The Pain Factory that is Mizzou Basketball

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author, frank haith, kim anderson, mike alden, missouri, missouri basketball, mizzou, norm stewart, quin snyder, Stephen Roth, tigers

Something sad is happening this winter in Columbia, Missouri.

University of Missouri basketball has never been great, but it is usually pretty good. Most seasons, the Tigers will knock off a couple of highly ranked teams and contend for a berth in the NCAA Tournament.

Kim Anderson doesn’t have much to smile about these days.

This year, Mizzou basketball is terrible. The Tigers stand 7-20, having lost 13 straight games in the mediocre Southeastern Conference. Some of those losses have been heartbreakers, but most of them have been by double-digits. The team has looked overmatched against mighty Kentucky, and overmatched against less-than-mighty Alabama, Vanderbilt, and Mississippi State. The only suspense left to this season–Missouri’s worst in almost 50 years–is whether or not the Tigers will manage to chalk up another win. That scenario is starting to seem more and more like a childish fantasy.

This is the first season for Tigers coach Kim Anderson, a former Mizzou big man from the 1970s whose first game leading the team in Columbia was a humiliating 69-61 loss to a directional school, the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Everyone expected 2014-15 to be a tough season for Anderson. Previous coach Frank Haith left very few experienced players before bolting for the Tulsa job last April. Still, the roster has a few freshmen and sophomores who were top-50 recruits. There was reason to expect a young, energetic, competitive team.

That hasn’t happened. Some games, the Tigers play hard but make a ton of mistakes. Other games, they seem lethargic and make even more mistakes. Anderson has benched players and suspended players. He has lectured them about sitting up straight and looking people in the eye during post-game press conferences. He has talked about gutting the program in order to build it back up. Hopefully, these tactics will work, but it will take some time. Most people expect some players to transfer out of the program at season’s end. Next season could be just as bad as this one.

For long-time fans of Tigers basketball, it is just another chapter in a long story that even a Russian novelist would find too depressing to believe. When Missouri fans complain about the pain and anguish of being Missouri fans, they are mostly talking about hoops. Mizzou football has had a couple of famously devastating defeats, but the gridiron Tigers have been reliably good for more than 10 years. Tiger basketball, meanwhile, has been as volatile as a tech start-up’s stock price on the NASDAQ.

Norm Stewart’s teams were good, but not great.

I don’t want to bore you with too many details, but here’s what has basically happened with Mizzou basketball over the past 15 or so years:

1999

Athletic Director Mike Alden mishandles the firing of legendary Tigers coach Norm Stewart. Missouri hires Duke assistant and all-around pretty boy Quin Snyder.

2000-2003

Snyder takes the Tigers to four straight NCAA Tournament appearances, including an Elite Eight run in 2002.

2003

The arrest of point guard Ricky Clemons and subsequent jailhouse tapes of him divulging some dirty laundry eventually lands the Tigers on probation for a couple of years. The program goes into decline.

2004

Missouri’s new basketball palace opens and is named Paige Arena after the daughter of “anonymous” booster and Walmart beneficiary Bill Laurie. The building’s name is changed to Mizzou Arena a few days later, after news breaks of a college cheating scandal that involved Paige Laurie.

2006

Athletic Director Mike Alden botches the firing of Snyder. Missouri hires Mike Anderson from UAB.

2006-2011

Anderson leads the Tigers to three straight NCAA Tournament appearances, including an Elite Eight run in 2009. He then bolts for the head coaching job at Arkansas.

2011-2014

Under new coach Frank Haith, the Tigers shock everyone by going 30-4 and winning the Big 12 tournament. They shock everyone again by losing a first-round game in the NCAAs to 15th seed Norfolk State. Haith sticks around for the Tigers’ first two seasons in the SEC, then bolts for Tulsa.

Which brings us to 2015 and the Tigers’ second Coach Anderson in less than four years. When Kim Anderson took the job, many fans had hopes of him returning Missouri to the glory days of Norm Stewart, when they recall the Tigers always playing hard and beating Kansas on a regular basis.

The thing is, even Stewart, over the course of 30 years, could not lead the Missouri Tigers to greatness. His teams won a few Big Eight championships and gave Kansas some headaches, but Stewart also lost a lot of first-round games in the Big Dance, He never reached a Final Four. His teams were talented but often suffered the same confounding lapses that have marked all Missouri basketball teams.

Throughout their history, the Tigers have never quite been tough enough, deep enough or big enough to achieve true college basketball greatness. George Mason, Virginia Commonwealth, Western Kentucky, Indiana State, Seton Hall, and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte have all been to a Final Four. The Missouri Tigers have not.

Yeah, this happened, too.

Maybe they will get there someday. Maybe 2014-15 is Kim Anderson’s Valley Forge, and he will go on to have a long, storied career in Columbia.

I have my doubts, though. The Tigers just posted another dumpster fire of a loss this afternoon, this time to a feeble, inexperienced but well-coached Vanderbilt squad.

It’s just another low for a program that has had too many of them over the past several years.

Stephen Roth is the author of the humorous novel, A Plot for Pridemore.

Be sure to “like” his author fan page at https://www.facebook.com/StephenRothWriter

The Sadness of the Selfie

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buzzfeed, Facebook, humor, media, obama, observations, oscars, president, selfie, selfie stick, twitter

Me, in my car today.

There once was a time not too long ago when taking pictures of yourself could only mean that you didn’t have anyone in your life to take your picture for you.

Nobody took selfies, not even with Polaroid cameras. To do so would admit to the world that you were either a pathetic, lonely loser, or someone who was extremely egotistical. A self-taken picture was sad and embarrassing, like a teen-aged boy caught playing alone with a football and making his own crowd noise in the backyard.

Times have changed.

Anyone with a smartphone knows that selfies are now an accepted, and frequent, form of social expression. Even the President takes them. If you missed the BuzzFeed video from a week ago of the Commander-in-Chief mugging around with a Selfie Stick, here it is.

Obama took a lot of flack for it, just as he does for everything else. I feel for the guy, but I have to admit that there’s something embarrassing about the Most Powerful Man in the World, the one responsible for our foreign policy and all our troops oversees, staring self-consciously and making faces at his phone like an eighth-grader. The message of the video seems to be, “Hey, the President is a regular guy, just like you.” That is not a sentiment that fills me with a rush of confidence.

It would be easy for me to plant a flag in the ground and say, “Hey, we weren’t taking pictures of ourselves back in the 1980s and 90s.” The reality is that we probably would have been if the technology were around to make it so easy to do. Selfies are not making us more narcissistic. We have always been narcissistic. Selfies just make our narcissism more obvious to the outside world. Maybe that is a form of public service.

I don’t take selfies very often. One reason is that I have short arms, and I only learned about the existence of the Selfie Stick about a week ago. Another reason is I don’t think very many people are interested in viewing self-generated photos of me. A third reason is plain old sheepishness: a selfie posted on Facebook or Twitter seems squeamishly revealing, like inviting someone I don’t know very well to come over to my house and watch me make faces in the bathroom mirror.

I should just get over myself. The selfie is here to stay. Neil Patrick Harris is already bragging about how his selfie at the upcoming Oscars is going to top Ellen’s selfie from last year’s Oscars! What can you say? People love it! We selfie, therefore we are, or however that old saying goes.

In a way, selfies may be the most honest form of expression, and may reveal more about ourselves than we intend. I’m going to try to remember that the next time I take a photo of my feet in front of a swimming pool.

Stephen Roth is the author of the humorous novel, A Plot for Pridemore. Be sure to “like” his author fan page at https://www.facebook.com/StephenRothWriter

New Books from Harper Lee and Some Guy Named Stephen Roth

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a plot for pridemore, an american band, go set a watchman, gregory peck, harper, harper lee, mercer university press, new york times, Stephen Roth, to kill a mockingbird

On Monday, Harper Lee dropped a literary bombshell by announcing to the world that her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, is set to be published this summer.

Today, Stephen Roth amused a few of his friends and a smattering of other fiction readers by announcing work on his second novel, tentatively titled An American Band, which he hopes will be published someday.

“I have nothing but profound respect for Harper Lee. I’ve been a huge fan of hers since I was in 6th grade,” Roth said in a recent interview. “I’m not trying to steal any thunder from her big announcement, but I wanted to let people know that I am halfway through writing my second book, and I hope to finish the first draft this summer.”

Lee’s first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is an American literary classic, and still sells hundreds of thousands of copies each year. The book spawned an iconic movie, in which Gregory Peck portrayed the soft-spoken but courageous small-town lawyer, Atticus Finch. Go Set a Watchman, described as a sequel to Mockingbird, will be Lee’s first published work since 1961.

A pretty good rookie effort.

Roth’s first novel, A Plot for Pridemore, was published last May, and has earned 22 positive reader reviews on Amazon.com. The author has described book sales as “pretty good so far,” but declined to share specific figures. He noted that the book is available as a Kindle or Nook eBook, “if people prefer to read it that way.”

Unlike Lee’s new book, An American Band is not a sequel, although it does share the same humorous storytelling style as Roth’s rookie effort. The new novel focuses on two groups of people: a three-man, middle-aged rock band in Charlotte, N.C. that decides to go on tour, and a collection of retired conspiracy theorists in South Georgia who are ready to engage in radical activism. Roth said he has enjoyed writing about how these two distinct groups become intertwined. To date, he has completed 160 pages of An America Band.

The announcement of Lee’s new book has sparked a firestorm of excitement and speculation. Fans have been clamoring for another book from the reclusive Alabama author for 55 years. The book’s publisher, Harper, plans to print two million copies of Go Set a Watchman, according to an article in The New York Times.

Roth expressed excitement about his own second novel, and said he felt the need to “get the word out” about it.

“I’ve gotten a few emails from people asking me when I’m going to write another book, so I felt like now was a good time to make some sort of announcement,” Roth said. “It’s nice to know that some people are interested in reading another one of my books.”

Stephen Roth is the author of the humorous novel, A Plot for Pridemore. Be sure to “like” his author fan page at https://www.facebook.com/StephenRothWriter