Weird story coming via the Sports Tri-Cities site. Apparently political pundit James Carville spent 6 minutes of a radio show on XM ripping Paul Wulff and the whole Calvin Schmidtke situation.
Like Carville, just weird.
Carville said, “My favorite part, though, by the way, is Cougars coach Paul Wulff made the announcement (withdrawing the scholarship) saying, “We feel this is in the best interest of both Washington State University and Calvin.
“Well, what happened after the eighth, the ninth, the 10th (citation)?” Carville added. “He ain’t even out of high school!”
Russert later quipped, “The (Cincinnati) Bengals had 11 arrests in 18 months, but that was a team!”
You can hear the whole thing here, via an RSS feed.
I wonder how the whole “One Ring to Rule Them All” deal is coming? Still searching I see.
Seriously now, when you think about it, was the Schmidtke thing ridiculous? Sure. That many arrests and/or incidents makes you wonder what they were thinking when they took him in the first place. But then again, we have to remember what little time the staff had to sign the class to begin with. We’re talking two months to sign 20+ kids, so, there were bound to be mistakes. Not suggesting that Schmidtke is a bad kid, or that our coaching staff was asleep at the wheel. Everything just sort of converged at once. Should we have pulled the offer sooner? In hindsight, yes. The coaches knew he was a bit of a bad egg and reportedly even warned him to straighten up and fly right, but as the saying goes, it is what it is. What’s kind of amazing is that for 6 minutes, our coach and program was mocked by a guy like James Carville. WEIRD.
Congrats to Junior Griffey. #600, and surrendered by our own Mark Hendrickson to boot. Cool NW connection there. I know Junior’s a broken down old horse now, inching closer to the end with every at-bat. I prefer to remember his early days myself. He gave me some of the greatest sports memories that I’ve ever witnessed, including that dash around the bases in ’95 (remember the view Hooty?). I could have put “I will always love you” by Whitney Houston here, but instead, I found an old Hit It Here commercial that brought back good memories. Enjoy:
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
