Bottom of the Bird Cage 4/6

Day No. 96 of the year and we salute the small number of players who have worn the number for the Chiefs, including defensive end Jimmy Wilkerson and linebackers Aaron Pearson and Monty Beisel.

On this day in 1970 Maurice Stokes died in Cincinnati. Unknown too many young basketball fans, Stokes was the NBA’s Rookie of the Year in 1956 playing for the Rochester Royals. He had 38 rebounds in one game that season and set a new NBA record for rebounds in 1957 with an average of 17.4 per game. In the final game of the 1958 regular season, Stokes suffered a concussion when his head banged off the floor in Minneapolis. Several days later, he suffered a seizure and fell into a coma and was left partially paralyzed. Doctors eventually diagnosed him with encephalopathy, a brain injury that damaged his motor skills. He was cared for over the last years of his life by his former teammate Jack Twyman before he died of a heart attack at the age of 36.

Stokes story was made into the movie Maurie, that was released in 1973. Former football player turned actor Bernie Casey played Stokes.

Oh by the way, the Rochester Royals became the Cincinnati Royals and they became the Kansas City Kings in 1972.

From colts.com:
If the NFL Draft is a mysterious process, Bill Polian said there’s at least one area that’s often not complex at all. The area: draft day trades. Polian, currently preparing for his 12th draft as the Colts’ president, said while the perception of draft-day trades may have something of a back-room, wheeler-dealer feel, the reality in the NFL Draft often is significantly less exciting.

Recently, he recalled a story: “This goes all the way back to the 1980s,” Polian said recently as he prepared for the 2009 NFL Draft, which will be held April 25-26 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. “It was a first-round trade I was involved in. It was pretty clear that both parties were willing to do the trade.”

The deal, Polian recalled, was fairly routine in NFL terms. A team wanted to move up in that year’s draft. Polian was willing to trade first-round selections – in exchange for a lower-round selection. Polian, then the general manager of the Buffalo Bills, said he then received a phone call. “The other party got back to us,” Polian said. “They said, ‘Ah, give us a sweetener. We have a couple of people after the pick.’ ”

The ensuing conversation went as follows: Polian: “How about a seventh?” Reply: “Ah, how about a fifth?” Polian: “Let’s settle on a sixth.” Reply: “OK, fine.”

“So everybody’s happy,” Polian recalled, laughing. “How long did that take? Thirty seconds.” That, Polian said, is pretty much the norm for draft-day trades.

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The guy who really got the swapping of draft picks going was former Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson. He and his staff with the Cowboys created a draft-pick value chart, which assigned a number to each tradeable choice. Obviously, the higher the pick, the greater the value. With this chart, swapping picks became a simple matter of math. Team A wants to move up 10 spots in the middle of the first round. Team B is willing to trade their pick. Its value is 1,000. Team A has to come up with enough other picks to at least equal 1,000. This allows for quick evaluation.

From Indianapolis Star columnist Bob Kravitz:
Maybe we should have the Indianapolis Motor Speedway people run Lucas Oil Stadium and Conseco Fieldhouse. After all, they don’t come running to the city when things get tight. This whole issue is not about the Indianapolis Colts or the Indiana Pacers, even if they are tangentially related, but the Capital Improvement Board, the organization that runs our local sports facilities.

Before we even think about another tax to make up that reported $47 million shortfall, an independent auditor must be brought in to look at the books. I want that person to tell the public what happened to the money. Why is the CIB in this current hole? Who is responsible? Sure, we know the CIB took on $15 million of the Pacers’ expenses to operate the fieldhouse, but where did the rest of the money go? When we were taxed in order to build Lucas Oil Stadium, wasn’t money put in the budget so that we could afford to, you know, turn on the lights and pay the water bills?

Angry fans and politicians want to turn this into a bailout of our pro sports teams, and while it’s true the Pacers are asking for help at a very unfortunate time, the truth is, the Pacers were foolishly given the lease option to renegotiate the agreement after 10 years. They are exercising their right. To me, this is about the CIB, a bunch of government-appointed officials who are charged with running our facilities. And it’s about accountability, and accounting.

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They’ve got problems in Indianapolis with their sports facilities right now. They can’t pay the bills and they are talking about increasing taxes at the worst time possible when it comes to the economics of the average Hoosier. So many people got upset with Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser because he wanted to eliminate a $2 million city subsidy to the Truman Sports Complex. That was nothing compared to the $47 million shortage they are dealing with in Indy.

From Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Gene Collier:
Gushers of architectural praise counterbalanced by all the appropriate populist blowback over the two new baseball stadiums in New York will likely consume most of the summer, but with the 2009 season beginning tonight, you wonder sometimes how baseball will sustain itself at some point where it is not constantly demolishing its cathedrals and unveiling new theatres.

At least I do. Your results may vary. Wrecking balls and dynamite have taken down 17 baseball parks in the last 30 years, 14 in the last 10, so that only the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs can now be said to inhabit truly old stadiums. But even with the destruction of Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, the cycle isn’t complete.

Minnesota’s behated Homer Dome, the Hubert H. Humphrey Center for Big Flies and Baggy Fences, is apparently headed toward its final summer, and hardly without a healthy share of memories. The Twins won two of the most dramatic World Series ever there, and if nothing else, it is the place where Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin sat down and re-wrote Grantland Rice.

It was Rice who wrote, from a Notre Dame football game in 1924, “Outlined against a blue, gray October sky, the four horseman rode again,” often mentioned as the greatest lead in sports writing. It was Conlin, the best baseball writer of the last 50 years, who wrote from a Minnesota World Series, “Outlined against a blue, gray Teflon sky, the hoarse Norsemen roared again.”

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We have seen a very active period of stadium construction around the world of sports over the last 15 years. Many who didn’t build new, decided to renovate old and turn them into different experiences. All of them cost money, and those bills are weighing down fans and teams that have invested billions of dollars into the building boom. Stadium economic issues are not new to the world of sports. More than 50 years ago it was the driving reason the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. But the problems figure to get only bigger over the next few years with a struggling economy.