The Silence Is Deafening
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Daniel [email protected]
A county budget shortfall that caused a temporary 7-percent pay cut for county employees?[[In-content Ad]]Boring.
A series of personnel upheavals at Warsaw Police Department?
Yawn.
Redistricting of the Warsaw elementary schools?
We are now entering deep REM sleep.
You want people to get whipped up into a frenzy, don't burden them with mind-numbing topics like budgets, police and where their kids are going to school.
You want people yelling and foaming at the mouth, you gotta write about Warsaw Tiger Basketball.
After reading an Associated Press story about Duke in our sports section earlier this week where the Plumlee brothers were prominently featured, it got my mind churning.
So at the risk of opening up some old wounds, here we go.
For those living under a rock, a couple of years ago the sports editor here, Dale Hubler, wrote a column called "What's Wrong With Tiger Basketball?"
The column is basically Hubler yodeling about what was wrong with Warsaw Tiger basketball circa March 2006. (Part of what Hubler or any other sports guy is paid to do is yodel.)
At the end of the column he talks about how Miles and Mason Plumlee were going to transfer. All 13-foot-2 inches of them. Nowadays they're about 7-feet-tall each, but I digress.
Hubler was basically saying these two kids should have been playing more and wanted to know why they weren't. He also said they were likely Division I college prospects.
If I remember correctly, that column came out on a Saturday.
By Monday morning I couldn't go anywhere in this town without anyone who knew I wrote for the Times-Union asking me about the column.
And then things proceeded to get surreal. Letters cascaded into the newspaper.
Some people e-mailed, some people hand wrote letters, some even brought them in.
The consensus was that Hubler was wrong. The community backed Ogle and many people thought Hubler's assessment of the Plumlees was way off base. They just weren't that good.
In fact, a prominent member of the community told my boss, Gary Gerard, around that time, "There isn't one Division I basketball player on that team."
He was right.
There were two.
The Plumlees are now playing basketball for some little private school in North Carolina for a coach whose name starts with "K" and nobody can spell.
They also have a "little" brother who is deciding whether he wants a school like Notre Dame or Purdue to pay his tuition for playing basketball.
Now let me make a few things clear.
I like Doug Ogle. I covered him when I was in sports and he was always good to work with. He returned calls and he provided any information you needed.
Besides that, all a sportswriter cares about is what they're serving in the hospitality room.
Also, I don't know the Plumlees outside of maybe an interview during basketball season.
This column isn't an indictment on Ogle, who I think is a good guy.
In fact, I felt like it was wrong that while some people were coming out in defense of him, privately they were looking to push him out.
Ah, the Machiavellian nature of small-town America.
It was like Julius Caesar with a basketball and infinitely less interesting.
I just don't know what I'm more amazed at: the fervor after that column came out or the silence now that it seems at least when it came to the Plumlees, Hubler was right.
And I don't think I'm overreacting when it comes to how this community dealt with that situation.
It was a civil war of insanity and ridiculousness.
It exceeded the fervor of something that may have actually been important.
Taking the thousand-foot view, I feel like everyone came out of it unscathed.
Obviously, the Plumlees are doing fine.
Warsaw's doing fine too. The Tigers have had some winning seasons, won a sectional title and have a D-I player of their own in Nic Moore.
The fallout also allows high school sports geeks plenty of time to wonder "what if the Plumlees stayed" while sitting in their mom's basement.
But in my time here, I've never seen the community rally over something quite like the Plumlee fiasco.
Nobody lost their job, nobody got in trouble with the law and nobody was ostracized.
Yet they held a town hall meeting about the basketball team that was eerily similar to a scene from the movie "Hoosiers".
A town hall meeting!?!?
Luckily nobody was screaming that Ogle was a socialist or the Plumlees were actually from Kenya.
Now nearly four years later, all I can do is sit back and wonder: What is there left to care about in this post-Plumlee world we live in?
A county budget shortfall that caused a temporary 7-percent pay cut for county employees?[[In-content Ad]]Boring.
A series of personnel upheavals at Warsaw Police Department?
Yawn.
Redistricting of the Warsaw elementary schools?
We are now entering deep REM sleep.
You want people to get whipped up into a frenzy, don't burden them with mind-numbing topics like budgets, police and where their kids are going to school.
You want people yelling and foaming at the mouth, you gotta write about Warsaw Tiger Basketball.
After reading an Associated Press story about Duke in our sports section earlier this week where the Plumlee brothers were prominently featured, it got my mind churning.
So at the risk of opening up some old wounds, here we go.
For those living under a rock, a couple of years ago the sports editor here, Dale Hubler, wrote a column called "What's Wrong With Tiger Basketball?"
The column is basically Hubler yodeling about what was wrong with Warsaw Tiger basketball circa March 2006. (Part of what Hubler or any other sports guy is paid to do is yodel.)
At the end of the column he talks about how Miles and Mason Plumlee were going to transfer. All 13-foot-2 inches of them. Nowadays they're about 7-feet-tall each, but I digress.
Hubler was basically saying these two kids should have been playing more and wanted to know why they weren't. He also said they were likely Division I college prospects.
If I remember correctly, that column came out on a Saturday.
By Monday morning I couldn't go anywhere in this town without anyone who knew I wrote for the Times-Union asking me about the column.
And then things proceeded to get surreal. Letters cascaded into the newspaper.
Some people e-mailed, some people hand wrote letters, some even brought them in.
The consensus was that Hubler was wrong. The community backed Ogle and many people thought Hubler's assessment of the Plumlees was way off base. They just weren't that good.
In fact, a prominent member of the community told my boss, Gary Gerard, around that time, "There isn't one Division I basketball player on that team."
He was right.
There were two.
The Plumlees are now playing basketball for some little private school in North Carolina for a coach whose name starts with "K" and nobody can spell.
They also have a "little" brother who is deciding whether he wants a school like Notre Dame or Purdue to pay his tuition for playing basketball.
Now let me make a few things clear.
I like Doug Ogle. I covered him when I was in sports and he was always good to work with. He returned calls and he provided any information you needed.
Besides that, all a sportswriter cares about is what they're serving in the hospitality room.
Also, I don't know the Plumlees outside of maybe an interview during basketball season.
This column isn't an indictment on Ogle, who I think is a good guy.
In fact, I felt like it was wrong that while some people were coming out in defense of him, privately they were looking to push him out.
Ah, the Machiavellian nature of small-town America.
It was like Julius Caesar with a basketball and infinitely less interesting.
I just don't know what I'm more amazed at: the fervor after that column came out or the silence now that it seems at least when it came to the Plumlees, Hubler was right.
And I don't think I'm overreacting when it comes to how this community dealt with that situation.
It was a civil war of insanity and ridiculousness.
It exceeded the fervor of something that may have actually been important.
Taking the thousand-foot view, I feel like everyone came out of it unscathed.
Obviously, the Plumlees are doing fine.
Warsaw's doing fine too. The Tigers have had some winning seasons, won a sectional title and have a D-I player of their own in Nic Moore.
The fallout also allows high school sports geeks plenty of time to wonder "what if the Plumlees stayed" while sitting in their mom's basement.
But in my time here, I've never seen the community rally over something quite like the Plumlee fiasco.
Nobody lost their job, nobody got in trouble with the law and nobody was ostracized.
Yet they held a town hall meeting about the basketball team that was eerily similar to a scene from the movie "Hoosiers".
A town hall meeting!?!?
Luckily nobody was screaming that Ogle was a socialist or the Plumlees were actually from Kenya.
Now nearly four years later, all I can do is sit back and wonder: What is there left to care about in this post-Plumlee world we live in?
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