Jeff Duncan (Part Two)

An Interview with Jeff Duncan (Part Two)

Jeff Duncan: Interviewed on March 1, 2007

Position: enterprise sports reporter, New Orleans Times-Picayune

Born: 1964, Louisville

Education: University of Louisville, 1986, communications

Career: Louisville Courier-Journal (part-time), St. Petersburg Times (part-time), Monroe News-Star 1989-96, Florida Today 96-98, Nashville alternative weekly 98-99, Times-Picayune 99 –

Personal: single

Favorite restaurant (home): Jacquimo’s “the quintessential New Orleans restaurant – get the alligator sausage cheesecake – it sounds horrible and if you’re not from here you wouldn’t know to order it – 10,000 calories but worth every one”; Cochon “warehouse district – hottest new restaurant in town – specializes in Louisiana pork”

Favorite restaurant (road): Jake’s Del Mar Restaurant, Del Mar, Ca., “beachfront dining and Del Mar is one of the most beautiful towns in America”

Favorite hotel: Grand Marriott, Point Clear, Ala. “where we stay covering the Senior Bowl – old historic hotel on a bluff – you get the points and you’re in a nice hotel”

Jeff Duncan, “Desire Without End,” excerpted from the Times-Picayune, Dec. 11, 2005, published in “Best American Sports Writing 2006:

NICEVILLE, FLA. — It’s a typical sight on an October night in Louisiana: a group of coaches leading a high school football team into battle.

But nothing is even remotely typical about this night, or these coaches, or their players, or the school they represent.

They are a New Orleans school, but they are driving to the game from their new campus at Camp Timpoochee in Niceville, Fla., five hours away.

To prepare for the game, they have had just one week of class and one full practice in pads, on a potholed, unlined field that is better suited for sack races than football.

En route to the game, the team caravan has to stop at a sporting- goods store to buy helmets for some of the players, and maroon T- shirts for the coaches.

Before heading to Porter Field at St. Martin’s Episcopal School in Metairie to face the Crescent City Christian School Pioneers in their first game of the season, the team makes one more stop: Desire Street Academy, a fledgling New Orleans school for 7th- through 12th- grade boys.

It is their school, an offshoot of the Desire Street Ministry, in the heart of the 9th Ward and founded by Mo Leverett in 1990 to serve the impoverished, crime-ridden Desire-Florida neighborhood. Now it is in ruins.

On this night, on the way to their first game, the members of the Desire Street Academy Lions are seeing their decimated building, and their devastated neighborhood, for the first time since Aug. 29.

After the tour, they board the bus quietly and head to their game across town.

“They had to see it,” said assistant coach Mickey Joseph, a former standout athlete at Archbishop Shaw High School. “I think it helped them start to appreciate this place a little more, knowing they’re not going back anytime soon.

“They know they’re not going back now.”

—-

When Leverett planned the construction of Desire Street Ministry’s new school building five years ago, he did so with its rough 9th Ward neighborhood in mind.

He knew only too well that windows were an invitation for trouble in the crime-ridden Desire-Florida area; a few years back, a bullet crashed through the glass door of his back patio and rattled around the floor just feet from his wife and daughters.

Flying bullets and thrown rocks wouldn’t threaten the students inside Desire Street Academy. Leverett fortified the walls in the new building with stone and concrete and included only a few windows in the 36,000-square-foot fortress.

Figuratively and structurally, Desire Street Academy was built to withstand any hell that impoverished urban life could deliver.

Any hell, that is, except high water.

On the morning of Aug. 29, Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge tore a 50-foot-wide breach in the floodwall that stretches from Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River and protects the 9th Ward. The force of the current lifted train boxcars and 18-wheeler trailers at the France Street rail yard and deposited them a football field away.

The Desire Street Academy’s plush $3 million complex, two blocks northwest of the breach on the west side of the Industrial Canal, was directly in the path of the onrushing floodwaters.

Water burst through the gym windows, poured over the basketball court and eventually rose past the first seven rows of bleachers.

When Leverett returned to the building to survey the damage a month after the storm, he found a dead crab in the parking lot and half a telephone pole resting on the stage in the gym.

The contents of his office had been tossed on the floor like toys in a kid’s playroom. In the next room, a wooden bookcase had punched through a wall in the office of Danny Wuerffel, the former Heisman Trophy winner and New Orleans Saints quarterback who now serves as the school’s development director.

In half a day, Katrina destroyed what Leverett and his staff worked 15 years to build.

Q. What was the background to “Desire Without End?

A. Being a Saints reporter I was familiar with Danny Wuerffel and his association with Desire even before the storm. Danny felt called to this school and left the NFL – he was a backup quarterback for the Redskins bouncing around and he realized he was going to be a journeyman – and he made the decisions that this was more important to him. He came across Mo Leverett, the founder of the academy, when he played for the Saints – that’s how he was familiar with the ministry.

I was at a Zydeco barbecue after the storm eating with a bunch of journalists. Danny was on TV talking about the school. It was a big story to me. I knew the school was located right in the middle of the flood zone and I knew what they were up against in trying to administer and counsel the students and young of the Ninth Ward – the area Marshall Faulk came out of. How would they get this school back together? It was going to be the first year of organized sport when Katrina hit – it seemed like a no-brainer.

When I reported it I found out they had relocated to Camp Timpoochee on the Florida coast – these tough inner city kids were going to class along the bucolic shoreline on the Gulf and then playing football and driving five hours on a bus to play football games. How Danny and Mo and the rest of the administration used football to get these kids to come to school and to save some kids was one of the most compelling and rewarding stories I’ve written. Lots of factors were in that – Katrina and sports and poverty – you didn’t have to be a sports fan to get it, in fact, it ran in the features section. It drew a widespread response. Hopefully it helped the school get donations.

Q. How did you tell it to maximum effect?

A. You had two different story lines I felt needed to be addressed. One was the students, many of whom were in the floodwaters themselves, and their families who were scattered in the Diaspora, in shelters all over the country. The other part of the story was the school administrators – Mo and Danny and the faculty who had this mission and were seeing their dreams wash away, literally, in the flood. It was a complicated and difficult story to write.

I had to weave a narrative and go back and forth from Katrina and the Ninth Ward to Timpoochee and football. It took me a long time to write it because it was so complicated. Mark Lorando, our features editor, did a tremendous job of helping me maintain focus. It’s always a challenge to write a story of that scale – I spent a lot of time on it. I went to Timpoochee a handful of times and I went to games they played in this area – the reporting spanned months. It was an evolving story, with kids leaving and dropping out of school, and getting homesick to see their parents. It was such a unique situation it needed time to give it context and perspective.

Q. Why did you go back to sports at the Times-Pic?

A. To be honest, it was a grind. If you live this reality – this post-Katrina dynamic – its tentacles reach into every part of your daily life – you work it and live it. While I didn’t have that much damage – I had colleagues who lost everything. Living here is a difficult place to live and is going to be for the next five or ten years. We’ve seen it in the newsroom – it takes its toll. There’s been a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder and a lot of counseling needed in the newsroom.

I got to the point where I didn’t want to keep writing about everything wrong in the city. I found a niche in the sports department as the Katrina sports reporter – it certainly affected sports in the city. I had a unique perspective in that I covered the storm and sports.

Q. Did you write on the Saints this season?

A. Everybody was on the bandwagon. It was a huge story for the city and a huge national story. More colleagues came to town this year than the previous five or six years combined. The Saints were a tremendous story. The relationship between the team and the city was unique before the storm and now it’s more unique. New Orleans is a provincial city – because of its history and background and melting pot it’s different. The relationship to the team is similar to Green Bay but that wasn’t recognized on a national basis – the national reporters found out this year.

The story line initially was how the team lifted the city at a time when the city was looking for something to lift its spirits. Then the dynamic inverted and the city lifted the team. The players would admit that – they did down the stretch – they said they were along for the ride down the stretch – that it was bigger than just blocking and tackling and the team was swept up in it. You could feel the energy in the crowd – it was like a college experience – not the typical NFL experience, which is so managed and corporate these days. People kept coming back because it was different – I’m not sure they can capture it again.

I was brought right into the mix, obviously due to my experience knowing the team and players. I found the story to be less about the team and more about the city and the people and fans, and how they escaped the drudgery of post-Katrina life for four hours every Sunday. It was a unique story you’re not going to get in any other market.

One thing I liked about writing Saints stories this year was keeping in contact with the NFL reporting community. I can’t tell you how many offers of monetary help and assistance came from reporters all over the country. They helped out my colleague, Brian Allee-Walsh, who lost his house in Lakeview. He received assistance from the NFL reporting community – clothes and whatever they could send. People went above and beyond to help out – that said a lot about the character of people in our profession.

Q. Isn’t there a book in this?

A. I’m pitching one now – on the Saints season and everything we talked about. The publishers are a little leery – more of the Katrina stuff because there’s so much out already. I’m trying to convince them it’s not just Katrina – nobody has written a book on what it’s like living here now, enduring this in their daily life and putting this disaster back together, and how this team came along and lifted them up.

Q. Do you miss covering the NFL?

A. I got out at the right time. Access is becoming more limited now that you’ve got nfl.com and NFL TV.

I have all the respect in the world for NFL beat writers – they’re competing with guys like (ESPN’s) Len Pasquarelli and John Clayton and all those pit bulls on the major websites Beat reporters have to cover the team day-to-day without having the luxury of parachuting into town and writing a story. National reporters don’t have the challenge of writing a tough story and going out to practice the next day – that’s one thing I do miss.

The website guys are seasoned reporters with contacts all over the league who work 24 hours a day, and who become de facto reporters for local TV and radio, which can’t get out to Saints practice every day but can read the Internet. Lenny breaks a story on the Saints and it gets into local media – they become your competition as well. It’s a 24-hour work environment – you work in fear.

There are some guys in small markets who own their beats – John McClain (Houston Chronicle), Jim Thomas (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), Bob McGinn and Tom Silverstein (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Paul Kuharsky and Jim Wyatt (The Tennessean). Your job is to own your beat but you’re up against it with everybody coming in. That’s how we felt about the Saints this year – all the top reporters were coming in but we felt we could cover it better. We have the advantage of knowing the whole story – hopefully our readers appreciate it.

Q. Why is it hard to compete with the national website reporters?

A. They operate with different standards – they don’t have to attribute sourced material and they can protect sources that way. Local reporters are handcuffed by attribution standards most newspapers hold. Now people in the NFL have gotten comfortable with that kind of reporting and they don’t want to be identified in their quotes – if they are they get chewed out or worse. There’s so much money at stake that it’s become the normal mode – people aren’t going to go out on a limb and risk losing their job. ESPN can get away with it – we can’t. But our editors are coming around – they understand that if we don’t adapt we’re going to get beat unless we learn to work within the confines of modern pro sports.

Q. Are you a lifer at the Times-Pic?

A. I love it here. I feel like a New Orleanian now. This is by far the best newspaper I’ve ever worked at – there is tremendous talent in the newsroom. I was inspired by our work during the storm. We won two Pulitzers – I was part of that coverage and I feel a bond with a lot of people in the newsroom. I feel compelled to continue to cover the Katrina story. It’s a fascinating story – a great American city was devastated and broken and we’re putting it back together again. I’m not sure another story I’m going to come across is going to be that important and that rich – I want to continue covering it. But if another opportunity comes along I’m open to bettering myself, although I’m not looking for anything. Covering the NFL was a great experience – a great challenge. I had never covered anything of that magnitude – it prepared me to be the journalist I am today. After six years I was ready for another challenge. This role I have now is perfect – I can do in-depth reporting and take my time and sink my teeth in and challenge myself as a writer. That was difficult to do on the NFL beat, which is high intensity and high pressure. We need to expand as journalists or we stagnate.

Q. What should we know about Jacquimo’s?

A. I must have taken dozens of reporters there. If you’re not from here you wouldn’t know to order the alligator sausage cheesecake – it sounds horrible and it’s at least 10,000 calories but worth every one. Jack Leonardi, the owner, knows how to treat customers – they’ll bring you a free dish just to let you sample it. It’s the epicenter of the Jazz Festival – they’ll seat people on the sidewalk and it stretches down to the Maple Leaf. They seat people in the back of the pickup truck out front – I’ve seen two or three marriage proposals take place out there.

During Eagles-Saints playoff week I took Les Carpenter (Washington Post), Jere Longman (NY Times), Sam Farmer (LA Times), Ohm Youngmisuk (NY Daily News), Benjamin Hochman (Times-Picayune), and Ashley Fox (Philadelphia Inquirer). Sam goes with me every time he comes to town. A lot of the NFL reporters who come in on Saturday end up at Jacquimos and the Maple Leaf – it doesn’t get any better than that.

I always urge out-of-towners to get out of the French Quarter. Go uptown to some of the smaller clubs and restaurants.

(SMG thanks Jeff Duncan for his cooperation)

LIVING

Desire without end ; Its school building flooded, its neighborhood destroyed and its student body scattered, a 9th Ward ministry regroups a world away from home and finds hope in a high school football season.

Jeff Duncan Staff writer

4135 words

11 December 2005

Times-Picayune

English

NICEVILLE, FLA. — It’s a typical sight on an October night in Louisiana: a group of coaches leading a high school football team into battle.

But nothing is even remotely typical about this night, or these coaches, or their players, or the school they represent.

They are a New Orleans school, but they are driving to the game from their new campus at Camp Timpoochee in Niceville, Fla., five hours away.

To prepare for the game, they have had just one week of class and one full practice in pads, on a potholed, unlined field that is better suited for sack races than football.

En route to the game, the team caravan has to stop at a sporting- goods store to buy helmets for some of the players, and maroon T- shirts for the coaches.

On this night, on the way to their first game, the members of the Desire Street Academy Lions are seeing their decimated building, and their devastated neighborhood, for the first time since Aug. 29.

After the tour, they board the bus quietly and head to their game across town.

“They know they’re not going back now.”

. . . . . . .

When Leverett planned the construction of Desire Street Ministry’s new school building five years ago, he did so with its rough 9th Ward neighborhood in mind.

Figuratively and structurally, Desire Street Academy was built to withstand any hell that impoverished urban life could deliver.

Any hell, that is, except high water.

The Desire Street Academy‘s plush $3 million complex, two blocks northwest of the breach on the west side of the Industrial Canal, was directly in the path of the onrushing floodwaters.

Water burst through the gym windows, poured over the basketball court and eventually rose past the first seven rows of bleachers.

When Leverett returned to the building to survey the damage a month after the storm, he found a dead crab in the parking lot and half a telephone pole resting on the stage in the gym.

In half a day, Katrina destroyed what Leverett and his staff worked 15 years to build.

. . . . . . .

Katrina scattered Desire’s faculty and students across the country.

Leverett, most of the staff and several students evacuated to a Presbyterian church camp in Jackson, Miss. Wuerffel, wife Jessica and 22-month-old son Jonah, whose Lakeview home was destroyed by the 17th Street Canal breach, worked their way to his parents’ house in Destin, Fla. School Principal Al Jones stayed with family in Baton Rouge.

Most of the students, however, did not have the means to evacuate, and they fought for their lives in the swamped city. Some wound up stranded on rooftops. Some huddled with the masses in the Louisiana Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, or waited for buses on Interstate 10.

Gathered with staff at the camp in Jackson, Leverett anguished each time his cell phone rang.

“I was getting calls from these kids in the Superdome and Convention Center saying, ‘Coach, get me out of here,’ ” Leverett said. “Everybody was fending for themselves and doing as they saw fit. (One student) was scared. He was literally losing his mind and begged me to do something.”

Leverett called Wuerffel and board members to plan a rescue mission. They told him the city was off-limits. The National Guard would not let them in.

“Some of the kids were highly dependent on our ministry,” Leverett said. “Our school had become more than just a place to go to before these kids went home to be with their families. We had become their families.”

Leverett and Wuerffel made a commitment to keep the ministry afloat.

The next morning, Wuerffel woke before sunrise, went to the neighborhood church in Destin, sat at a piano and quietly played an old hymn:

In every high and stormy gale,

My anchor holds within the veil.

His oath, his covenant, his blood

Supports me in the whelming flood.

On Christ the solid rock I stand;

All other ground is sinking sand.

“I must have played that song for an hour straight,” Wuerffel said, “singing and crying.”

. . . . . . .

One of the kids Leverett and Wuerffel worried about was Deangelo Peterson.

Peterson stayed behind with family to ride out the storm at their apartment on Bullard Avenue in eastern New Orleans.

A wiry 6-foot-3, Peterson is built like an NFL wide receiver, with sinewy arms, long legs and massive hands that belie his 16 years.

Peterson’s preternatural frame was vital on the Tuesday after Katrina, when high water surrounded his second-floor unit in the Wind Run apartment complex.

“The water was rising,” Peterson said. “And it kept rising.”

Using every inch of his frame, Peterson propped his nieces, ages 7 months and 3 years, above his head and waded through the chest- high water to the safety of a nearby hotel. He returned to rescue his mother, his sister and an aunt.

“I was a little bit scared, but I knew I could walk through the water,” Peterson said.

The group survived at the hotel for three days, with minimal food and water, before military troops rescued them by boat and took them to the Convention Center.

Three days later, officials took Peterson and his group to Louis Armstrong International Airport, where they slept on the ground for a night before being evacuated to a shelter in San Antonio.

Desire Street officials found Peterson by sending a local pastor to the shelter with a bullhorn to call out his name.

. . . . . . .

Heath Davillier, a bright-eyed eighth-grader with an infectious smile, waded through chest-high water from his home on Bienville Street and headed toward the Superdome. He couldn’t make it.

“The water was nasty, and it was up to my neck,” the pint-sized 14-year-old said. “I had to carry my bag over my head to keep it dry.”

Deeper water blocked their path to the Superdome, so the group of eight found their way to an Interstate 10 ramp and tried to make their way across the Crescent City Connection. Halfway across, an RTA bus picked them up and dropped them at Worley Junior High School in Westwego. They stayed there for three days, sleeping on the gym floor and subsisting on a diet of granola bars, fruit cups and water.

Three days later, a relative picked them up and took them to Baton Rouge, where Heath re-connected with Desire officials.

“I couldn’t wait to get back here,” said Davillier, a point guard on the Desire basketball team. “This is where all my friends are, and I knew I would get a good education here. They try to help you as much as they can here. This is like my family.”

. . . . . . .

Day by day, other students began to surface. The school opened an administrative office in Atlanta. Officials established a “people locator” database on its Web site and sent staffers into shelters with Desire Street Ministries T-shirts to locate evacuees. In other spots, they asked church volunteers to post fliers with the ministry’s phone number and Internet address. Wuerffel used his media connections to make appearances on TV and radio.

“We needed to resuscitate our school,” Leverett said.

One by one, the lost were found. Some were as far away as Kansas City, Mo. Most were in Texas. On a three-day reconnaissance run through east and south Texas, a group of coaches rescued 47 boys, picking them up in passenger vans borrowed from local churches.

Students in more isolated locations were flown in on private jets whose cost was donated by supporters. Some used frequent-flier miles of board members to fly commercial.

In the end, the staff located almost 75 percent of the school’s 192 students. The whereabouts of about 30 are still unknown to the school.

“The way those kids were calling, we knew we had to go get them,” said head football coach Byron Addison, who, along with his coaching staff, helped organize the bus run. “It was all on them. They wanted this.”

. . . . . . .

On Oct. 3, the academy re-opened its doors as a boarding school on a donated patch of peaceful countryside in the Florida Panhandle.

Camp Timpoochee sits at the end of a narrow dirt road on the outskirts of Niceville, hidden among a thicket of oak and pine trees along a bluff overlooking Choctawhatchee Bay. Once a playground of the Euchee tribe of American Indians, the area known as Stake Point is a favorite of artifact collectors, who still find remnants of pottery along its sloping, sandy beach.

First and foremost, Timpoochee is a 4-H camp. Deer roam the woodlands, dolphins play in the bay’s warm, shallow waters and box turtles creep along the forest paths.

“This is not normal for any of us,” said Jones, a native New Orleanian. “But we’re still Desire.”

To function as a school, though, Timpoochee needed work. During a few frantic weeks in late September and early October, a transformation took place.

Desire Street staffers worked with contractors to enclose an outdoor pavilion and create a set of classrooms. They converted log cabins into dorms. They cleaned and reorganized a cafeteria, a recreation hall and a handful of wood-paneled administrative offices.

“I like it so far,” Peterson said. “It’s fun. You get to hang out and sleep with your friends. It’s like college.”

And like college, hijinks are common. Eighth-grader Eric Green said he and his friends are fond of late-night canoe excursions in the bay. On a recent Sunday night, Jones happened upon a midnight pillow battle being waged between cabins. He discovered the sortie when he noticed “a big white blob” moving across the darkened courtyard.

“We’re still learning as we go,” Jones said. “This is new to all of us.”

Still, as idyllic as Timpoochee is, it’s not home. Other than the presence of an outdoor basketball court, it has little in common with the students’ former homes. For all the problems the Desire- Florida neighborhood has, for most of the students, it’s all they’ve ever known. And many are desperate to go back.

“I want to go home, too,” Jones said. “We all want to be in New Orleans. We’re just going to have to tough it out. If we can get through the transition stage, we have the perfect opportunity to train the total kid here.”

. . . . . . .

Desire demands a lot from its students. The school day runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The college preparatory curriculum remains unchanged at Timpoochee. Students are tutored in English, math, science, arts, music, physical education and Bible study. There are also elective courses in construction and culinary arts. Study halls are conducted nightly. Cornrows and braids are prohibited. Students must stay to the right at all times when walking down hallways. Cursing is strictly forbidden. Lights-out is at 10:30 p.m.

The discipline and structure are vital at Desire, where more than two-thirds of the students are raised by single parents or extended family members.

Deep-pocketed donors provide partial sponsorships for the majority of students because few can afford the $6,000 annual tuition. Sponsorships are determined by need (income and family size) and merit (academics, citizenship, athletics and parental participation). Each student’s family is required to pay or work for $500 toward the tuition amount.

Before the storm, Desire’s enrollment was a healthy 192, a nearly 300 percent increase from its original 70 in 2002. The goal was to increase to 240 in 2006.

Katrina derailed those plans. It decimated enrollment and plunged the academy into debt.

The ministry’s board of directors has tapped its national pool of supporters. Assistance has poured in from across the nation.

The University of Florida, where Wuerffel starred in the mid- 1990s, donated $50,000 from pay-per-view proceeds after the Gators’ game against Louisiana Tech.

Larry Arrington, dean for extension at Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, offered the use of Camp Timpoochee.

An Atlanta area church recently donated $66,000 to buy a new bus.

On one October night, a local family dropped off a television set that wasn’t being used at home. A couple of hours later, a truckload of desks arrived.

Three rooms at the facility are overflowing with school supplies, backpacks, clothing and linens.

And yet, it’s not enough.

The demands of operating a boarding school have stretched the ministry’s resources and 50-person staff thin. Staff members’ work schedules had to be re-structured to comply with U.S. wage and labor laws. Counselors were hired to assist the staff and help them cope with the stress. More “dorm dads” were added to supervise the boys overnight and give the beleaguered staff a break.

The school’s expenses have increased four-fold, Leverett said. The demands have forced Leverett and Wuerffel to spend the majority of their time on the road in fund-raising efforts.

“We’ve had to raise a truckload of more money,” Leverett said. “We’ve got a lot of challenges to survive as an organization.”

. . . . . . .

Despite the hurdles, school officials felt it was imperative to revive the District 10-1A football program.

Football is an integral part of the school’s mission, as indicated by its well-pedigreed staff. Leverett was a kicker at Tennessee-Chattanooga and an assistant coach at Carver High School. Wuerffel was the 1996 Heisman Trophy winner while at the University of Florida and a fourth-round draft pick of the Saints in 1997; he played six seasons for the Saints, Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers and Washington Redskins. Principal Jones was a standout defensive end at St. Augustine High School and Tulane University, and coached at Walker High School. Joseph, the offensive coordinator, was a star quarterback at Shaw High School and University of Nebraska standout. Head coach Addison prepped at Carver and played collegiately at Grambling State University.

“After all that they’ve been through, we owed it to them to play,” Joseph said. “These kids have worked so hard to get to this point. This is what they wanted.”

The Lions arranged to play an abbreviated schedule of games back in Louisiana starting Oct. 10, only days after their new equipment arrived.

They made their official LHSAA debut against the Crescent City Pioneers in uniforms that were rescued from high shelves in Addison’s flooded-out home two days earlier. Their nifty helmet decals with the block “D.S.A.” and Lions logo had not arrived yet, so the players played in plain black helmets.

At the opening kickoff, one assistant was still peeling the “XL” sticker off his just-purchased “coach’s shirt.” Water coolers and marker boards would not arrive on the sideline until midway through the first quarter.

On the Lions’ first play from scrimmage, they lost a fumble and one of their best players when running back Byron Weber injured his knee.

On the next play, Crescent City rambled 25 yards for a touchdown. Fourteen seconds into their season, the Lions trailed 7-0.

From there, it only grew worse. Two more quick touchdowns gave the Pioneers a shocking 20-0 first-quarter lead. The margin grew to 35-6 at halftime.

Bankrupt of confidence, the Lions’ play and attitudes devolved in the second half. They played two snaps with 10 players. They jumped offsides and were penalized for delay of game repeatedly. They fumbled twice, threw three interceptions and nearly snapped the ball over the punter’s head and between his legs on consecutive attempts. Players argued with each other and talked back to coaches. One player threw his helmet into the fence behind the team’s bench. Another tried to pull off his shoulder pads and quit on the spot. Another broke down in tears.

It was a startling contrast to the promising start of the Lions’ season. Four days before Katrina, the Lions had defeated Abramson High School in their jamboree. Back in the spring, they had tied St. Bernard (12-12) and Douglass (6-6).

By the time it was over, Crescent City had drubbed the Lions 50- 14. In the hectic rush to schedule the game, school officials forgot to arrange for post-game shower facilities. So the players and coaches boarded the bus for the five-hour ride to Niceville dirty and defeated.

They arrived back at Timpoochee at 5:30 a.m.

. . . . . . .

The season got worse before it got better. Off the field, some students left the program and came back; others left for good. Enrollment, which started at about 80, had decreased to less than 70 by the time the first academic quarter ended in late November, prompting the administration to begin accepting students from its waiting list, which numbered into the hundreds before the storm. The school opened its doors to about a dozen new students for the second quarter.

On the field, Desire lost to St. Charles Catholic 47-12 and then to Fisher 45-6. In their first three games, they were outscored 142- 32 and produced more penalties and turnovers than points.

“There was considerable digression in the four weeks after the storm,” Leverett said. “(The players) have had to deal with so much. The bottom line is emotionally there was a very thin layer of capacity to deal with disappointment. They spun out of control when they had to deal with adversity. It was a more difficult experience than I realized.”

Essentially, the Lions had become sacrificial lambs. Each game required a 10-hour round-trip bus ride. The home crowds grossly outnumbered their smattering of staff and students in the visiting stands.

But the team played on, and in the manner of the best Hollywood movies, its perseverance was rewarded. In its final game of the season, Desire Street defeated Ridgewood 36-8.

“It was one of the best sporting events that I’ve been a part of,” said Wuerffel, who guided Florida to college football’s Division National Championship in 1996 with a 52-20 win against arch- rival Florida State in the Sugar Bowl at the Superdome. “It meant so much more than just winning a football game to these kids.”

. . . . . . .

Leverett hopes to make Desire’s mission more manageable next year. He’s in the process of purchasing a church facility on 24 acres in Baton Rouge, where he plans to run the school next season while the 9th Ward is being rebuilt. Officials hope the Louisiana location will help them attract many of the displaced students who couldn’t make it to Florida.

“Our school is a very important school in our city and in our state,” Leverett said. “I think it’s highly important that we preserve Desire Street Academy. It’s addressing what was at the heart of the problem in New Orleans in many ways. It’s the only one of its kind. It’s desperately needed.”

Environmental contractors have cleaned the old facility in the 9th Ward. The building is structurally sound and salvageable, Leverett said. The Desire-Florida neighborhood, however, faces a more uncertain future. Leverett said he wants to become a catalyst in the area’s redevelopment.

Time is not on Desire’s side. The ministry’s lease at Camp Timpoochee expires May 20.

“I’m not entirely sure how it’s all going to shake out,” Leverett said. “But I remain committed to the goals of our ministry. Hopefully, we can be a launching point for the rest of the neighborhood.

“I miss New Orleans like crazy. I’m in a nice place on the Emerald Coast. I can ride my bike around the neighborhood and not get shot at, but it still don’t feel like home. The 9th Ward of New Orleans, that’s where my heart is. I can’t shake that.”

No one knows for sure when the 9th Ward will be ready for Desire’s return. Like so much else in New Orleans, its future is clouded by uncertainty.

Only one thing is certain: The experience of being away has changed the people at the school.

“It’s been difficult,” Leverett said, “but in the end we’ll look back on it and say it was worth it. We kept something going that is extremely important during one of the worst tragedies the city has ever seen. In the absence of families and resources, we made a difference.”

. . . . . . .

For more information about the Desire Street Ministry or to donate funds and supplies, call (866) 633-0070 or visit www.desirestreet.org
.

Staff writer Jeff Duncan can be reached at jduncan@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3405.

Caption: TOP OF PAGE: Robert Kelly sweeps the porches of his cabin at Desire Academy’s Niceville, Fla., campus. Students are responsible for keeping their cabins clean. [1840901] Biology teacher Daniel Ballard shows off examples of marine life at his new classroom near the beach. ‘The kids love this stuff,’ Ballard said. ‘We talk about guy stuff in here.’ [1840895] The Desire Academy Lions pause to pray after their first game of the season against the Crescent City Christian School Pioneers, delayed five weeks by Hurricane Katrina. [1840888] The Desire Academy Lions practice as the sun sinks into a faint glow over the campground that serves as their temporary school. [1840909] The frustration is apparent on DSA player Jonathan Rochon’s face when the team struggles in its first- game. [1840883] Members of the St. Charles Catholic Comets offer words of encouragement after trouncing Desire in the team’s second game. [1841862] A Desire Academy student walks to practice from his cabin at Camp Timpoochee 4-H Center in Niceville, Fla., a setting very different from the school’s 9th Ward campus. [1840912] In the cabins at night, Rosha Washington checks his cell phone for messages from home as Darwin Pechon, center, and Jarred Micken look on. [1840919] Jeremy Armstrong gets some one-on-one tutoring from his geography teacher, April Vandergriff, while his classmates joke around behind them. [1840910] Six feet of flood water engulfed the Desire Street Ministries and Academy building in the 9th Ward. [1840866] Mo Leverett looks over family photos and mementos inside his flooded home at Desire Street Ministries. [1840850] Desire Street Academy junior Jonah Leavell heads out from the equipment house for afternoon practice at the school’s makeshift Florida campus. ‘We kept something going that is extremel

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Gordon Edes

An Interview with Gordon Edes

“I was surrounded by a ton of talented people at the Globe; it saddens me to see the talent, and institutional memory, that has been lost, a story repeated throughout our industry. It’s absurd to think they don’t have plenty of good people left, but equally absurd to think that they can absorb the hits they’ve taken without feeling the impact.”

“I’ve never accepted the premise that people don’t read game stories—I think they’ll still read a gamer written with style and information they can’t glean elsewhere, like the Series gamer I wrote last October about what led to Papelbon picking off Matt Holliday. That gave me great satisfaction, to have something no one else had among 500 or so other reporters at the Series.”

Gordon Edes: Interviewed on August 13, 2008

Position: National baseball writer, Yahoo! Sports

Born: 1954, Fitchburg, Ma.

Education: North Park College, Chicago, history, political science “hired as a copy editor at the Chicago Tribune three classes short of a degree”

Career: Chicago Tribune, copy clerk 1972-76, copy editor 1976-80; Los Angeles Times, 1980-89; Atlanta Journal Constitution, 1989; The National Sports Daily (RIP), 1990-91; Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, 1991-96; Boston Globe, 1996-2008; Yahoo!Sports 2008 –

Personal: Married (Bonnie) with three daughters, “one Iowa Hawkeye fan for a son-in-law and one 6-year-old grandson destined to be a Cubs fan”

Favorite restaurant (home): Walden Grill, Concord, Ma.

Favorite restaurant (away): Trattoria Contadina, San Francisco “neighborhood joint on Russian Hill, with 4-star food. Thank you, Blake Rhodes, Giants PR”

Favorite hotel: Marriott Harbor Beach, Ft. Lauderdale “the place that gave me a grand piano during the World Series”

Gordon Edes, excerpted from Yahoo!, Aug. 12, 2008:

ATLANTA – He was laid to rest on an off day, about right for a man who broadcast in the neighborhood of 5,000 ballgames. And while he couldn’t call his own funeral, Skip Caray almost certainly would have approved, except for all the people wearing neckties, which he loathed.

Still, the service didn’t run too long, it wasn’t interrupted by a rain delay, nobody did the wave, and there were plenty of funny stories from his old partners, Pete Van Wieren and Ernie Johnson Sr.

Best of all, his beloved Atlanta Braves
were there to see him at the end – Chipper Jones
was a pallbearer, John Smoltz
and John Schuerholz spoke, and front pews were filled with manager Bobby Cox, his coaches and Braves players past and present, Phil Niekro, Otis Nixon and Rick Camp paying their respects with Tom Glavine
and Jeff Francoeur
and Brian McCann
.

And no one was allowed to make Caray something in death he wasn’t in life…

…Over countless hot summer nights, Caray, who never lost the radio man’s knack of connecting with one listener at a time, as if he was sharing the same back porch, delivered smiles by the bushel. A foul ball would land in the stands, Caray would pretend to identify the hometown of the fan who caught it.

“He’d say, ‘A fan from Visalia just caught that one,’ ” said Ernie Johnson Sr., whose son, Ernie Jr., has become a fixture on NBA telecasts. “People would actually call up and ask, ‘How did Skip know?’ “

Q. As you leave the Titanic, er, Globe for Yahoo, what are your thoughts on the people who are left behind? How did it come to this?

A. My leaving is very bittersweet. Covering baseball for the Globe, and making regular appearances on NESN as part of my Globe duties, gave me about as high a profile as a baseball beat writer can have. The intensity of the beat trumped anything I had experienced in the past; former Globe sports editor Don Skwar gave me a taste of what was to come when he called my parents’ home at 8:45 on Thanksgiving morning my first year at the Globe because the Herald had a Mo Vaughn contract update in the paper and he wanted me to call Sox GM Dan Duquette—at his parents’ home—to do a folo!

This was my 12^th season covering the Sox. I expected to retire at the Globe, working at my hometown paper. How could you ask for a better audience, knowing that one of my heroes, Doris Kearns Goodwin, as well as my high school English teacher, Pete Lincoln, were reading me regularly? But the Globe vision of my future did not match up with my own. I expected to return to my former job as the paper’s On Baseball columnist once they settled on a new beat reporter—Chris Snow had left in ’06 to become a hockey front-office man, and when they asked, I had agreed to go back on the beat until they found a replacement. I agreed to remain on the beat in 2007 and 2008 while Amalie Benjamin gained more experience.

But prior to the ’08 season, sports editor Joe Sullivan said that his plan was to have two on-baseball columnists, Nick Cafardo and myself. To me, that was like returning to half a job. I said if he wanted to keep Nick on Sunday Notes, that was fine by me, but I felt I had earned the On-ball designation, we had only one on-ball columnist for other sports and that’s what made it distinctive. He disagreed, and Steve Henson, the baseball editor at Yahoo!, offered me the chance at a baseball writer’s dream job, a national job in which you are restricted only by your imagination.

The Globe offered buyouts; I took mine, and subsequently was denied it. I appealed that decision, Yahoo! waited for that process to play out, but when it became clear it would drag on, I gave my notice and left on Aug. 1. I remain extremely disappointed that the New York Times Co. dispensed over $30 million in buyouts last year but elected to deny me; I remain hopeful that decision will be overturned, but in the meantime I made it a point not to let that impact my work.

I was surrounded by a ton of talented people at the Globe; it saddens me to see the talent, and institutional memory, that has been lost, a story repeated throughout our industry. It’s absurd to think they don’t have plenty of good people left, but equally absurd to think that they can absorb the hits they’ve taken without feeling the impact.

I told Joe Sullivan, and I meant it, that the nearly 12 years I spent at the Globe were the best of my professional life. I trust the friendships I made while there will endure.

Q. What can you tell us about your Yahoo job? How often will you write? Does it involve podcasting or any electronic work? Can you keep a straight face when you introduce yourself as Gordon Edes of Yahoo?

A. I’ll answer the last question first. That does take some getting used to, but I’m learning already that the recognition factor is high. I haven’t had to spend much time explaining who we are. I expect to write at least four times a week, if not more, and my sense of what the job entails, and what I want it to entail, is constantly evolving. I expect there will be a fair amount of videostreaming, mailbags, chats and the like, and I expect podcasting will be a component, too. Breaking news, analysis, opinion, features—the job gives me the freedom to do all of the above. And if Steve wants me to write the gamers during the World Series, I’ll be happy to oblige. And then there is the sweetest of words: No running.

Q. What attracts you to a story? Name a few of your favorite stories.

A. I love the telling of a story in detail, giving people the sense that they are seeing things through a unique window when they are reading me. The stories behind the story, like the pieces I did on the Sox failed attempt to trade for Alex Rodriguez, the signing of Daisuke Matsuzaka, or a reprise of the Kirk Gibson home run in 1988.

I’ve never accepted the premise that people don’t read game stories—I think they’ll still read a gamer written with style and information they can’t glean elsewhere, like the Series gamer I wrote last October about what led to Papelbon picking off Matt Holliday. That gave me great satisfaction, to have something no one else had among 500 or so other reporters at the Series.

I like breaking news, though in our 24-7 cycle scoops have a shelf life of about five minutes. I am drawn to the human element, like weaving Tim Wakefield’s joy at flying with the Blue Angels into the story of a Blue Angel pilot who was a huge Sox fan and died in an air show a couple of years after standing in the Sox dugout at the Series. I surprise myself, sometimes, that after 28 years in the business, I still find as much pleasure as I do in going to the ballpark. I was told long ago that the purpose of my job was to inform and delight: I still strive to do so.

Q. How would you grade yourself on your coverage of the Steroid Era? In retrospect, would you have done it differently?

A. I failed badly, out of naivete and ignorance more than anything else. I didn’t raise the issue enough, and certainly didn’t press it with my bosses. One of the biggest stories I missed was giving light treatment to the fact that the owners and players were willing to shelve drug testing as an issue in exchange for labor peace in the 2002 CBA.

How would I have done things differently? I don’t think beat reporters should have been acting as private detectives on a nightly basis—their primary responsibility was to tell the reader who won and lost and why—but in my On Ball role I certainly could have pounded away at the issue.

Q. You don’t call attention to yourself in your writing – why?

A. The power is in the story itself, not who wrote it. You tell a story well enough, the attention will come.

Q. How have e-mails changed your reporting process?

A. A good deal, I would say. It’s the primary way I communicate with Red Sox owner John Henry for example. In some ways it gives you better access; there are people more inclined to answer an e-mail than return a phone call. But I also think some give and take is sacrificed in the process.

Q. You tend to downplay the more advanced baseball stat measures – why?

A. On a nightly basis, I would agree with you that I downplay some of those numbers, though I think you would find that I have championed the work of Bill James and the people at Baseball Prospectus, and incorporated some numbers (OPS, WHIP) that I paid scant attention to in the past. But I also have never lost sight of the fact that I write for a broad audience that might get lost in the VORPs and WARPs and Win Shares, and the people who are into that stuff can find plenty of places to get their fill.

Q. How do you keep up with baseball? What and who do you read and watch?

A. I receive a daily file of newspaper stories written on every team. I also think Baseball-Reference.com is the single greatest resource to come along in my years in the business. I read Buster (Olney) and Peter (Gammons) at ESPN and Baseball Musings, Steve Henson has introduced me to ProSportsDaily, and I am now immersing myself in all that we have on our site.

Q. Beaver Cleaver – any relation?

A. What would ever make you ask?

Gordon Edes, excerpted from the Boston Globe, Oct. 26, 2007:

…The Sox won their sixth straight Series game and fifth straight of this postseason with one never-before-seen wrinkle. Papelbon, who had not picked off a runner since he broke into the big leagues in 2006, nabbed Matt Holliday straying off first base to close out the eighth inning. Holliday had nearly taken out both Papelbon and second baseman Dustin Pedroia with a line single up the middle, his fourth hit of the night. The ball appeared to glance off Papelbon’s leg and caused Pedroia, who gloved the ball with a sprawling spot, to writhe in pain after he landed heavily on the left shoulder he’d dislocated already once this postseason.

At the plate was Todd Helton, the signature player in Rockies history. But he never saw a pitch in the eighth, as Papelbon whirled and picked off Holliday.

“Probably will go down as one of the biggest outs of my career,” Papelbon said.

It was not happenstance. Holliday was intending to steal – he confirmed so after the game – and the Sox had a strong suspicion he was going.

They knew that the Rockies were scouting them in the Division Series against the Angels, when Howie Kendrick stole second and third unchallenged against Papelbon in the eighth inning of a tie game.

“If you were advancing us, you would have said the same thing, that Pap is 1.8 [seconds] to the plate, and he doesn’t pick,” Mills said. “But it was a different situation in the game against the Angels. We didn’t care if he stole, because we had confidence in Paps getting the hitter and we didn’t want to take anything away from him to try to get the runner on that situation.

“We know they’re advancing us, they’re watching it. That night I was talking to Pap in the shower about that exact thing, and about what was to come. [Bullpen coach] Gary Tuck was talking to him about it, [pitching coach] John Farrell talked to him about it, about different things we were going to do.”

When manager Terry Francona went out with trainer Paul Lessard to check on Pedroia, Mills noticed that Glenallen Hill, the Rockies’ first base coach, never stopped talking to Holliday. Mills also had a color-coded chart he keeps on every player, that showed that Holliday likes to steal on the first pitch with two outs. “It was right there in my pocket,” Mills said.

Indeed, it was right there on the chart, multiple steal attempts Holliday had made on the first pitch with two outs.

“You put all those things together, and it comes up, ‘Hey, we’re going to pick once to see where he’s at, and then we’re going to slide-step.’

“And, we were watching. I got a big lump in my throat because he kept inching, inching, inching off, and Pap did a great job of holding the ball, letting him get off there. And then I’m sitting there, with a lump in my throat, hoping he doesn’t throw [it] away.”

Papelbon made the play, Mills said. “He made the great pick.”

But while it was nowhere as dramatic as Kirk Gibson knowing that Dennis Eckersley was going to throw a backdoor slider on a full count before Gibson hit one of the greatest home runs in Series history, it was a stunning example of how inside knowledge and paying extraordinary attention to detail can turn a Series.

“There are a lot of times we don’t want him to throw over,” Mills said. “But in this situation with Helton and [Garrett] Atkins coming up, we couldn’t afford it, and it just happened to work out.”

(SMG thanks Gordon Edes for his cooperation)

Chris Broussard

An Interview with Chris Broussard

“Usually when I send a blog in it takes 10 to 15 minutes before it’s up on the site. This one took probably eight hours.”

“One reason I wrote this column about the homosexuality issue is because everything I read, the overwhelming majority, basically came from a liberal standpoint.”

“In terms of being objective if a player was openly gay, that wouldn’t affect my coverage of him. A lot of players live lifestyles I won’t agree with but I won’t throw my personal beliefs into my coverage. People who know me know I’m a Christian and if a subject comes up I’m not ashamed to talk about what I believe.”

Chris Broussard: Interviewed on May 24, 2007

Position: senior writer, ESPN the Magazine, espn.com

Born: 1968, Baton Rouge

Education: Oberlin College, 1990, English

Career: Cleveland Plain Dealer 1990-94, Akron Beacon-Journal 94-98, NY Times 98-2004

Personal: married, twin daughters

Favorite restaurant (home): Amy Ruth’s, Harlem, “soul food – the honey fried chicken is what I usually get”

Favorite restaurant (road): Heaven on Seven, Chicago, “Creole/Cajun place”

Favorite hotel: Marriott “everywhere, for the points”

Chris Broussard’s blog, espn.com, Feb. 13, 2007:

I think the NBA is ready for an openly gay player.

By “ready” I don’t mean that everyone on the guy’s team or in his organization will like the fact that he’s a homosexual, or that the guy might not get called names by opponents on the court, or even that his own teammates might not chuckle behind his back.

But by “ready” I mean that players will tolerate a homosexual teammate or opponent. Like Charles Barkley said, some have been doing that already.

Just look at the comments made by players, coaches and Commissioner David Stern when asked about former player John Amaechi’s recent disclosure that he is gay.

The overwhelming majority of comments have been politically correct, even the ones that were considered homophobic by Philadelphia’s Shavlik Randolph and Steven Hunter.

Go talk to guys at an open gym in your neighborhood, and lots of the comments won’t be so polite.

But America has become so politically correct — not to mention that, in my opinion, much of the media and Hollywood are promoting the idea that homosexuality is a normal lifestyle — that many players are afraid to voice their true feelings publicly.

Thus, whenever a current player comes out as gay, you will hear overwhelming support for the guy. And while I think Mark Cuban went overboard in saying the guy would be “an American hero,”
I do believe he would be embraced by a sizeable segment of the population.

He would definitely get marketing/endorsement opportunities, and some folks in the media would champion him and the gay cause.

Well, anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I’m not concerned with being politically correct. So here’s where I stand:

I’m a born-again, Bible-believing Christian (no, I’m not a member of the Religious Right). And I’m against homosexuality (I believe it’s a sin) and same-sex marriage.

But before you label me “homophobic,” know that I’m against any type of sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman. That includes heterosexual fornication (premarital sex).

Some cats in the NBA run around, sleeping with different women in every city — I don’t agree with their lifestyles.

Some players run around, cheating on their wives — I don’t agree with their lifestyles.

It’s all wrong to me and against the biblical teachings I believe in.

I’m saying all that to say that if I can play basketball with a homosexual, just about anyone can.

I’ve played in several rec leagues with LZ Granderson
, who is an openly gay writer at ESPN The Magazine.

I consider LZ a friend. I’ve gone out to lunch with him, talked music, sports, politics and lots of other things with him. I greet him with a handshake and a hug, just like I greet lots of other guys.

By the way, LZ can ball. In a league in New York City that features several former college players, we both made the All-Star team. He was kind of like our Shawn Marion minus the dunks (though he claims he can still slam!) and I was like our Gilbert Arenas (high game of 39, thank you).

Anyway, when we play in our rec league games, I give him high fives and hugs. Same with one of his friends who is on the team and also gay. When we’re on the court trying to get a win — or in the office talking about a story, for that matter — his sexuality is not an issue.

Granted, I don’t shower with LZ after games like NBA teammates do, and I’ll admit that if I had to, it might be a little uncomfortable at first.

But if a gay player just goes about his business in the shower, showing that he has no sexual interest in his teammates and that he’s not “checking them out,” I think the awkwardness would wear off fairly quickly.

LZ and I know where each other stand and we respect each other’s right to believe as he does.

I know he’s gay, and he knows I believe that’s a sin. I know he thinks I get my moral standards from an outdated, mistranslated book, and he knows I believe he needs to change his lifestyle. Still, we can laugh together, and play ball together.

That’s real diversity. Disagreeing but not being disagreeable.

For the record, I covered Amaechi as a beat writer for the Akron Beacon Journal when he was a rookie playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

I like John. He’s intelligent, nice and you can have a good conversation with him. I haven’t seen him in several years but if I saw him today, I’d smile and give him a hug. I think dinner with him would be a blast, with lots of great discussion/debate about race, politics, religion, Africa and yes, sexuality.

Since Amaechi came out, I’ve read lots of columns about being “progressive.” The implication — or outright assertion — is that anyone who believes homosexuality is wrong is not progressive or enlightened.

That’s where this thing becomes problematic, because those who hold to that view are saying I must change my entire belief system/religion because of your belief system.

Where’s the diversity in that?

Those folks don’t want diversity. They want everyone to agree with their “enlightened” opinion.

Look, I’ll accept your right to have your own belief system and to live as you please, but I’m not changing mine. Diversity is not just accepting alternatives to what has long been perceived as normal, but it’s accepting the significant number of people who hold to long-standing “traditional” beliefs as well.

Millions of Christians who follow the Bible — and Muslims who follow the Koran and Jews who follow the Torah, as well as many nonreligious Americans — believe homosexuality is wrong.

That doesn’t mean they’re unenlightened. That just means their moral code doesn’t fluctuate based on society’s ever-changing standards. As long as we’re not being violent toward one another, as long as we can be civil, everything should be fine. We don’t have to agree.

And please don’t compare being homosexual to being black. I consider that insulting to blacks for a number of reasons. The fact that some blacks make the comparison themselves only shows how crushed our racial esteem has become because of America’s oppression (witness our insistence on calling ourselves the n-word).

You can’t hide your skin color, choose your skin color, change your skin color or switch your skin color back and forth. Some argue that you can’t do that with your sexuality either, but there are many scientists on both sides of the genetic debate, and I believe a truly objective person would admit the biological evidence for homosexuality is far from definitive.

Nor has the Bible, the Koran or the Torah ever associated a particular skin color with sin (it was only racist whites who twisted the Scriptures 400 years ago who did that, never the Bible itself).

I’m not trying to get into a religious or scientific discussion here, I’m just saying that some people will accept homosexuality as fine and others will not.

Some will write me off as a bigot for this article, but folks, this is real talk. Unfortunately, we can’t have real talk in America nowadays.

Whites can’t voice their real opinions — no matter how legitimate — about race for fear of being called racist, and everyone’s afraid of offending anyone. It seems the only person who can be openly criticized, or disagreed with, is the President.

How crazy is that?

Until we can honestly hear each other out — and be civil while doing so — we won’t get anywhere. One thing I hope this article does is encourage people to have frank discussions about sensitive issues such as this one.

Here’s the bottom line: If I can accept working side-by-side with a homosexual, then he/she can accept working side-by-side with someone who believes homosexuality is wrong.

If an NBA player can accept playing with a homosexual, then the homosexual must accept playing with guys who don’t agree with his lifestyle.

Believe me, when the ball goes up, his sexual preference isn’t going to matter.

Q. What was the reaction to your blog?

A. Reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Usually when I send a blog in it takes 10 to 15 minutes before it’s up on the site. This one took probably eight hours. They sent it to several editors, the top editors at espn.com as well as The Magazine, where I mainly work. It was controversial and they wanted different people to see it.

When they finally put it up I got about 1100 e-mails. I would say about 90 percent were positive. About 65 percent were from Christians who totally agreed with what I said. Another 25 percent were from people who disagreed with my view of homosexuality but liked the overall tenor of the article, including some homosexuals. About 10 percent were totally against it.

Within ESPN itself, from the things people said to me, it was received positively as well. A lot said they enjoyed it and liked it – I got that from several Christians who work there, as well as people of other religions and people who aren’t religious. It was read on “Mike and Mike in the Morning” – they really liked it. I thought the response within ESPN itself would tend toward the negative though I never doubted they would publish it. Then I thought public opinion would be 50-50 but it was overwhelmingly positive.

Q. Did you respond to the e-mails?

A. I put the results of the e-mails on my next blog. I responded to a few – I wouldn’t have had time to respond to all. I got a call from Athletes in Action, a Christian-based sports ministry – I was asked to appear at one of their events at All-Star weekend. They had me seated on the dais but I didn’t speak. There were over 1000 people at this breakfast.

Q. Would you describe yourself as a conservative?

A. No. Most African-Americans, socially, are conservative, largely because of their church background. In terms of my beliefs as a Christian I am against abortion and same-sex marriage. Socially, I would definitely say I’m conservative, but in terms of government and policies I would say I’m probably more in line with Democrats. I would love to have universal health care and I’m for affirmative action. I’m an independent – not registered with either party. No, I’m not a conservative in the technical sense of what a conservative is in terms of going back to the way things were. No African-American wants to go back to the way things were.

Q. But if you go back to the 1950s homosexuals weren’t claiming their rights – wouldn’t that appeal to you?

A. The big problem then and up through the civil rights movement was racism and the notion of white supremacy – those were the main problems. If I could remove the racism and the way people of color and Native Americans were treated then I do see a lot of great things about the overall culture that was America. It was more conducive to family values, which are important for any society and civilization to have. But the huge blind spot was racism. Obviously I liked the standards in other ways back then. In my opinion we’re gone way too far in terms of what we allow on TV and radio. You’ve got little kids watching these TV shows and being affected negatively, in my opinion.

Q. Does sports media tend to be liberal?

A. Media in general tends to be liberal. I was at the New York Times for six years and they were certainly liberal. Sports media – I would lean toward yes – but in sports it’s harder to tell. You’re not commenting on social issues. One reason I wrote this column about the homosexuality issue is because everything I read, the overwhelming majority, basically came from a liberal standpoint.

One black player said he was okay having a gay teammate as long he “don’t bring it on me”. He was ripped in all the columns I read. Anybody who made comments that were not pro-homosexual were taken to task as not being progressive. And I wrote before Tim Hardaway – that’s a whole different take.

Q. Do you find political correctness in sports media?

A. In this instance I did. I obviously butted my head against it. For the most part everything written before I wrote was politically correct. In some racial issues you don’t. Barry Bonds – you saw the poll numbers – the majority of African Americans support him. ESPN has been fair to Bonds and maybe has gone the other way. He had his own show on TV and the way they’ve covered his pursuit of the record they’ve taken it at face value – this guy has hit a lot of home runs. But columnists and talk show hosts come out negatively against Bonds. If you’re talking in a racial sense that political correctness means always giving in to people of color – I don’t think so.

That’s a hard question. Bonds wasn’t good to media so some of it is his personality. On the other hand he is going to break the record of an African American so you wouldn’t say it’s racism. But you might in comparing him to the treatment Mark McGwire got. We knew he was taking something, even though what he was taking wasn’t illegal back then. Steroids weren’t illegal when Barry Bonds took them – so he’s bearing the brunt of what McGwire got away with. Some people in the black community wonder about Roger Clemens. There’s no evidence that he took anything but there’s rumblings and certainly you have the circumstantial evidence on the field. To be getting better into his 40s is remarkable. Yet he’s still treated like a star and the Yankees shower tons of money on him.

Q. Where do you draw the line between acting on your beliefs and not acting on them?

A. When I’m talking basketball on TV or on a blog or in an article my beliefs govern how I interact with people. A lot of sportswriters talk about sex with athletes and who they’re sleeping with – the way guys do. I don’t do that. I’m not talking to an athlete about him cheating on his wife, about him out there fornicating. I don’t condemn them, but when we’re not talking about sports and I’m not interviewing them we may talk about kids, music, and numerous things. I don’t talk about those things with other people so I’m not going there with athletes.

In terms of being objective if a player was openly gay, that wouldn’t affect my coverage of him. A lot of players live lifestyles I won’t agree with but I won’t throw my personal beliefs into my coverage. People who know me know I’m a Christian and if a subject comes up I’m not ashamed to talk about what I believe. But I don’t bring it into the daily coverage when it has no place there.

In the blog I threw my personal beliefs in because it’s a blog and you’re allowed to do that in a blog. Columnists are allowed to do it in a newspaper and if I had had a column in the New York Times I would have tried to do that. Everyone who wrote a column about that issue brought their personal beliefs in. Most were ultra-liberal. Maybe their personal beliefs aren’t informed by religion but they’re informed by something that brought them to the side of being pro-homosexual. I brought my beliefs in and they happened to be on the anti-homosexual end. But what I did wasn’t different than anybody else.

My belief system is impacted by my faith. That’s what being a Christian is, and a Muslim and a Jew. I can’t have religion just on Sunday. It’s going to affect how I am at work. But when it comes to writing about sports – when it doesn’t deal with social or personal beliefs – I keep it objective.

Some people say you’re trampling on the separation of church and state. I don’t think so. I think I’m in line with the general principles of the founders. My view is that the intentions of the founders was not to divorce moral principles that come from religion – Christian religion in the case of this country – from the public discourse and public sphere. The Bible was used to teach kids how to read in school. The Ten Commandments were up in courtrooms. We still put a hand on a Bible to take an oath. The founders weren’t anti-religion – they just didn’t want one denomination persecuting other denominations or faiths. That had been the case in Europe.

Part of the idea of writing the column was that I felt a lot of people in the country were against homosexuality and I don’t think their viewpoint was being presented. You would think America was overwhelmingly pro-homosexual. That’s not the case. I felt it was 50-50 or even slightly tilted toward my view, and I thought in fairness this other view should be presented.

Q. What did your parents do?

A. My father was a personnel manager for Travelers Insurance Co. He stopped that after 20 years and began working with the federal court system. My mother worked in the school board. Some years she was at home and other years she was a teacher or administrator in the public school system.

My father got transferred a lot in his job. I was born in Baton Rouge and I lived in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Syracuse, Des Moines, and Cleveland. I graduated high school in Cleveland. Oberlin College is near Cleveland. I stayed near Cleveland my first eight years out of college. Oberlin is a very liberal school. Homosexuality was out in the open – I had a good experience there.

I do interact with LZ Granderson and other people who are homosexual. LZ and I are friends – we play basketball together. There are other homosexuals at the Magazine – I don’t know how they feel about me personally now. I would say to them – just like I put aside my personal beliefs to work with them and be friendly to them – I would expect the same thing from them.

Another point in the article I wanted to get across. This thing I called “diversity” is not just a liberal thing. It’s not just if your viewpoint agrees with the so-called liberal standard of diversity. Diversity is when you don’t agree with the liberal standard. In my opinion diversity is accepting people – being able to disagree but not being disagreeable. LZ and I disagree yet we aren’t disagreeable. We can laugh and go out socially together.

Q. You write about black athletes having “leverage” to help black social causes? Do black sportswriters have “leverage”?

A. Oh yeah – the power of the pen. Especially if you’re a columnist, you can shape other opinions. Even a beat writer – in terms of how you present athletes in a different light than the mainstream white media.

Sometimes in the mainstream white media racism does play a part. Sometimes I think it’s just ignorance in not knowing black culture and understanding where an African-American player may be coming from. I remember when players started wearing cornrows and some white sportswriters associated that with thugs and gangsta culture. But cornrows have been associated with African-American culture forever. When I was a kid a lot of kids were wearing them and they weren’t gangsta. My daughters wear them.

As an African-American writer you can present a more balanced and accurate and fair viewpoint than another writer who may not be familiar with African-American culture.

Today with sportswriters gaining such prominence and being on TV – that increases the opportunity to help the black cause. Your job is talking about sports and being objective but inevitably the opportunity arises where you can present another side. I was on “Cold Pizza” a couple of years ago commemorating Martin Luther King Day, on a panel with Swin Cash and Jay Harris, who was moderating. We talked about the Ron Artest brawl in Detroit. I brought up the fact that it was not the first time an athlete charged into the stands and that white mainstream media seems to have selective amnesia regarding black issues. In the 1970s Rick Barry charged after a 15-year-old boy who cursed him. Ty Cobb definitely did it. We talk about today’s athletes and how much trouble they get into – that’s code for black athletes.

Let’s be honest, throughout the history of American sports athletes have had a lot of boorish behavior. We know about Babe Ruth’s behavior. Cobb was an avowed racist; Mickey Mantle was an alcoholic and the media protected them. I know the media is different today, but to act like the athletes of yesteryear were such moral pillars and now today they’re thugs and criminals and womanizers – it’s not fair and accurate. There’s subtle racism in that because of the makeup of athletes – a majority are black.

As a black sportswriter you do have the platform to bring out these truths that may not have come out decades ago when most sportswriters were white.

(SMG thanks Chris Broussard for his cooperation)

Broussard’s phony iconoclasm would compel a lot more if he’d also:

– called for the execution of children who strike a parent (Exodus 21: 15, 17)

– defended the slave-master’s right to beat his slave without mercy since “the slave is his money” (Exodus 21:21)

– called for the destruction of anyone who worships any other god (Exodus 22:20)

– blasted people who eat shellfish

– noted the uncleanliness of any menstruating woman or those who touch them (Leviticus 15:19-32)

– acknowledged that dwarfs, the blind or other “limited” people cannot be priests (Leviticus 21: 17-21)

– advocated the execution of blasphemers (Leviticus 24:16)

– noted that a man can force his wife to drink the “water of bitterness” and that if she dies, that proves she’s an adulterer (Numbers 5: 11-31)

– defended men’s rights to sell their daughters into sexual slavery (Exodus 21:7-11)

– noted that Jews are the children of the devil and the fathers of lies (John 8:39-44)

Broussard yearns for a victimhood equal to that of others because he follows one absurdist and self-contradictory (if often beautiful) book that even he doesn’t really follow. It’s preposterous, and unserious in rational discussion.

posted: Tuesday, February 13, 2007|Feedback
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