JOEY? HOW ABOUT EARLY RETIREMENT?

February 8, 1985 Bernie Lincicome Leave a comment

The thing for Joey Meyer to do, obviously, is to announce he is retiring as De Paul basketball coach at the end of the season, not an original strategy but nonetheless worth a try. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

It worked for his father Ray, who only lost half as many games as Joey has lost already with the same team.

Besides, all the common motivators are used up. Revenge didn’t work. Dayton whipped De Paul worse the second time than the first, and paid its own way here to do it.

The Horizon winning streak is gone, dead at 36. No longer can De Paul depend on the home-hangar advantage, which has always been greatly magnified by the astonishment of visitors realizing they did not have to dribble around parked aircraft or dress like Mr. Goodwrench.

Defending a high national ranking is a memory. That incentive was half gone before the latest loss and is sure to disappear completely the next time AP voters express an opinion on the Blue Demons. There may not be enough fingers on the starting five to count De Paul’s position among America’s college basketball elite.

Even the threat of losing a bid to the NCAA tournament is inconclusive. So many teams are invited to join the march through March that even twin- hyphened colleges that get their mail RFD have booked rooms with running water in Lexington, Ky., where the four finalists will gather in eventual resolution.

By winning just half of its remaining eight games, De Paul can expect at worst to be exiled to some remote tournament outpost, playing the late game against the top seed, a fate usually reserved for the Ivy League sacrifice or any school that has Baptist as a last name.

And who can say that, just as this season has gone exactly the opposite of what was expected, the usual tournament results will not be reversed, too? De Paul losing early is not quite as unusual as De Paul losing late, though it has been done that way, too. In fact, the last time De Paul made the Final Four, that is precisely the way it was done. With eight games remaining in the 1978-79 season, De Paul had already lost four, including one each to Dayton and Western Michigan, a pair of familiar curses.

Edgy about missing the then considerably smaller NCAA tournament field, De Paul worried its way into an invitation, not losing (to Loyola) until it had been anointed. Indiana State and Larry Bird subsequently disposed of De Paul in the semis.

Mark Aguirre’s considerable presence at the time may be enough to make present comparisons seem foolish, though Dallas Comegys and Tyrone Corbin have big enough feet to wear one each of Aguirre’s shoes, and Comegys alone has enough room to share the question mark that Aguirre has never quite been able to erase.

Having Kenny Patterson running the De Paul offense has not proved to be lethal, but one suspects that as a senior, Patterson has somehow regressed to the point where he might not even be recruited by De Paul today.

The important thing for De Paul to realize is that it doesn’t have to look any further than the school yearbook to find the recipe for redemption.

Joey Meyer has gallantly taken the blame for all of this, which is the least he can do, even if he was in the most unenviable of all positions for a first-year coach. Meyer had to start his coaching career without benefit of a single excuse.

Other coaches inherit the mistakes of strangers. They get three years to be repairmen before judgments are made. Meyer took over a winner from a relative. He did not have to introduce himself to his players or his players to his methods, which immediately removed the most handy alibi for failure.

The biggest move he had to make was one seat up on the bench. He assumed a 26-3 team with exactly the same players save Jerry McMillan, who no one imagined would be missed.

Meyer’s mission was to not botch things up, and there is not enough evidence yet to determine whether he has or not.

All that is known is that these players are not performing for the son as intensely or effectively as they did for the father. The present danger is that the De Paul basketball season will come down to an argument against heredity.

PHOTO: Joey Meyer.

Chicago Tribune, Professional

ATHLETES JUST NOT THE RETIRING TYPES

February 6, 1985 Bernie Lincicome Leave a comment

The most difficult thing any athlete has to face is that moment when he knows he is no longer able to play the game. Few walk away on top. Some are carried away. Most are simply excused. Occasionally one is ignored into retirement, which is pretty much what happened to Greg Luzinski.

Retirements are, at the same time, not unlike vaccinations. We have to wait a while to see if they take. Any one of us could retire ourselves if we had just had the ice concession for all of Muhammad Ali’s retirement parties. Or half of Billie Jean King’s.

I do not believe we have seen the last of Luzinski, not only because he is visible from so great a distance, but because some American League team will find a hole in its right-handed power before May and remember Luzinski’s roofers instead of his dribblers to second base. Maybe even the White Sox.

For now, let us concede Luzinski’s collision with the inevitable, however it came about.

Great athletes who have quit in their prime can be counted on one hand. Rocky Marciano. Sandy Koufax. Jim Brown. Bob Cousy. That’s it. Think of another one and the next Lite beer from Miller is on the house.

Pete Rose had to beg, take a pay cut and then a second job to keep chasing Ty Cobb. Julius Erving soars only when absolutely necessary these days and is often a fourth-quarter decoy. Franco Harris allowed his glory to be tarnished by strangers. Gordie Howe, for all we know, may still be playing hockey somewhere.

Aging athletes disturb our memories. We would much rather see Arnold Palmer make his first putt than his fourth. Franz Klammer should never have skied again in public after his 1976 Olympic downhill. Reggie Jackson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ought to always have more hair than the rest of us. Horses have the right idea. Win the Triple Crown and go to bed.

Not all athletes will admit being aware of the exact moment that the end came, but they all know. I remember talking to Bubba Smith and other Lite beer salesmen about this very thing, and Smith nearly broke into tears recalling the end.

“I was only 27 years old,” Smith said. “I went down on a yard marker in Tampa (and tore up a knee). It was so unfair. I never played a full game again. I ended up in Houston as a substitute for my little brother.”

Bernie Geoffrion first left hockey at age 32. He wanted to be a coach, and he said Montreal promised he would take over the Canadiens after some schooling in the minors. “They never called me back,” said Geoffrion, who unretired to play in New York, and did, in fact, coach the Canadiens. “I see they were just pushing me aside for young kids.”

Impatient youth can shove harder than the calendar.

Ray Nitschke is in football’s Hall of Fame. He played 15 years in Green Bay, his last one as a substitute linebacker. “I was cut in training camp (by Dan Devine in 1973),” Nitschke said. “Most of Lombardi’s boys were already gone and I knew it had to happen to me sometime, but it didn’t make it any easier.

“The hardest thing any athlete has to do is realize you’re only on stage for a little while. But, oh, it is so hard to resist taking one more bow.”

Len Dawson was past 40 when he stopped playing quarterback for Kansas City.

“When do you get out?” he asked. “The only guy who can decide is the athlete himself. It’s never a question of how much you’ve done or what you’ve achieved. There’s always something you still have to prove, even if it’s only to prove you can recapture something.

“Then there’s the question of still believing you have the skills. It’s no different for anyone who ever played a game. Everyone plays like that.”

No one put this in better perspective for me than Rocky Graziano, the old middleweight champ, who was explaining at the time why Ali kept fighting.

“A fighter, a champeen,” Graziano said, “he fights maybe 10 fights after he’s through. He fights them for the money.

“Then if he’s smart, or lucky, he gets out. I see old champs all the time. Whadda they doing? They’re caddies, shoeshine boys. I see old champs all the time. Bette”

Bob Lilly, the great defensive tackle for Dallas, admitted he played two years too long.

“I left because I didn’t want to be on the sidelines, waving at the crowd,” Lilly said. “The thing I didn’t want to do was to have a good career and then wind up with people laughing at me and running over me. There’s so much money out there, but money has nothing to do with it, finally. We all have to quit.”

I always believed that Chris Evert Lloyd, for seven years the uncontested best female tennis player on the planet, would walk away on top. The first year she slipped from No. 1, we talked about her choices.

“What I have to decide,” she said, “is if I want to make a million dollars a year but be No. 3 in the world.”

She took the money. They all do. So would we.

Keywords: ANALYSIS