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An article in The Globe and Mail on able bodied athletes competing in wc bball at the Canada Games.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/more-sports/able-bodied-athletes-get-behind-the-wheel/article1913779/

Whoever said that must have had one hell of a blog.

As for me, this second season of blogging is coming to an end.   It was much more self-indulgent than I’d planned.  I really did intend to write more about the tournament, but I think my birthday and the constant questions about my retirement combined to turn my thoughts inward. 

There’s still time though to offer a few observations about the team and tournament, while they’re still fresh in my mind.

Q: What did Team Canada prove? 

A:  For one thing, that it can handle fast teams surprisingly well given that it lost its fastest player and several primary ball handlers.  I was genuinely impressed with the way that this team worked together to bring the ball up the court, to attack in the half court, and to deal with pressure.

I think the team also proved that there remains untapped potential in some of its most senior members, players and coaches alike. There was always much more to Team Canada than its superstars, and its more evident now than ever.

Q: What remains for Team Canada to prove?

A: That it can establish and maintain that level of teamwork over the course of an 8 game tournament.  There was a time when we could take success in the round robin more or less for granted.  I think the players realize that they can’t expect this to be the case at Worlds next summer.  And from what I saw over the past 10 days, the coaching staff has a pretty good grasp of the situation and is trying to equip the team to meet this challenge.

Anyway, from me to them, congrats on qualifying.  The hard work starts now.

I left things hanging yesterday with a hint.  I should rather have called it a cryptic clue, but anyway.   John 3:30 simply says, “He must increase, I must decrease.”  John the Baptist said it in reference to Jesus, but that’s not really relevant here.   

What I wanted to convey is the idea of getting out of the way.   

I’ll back up a bit.  My experience playing with Team Canada from ’97 to ’08 was nearly perfect.  No, we didn’t win everything.   But we won our share.  And I feel like I maximized my potential, all things considered.  What more could I ask for?

Immediately after winning Worlds in Amsterdam in ’06, I felt a seismic shift.  It was like a rubber band had suddenly snapped inside me.  It was alarming.  I hadn’t realized just how tightly wound up I’d been.  It was also thrilling.  I could sense the beginning of the end.  And a new beginning.

Three years later, that new beginning remains enigmatic.  The beginning of what? I’ve explored, plotted, advanced, retreated.  Been to music school and back.  Seen wild visions of new wheelchair basketball leagues and discovered that I have friends who’ve seen them too.  I’ve talked about everything and tried anything.

So what does that have to do with getting out of the way?  Well, simply this.  That kind of distracted focus is obviously not the soul of a successful national team program.  Neither is talent or skill level in my opinion.  What drives a program is the passion to compete.  And once that passion has run its course, it’s time to step aside and clear the road for someone else.

One might counter that the pursuit of excellence is the soul of sport.  But that pursuit does not happen in a vacuum.  The thrill of competition is the spark that ignites the pursuit of excellence.  Not once like a forest fire, but again and again, like an engine. 

I’ll leave it there for now.  

Big game coming up for us tomorrow ie. Friday.  Canada vs Brazil at 5pm PDT.  I look forward to seeing how we handle their passion.  They’re rather excitable.

                                                (photo: Bogetti-Smith – www.bogetti.com)

Today is my last game.  We play an experienced, cagey Mexican team tonight at 5pm PDT to wrap up the round robin.  Both teams are 2-0 so far, meaning the winner will finish first in Pool A.  Same scenario on the other side where Brazil and the USA will play to determine first place in Pool B.  That game is at 7pm.   You can watch both live at sportscanada.tv or archived at wheelchairbasketball.ca.

After that, I will slip back into my housecoat and slippers and smoke my pipe on the sidelines while the rest of the guys suit up for the quarterfinals tomorrow.

I will admit I’m having a little trouble explaining to myself and others why I don’t want to do this anymore.  As I survey my immediate surroundings and latest experiences, “this” means having fun on the court, being part of a great team, mixing with the international basketball community, showing off with cameras around, and staying in multiple-star hotels. (ONLY 4 pillows per bed though?  Really Sheraton?!)  

That’s not to mention all the other exciting and fulfilling aspects of competing internationally.  Representing Canada, traveling the globe, playing on the world stage.  It’s where talent meets passion meets resources (increasingly).  A highly addictive cocktail that is the pursuit of excellence.

And I’m sure there are other perks I’m forgetting at the moment.

So why not keep playing? 

Answer coming tomorrow.

(Hint – John 3:30)

What better time to live in the past than my 30th birthday.   My friend Anna Parisi who works for the CPC emailed me this photo yesterday and wondered aloud what a thought bubble might reveal.  I don’t remember what I was saying or thinking, but I do know what Stouty was thinking: “There might be five people on this planet who can hold a bouquet of flowers while wearing a laurel wreath and still look like a badass.  I am one of those people.  Pat is not.”

Short and sweet.  That applies both to this unsolicited blog post and as well as to my upcoming stint with the national team.   For a variety of reasons, it made simple sense for me to join the Canadian team for the next 10 days for the America’s Cup Qualifier as an injury replacement.  While I’m at it, I figured it would be fun to resurrect this blog for a couple of weeks.  

Quick facts – the ACQ will determine the three teams that will represent our zone at next summer’s World Championships in Birmingham, England.  Considering that Canada and the USA have met in every Qualifier final since at least ’98, it wouldn’t be shocking to see it happen here in Vancouver.  But anything can happen.  

My plan is to play in the round robin and help the team set the table for the big crossover games at the end of the tournament.  That’s as far as my playing contribution will go.   From that point on, I’ll be as curious as anyone to see how our guys do in the medal rounds.  No Jaimie, Stouty, Ross Norton, or Brett Fa…I mean Pat.  That’s 33% of our Sydney/Athens/Beijing teams, and three starters.   

But there’s a small batch of new guys who are working their way into the team.  Smart, disciplined players.

And of course, we still have Joey, the Daves, Bear, Yvon, Bo, and Abdi from Beijing.  And Adam, who’s been filling my shoes.  Get it?!   Thank you.  I’ll be here all week.

Two links to share…

1 – For more info about the ACQ tournament, click here.

2 – To watch the tournament online, click here.

{The following post contains immature language and not a little irony.  Reader discretion is advised.

Seriously, I owe Troy Sachs an apology for the verbal sucker punch below.  Whatever his gifts or gaffes, I should have spoken to him privately before sharing my opinions publicly.  And there was no good reason to overstate them in such an ugly way.  

Congrats to him and again to the rest of the Aussies.}

Hey, remember me?  The guy with the blog?  Yeah, I know, it’s been a while.  As you probably know by now, if you’ve slogged it out with me these past few weeks or months, I am the proud owner of a silver medal and another colourful batch of memories.  I thought about writing a few times over the past week, but I couldn’t find a two hour span when I wasn’t wiped out, or still pissed off, or a little drunk.  Might have made for an entertaining read, but I didn’t want to say anything I might regret later.  So here I am back in Vancouver, practicing safe blogging, and wondering how to wrap this thing up.  I think I’ll tackle it in bullet form…

Losing Gold

This has to come first, cause it’s the first thing everyone wants to know about.  What happened?  Are we disappointed?  What does it mean not to win three in a row?  Well, as anyone who reads Bill Simmons on espn.com knows, there are levels of losing.  He has a fairly elaborate system worked out that I won’t get into.  Suffice it to say, losing hurts, but some losses hurt more than others.  Of course, I can only speak personally.  It’s different for each guy in the room.  For me, I can live with it.  Making history would have been nice and made for a good story, but it was never high on my list.  I would have loved to see a gold medal around the necks of the new guys, but they’ll have more chances.    I was only really bothered by one thing – that I couldn’t be the leader we needed in that final game.  The team needed me to get fired up, but I couldn’t do it (more on this later).  I tried, but everytime I did, I could only think of how tired I was.  Tired is the wrong word.  Empty is better.  Whether it was the double OT or ten years of chasing a ball around, the gas tank was empty.  And this loomed like a colossal failure to me.  Why couldn’t I dig deeper?  Fatigue is no excuse.  The grind is no excuse.  I let everyone down.

But now it’s a week later, I’m back in surprisingly sunny Vancouver, contemplating an open road of possibilities.  And looking back I realize that I gave everything that I had, no more, no less.  I wasn’t the same leader that I was in ’04, but I tried to lead as well as I could.  Other guys like Deng, Jaimie, and Dirt stepped up and let me be myself and offer what I could.  (Well except Jaimie – he complained more or less constantly about me dumping responsibilities on him, but what are friends for).

Winning Silver

Second best.  That’s not bad, right?  Right??!

The Aussies

In my mind, besides playing good, smart basketball, they did two important things very well.  They hit free throws.  And they controlled the emotional game within a game.  If this was an intentional part of their game plan, then their coach deserves some credit. First a little history.  In the past, games between Canada and Australia usually went like this; they came out like a battering ram, we got pissed off, and then it was game on.  We fed off the aggression and occasional outright violence of their players, and it usually worked in our favour.  In the final though, I felt like they lulled us to sleep.  They were playing hard, fast, and with intensity, but it was channelled more productively than I’d ever seen before.  Even Troy seemed less obnoxious than usual, for most of the game at least.  Somehow they avoided getting under our skin until it was too late.

Speaking of Troy, and I never do publicly, I feel like I owe a brief explanation of what I was thinking at the end of the game, in case you catch it on TV.  I took a fake-flagrant on Troy Sachs with 0.1 seconds left.   The thing is, as the clock was winding down, I suddenly realized that if this was my last game, it might be my last chance to punch him in the face.  Believe me, there was nothing emotional in it.  I wasn’t angry.  It’s simply that he’s been hiding behind the refs and the integrity of the game for a long time, and no one holds him accountable for being an idiot. 

That’s not my job though.  Besides, I’m biased and I’m no choir boy myself.  But since no one seems to talk about these things openly, I figure I’ll go ahead and offer my two cents, for what it’s worth. Troy’s the most talented athlete and the most f’d up person I’ve ever met.  

Most of the Aussies are good guys though.  They paid their dues and earned their success the hard way.  I congratulate them.  

Team Canada

Hard to say what the team will look like at Worlds in 2010.  I can’t speak for others, but I know that a number of guys have either decided to or are considering hanging it up.  But for all my blathering on about the well running dry, it was great to hear guys in the locker room after the final game talk about how much fire they still have.  Regardless of who moves on, our program is in good hands, from our staff at cwba to the coaches to the players.  

Retirement and the Future

I’m not announcing anything, cause I don’t want to have to pull a Brett Favre someday.  I have a gut feeling that I’m supposed to move on to something else.  Within the sport, outside the sport, maybe both, don’t know.  I want to stay in Vancouver at least for a few more years, finish the music program I started at VCC, and take it from there.

So that’s it.  I’m going to post some photos, but there are some great photo galleries by Kevin Smith on the cwba site, here.  On the front page, there are still links to various articles and coverage.  Oh, and there’s a really good article about Jaimie’s chair here.

I’m going to try to resist a few urges tonight. Yes, those ones too – we have a big game tomorrow, after all. I was referring though to the urge to editorialize last night’s game. Maybe after it’s all over.
For now, just a brief recap and a few comments.

We showed up at the stadium at halftime of the Australia/GB semi. The Aussie’s were up big and going away with it, so it seemed. I hit the warmup court right away, but kept one eye on the TV. GB did manage to put a run together to get the deficit down to single digits, but they ran out of time. Little did I know that we’d be in a similar situation before long.

The US came out with all guns blazing. They were hitting shots and they were disrupting our offense. Remember what I wrote about the US pressuring you to reinvent yourself on the fly? That didn’t take long. They were picking on me quite a lot, so I abandoned my usual role of inbounding the ball and just tried to get up the court without the ball to relieve the pressure. Big mistake. But once we made that adjustment, and a few others, we stopped the bleeding and prevented the game from getting completely out of hand. We were still down double digits, but by midway through the second quarter, I felt like the worst was over, and we court really start to claw back.

And that we did in the second half, slowly but steadily. If you want to see how it all played out, you’ll have to watch the tape or read Stouty. He’s the king of details, most of which are at least partially based on true events. I guess we did just enough to win. Just enough free throws, just enough stops. We watched video today, and it was gratifying to see us executing some fairly simple but essential skills well, especially down the stretch. You don’t appreciate those things as much as the big turn of events, makes and misses, that kind of thing. But those little details kept us in the game, and eventually brought us back.

Not that we were perfect. Speaking personally – and painfully – I had a few atrocious junior ball turnovers, that would have racked my conscience with guilt had we lost. And though I made a few of the biggest shots of my career, I also made at least one of the biggest bonehead plays of the decade. In OT I got a rebound off Joey’s missed free throw, and found myself in the paint, facing him, back to the basket. It’s not often you have the chance to look a teammate square in the eye, consider his squared up scoring position 8 feet from the basket, and then firmly decide that your backwards 6 footer is the safer bet. That kind of opportunity does not come around every day.
I have to admit though, one of the more discouraging features of the blind backwards shot is that it’s hard to spot the American player who’s about to block it and take the ball away. Tough to see him coming.

But we survived it, though barely. Now we can laugh. If we’d lost, I wouldn’t find it quite as funny. Like I wrote a while back, winning heals all wounds. So does time. I know this because back in 2002 at the World Championships, the shoe was on the other foot. The similarities are eery. Canada vs the USA. Semifinal of a major tournament. Big halftime lead. Second half comeback capped by a tying basket in the dying seconds of regulation. Two OT’s. In the end, one euphoric winner, and one crushed loser. Except that time, the roles were reversed. They were the ones celebrating, and we were the ones wondering what went wrong.

Now it’s six years later, and if anything, I appreciate the experience, for two big reasons. The first one is that it motivated us to kick ass in 2004. The other is reason is that late in the game, I had a chance to take a wide open layup to put us up by four points, which might have iced it. But I turned it out. (And a few seconds later turned the ball over, leading to their tying hoop). I did it partly cause I was trying to be clever and kill clock, and partly because I didn’t have the kahonas to go in and take a pressure layup with my left hand (I was coming in on the left side and this was back when Frog would all but threaten to chop off our left hand if we didn’t use it on the left side. Ahh, the good old days, when everything was black and white…). Anyway, I felt like a real failure afterwards. But I had a good chat with Jerry at the Tokyo airport on the way home, and he told me never to do that again. Take the points. I said ok.

So good came from bad, and we benefited in the long run. I have no doubt that the US will learn and rebound from last night’s loss, both as a team and as individuals. They have time.

Incidentally, the US went on to win the Worlds in ’02. So let’s hope the similarities continue.

Ok, time for bed. I guess that turned into something of an editorial after all. Oh well. Some urges just can’t be resisted.

ps. Apparently, I didn’t have my details straight wrt the Iran situation. Here’s the official story – the Iranians boycotted their quarterfinal vs the US because the organizers changed the game time at the last minute ie. the day before. They filed a protest and refused to play. Why would they come so far only to give up over so little? Did they not want to play the US? Did they anticipate a politically unsavory matchup with Israel after the quarters? Draw your own conclusions. I’m staying out of it. I just wished they’d stuck around and played it out. They were fun to watch.

pps. Should I write something about the Aussies? What should I say? Same cast of characters from 2004, with a couple new faces. Same intensity. Same aggression. They’re playing well. Many of their top guys play competitively year round, in Europe, then in the Aussie league. So they look fit and game ready. That’s about it. Oh, and God help the referees.