What Just Happened? Vol. 86
I began Season 3 of this column in August, vowing to strike a more optimistic tone. Season 2 of “What Just Happened?” had descended into a dark hole of ruminations on the inevitability of death, which was probably a little heavy for a weekly column about University of Missouri athletics.
As it turned out, I was just a year ahead of my time. Now, all the sports columnists are writing about death. With “What Just Happened?” you get this year’s commentary last year.
But I will acknowledge in this, the last column of the season, that optimism was the wrong approach. I cringe as I look back at what I wrote in August. Here is a sampling:
“This is Barry Odom’s fourth season as head coach, and it’s the first time he’s entered a season without skepticism about his credentials or speculation about his job security. … 10-2. … If the choice is between drinking beet juice and having my heart explode on a football field, give me the beet juice.”
You get the idea. The coach, his team and its magical elixir went down hard in the thin air of Wyoming, and their reputations never recovered. The NCAA got in its licks. Odom got the ax. The basketball teams ranged from mediocre (men) to bad (women). It was a very blah fall and winter. Then the whole thing ended suddenly, as the Coronavirus, one of several terrible things happening elsewhere for two months, became the terrible thing happening here.
Now, there’s nothing to watch, nowhere to go. Many of life’s simple pleasures — like a night out at a restaurant, movie or concert — are off-limits. It’s inconvenient unless your job is to provide services to groups of 10 or more people, in which case it’s devastating.
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But the alternative of half-measures, as now evident in the health care hellscape of Italy, will lead to a far worse outcome. So we bunker down and pass the time. If you had planned to spend March rooting against Kansas, transfer that dislike to your town’s toilet paper ghouls who are hording like they’re running a dysentery clinic. Unless you’re the Octomom or the Duggar family matriarch, you do not need to designate an entire spare room to emergency toilet paper storage.
Toilet paper is the fabric of our society. Without it, we’re wild animals with phones.
So think of your neighbor on the john before reaching for that second pack of Charmin if you’re lucky enough to be tipped off about a TP shipment to your local grocery store. That’s my suggestion, although I completely understand if you disregard it, because looking back on the previous 26 columns of this season, I have provided a mixed bag of advice. In fairness, for $10 a month, you can’t expect to receive Dalai Lama-level wisdom.
I would like do-overs on the following:
“I suggest we stop delaying games for lightning. … The loss (to Vanderbilt) was damaging to Missouri’s chances of finishing atop the SEC East, although not fatal. … A root vegetable got the Tigers into this mess, so maybe it can get them out.”
Sorry about those. But I stand by these statements:
“I wouldn’t put too much stock in the opinion of a person who prefers a meal in a genitalia-free setting and then choses to dine at Bazooka’s Showgirls. … Do not get your hopes up when the scooter pauses halfway down the aisle. Your lover is merely grabbing a 24-pack of Diet Dr. Thunder for the road. … The right time to point out the relative merits of Hitler is never. … It would be tempting to say there is nowhere to go but up after 2019, but let’s not tempt fate.”
Painful as it might be, let’s take chronological a look back at What Just Happened?
August
The Waltz of beverages.
September
As torn up as we are that the Missouri men’s basketball team was robbed of closure and spring sports barely got started, the real Mizzou sports shame of the Coronavirus shutdown is that it could cost alums J’den Cox (wrestling) and Karissa Schweizer (distance running) a chance to compete in the Olympics this summer in Japan. No decision has been made on whether the Games will be held, so there is still hope on that front.
Cox crushed the competition at the World Championships in Kazakhstan, giving up no points in four matches and beating Iran’s Alireza Karimi 4-0 in the final on Sept. 20. Cox has announced he would compete at 97 kilograms, meaning he would have to beat defending Olympic gold medalist Kyle Snyder at the April trials just to make the U.S. team, but Cox hasn’t lost since 2018.
October
In 1945, a farmer in Colorado beheaded a chicken that was supposed to be served for dinner, but he missed the chicken’s jugular vein and most of its brainstem. Mike the Headless Chicken lived for another 18 months and toured the country as a sideshow act before choking on a kernel of corn in the middle of the night in a Phoenix hotel room.
In the first quarter of Missouri’s victory over Troy on Oct. 5, linebacker Cale Garrett, who was playing at an All-American level, suffered a torn pectoral tendon. He went on to intercept two passes and return one of them for a touchdown before he was diagnosed with the season-ending injury at halftime. The Tigers won that game and beat Ole Miss the next week before meeting their kernel of corn in Nashville.
November
On the Monday before Thanksgiving in 2016, former MU athletics tutor Yolanda Kumar unburdened herself. Three years later, on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the NCAA announced it was upholding Mizzou’s severe penalties for academic fraud. That meant the football, baseball and softball teams would be banned from the postseason. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Later that week, football season ended just as I had predicted in August, with Taylor Powell completing key passes to Barrett Banister and Tauskie Dove to ensure a comeback victory over Arkansas, followed by Jim Sterk firing Odom.
December
Odom got to know the feeling of working for an unimpressed boss in November. It was Sterk’s turn in December. The Board of Curators was underwhelmed with Sterk’s list of coaching finalists — which included Arkansas State’s Blake Anderson, Louisiana Tech’s Skip Holtz and Army’s Jeff Monken — and a person close to the situation leaked that information. A humbled Sterk was sent back on the road and returned with Eli Drinkwitz, who went 12-1 in his only season at Appalachian State.
Outlasting enemies was one of Mike Alden’s specialties as athletic director. He survived his own brush with coaching search termination in 2006 while he was trying to hire basketball coach Mike Anderson after a messy firing of Quin Snyder. Alden became much more popular when football coach Gary Pinkel started winning big. Sterk’s popularity, and perhaps his longevity, will be tied to Drinkwitz’s success.
January
The Missouri men’s basketball team struggled throughout the month to score 60 points a game, but if you let the Tigers shoot unguarded from 15 feet, they couldn’t miss. Led by free throw maestro Dru Smith, they went 31 of 31 from the line at Alabama and then made their first 23 at home against Texas A&M. That run of 54 straight broke the NCAA record of 50 set by Wake Forest in 2005.
Missouri still managed to lose both games, mostly because its players couldn’t shoot from 22 feet, 1¾ inches. The dynamic was best illustrated at the end of the Texas A&M loss, when Smith accidentally made a free throw he was trying to miss and Torrence Watson missed an open 3-pointer at the buzzer after a perfectly executed play 90-foot inbounds play.
February
It was a modest year by Missouri wrestling standards, but sophomore 149-pounder Brock Mauller provided a noteworthy highlight. Facing undefeated and top-ranked Boo Lewallen of Oklahoma State in Stillwater, Mauller trailed 3-0 entering the final period. He tied the match on a late takedown and won it on another takedown in the sudden-victory overtime period.
Mauller went on to post a 28-1 record and was headed into the NCAA Championships seeded fourth. He was denied the chance to repeat as an All-American when the event was canceled by COVID-19.
If there is any justice, he will soon be allowed to profit off his name, image and likeness and will sign a lucrative deal with St. Louis-based Maull’s BBQ sauce that will allow him to shout over the airwaves: “Don’t baste your barbecue. Maull it!”
March
In 1991, the Missouri basketball team was banned from the NCAA Tournament but was allowed to compete in the Big Eight Tournament. The Tigers, featuring Doug Smith and Anthony Peeler, made the best of their abbreviated postseason by winning the conference tourney.
That was the last time Missouri finished its season with a win until this year. The Tigers beat Alabama in a regular season finale so nondescript that the most memorable moment was fan Logan Locke doing the seemingly impossible and making the Putt for Pork to win a year’s supply of bacon.
Nobody expected that game to be the last. That’s the thing about the end — it can sneak up on you.
We have reached the end of another Missouri athletic season a little sooner than expected. I will keep my distance for the next five months, assuming the end doesn’t sneak up on me sooner. So I leave you with this: Be safe, keep your neighbors’ bathroom hygiene in your thoughts and by all means do not drink any beet juice.