maly, too: These Tigers Have Plenty Of Bite

Monday, December 23, 2013

These Tigers Have Plenty Of Bite

By RON MALY

A holiday shout-out from me to coach Joe Sigrist, his assistants and the players, student managers and trainers on the unbeaten and very impressive Valley High School girls' basketball team in West Des Moines.

Sigrist's Tigers have a 7-0 record and are either No. 2 or No. 3 in the state's class 5-A rankings, depending on whose ratings you believe.

In my case, I'll buy the No. 2 ranking because I've seen Valley play a number of times this season, both in and away from Bill Coldiron Fieldhouse in West Des Moines, and I think the Tigers are doing the things necessary to be big winners.

What I like about Sigrist's coaching is that he's teaching fundamentals, he's got his players going hard to the backboards and he's got them playing defense.

Indeed, Valley's girls are playing much better than the school's inconsistent boys' team.

On the same night Valley's girls turned in a tremendous display of both strong offense and defense while rolling past West Des Moines rival Dowling, Valley's boys were getting their slam-dunk shots blocked by Dowling in an easy victory by the Maroons.

If you haven't learned until now about how good Valliey's girls are, it's not surprising.

The team is being largely ignored by the paper, as usual.

Indeed, the paper's present bosses are doing all they can to ruin any hope of improved circulation numbers in the future.

Today's high school kids are the would-be newspaper readers of the future. But when there's little or nothing in today's papers about their accomplishments or their friends' accomplishments, they certainly won't be buying any papers in the future that could perhaps help keep the journalism business alive.

Most of the time, the one- and two-paragraph game stories of high school games are buried next to the "house ads."

The paper makes no money off the house ads, of course.

I'd have written buried back by the tire ads, as former Drake football coach Chuck Shelton used to say about the paper's lousy coverage of the Bulldogs, but there are no tire ads anymore.

While on the subject of the paper, I've noticed that the bean-counters in the newsroom have been hard at work lately.

They wouldn't [or couldn't because of budget problems] send a sportswriter to the NAIA championship football game Grand View won Saturday in Rome, Ga.

The Associated Press wrote the game story for the Sunday paper.

That kind of stuff was unheard-of in the old days.

Also, the paper has no sportswriter in Hawaii this week to cover Iowa State's outstanding basketball team, and Drake's women's basketball team is being short-changed again, too.

The paper is depending on Drake's sports information staff to cover most of its women's games--even those at the Knapp Center, which is just a few miles from the paper's newsroom.

Even when the paper acted like it had no reporter available to cover Drake's women in past seasons, the bosses would send Chuck Schoffner, the long-time and now-retired Associated Press writer from Des Moines, to handle the writing on a freelance basis.

However, I haven't seen Schoffner's byline in the paper for months.

And whatever happened to Jim Ecker's coverage of Northern Iowa?

Ecker, a freelancer from Cedar Rapids, was costing 'em too much, I guess.

Now the paper gets coverage of the Panthers free from Jim Sullivan of the Waterloo/Cedar Falls Courier.

It'll interesting to see how many reporters the paper can afford to send to Florida for Iowa's bowl game.

And I'm wondering if Pat Harty of the Iowa City Press-Citizen, another Gannett Co., paper, will make the trip.

Harty did outstanding work, as usual, on the Iowa football beat during the regular season, and some of his stories were carried by the paper here.

But I don't think he was sent to all of the Hawkeyes' road games. So it's anybody's guess if he'll show up in Florida.

One of the reasons the Register's sports budget is hurting now is because far too often two, sometimes three, sportswriters were sent to meaningless collegiate games on the road during the regular season.

Now the paper is paying the price for that.

Sad stuff.

JOLTIN' JOE GOT IT STARTED

When Ron Maly was a kid in Cedar Rapids, he wanted to enter an essay contest, and he did. He wrote about Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees being his favorite baseball player. For finishing second in the contest, Ron won a Louisville Slugger baseball bat autographed by DiMaggio. Ron later wanted to be the first person in his family to attend college, and he was. He earned a degree in political science from the University of Iowa, and did what all political science majors do. He became a sportswriter. He had, after all, covered high school football, basketball and baseball games for the Cedar Rapids Gazette while he worked parttime during his university days. Ron wanted to sit in the press box and write about an Iowa-Minnesota football game, and he did. It happened while he was the sports editor at the Albert Lea [Minn.] Tribune, and the game was at Memorial Stadium in Minneapolis. Ron wanted to cover a World Series, and he did. Also when he was working for the Albert Lea newspaper. Ron wanted to cover Rose Bowls, Sugar Bowls, Orange Bowls, Cotton Bowls, Holiday Bowls, a Freedom Bowl, a Sun Bowl, a Super Bowl and NCAA basketball tournaments, and he did those things after he moved to Des Moines. Ron was a four-time sportswriter of the Year in the state of Iowa [the years were 1977, 1978, 1994 and 1996]. In 2006, he was named a charter member of the University of Iowa's media Wall of Fame in the Kinnick Stadium press box. A photo of the plaque that's displayed in the press box is displayed above this story. Following Ron's retirement from the newspaper business, a publisher asked him if he wanted to write a book about the rich football tradition at the University of Iowa, and he did. The hardback version of "Tales from the Iowa Sidelines" was a best-seller, and so was the revised, softback version. Now he's been asked by his publisher to update the book for a second time. He's in the process of doing that at the present time. Ron considers being asked to update a best-selling book for the second time to be the supreme compliment, considering the Hawkeyes won just four games in the 2012 season. When Ron isn't working on books, he's busy traveling and spending time with his family. Indeed, he attends the athletic, theatrical and musical [both vocal and instrumental] events in which his six grandchildren participate. He also writes about anything that interests him for his many websites. Every chance he gets, Ron proudly wears his America Needs Farmers T-shirt.

The Hawkeyes' Rich Football Tradition, Revisited

I mentioned a while back that I was in the process of updating my Tales from the Iowa Sidelines book. Updating it for the second time. The original hardback edition of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines [pictured at the right] was published in 2003, during the 10-3 season, when coach Kirk Ferentz and his Iowa football team had a 10-3 record that included a 37-17 victory over 15th-ranked Florida in the Outback Bowl and after the Hawkeyes went 11-2 in 2002. That book was a best-seller, so the publishers came to me again in 2005, a season that finished with a breathtaking 30-25 victory over No. 11 Louisiana State in the Capital One Bowl on New Year's Day, 2005. Because buyers had cleaned out the the shelves in the bookstores, the publishers wanted to know if I'd do an updated version of the book. I agreed, The revised, soft-cover edition [pictured at the left] was published in 2005. Warren Holloway, who teamed with quarterback Drew Tate on a miraculous 56-yard touchdown pass to win the Capital One Bowl, was featured on the cover. That book, too, turned into a best-seller, So I had reason to feel very good about my years as a published author. It's not every day that a the original version is a best-seller, and so is the updated version. Then, imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from a senior editor at the publishing company last fall, wanting wanted to know if I was interested in doing a second updated version of the book. It came at a time when things weren't going well for the Hawkeyes in the 2012 season. They lost their last six games and finished with a 4-8 record. Frankly, the thought of doing a revised edition of the book during a 4-8 season seemed to be a stretch. "Maybe producing a revised edition in a year or two would be a better idea," I told the publishers. "We'd like to do it now," I was told. "Let me think about it," I said. After a few days of thought, I accepted the idea. I talked myself into the idea that this was the supreme compliment--being asked to do a second book update during a 4-8 season showed strong confidence by the publishers in me and in the Hawkeyes' football program. So I got back into the business of interviewing players and coaches again, going to postgame press conferences, weekly press conferences and a scrimmage in West Des Moines. After a press conference in Iowa City, I did a one-on-one interview with coach Kirk Ferentz, and mentioned to him that I was in the process of doing a revised edition of my two best-selling books. I congratulated him on the excellent things he had done for Iowa's football program--all of which contributed to the success of my books. "I think Coach Fry had more to do with it," he told me, bringing up the name of Hayden Fry, his one-time boss at Iowa and a man who brought Iowa's football program back from the dead in the 20th century. That's modest Kirk Ferentz for you. Even though the 2012 season wasn't something Hawkeye coaches, players and fans will recall with any special feeling, Ferentz has a 14-year record of 100-74 at Iowa that includes two 11-victory seasons [2002 smd 2009], two 10-victory seasons [2003 and 2004], plus he's been the Big Ten coach of year in 2002, 2004 and 2009, and national coach of the year in 2002. Indeed, Ferentz has done some wonderful things at Iowa City, and I fully expect his success to continue. I've concluded my writing for the second update of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines, and the senior editor has furnished me with an early look at the book. Not only are the Kirk Ferentz years included in the updated version, but so is the stuff I previously wrote about Howard Jones, Dr. Eddie Anderson, Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick and the 1939 Hawkeye Ironmen, Ronald Reagan, Ozzie Simmons, Ossie Solem, Randy Duncan, Alex Karras and lots of other legends from Iowa's rich football history. I expect the book to be in stores soon. I hope you like it.