I know Chris Wright won the game’s MVP award after Dayton dismantled Xavier, 90-65, Saturday at UD Arena — and with 17 points, nine rebounds and three blocked shots he deserved it — — but I’d give the honor to two other Flyers:
1 — Brian Gregory
2 — Rob Lowery
Gregory — as was the subject of my column in Sunday’s newspaper — showed himself to be the master motivator when, just minutes before the Flyers would take the court for the opening tip, he came bobbing into the team’s cramped dressing quarters to the beat of LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.”
The head coach was wearing a long red and white, hooded fight robe and boxing gloves and he fired off volleys of punches at each of the Flyers as LL Cool J — who Gregory, to the hoots of some of his players, calls “the greatest rapper of all time.” — provided the theme music:
“Rockin my peers and puttin suckas in fear
Makin the tears rain down like a MON-soon…..
“I’m goin insane, startin the hurricane, releasin pain
Lettin you know that you can’t gain, I maintain…”
“I’m gonna knock you out (HUUUH!!!)
Mama said knock you out (HUUUH!!!)”
“None of us expected that,” senior center Kurt Huelsman said afterward. “He’s usually pretty serious and intense….But that really got to us. It riled us up and it really loosened us up, too…And that’s how we went out and played.”
Senior guard Mickey Perry agreed: “All year he’s just wanted us to get an identity of playing hard every game and today that’s what we did. He just wants us to always be able to show who we really are out there.”
No one did that more on Saturday than did Lowery
If you remember, a year ago when Xavier came to UD Arena, he tore the patellar tendon in his right knee midway through the first half. He crumpled right beneath the basket in front of the UD student section and lay on the court for several minutes cradling his knee.
When the training staff got him to the dressing room and told him the extent of the injury — that he’d need surgery and his season was done — he began sobbing uncontrollably.
He missed almost a year, returning Dec. 5 this season.
“I remember the play he got hurt like it was yesterday,” Chris Wright, who shares an apartment with Lowery, said after Saturday’s game. “We talked about that last night in the living room when we were watching SportsCenter and all the NBA games.”
Rob Lowery
Lowery admitted the memories of Xavier’s last visit — and what had happened to him — were on his mind Saturday.
“I thought about it a lot and it got me kind of emotional. This game does it to you anyway just because of the rivalry and all. When we go down to Cincinnati, they’re always on us and when they come up here our fans are on them.
“Our crowd makes us feel like we just can’t lose…That’s why I wanted to go out there and play with no fear. And I think I did.”
He finished with 16 points, five assists and two steals.
After the game as Marcus Johnson was about to hoist the Blackburn-McCafferty Trophy above his head to show the crowd, he looked for Lowery and called him over to help.
“I thought about what happened to Rob in this game last year,” Johnson said. “I remember going in the training room at half time and seeing him so upset and I told him we’d take care of things for him. Right after that I wrote 3s (Lowery’s jersey number) on my shoes to support him and, to this day, I still wear them at every practice.”
Lowery said when Johnson called him over, he understood:
“He knew what I had been through. I had cried to him that night it happened and poured my feelings out. And now he wanted me just to help show I was back and we had all done something pretty special.”
Over the years, I’ve covered some 30 Super Bowls. Here’s one story I won’t forget:
I was headed to one of those cattle-call press conferences that precedes the game. In this case, some 1,500 media types were descending on about four dozen Denver Broncos scattered across the Rose Bowl field for some Super Bowl XXI talk.
I had planned to write about John Elway, but as our loaded bus joined the caravan heading to the stadium, my best friend, the late — and I’ve got to say great — Shelby Strother, a columnist for The Detroit News leaned over and whispered an amazing tale.
It involved Tony Lilly, the Broncos defensive back who was known for his tough-guy image.
“None of these guys know this,” Shelby whispered. “In the offseason, Tony was hunting with some fellows and stumbled into a bear trap. The thing clamped around his leg, but as he lay there on the ground writhing in pain, he gritted his teeth, pried the trap open and pulled his mangled leg free.
“Talk about a tough guy! After he wiped away the blood, he tied his T-shirt around the wound and kept on hunting. He limped through the woods, came up on that bear and took it home as a trophy.”
The story had me mesmerized and as soon as the bus door opened, I all but sprinted to Lilly’s side:
“Tony, tell me about your hunting trip … the one with the bear… you know, where you stepped in that trap, pried out your leg and then shot that bear.”
The other writers who had gathered around rolled their eyes. Lilly took a step backwards. I thought he was being modest. He thought I was nuts.
“This story shows how tough you are,” I said. `It …”
Before I could say any more, he threw up his hands:
“Stop….Stop… I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even hunt!”
As I slumped away in embarrassment, there stood Shelby, doubled over in laughter.
I looked across the field to where Elway was perched, but by then he had 300 media types mobbed around him. I’d never get close to him.
But looking back now I ended up with a Super Bowl moment that still makes me laugh.
Just as Justine Raterman was about to shoot a free throw in the first half of the Dayton Flyers women’s game with Charlotte Wednesday, here comes a piece of gold confetti — about the size of an open matchbook — fluttering down from the network of rafters and catwalks high above UD Arena.
Referee Dennis DeMayo spied the glittery intruder as it pinwheeled downward, positioned himself in its flight path and snagged it when it got within reach.
Several times this season I’ve watched similar pieces of confetti — some blue, some silver, some gold — come flittering down from the heavens during Flyers men’s games.
For some the stuff was a big mystery. But folks at UD say the errant pieces confetti are left over from the Winterguard festivities that pack UD arena every April. They said they’re stuck on girders high above floor that are too narrow for anyone to walk out on to sweep them up.
Every once in a while an Arena updraft — or maybe it’s a backdraft from one of Chris Wright soaring, jet propulsion dunks — blows some of that stuff loose up there.
Saturday, though, at UD Arena — at halftime of Dayton’s much-anticipated game with Xavier — there will be cash dropping from up above.
As part of a promotion to announce its new autonomy, PNC Bank will be dropping balloons affixed with gift cards worth various cash values from the Arena catwalks at halftime.
The bank also will put red and white shirts on every chair. It’s part of UD’s attempt to create a “white out” atmosphere in the Arena, though the idea may be trumped — if our always breathless, over-amped weather reports around here are true — by 4 to 8 inches of snow outside.
To be sure that Flyer fans can sport all their school colors Saturday, White Allen will supply red and blue towels for everyone at the game.
And if Dayton avenges the smack down it took at Xavier last month — and I think it will — a little confetti might be in order, as well.
It was 1.a.m. a few nights ago and Cliff Pierce couldn’t sleep.
With the temperature in the teens, he started thinking about Dwight Anderson. Prep hoops rivals in the late 1970s, they live very different lives now.
Pierce and his wife live in a restored Victorian home on Gordon Ave. and Dwight lives on the other side of West Dayton in a garage with no heat, a couch for a bed and a bicycle for transportation.
“I kept thinking how cold he must be, so I went and got him,” Pierce said. And so for few days, Dwight had a place to clean up, eat, watch TV and tell stories about a high school scene unlike anything Dayton had witnessed before…or since.
“Dwight was as gifted a player as has ever come from our town, said John Paxson, the Chicago Bulls executive who was an Alter High and NBA star.
The nation’s No. 1 prospect while at Roth High, Anderson packed gyms and drew the top college coaches to town.
“He was bright lights and entertainment,” Pierce said. “Yeah, we had the Ohio Players and Heat Wave, but folks weren’t talking about them like they were about Dwight.”
After starring Kentucky, then Southern Cal, drugs, alcohol and then self-doubt helped derail his career.
He disappeared into the shadows of the city that once adored him and his story became a cautionary tale that, in 2008, Pierce decided needed a new ending.
All that is the subject of my big story in the Sunday, Jan. 31 newspaper, a story that also can be found on this website.
In a nutshell: Pierce found Anderson — who’d worked some parking lot security — along Hoover Ave., opened his home to him and now he’s trying to get the rest of the city to open its arms again — starting with a meet-and-greet next Friday, Feb. 5, at Rut’s Eatery.
“When you been away from people, you get a little shell-shocked. the 49 year old Anderson admitted. “I’m just trying to get back amongst them again … and it’s OK.”
Pierce was right — it’s time for Dwight Anderson to come in from the cold.
To get an idea just how the Super Bowl-bound Saints have captured the heart of New Orleans, here’s a picture my friend Kim McLendon Strother sent me of the priest at the city’s famed St. Louis Cathedral following Mass last Sunday.
I know they’re saying Matt Liddy died of a heart attack, but I’m wondering if it wasn’t a little bit of a broken heart, too.
Liddy
Liddy — the longest tenured person in the Wright State athletics department, the most decorated coach in WSU history, a popular member of the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame and guy who “bled green and gold every day of his life” said his longtime friend Tony Ortiz — died suddenly of an apparent heart attack Monday. He had just turned 50.
His wake will be held at Kindred Funeral Home — 400 Union Road, Englewood — Friday evening, Jan. 29, from 4-8 p.m. His funeral Mass will be Saturday at noon at Precious Blood Catholic Church at 4961 Salem Ave.
Less than six months ago, Liddy — who had advanced from WSU’s highly-celebrated swim coach to an associate athletics director some four years ago — lost his job at the school.
Facing some tough, unenviable decisions, new athletics director Bob Grant — another lifelong Raider with whom Liddy had vied for the job when longtime AD Mike Cusack retired — decided, along with several other cuts, that Liddy’s job was expendable and would help his department meet the massive budget cuts the school is facing.
The decision stunned many, especially Liddy, who I talked to that day just a couple of hours after he’d gotten the news.
“This school is all I’ve known for most of my life,” he had said quietly. “I’m just numb.”
As a guy who knew him pretty well, I can tell you Liddy was a gem of a man.
He and his wife, Lisa have three children, Jeremy, Kayleigh and Tyler.
Recently, Liddy had been trying to land an athletic directors job at some area high schools. But everyone who knew him knew his heart was still at Wright State.
“We’ve been friends for 25 years,” said Ortiz the longtime WSU athletics trainer who recently retired. “We went to lunch every day. … We’d bounced things off each other, not just about athletics but our families. He’d ask about my family all the time.
“The only thing he wouldn’t talk about was the stress lately, but I knew it was there. … He loved Wright State.”
Liddy had been at Wright State — except for a three-year hiatus to coach age-group swimming after his graduation from the school — for 30 years.
During his 16-year coaching career — in which he was named the conference coach of the year 11 times — the Raiders won seven league championships on the men’s side and nine on the women’s side. He had a combined 228 dual meet wins, developed 170 individual conference champions and 65 conference relay championship teams.
While an assistant under WSU Hall of Fame coach Jeff Cavana, Liddy helped guide the Raiders to five Top Ten finishes in NCAA Division II in a three-year span.
In his four years as an assistant AD, he had overseen several sports, dealt with human resources and currently directs the operation of the school’s facilities and manages the athletic competitions.
This Saturday, Wright State is scheduled to meet Xavier in a swim meet that also was going to include an Alumni Reunion.
“A lot of folks were coming back for that,” Ortiz said somberly. “Now they’ll be coming back for something else. … It’s just so sad what has happened here.”
Miami University’s Cradle of Coaches’ reputation is being reinforced in super fashion right now.
The New Orleans Saints — who will be playing in the franchise’s first Super Bowl ever when they face the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV in Miami, Feb. 7 — are being guided by five coaches with strong Miami ties, including head coach Sean Payton, who has become something of a patron saint in the city ravaged by Hurricane Katrina less than 4 1/2 years ago
Sean Payton
The quarterbacks coach and co offensive coordinator of the RedHawks in the mid-1990s, he has secured his spot among Cradle of Coaches legends that include Earl Blaik, Paul Brown, Woody Hayes, Bill Arnsparger, Weeb Ewbank, Sid Gillman, Ara Parseghian, Bo Schembechler, John Pont, Bill Mallory and a dozen or so more coaches of note.
But when he left his Dallas Cowboys assistant coaching job to take over the lowly New Orleans franchise just a few months after the deadly storm, people thought Payton was nuts.
The city was in ruins. More than 1,800 people had died and the battered Superdome — the Saints home field — was missing much of its roof.
Payton has said he came because he thought he could make a difference.
And — both on the football field and in the city — that has happened beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
The Saints had losing records in 27 of their previous 39 years as a franchise, before Payton got there, but he turned things around instantly.
He convinced quarterback Drew Brees to pick New Orleans over several other NFL clubs after San Diego got rid of him. And he drafted Reggie Bush.
In 2006 — his first season — Payton guided New Orleans to its first ever NFC title game and ended up being named the NFL Coach of the Year. Now — after the Saints topped Minnesota 31-28 in overtime Sunday — he’s got them in their first-ever NFL title game.
Just as importantly, he and Brees and Bush have become pillars of community involvement and giving.
“After Katrina (they) came aboard here like God gave them to us and the whole city has wrapped their arms around them,” Darrel Guy a director at the Boys and Girls Club of New Orleans told USA Today recently. “They’ve given this city hope.
Payton’s Play It Forward Foundation — which he runs with wife Beth — raises money and awareness for disadvantaged families . He helps fund a food bank. And he invites children who lost everything in Katrina to his team’s Friday practices, a move that helps set a tone for the rest of the organization.
He’s assisted by several other Saints coaches from Miami’s Cradle. They include:
— Aaron Kromer — The offensive line and running game coach — whose digital video library of nearly every play run in the NFL each season is praised around the league and credited for much of the Saints success — was an offensive tackle for Miami in the late 1980s and twice was named team captain. He then coached at his alma matter — tight ends, H backs, offensive line — from 1990 to 1998.
By the way, the guy he credits for much of his successful is Jon Gruden — the former University of Dayton quarterback — who made Kromer an integral part of his staff when he was the head coach of the Oakland Raiders and Tampa Bay.
— Bret Ingalls — The Saints running backs coach mentored tackles and tight ends at Miami in 2005.
— Dan Dalrymple — The Saints strength and conditioning coach was a two-time, first team All MAC offensive lineman for Miami, was the team captain and has been enshrined in the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame. After graduation, he spent 17 seasons at Miami where he built the conditioning program for all of the school’s athletes. In 2003 he also was named one of Miami’s assistant athletic directors.
— Mike Mallory — An assistant special teams coach with the Saints, he is the son of Bill Mallory/
By the way, the Dayton Flyers have a connection to the Saints:
— Joe Lombardi — The grandson of the legendary Vince Lombardi is the Saints quarterbacks coach. He started his coaching career at UD, where he was he defensive line coach for Mike Kelly from 1996 to 1998.
Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.
Winter weather photos
Council votes no on KI tax
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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.
Latest comment
To 21: X plays in front of the UD crowd EVERY year so your point makes no sense. That being said,