Zack Walz On Pat Tillman

Sunday's Los Angeles Times carried a moving story about Pat Tillman, who gave up a promising career with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army only to die in Afghanistan in April of 2004. From Bill Plaschke's story in advance of the Cardinals facing the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl:

The NFL loves to wrap itself in the flag, yet the league has no plans to remember him.

The Cardinals have a statue and reflecting pool dedicated to Tillman outside their stadium, but nothing on their jerseys.

Tillman's foundation has no knowledge of any involvement. A Tillman family member said he was unsure of any family plans to attend.

An NFL spokesman said there may be something about Tillman on the NBC television broadcast, but there were no guarantees.

The photo at the top of the story is of Zack Walz '98, the former Dartmouth and Cardinals linebacker, holding aloft his friend's dog tags at a Tillman memorial service in May of 2004. From the story:

If anyone knows of the whereabouts of two dog tags that once adorned the neck of a former NFL star who was killed while fighting for his country in Afghanistan, please come forward.

His former team, the Arizona Cardinals, play Sunday in the Super Bowl.

His former Cardinals roommate, Zack Walz, is desperate to wear them again.

Walz was given the tags by Tillman as a gift shortly before his death. With trembling hands, he held them aloft during his eulogy at Tillman's nationally televised memorial service.

Several months later, he says, they were ripped from his neck.

I spoke with Zack last night and for as much as he hopes to get the dog tags back, that's not why he was glad to talk to Plaschke. Here's some of what Zack said to me last night:

"I think he needed to put it out there and raise awareness again. He needed to remind people kind of what the NFL ... has failed to do. They put a Gene Upshaw sticker on the back of their helmets for an entire year. And they let players wear a Pat Tillman No. 40 number for one week and then fined Jake Plummer for wearing it any week past that."

For a video interview with Zack regarding Tillman, click here.

Walz, by the way, reports that Student-Athlete Showcase – the business he co-founded that helps "maximize the collegiate opportunities for our qualified athletes," – continues to grow and have success getting high school athletes onto college coaches' radar. To read a little more about Zack, find his bio here. And if you have a potential college athlete in the family, do check out the SAS blog, which right now has a posting about the "7 Myths of College Recruiting."

Finally, in talking with Zack last year he expressed interest in coming east to help out with Dartmouth spring football. While for one reason or another that didn't come about in 2008, he'd like nothing more than to be in Hanover this spring sharing some of the lessons that helped him spend a handful of years as an undersized linebacker with the Cardinals.

Now lots more links ...

A Daily Dartmouth columnist writing about the Ivy League's curious and uneven approach to postseason tournament action:

If the Ivy presidents contend that the postseason football ban is largely about preserving academic integrity, why not extend this to the other sports?

Another Daily D columnist says the Ivy League is missing the boat both in football and basketball:

I agree ... that the Ivy League football champion should be able to compete for a national championship, but there is no way to get around the fact that the Ivy League completely misses out on the greatest month in college sports.

A columnist from the Columbia Spectator writes:

If lacrosse has been given a tournament on the basis that its teams have been successful and could use a boost to get into the national tournament, I think that the Ivy League needs to realize that success is fleeting, and decisions that shape the future of the league should not rest on past or present success. These decisions should be based on what is best for the league and for the players within it. If a postseason tournament works for lacrosse, why can’t it work for other team sports?

Shouldn’t basketball, soccer, and other team sports—including football, but that’s a column on its own—be offered the same opportunity?
The only fair answer is yes.

Former Dartmouth safety Matt Burke, a coach with the Tennessee Titans, might be headed to the Detroit Lions' staff according to the Detroit Free Press.

The Daily Dartmouth, writing about athletes and fraternities, has this interesting nugget. It quotes Andrew von Kuhn, the former wide receiver whose career was ended by injury but was a volunteer coach this fall:

Beta’s largest athletic presence comes from the football team, including some senior transfers from GDX, the organization which, in recent history, has been viewed by many as the “football house” on campus.

Speculation about this movement led some to claim that varsity football head coach Buddy Teevens ‘79, who is a Beta alumnus, encouraged his players to become Beta members.

According to von Kuhn, however, there is no truth to this rumor.

“Coach Teevens never pushed or encouraged it,” he said. “There were other factors involved, but coach actually encouraged guys to try to pledge many different houses around campus, so that football players could be more widely involved.”

The University of New Hampshire has found its next possible football victim. No, not another Ivy League team silly enough to schedule the Wildcats. Another FBS team silly enough to schedule them. From the Manchester Union Leader:

UNH will travel to Muncie, Ind., on Saturday, Sept. 12, to play Ball State. Ball State went undefeated during the regular season last fall and advanced as high as No. 12 in the national polls.

The Wildcats have beaten the last four FBS teams they have played -- including Army in 2008 -- and that success, along with their going to the FCS playoffs each of the last five years, has made it more and more difficult to find teams willing to play them.

"No question, this was the toughest time we've ever had," (Steve Metcalf, the senior associate athletic director for internal relations) said. "I talked to a half dozen teams who had open dates who simply said they weren't interested in playing us."

UNH already has contracts for games with Pittsburgh in 2010 and Boston College in 2014.

A couple of notes out of Yale. First, new coach Tom Williams has taken the Buddy Teevens approach to discipline in meetings. From the New Haven Register:

The first order of business for Williams was to instruct his players to take off their hats and sit up straight.

“We just wanted to set some ground rules ... my expectations of them, and what they can expect from me,” Williams said. “I think you listen with your eyes, so I told them I wanted all eyes at attention. We’ll get into more specifics as we get closer to playing football, but I just wanted them to have some idea of the parameters that are going to be set and the direction we’re going in."

And this about Yale's new captain, Paul Rice. The 6-foot-2, 240-pound corner (he'll probably be moved this year) is the son of a former Harvard player, which makes things interesting on one Saturday afternoon each November. From the Register:

Talk about interesting family dynamics. You have a dad, Lou, who has promised to root for Yale for four years and not a minute longer; who will sit on the Yale side of the field during The Game, but won’t wear a stitch of Yale regalia.

Then you have Paul Rice, the highly productive cornerback/monster back, who doesn’t regret for a day his choice of Yale, even knowing how his dad “must have been grinding his teeth in the background when he was watching (the recruiting process) happen,” Rice said. Rice also vowed to get his dad into a Yale hat or sweater or scarf for the big game, 2009.

“I’m afraid I’m going to be bullied into doing it,” Lou Rice said. “I guess I’ll just have to live with the recriminations from my classmates at Harvard.

Click here for video of potential Dartmouth running back recruit Bo Snelson from Pasadena Memorial in Texas.

Dartmouth doesn't have anyone playing in the Super Bowl this year, but there's one sure connection and another that fell through.

The sure connection is the Pittsburgh Steeler Rooney family, which has sent freshman quarterback Dan Rooney to Hanover...

The one that fell through was mentioned briefly in the St. Petersburg Times. The temptation is to make you read the whole story under the headline, "Tampa's adults-only businesses hope to cash in on Super Bowl," but I'll save you the trouble. The story – which included a photo caption reading, "As the Super Bowl approaches, dancers at clubs such as Deja Vu in Tampa hope to draw big crowds and make big bucks," – includes this:

About two dozen tried out, including one who Romagna said is a student at Dartmouth College. The dancer said she wanted to "get away" and didn't care how much money she made. She brought a suitcase full of makeup, 6-inch heels and high hopes.

In the end, she decided not to come back for game week.

And no, I didn't go looking for that story. Someone sent me a link ;-)

The New Yorker has a piece about last week's Ivy Football Association dinner that begins this way:

If the election of President Obama was supposed to signal the end of clubby, fraternity-style rule and usher in a new, thin-necked, cerebral era, you wouldn’t have known it from the Ivy Football Association Dinner, which, like a congressman’s reëlection bid, occurs every two years.

And finally, being someone who usually did sports that included a ball, I've always had a little bit of trouble understanding the nuances of track. I got a lesson yesterday on why runners are held out of races. That certain Hanover High School junior, like her dad in his day, just wants to get out there and compete. Is there a game? Let's play. A race? Let's run. That sore leg? Who cares? A cough? No problem.

Um, problem.

Battling a nasty cough all week, "tossing cookies" during training Thursday (something that hadn't happened before), that certain distance runner decided to run the 3,000 anyway yesterday at UNH. Less than a quarter mile in it was clear she'd made a mistake. A kid whose face never reddens when she runs was bright red from ear to ear. The usual placid look was replaced by a grimace and, eventually, a fight to hold back tears.

To her credit, she came back at the end of the meet and ran a leg on the 4x400 relay team so the team wouldn't forfeit, but it wasn't easy.

She was extremely unhappy with her time yesterday and still in the dumps this morning. The easy answer is to remind her that it's better to be fighting a bug now than in two weeks when states roll around. But it's easier to say than it is to hear.