The Rake Magazine

Tag: sports

  • Building the Boys of Summer

    There’s no tarp on the ball field at Cretin and Grand, though snow sprinkles the brownish grass and the morning promises more. A white portable fence arcs in awkward sections from the right to leftfield foul lines, where orange foul poles stand uncertainly against a wicked northwest wind. For a clueless pilgrim seeking the heart of American small-college baseball, it’s all a bit underwhelming.

    I’ve crossed the river on this early April morning in search of everything that is pure and wholesome in the world of college sports, a place where students go to school to learn, and where they play ball for fun. It’s a world completely foreign to followers of March Madness and the Bowl Championship Series, recruiting wars, and academic scandals. Casual readers of the sports pages would know little of this universe, but hardcore fans may get an occasional glimpse, as some of us did last fall when the Johnnies of St. Johns University played for the Division III football championship, or in 2001 when the University of St. Thomas baseball team beat Marietta (Ohio) 8-4 to become only the second Minnesota team to claim a national college baseball championship (the Golden Gophers did it in 1965).

    But I’m not here at McCarthy Gym to rehash past glory. I’m looking for edification—enlightenment even—on the sticky subject of college athletics. I want to know what can be done to unravel the tightening knot of money, media, and malfeasance that plagues major college sports. And Tommies baseball coach Dennis Denning may be one of the only guys in town with an answer that makes any sense.

    Dennis Denning stands at the front desk in corduroys and a sweatshirt. He extends his hand—a fleshy, gnarled mitt that betrays a lifetime of foul tips and bad hops—and shows me to his office. I notice the framed and autographed photos on the wall of the cramped room, and the stocky, white-haired coach describes some of the more notable of the batch: Tommies alum Buzz Hannahan in a Philadelphia Phillies uniform (“Three for five in his first spring training game this year”); Twins farmhand Jake Mauer (“Only four errors last year at Quad Cities”); son Wes wearing the Montreal Expos colors (“He’s a St. Paul cop now and doing great”). I remark innocently on the potential of Jake’s brother Joe Mauer, the Cretin-Derham Hall phenom whom the Twins drafted out of high school, and Denning launches into a detailed explanation of Joe’s batting stance and swing—neglecting only to mention that the young Twins catcher may have picked up some tips at Denning’s long-running summer baseball camps.

    Before we can get to the exploits of his other star pupils, guys like Paul Molitor, Chris Wienke, and Steve Walsh, the phone rings, and Denning is quickly pulled into what seems to be an emergency academic counseling session. “Yeah, OK, uh-huh…Well, if you drop it, you’ll be ineligible, you know…” he says. The conversation ends with instructions on where to get help. He hangs up and describes the forlorn player on the other end of the line as a junior varsity player having trouble with chemistry. “A lot of these kids come here after getting real good grades in high school, but they’re not prepared for how hard it is here,” he explains.

    It turns out that Denning’s job at St. Thomas extends far beyond running a baseball program that has become a perennial NCAA Division III powerhouse. He’s in charge of programming at the gym, acts as an informal academic counselor, and even does a little groundskeeping on the diamond outside. “It’s like running a park and rec center,” he says.

    No administrative assistants, no PR flunkies, no sycophantic boosters. It is a small-budget operation in a conference full of small-budget operations. “Our facilities are terrible,” he says, almost apologetically. “The worst facilities in the MIAC.” And yet, Denning’s baseball team can boast a national championship, two second-place finishes, and NCAA tournament berths in seven straight seasons.

    “His team consistently improves throughout the year,” says Concordia College baseball coach Bucky Burgau. “Along with getting very good players, Dennis is a very good teacher of all phases of the game.”

  • Genius Lessons

    THE RAKE: What is the scoop you’re most proud of?

    Sid Hartman: The two biggest ones were about Ara Parseghian and Bud Grant. In 1975 I got the scoop that Parseghian was leaving as football coach of Notre Dame and that he would be replaced by Dan Devine. And in 1983 I reported first that Bud Grant was stepping down as the coach of the Vikings.

    THE RAKE: What about non-sports scoops?

    Sid: Well, there have been a lot. I helped the Star Tribune get the names of the finalists for the job of president of the U of M a couple of times. I do know a lot of people in town, and when you get to know a lot of people you hear a lot of stuff.

    THE RAKE: If you get a good scoop, but it means losing a friend, what do you do?

    Sid: I’d print the scoop, if it’s accurate, even if it meant upsetting a friend. If the friend knows it’s accurate, they might be mad for a short period. Bud Grant was probably my closest friend, and he used to get upset with me all the time. When cut-down day came at the Vikings training camp, I had friends in the NFL with the waiver list of who was going to be let go, and I’d print the names. Bud would get upset, because he hadn’t told the players yet. But my loyalties are with the Star Tribune and with WCCO Radio. I’m paid to do a job and that’s the number-one concern for me.

    When you write something that’s a criticism or a rip, if it’s accurate, there’s no problem. They’ll get mad for a week or two. But here’s the thing: If you write something that’s going to upset some athlete or coach, be sure you show up the next day and face them. The biggest mistake these writers make is that they hide for a couple of weeks and it hangs out there and gets worse. If you face the guy, he’ll be pissed off, but if you show them that you’re willing to take the heat, they’ll respect you. I go out of my way to do that, I’m there the next day. I don’t rip that much, but I’ll do it if it’s right.

    THE RAKE: Who is the greatest athlete to ever play on a Minnesota team?

    Sid: There have been so many of them. Bud Grant may have been the greatest athlete that the U of M ever had. He was a starter in all three major sports. Dave Winfield would be up there, too. They’re both great, great athletes. On the pro side, well, I think Kevin Garnett rates at the top. He and Kobe Bryant [of the Los Angeles Lakers] really stand out, in that they have been the most successful players to go right from high school to the NBA.

    THE RAKE: Will you ever retire?

    Sid: I’ll never forget when I was in third grade. I had a teacher, Mrs. Nettleton. One of the kids in our class was always looking at the clock. She said, “I hope when you boys and girls grow up, you get jobs that you like enough where you don’t have to be looking at the clock all day.” And that’s exactly what I’ve got. I love the relationships I have with people.
    My job is all an adventure. I contact every beat every day. How many people do you think want my job? I’m the luckiest guy in the world.

    THE RAKE: Could anyone today take the same path to success that you did?

    Sid: I never went to college. If I went and tried to get my job today, they’d laugh at me. I was delivering papers for the old Minneapolis Times and working in their sports department at the same time when I was 17 years old. You could never do anything like that now. My friend gave me a job delivering papers to newsstands when I was a teenager. Before that I was selling newspaper on the street corners, starting when I was 8 or 9 years old. You were supposed to be 12 years old to sell papers to people, and this guy, Nathaniel Johnson, chased me all the time to get me to stop. He caught me when I was 10, but he left me alone and let me sell the papers, because he said anyone who worked that hard should be allowed to do it. After that we became lifelong friends. At one time, I sold Sunday papers at Fifth and Hennepin, starting at 7 p.m. and working through to 3 a.m. [The Minneapolis Times was an evening newspaper—Eds.] I worked that corner because that’s where the streetcars would line up, leaving every hour at 1, 2, and 3 in the morning. It would be 15, 20 below zero, and I’d ride my bike home to 525 North Humboldt Avenue after I was through.

    THE RAKE: Do you still travel to away games?

    Sid: I don’t do much traveling anymore. I’ll go if I can go to the game in the morning, and then come back, maybe with the team, in the same day. I didn’t make a single Vikings or Gophers road trip this year. That was a first. I’m sick of all that travel. It’s a joke. You have to wait around in airports forever. Why should I do that, if I can watch the game on TV and then call the coach and the players afterwards? I’ve got all their numbers.

    THE RAKE: You’ve done radio and newspapers. How come you never got into TV reporting?

    Sid: I was never that interested. TV’s just a pain in the rear end. It’s not the reporting that’s the problem, the problem is they only get about three minutes on sports. They’ve got to do the weather for about ten. You don’t get the chance to really cover sports on TV.

  • Celebrating Sid

    There have been a lot of great journalists to come out of this town, starting with Eric Sevareid and going right on through to three guys writing for the New York Times right now: Tommy Friedman, David Carr, and Ira Berkow. But for my money, I think the best of them all is the Midwest’s number one sports personality, Sid Hartman, and I don’t care who knows it.

    Sid gets a lot of grief from geniuses who think he’s not a “journalist” in the modern sense of the word. Let me tell you something, those people don’t know what they’re talking about. He may be from a different generation that didn’t care as much about “objectivity,” whatever that means. He may blur the line between what he calls his “close personal friends” and what the New York Times may call “a source.” He may even be guilty of what some pointy-headed journalism professors would call being an “actor” rather than an “observer” of local news.

    But in the Snapper’s book, all that stuff is irrelevant because what Sid is most of all is a winner. Nobody has ever beaten him when it comes to what newspaper readers want most—and that is the scoops, the exclusives, the inside stories on the sports heroes in this town. I don’t care what the bleeding hearts who run the newspaper business nowadays say. They owe their paychecks to guys like Sid who get the eyeballs off the boob tube and into the newsprint.

    Listen, who else can come anywhere near the number of scoops he’s had? Who first reported that legendary Notre Dame football coach Ara Parseghian was leaving the school? Or that Bud Grant was retiring as the best coach the Minnesota Vikings will ever have? Nobody gets the stories like Sid does, because even though he’s in his 80s, nobody outworks him. And because he’s not afraid to count athletes, politicians, businessmen, and hundreds of “little guys” as his personal friends. You treat a friend as a friend, you don’t rip them just because you can.

    And that’s all a lot of these so-called modern journalists want to do: rip, rip, rip. They think it’s wrong to have friends. Let me tell you, that’s why these jerks don’t have any. Sportswriters who have gone up against Sid and have lost know better than anyone else that he’s the best. That’s why I’ve contacted some of them (I have all their home phone numbers) and persuaded them to share some of their favorite memories of the Man Himself. There’s nothing Sid hates more than a reporter getting his story from other reporters—but this story is about Sid!

    Early Lessons
    Sid got plenty of early lessons about the value of having friends and being loyal to them in his formative years in Depression-era Minneapolis. His childhood was a true Horatio Alger story in which he was forced to fend for himself and his family by selling newspapers on wintry street corners, desperately competing for a slice of the meager economic pie that was available to members of the Jewish immigrant clans of those days. Competition was tough for the choicest paper-hawking turf on the most lucrative corners—the winners were the ones who were the smartest and most driven.

    Young Sid got obsessed with the minutiae of sports, and it would serve him well later in life. Among the main reasons for Sid’s success were the connections he made and carefully maintained as a young man, not only with his North Side neighborhood chums but with people he met in that gray area, shunned by the city’s “respectable” pre-war WASPs, where pro athletes, bookies, reporters, organized crime figures, and politicians mixed socially. Booze and gambling is what this scene was all about. It was a great way to learn who really mattered in a small town like Minneapolis.

    Has All the Phone Numbers
    As anyone who has ever worked with Sid knows, the secret to his success is his little black book of contacts. No one has ever compiled a greater sports reference tool than Sid’s collection of names and phone numbers, which he has painstakingly amassed over the years. Anyone who wants to go up against Sid must take this into account.

    Just how powerful is this weapon? I asked Bill Peterson. Peterson is a St. Paul Park native who started at the Star Tribune as an “agate clerk” in the mid-1980s and later went on to his own sports-writing career at the Cincinnati Post. An agate clerk is a guy who collects all the high school sports scores that get printed in tiny, or agate, type on the sports pages—meaning Peterson was a nobody. He says this enabled him to avoid the newsroom conflicts that so-called “real sports writers” had with Sid. Those bozos thought Sid was too close to his sources.

    “Back then, there were some serious power struggles between Sid and guys like Jay Weiner, but Sid kind of liked me,” Peterson says. “He pulled me into his office one day and asked me to do him a favor. He says, ‘Go through my files and throw out anything more than a few years old.’ So I had the full run of his files. I was just amazed. Sid had complete in-season and off-season lists of the addresses and phone numbers for everybody on every team in every league, NHL, NBA, whatever. He had all this stuff. I came to learn not long after that, in Cincy, just how valuable that info is. Nobody else has all that stuff. He got updated lists every year.”

    How’d he do that? “Say the Kansas City Chiefs were coming to town to play the Vikings. Sid would take the key Chiefs players and coaches out to lunch before the game, and then send each of them a personalized letter afterwards. In the letters he’d say everything they did was first class. He was extremely good at cultivating and maintaining sources this way. The old slogan about Sid is that he always gets his man, he always did because he had those numbers.”

    Listen, the nit-wits out there who say Sid doesn’t really have all these personal friends don’t know anything. He’s got more friends than all the other sports writers in this town put together. Big shots return his calls all the time not only because they know he gets the story right, but because Sid knows the names of their kids. If some of these know-it-all writers we’ve got now would take a minute to get to know the athletes as people instead of always ripping them, then maybe when the star receiver gets arrested on some trumped-up charge they’ll get the scoop.