be tied because of football, and I know there are plenty of families around Massachusetts in a similar situation.

This is far from the sole reason to get rid of Thanksgiving Day games. All families – regardless of miles between them – have to make decisions about how and where to spend the holidays. (Heck, my parents struggled with it, and my grandparents used to live across the street from each other.) But it is a factor that I never hear raised in the discussion. For all the talk of “games with nothing to play for” or “resting players for Super Bowls,” I never hear my fellow high school sports reporters say, “this scheduling is difficult for families.”

Deep down, I hope there are always Beverly-Salem, Woburn-Winchester, Weymouth-Walpole and Sharon-Oliver Ames games as a Thanksgiving day appetizer. But I know the current climate may have those games’ days numbered.

Three (okay, four) questions for Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick

30 October, 2014 / Kat

#457326248 / gettyimages.com

I feel awful for the journalist who got shut down by Bill Belichick in the New England Patriots head coach’s Wednesday press conference. I know what it’s like to think you have the best question ever…only to have the subject crush all your hopes and dreams like the Harvard graduate school application process. It stings. You deeply question not just your choice of profession, but your own understanding of the English language. Then you drink a beer, tell yourself there are worse things, and move on with a new found habit of obsessively reviewing every single interview question 17 times before asking it.

Given that my sports consumption habits are approximately half Boston focused and half Western New York focused, I hear a lot of Belichick press conferences. My go-to midday show (Christian and King on ESPN New Hampshire) plays the weekly Belichick press conference at the top of their show every Wednesday. The morning news and sports recap shows I watch show clips from Belichick post-game press conferences. And every single time I listen to one of his conferences, I think of what I would ask him if given the opportunity. What could I ask that wouldn’t get a grunted or bored response?

Mind you, I’ve been in the same breathing space as the man, the myth, the person-responsible-for-the-Giants-defense-that-crushed-my-Bills-fan-dreams once. It was at a lacrosse tournament I was covering at Gillette Stadium that included Ohio State. His daughter Amanda was the assistant coach for the Buckeyes women’s lacrosse team at the time. (She is now the head coach at her and her dad’s alma mater, Wesleyan.) Belichick had been lurking on the sidelines during Ohio State’s tilt against Northwestern, engrossed in the action.

After the game, I was waiting in the hallway for Northwestern’s head coach, Kelly Amonte Hiller. I looked over my shoulder and found a positively beaming, excited and jean-clad Belichick directly across from me. I nearly jumped up in surprise.

The hallway we were in was quite wide, so it’s not like I could strike up a conversation with him without yelling. (“PLEASED TO MAKE YOUR ACQUAINTANCE, BILL!”) Plus, I had a job to do – interview Hiller, a legend in her own right – and was focused on preparing for that.

With all of that on the table, and given that I’m a far more experienced lacrosse journalist than NFL journalist, I know what I would ask Belichick that would prompt the tightly wound and tight lipped coach to be happily loquacious. I would ask the lacrosse-obsessed coach about the sport. (It works for the Baltimore media.)

Here are my three questions, in no particular order:

What are your thoughts on the trend of young lacrosse players to drop all other sports and focus solely on lacrosse at an increasingly early age?
Hypothetically, if Bob Kraft purchased a professional lacrosse team and asked, “Bill, I’m not allowing you to pull double duty as head coach of both teams as much as you want to. Who should I hire as head coach?” who would you recommend and why? Living, dead, retired, active – say you could have anyone ever in the history of lacrosse.
We have seen a lot of lacrosse/football player hybrids play tight end, including yourself and Will Yeatman, who you brought in for a time. Most recently in Massachusetts, we have Marblehead’s Brooks Tyrrell, who is one of the best tight ends in the last 10 years of high school football, but is headed to Notre Dame to play lacrosse. From both your coaching and playing days perspective, what skills does a good tight end have that compliment one’s lacrosse game?

I would like to imagine that at the end of this conversation, Belichick would be smiling and so gosh darn happy he’d say, “Golly, Kat, let’s go pick up our lacrosse sticks and go outside and play.” And then during our shoot around, I’d get all the actual dirt on the Patriots.

No, I wouldn’t do that to him, though I would try to sneak in one football question:

How much did the Bills’ use of Steve Tasker – who your mentor, Bill Parcells, once called one of the most difficult players to defend against – influence your uses of Wes Welker and Danny Woodhead when they were with the Patriots?

I understand most beat journalists don’t have the luxury of asking such questions – they have a quite defined job to do. But maybe someday down the line, in an off-season, I would love to see a Boston media outlet do the grand “Belichick Talks Lacrosse” interview so that fans and media alike can see an entirely different side of the man.

In Brady, Young Senses Deja Vu: Quick Thoughts on Dilfer, Young, Brady and Monday Night Football

1 October, 2014 / Kat

I’ve always been a Steve Young fan for multiple reasons, two of them being that he’s loquacious and opinionated. Never has this side of Young been more evident than in his commentary role on Monday Night Football’s pre and post game shows, and Monday night’s comments on the New England Patriots’ Tom Brady are a perfect example.

If you missed it, Young and fellow commentator Trent Dilfer made remarks Monday essentially saying that the Patriots’ have left the 37 year old Brady out to dry, not giving him quality receivers and letting him work behind a woeful line. They claimed that the Patriots’ regime refuses to spend the cash needed to make upgrades that could propel the late QB model Brady to one more Super Bowl run.

The Boston media was as crazed as a teenage girl over an Instagram post by a One Directioner by the comments, and then arrived at a whole new level of obsession when one source claimed to have video of Brady chatting with Dilfer before Monday’s game. “Dilfer and Young must be speaking for Brady,” the media claimed. “The Patriot Way of business will never allow Brady to speak his mind, so he’s having Young and Dilfer speak for him!”

Add to this that Brady and his team looked atrocious in Monday night’s loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, and you have a media base that has wound itself into a (rightful) tizzy.

I’ve read about 16 columns and listened to five different radio segments about it (including the one I’m listening to as I type.) The Boston media is missing a ton of context and back story, not only about Young, but about how Monday Night Football works, that would put Young and Dilfer’s comments in their proper place.

First off, if you have arrived a few hours before kickoff of a Monday Night Football game, you will see Young, Dilfer and the ESPN crew running around on the field like kids playing backyard ball. In the process, they do literally and figuratively run into some of the players as they warm up in sweats and such, and start chatting. Brady chatting with Dilfer pre-game would not be out of the ordinary for a Monday Night game, so the media needs to stop giving that “evidence” the level of importance it is.

Secondly, I don’t know Brady’s exact relationship with Young, but those media claiming that Brady “idolized” Young as a kid show their lack of research. Growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s, Brady idolized San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana. Brady says as such on a regular basis. He would have been a teenager by the time Young achieved success, and probably did not idolize Young as much. In fact, one rarely, if ever, hears Brady point to Young as a quarterback he idolized. This may be a semantics argument more than anything, but please, stop saying Brady “idolizes” Young. There is absolutely no evidence to that point.

Third, and most importantly, if one looks at how Young’s career ended, you will understand how he could have jumped to conclusions about Brady’s situation on his own and why he could be so impassioned about it.

In September 1999, a 37 (almost 38) year old Young was aging and hurting. Concussions were beginning to take a toll on the 49ers quarterback, and he went into a Week 3 Monday Night match-up against the Arizona Cardinals having already suffered one concussion that season because his very young and not-at-all talented offensive line was leaving him vulnerable. The 49ers were having ownership issues, as Eddie DeBartolo was in the midst of a corruption case, leaving the management of the team hurting. They were unable to keep up the talent level that had kept them extremely competitive through all of the 1990s.

Are you sensing a theme yet?

That Monday night, Young dropped back into the pocket and his line broke down. Right tackle Jeremy Newberry, a second year player who was only starting in his fourth NFL game because of an ACL injury the year prior, missed his coverage, and recent Hall of Fame inductee Aeneas Williams dashed up the right side and leveled Young into the turf. The hit renders Young unconscious, ending his playing career.

In Brady’s current circumstances, behind a lackluster line with little veteran presence and with a pocket that keeps collapsing on him, Young could be seeing a lot of himself as a NFL quarterback at age 37. Especially in an early season Monday Night match-up.