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Whitt's End: Mavs Luka & KP Return To 'Red-Meat Texas'

Whitt's End: Dallas Mavs Luka & KP Return To 'Red-Meat Texas, Dallas Cowboys Face A 'Cluster***k' and Our Weekly DFW Sports Notebook

Whether you’re at the end of your coffee, your day, your week or even your rope, welcome to Whitt’s End 6.19.20 …

*While some of America’s leaders are curiously claiming that COVID-19 is suddenly “dying off,” America’s Team is preparing as if the disease is here to stay. While each employee at The Star must – via facial recognition software – get their temperature taken and answer health and whereabouts questions daily, the football operation is also tweaking “business as usual” in advance of new guidelines.

Some of the more bizarre, seemingly impractical plans: A water bottle designated for each player, significantly increasing the degree of difficulty for trainers running onto the field during timeouts. Also, social distancing … on the bench. Imagine:

“Okay offense, over here! Now!!” says head coach Mike McCarthy. “Listen up … wait, what?!”

To gather his offensive troops (including backups) for a socially distanced chalk talk, McCarthy’s gonna need about 50 yards of bench. Or perhaps the Cowboys will install rows of pews on the field at AT&T Stadium. Regardless, I envision McCarthy mounting a horse and having to gallop from end to end to properly deliver his Braveheart speech.

Said a team source this week, “Without fans in stadiums, communicating with players six feet apart will be easier. But it’s still gonna be a cluster***k.”

*Jerry Jones: Still silent. Mark Cuban: Louder than ever. The Dallas Mavericks owner continues to put his money where his mouth is when it comes to racial equality, this week donating $100,000 to the National Association of Black Journalists. Bravo! A step further, Cuban says he will join Mavericks players in kneeling during the national anthem. A risky move here in red-meat, red-state Texas, but Cuban has always correctly prioritized being right over being popular.

As for Jones, we’re beginning to connect the dots to his eerie emptiness. Among Texas donations to President Donald Trump’s fundraising efforts is $1 million from Glenstone Limited Partnership, a group with the same Frisco address as the Cowboys and with state filings drawing a straight line to Jones.

When you’re trying to balance a roster of players wanting to kneel in protest with corporate power brokers who demand loyalty to “patriotic” status quo, you got yourself a conundrum.

XX

Says Spurs’ head coach Gregg Popovich about the silence of wealthy, white sports owners, “It’s just hypocritical. It’s incongruent. It doesn’t make sense. People aren’t blind. Do you go to your staff and your players and talk about injustices and democracy and how to protest? I don’t get it. I think they put themselves in a position that’s untenable.”

*Luka and KP return and ask yourself this: As Luka Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis return to DFW from Europe as you read this, won't even they - young men who are caucasian but who are citizens of the planet - respect Cuban's alignment? And play with even more devotion to their boss as a result? 

Stevallica

Stevallica

*Life comes at you fast. So does cancer. On Dec. 21, 2019, my 79-year-old dad played 18 holes of golf with his regular group at Cleburne Links Golf Course. Played well. Won a couple of bucks.

By Christmas at my house, however, he was complaining of extreme fatigue.

“Feels like my pockets are filled with wet sand,” he said.

He was abnormally cold, shivering under blankets. He was unusually sleepy, dozing during our family’s tradition of grazing and alternating between A Christmas Story and NBA hoops on TV. On Dec. 31 he texted my brother and me, “Can’t wait for a better 2020!” Four days later he imploded, went to the hospital and was immediately transported to Fort Worth Huguley’s cancer ward.

“Leukemia,” the oncologist told us on Jan. 4. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it, you’re looking at a long, hard road.”

With that, I saw my dad cry for only the third time in my life (the others being the deaths of his parents).

“I thought I was ready,” he told about eight of us as he lay in the bed in the wake of the diagnosis. “But nothing prepares you for this.”

With only two hiccups where pity momentarily wrestled control of his persistence, he began to fight. Chemo via IV. Chemo via pills. Countless blood transfusions. Painful biopsies. Constant checking of his vitals. Learning about platelets and hemoglobin and plasma. Bland food. Bad TV. Good nurses. Sleepless nights recounting his life and contemplating his death. With his immune system compromised, only a few us could visit. When we did, we wore caps, gowns, gloves, masks, the works.

We kept him positive, pinning a motivational carrot to his calendar. “Father’s Day,” I told him five months ago, though privately uncertain about the goal. “By then we’ll be playing golf again.”

After the first round of chemo in late February, he was allowed to go home. But two days later, his blood sugar mysteriously plummeted to a near diabetic-coma levels and he was rushed back to the hospital. A week later his heart suddenly fluttered out of control, and he was raced to ICU.

“Is this life-threatening?” I asked the doctor.

“Most certainly,” he said grimly. “It’s serious. Touch and go.”

He turned 80 in the hospital in March, a birthday he’ll never forget. But he survived. He persevered. He powered through another 28-day round of chemo, until the good levels – when admitted, approximately 76 percent of his cells were infected with Leukemia; by late March it was down to 8 percent – and the bad boogeyman known as COVID-19 prompted his premature release. Once home, he couldn’t walk 10 feet from car to back door of his house, crumpling in the grass for 20 minutes. He used a walker. He had daily home healthcare nurse visits. To pass the time we watched the entire series of Breaking Bad and I tutored him on a new smartphone, both of which seemed to take the same amount of unfathomable time.

Not hour by hour or necessarily day by day, but week by week he felt better, got stronger. He walked farther to each weekly check-up at the hospital, which regularly unveiled continued improvement of his levels.

“Father’s Day,” I kept telling him. In April he ditched the walker. He started helping me mow his yard. He tinkered with his car. Then drove it. In early May – without warning or fanfare – he went to his backyard and began chipping golf balls. His latest checkup revealed infected cells of only 4 percent.

“You’re in remission,” the doctor crowed. 

I was wrong about “Father’s Day.” Dad’s been back on the course – shooting his age, no less – playing multiple times a week since mid-May.

He beat my goal. He beat cancer. Happy Father’s Day.

*The Ticket dominated DFW’s sports radio ratings during April’s NFL Draft. The final scores:

Day 1: Ticket 9.8/ ESPN 3.3/ Fan 1.6

Day 2: Ticket 6.5/ Fan 3.0/ ESPN 0.8

Day 3: Ticket 3.9/ Fan 1.5/ ESPN 0.5

In radio, however, breaking down “dailies” is a dicey and oft-misrepresented proposition. The Thursday morning (5:30-10 a.m.) of the April 23 draft, for example, was basically flipped:

ESPN 3.8/ Fan 3.2/ Ticket 2.2

The bigger the picture, the more accurate. Quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year. Anything smaller can easily be manipulated into disingenuous cherry-picking.

To that end …

In May 2019, The Ticket led The Fan (Men 25-54, M-F, 6a-7p) by 7.6-3.1.

In May 2020, The Ticket led The Fan (Men 25-54, M-F, 6a-7p) by 3.7-3.4.

What for the better part of 25 years was a one-round knockout, is now a decent tussle.

(And to some of you that are right now typing “What about stream??!!”, allow Nielsen to refresh your memory as to why it’s counted, but not combined.)

*Confederate monuments taken down in Dallas parks? Good. Aunt Jemima retired? Kudos. Again, there’s never a wrong time to do the right thing.

As a white man blessed with a lifetime of privilege, I cannot begin to fathom how painful and disheartening it would be to see statues in my local park of “heroes” from an era when my family members were shackled, sold, beaten, raped and lynched. And, please, don’t fall into the lazy trap of deciding what should and shouldn’t be offensive to minorities. You know why.

*Hot.

*Not.

*I love sports. I miss sports. I’m beginning to admit it might be too soon for sports. Ezekiel Elliott has COVID-19.

So too do six University of Houston football players, forcing the school to shutter its facilities just two weeks after opening. A full 27 percent of Texas Longhorns players have the virus. Our state has seen record hospitalizations for seven consecutive days. More than shrinking, it’s spiking.

Now former Allen High School star Kyler Murray comes with a great gesture doubling as a horrible idea. Murray, last year’s NFL Rookie of the Year with the Cardinals, is paying $40,000 to fly 20 teammates to DFW next week for on-field workouts and team-building exercises including bowling and Top Golf. Betcha $1 within two weeks one of the Cardinals tests positive.

In fact, now that I think about it, I’m guessing the fact that several Cowboys and Texans tested positive around the same time means they were intermingling around the same time. This stuff is science, but not rocket science.

*Given the burgeoning “second wave” and players testing positive before even reporting to NFL facilities, seems highly doubtful that in just 48 days the Cowboys and Steelers will play a preseason football game.

Said Rams’ coach Sean McVay on a conference call this week, “We are going to social distance, but play football? I don’t get it!”

*Bad news for Zeke, and anyone else that has contracted coronavirus. Sure enough, you can get it twice.

*Some are upset that this week the Supreme Court upheld rights for L.G.B.T. workers. What those critics might not realize is that same-sex weddings have boosted the U.S. economy by $3.8 billion since gay marriages were legalized in 2015, by supporting 45,000 jobs and generating almost $250 million in tax revenues.

*Jamal Adams can't golf much ...

 But the wannabe Cowboy can play football.

*Jimmy Johnson’s legend as a talent evaluator has grown to mythical proportions. But I was reminded this week of a deal he engineered in 1990 that turned out to be one of the worst trades in Cowboys history. Stan Smagala, in exchange for five draft picks. The feisty Notre Dame safety went to the Raiders in the fifth round of the ’90 NFL Draft, but Johnson quickly acquired him for picks in the sixth, eighth, ninth, 10 and 11 rounds. None of the players from those picks materialized into anything special in Oakland but neither did Smagala, who played only 11 games for the Cowboys.

*While NFL players – including Murray – will kneel in mass protest during the national anthem before NFL games this fall, the man who “orchestrated” the movement continues to understand without participating. It was former Army Green Beret Nate Boyer who suggested Colin Kaepernick kneel – in lieu of sitting – as a sign of peaceful protest.

Said Boyer this week, “I will continue to stand with pride when the anthem is played. That doesn’t mean I’m against or don’t support the reason others kneel. We can spend the rest of our lives debating whether sitting, kneeling, standing on your head is offensive, or we can focus on fixing the why.”

Amen.

*Once upon a time, Aubrey Huff was a hard-nosed baseball player from Fort Worth that won two World Series rings. These days he’s deteriorated into one of the angriest, dumbest men on the planet, suggesting last week, “I’d rather die from coronavirus than wear a mask and live in fear.”

Though science and scientists continue to encourage people to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Huff inexplicably believes doing so would make him un-American, anti-Christian and weak.

Wonder if he also went on a macho rant and tore out the seat belts in his car?

*Last I checked there wasn’t a cover jinx for Dave Campbell’s Texas Football. Good news for SMU’s Shane Buechele.

*Skip Saturday for using “just don’t have enough time in the day” as an excuse to put off … whatever. June 20 is this year’s Summer Solstice, complete with a whopping 14 hours, 21 minutes of daylight. Enjoy.

*Cowboys’ employees are, for the first time, enjoying a paid holiday Friday in observance of Juneteenth. Small steps.

*This Weekend? Friday I’ve got a tennis tournament that – with any luck – will mandate four matches in three days in the summer sun. If I’m alive come Sunday, some backyard grilling for dear ol’ dad. As always, don’t be a stranger.