Why on earth would we want to drive such an art-form underground

Dozens of Pat Summitts former Tennessee players and coaches descended on Knoxville over the weekend, making the basketball pilgrimage to say their final goodbyes to the winningest coach in Division I college basketball history.Summitt, who died Tuesday morning at age 64, was much more than just their coach. She was a role model, a second mother, a friend, a mentor.WNBA stars Candace Parker and Tamika Catchings knew they had to see her one more time. So they flew in over the weekend between WNBA games.Shes touched so many lives in the game of basketball and has grown the game, Parker said. Shes changed the way womens basketball is played. Shes changed the nature of womens basketball. She changed the way I looked at life.Shes not a person that just talks the talk, she walks the walk as well.Catchings said the biggest thing that Summitt taught her was integrity.Have integrity in everything you do, Catchings said Tuesday.I was blessed to have the opportunity to have such an amazing role model and such an amazing mentor, sister and friend, she added. To have the opportunity to be around someone like her (was special).Summitt came to watch Catchings win her only WNBA title in 2012. It meant the world to Catchings as she embraced her coach after the series clinching game.Catchings went with her mom to see Summit toward the end of last year. She knew she had to see her one more time before she died.Selfishly, I wish she was here, Catchings said. When I think about it, Im glad that she is free.Basketballs, orange and white balloons and flowers were left in front of her statue on Tennessees campus Tuesday. Summitts family plans a private funeral and burial but will hold a celebration of her life July 14 at Thompson-Boling Arena, where the court is named after the former coach.Shes the most important figure in the history of the sport, former Tennessee player Kara Lawson said. Her impact, she forever changed the sport, and her impact will always be felt by any player that plays the game. Anybody that loves the game of basketball owes a debt of gratitude to her. You think of how far the womens game has come, how normal it is to watch women play on TV, how normal it is for a young boy to look up to a young woman. That wasnt normal.Summitt helped grow womens basketball as her Lady Vols dominated the sport in the late 1980s and 1990s, winning six titles in 12 years. She made people care about the game.I think she brought the womens college game from the back page to the front page, Los Angeles Sparks coach Brian Agler said. Tennessee was the foundation that the modern era of womens basketball was built on.In 1995 when she played UConn in a national televised game, the AP held its womens basketball poll until the game ended -- the first and only time thats happened in the polls 40-year history. Tennessee and Connecticut had the best rivalry in the sport over the next dozen years before it ended. UConn coach Geno Auriemma put Summitts impact succinctly when he said Monday:Our sport is synonymous with Pat Summitt, and Pat Summitt is synonymous with womens basketball.Tennessee -- the only school she coached -- won NCAA championships in 1987, 1989, 1991, 1996-98 and 2007-08. Summitt, who won eight NCAA championships overall, had a career record of 1,098-208 in 38 seasons, plus 18 NCAA Final Four appearances.But a stat that was really important to the Hall of Fame coach during the 38 years she coached at Tennessee: graduation rate.It was huge for her, said Holly Warlick, who took over for Summitt as coach of Tennessee and also played for her. You were not going to step on the floor if you missed a class, her rules were very simple. We still use them today.You sit in the first three rows. If you miss a class, you miss a game. ... She never wavered. We still have a 100 percent graduation rate. Yeezy 350 v2 Acheter .2 billion agreement with Rogers Communications for the leagues broadcast and multimedia rights. Yeezy 350 v2 France . Halifax beat the Saint John Sea Dogs 7-5 on the strength of two goals apiece from Nikolaj Ehlers, Matt Murphy and Brent Andrews. Jonathan Drouin also scored and had three assists while Zachary Fucale made 17 saves for the Mooseheads (16-8-0), who led 6-1 after two periods. http://www.pascheryeezy350v2.fr/fausse-yeezy-350-v2-sesame.html . Already owning gold from competition in Vancouver in 2010, Loch posted a combined four-run time of 3:27.526. That included a track-record third run of 51. Yeezy 350 V2 Antlia Pas Cher . Team physician Dr. Steve Traina performed the surgery Friday. Robinson was injured in a spill underneath the Nuggets basket during the first quarter of Wednesday nights loss to the Charlotte Bobcats. Yeezy 350 v2 Promo .Y. -- The Buffalo Sabres have recalled forward Kevin Porter and defenceman Chad Ruhwedel from the minors as part of a five-player roster shuffle made by the NHLs worst team. The law is an ass. Dont take my word for it, take Bob Woolmers. In an interview with The Guardian on Wednesday, Pakistans coach decided that attack was the best means of defending his team, as he accused Law 42.3 - their alleged breach of which has thrown the game into chaos - of being anachronistic and contrary to crickets best interests.Id scrub out the law completely, said Woolmer, of a ruling that once consisted of a couple of ambiguous paragraphs about the dos and donts of ball maintenance, but has - since the start of the millennium - been rehashed as an eight-clause, 13-subclause magnum opus.It was brought in because of ball-tampering with razor blades and bottle tops and everything else in the past, added Woolmer, but thats been shoved out of the game now. Its like prohibition: the more you ban alcohol, the more it goes underground. They really need to open it up in my opinion.These are brave words from a man who had admitted that, before yesterdays hearing postponement shifted the goalposts, the future of Pakistans tour of England hinged entirely on that very charge of ball-tampering. As one exasperated journalist pointed out at the height of the brouhaha on Monday, cricket is such a hicks game. Only in cricket could a team prepare their defence of a rule-breach by turning round and saying: Well, its a silly rule anyway.Well, it is a silly rule, and thats what makes this whole issue all the sillier. Though the moralists froth with righteous indignation, in the eyes of the ICC law-makers, ball-tampering barely even registers on the Richter Scale. It is deemed a Level 2 offence, which is on a par with sticking too large a logo on the back of your bat, or getting over-excited in the pursuit of an appeal.The Level 3 offence, the disrepute charge that Pakistan are now willing to accept, is actually one notch more serious, though it does not come attached with anything like the same historical, emotional and moral baggage. Pakistan have no truck with being called troublemakers, but quite understandably, they wont stomach being called cheats.Well, most of them wont, at any rate. Shahid Afridi, however, has always done things differently, and back in February, at a time when his teams bowlers were being lacerated by Indias batsmen on the slow, flat featherbeds of Lahore and Faisalabad, he gave an interview to the Indian news channel, Times Now, extolling the virtues of making the ball.You have to make the ball in order to make it swing, said Afridi in the interview that has spread like wildfire since Sundays stand-off. I dont think theres anything wrong because its a torture for the bowlers to bowl on these wickets. With the kind of cricket that is going on, it spells death for the bowlers if you dont.Afridi has a very valid point. In the first two Tests of that turgid series, 2770 runs were scored for the loss of just 36 wickets, 410 of which came in a single opening stand between Virender Sehwag and Rahul Dravid. It is all part of a modern-day trend towards bland, conformist pitches that last a full five days and thus please the TV companies, ground authorities and everyone else whose priority lies with the short-term buck. No wonder any attempts to assist the bowlers are so frowned upon.Pakistans underlying grievances, however, stem from the double standards inherent in ball-tampering. As anyone who has ever played the game knows, a bit of spit and polish is perfectly acceptable, essential even, but a bit of scratch and scour ... well that can only be the devils work. But remember last summer when England reinvented the art of reverse-swing? The claim doing the rounds in the Australian press, in a not-so-distant echo of Englands own gripes in 1992, was that their fielders had been armed with boiled sweets to make their shiny sides all the shinier.ddddddddddddWhether sugar-enhanced spittle constitutes an artificial substance is a brilliantly moot point - its not exactly Justin Gatlin territory is it? You might as well ban high-energy drinks if youre that worried. But when Simon Jones plucked out Michael Clarkes off stump at Old Trafford with perhaps the most orgasmic delivery of the summer, the only thing that mattered was the sheer, unadulterated skill on display.Personally, Id seen nothing like it since Wasim and Waqars own zenith in 1992. Why on earth would we want to drive such an art-form underground? To hear Afridi talk of making the ball as an innings progresses is a wonderfully creative vision, the sort that should appeal to any schoolboy who has ever sat at the back of a history lesson, folding his way to the perfect aerodynamic paper dart. Its time for the dark arts to be brought into the light.But lets go back to Woolmers thoughts, because they are the most intriguing. Id allow bowlers to use anything that naturally appears on the cricket field, he suggested. They could rub the ball on the ground, pick the seam, scratch it with their nails - anything that allows the ball to move off the seam to make it less of a batsmans game.Provocative comments, but personally, I wouldnt go quite that far. I certainly wouldnt permit rubbing on the ground, because that just replaces one grey area with another - remember Steve Kirbys furtive scrape on the carpark concrete at Sophia Gardens? And besides, who wants to see the unedifying spectacle of a bowler sandpapering the match ball on the cut strip for minutes on end?Afridi himself suggested making it all legal from the 30th or 40th over, which is a neat solution, albeit one that is equally open to abuse. But, in an extension of the natural-substances line, how about this as a solution? Why not require all players to have their nails clipped at the start of a match, and then send them clawless out onto the field, in the full gaze of 26 television cameras, to do their damnedest as the match progresses?Its not as ludicrous as it sounds - after all, footballers are required to have their studs checked before they set foot on the pitch. And more importantly, in bringing the practice up to surface level, we would get one step closer to demystifying the whole phenomenon of reverse swing, which everyone talks about but no-one truly understands. Last summer, one national newspaper commissioned a full-page spread on the subject, complete with illustrated diagram. They happened to get their aerodynamics completely wrong, but of course absolutely no-one noticed.Ultimately, what people find most offensive about ball-tampering is not the act itself, but the furtiveness involved. When Mike Atherton was fingered for the dirt-in-the-pocket scandal in 1994, he could have insisted that he was maintaining the condition of the ball, as per the rules. But upon encountering the formidable figure of Peter Burge, the match referee, Atherton panicked and changed his defence.Bad move. It was quite clear from Athertons actions that he was guilty of something - anything! - and in the kangaroo courts of the British media, that was enough for pandemonium to ensue. It sounds familiar, doesnt it? ' ' '