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After a few years of uneventful trips to the dog park, I was surprised when my pooch suddenly took the usual playful roughhousing in a new, more erotic direction. I scurried over, yelling commands like “down” and “off” that I had never bothered to teach him, but he remained quite focused on the task at hand, his eyes fixed on the horizon while his hips did their dirty business.
When I pulled Frisco from the fray, I gave him a stern talking-to, mostly for the benefit of the other pet owners nearby, lest they think I condoned this behavior. But I had barely ended my lecture when he bounded off, found another furry backside to his liking and was back at it.
So I cut the visit short. On the way home, I tried to figure out where he had picked up this habit. He had long harbored a blinding hatred of U.S. Postal Service employees and a distrust of any other human who breached the property’s perimeter without first offering him cheese as tribute, but this crude display of dominance toward other dogs was new.
I chalked it up as a bad day. Maybe he just got a little overstimulated.
A week later, we went back. Same story. I waited another month and tried again. Uh-oh. Once is a coincidence, twice is an emerging pattern, thrice is a trend.
It’s time to face the facts. My dog is a humper. I love my good boy all the same, but he is indeed a humper. I hope this is just a phase, like the period in the late 80s when I briefly succumbed to the trend of pegged jeans — tightly rolling the cuffs of my acid-washed Levi’s before liberally applying the Drakkar Noir, stuffing the laughable fake ID in my pocket and heading to By George's — but change requires a conscious choice.
Admitting the problem is the first step to addressing the problem. This brings me to Missouri basketball.
There are many adjectives that could describe the second-half collapse at Georgia on Tuesday, but “surprising” isn’t one of them. The Tigers were outscored by 23 points in the final 15 minutes by a below-average team. That would have been shocking two months ago, but now it’s on-brand.
Just as it did in the loss to Mississippi State, Missouri not only coughed up a double-digit lead in the second half, it wound up losing by double digits. The Tigers also were outscored by 16 points in the second half in a loss at Ole Miss. They nearly blew a 20-point lead in the final four minutes against Alabama before hanging on for a narrow victory.
The first time it happened, I wondered if the Tigers thought they had the game in hand and relaxed. But it’s the opposite. When the opponent starts to put a dent in the lead, Missouri panics.
At that point, the offensive freedom Cuonzo Martin gives his players is often misdirected into rushed shots by the guys who shouldn’t be shooting in important situations and skittish turnovers by point guards who are long past the fake ID stage and rapidly approaching the age when they can rent a car without paying a higher rate.
It’s not strictly an offensive problem, but the missed three-pointers and live-ball turnovers create easy opportunities for their opponents. That allows big leads to evaporate in a few minutes. This trend predates Jeremiah Tilmon’s two-game leave of absence, and his return is unlikely to magically fix it. If Martin doesn’t figure it out, Missouri’s season could mirror some of these individual games, with an impressive start undone by a late collapse.
So what can fix it?
I know what I would say if I were a dog behavior expert, because they always give the same advice, which is that you should reward your dog on the spot for good behavior rather than punishing it for bad behavior. Am I supposed to walk around the dog park with a duffel bag of Snausages to give him every moment he isn’t actively mounting a goldendoodle? This doesn’t seem like a realistic strategy. And handing players orange slices after every ball reversal or uneventful bounce pass would pose nearly insurmountable logistical problems.
However, distracting man or beast from the bad habit they are about to engage in might work. Martin tends to let the players try to sort things out themselves, waiting until the lead is almost gone before calling a timeout. That hasn’t worked. Timeouts aren’t that precious in basketball — just save one for the final seconds in case you need to get organized for a final play — so call one earlier in the meltdown.
Use that timeout to order up structured set plays that minimize the mental burden on the players and reduce the likelihood of a bad three-point shooter trying to save the day with 25 seconds left on the shot clock.
If that doesn’t work, call another timeout and offer orange slices.
Goodbye, Terez
Back when I was covering Mizzou sports more seriously, there was always a little anticipation and trepidation among the press corps when a new beat reporter arrived. Best-case scenario, the new person would be a lot of fun and lazy as hell.
So when Terez Paylor showed up as the new Missouri Tigers reporter for The Kansas City Star, we were curious about the new guy. It turned out, Terez was fun to be around but he worked relentlessly, so I guess he batted .500 in our eyes.
This was during the Frank Haith/conference realignment era at Mizzou, which was not a golden age of faith in the stated intentions of people speaking into microphones. Terez was different. He didn’t assume everyone was lying to him all the time — he was probably wrong about that, God bless him — and he was puzzled that the rest of us did.
When I talked to him or saw the angles he took in interviews and stories — which weren’t filled with references to Missouri’s tortured past — it did occur to me that he might be on to something. Of course, I never followed up on that thought, nor made any changes to my approach whatsoever, but still, I noticed. Players, coaches and readers responded to his passion for sports that wasn’t coated in a layer of sarcasm.
Terez was only here for a few years before moving on to cover the Kansas City Chiefs for The Star and then the whole NFL for Yahoo! Sports. It was a remarkable ascent.
He died unexpectedly Tuesday at age 37. It was a stunning loss.
Terez was big on helping young journalists find their way. I think the lesson of his career is that if you emphasize the thing that sets you apart from the crowd — in his case, an unvarnished enthusiasm for football, stripped of all guardrails — people will notice over time. People appreciate what’s genuine and what they can’t find just anywhere. Enthusiasm for his subject matter oozed from his stories, podcasts, even his mock drafts.
The lesson of his life is you can do all of the above and still be the person everyone remembers fondly and misses dearly.
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