John U. Bacon

Tomorrow morning, one of Michigan’s oldest traditions will be on display. No, not at the Big House, but at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house.

That’s where they’ve played something they call The Mud Bowl every year since 1933, the same season Jerry Ford played center for the national champion Wolverines, and Columbia University won the Rose Bowl.

Back then, the leap from the Mud Bowl to the Rose Bowl was a lot smaller than it is today. Oh, and a new venture called the National Football League was little more than a decade old, but few cared. Today college football is a lot closer to the NFL than it is to the Mud Bowl – which still doesn’t charge its spectators a dime.

Last fall, I woke up on a cold, rainy Saturday morning to see the tradition for myself.

A few days before, the fraternity had its pledges dig up their front yard, flood it with water, and voilà! Their lawn becomes a bowl of mud, ready for the annual football game.

By 10 a.m., the bowl-shaped front lawn was packed with an estimated two thousand people, but it’s hard to say, because the Mud Bowl doesn’t have turnstiles, ticket scanners or seat licenses.

The “field,” which doesn’t have a blade of grass on it by game day, is not quite twenty-five yards by fifty yards. But that’s okay, because it’s not quite rectangular, either, or even flat. It runs uphill from west to east about four feet. The SAEs naturally gave the deeper end to their opponents, the Fijis, who’d won a playoff for this honor.

The play wasn’t pretty, but it was fierce, with almost every down resulting in at least one player getting jammed face-first into the swamp, followed by a five-man shoving match, which usually ended with at least one more player eating mud. If you could claim anything was “beautiful” about a game that couldn’t be uglier, it’s that they were playing this hard for nothing more than bragging rights. No money, no fame, just pride – which might explain why neither side backed down an inch.

On one play, the Fijis had the SAE quarterback on the run. He escaped his attackers, only to tackle himself by tripping in the mud and wiping out. Although he was clearly down – his mud-covered T-shirt told you that – a Fiji slogging by still felt the need to dunk the quarterback’s face into the mud. And that started yet another fight.

That’s when it hit me: All of us watching this primal contest had gone farther back in time than just eight decades. We had traveled all the way back to 1869, and we were watching the first American football game between Rutgers and Princeton. It was glorified rugby – an excellent outlet for excess testosterone, and catalyst for school spirit.

The forward passes the players threw were new, but everything else had been done before, countless times – and these players were showing all of us why football had caught on in the first place. It was cold, it was chaotic, it was crazy, but the pure energy pulled the crowd in, just as it surely did four years after the Civil War. The banks were packed with people the entire game, and I didn’t see a single soul leave. Of course, it helped that they didn’t have to suffer through any TV time-outs.

After SAE dispensed with the Fijis 30-21, they naturally celebrated by diving into the mud – and not just the players, but all the brothers.

Every Michigan football player I’ve ever talked to about the Mud Bowl was dying to play in it. I know of at least a few who – at the risk of Coach Schembechler killing them with his bare hands – snuck out of the Campus Inn hotel early on Saturday morning to see the spectacle for themselves, before dashing back to catch the team buses to the Big House. Given the forty-hour workweeks they go through just to play big-time college football, it’s not hard to understand why they might envy the Mud Bowlers their simple fun.

If you added it all up, the frat brothers might have the better deal.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

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John U. Bacon

“I think we have too many AAA, Showcase and elite camps for the kids today, and as a result, we are creating a bunch of robots. We need to make it fun for the kids and let them learn to love the game the way we did.” – Herb Brooks, coach of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team in “Pond Hockey: A Documentary Film”

Just over half a million kids play organized hockey in the United States, as I did – but trust me, they’re missing out.

We’re deep in the dead of winter. And for most of us, there’s not a lot to do, and not much to look forward to for the next couple months. But if you’re a hockey player – scratch that, if you’re a pond hockey player – this is the best time of year.

When I was growing up – not that long ago – we’d come home from school, slip our skates onto our sticks and throw the sticks over our shoulders like hobos carrying their knapsacks, then trudge through the apple orchard behind our neighborhood to a pond in the middle of the woods. We’d lace ‘em up and play until it was too dark to see, then put our boots back on and head home for dinner.

On weekends, we’d spend all day down there. Friends of mine who lived near Burns Park and Thurston Pond would come home, eat dinner with their skates on, then go back to the ice for more.

We got more ice time in a single day on those ponds than we got in weeks of indoor practices and games. And it was more fun, too. No try-outs, no scoreboards, no whistles, no drills, no lines, no benches, no coaches, no refs – in fact, no adults at all – and no nets. Just a pair of boots at each end.

I don’t recall once coming back from the pond upset that we’d lost. That’s because we played about a dozen games a day, and whenever one team lost too many, we’d just change teams. I also can’t recall much about the hundreds of indoor practices I endured as a kid, but I can remember those long, happy days on the pond like they were yesterday.

But when you drive by those very same ponds today, you won’t see any kids. They’re all packed in vans, being dragged to some tournament two hours away. And when they get back, they’ll be inside playing video games.

So when my old high school teammate, Pete Read, put together his third annual Michigan Pond Hockey Classic at Whitmore Lake last weekend – one of the nation’s biggest – it was no surprise that almost all of the 500-some players were over thirty.

Read laid out 15 rinks, separated only by snow banks. We played four-on-four, with no goalies or fancy nets – just a flat box of two-by-sixes. Everyone got dressed in one big tent, and sat on hay bales. A hockey locker room is one of the few places on earth where the smell can be improved by fresh hay. The guys getting ready to play could see their breath, while the guys coming back in could watch the steam coming off their pads as they stuffed them back into their bags.

My team, consisting of a bunch of former high school teammates, got our butts kicked in the first two games by margins like 21-14 – football scores. In our last two games, however, we staged heroic rallies to lose by a little less.

But we had a blast all weekend. Until our last game, that is, when the volunteer score keeper – god bless ‘im – decided to play full-time ref, and rule on every out-of-bounds play and every goal. Before we realized what we were doing, we started sniping and hacking at each other, and the once friendly match quickly devolved into – well, a little league hockey game. Once we told the would-be ref we could handle the game ourselves, we got back to playing pond hockey – and that’s what we love.

One of my friends brought his son along, but he couldn’t play with us because his travel team had a game later that day.

Poor kid doesn’t know what he’s missing.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami of Ohio, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

A moment of rest for the familiar red kickball. (Photo by the writer.)

The red playground ball scuffs across the dirt the same way it did when you were 10, and the kicker takes a mighty running swipe at it, hoping for one of those big, arcing kicks that no one can get to – or maybe a line drive that will tattoo the ball’s cross-hatch pattern onto some unlucky infielder’s forearms.

It’s Friday night at Veterans Memorial Park, and all four of the park’s softball fields have a kickball game underway. Welcome to the big kids’ playground.

Ann Arbor Rec & Ed started its first kickball league in 2005 with six teams. This summer there were 38. Team sports director Larry Dishman compares the vibe to the early 1970s, when folks of dubious athletic cred were coming out in even bigger numbers to play a laid-back, social sport called slow-pitch softball.

“You had people saying, ‘Well, I can play this game,’” Dishman said. “Right now you’ve got largely that same type of phenomenon happening with kickball.”

Twenty-eight teams signed up for the fall season, which runs through October. (Kickball, incidentally, features some of the best names in Ann Arbor recreational sports: Miracle on Dirt, We Got the Runs, Kicking Balls and Taking Names, Kick It to The Man…)

“It’s a blast,” said Ben Pierce, manager of The Untouchables, which on this night is opening its season against a team called Jiminy Kick It. Last fall Pierce and a buddy from work ran their own kickball league in Ypsilanti.

“It’s competitive; you get to run around,” he said. “We played like three times a week last year. This (Rec & Ed league) is even more competitive, and more fun.”

Across the diamond, The Chronicle learns that most of the members of Jiminy Kick It met in preschool – their kids’ preschool – Northstar Montessori in Saline. None of the kids are in preschool anymore, but they still come along on Friday night to play in the dirt by the bleachers while their parents play in the dirt between the chalked lines.

“No pressure, no outs,” someone calls from the sideline as a Jiminy player sets up behind the plate, staring down pitcher Jason Yax of The Untouchables.

But of course, there’s really no pressure anyway.

“As soon as somebody gets competitive, we’re like, ‘It’s kickball.” said Jennifer Fansler.

Jason Yax from The Untouchables gets ready to pitch to the kicker on team Jiminy Kick It, playing at Veterans Memorial Park in Ann Arbor. (Photo by the writer.)

Jiminy pitcher Rick Gilbert wanders past the bench, where coach Katie Lyons is explaining how her team mostly learns by failure, and how she got her position by default because she’d played softball in high school.

“How much are we winning by,” Gilbert asks.

Lyons glances at her clipboard. “Negative two.”

Now, if anyone tries to tell you kickball isn’t competitive, they’re lying. It’s a contest. Someone wins and someone loses. It’s competitive by definition.

But it’s not cutthroat.

“You look for the person who looks like they’re not going to catch it and you aim for them,” said Pierce.

OK, not too cutthroat.

Pierce says despite a certain amount of playground mentality, the people he plays with now are much better behaved than the schoolyard players of yesteryear.

So that’s the benefit of 20-some years of maturity?

Nah, he says. Umps.

“I remember arguing a lot (as a kid),” Pierce said. “Now we don’t argue because we have the ump here to tell us to shut up.”

Nonetheless, Rec & Ed recreation specialist Sean Williams says umpires clamor to work the kickball games. It’s refreshingly different than small-ball counterpart.

Umpire Terry Condit has been officiating kickball games for three years. Before that he did high-level men’s softball. It took him half a season to adjust to the culture shift between men’s softball – with its high incidence of players who believe they’re just a step shy of the major leagues – to kickball, with its high incidence of players who routinely show up late.

Karla Tensley from Jiminy Kick It plays first base as runner Ben Pierce of The Untouchables gets ready to make a play for second. Pierce is also team manager. (Photo by the writer.)

He worked one game last summer where one of the teams showed up with every player dressed as a superhero.

“One woman was dressed as Isis, and I had to have her take off all these heavy bracelets, and her crown,” he said. “I had to make another guy take off his head because he could hardly see. Come to think of it, he wasn’t walking too well, either.”

(Public service disclaimer: Alcohol is not allowed in city parks. That’s all we’re going to say about that.)

So why kickball? Well, you don’t have to be a superhero – or even an athlete – to play, for one thing. Everyone’s there to have a good time, to laugh and run and wear a T-shirt with a nickname on the back. A lot of people find it’s just like they remember from fourth grade – only better.

“I don’t know that I ever played it as a kid,” said Chris Graham, whose T-shirt bears the nickname “Stay-Puft.” “So it was strange at first because I get to be athletic. That’s unusual for me.”

In the late innings Jiminy Kick It begins to show signs of wear. Karla Tensley, a runner in recreational real life, is stretching her right leg, trying to ease out the knot where a kicked ball hit her in the hamstring. Gilbert is sidelined with an eye injury. He sits on the bleachers, trying to shake it off.

He squints hard with his right eye, blinks, squints again.

He was playing with the kids, and one of them poked him in the eye.

A spectator watches a play not-quite-made and shrugs, “It’s better than watching the Lions.”

About the author: Amy Whitesall is a freelance writer based in Chelsea.

John U. Bacon

Last week I wrote about the case of Kimberly Knight. She’s the treasurer who pled guilty to embezzling almost a million dollars from the Ann Arbor Amateur Hockey Association. Knight effectively wiped out the organization’s savings – including its scholarship fund, its down payment for a new rink, even its operating budget. And now the association is fighting for its very existence.

For most crimes, there are shades of gray, and two sides to the story. Not this time. On one side you have an all-volunteer organization that’s helped 20,000 kids play hockey since 1951.

On the other side you have a corrupt treasurer who methodically emptied almost a million dollars from the pockets of those kids who paid to play hockey. She pulled this off over a two-year period – hardly a spontaneous act. Then she gorged herself on diamond earrings, Escalades and expensive trips.

Knight claims she’s already paid back almost a quarter million. The association says she hasn’t paid back a cent. Hmm. Whom do you believe?

Before Knight’s sentencing, the probation department recommended she pay back $160,000 immediately, to keep the league afloat. Judge Melinda Morris agreed, but Knight asked for two more weeks to get the money together. Judge Morris said: Sure.

On Monday, Knight asked the judge if $75,000 – less than half of what the judge had asked for upfront – would be enough. Judge Morris said: Sure. But Knight still hasn’t paid a dime of even that amount, because she’s still “waiting for checks to clear.” I’m sure we can safely assume the checks are in the mail.

Am I the only one who gets the feeling the criminal is calling the tune here?

The rest of the sentence wasn’t much tougher. Instead of prison – or even work release or house arrest – Knight got parole. Instead of paying back all the money, she needs to write a check for only $1,500 every month. At that rate, with a meager 2.5% interest and no inflation, she will send in her last check when she’s 116 years old. Let’s hope she’s not a smoker.

The rationale for this is simple: If they put Knight behind bars, she can’t pay the money back. But given Morris’s sentence, she’s not going to anyway.

Which brings us to a central problem with embezzlement cases in general – and this one in particular. The old joke goes, if you owe the bank ten thousand dollars, they’ve got you. But if you owe the bank ten million dollars, you’ve got them. Apparently, the more you steal, the more power you have, the softer you can make your sentence.

You don’t have to be vengeful to expect more. It’s a question of who we’re looking out for: the criminal, or the kids? Since Knight became treasurer in 1999, enrollment has dropped dramatically from 1,200 players to just 500 now. The scholarship program is history, as is the league’s “learn to play” programs. The kids who used to get the most help, now get the most hurt.

Another judge in town takes a different approach. Tired of deadbeat dads not paying their alimony child support, he decided to call their bluff and put them in jail, every time, until they paid. It was amazing how quickly they all seemed to find the money they owed their kids. Problem solved.

Something tells me it’s pretty hard to burn through a million bucks with nothing to show for it. And if Judge Morris had the backbone to put Knight in jail, I bet you’d see Ms. Knight cutting a rather large check by lunch.

In coddling the criminal, Judge Morris sold out the kids. Which is a shame, because it’s from hockey that kids learn things like fair play and honor.

Obviously, Kimberly Knight never learned those lessons. Thanks to Judge Morris, she’ll never have to.

But the kids will – the hard way.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami of Ohio, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

Julia Friedman, a member of the Sharks team coached by her sister Rebecca, scores a run. (Photo by Louise Chang.)

We were in the field and there was a runner on second. I yelled a reminder from the dugout that we could only get an out at first base. The batter hit a soft grounder right to my shortstop, who fielded it cleanly and made a perfect toss to the third baseman.

The two girls looked quite pleased with themselves. It would have been a textbook play – that is, if anyone had been running to third base. Despite our extensive discussions in practice of what makes a force play, some of the girls still seemed completely confused. I felt that no matter how much I tried, I was doing something wrong as the coach. I felt like I was in over my head and worried that I wouldn’t be able to help the girls. I began to wonder if I had made a mistake taking on a team as head coach.

My dad had been my sister’s Ann Arbor Rec & Ed softball coach since first grade and all I had asked was if I could help out occasionally. He instead offered me the head coach position and a group of 16 nine-year-old girls. Having absolutely no coaching experience, I thought the job sounded like fun and relatively little work. I accepted eagerly.

When it came time to start preparing for my first practice, I began to realize that it might not be as easy as I had anticipated.

Coach Rebecca Friedman with Katrina Sadis. (Photo by Wendy Binkley.)

It was five minutes to 7 p.m. and I was standing at Winchell Park going over again and again in my head the drills and stations I had planned for the Sharks’ first practice. How am I supposed to keep 16 fourth-grade girls focused for an hour and a half? What if they don’t like me? What if they ask questions I can’t answer? I knew my concerns were typical for a first-time coach, but this made me no less uneasy. I worked hard to appear as collected as possible for that first hour and a half and, to my surprise, got through it without any major train wrecks.

The girls seemed enthusiastic for the most part and generally listened without my having to grovel. I had learned my first lesson: If I acted as though I knew I was in charge, the girls would listen, but I needed to add a little more conviction to my normally soft voice. I felt guilty at first using anything other than a soothing tone, but I quickly learned they could handle something a little harsher. This proved to be at least somewhat effective, especially with the small blonde girl who seemed determined to convince me she could throw just as well sitting down as she could standing.

Coach Rebecca Friedman leads the Sharks in a stretching exercise. (Photo by Louise Chang.)

At 8:30 the girls packed up and headed towards their waiting parents. “Thanks, Coach!” a few of them called out. I guess that’s when it hit me that it was my team. I felt an immediate attachment to each of the girls.

As our first game approached, I encountered the wonderful behind-the-scenes coach’s responsibilities. First, I had to e-mail all the parents and let them know when and where to be for each game. I seemed to be constantly using that e-mail list throughout the season.

Making the lineup turned out to be much more time-consuming than I had anticipated. I had to balance the innings the girls were in the infield, outfield, or on the bench; I couldn’t have a girl “cheer” two innings in a row; and I couldn’t have anyone sit twice before another player sat once.

The Sharks weren't happy with their bland white T-shirts – they later decided to tie-dye them red and blue. (Photo by Wendy Binkley.)

I also had to accept that while putting the best players at the busier positions might win more games, it wasn’t exactly in the Rec & Ed spirit. When the jerseys arrived, I had to distribute them, doing the best I could to give each girl the size she ordered and a number she happy with. The girls weren’t too happy with the boring white jerseys we were assigned, so we decided to tie-dye them, making us the coolest looking team in the league.

When it was finally game time, the nerves that had subsided after that first practice returned. I saw flashes of my team being demolished every game, with angry girls and parents blaming me. It turned out I didn’t have to worry. The girls played far beyond my expectations, fielding balls I was sure would roll between their legs and catching throws I thought would fly beyond them.

I coached first base when my team was at bat, and gave each girl a high five when she got a hit. I loved their look of excitement when they realized they had done something well. We won that game 30-24. Yes, this is a softball score. Although I hadn’t done anything on the field, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment, with a lot of relief as well.

My nerves were gone after that and I enjoyed practically every minute of coaching. After the team won the next two games, I was feeling good about our undefeated record. It didn’t last. With half the team missing, we lost the next game. I took it harder than the girls. We won the next two but then set into a rough patch, losing three games in a row.

Katrina Sadis gets ready to run as Rebecca Friedman coaches from beside first base. (Photo by Louise Chang.)

I went into the last game as nervous as I had been for the first. We were playing the Cardinals, an intensely coached team that had lost only one game all season and had wiped us out the previous week. My girls were completely oblivious to the fact that, with five wins and four losses, our winning record was at stake. I tried to convince myself it really wasn’t all that important. But … I really wanted the win.

I tried to keep low expectations and just hoped that some of the lessons I had been drilling into the girls’ heads all season would stick. Maybe they would actually run through first base without staring at the balls they had just hit, or would catch the ball with their glove facing up instead of flopping it around upside down.

The game was close and nerve-wracking throughout. My girls were hitting well, executing plays we had gone over in practice, and, for the most part, throwing to bases where runners were actually headed. But the other team was doing the same. We went into the last inning tied. My girls scored four runs. However, at that age, four runs can disappear before you know it.

Their first batter hit a pop fly right to my second baseman. She held out her glove and the ball fell right in – and to my surprise, stayed there. One down, two to go. One batter got on base but we got two quick force outs to close them out. We had won. The girls started jumping and screaming with excitement. I had to force myself to act mature and not join in.

Isabella Binkley, left, claps after Samantha Restorick doused the coach with water at an end-of-the-season celebration at Dairy Queen. (Photo by Wendy Binkley.)

After the game I handed out participation trophies to each girl. Even though they still would have received them if we had lost each game, I loved how excited they got when they saw the box of shiny plastic statues.

After making the girls sit through an end-of-the-year speech, I decided to celebrate at Dairy Queen. Eating our ice cream, having staring contests, laughing together, and even having a cup of ice cold water poured over my head on DQ’s back benches is one of my favorite memories of the season.

It was the last time I would be surrounded by a sea of blue and red tie-dyed Sharks. I was sad that the season was at its end. I wanted a few more games to see how much more the girls could improve, and how much more I could show them. I made sure to give each girl a hug as she gave me her last high-pitched, “Thanks, Coach!”

A team photo of the Sharks. (Photo by Wendy Binkley.)

About the writer: Rebecca Friedman, an intern with The Ann Arbor Chronicle, will be a senior this fall at Huron High School.