A few days ago in the Twitterverse, the land of the droll and pithy, a crafty wisenheimer made an observation that merited a retweet along with some combination of social media shorthand scrawl and hieroglyphics.
Texas Tech, this poser, err, poster, proffered was no longer simply a meat judging school.
Fair enough. Indeed, the Red Raiders have been unstoppable in the art and science of assessing veined hinds and the such. Tech provides the livestock industry with the top picks in its draft – if it had a draft — one through five or 10 every year.
In truth, Tech’s dominant run and its superior players will have greater impact on the lives of others than what Patrick Mahomes will ever do receiving a football by way of a transfer from a, well, veined hind.
These are the future leaders of the industry. They feed people. One might run for president one day with the mantra, “a porterhouse on every grill.”
The tweet was in reference, however, to the giant leap of Texas Tech’s athletic program, which has become, by just about any standard (but one), elite, with programs that compete at the highest levels nationally.
Over the weekend, Texas Tech won the men’s national track and field championship and sent another baseball team to the College World Series after topping Oklahoma State on Sunday in a best two-out-of-three series at the Lubbock Super Regional.
In track, there are some who believe Divine Oduduru, who won his third and fourth individual national titles is the best 100/200 sprinter in NCAA history.
In baseball, the trip to Omaha will be the Red Raiders’ fourth in six seasons.
In basketball, Tech almost mastered March Madness, going all the way to the NCAA Tournament championship game.
“What I do know is June 26th or 27th, you can win the whole thing,” Tech baseball coach Tim Tadlock said. “We’re five games away from doing that, and that’s a long time. There’s going to be distractions along the way, but it’s usually play a game, take a day, play another game. So that’s not necessarily what I feel, but that’s our plan. We plan on playing.”
If Jarrett Culver goes in the top-10 of June’s NBA Draft, Texas Tech will be the only school to have three players selected in the top 10 in the MLB (Josh Jung), NBA, and NFL (Patrick Mahomes) drafts in the last five years.
Mahomes is the reigning NFL MVP.
When Tech hired Kirby Hocutt as athletic director in 2011, he was considered a rising star among a new generation of athletic administrators. In stints at Ohio University and Miami, he infused the departments with an enthusiastic leadership and build a reputation as a strong administrator in academics, brand marketing, facilities and fundraising.
In Lubbock, he has only enhanced that reputation.
During his tenure, the school has constructed a new indoor football facility, a new track complex and soon emerging from the South Plains will be a new, state-of-the-art practice facility for the basketball program, made possible by a generous gift for Dustin R. Womble. Womble, a Tech grad, sold his Interactive Computer Designs company to Tyler Technologies, a $6 billion company that sells software and services to local governments and schools.
In retirement, Womble discovered a new passion, Texas Tech basketball. Terry Fuller, a distinguished engineer from Texas Tech and president and founder of Phoenix PetroCorp, Inc., very much enjoys track. The guys at Double Eagle in Fort Worth are former Tech football players.
Hocutt, a native of Sherman, has built – in some cases, rebuilt after the Mike Leach affair — the relationships that matter.
He understands coaches and coaching, putting good people in positions and putting them in position to succeed. He hasn’t hit on all of them (Billy Gillispie, his first hire, and Kliff Kingsbury, his second), to be sure.
None of this matters, of course, not even national team chess championships in 2011 and 2012, without addressing the elephant in the room.
Football.
Without success in football, Tech is merely considered a very nice athletic program.
Matt Wells, you have your marching orders.
* * * * *
PressBox DFW’s Jim Reeves today eulogized former Rangers manager Frank Lucchesi, who died on Sunday at age 92.
Before arriving in Arlington, Lucchesi was fired by the Phillies, his first big-league managerial job, in 1972. He was ultimately replaced on a permanent basis by Danny Ozark, who led the Phillies to three division titles in 1976-78.
Ozark is part of a little known fact, one of five big-league managers who also played for the Fort Worth Cats.
Sparky Anderson, Bobby Bragan, Dick Williams and Maury Wills were the others.
* * * * *
Last week’s commemoration of the 75th anniversary of D-Day triggered the memory of the story of Leon Day, the Negro League star who landed on Normandy Beach driving an amphibious supply truck.
He was admittedly and understandably “scared to death” like just about every one of the 175,000 men in his same position.
“When we landed we were pretty close to the action because we could hear the small arms fire,” he told a Negro Leagues historian years later. One night, a wave of German fighter planes appeared, “dropping flares and [lighting] the beach up so bright you could have read a newspaper.”
Day evacuated his ammo-laden vehicle and jumped into a foxhole, manned by a white military policeman. As the German Luftwaffe strafed the beach, the MP shouted, “Who’s driving that [truck] out there?”
“I am,” Day said.
“What’s it got on it?”
“Ammunition.”
“Move that duck from out in front of this hole!” the MP shouted.
“Go out there and move it your own damn self!” Day said.
Day won Game 2 of the European Theater of Operations World Series, played a Nuremberg Stadium, in September 1945. More than 50,000 Army men watched a team of American soldiers stationed in France play a team of American soldiers in Germany for the opener.
