Four questions about 96 shots

& stories of two miscarriages of justice

4-11-2024 (issue No. 136)

This week:

• Video of the police killing of Dexter Reed leaves some key questions unanswered

• Two miscarriages of justice in the news bear further review

• Trump’s effort to move toward the middle on abortion

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• When is it too late to call a dead person ‘late’?

• A special guest on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week — Gregory Royal Pratt, whose new book on the Lori Lightfoot years is the talk of the town

• Quotables

• Re:Tweets — The Tweet Madness 2024 champions and a new dad-tweets poll highlight this week’s dive into Twitter humor

• Good Sports — On Caitlin Clark (again) and Nelly Korda

• Tune of the Week — “Just One of the Guys” by Jenny Lewis nominated by reader Steven K

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

Video of the police killing of Dexter Reed leaves some key questions unanswered

1. A team of plainclothes tactical officers pulled over a driver for failure to wear a seat belt?

On March 21, five plainclothes Chicago police officers in the Humboldt Park neighborhood pulled over an SUV driven by Dexter Reed, 26, touching off a ghastly series of events that ended with Reed firing his gun and striking one of the officers. then being killed in a hail of an estimated 96 bullets.

Reports say his offense was not wearing a seat belt. But this screen grab from the video taken by a nearby porch camera shows the police vehicle, on the left, overtaking Reed’s vehicle just before Reed pulled over to the curb:

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability “is uncertain how the officers could have seen this seat belt violation given their location relative to Reed’s vehicle and the dark tints on Reed’s vehicle windows.” wrote COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten in an open letter to police Superintendent Larry Snelling “This evidence raises serious concerns about the validity of the traffic stop that led to the officers’ encounter with Reed.”

I share her skepticism and wonder how well the story of the reason for the stop will hold up under the scrutiny of further investigation.

2. Reed thought it was his best and only option to open fire on one of the officers?

Police say, and the videos released Tuesday clearly show, that Reed fired first, wounding an officer standing near his passenger door in the hand. How many shots he fired is still undetermined — some reports say 11 — but firing even one shot at a police officer is an invitation to draw significant and likely fatal return fire.

The suggestion that Reed might not have known that the men and women surrounding his car were police officers and not, say, carjackers isn’t credible. Their vehicle was displaying the telltale flashing tail lights of police cars.

But even if the armed people confronting Reed were carjackers, he had one option as they surrounded his car with guns drawn: Comply. Resisting police orders very seldom ends well. And if those orders are unfair or unlawful, your best and only recourse is to file complaints or lawsuits afterwards.

I wish Mayor Brandon Johnson had been explicit on that point during his remarks to the media Tuesday morning.

He did say “Shooting a police officer can never be condoned. … I will never stand for that, and neither will the city of Chicago.”

But he did not say “Fight the police in court, where you might win, never on the streets, where you’ll never win.”

3. Aren’t police better trained at de-escalation techniques than what we saw in those videos?

In the body-cam footage we see this traffic stop go straight to 11, with guns drawn and F-bombs shouted almost immediately. Yes, police are trained to take absolute command of situations, and even routine traffic stops can turn dangerous. They must be on their guard at all times and expect the unexpected. But once it was clear Reed wasn’t cooperating — he refused to open his car door or lower a tinted rear window so police could see if there were any passengers in the back seat — it seemed like a time to step back and assess the options as well as the potential dangers.

This police how-to training video seems commonsensical.

4. 96 shots? Really?

I know it’s easy to armchair quarterback decisions made under danger and extreme duress when adrenaline and fear are running high and a fellow officer has been shot, but the fusillade of return fire, particularly those several shots that were fired with Reed already face down on the pavement behind his car seems so excessive as to be irrationally frenzied.

We’ll wait for the autopsy results to see how many of those bullets struck him, but the optics — and the sound of all those shots ringing out in 41 seconds — aren’t good.

Thursday’s Tribune editorial makes this contrary point:

So, are we now going to criticize — or, as some want, prosecute — police who fail to count how many bullets are flying their way before shooting back and ensuring the number of shots is “proportional?” Even after a fellow officer has been shot? We are asking officers to risk their lives every day on the streets of a city awash in guns, many of them illegal. (Reed was facing past charges for illegal gun use.) Requiring cops to respond “proportionately” when someone is shooting at them not only is unreasonable; it will make recruiting new officers even harder.

Criticize, maybe. We do want police to keep their heads and use lethal force judiciously, even in highly charged circumstances. It’s not just responsible but necessary to review every last element of this confrontation to ask if, in retrospect, there were better ways to handle it.

On the exoneration watch

Demetrius Johnson

This one ought to be easy for Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Wednesday, Demetrius Johnson went before the Illinois Prisoner Review Board seeking a full pardon for his conviction 18 years ago on charges that he was a felon in possession of a firearm.

On August 11, 2006, Johnson “was on his way home from his job as a driver for Nav-Tech, a navigation IT company,” according to his clemency petition with the board. “He was found with a weapon during a stop for a traffic violation, and he told police that he kept the gun for protection.”

He’d been released from prison two years earlier after serving nearly 14 years of a 25-year sentence for a murder and attempted murder that occurred in 1991 when he was 15. And he was in clear violation of Illinois law that states:

It is unlawful for a person to knowingly possess … any firearm or any firearm ammunition if the person has been convicted of a felony under the laws of this State or any other jurisdiction

Under those circumstances, “Johnson knew he had no viable option other than to plead guilty … and he was sentenced to 3 1/2 years,” his lawyers wrote.

The wrinkle is that Johnson was innocent of those crimes in 1991 — another victim of corrupt, disgraced homicide detective Reynaldo Guevara, who buried exculpatory evidence and lied about it at Johnson’s trial. But it was not until 2019 that the courts recognized this fact, overturned his conviction and granted him a certificate of innocence in the 1991 case.

So his 2006 conviction was based on his wrongful status as a convicted felon, making it, in retrospect, “absurd, unjust, and unreasonable,” in the words of attorney Joshua Tepfer of the Exoneration Project. Until recently, the state has opposed vacating that 2006 conviction because, prosecutors argued, “the status of the prior felony conviction at the time that the defendant possesses the firearm controls, regardless of whether that prior conviction might later be invalidated.”

Astonishingly, the Illinois Appellate Court agreed with this twisted logic in 2021, and the Illinois Supreme Court last March deadlocked on the matter (because one justice recused herself).

With the 2006 felony conviction still on his record, Johnson has had to endure personal and professional setbacks, according to Tepfer, though he has been doing well:

Johnson has … built a career as a well-known and respected youth basketball coach. He began coaching when his Church asked him to coach his son’s basketball team. Since then, he has continued to coach youth teams all over the city, was invited to the Junior NBA Summit, and is currently coaching a team for Joakim Noah’s 2023 One City Basketball League tournament. In 2021, he was invited by the Chicago Bulls as a special guest after his exoneration.

Today, Johnson lives on the west side with his two sons, Shane and Elliot, and runs his own barbershop, Kut Close Barbershop. Johnson’s commitment to his community, however, still trumps his own personal business interests. Johnson offers free haircuts for the students who attend the two high schools right across from the shop, and he is currently collecting clothes, supplies, and toys for the South American immigrants who are moving to the area. He recently started providing moving services with his own sprint truck, and he is motivated and excited to grow this new business.

The state offered no objections to his petition on Wednesday morning and indeed last month Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx released a letter that ought to end the dispute.

Pritzker should act quickly to remedy this situation by giving Johnson a full pardon.

Anthony Robinson

The Sun-Times reported this week on another wrongful murder conviction that has been overturned by the courts.

In January 2013 … (Anthony Robinson) was identified by police as a gunman who sprinted after Kelvin Jemison in front of the Washington Park Homes and gunned Jemison down.

But:

In late 2012, Robinson (had been) shot multiple times in his leg and foot and endured multiple painful surgeries and a long recovery that left him unable to walk without crutches. … X-rays helped prove Robinson’s innocence. Based on a report from an orthopedic surgeon, which included images of pins and screws implanted in his foot and ankle, an appeals court sent Robinson’s case back to the judge who convicted him.

That Cook County Judge, James M. Obbish, had convicted Robinson in 2014 despite the recantation of the one witness against Robinson, a gang member, and despite video evidence from the crime scene along with the testimony of two other witnesses that excluded Robinson. Rob Warden detailed the case in 2019 for Injustice Watch.

Although nothing beyond (the recanted testimony) linked Robinson to the crime—no physical evidence, no confession—Obbish found him guilty, branding (the) recantation “incredibly unbelievable.”

In September 2017, a unanimous panel of the First District Illinois Appellate Court affirmed Robinson’s conviction and 55-year sentence. Justice Joy V. Cunningham wrote the opinion, holding in essence that the conviction could stand on uncorroborated, recanted, prior statements—despite credible, exculpatory eyewitness testimony corroborated by video evidence. Justices Mary Katherine Rochford and Mathias W. Delort concurred in the opinion, which the Illinois Supreme Court declined to review.

The medical evidence, put forward by the Exoneration Project, did not figure into the Appellate Court’s deliberations, though the evidence that court did have was already so flimsy that Warden wrote the case tempted him to unleash “a stream of invectives.”

Prosecutors moved on March 12 to vacate Robinson’s conviction but Obbish — who, as the trial judge, certainly knew he’d been party to a miscarriage of justice — let Robinson languish in prison for nearly four more weeks before freeing him Monday from Stateville Correctional Center.

The unnecessary delay was just the cruel topper on a clusterfuck of bad police work, cynical prosecution, utterly incompetent representation by a public defender and obtuse judging.

And it explains yet again why I’ve repeatedly said over the years that our justice system does not deserve to have the power to execute people.

What Trump didn’t say about abortion

“Republicans are getting what they said they wanted on abortion,” tweeted former Tribune metro editor Mark Jacob after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a near total ban on the procedure in the state this week, mirroring an upcoming near-total ban in Florida. “And the voters will punish them for it. This is the dog catching the car, and then jumping in front of it.”

Yes. The animating logic of opponents to abortion rights leads them right into promoting restrictions on the procedure that are deeply unpopular. If human life worthy of legal protection begins at conception, and that the circumstances of that conception — rape or incest — does not minimize those protections.

Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll, Feb 20-28, 2024

And here is a Washington Post graphic showing where state lawmakers have enacted these deeply unpopular bans:

Likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump released a video statement Monday that seemed to want to have it both ways. Here are the relevant passages:

My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be. At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people. …

Now it's up to the states to do the right thing. Like Ronald Reagan, I am strongly in favor of exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. You must follow your heart on this issue, but remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and, in fact, to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline

He didn’t say he’d protect access to abortion-inducing medications, what limit he personally endorses of whether he would sign a national abortion ban should such legislation ever cross his desk (highly unlikely given the power of minority parties to throttle bills in the U.S. Senate).

Wednesday Trump told reporters he would not sign a national ban, but given his propensity to lie and change positions on whim, no serious person could possibly credit the assertion. From CNN:

As a 2016 presidential candidate, Trump embraced a federal abortion ban as he sought to consolidate Republican support for his unexpected ascension to GOP nominee. He sent a letter to anti-abortion leaders committing to signing legislation that would have criminalized abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for instances in which the life of the mother is at risk or cases involving rape or incest.

Trump reiterated his support for the bill in 2018 when he was president, saying at a March for Life rally, “I strongly supported the House of Representatives’ ‘Pain-Capable’ bill, which would end painful, late-term abortions nationwide, and I call upon the Senate to pass this important law and send it to my desk for signing.

In recent months, Trump had suggested he could back a 15-week abortion ban, saying in a radio interview last month “15 weeks seems to be a number that people are agreeing at.” However, he ultimately sided with advisers who encouraged him to punt the issue to the states.

Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, blistered her uncle on Substack:

Donald might have thought he was making his anti-abortion rhetoric more palatable by suggesting he thinks abortion should be left to the states, but he managed to piss off the two groups he needs: first is the right, who want him to pass a national ban; and second are independents, who don’t want states to ban abortion. Nice job, Donald.

I’ve long believed that the media, perhaps unintentionally, has been helping Donald on abortion by allowing him to obfuscate. Until he posted this video, Donald has been able to remain ambiguous and inconsistent on the issue. The media must hold Donald’s feet to the fire and scrutinize not only his stance but the potential implications for health care and women’s freedom.

Land of Linkin’

• Scraps from the Loft posts transcripts of certain TV shows, such as “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Last Week Tonight,” and “Family Guy.”

• On Tuesday I followed up on my commentary regarding deep cuts at Chicago Public Media (WBEZ-FM and the Sun-Times) with a look at the radio station’s executive compensation. In case you were wondering where a good part of your membership money goes.

• Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, blasted his news organization with an essay for the Free Press Substack headlined, “I’ve been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s how we lost America’s trust.” NPR’s David Folkenflik fired back on the NPR site.

• “Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative promise — Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project” is 950 pages of hard right talking points from the Heritage Foundation that should scare the crud out of anyone who worries about climate change or believes in abortion rights, LGBTQ rights and the necessity of regulation to rein in corporate malfeasance. Also scary, conservative enthusiasm for repealing the 22nd Amendment so that, if elected, Donald Trump could be president for life.

• “Why The 'Hormone-Free' Label On Your Chicken Is Basically Meaningless.” “The USDA prohibits the use of hormones in all poultry products. So, while the label isn't an explicit lie, it's misleading to suggest that hormone-free labeled chicken is any different from other chicken products in terms of hormone use.” Same with eggs.

• Mixed results from the Pew Research Center on “How Americans view states’ trans and gender identity policy proposals.” A 64% majority of Americans favor policies that protect transgender individuals from discrimination in jobs, housing and public space … (but) 58% say they would favor or strongly favor policies that require transgender athletes to compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth.”

• Roger Parloff, a senior editor at Lawfare, unpacks the latest in Donald Trump’s classified documents case.

• Steve Chapman: “The grave threats to abortion rights are sparking a backlash”

• In 2015, my then Chicago Tribune colleague Phil Rosenthal wrote about “When Philip K. Wrigley and the Chicago Cubs resisted the national anthem before games.”

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ Columnist Margaret Sullivan hails “a Trump headline that … began to change my mind about how the media should cover his unhinged rallies and speeches.”

■ War in the Mideast has put Vice President Harris and her Jewish husband in an awkward place.

■ “Nothing freakin’ happened”: This week’s solar eclipse disappointed USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “I was promised a descent into eternal darkness and an end to the ceaseless anguish of American life.”

■ The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri mocks eclipse alarmists, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I am a rational woman of faith, and I think maybe we should pray hard on Monday so the moon will release the sun and not eat it.”

■ Museum of Science and Mystery: Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg drags the Museum of Science and Industry for refusing to explain why it shut down last Wednesday afternoon—but he got an answer from the Air Force.

■ Square reader Barry Koehler condemned one of those “pink slime” fake partisan operations masquerading as local news—for publishing voters’ birth dates, addresses and voting histories. Then, mention of that blight prompted reader Steve Ignots to ask, “How do we, the great unwashed, fight against pink slime?” Some answers:

■ First of all: Take a shower. Or a bath.

■ Then, follow the unofficial motto of the gone-but-not-forgotten City News Bureau: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” If a suspect “pink slime” site doesn’t pass the stink test (for instance, check Google’s “News” tab to see what others have said about it), shoot it down wherever you see it: Tell friends sharing stuff from “pink slime” sites to stop it—and explain why.

■ Here’s more guidance from Poynter.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Nerding out on wording

How late is too late to call a dead person ‘late’?

An Associated Press story earlier this month about the North Carolina State men’s basketball team referred to the team’s coach in the 1980s as “the late Jim Valvano,” even though Valvano died in 1993. This prompted two questions in my mind:

1. At what point do we stop noting that someone has died? We would no longer say “the late President Lyndon Johnson.” He died 51 years ago. But we might say “the late President Ronald Reagan,” who died nearly 20 years ago.

The Columbia Journalism Review tackled this question and gave advice to writers in 2015:

There’s no easy answer. Garner’s Modern American Usage suggests that “anything more than five years or so is going to strike most readers as odd.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says others have suggested anywhere from 10 years to half a century, though “our evidence shows that the late can be applied to people whose lives were recent enough to exist at any point within living memory of the writer or speaker.” The best advice from M-W is to “use your own judgment to decide whether it is appropriate in a particular instance.” …

Take a moment to decide whether it’s even important to mention that the person is dead: Especially when speaking of someone who is eminent, it’s often not necessary at all, unless they are very recently dead. If a reader needs a reminder, do it not with the adjective “late,” but somewhere else: “Shortly before her death, she published her last book.” You could do it this way: “Edward ‘Ted’ Kennedy attended the school’s dedication in 1965. Kennedy died in 2009.” Perhaps putting it elsewhere can make you realize how unnecessary it is in the context to mention that someone is dead, as it is in that case. …

Let context guide you: A death notice of a 95-year-old does not need to mention that her parents were “the late Stanley and Martha Black.” It would be very surprising if they were survivors.

2. Why do we refer to the deceased as “late”? As the old quip has it, “If he’s dead, he ain’t late. He ain’t coming!”

The Online Etymology Dictionary says  “late” as a euphemism for “dead” dates back to the 15th century and is connected the adverb’s sense of "occurring in the latter part of a period of time" or “occurring in the near, or not too distant, past.”

The end of ‘the phone’?

Subtle usage shift note: Those of a certain age will remember when people referred to “the phone,” as in “I got up to answer the phone” or “he sure spends a lot of time on the phone.”

My observation is that, in the smartphone era when so many of us have abandoned our landlines for individual portable devices, “the phone” has become “my phone.”

“The phone” has become “my phone.”

Will it ever be known by another name? Calling the mini-computer you carry with you nearly everywhere a “phone” is odd given that speaking to others in real time is pretty far down the list of actions most of us use it for. Mine is an alarm clock/timer, a camera, a music/podcast player, a social media portal, a metronome, a calendar, a wayfinder, a recorder, a web browser and many other things more than it’s a phone.

Maybe someday it will be rebranded and “phone” will go the way of “VCR.”

Gregory Royal Pratt, Cate Plys, Brandon Pope, Eric Zorn, Marj Halperin and host John Williams

Minced Words

Gregory Royal Pratt, Tribune investigative reporter and author of the new book on Lori Lightfoot “The City is Up for Grabs” joined Cate Plys, Brandon Pope, Marj Halperin, host John Williams and me for this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. Before chatting about Pratt’s book the panel talked at length about the police shooting of Dexter Reed. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Our intro video this week was not particularly newsy:

Quotables

There is no bigger Trump fan in the world than I am. — Mike Ditka

Christian Nationalism is just white supremacy in Bible drag, which is odd as there are no white people in the Bible. @BettyBowers

Elon Musk is the Henry Ford of the 21st century, in that he builds cars and spews vile bullshit. Gian Doh

Yo' momma's so stupid, she thinks someone else being trans negatively impacts her in some way. — George Wallace

(Abortion) is a very personal issue that should be determined by each individual state. — Kari Lake

If  you don't accept that bodily autonomy is an essential unconditional liberty, it's a waste of time talking to you at all. No other liberties survive without that one, more fundamental than property rights: If you don't own yourself absolutely, you own nothing. — Pete Alex Harris

“I never thought leopards would eat my face,” says woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party – Adrian Bott

Returning my Trump Bible. It arrived with eight of the Ten Commandments already broken. — @RickAaron

Re: Tweets

Cut down the (inter)nets! They are the champions (post repeated from Tuesday’s Picayune Plus)

The Final Four battle for the top tweet of the last 12 months was extremely close.

The winner in the written tweets division was one of my all-time favorites:

Doctor: Your parents were in a car accident. Me: How are they? Doctor: They're extremely critical. Me: So they're awake, that's good. — @Browtweaten 

The name associated with this account is “Adam Cerious,” and I could find nothing about that person online except that he hails from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Just behind in second place was, “Me: It's not about how many times you fall, it's about how many times you get back up. Cop: That's not how field sobriety tests work. — @HenpeckedHal

In third place was “When I was a kid you could go to a store with just a dollar and come home with four comic books, three candy bars, two packs of trading cards, a bag of chips and a cold drink. Now they have cameras everywhere,” from an unknown source.

And in fourth place, “I love when my husband says, “Correct me if I’m wrong,” like I would pass up that opportunity. — @MumOfTw0 

This is the visual tweets winner.

I usually don’t credit these viral images to any one particular person because the provenance of these jokes is almost always murky. Credit is lost or stolen many times along the way (the same thing also happens with written tweets at times).

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

•  I was at a funeral yesterday and spiced things up by walking over to complete strangers and saying, "Ignore what everyone else thinks. I, personally, have no issue with you being here." — @GraniteDhuine

• Oh, please forgive me, I didn’t realize you had anecdotal evidence. — @the_worst_vibes

• If you’re a White Sox fan, I recommended that you stare directly at the sun during the eclipse so you wouldn’t have to see another minute of White Sox baseball this year. — @courtney883

• I’m really mad about how fast my life went from MySpace to MyChart. — unknown

• Can anyone recommend some new music? For context I mostly like music that is familiar and comforting and was meaningful to me at an earlier stage of my life. — @John_Attridge

• Does anyone know where I could find some unsolicited advice? Preferably from people with weird personality disorders who don’t know anything. — @dril

• First rule of Might Club: Never commit to anything. —  @_KimberleyAnna

• Jerk chicken is like regular chicken except it takes the last donut at work and calls everyone “chief.” — @BobTheSuit

• My favorite kind of deniability is plausible. — @mxmclain

• A solar eclipse makes me feel small and insignificant, like I’m not the center of the universe. Which is why I refused to look at it.  — @badbanana

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

And now, with apologies for the terrible puns, another special bonus “dad tweets” poll:

• Shout out to the people wondering what the opposite of in is.  

• A recent study found that six of the seven dwarfs aren’t happy.  

• Just finished reading a book called “Practical Jokes Involving Glue.” I couldn't put it down.

• I only know 25 letters of the alphabet. I don’t know Y. 

• I told my therapist I was afraid of spontaneously combusting, so she prescribed me an anti-inflammatory.  

• I caught my son chewing on electrical wires. So I grounded him. He's doing better currently and conducting himself properly.

• When a cannibal shows up late for dinner they end up getting the cold shoulder.  

• What do we want?A really fast car to drive past! When do we want it?NeeeYOWWWwww!

• I love the way the Earth rotates. It really makes my day. 

• If pronouncing my b's as v's makes me sound Russian, then Soviet. 

Vote here in the Dad tweets poll.

Usage note: To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Good Sports

To the victor belongs the MVP spoils?

Dominant center Camilla Cardoso of the victorious University of South Carolina Gamecocks was named the Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament even though, by most statistical measures, Iowa Hawkeye’s superstar Caitlin Clark deserved the honor.

• Cardoso averaged 16.6 points per game in the postseason, while Clark averaged 30 points

• Cardoso averaged 1.4 assists per game in the postseason, while Clark averaged 8.7 points

• Cardoso shot 56% from the free throw line in the postseason, while Clark shot 87%

Cardoso, who stands 6 feet 7 inches, did average 10.8 rebounds a game, better than Clark’s average of 7.7 rebounds per game, and Cardoso’s 17 boards in Sunday’s championship game were a big part of why South Carolina dominated Iowa to win the title.

And though there is a tradition of giving “most valuable” honors to a member of the team that wins it all, it’s hard to argue that Clark, with her phenomenal shooting range and pinpoint passing, wasn’t the individual standout player of the tournament.

Caitlin fever, which I have had a case of ever since seeing her highlight reel in the 2022-23 season, is based on her ability to hit very long range shots — fearless feats of prowess that few players in the world of any gender could match.

Due in significant part to Clark, the women’s NCAA final game drew more viewers than the men’s final for the first time ever (though the women’s game was on broadcast TV and the men’s game was on subscription channels). She is almost certain to be the first choice in the upcoming WNBA draft, and the league announced this week that 36 of the 40 games of the Indiana Fever, the team that owns that first pick, will be nationally televised.

“It’s more important for the game to share the spotlight,” said University of Connecticut standout Paige Bueckers “To grow the game and show all the stars of college basketball, not just focus on one particular player.”

She’s wrong.

Superstars are catnip to fans. We admire a good team, sure, but we can’t take our eyes off such phenomenal talents as Michael Jordan, Patrick Mahomes, Shohei Ohtani, Tiger Woods, Novak Djokovic, Lionel Messi, Serena Williams, Simone Biles., Caitlin Clark and now, I’m guessing …

… Nelly Korda

Korda, 25, has won her first four starts on the LPGA tour this year and, if she can maintain some of that dominance, could provide a Clarkian boost to women’s golf. The LPGA reports

Lorena Ochoa in 2008 was the last player to win four consecutive starts. Korda, the world's top-ranked player, will try to tie the record of five — set by Nancy Lopez in 1978 and matched by Annika Sorenstam in 2004-05 — (April 17-21) at the season's first major, The Chevron Championship outside Houston.

Korda is currently the No. 1-ranked player in the world and is said to have an almost perfect swing. From The Telegraph:

Korda’s swing is the Mona Lisa of golf, a multi-layered action of simplistic beauty. ….Korda swept onto the scene and threatened to take complete control with that seemingly magical mix of artistry and audacity.

At this time, her long-time coach explained to Telegraph Sport what made her special. “She is definitely the best driver of the ball I have ever seen,” said David Whelan, the former Tour pro from Sunderland. “She’s so accurate. And as pretty as it all is, she has the will as well and is not frightened to win. Nelly is dominating and I don’t see it stopping any time soon.”

Tune of the Week

I’ve been opening up Tune of the Week nominations in an effort to bring some newer sounds to the mix. I’ve asked readers to use the comments area for paid subscribers to leave nominations (post-2000 releases, please!) along with YouTube links and at least a few sentences explaining why the nominated song is meaningful or delightful to you. The following nomination is from Steven K.

I first heard “Just One of the Guys” from Jenny Lewis’ 2014 album “The Voyager” on WXRT, and became enamored of it. Nothing special at first, just a couple of chords being strummed in support of some pedestrian verse singing, and then — bam! — a gorgeous melodic hook takes us into a chorus that is nothing short of sublime. It is one of the millennium’s finest tunes.

In the video you’ll recognize Anne Hathaway, Kristen Stewart, and Brie Larson standing in for Lewis’ backing band, and you’ll dig the seemingly Peter Max-designed outfit and guitar that Lewis flaunts in her performance. Fun for everyone!

No matter how hard I try to be just one of the guys
There's a little something inside that won't let me
No matter how hard I try to have an open mind
There's a little clock inside that keeps tickin'
There's only one difference between you and me
When I look at myself all I can see
I'm just another lady without a baby

Zorn addendum: Music in Notes has an essay on this song. American Songwriter profiled Lewis in 2023.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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