Today, for only the third time in almost a century, the Big Ten will officially admit another university to the league.  Nebraska left the Big Eight conference to start playing Big Ten football this fall.  The Cornhuskers will receive a slice of the much bigger Big Ten TV pie, but that might not be the best reason to join.   

To celebrate Nebraska joining the nation’s oldest conference, the Big Ten Network will be kicking off three days of non-stop programming.  Now I’m the kind of guy who might actually watch three days of non-stop programming about the Cornhuskers, but you might have other priorities this holiday weekend.  So, I’m here to tell you what you need to know in three easy minutes.   

Adding Nebraska is nothing but good for the Big Ten, which needs 12 teams to host a lucrative conference championship game.  Nebraska’s football program is one of the most successful and respected in the nation, and their fans are gracious in victory or defeat.  They have class.   

They’re based in Lincoln, and their most famous alum is a guy named Warren Buffett, who still sits with the common folk in the cheap seats. 

The Bo Schembechler of Nebraska football is Tom Osborne.  He took over in 1973, after his mentor retired by winning two consecutive National Titles. But Osborne had to wait a decade for his first chance at a national crown.  He finally got it in the Orange Bowl against the Miami Hurricanes, the anti-matter of the conservative, corny Cornhuskers. The ‘Canes engaged in toxic levels of trash talk, and were led the next year by Jimmy Johnson, who now shills for a “male enhancement” product called ExtenZe.   

The Cornhuskers, in contrast, celebrate their touchdowns by handing the ball to the referee.  Whether ahead by thirty or down by three, Osborne looked about as animated as a flight attendant explaining how to buckle your seatbelt.  When Osborne retired, he skipped pitching for ExtenZe to become a Congressman – though, given recent Congressional photo scandals, maybe that’s a wash.  

But under the surface, Osborne was surprisingly bold.  In the final moments of that 1984 national title game against Miami, he decided not to kick the easy extra point for a tie – which would have secured his first national title -- and instead went for the riskier two-point conversion to win.  It failed, they lost, and Osborne had to wait another decade to win his first national title.  But recently he explained that playing for a tie would have been insulting to his players and the people of Nebraska, who appreciate good football, and he would never vote for a team that played for a tie.  In my book, that’s pretty cool.   

By joining the Big Ten, Nebraska will get more money, more fans, and more visitors.  David Byrne of Talking Heads once wrote that no one pays money to see flat landscape – and Nebraska is so flat, you can see three state capitols just by standing on a park bench.  But people will pay to see great football.   

Nebraska is a solid school, but ranks in the Big Ten’s lower half academically.  Fewer than half its students graduate.  This gives rise to an old joke: What does the “N” on Nebraska’s helmet stand for?  Knowledge.   

But, in joining the Big Ten, Nebraska’s faculty is automatically admitted to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, or CIC, which provides a big boost to the Big Ten’s big research universities.  Since Penn State joined the Big Ten twenty years ago, its research income has tripled, to 780 million dollars.  

Nebraska is not the first school to leverage football to improve its academics.  Chicago, Notre Dame, and Michigan State, among others, have all done it, and done it quite well.   

Twenty years from now, the N on Nebraska’s helmet might stand for Nobel laureates – and the joke will be on the Big Eight schools Nebraska just left behind. 

Copyright© 2011, Michigan Radio

Canada might be the only nation on earth that invented its favorite sport, has no other sport that’s even half as popular, and remains arguably the best in the world at playing it.   

How big is hockey in Canada?  They put the sport on their five-dollar bill.  It has a drawing of kids playing a pick-up game outside, and a quote from a beloved children’s story, “The Hockey Sweater.”  It goes like this:  

“The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places - the school, the church and the skating rink - but our real life was on the skating rink.” 

That’s right: on our finski, we put the Lincoln Memorial.  They put pond hockey.  

That’s why it killed them when they lost the Olympic gold medal – in 1956.  I’m not kidding.  I was out for dinner with two Canadian friends last week, and they told me it still bothers them.  No surprise, then, that it’s a crisis of national confidence that no Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup since 1993.   

Despite a little skirmish called the Civil War, the United States is still far more unified than Canada is.  Its biggest province speaks French and every few years, threatens to secede.   

But hockey – and only hockey -- brings them together.  A few years ago, I was in Vancouver on business during the Stanley Cup playoffs.  The Canucks had already been eliminated, but I was stunned to see business signs in the English-speaking city saying “Go Habs!” – the Montreal Canadiens, that is, the last Canadian team left standing that year.  You never saw that in the eighties.   

So great is the Canadians’ desire to bring the Cup home again, they’ll look past language, culture and decades of bitter rivalry just to see their countrymen hoist the grail once more.  

That’s why all of Canada was cheering for Vancouver when the Canucks got to the Stanley Cup Finals this spring.  They got ahead of the Boston Bruins two games to none, then three to two.  The dream was that close.   

But it came down to a winner-take-all game seven.  NBC covered it, which got the highest ratings in the U.S. of any NHL game since 1973.  Of course, that still meant it finished behind a re-run of NCIS.  I don’t even know what NCIS is.  Is it related to CSI?  The CIA?  The NLRB?  I have no idea – but whatever it is, it’s still more popular than the biggest hockey game of the year.     

But even those ratings were far better than the Stanley Cup Final ratings a few years ago, which finished behind a Food Channel show called, “How to Build a Better Burger.” 

Few Americans outside of Boston probably cared, but the Bruins beat the Canucks to take the Cup.  Canadians were devastated.  The locals trashed the town the way Detroit did when it won the World Series in 1984.  (One difference: Canadian parents turn their teenagers into the police.)  

But there was a silver lining, made official this week: The NHL approved the sale of the Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg, which had lost its first NHL team to Phoenix back in 1997.  Not because they didn’t love them – they packed the place – but because they couldn’t get big the TV money the NHL required in a small market, and the exchange rate was killing them.  

They say the rich will find your fun, buy it and sell it for a profit.  So it’s good to see the Canadians get some of their fun back.   

Go Winnipeg.  Go Canada. 

Copyright© 2011, Michigan Radio

My dad grew up in Scarsdale, New York – but, as he’s quick to point out, that was before it became “Scahsdahle.”  His dad told him always to root for the underdog, and my dad took that seriously. 

All his friends were Yankees fans, but Dad loved the Brooklyn Dodgers.  A perfect Friday night for him, when he was a young teen, was to go up to his room with a Faygo Redpop, a Boy’s Life magazine – he was on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout – and listen to Red Barber reporting on the Dodgers’ game.   He wouldn’t say something so prosaic as, “the bases are loaded,” but “the bases are saturated with humanity.”  

Dad was a decent athlete – baseball and golf – but he didn’t make his high school team.  He did have a star turn as the short stop for his fraternity softball team, which won the championship when he pulled off a perfect squeeze play.  You never forget those moments.  

My parents raised three kids, and spent most of their weekends schlepping us to swim meets and hockey games.  My dad had to wake me up at five in the morning, then pile me and my hockey bag into our 1965 Volkswagen Beetle – which had no radio and a heater only in theory.  I’m sure I complained every time he woke me up.  He didn’t complain once.  

My dad didn’t play hockey, but he taught me the important things: Play hard.  Play fair.  Losing is okay.  Loafing is not.  And hot-dogging after a goal was unacceptable.  You’re better off not scoring than doing that.  

My dad and I spent countless hours together watching George Kell do the Tigers’ games on TV, and Ernie Harwell on the radio.   

In high school my brother and I both made the hockey team, and played together for one season. My dad is not one to brag, but he gushed to us about seeing his two boys standing together on the blue line for the national anthem.  It didn’t matter to him that that was all the ice time we usually got.   

When I became a sullen teen – at least at home – we didn’t have a lot to talk about.  Still, like Daniel Stern’s character said in City Slickers, we always had baseball.  That kept us connected, when it seemed like few things did.  

After I left home, we started becoming good friends.  As Mark Twain said, “It was amazing how much my father had changed.” 

We formed another bond when I took over my old high school hockey team, Ann Arbor Huron, which had not won a game in a year and a half.  Assessing my team’s situation, my dad said, “Well, when you’re on the floor, you can’t fall out of bed.” 

I gave my parents a schedule, but I didn’t expect them to see them at the games.  But they came to every one of our home games.  And the games in Trenton, and Muskegon, and Traverse City, and even Culver, Indiana.  They became valued members of the hockey parents’ gang.   

When we won our first game, they were there.  When we finally beat Pioneer in my third season, they were there.  The lobby crowd was loud, but not my dad.  He didn’t say a word, but I’ll never forget his glassy eyes as he reached out his hand to grasp mine, and he held it, firmly.   

He knew how much it meant to me.  And I saw how much it meant to him.  

When I asked him a couple months ago what I could possibly get him for his birthday, he said, “Just your friendship.” Consider it done.   

And that’s what he’s getting for Father’s Day, too.

Copyright© 2011, Michigan Radio

I went to Ann Arbor Huron High School, considered by every objective source to be the greatest high school in the history of the universe. And one of the things that made it so great when I was there was an intramural softball league.  

Maybe your clearly inferior high school had one, too.  But the IM softball league at Huron was created and run entirely by students – the burnouts, no less.  That meant the adults, perhaps wisely, wanted nothing to do with it.  

So the burn-outs got the park permits – God bless ‘em -- and every clique had a team, from the guys in auto shop to marching band.  They gave their teams names like the Extra Burly Studs, the Master Batters and – yes – the ‘Nads.  If you pause to think of their cheer, you’ll get the joke.   

My buddies and I failed to get a team together our junior year, but our senior year, we found inspiration.  Most of my friends weren’t playing spring sports, so we came home every day after school to catch "Leave It To Beaver" re-runs on channel 20 – on something called UHF.  (Kids, go ask Grandpa.)  

Come softball season, we were moved to build a team around that very name: The Cleavers. But if we were going to face battle-tested squads like the All-Star Rogues and the Ghetto Tigers, we knew we’d need an edgier name.  And that’s when we came up with – yes – the Almighty Cleavers.  You know, to instill fear in our opponents.   

You can imagine how well that worked.  

Our next stroke of genius was our uniform: we each got one of our dads’ undershirts, then used a laundry marker to write one of the characters’ names on the back: Ward, Wally, Eddie – we had ‘em all.  Now all we needed were ten more players. 

No problem.  Once word got out about our hardcore name and unis, people flocked to our team, even a half-dozen women. None of the other teams were co-ed, but there was no rule against it – because there were almost no rules.  That’s what you get when you play in a league founded by burnouts.  

We didn’t just expect to lose.  We were built to lose.  But we didn’t care.  In fact, that was our team motto: “We Don’t Care.” Whenever somebody was seen running too hard or – god forbid – sliding into home plate, we started our chant: “We Don’t Care!  We Don’t Care!” 

The girls could play wherever they wanted, and nobody was allowed to yell at anyone, no matter how badly they screwed up.   

It probably helped that, like most teams, we brought cooling beverages to each game, be they “jumbos” of Goebel’s. “torpedoes” of Colt 45 or, for big games, an actual quarter barrel of Stroh’s Bohemian Style.  We’d set it up right at the corner of Huron Parkway and Fuller, with Lord knows how many teachers, parents and police officers driving by.  No one cared.   

Yes, I know we were being stupid and illegal, but you have to remember this was at a time when Huron had a smoking lounge for students, Ann Arbor had a five-dollar pot law, and the Almighty Cleavers were probably on the conservative side of things.  Okay, on a very relative scale.  And all of it might explain why I can’t recall a single fight among the twelve tribes that played.  (Take that any way you want.)   

But what I saw next defied explanation: Against a bunch of guys who clearly wanted to beat us, our coed squad won the game.  And then, another.  And another.   

It was incredible. Once the girls realized they weren’t going to get yelled at, their Inner Softball Players came out – and before we knew it, we finished the regular season at 9-2, in second place.   

Well, our magical season had to come to an end, and it did – with a playoff loss to the always-tough Junior Junkies. Even more heartbreaking, actor Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward Cleaver, died the week before, prompting all of us to draw black armbands on our sacred jerseys.   

But then, something even stranger happened. The mother of one of our founders happened to be the president of the American Psychiatric Association, so reporters were always calling her up to get her expert opinion on this or that. When an Associated Press reporter asked her about violence on television, she finally said, “Well, it can’t be that bad.  My son watches ‘Leave it to Beaver’ every day with his buddies.’” 

It just so happened the reporter was a big “Leave it to Beaver” fan, and voila! All of a sudden our team was on the AP wire, in the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press and featured in TV Guide, for crying out loud.   

My grandparents, in from Eastern Canada, must have been completely confused – or simply assumed all American teenagers appear in national stories for playing IM softball as a rite of passage before graduating.  But the unexpected attention wasn’t the point.   

I don’t know if I’ve ever had more fun playing anything than I did playing intramural softball that spring. No parents, no umpires, no rules except most runs wins – and win or lose, get over it.  “No One Cares!” 

It was low-rent, small stakes, and big, big fun – because it was ours.   

I don’t think kids today have any idea what that feels like.

Copyright© 2011, Michigan Radio

This tale of woe takes place in the ninth grade, back when ninth graders still stayed in junior high.   

I had detention. I don’t remember why.  But so did the prettiest girl in the class, whom I’ll call Rhonda—because that was her name.  

The catch was, she was dating Benny, the captain of the football team.  But, at detention, I learned there was trouble in paradise.  Oh yes.  They had broken up, with just four days to go before the big ninth grade dance.  Tragic!    

We had a fine chat when I walked her home, so when I got home, I decided, what the heck.  I called her up to ask her to the dance.  Sure, she said, why not.  

Simple stuff! 

Of course, I was level-jumping, and I knew it.  So I had to avoid her the entire week, to make sure she didn’t back out.  Because her locker was near the bathroom, that meant I couldn’t go to the bathroom at school all week.  Couldn’t risk it. 

And, as luck would have it, my mustache was finally coming in that very week, so after four days of rubbing my fingers over my lip, I had two mustaches: one made of wispy blond hair, the other of acne.  Awesome. 

Dragging that blade over my lip for my shaving experience was fantastic.  Man that felt great!    

Being only 14, my dad had to drive me to her house, and this is where things got tricky.  Her father happened to be the head coach of the Huron high school hockey team.  My entire life, I dreamed of not of winning Nobel Prizes or even playing for the Red Wings or even Michigan, but suiting up for the River Rats of Huron High.    

So, when I got there, I had to be cool around Rhonda – wearing a beautiful spaghetti strap purple dress I remember to this day – tough around her dad, but sweet around her mom.   After we took some pictures by the fireplace, I figured I’d pulled the whole thing off – until we get to the gym.  

I made sure we showed up about 20 minutes late, so all my friends – and especially my enemies – could see me walk in with the prettiest girl in school.  

Well, it worked – maybe too well.  

My former best friend yells, from the back of the gym, with 300 people I’ve known my entire life between us:  “Hey Bake!  Look at your coat!” 

I look down, and I see a sight I will also never forget: There are only two buttons on a sport coat, and I’ve got them mixed up.  The coat is a mess – with everything tilted to the side, as if I’m on a skateboard flying by.   

My brain goes into full panic mode – Reee!  Reee!  Reee!  Overload!  Overload!  Can’t function!  Can’t function!  To this day I don’t know if I put my right foot down and kept walking, or even if I could have.     

The rest of the night, I was a shell of my former self.  But I was young, and after school got out, I recovered, finding solace by playing baseball and hanging out with my friends. 

Until, that is, I got a little envelope from a strange address.  I open it up.  In it is a sweet note from Rhonda’s mom.  And – what’s this? -- a photo, of us standing together, next to their fireplace – with my coat buttoned wrong!   

And that’s when that tender wound that had just started to heal tore clean open. 

Oh, and her father left Huron to start coaching one of the Red Wings’ minor league teams that fall.  Lot of good all that did me.  

So, boys, this prom season, be sure to double-check your coat to make sure you buttoned it properly.  Girls, be sure double-check your date’s coat to make sure he buttoned it properly.  And moms, if your daughter’s date didn’t button his coat properly – don’t send him photos.  

But don’t worry, boys.  Even if you do screw it up, you’ll get over it—after years of therapy and light medication.  You’ll be fine.  Trust me.  

Copyright© 2011, Michigan Radio