RICKAROO - The New Mexico Sports Place

 I can’t say I knew Billy Tubbs, the irascible, inimitable college basketball coach who won 641 games at Lamar, Oklahoma, TCU and Lamar again, who died on Sunday at age 85. But I remember him well. Very well. Among the memories: In January 1997, Tubbs brought his TCU Horned Frogs to the Pit to play New Mexico, at the time a Western Athletic Conference rival. He refused to use Albuquerque’s mile-high altitude as an excuse for a loss that night. In fact, he refused to acknowledge the altitude. “The game was played indoors,” he explained.  Oh, OK.  The following summer, TCU transfer power forward Damion Walker signed with New Mexico. Tubbs was furious, believing UNM had contacted Walker before his release from his scholarship at TCU — a violation, if true, of NCAA rules. Lobos coach Dave Bliss denied any such impropriety. That January, at the end of a UNM blowout with the Lobos approaching the century mark, Tubbs called two timeouts in the final minutes. Both teams had their...

On Monday (May 11), in response to a query from a friend,  I pored through the Albuquerque Journal’s obituary listings for August 2011. I didn’t find what my friend was looking for. I did find an obituary notice for Lillian Cantrell, age 100, who died on Aug. 10 of that year.  Oh my goodness. This had to be the Lillian Cantrell who worked for my family as a housekeeper — the term at the time was “cleaning lady” from roughly 1957-69.  What a very hard life she had.  Lillian lived in a poor section of Albuquerque’s South Valley. She made her living cleaning, doing laundry, etc., for ours and other households. Her husband had deserted her and left her with three children, two of whom had a disability  (I don’t remember exactly what the disability was). Her other son died young, I believe in a car crash. Yet, Lillian was unfailingly cheerful. She loved our first Welsh Terrier, Terry, and got along better than some of us did with our second, Binky, who ha...

Reacting to my recent blog about the 1983 Final Four in Albuquerque, Dennis Latta, then sports editor of the Albuquerque Journal, emailed me with recollections not just of Final Four week but of that entire NCAA Tournament and how the Journal covered it. Forthwith:  Your note made me stop and think about that 1983 Final Four and I thought I would pass along some of the things I remembered. When we were preparing, I went to a weekly  Tuesday  meeting with Frankie (McCarty, managing editor) and crew. I never went so she was surprised to see me there. I told her we should coordinate coverage, and she informed me that they didn't need anything for A1 on a sports event. But Susan (Stiger) and the woman who was head of that weekly women's magazine we printed (Pat Reed) stood up and told her it was a very big event. So Frankie informed me that they would assign someone from the city desk, she didn't want anyone from sports writing for A1. That needed a real rep...

This morning, my friend and former Albuquerque Journal colleague Chris Tomasson direct messaged me with a reminder that today is the 37th anniversary of North Carolina State’s unforgettable victory over Houston at the Pit.  Why not, wrote Chris, now the Minnesota Vikings beat writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, tweet out some memories? Great idea. But why not blog some memories instead? That Final Four week was a week like no other in my memory for the Journal sports staff. Dennis Latta, our sports editor, made sure everyone was involved.  I was a bit disappointed when Dennis did not schedule me to cover that Saturday’s semifinals between Houston-Louisville and NC State-Georgia. But he did assign me to do a sidebar on Sunday’s Coaches All-American all-star game. My subject was Kentucky guard Dirk Minniefield, who happened to be a cousin of former Lobo Darryl Minniefield.  During the week, I’d done a story about an appearance by then-UNM coach Gary Colson at a...

Let me start, first of all, by wishing everyone a happy holiday season and a happy and prosperous new year. Let me follow that, though, by saying that in my very humble opinion whoever invented the term “politically correct” was an idiot. (If that offends anyone, I’m deeply sorry). What I think is what I think and what I believe is what I believe, and anyone who dismisses my thoughts and beliefs as politically correct is merely saying those thoughts and beliefs run counter to his/her thoughts and beliefs. The PC thing is simply a label and a weapon — and a stupid one. As for the flip side, people who proudly label themselves as politically incorrect, like HBO’s Bill Maher, are really saying “I’m better and smarter than the rest of you.” Pure arrogance. With this in mind, let me proceed with my No Class lumps of coal: Sunday, Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield saw fit to once again taunt former Browns head coach and current Cincinnati Bengals assistant Hue Jackso...

A while back, someone decided the plus-minus category that long has been a part of hockey statistics should be applied to basketball as well. I don’t closely follow hockey, but I’ve always assumed plus-minus is of value there, where it originated. In basketball, in my humble opinion, plus-minus is as useful as a fork in a soup kitchen. The concept is so simple that, on its face, it would seem to make sense. It measures how a team does when a particular player is in the game. A plus number means a team outscored the opposition when that player was on the court; a minus number means the opposite.  In practice, plus-minus simply doesn’t compute.  Example: the New Mexico Lobos’ 82-70 victory over Central Arkansas on Sunday afternoon at Dreamstyle Arena in Albuquerque. The final statistics show UNM senior guard Anthony Mathis with a team-best plus-16. They show Lobos junior forward/post Carlton Bragg with a team-worst minus-4.  Those numbers are virtually meanin...

As Mike Locksley became the likely candidate to become Maryland’s next head football coach, stories in the media invariably mentioned the off-the-field behavioral problems he experienced while the head coach at the University of New Mexico (2009-11).  Fair? Of course. What one has said and done in the past never goes away, especially in the Internet/social media era. (Just ask Kevin Hart). That’s all behind him, Locksley said, and Maryland believes. He was introduced on Thursday as the  Terrapins’ new coach.  As one who covered Locksley’s tenure at New Mexico, first as a columnist, then as a beat writer, I believe as well that the off-the-field issues that dogged him in Albuquerque will not reoccur in College Park. It’s on-the-field issues that concern me. Regarding the off-the-field stuff — an office manager’s sex-discrimination complaint, a physical altercation with a wide receivers coach, alleged intimidation of a UNM student newspaper reporter at a sports b...