Great memory turns Gabbert into top prospect

Blaine Gabbert rattled through math problems so easily as a child, remembering everything from multiplication tables to batting averages, that his mother, Bev, began to imagine something magnificent going on in her oldest son’s head.

“He’s almost got a photographic memory,” she says over the phone from the family house just outside St. Louis.

This is the attribute that might just take Gabbert far in his pursuit to be a starting quarterback in the NFL. He already has those other things the NFL desires: standing 6-foot-5 with the ability to fling the ball three-quarters of the field in the air. But it is his mind that might push him farther, for in the complex world of football offenses little matters more than memory.

“Once you say it to him it is set in stone,” says David Yost, University of Missouri offensive coordinator and quarterback coach. “His ability to process the information is amazing. You give it to him, he retains it.”

The NFL has all kinds of tricks designed to test a quarterback’s intelligence. Over the past few weeks, as Gabbert has talked to the teams that need a quarterback in this draft – Carolina Panthers, Buffalo Bills, Arizona Cardinals, Tennessee Titans and Washington Redskins – the challenges have come out. Teams have handed him pens and asked him to draw from memory his offense from college. Then they dictate the elements of their own offense, often one he has never seen before. After he has scribbled this on the same board, they erase it and tell him to write it all over again.

Gabbert shows off wheels at the combine.
(US Presswire)

Here is where the NFL men learn about the minds of their future passers. Can they learn fast? Can they adjust? Ultimately the result is often more important than if the quarterback can hit a receiver on the dead run with a 65-yard throw.

And the reports that have trickled back to Missouri where Gabbert played quarterback are that he has dazzled with his ability to decipher offenses. And it is probably the biggest reason he has risen as a junior who left college early to one of the top two quarterbacks taken in next week’s NFL draft.

“I guess I’m good at remembering and picking things up quickly,” Gabbert says over the phone with a bit of an embarrassed laugh. “I’ve always retained things quickly.”

Few characteristics are greater for NFL quarterbacks than their mind. Offenses have become so complex, with so many different variations and adjustments made each week that a quarterback who can understand what is going on becomes invaluable. The 700-page playbook Al Saunders introduced to the Washington Redskins when he was hired as their offensive coordinator in 2006 immediately became legend around the league, until it was revealed that 700 pages was actually normal for an NFL team and that Saunders’ book might really run closer to 1,000 pages with all the other options the plays demanded. Many others are similar in size.

At Missouri, Yost sometimes changed the Tigers’ offense depending on the team they were playing, a common adjustment professional teams make. He learned early that Gabbert, who reportedly scored 42 out of 50 on the Wonderlic test during the NFL scouting combine, could handle the change. Where most quarterbacks he worked with usually needed to see the play on a board or have it explained with video, Blaine almost always understood when the play was first described.

For instance, while preparing for the Insight.com Bowl against Iowa late last year, Yost mentioned a particular red zone defense Iowa likes to play to Gabbert and quickly offered a solution. Later that day, in practice, a red-zone situation arose and Gabbert immediately made the change even though it was something he had barely discussed with Yost hours before.

Subtle emergence

In an autumn where the quarterback news was dominated by Stanford’s senior-to-be Andrew Luck and Auburn’s Cam Newton, who might be the most scrutinized Heisman Trophy winner in years, Gabbert was an afterthought. His Missouri Tigers won 10 games yet he was never much in the conversation as a first-round draft pick for this spring. He could throw long but he played in Missouri’s spread offense in which the quarterback is almost always in the shotgun. It’s the kind of offense that’s generally perceived not to translate well to the NFL.

So in many ways Gabbert is kind of a new discovery. Obviously the pros knew about him. but they didn’t seem to understand exactly what they were getting. One big misconception is that he was not fast or athletic compared to Newton who can tear down the field. Lanky with blonde locks that spill out from beneath his helmet, Gabbert looks like he wouldn’t be very agile or fast. But Gabbert ran a 4.62 40 yard dash at the combine and is, if nothing else, elusive. At Missouri he rushed for 458 yards.

He also knows how to play under center having worked since midway through high school with a private quarterback coach Skip Stitzell, who often drove to the Gabbert’s St. Louis-area home. Stitzell only instructed Blaine on running a pro-style offense – even while Gabbert was in college – figuring it to be the best base from which to learn.

“I have a joke with Blaine that everyone says he’s going to have to learn to stand under center and do three-, five- and seven-step drops,” Stitzell says by phone from his Fayette home. “No he doesn’t. I think he’s actually better under center than in the gun. He’s got better rhythm and timing. He’s very good at the play-action stuff which you need to do in the NFL.”

“Would another year in college have made him a better quarterback?” Yost asks. “Sure. But talking to NFL people I don’t know if another year would have made him more marketable to the NFL.”

So he left.

“The timing was right,” Gabbert says. “I know I need to challenge myself at the next level. From a quarterback standpoint I knew I was the best quarterback coming out of college football.”

Gabbert had a school bowl record of 434 passing yards in the loss to Iowa.
(US Presswire)

He does not say this in a cocky way. Rather his tone never changes. It is something he is sure of, something he believes. He had a decent junior year throwing for 3,186 yards and 16 touchdowns in 13 games and probably could have improved on all of those numbers had he come back next season. It was a surprise to some that he came out, but then, Gabbert can surprise.

Like when he says that if he hadn’t been such a top athlete he might have gone the way of his good friend growing up, Steve May, who went to West Point. When the rest of his teammates ask to play the traditional “Halo” in the Missouri locker room, Gabbert insists on the game “Call of Duty,” showing a unique understanding of World War II battles and generals’ tactics.

He says he loves to read about war history, often reading on planes when his colleagues are more likely to be sleeping or watching movies. His favorite book is “Lone Survivor” by Marcus Luttrell, the story of a Navy SEAL who was the only member of a four-man team to live through an attack in Afghanistan.

In a league where coaches often look to the memoirs of military leaders for inspiration, Gabbert’s interests will undoubtedly be an asset. As will his memory.

“He’s the smartest guy I’ve ever worked with,” Yost says.

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Unlikely hero lifts Bruins back to final

BOSTON – For those last seven minutes, a huge cleansing scream filled the inside of the TD Garden. It rattled off the stands. It rolled off the ceiling. It pierced eardrums and left stomachs clenched against its fury. It was a combination of love and elation but tinged nonetheless with the dread that something would go wrong, just as it has all those times before.

But when the end came and there was no great collapse, no trap door opening in the ice to let the Boston Bruins fall through, the 17,576 fans who roared and agonized all at once began to chant.

“We want the Cup!”

“We want the Cup!”

Boston's Tim Thomas (L) congratulates Game 7 hero Nathan Horton.
(Associated Press)

“Oh, you know we are the same way as all of them,” said Bruins right winger Nathan Horton(notes) late Friday night, having written his name into the endless Boston sports scroll with the Game 7 goal that sent the Bruins to the Stanley Cup Finals with a 1-0 victory over Tampa Bay.

In this recent run of Boston sports teams shedding decades of old ghosts, the Bruins have been the one franchise denied. So many misses. So many blown chances. In a Garden where the banners hanging in the rafters are everything, that last Stanley Cup title from ’72 looks old and worn. All around the arena’s corridors hang pictures of Bruins players clutching the Cup, kissing it, caressing it. But they are wearing paisley shirts with wide collars and checkered sports jackets. Unkempt sideburns adorn their cheeks.

It has been a long time for the Bruins, a time that has eluded New England’s hockey team in the most damning of ways, perhaps none worse than last year’s blown 3-0 series lead against Philadelphia in the second round. And when Boston failed to close out this series with the Tampa Bay Lightning in Wednesday night’s Game 6, it seemed everything was falling apart once more.

But it took a player who had never played for them before this year, one who didn’t experience last spring’s tumble, to slip through the Tampa Bay defense, tap the puck into the net and bring all of Massachusetts to its feet. Maybe this is the way it was supposed to be; the outsider swooping in to save everyone. In Game 6, Horton had made himself something of a villain when cameras appeared to capture him spraying water on fans in Tampa Bay in anger. This led to wild speculation that he would be suspended for Game 7 on Friday.

Horton smiled at the thought he might have missed Friday’s game when it was suggested to him. He said the league never called about the incident and nobody from the Bruins mentioned anything about a suspension.

“I don’t know about that; it just felt great,” he said.

Having played his career elsewhere, perhaps he could not have understood exactly what he brought the Bruins on Friday, or how much he saved their fans who would have been apoplectic had Boston not found a way to somehow win this series. Whether those suffering in the Garden or the bars outside appreciated the brilliance of this Game 7 is lost in the chaos that came after Horton’s goal with 7:33 left in the last period. Boston pounded Tampa Bay’s goalie Dwayne Roloson(notes) with 38 shots – some he must never have even seen – and yet nothing went in. Cheers for good shots soon turned to groans of disappointment and then shrieks of despair. Heartbreak couldn’t happen again … could it?

Later, when looking back at the failures of recent seasons, Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara(notes) used the word “unfortunate.”

As the third period wound down, it seemed like such an understatement.

Then came Horton.

He found it funny that people thought his goal came on a designed play. There was no design, no coordination. He rushed at the goal as hard as he could, saw the puck flying in and tapped it with his stick at the last moment. Roloson never stood a chance.

And the party was on.

The roar was so loud in those initial moments after Horton’s goal that the stands shook. Some of those who have seen plenty of sporting events in this arena say it was the loudest they’ve ever heard it. As time ticked down, something was released by nearly everyone in the building.

“How long has it been since Boston was in the Finals?” Bruins goalie Tim Thomas(notes) asked.

Twenty-one years, he was told.

He nodded.

“It’s been a long time for Boston,” he said.

Next week brings Vancouver and the Stanley Cup Finals. The last ghost has not been vanquished. The Bruins still don’t have a sixth championship banner to hang next to the one that reads “1972.” Back then, when Bobby Orr patrolled the ice, it must have seemed like the Bruins would forever play for more titles. Then everything went dark – until Friday night, when it took a newcomer who might have been suspended were this not a Game 7, to take Boston four games from the Stanley Cup.

For a night, everything seemed possible in New England again.

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Taurasi's travails strangely gave her peace

It is impossible to watch Diana Taurasi, the best player in the WNBA, probably the best women’s player in the world, and not feel the fire burning through your television. Few women – heck, few men – play with what seems like an intense, pulsing glow radiating across the court.

It is also impossible for Diana Taurasi to turn off her fervor. There is no switch, nothing to trip her mind, to tell her basketball is over for the day and it is time to settle down. Instead the pulsing continues. Did she have a good practice? Was she productive? Will she be productive tomorrow?

Will she win? She must always win.

“I think about it 24 hours a day,” she says. “I feel like Bobby Fischer a little bit.”

Diana Taurasi's banishment from a Turkish team prompted her to relax.
(Getty Images)

For all those who mock the WNBA, who think the league that begins its 15th season Friday lacks the seriousness of the NBA, perhaps they have never watched the guard from the Phoenix Mercury, never seen her take charge of a night, careening through the lane to score basket after basket when her teams needs them most.

Every day there is someone to sway – a coach, a teammate an opponent – even after they’ve all acknowledged that she’s probably the best ever. Their affirmations aren’t enough. She has to show them, show herself, tell them the extra 20 minutes of lifting weights, the extra jump shots, the running was worth it, that somehow in the day she is making herself or someone better. Slowing is so hard.

Only this winter she had to stop. The Turkish team for whom she was playing last winter dropped her after she tested positive for a mild stimulant called modafinil. She vehemently denied the allegations, even taking a polygraph test to establish her innocence. Her protestations were so strong, the Mercury’s general manager, Ann Meyers-Drysdale (who was something of the Taurasi of her day), believed her player immediately. Perhaps a part of Taurasi’s intensity is the fact she had never lied to the team in the past, and it seemed hard to believe she would now.

It was only after Taurasi returned to the United States that word came down: The testing company had made a mistake. There had been no positive test. There hadn’t been a stimulant. As if she needed anything more to drive her on the court. This week, the World Anti Doping Agency suspended accreditation for the testing company for six months, as much a validation that Taurasi was telling the truth as any.

But her banishment from the Turkish team also brought a strange but welcome benefit. It prompted her to relax.

She never had time away from basketball before. While playing at the University of Connecticut, there were always summer teams, national teams, tournaments in which to play. Her first four years in the WNBA she’d play the summer-fall league season in the U.S. and then go to Russia to play professionally through the winter and early spring. Add in the Olympics and World Championships and she was exhausted.

Meyers-Drysdale remembers Taurasi’s former college coach Geno Auriemma, who was also coach of the national team last summer, lamenting at the World Championships that Taurasi was there in body but her mind was drained. By missing the rest of the Turkish season, Taurasi could rest.

“Actually, they did her a favor,” Meyers-Drysdale says.

The general manager pauses to consider the notion, then adds, “You know she’s never been healthy since she’s been in the WNBA?”

Now she is.

Where do you go when you’ve won nine championships between college, the WNBA and overseas? You keep pushing.

Diana Taurasi was forced to grow up when faced with some personal adversity.
(Getty Images)

“To me, it’s like Bill Russell, you sustain it,” Meyers-Drysdale says.

There was a time Taurasi did not like the attention. This came early at Connecticut, one of those rare places where women’s basketball players are festooned with the kind of acclaim most men at even big college basketball schools aren’t. The interviews kept coming. Day after day. The words repeating in her mind. She began dreaming she was doing interviews, sitting up in bed, tying her hair in a bun – as she often did when talking to the media – and prepared for the onslaught of questions until she realized it was nighttime and there was no interview and she could go back to sleep.

Eventually grew out of his and came to dominate women’s college basketball. Twice she was the college player of the year and led UConn to three national titles. For seven years she’s essentially been the face of the WNBA, its best player, the one who generates its few highlights on the nightly roundups, who seizes the games down five with two minutes left, attacking, attacking, attacking until Phoenix finally wins.

This has made her an MVP. This has won her two titles with the Mercury. This has left Auriemma to laugh at the silliness of the question when asked who in the armada of stars who played for him was best. Taurasi.

But there was a price to pay; a heavy one when she was arrested in 2009 and charged by Phoenix police with an “extreme DUI” after she tested with a blood alcohol content of .17, more than twice the legal limit. She later pleaded guilty to a DUI and served a day in jail. A lesser player in the league probably would have avoided the public shame, yet since arrests are a rare thing in the WNBA and Taurasi was the league’s best player, the words “extreme DUI” hummed across the news wires. It was an embarrassment for a league trying to hard to grow.

And yet it was something else too.

“She woke up,” Meyers-Drysdale says. “She made it a positive. She turned her life around.”

Asked exactly what this meant, Meyers_Drysdale replies: “It got her life back. In how she lived away from the game.”

A lot has happened to Taurasi in the last two years. In addition to the DUI and the issue in Turkey, there was also the 2009 murder of Shabtai Kalmanovitch, owner of the Russian team Spartak Moscow for which she played four years after the WNBA season was finished. She was close to Kalmanovitch’s family, Meyers-Drysdale says.

Suddenly Taurasi, who faced so little adversity, for whom everything came easy and as a result was probably given great leeway in return, was forced to grow up a bit. This is never easy. But she began to find peace in simpler things. Once she would have raced home from practice to sit on the couch and text and tweet and email as many friends as possible, surrounding herself with a close but invisible cocoon of safe faces. Since the arrest and the stimulant test, she puts the phone and computer away, ignoring the social media she once craved.

Last year she posed nude on the cover of a national sports magazine. She did not want to do it. It was a lot of control to relinquish. Her agent asked her four times before she agreed and even then she only did so because the agent said it would be a good thing for her to do. It was only after the magazine came out and she saw the photos that she was glad she did the photo shoot.

“As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned how to relax a little more,” she says, insisting she is serious. “I can sit on the couch now and read a magazine or sit on the couch and have a cup of coffee.”

Which is about as much as the most intense player in the WNBA can possibly let go.

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Hockey Pop: Popeye Jones' Son Is A Rising Star, But Not In Basketball

Hockey?

To Popeye Jones this had to be a phase. His sons wanted to play hockey? At first he smiled when the subject came up after he returned home from an NBA season away. Sure, he liked watching hockey and he noticed that the neighborhood children played it outside their suburban Denver home. But he was an NBA basketball player, after all, a forward well into an 11-year career. Didn't basketball players' kids want to be basketball players too?

He looked at his three sons, amazed.

"You want to play ice hockey?" he asked.

They were standing in the middle of a sporting goods store, more than 10 years ago now. All around them lay piles of skates, sticks, helmets and sweaters. His credit card was out, the register was buzzing. Suddenly he felt an anger welling inside. He had a certain cache in being Popeye Jones. He was a 6-foot-8, a power forward, not a superstar but known enough to be recognized wherever he went. Now his kids were telling him they wanted to become hockey players?

How did they even learn how to skate?

Popeye chuckles at the memory. He's had time to adjust. His oldest son Justin, 20, just finished a season with a junior team near his Dallas home called the Texas Tornado. His youngest boy Caleb, 14, is showing promise too. But it is his middle son, 16-year-old Seth, whom hockey people are talking about. They say Seth, a tall, rugged defenseman who plays for the U.S. Under-17 team, might be a top 10 pick in the 2013 NHL Draft.

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Popeye doesn't know much about hockey, not like basketball where he is an assistant coach with the New Jersey Nets. Over the years, he has stood in the back of rinks, a giant of a man trying to hide as he watched his sons skating across the ice. He calls out encouragement. He has learned the game but not enough that he can break down their performances.

Once, at the Pepsi Center in Denver, he bumped into Joe Sakic of the Colorado Avalanche.

"My sons want to play hockey, what do I do?" he asked.

Sakic stared at the man towering before him.

"They'll probably be big," Sakic replied.

Popeye can tell Seth is going to be very good. It doesn't take the trained eye of a hockey expert to realize he has skill. He's a defenseman, 6-foot-3, 185 pounds, physical but not intimidating. When Popeye watches Seth play, he sees a leader. The first word that comes to mind is "intelligent." He glides with purpose, weaving through players, never firing the puck too hard or too soft.

"When he's playing I see a calmness," Popeye says. "I see the ability when he is on the ice that more often than not he will make the right decision."

Or as his ex-wife Amy, the mother of his three boys says: "Seth sees things the others don't."

At USA Hockey they love Seth. The coaches there notice the same things that are so obvious to the father. The Under-17 team coach, former NHL player Danton Cole, calls Seth "a point guard."

"When it needs to go fast he speeds it up," Cole says. "When it needs to go slow he slows it down. His poise and maturity are an interesting combination. He's a tremendously mature young man as well."

Cole pauses.

"That kid was born to play hockey," he says.

Any hope Popeye had of converting his middle son to some other sport died soon after Seth first started playing hockey at about age five. When Amy realized the children loved the game, she took them for skating lessons. After that Seth wanted nothing more than to be a hockey player. Popeye tried to get him to fall for another game. There was basketball, of course. And when Seth turned out to be left-handed, Popeye -- who grew up playing baseball in addition to basketball -- thought maybe he could make his boy a pitcher. No chance. Seth wanted hockey.

"Since I started playing this is what I have wanted to do," Seth says. "It's just the speed and the intensity of the game."

He is in Ann Arbor, Mich., when he says this by phone. He moved there over a year ago when the U.S. team called, leaving his mom and his brothers behind to live with a host family and attend high school far away from the suburban Dallas home where his family relocated a few years ago. It is a lonely life in a way. "A different life," Seth calls it. But it might also be the greatest gift his father could have provided: An ability to focus completely on a sport, locking himself into it for weeks, even months at a time.

Through the years, Popeye brought his children around to the practices and locker rooms and games of whatever team he happened to be with at the time. From a young age they all noticed how it was a job to the players, how they had to work for hours lifting weights and practicing jump shots. It wasn't lost on Seth, for instance, that Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki took hundreds of jump shots alone in an empty gym just to be able to make 10 in a game.

Basketball took Popeye away for months at a time. For a few years, whenever he changed teams, the family moved along, following him from Dallas to Toronto to Boston and eventually Denver. When he signed with the Washington Wizards in 2000, they stayed behind in the Denver suburbs. Popeye played in Washington and moved back when the season ended. That's when the hockey started.

Popeye and Amy agree this is the way it had to be. Basketball was not something Popeye could fake and the nomadic life of a basketball player bouncing from team to team does not give the children a stable life in which they could stay in the same schools or keep the same friends. When hockey came along, everyone in the family says, it was Amy who had to drive the boys to practice, sit for hours in frigid rinks watching workouts and games until she could detect flaws, and tell her son about them the moment he was off the ice.

Asked if Popeye was the kind of father who came to games, yelling at the referees and harassing the coaches, Seth laughs. No, he says. When his father came, he'd stay in the back, out of the way. It was his mother who yelled. "She's been a great role model," he says.

But, of course, the story is always about Popeye because this is something most people can’t believe. In some ways it is a racial thing. Popeye Jones is black and while there have been more African American hockey stars in recent years, it is still seen as very much of a white game. With Popeye being so visible, a man most people have some kind of mental picture of, the fact his boys play hockey can create mild confusion.

"A lot of people do double-takes," Popeye says of his trips to the rink.

Amy is white, however. And maybe because of this and the fact the children were so good, the comments that might have been made in the past have never come up. Almost nobody makes mention of Popeye on the ice. Cole says he noticed Seth was asked a lot by the U.S. teammates and officials about his famous father. He answered the questions and then the conversation went somewhere else. "That's only going to go so far in a locker room," Cole says.

Popeye has a lot of funny stories about the cultural divide between his life and his sons. He remembers returning home from his seasons away and sitting down to watch basketball playoffs on television only to be overruled by his wife and kids determined to watch hockey. “I got banished to another room to watch basketball," he says.

Jokingly he blames Mike Modano. It was Modano, the former Dallas Stars center who first invited him to a hockey game after they met at a charity function when Popeye was a young player with the Mavericks. Popeye brought his wife and young children. They had so much fun, he remembers they kept going back. Maybe if he had never met Modano, or if they had never gone to the hockey game, things would have turned out differently. His boys would be playing basketball or baseball -- something he understood better.

Mostly, though there is pride mixed with a father's regret of a life lived on the road. So much he missed.

"It tore at my gut to not be able to see him on the (U.S.) team," Popeye says.

His salvation came from a video company who has an office in the Nets training facility. The company can make a DVD of any game that has been televised anywhere and it found many of Seth’s games for Popeye, burning a recording on a disc and leaving it on his desk for him to watch later. Last year, when the Youth 17 Championships coincided with a Nets game, Popeye found himself sitting in his hotel room at 2:30 a.m. watching recordings of the hockey, amazed by his son's poise and maturity.

He realizes Seth is so different than himself at that age. At 16 Popeye didn’t even know he wanted to be a basketball player. He played baseball and football in addition to basketball and loved them all. The fact Seth is so devoted to one thing amazes him.

"I know Popeye misses being around it," Amy says.

But this was the price of a life in basketball, a life that despite the long gaps also gave their children advantages others never had. The children never wanted for much outside of hockey, but there was always money for equipment and rink rental and lessons along with those trips to the NBA locker rooms and the understanding of how much you have to sacrifice to become great.

It's all worked out for the best.

Except Popeye still has this one thought. Every time he watches his son on the ice it won't go away, nagging in the back of the coach’s mind. Seth is so tall, so smooth, so in control ...

"I still think he'd make a great basketball player."

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The window remains open for Lefty

BETHESDA, Md. – The Last American climbed the hills of Congressional Country Club in a white shirt and pastel linen pants. Things have been good for Phil Mickelson in these final days before he turns 41. He can feel it in a swing that has needed little tinkering. He can see it in the putts that finally rolled true two weeks ago at the Memorial.

Yes, he said, smiling at yet another television reporter, “I really believe I can win this tournament.”

The frequent narrative about the last American to win a major – Lefty captured the 2010 Masters – is often about the things he doesn’t win. For years, all everyone talked about was how he couldn’t win a major, and then he won the Masters in 2004 and won it again and again. But now it seems that isn’t enough, that somehow his career isn’t complete unless he wins a U.S. Open. And with Tiger Woods gone for what could be a significant period, the idea is that this weekend, here, is finally his time.

BETHESDA, MD - JUNE 14: Phil …
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Which is why he spent much of the last few days walking around Congressional saying again and again: “I think I can win this tournament.”

Woods is gone but he always lurks near, ready to leap from the shadows. Mickelson never won many battles with Woods. Few have. Maybe that’s why Woods’ name keeps coming up this week, almost as a qualifier, signaling freedom for Mickelson to have his victory at last. With the 14-time major winner out of the way, won’t that make things easier?

Michelson smiled. It’s a delicate question. Yes, Woods’ absence makes for a psychological advantage. It removes an impediment no matter how poorly Woods had been playing before these latest injuries. But it also leaves a wide-open tournament, one that seems less predictable and less safe. Woods, he said, pushed him the way no one else did, pulling out his best game even if the result was another dispiriting defeat.

“The challenge now is, without him playing his best or even competing like he’s not this week, is pushing myself to achieve a level of play that is there without him forcing me to do so,” Mickelson said. “So in that sense it might be a little difficult.”

It was perhaps as honest a comment as you might hear from an athlete. Most would never let similar words leave their mouths. The natural assumption would be to believe the fact that this is the U.S. Open would be enough to make Mickelson play his best, but here he was admitting that he would almost have to summon the ghost of his fiercest rival to reach that height.

He’s always come across as more complicated than Woods, who openly wore his single-minded zeal, burying any hint of a personality in a carefully -crafted monotone. Woods would never admit he needed another player to push him to a higher level. He also wouldn’t stroll easily through the grounds, waiting patiently for television reporters to set up their interview before forcing him to smile and say hopefully enough: “I really believe I can win this tournament.”

But Mickelson has been through so much, little seems to bother him now. He started talking about the wretched hours between the end of a round Saturday and tee time Sunday during a tournament when winning is a possibility. This is where crazy thoughts creep into a golfer’s mind. It’s where Woods was always his best and where Mickelson has often struggled.

“Does holding the trophy go through your mind?” he said, “because if it does, you’re going to have a problem the next day.”

He’s learned the hard way.

The loss at Winged Foot in 2006 is Mickelson’s most spectacular U.S. Open defeat, but he also looks back to the 1995 Open at Shinnecock, one in which he finished tied for fourth, as the moment he first understood how to play this event. It was there where he stopped trying to reach the green on the par 5s, stopped trying to steal strokes on holes designed to trap the impatient golfer.

The Last American was asked this week if he is staring at a closing window, having lost too many years to the shadow of Woods. It was a polite way of wondering if he is nearly too old to ever win this thing. The words slapped into him, stopping him for a moment.

“Not yet, no,” he said, his voice filled with surprise.

But this is how it is going to be for the Last American, the one for whom a nation turns to this week. On Wednesday, Mickelson will go to the White House. He is excited about this and talked happily about how his wife, Amy, is coming into town early for the occasion.

“(Obama) plays left-handed so it’s the biggest decision he’s done right,” said Mickelson, feigning his own left-handed swing.

Everybody chuckled. He stood under a tree near the tennis courts. A television network was putting together its interview, the camera guy finding focus, raising his hand, 3-2-1 ready. Here came the first question.

And Phil Mickelson smiled once more.

“I really believe I can win this tournament,” he said.

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Fort Valley State prospect closes in on NFL dream

The father sells hope to the forgotten.

Every day Earl Lockette moves slowly through the halls of the Turner Job Corps Center in Albany, Ga., where he is a counselor advising those who don’t have a diploma or are have maybe been in trouble. It’s the last chance for many.

As he strolls, he tugs on the pass from the NFL’s scouting combine around his neck, a gift from his 24-year-old son and adjusts the combine cap on his head, hoping the pass or the hat can attract a curious look from one of the students, perhaps a question, allowing Earl a moment to engage.

“Oh you like football? OK. By the way, my son is playing football, he’s doing pretty good. You know, he’s got a chance to play in the NFL …”

Then he is into the story of his boy Ricardo; the one who loved football, the one who desperately wanted to be a professional football player. And yet the more Ricardo wanted to be a football player, the farther away he seemed to get. Except he never quit on his dream, pushing it until one day this winter a letter arrived from the combine telling Ricardo he was one of some 300 players in the country who had been invited. Suddenly the impossible fantasy of the NFL was on the verge of coming true.

And always Earl laughs.

“He’s the proof in the pudding,” Earl says.

He tells them how Ricardo desperately wanted to be a wide receiver at an SEC school but bad grades and low test scores chased the big-school coaches away, leaving him to run track at Wallace State (Ala.) Community College, then tiny Division II Fort Valley State. He describes how Ricardo won a national title in the 200 meters and barely missed the Olympic trials after a qualifying time was ruled to be wind-aided. He tells them too how Ricardo did play football at Fort Valley and how that career was nearly disrupted when he tested positive for a banned over-the-counter supplement at a track event and had to sit out an entire season after his junior year.

And then he always finishes with this: Ricardo came back for that senior year at Fort Valley and despite catching just 23 passes this past season, the NFL was still interested. In fact he might well be a late-round pick in next week’s NFL draft.

“I’m so proud of him,” Earl says.

He just hopes the students are listening. He wants them to believe. He wants them to trust that just like Ricardo, anything is possible.

“I always use Ricardo when I’m talking to them,” Earl Lockette says. He is on the phone, talking from Albany, where Ricardo was raised. His voice rises. “Even now, he hasn’t even made it to the NFL yet but he’s stuck to his guns. The greatest thing I’ve heard anyone say is ‘he’s going to be successful.’ With these kids I tell them: ‘if you don’t make it right away, keep working. You will make it. You will get your dreams.’ ”

Ricardo was once asked by a reporter: “Did speed run in your family?”

His reply: “No, determination did.”

Many times Ricardo Lockette wanted to give up football, throwing away his silly hope and finding something more substantial to do with his life. When the coaches at one SEC university supposedly told him he wouldn’t have the grades and test scores to get into school and suggested a year at a prep school, he was devastated and then defiant. He did not want to go to a prep school. He wanted college. He claims several schools told him they would give him a scholarship to run track. Fort Valley, which is where his father and grandfather went, would take him.

“I’ll just go to Fort Valley State and run track and go to the Olympics,” he told Earl.

When the qualifiers for the 2008 Olympics came and went and he wasn’t a part of it, he began dedicating his time again to football. He was always fast and though his skills weren’t as refined as someone who had been playing his whole life, he knew he was fast enough to get past defenses.

“I was a receiver by Division I standards,” Ricardo says by phone from Georgia where he has been training for the draft.

Lockette participates in drills at the combine.
(US Presswire)

Just because it is a small school does not mean Fort Valley State is a football wasteland. Databasefootball.com lists 11 Fort Valley players who appeared in at least one NFL game, including former Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Greg Lloyd, onetime Raiders safety Eddie Anderson and receiver Tyrone Poole(notes). Ricardo says the coaches there welcomed him enthusiastically. He began to blossom in his junior season but then the positive test for a banned substance came in.

Ricardo will not reveal the substance. He describes it as something he bought at a national supplement chain and believed to be allowed by the NCAA. He says he has no clue he did something wrong until he got a letter announcing his positive result and a one-year ban from college sports for the 2009-10 academic year.

“It was tough,” Ricardo says of his season away from football. He thought about leaving school but for what? Instead he chose to make the suspension a test.

“You really learn about people in how they battle through adversity,” he says. “It caught me off-guard but there’s no use crying over spilled milk. I hope I can help people through my mistakes. I’m not ashamed of it at all. It’s an honest mistake that’s happened.”

For a moment he is quiet.

“It’s been a long road to hopefully get to the NFL,” he says.

At the combine Ricardo ran fast. There had been some talk he could break the all-time record of 4.24 seconds in the 40-yard dash tied three years ago by Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson. Instead he tied for fourth at this year’s combine with Abilene Christian receiver Edmond Gates with a 4.37, which is still very fast and helps make him a candidate to be drafted. He says the Cleveland Browns, New England Patriots, St. Louis Rams and Philadelphia Eagles have shown interest. Most who have talked to him say they see him someday returning kicks or playing on special teams.

At this point he’ll take anything.

And Earl Lockette has something more to tell the students at the Turner Jobs Corps.

“The significance of Ricardo is that I can give them something concrete, it’s real,” Earl says. “A lot of my students now know about Ricardo. But I show just as much energy as I do talking about Ricardo as I do when one of the kids who gets a diploma or a GED or they’re 50 percent through with GED work.”

Earl laughs one last time before he has to go back to work.

“The NFL would be great but I’m already at the point where Ricardo can’t impress me anymore,” he says. “Let his success be there for someone else to be inspired from.”

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Decertification was failing strategy by NFLPA

For all of his shouting and table pounding and proclamations that the NFL Players Association “went to the mattresses” with the NFL, here is where DeMaurice Smith has his decertified union two months into the lockout: about to argue a case it will probably not win in a labor battle his constituents will soon tire of fighting.

The NFLPA’s rhetoric in the months leading up to this spring’s work stoppage never matched the issues. Nothing was serious enough to warrant a shutdown. Nobody will ache for the rookies who won’t get $40 million guaranteed in whatever new deal emerges, while the splitting of $1 billion in a league that has made so many rich is hardly a horrible problem to have. And yet the leaders of the players union were dying to decertify as far back as 2008, apparently screening executive director candidates on their willingness to push the nuclear option.

DeMaurice Smith (right) with Colts player representative Jeff Saturday.
(Getty Images)

So now we are mired in the doldrums as each side waits to go through the motions with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, a body that has already signaled its intent to uphold the lockout. All of this is less a legal wrangle – if it ever was one – than a bout between egos tussling to see who can claim momentum and thus a victory before sitting down to the negotiations which could have been done in March.

At stake is only the football season.

The blame for this lockout should be shared equally. Fingers have rightly been pointing at the NFL’s owners for starting this mess. They are easy to hate right now, complaining of weak annual returns while sitting on civic assets worth north of $1 billion in some cases. In many instances, they extorted their communities for gleaming stadiums which only helped to fatten their wallets. They cut a labor deal they never wanted in 2006 to protect Paul Tagliabue’s legacy, then blew it up two years later, attempting to illegally squirrel away television money as a lockout fund.

Still, to scream at the owners while ignoring the NFLPA leaders’ behavior in the sandbox is misguided, for the NFLPA pushed this drive to the cliff in the final days of civility. Back when Judge David Doty ruled the NFL couldn’t collect its lockout stash from the television networks, the players were gaining momentum. They got the owners to bend. The owners even agreed to show parts of their books. It wasn’t everything, but it was something more than they offered before – a real sign of progress – only to have the players reject the attempt.

One source with knowledge of the negotiations said the message delivered by the players’ leadership was that the show of demanding the owners’ books had become too valuable a PR move to give up. Then, after threatening to blow up the talks with decertification and lawsuits, they did just that – leaving many to wonder if this is what they wanted to do all along.

But why? Decertifying and getting the courts to rule the lockout illegal was always a long shot. The Eighth Circuit loomed with a history of favoring business in labor matters. Yes, the union won free agency in a similar fashion in the early 1990s. It became a big part of the narrative of the NFLPA’s previous leader, Gene Upshaw, who often spoke fondly of those days. And it became a great selling point to the players, who have never had the stomach for a true labor dispute the way their colleagues in other sports have. What wasn’t peddled nearly as well was a very real risk that the court option would slam into a wall, cornering the players and leaving them with nowhere else to turn.

“Look at it this way: If the union loses a decertification lawsuit, then it has gone and shot everything it has,” said Michael Cramer, director of the University of Texas Sports and Media program, who went through labor disputes in baseball and hockey. “You drew a 13 at the blackjack table and now you’ve got to go back to the negotiating table with nothing. Who would have bet they’d win a decertification lawsuit? You just don’t do it.”

Cramer, who was part of a group that looked seriously at buying at least two NFL teams in recent years, is amazed the labor situation has gone this far – shaking his head at the actions of both players and owners who are fronted by leaders so desperate to establish their dominance.

“This is so unbelievably easy to solve – that would be if there was leadership on either side,” Cramer said. “This is a contract that should be agreed to tomorrow. That these two goofballs [Smith and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell] are waiting around for the courts to tell them what to do to get this solved is crazy.”

Then again, the NFLPA – which has spent heavily on outside legal fees in recent years – loves litigation. It always seemed the preferred weapon of Upshaw, who was criticized later in life for ignoring important issues such as disability and retirement benefits in favor of quick and easy revenue increases which keep current players happy. Smith was supposed to represent a change from those days.

Instead, we get bizarre moments such as his recent address to graduates at the University of Maryland, in which he ended an otherwise inspiring speech by pleading with the students to scream “You suck!” in an imitation of the drunken louts at Terrapin and Washington Redskins games.

“And for anybody who would ever think that it is the wrong thing to do to care so much that you’re willing to risk everything because it is right, reserve those two words for them,” he said to the crowd as graduates and parents stared dumbfounded.

Let’s hope the owners and players are secretly negotiating even as the court date looms, because it’s hard to believe the players are going to want to “risk everything” on oversized blather and a Hail Mary they had little chance to complete.

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Seven Years After His Death, Pat Tillman Is Needed By The NFL Community More Than Ever

Last Thursday morning, as the NFL and its players sat through another sham of a mediation session unwilling to divide $1 billion between them, Jeremy Staat, once an NFL defensive end and United States Marine scoffed as he drove across the desert toward Tempe from his home in Bakersfield, Calif.

"If I could run the NFL, I'd take away these $80 (million) to $90 million contracts these young guys get," he said, spitting out the words as he spoke. "Unfortunately in the NFL these guys are making money, but they aren’t giving back. That left a bad taste in my mouth when I played -- the self-righteousness of these guys. They have this feeling of entitlement.

"You know, it's just a game."

That he was driving to his old college town where he would run in a race for his old Arizona State teammate, Pat Tillman, who walked away from a lucrative NFL life to give his in a mountain pass in Afghanistan made the irony all too clear.

As another one-time Tillman teammate, Zach Walz would later say:

"Pat never cared about the money."

Friday marks seven years since Tillman was killed in Afghanistan and nothing has changed, even if everything has changed. The official military announcement that he died in an ambush has proven a piece of grievous fiction replaced by a more unsettling truth that he was in fact killed by friendly fire. The wars in the Middle East that he so valiantly volunteered to fight have lost the attention of many people back home -- white noise to an impatient country that has already changed the channel. His name is a pawn now: Equally used by those who believe in the wars and those who despise them.

A book has been written, a movie made. His life has been cut open and dissected, all his complexities and contradictions parsed and yet in a world where heroes prove as cheap as the wind that blows through their paper-thin facades, Tillman remains as revered as the day he died.

After everything that happened he still matters.

Last weekend they ran the race they always do in Pat Tillman's name at Arizona State. They call it Pat's Run. And this time 28,000 people showed up at the school's Sun Devil Stadium to run the 4.2 mile race for the player who wore No. 42 there as an ASU linebacker. They made the loop across the Rio Salado, over the 202 highway and back down into the stadium finishing on the 42-yard line because the money raised for the Pat Tillman Foundation goes for college scholarships for returning soldiers, because this seems right and because as one runner, Jason Blakley, of Phoenix said: "Gosh, how many people walk away from a pro football contract?"

"To me, it's not how he died, it's how he lived," says Doug Tammaro, who is a sports information director at Arizona State and an organizer of Pat's Run.

Tammaro, in his role as a public relations man for the athletic department, deals with athletes in a way few ever see. He's the one who must endure private temper tantrums, beg kids to visit a hospital or talk to a fan who is just dying to meet them. He's the one who knows which men are genuinely kind and giving and which ones just put on a smile for the cameras. Tillman he loved. Tillman was real.

He thinks often about the last night he saw Tillman. It was in Seattle not long before the Tillman's death. ASU was playing a basketball game at the University of Washington, and Tillman was based about an hour away, outside Tacoma. Tillman had been up all night as part of his training, he was tired, but still he made the trip with his wife and brother to see the PR man he considered a friend. This was Pat, he said.

"There were probably 1,000 other people who wanted to spend time with him," Tammaro recalled. "But he gave to everyone."

And last Saturday when he looked at the throng gathering outside Sun Devil Stadium, Tammaro smiled. There were so many children running through the parking lot, children with T-shirts bearing the No. 42 and as he watched them all he could think was how they were barely alive when Tillman was killed and how at some point their parents would have to explain why they were at this race and what his life meant. And that made Tammaro smile.

"He was just very respectful of everyone he met," Tammaro said. "You judge a person on how they treat people who can't help you in return."

It's easy when people die to only see the good. This is especially true when the dead person is young and seemingly selfless like Tillman, who by all accounts, was so moved by September 11, 2001 -- watching the attacks and the World Trade Center collapse at the Cardinals headquarters -- that he quit football less than a year later to join the Army.

It is likewise probably unfair to juxtapose Tillman's sacrifice against the current NFL lockout. He would have been 34 now and had he returned from the war he might have come back to football and still be playing. Regardless of his feelings about the labor dispute he would have been forced to sit out like everyone else.

But everyone who knows him has said the same thing. He would have been impatient with the posturing. Tillman was terribly organized, Tammaro said and not one to suffer inactivity well.

"The decisions he made in life, not one was about money," Walz said. "He would be: 'Just let’s get this crap done, we're entertainers.'"

And the image of a player who turned down a $9 million contract with the Rams to stay with the Cardinals, who had taken a chance on him with the 226th pick in the 1998 draft, is too hard to ignore these days. So too is the fact he never came close to making that $9 million by staying in Arizona and threw away unknown millions by going to war.

Walz remembered how Tillman, early in his career with the Cardinals, rode a bicycle around Tempe for a season. When he finally got a car it was a used Volvo, which he drove with flip-flop covered feet dangling out the window.

"I don't think people focus on the war with Pat, they focus on what he represented," Waltz said. "He represented putting aside materialistic things that drive people today."

And as the lockout drags on into yet another week isn't that a lesson we could all stand to hear?

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Ironhead's son Cameron forges own path

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The face comes from that commercial all those years gone now. This is the man the son remembers: the one with the contradictions, the one who could strike fear with a glare and then warm with the widest smile. He is grinning here and it’s impossible not to notice that enormous head, the one that used to knock tacklers to the ground, the one that has also gotten him that most wonderful of football nicknames.

Ironhead.

Craig “Ironhead” Heyward is lathered up for the commercial. It’s about a year before doctors will find the first of the brain tumors that are eventually going to kill him. It’s been three years since he gave up the drinking and partying and carousing that nearly destroyed his NFL career. His life is together, perhaps as perfect as it can be. His wife remembers him being thrilled to be picked for this ad and the joy effuses from the shower in which the director has placed him. His huge torso is soaped with Zest Deodorant Body Wash, which he is promoting. His face darkens before quickly turning bright.

“But Iiiiiirrrrronnheead!, Aren’t body washes for ladies?”

Then he clutches a bath puff and utters the most famous words he will ever say:

“But Iiiiiirrrrrronnhead! What’s with this thingy?”

They say Cameron Heyward looks exactly like his father. And as he sits at a restaurant a few blocks from the Ohio State campus late last week, devouring a plate of pasta, there is indeed a lot of Ironhead in the wide face, the kind eyes and his easy, big smile. In a few days he will probably be chosen in the first round of the NFL draft just like his father was by the New Orleans Saints 23 years ago.

But there is also so much that is different. And it is not just that Cameron is a defensive end while Ironhead played running back. For unlike his father at the beginning of his career, Cameron doesn’t drink. He stays away from parties and barely steps into bars. He has been with his girlfriend, Allie, a volleyball player, since their freshman year at Ohio State. In a few weeks he will graduate with a degree in education. When football is done he thinks he might want to be a fourth- or fifth-grade teacher.

“My dad’s dad had trouble drinking, my dad did, I don’t want to put anyone through that,” he says quietly.

As Cameron began meeting with NFL teams this spring, interviewing to be selected as someone’s defensive end of the future, the football men begin telling him stories. Ironhead roared through the league those first few seasons, more than 300 pounds on just a 5-feet-11 frame thundering through tacklers, that huge head bent down like a battering ram. He was so loud, so fun. And then the tales spill out; the stories of all the late nights and the piles of food.

Stories that prompted one general manager who employed him to recently say: “He had all the vices you could think of.”

Stories that Ironhead himself acknowledged a long time ago in a Sports Illustrated article in which he revealed that a typical night would include a case of beer, bottles of tequila, women he described as “whores” and four or five big polish sausages smothered in onions. Often he wouldn’t make it home until about 5 a.m. before heading out to practice at 8, still drunk from the night before.

Cameron shakes his head. On the night he was born, Ironhead was off at a party. He raced to the hospital the moment when he finally understood what was happening, tripping off a police radar along the way. As the officer flipped on his siren and trailed in pursuit, Ironhead stepped on the gas, squealing up to the hospital where he jumped out and quickly explained to the police that he was Ironhead Heyward and his wife was having a baby.

Amazingly, they let him go.

When asked about what he learned from his father in those years, Cameron smiles.

“It let me know what not to do,” he says.

Heyward scoops up a loose ball vs. Ohio in ’10.
(AP Photo)

Jim Heacock, the defensive coordinator at Ohio State, has had plenty of great players in 37 years of coaching. He’s pretty sure he’s seen determination and fire before. He knows he’s seen good men too, ones who studied in their classes, who visited hospitals and signed autographs, who had a moment for everyone.

Then Cameron Heyward showed up to school. And from the start there was something unique about him on the field. He never stopped. Every play in the games, every drill in practice Cameron ran the same. He was relentless.

“I never had anyone quite like him,” Heacock says through the telephone.

On Thursdays during the season Ohio State players wear shorts and small shoulder pads called shells to practice. It is always a light day, one in which players essentially walk-through the plays they will run in the game two days later. Hitting is forbidden that day.

And yet several times Heacock has to pull Cameron from the workouts. He’s hitting too hard, someone’s going to get hurt.

“It’s not that he’s trying to injure someone, I just don’t think he knows another speed,” Heacock says. “He only can go full-speed.”

But there is something else too. Heacock sees it when Cameron leaves the field. He’s so kind, so considerate, it’s as if a switch has been pulled and the ferocious player on the field instantly softens, eyes happy, smile wide: just like the father from that long-ago commercial alternately growling and then breaking into his sing-song cadence.

They made Cameron a captain at Ohio State and to Heacock that seemed obvious. Cameron was always at class, always working, always studying. A leader.

Finally the coach stops for a moment.

“You know,” he says. “He’s almost perfect.”

Cameron has never been comfortable with being an athlete. He’s never had much use for the notoriety it brings, the false acclaim, the people always hanging on pretending to be your friend. As he walks into the restaurant a man calls “Good luck next week,” and Cameron is polite. He nods and says “thank you.” But he would rather have not been noticed at all.

He hates the stereotypes people place on football players, the way their eyes size them up, assuming they are at school for the purpose of going into a life of sports with no curiosity, no interest in discovering something new.

It’s partly why he is early for this interview, standing outside the restaurant in jeans and a shirt with a collar – no logos anywhere – not the regular college athlete’s attire lest he draw more attention to himself than his 6-feet-5, 294-pound frame would already attract.

“I’m not the typical athlete,” he says. “Sometimes people will see you and think ‘this guy is treating school like a complete joke, he doesn’t like to go to class or do his work.’ I mean I don’t like going to class, most students don’t. But I do go to class. I do my work. Sometimes athletes are frowned upon. I don’t want to be like that.

“Sports will fade away one day but your legacy will never fade away.”

His mother, Charlotte Heyward, taught him this. In fact, she taught him most of his life lessons.

“She always knew how to shut us down,” Cameron says. “She was in charge.”

Charlotte loves football but she never was one to be the doe-eyed football wife in awe of her famous husband. She had her own life, first running a boutique and then becoming a realtor. She was the ballast to her often-wild husband.

It was not easy for foes to take down Ironhead.
(Getty Images)

While Ironhead took Cameron through locker rooms to meet his famous teammates, Charlotte taught him about the league that would always see its players as disposable, to be discarded at the first sign of wear.

“It’s a business, don’t take anything personally,” she’d always say.

Mostly, she pushed on Cameron and her two other sons, Corey and Connor, the value of a name, of a legacy. Children might someday be looking up to him, she’d say. Be careful what you do.

“You’re always going to be an example to everyone,” Charlotte says one evening by phone from her home outside Atlanta. “Everything you do is going to be observed by someone. You have a famous last name, in our community people are going to be watching. But beyond that, God’s watching even if no one else is. You must always remember someone is paying attention.”

But there was also this lesson Cameron took from Ironhead, one the NFL men don’t talk about as they spill out all their stories from his drinking days: Ironhead cleaned himself up. He went to rehab in 1994 and got sober. He did it in the middle of his career which few players in his situation do and he shed the old, outrageous lifestyle.

“He made himself more of a family man,” says Cameron, adding that his father drove them to school, took them to their sporting events, even went to games and yelled at the referees when they made a bad call.

“I think he knew I looked up to him,” Cameron says. “He was always taking me places. I made it clear he was someone who inspired me. Everyone always says ‘who is your greatest hero. Michael Jordan?’ But I look up to my dad because I saw how much he struggled and how he tried to break back from it. He tried to right his wrongs. After football it forced him to look in the mirror and understand who is important in life.

“You know he stopped drinking when he played in the NFL [1994]. That was a huge, huge thing for us. We were so proud of him. Every year we would talk about how he never drank for another year.”

Then Ironhead got sick. The first time was in 1998 when he was with the Colts. The vision in his right eye began to blur, he went to the doctor who found a benign tumor growing at the base of his skull. After 13 hours of surgery, the tumor was removed but Ironhead’s eyesight was never right again. His career was over.

Six years later he had a stroke. Cameron was at the hospital with his brother Corey when the doctor came in and delivered the news: the tumor had returned. This time it was much larger than before, wrapping itself around Ironhead’s brain.

“You could hear a pin drop,” Cameron says.

The doctors never did get all of the tumor. They gave Ironhead three to five years to live and the running back who just years before dazzled as the face of Zest faded quickly.

Cameron was away at a basketball tournament when his father died on May 27, 2006.

Infections had set into Ironhead’s system. He grew weaker and weaker until his giant body finally gave out. He was 39.

For a long time Cameron carried the guilt of not being there when his father died. Even now, almost five years later, Heacock will watch Cameron on the field, hear something he says and know he is thinking of his father. It’s something Cameron doesn’t say much about, but he knows it’s there.

“To die at 39, it hurts a lot,” Cameron says. “That’s so young of an age to die.”

Then he smiles.

“My dad lived the life of a 100-year-old man,” he says.

Allie was initially perplexed when she’d tell people she was dating Cameron and they’d reply: “Oh Ironhead’s kid.”
(Courtesy Y! Sports)

There’s a part of Cameron that is a big kid just like his father. Charlotte sees it in the jokes he plays, the way he laughs, the way he smiles and teases.

“But he also knows when to get serious,” she says.

At a time when most top draft prospects drop out of school to concentrate on their looming professional careers, Cameron stayed enrolled at Ohio State. His agent sent him to Scottsdale, Ariz., to train and Cameron studied online, flying back to Columbus when he needed to take a test or meet with a teacher.

“He is literally the exception to the way athletes are,” Allie says. “He is so far from the other football players. He just has this really good head on his shoulders.”

Cameron Heyward looks down. He smiles but the words seem to embarrass him too. He’s always hated the stereotypes of athletes, as if a football player couldn’t do something more than just play sports.

And maybe this will be his legacy, that he will be the man who won’t have to merely be Ironhead Heyward’s kid, but a man all of his own.

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DT Guy goes from special ed to NFL

TEMPE, Ariz. – Lawrence Guy(notes) is smart. You know this because in the spring semester of last year he got a GPA of nearly 3.5 in his classes at Arizona State, which allowed Guy, then a defensive tackle on the football team, to wear a patch on his jersey distinguishing him as one of the school’s “Scholar Ballers.” You know this too because when he grows comfortable with someone and his shyness falls away, the words spill out in torrents and his eyes shine bright.

And then you see why his former football position coach, a grizzled-sounding man now working in the NFL, calls him “a great kid.”

Guy was drafted by the Packers in the seventh round of the draft.
(Yahoo! Sports)

And why the academic counselor and learning coach for the ASU football, a warm, motherly kind of woman, smiles at him and always says: “They broke the mold when they made you.”

Which is why it is easy to forget that for much of his life, people told Lawrence Guy he wasn’t smart, that the man who would grow up to become a seventh-round pick of the Green Bay Packers in this year’s NFL draft, was actually so incapable, so learning-disabled that he was banished to special education classes where he would have languished without the persistence of his father, who eventually got him out. It is easy to forget too the list of challenges he fights every day until he rattles through them, his words sometimes muddled by a slight lisp, the result of having fluid in his ears for his first few years of childhood.

The tests have told him he is ADHD, which is why he could never sit still in school. He also has dyslexia that makes him sometimes read letters backward and dyscalculia, causing him to occasionally confuse numbers. And everything always came slower. It was almost impossible for him to take tests in the time everyone else did. In fact, as he goes through his history and the difficulty he always had with things that seemed so simple to others, it’s hard to imagine he even made it to college, let alone the NFL.

That is until you sit with him long enough and a grin spreads across his face and he says:

“I don’t believe in the word ‘no.’ I don’t believe in the word ‘can’t.’ ”

Early signs

“Lawrence was basically the fat kid who everyone used to pick on to say the least,” Lawrence’s father, Michael, says. “With a learning disability, he had to take the little yellow bus that the kids with learning disabilities rode.

“If you could have seen him then you would have never imagined he’d grow into this.”

It hasn’t been easy for Michael, the single father of a learning-disabled child, with three sons living with him and the two older boys sharp and witty and athletic.

From the beginning, Lawrence was always different. He acted strange. His voice was odd. He moved with a weird gait. Everything seemed awkward. Still, it wasn’t until Lawrence was three and Michael’s mother, who had been an educator, told her son Lawrence had a speech problem that Michael started looking for doctors.

So began more than a decade of tests, special education classes and a lot of worrying about the boy who seemed to be so far behind the other kids.

They lived in Las Vegas, in one of the roughest parts of the city’s school district where things like resource classes were considered a luxury. Bringing along a child with a learning disability was not a priority. It seemed to the family that Lawrence had been thrown into classes with kids the school didn’t know what to do with – kids who didn’t care, who didn’t want to be in class and in several cases, gang members.

“Through half my life I got told ‘no,’ ” Lawrence says. “OK you got put into disability classes and what they are really doing is forgetting about you.”

And there was trouble. Everywhere Lawrence went, kids tormented him, calling him “stupid” and “retarded,” mocking him for being fat. This agonized his father, a robust man who fights fires, and his older, athletic brothers for whom everything seemed to be easy. What to do with Lawrence? How to look out for him?

Guy makes a tackle against Wisconsin last season.
(Getty Images)

One day, when Lawrence was in sixth grade, his older brother Dell – an eighth grader – pummeled a bully who had attacked Lawrence for the crime of not buying the bully a Gatorade with his own lunch money. Dell broke the boy’s nose, and because the school had a zero-tolerance policy for fighting, Dell was charged with battery and assault with a deadly weapon (for kicking the bully) and given a citation. He had to appear in court and was sent to anger management classes.

“There was a lot of anger in me,” Dell says. “People were messing with him and messing with him. I was tired of it.”

Then two things happened: Lawrence grew big and strong and Michael finally got him out of the special ed classes.

In a matter of months before high school began, Lawrence got taller. His body filled out. He was no longer fat. He worked out diligently. Meanwhile at school, Michael was in the office every day demanding to know why his son was still in classes that didn’t challenge him or help him or prepare him for much of anything. It was clear Lawrence had a learning disability. Why weren’t they attacking that?

At one point he finally said to a counselor: “What if Lawrence was blind? What would you do?”

“We would give him an audio book,” the counselor said.

“Well find him something like that,” Michael replied.

Years later he sighs over the phone.

“I felt sorry for the counselors. I beat them over the head sometimes,” Michael says. “One of the best things that happened to us was the early diagnosis and then not challenging it. No one wants to say, ‘My kid has this.’

“I just hope someone reads this and then if they have a kid who can’t sit still or has to go to the office because he didn’t feel like being in class and they see this, they might say, ‘Hey, that sounds like my kid,’ and get him tested and fight for him.”

By then Lawrence was on the football team and showed instant promise as evidenced by a call Michael got after a few days of practice. The football coach was on the line. Michael braced himself for the inevitable suggestion that Lawrence try something else when the man instead asked if he wouldn’t mind moving his son from the freshman team to varsity.

Two years later the same coach pulled Lawrence aside one day and told him he was rated the top college football prospect in Nevada. Lawrence was stunned. Soon letters from colleges poured in, and scholarship offers, and the kid who three years before seemed locked forever in special ed classes was suddenly going to college.

Finding the right help

Ironically it was in college, a place where it would seem someone like Lawrence would struggle the most, that he eventually thrived. Perhaps some of this was because he was an athlete and thus had access to academic support other students might not have had. He also met Corinne Corte, a learning specialist for the football team who often works with players who have learning challenges.

But even with Corte’s pushing, Lawrence nearly blew everything. On the field he had become a starter by his fifth game, a freshman All American. But he didn’t know how to learn. His disabilities overwhelmed him. He came precariously close to flunking out of school.

Corte has played a key role in getting Guy on track academically.
(Yahoo! Sports)

Corte and others kept urging him to go to ASU’s Disability Resource Center, a place that specialized in learning disorders and offered help for students who had them. But Lawrence was a big football star now, a giant who would be easily recognized. There was a stigma in the DRC. Going there almost seemed like returning to those special ed classes, to the taunts of the other children. Lawrence wasn’t sure he wanted to do that again.

Still, he was on the verge of losing everything. A meeting was called with Lawrence, his father and an academic counselor in the athletic department. After the direness of his situation was expressed, they practically ordered him to the DRC. Grudgingly, Lawrence went only to find the help he never knew he’d been seeking.

At the DRC he was able to get personal tutors for each class. He was able to take tests in the time he needed. They taught him about learning as someone with dyslexia and dyscalculia, and showed him new ways to study. His oldest brother, Christopher, moved in with him and they set goals: He wanted to open up socially, he wanted to be a Scholar Baller, he wanted to be a leader.

And slowly these things started to happen. He visited Corte’s office every day, taking a seat next to her desk, commandeering a file cover on which to post sticky notes with reminders for papers and tests. He took education classes because he wanted to understand all ways of learning. He used seven tutors from the DRC mostly so he could see how each one taught.

He discovered that if someone threw a concept at him, he could memorize and repeat it, but that he wouldn’t understand its meaning. He had to discover new ways to comprehend things, taking time to parse things that other people might grasp instantly.

“I was always in study hall,” he says.

His life became one of work: lifting weights so long in the football complex his position coach Grady Stetz would later say, “He did everything we ever asked of him,” before plunging himself into the tedious challenge of slowly fighting through his classwork. His grades soared until he finally got the Scholar Baller distinction.

Yet in many ways his struggles probably would have remained a secret to his teammates and the other students had he not revealed them to Doug Haller, a reporter with the Arizona Republic. The story hit one game day in the middle of last season and suddenly everyone knew.

But by then he wanted everyone to understand, to know what it is like to have disabilities and how he fought through them. Then he started getting calls. The DRC wanted to know he if would talk to students who needed the resources but, like he had once been, were afraid to get help. Lawrence smiled. Of course he would help.

“Don’t be shy, don’t be scared of what people at school think of you because you are going to a disability center,” he told them. “You are getting help. This is your resource in school. Why decline that opportunity?”

Then calls came from local schools around Tempe. Could he come and talk to their learning-disabled students? He went home to Las Vegas a few times and stopped in at the resource classes there, a giant looming above the children, telling them all how he was the chubby little kid who everyone picked on, who had no future, and here he was now a college football player headed to the NFL with a nearly 3.5 GPA. If he could do it, why couldn’t they?

“I try to be a positive person, I don’t believe in negative things,” Lawrence says. “I try to be that person who people want to turn to and look up to. I try to kill the stereotype of students with disabilities. I don’t like the stereotype people have of athletes. If you didn’t already know I played football you wouldn’t. That’s not my personality.”

He laughs.

“That’s not how I want people to know me,” he adds.

The next day he sits in Corte’s office, in his customary seat beside her desk, jotting notes to himself on the sticky pad. She smiles.

“Lawrence is a unique individual,” she says. “He is very intellectual. He loves to learn. He comes in here so much for so many different things. He’s just a very determined young man. He would come in and write all sorts of things down on the sticky notes and then he would put a draft of a paper together. A lot of times it took four revisions of projects before they were done. But he did them.”

She pauses and glances at Lawrence who is busy jotting yet another note to himself on the sticky pad.

“Honestly, did a lot of people think you were going to be a Scholar Baller?”

They laugh.

“That’s hard work,” she continues. “Hard work and dedication.”

Wrong turn

Lawrence surprised everyone &ndsh; his father, his brothers, his coaches – by giving up his last year of college and announcing in January that he was entering the NFL draft.

“I had accomplished everything I wanted to in college,” he says.

One day he looked at the list of goals he wrote with his brother and realized he had in one way or another seen them all through.

“I want a new challenge,” he says. “The NFL is the biggest challenge there is. I have a really good work ethic, I can do it.”

His decision perplexed those closest to him. Stretz, who left after the season for a job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, advised him to stay in school as did the ASU staff. When asked where Lawrence needs to improve, Stretz says: “His reaction skills, his using his hands, his experience level and seeing the game. I could go on – it’s just the developmental process.”

Guy during the combine.
(Getty Images)

Apparently much of the NFL agreed with ASU’s coaches. Lawrence, it seemed, was not ready. There were published reports that said he did not interview well with teams at February’s NFL scouting combine, which would make sense. Quick combine interviews in a frenzied setting would probably be difficult for him, even as his coaches in college and a few who worked with him on draft preparation said he had an excellent grasp of the Arizona State plays and formations, having carefully studied them using symbols as a guide.

As last Saturday rolled on, the fifth round turning to the sixth and then the seventh, Lawrence paced around a relative’s house where he and his father and brothers had gathered to watch. At one point the Washington Redskins called to say they were interested in selecting him, but then didn’t. The Seattle Seahawks also called expressing interest and yet nothing happened.

Finally, with the day growing late and the draft nearly over, the phone rang. Lawrence, who had programmed the number of every NFL team into his phone, saw the words “Green Bay Packers.” This time it was real. He was going to the NFL.

Later, after having spoken by speakerphone to nearly every coach in the Packers war room, he sighed. Just eight years ago who could have imagined this? It all seemed so amazing.

“I don’t think I’d be in the position I am in today if not for the things I’ve had to fight through,” he says. “It’s made me a stronger person.”

Another step in a most remarkable life.

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No suspension for Burrows helps Canucks

“Thrusting my nose firmly between his teeth, I threw him heavily to the ground on top of me.” – Mark Twain

VANCOUVER – With Mark Twain it was intentional, a writer’s witty way of spinning the story of a scrum to his advantage. With Alex Burrows and the NHL, it was bizarre and backward. At least with both it was entertaining.

Burrows bit Patrice Bergeron(notes) on Wednesday night in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final. It seemed pretty clear on the replay. There was Burrows, a first-line left winger for the Vancouver Canucks. There was Bergeron, a top two-way centerman for the Boston Bruins. And there was Burrows biting Bergeron’s gloved right index finger during a scrum at the end of the first period.

The alleged biting incident occurred when Alex Burrows (L) and Patrice Bergeron mixed it up.
(Associated Press)

“He did it,” Bergeron said.

Or was it the other way around?

“He had his fingers in my mouth,” Burrows said, according to the Vancouver Province, “but I don’t think I bit him.”

Wait.

It gets better.

NHL senior vice-president of hockey operations Mike Murphy(notes) announced Thursday there would be no supplemental discipline, saying in a statement he could find “no conclusive evidence that Alex Burrows intentionally bit the finger of Patrice Bergeron.”

Bergeron wouldn’t bite (sorry) when asked if he thought someone could unintentionally bite someone else. He said he didn’t want to whine about it. But come on.

“I didn’t mean to put my finger in his mouth,” Bergeron said. “Why would I do that?”

What a joke – or jokes. They were too easy: The incident gave the media much to chew on. There was much gnashing of teeth. NHL discipline showed once again that it has no teeth. Its bark is worse than its bite. It was a hockey bite. We could do this all day.

But the shame of it was that it was serious. Not so much the incident itself, even though it could have been enough for a suspension. (It wasn’t a love bite, but it wasn’t exactly Mike Tyson on Evander Holyfield, either.) More because Burrows has largely gotten past this stuff, made himself into a valuable player and become a great story in these playoffs for all the right reasons, and had he been suspended, it could have had an affect on this championship … er, championship series.

“I think he’s starting to realize how good he is,” linemate Daniel Sedin(notes) said. “He doesn’t need to do those kinds of things. He’s too good of a player to do that. … That’s not him anymore.”

Burrows fought tooth and nail to make the NHL. (There I go again.) He played as a 19- and 20-year-old in junior, making him essentially a man among boys when that’s not what you want to be. He began his pro career in the East Coast Hockey League with the Greenville Grrrowl and Baton Rouge Kingfish. Then he bounced between the ECHL’s Columbia Inferno and American Hockey League’s Manitoba Moose, then between the Moose and Canucks until, finally, he stuck in the NHL.

“You talk about perseverance, hanging in there, finding a way to get yourself to be a player, you got a great example in Alex Burrows,” said Canucks coach Alain Vigneault, who had Burrows in Manitoba as well as Vancouver. “I think he’s done that through hard work. He gets the game. He understands what you need to do out there.”

Burrows started out as an agitator in the NHL, a fourth- or third-line player with what hockey types call – yes – bite. For a long time he and center Ryan Kesler(notes) seemed an inseparable pair as grinding, chirping role players.

But in February of 2009, while the Canucks were going through a bad skid, Vigneault split up that inseparable pair and tried Burrows with another inseparable pair – Daniel and Henrik Sedin(notes).

Alex Burrows has evolved from a fourth-line grinder to a top-line left wing.
(US Presswire)

“I think even before we started playing with him, we felt like he would be a great fit on our line,” Daniel Sedin said. “Once we got the chance to play with him, right away we felt good. I think he scored the first game, and from then on we’ve been playing together.”

It can’t be easy to find someone to click with the Sedins, identical twins who have been playing together their entire lives. Burrows once said the guys say they “communicate like dolphins.” Henrik led the league in scoring and won the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player last season; Daniel led the league in scoring and is a Hart finalist this season. They need more than just a third wheel.

But Burrows retrieves the puck well on the forecheck. He throws the puck behind the net, where Henrik Sedin likes it. He lets the Sedins work their magic, knows how to get open so they can find him, and pounces on rebounds.

“He’s a smart player,” Daniel Sedin said. “He doesn’t do anything extremely well, but he does a lot of things good. He’s a lot like us, I think.”

Burrows scored 35 goals in 2009-10, tying the lifetime high he set way back in junior. He dipped to 26 goals this season, but he missed 10 games, and after making a conscious effort to use his head instead of his mouth (more in a chirping than chewing sense), he became a more disciplined player.

Entering the Cup final, he had more goals (seven) than penalty minutes (six) in the playoffs. He scored both goals in the Canucks’ 2-1 overtime victory in Game 7 of their first-round series with the Chicago Blackhawks – and had a baby daughter, Victoria, the next day. He scored in each of the Canucks’ last three games against the San Jose Sharks in the Western Conference final.

Wednesday was indeed an aberration. Burrows took eight minutes in penalties, including a double-minor for roughing after the scrum that included the (OK, alleged) bite. Still, despite all that time in the box, he played 19:53, fourth-most among Vancouver forwards behind the Sedins and Kesler. He’s not only on the top line, but also the top penalty-killing unit.

As Daniel Sedin said, he’s too good of a player to get himself into trouble, and that’s the deeper story here. For Boston, it bites that Burrows wasn’t suspended. For the Canucks, had they lost Burrows, it would have been tough to swallow.

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Luongo tries taking it the distance this time

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – With every save, with every victory, the crisis fades farther into the past and the Stanley Cup comes closer.

Roberto Luongo(notes) is only three wins away now. He led the Vancouver Canucks to a 1-0 victory over the Boston Bruins in Game 1 of the Cup final with a 36-save shutout. Coach Alain Vigneault, who benched him in the first round, said Luongo is playing “some of his best hockey … that I’ve seen him play.”

Asked when he has ever played better, at least in Vancouver, Luongo hesitated. At first, he said: “I don’t know. That’s a tough question to answer.” Pressed, he smiled and conceded: “What can I tell you? I’m in the final. I guess I’m playing pretty well.”

Roberto Luongo keeps fighting off the challenges of opposing netminders.
(Associated Press)

I guess so.

I don’t know if Luongo will give up another goofy goal and lose Game 2 on Saturday night. I don’t know if all the concerns about him will come back just like that. I don’t know if he wins the Cup if he will necessarily be validated as a big-game goaltender, either, because he wasn’t when he won gold for Team Canada at the Vancouver Olympics last year, was he?

But I know this: Luongo already has shown guts by making it this far.

It looked like it would all fall apart just a few weeks ago. Luongo allowed 10 goals over two games and was pulled twice. He was benched the next game. He returned to the net only after backup Cory Schneider(notes) suffered a cramp on a penalty shot, and he allowed the losing goal in overtime. The Canucks blew a 3-0 series lead to the Chicago Blackhawks, the team that had eliminated them from the playoffs each of the past two years, the team they had fortified themselves to beat. Vigneault had risked alienating the Vezina Trophy finalist who was signed through 2021-22.

But since then, Luongo has gone 10-3 with two shutouts and a whopping .941 save percentage. He won Game 7 in overtime against the Blackhawks. He helped dispatch the Nashville Predators with fellow Vezina finalist Pekka Rinne(notes) at the other end of the rink. The guy who had never escaped the second round won his first appearance in a conference final, beating the San Jose Sharks’ Antti Niemi(notes), the guy who had a 6-0 record in playoff series. He began the Cup final by outdueling another fellow Vezina finalist, the Bruins’ Tim Thomas(notes).

Luongo has had his hiccups. He allowed some behind-the-net goals against the Predators, and he put a puck right onto the stick of Sharks captain Joe Thornton(notes) and watched it end up in his net for the first goal of that series. But none of the gaffes were fatal, and none seemed to faze him. At least at this point, most importantly, they have been trending downward.

“A lot of people took that Chicago series and kind of held it against him, but I think that was more of the exception and not the rule,” Schneider said. “I think he was just determined to finish out that first series and to come back from two games that weren’t up to his expectations and to answer all the critics and all the questions about him, and he’s done that and more.”

Winning games might be easier than winning over the critics for Luongo, because when he screws up, he looks bad, and when he plays well, he looks unremarkable.

Under new goalie coach Roland Melanson this season, Luongo has become more efficient. He has stayed deeper in his crease, which keeps people from pestering him in front – like former Blackhawk Dustin Byfuglien(notes) used to do, like Bruins behemoth Zdeno Chara(notes) tried to do on the power play in Game 1. He has tried to stay more upright, keep his shoulders more square and move post-to-post more fluidly.

In other words, Luongo is everything Thomas is not. Thomas was more spectacular in Game 1 even though he made three fewer saves and lost – because he faced more dangerous scoring chances, but also because he has the more spectacular style. He comes out to challenge. He flops all over the place. He seemingly has no pattern and just battles, somehow getting something in front of the puck.

“Thomas does some incredible things out there,” Schneider said. “He makes some really tough saves look easy, but he also makes some pretty easy saves look hard.

“So Lou tries to find a bit of a balance where he’s just trying to be consistent and our guys know what to expect from him. … He just looks relaxed. He looks at ease and comfortable in the paint, just making stuff look simple. He’s not extending himself. He’s not on his back or his stomach or swimming around. He’s really composed and just playing big and tight and letting pucks hit him.”

It’s amazing how quickly things can turn. Knowing that, let’s wait at least a little bit longer to crown Luongo or call his comeback complete. But let’s also appreciate how Luongo, who for so long had all those great regular-season statistics but heard how he had never won when it mattered most, has made that Chicago series seem like a bump in the road to something bigger. Let’s listen carefully to something else he said when asked when he has ever played better, turning an old criticism against itself.

“I mean,” he said, “I think you measure success in this league obviously by winning. Right now we’re three wins away from our ultimate goal. That’s all I really can say about that.”

Right now, that’s all there is to say.

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Sharks are making all of the wrong moves

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Going hard to the net? Good. Scoring a goal? Even better. Standing over the goaltender, looking down through the top of the net and talking smack afterward? Dumb.

Ben Eager had something to say after beating Roberto Luongo with a late goal
(Getty Images)

Even dumber when all you did was score a garbage goal at the end of a 7-3 blowout loss in an important playoff game, a snowball you helped roll down the hill by taking boarding and tripping penalties earlier in the night.

But that’s what Ben Eager(notes) did Wednesday, sparking a scrum, taking a roughing penalty and then adding a cross-checking penalty and a 10-minute misconduct after getting out of the box in the final seconds for good measure.

And the saddest part of all for the San Jose Sharks? At least Eager made an effort against the Vancouver Canucks. His coach would rather take the bad with the good he got from Eager than the little to nothing he got from others.

“We had some guys that really showed up and committed themselves to the team, and then we had some guys that weren’t sure,” Todd McLellan said. “There’s a few people in our group – and I’m not going to hide them anymore – they have to ask themselves whether they want to keep on competing.”

Who?

“I’ll hide that part,” McLellan said.

There is no hiding this: The Sharks aren’t going to be competing much longer unless they turn themselves around – and quick.

They have dug a 2-0 hole in the Western Conference final. They have lost five of their past six playoff games, after blowing a 3-0 lead to the Detroit Red Wings in the second round and winning Game 7.

As badly as they want to shed their reputation as perennial playoff disappointments and advance to their first Stanley Cup final, they have lost six consecutive conference final games over the past two years (and eight straight if you want to stretch back to 2004).

“It’s embarrassing,” Sharks center Logan Couture(notes) said. “That’s the only word that comes to mind about tonight.”

I’m sure Sharks fans can think of a few more, but they aren’t fit for print or pixels.

It was one thing when the Sharks lost their legs in the third period of a 3-2 loss in Game 1. They had only two days off after that epic, emotional seven-game series with Detroit, while the Canucks had enjoyed a five-day rest.

There was no excuse this time. Both teams had two days off, and the Sharks didn’t lose their legs. They lost their composure.

It was only a one-goal game late in the second period. San Jose goaltender Antti Niemi(notes) had just made a highlight-reel, potentially momentum-changing save, robbing Alex Edler with his right pad. Then Vancouver defenseman Kevin Bieksa(notes) cross-checked San Jose star Patrick Marleau(notes) at least twice. Marleau turned around and took exception, and they dropped the gloves.

I give Marleau credit for sticking up for himself. Former teammate Jeremy Roenick(notes) had called him “gutless” on television just last week, and by fighting for the first time since Dec. 20, 2007, he was making a statement for himself and his team.

The Canucks scored power-play goals on two Ben Eager minors.
(Getty Images)

Problem was, he got pummeled. Bieksa ripped off his helmet and landed some good ones, leaving some marks, most notably a bruise on his left temple. As much as Marleau shrugged it off afterward – “I’ve got an older brother, so I’m used to getting those,” he said – the damage was done.

“Yeah, you know, we’ve seen that before with Kevin,” Eager said of Bieksa, a pending unrestricted free agent. “It’s sad that someone’s got to sign him for big money when he’s a phony. He goes after our top player, and he’s been asked many times before [to fight by] lots of players throughout the league and he’s declined, so …”

Eager came out for revenge and drilled Daniel Sedin(notes) from behind into the boards with 28 seconds left in the second. Eager said he deserved a penalty even though Sedin “knows what he’s doing there” and “turns his back.” Eager got away with a two-minute minor for boarding, but he should have received a five-minute major and could receive supplemental discipline. (A fine? A suspension? Are you kidding? This is the NHL. Your guess is as good as mine.)

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll be getting a phone call,” Eager said. “I always do.”

The Sharks killed that penalty. But then Eager took a tripping penalty 6:57 into the third – “It’s the conference finals. I don’t know if that’s the appropriate call there,” he said – and the Canucks capitalized with a power-play goal by Chris Higgins(notes). Vancouver led, 4-2.

Then the Sharks were called for having too many men on the ice. Daniel Sedin scored his second power-play goal, the Canucks’ third of the game. Vancouver led, 5-2.

Now it was getting out of hand. The fans chanted, “WE WANT THE CUP!” Aaron Rome(notes), who had scored only two regular-season goals in his career, made it 6-2. Mason Raymond(notes) made it 7-2.

“We didn’t see that coming,” Couture said. “We said to stay out of the box; we didn’t. We said we got to kill the penalties; we didn’t. And the next thing you know, you look up and it’s 7-2 or whatever it was.”

The truth is, the game started going bad for the Sharks even before the Bieksa-Marleau bout and the Eager-Sedin hit. The Sharks went more than 10 minutes without a shot in the second period. Then they botched a forecheck they had worked on since September. Higgins hit Bieksa in stride with a sweet pass, and Bieksa beat Niemi between the legs to break a 2-2 tie.

“From there,” McLellan said, “it started to unravel.”

McLellan won’t name the players who didn’t show up to compete, but we can guess the list is long and includes big names like Dan Boyle(notes), Ryane Clowe(notes), Dany Heatley(notes), Joe Pavelski(notes), Devin Setoguchi(notes) and Kyle Wellwood(notes). Did we miss anybody?

The Sharks haven’t beaten the Canucks in regulation this season, and the Canucks are starting to roll now. Bieksa has scored in back-to-back games and had a Gordie Howe hat trick Wednesday. Not only did Daniel score twice, but twin brother Henrik had three assists, so the Sedins are producing. The Canucks scored seven goals in a blowout victory and Ryan Kesler(notes), who factored into 11 of their 14 goals in the second round, didn’t record a point.

Marleau was asked point-blank if the Canucks were just better.

“Well, he said, “we haven’t played our best yet.”

They better soon. Because this looked like a team that gave up – and the most notable exception, amazingly, was Eager, scoring that garbage goal, looking down on Roberto Luongo(notes) like some conquering hero. The Sharks need to look somewhere else.

The mirror.

“We’ve got some work to do,” McLellan said. “We’ve got some guys that need to ask themselves some questions, answer them and pull the skates a little tighter.”

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