June 14, 2014 · 6:37 pm

How soccer is like a David Lynch movie, and other mysteries

I started writing about soccer in 1980. I was on the Tulsa World sports staff and, initially, wrote an occasional sidebar on the Tulsa Roughnecks of the North American Soccer League. Later, I became a more regular fixture on the soccer beat, and covered the Roughnecks during their strange run to the 1983 Soccer Bowl title.

A lot of sports writers brought up on balls and strikes and first downs didn’t like covering a sport in which a 1-1 draw was an exciting result, but I did. I can’t even say why, exactly. Maybe it was the foreignness of it. Soccer in those days was as exotic to most Americans as Dr. Who and sushi. The United States had not played in a World Cup in 30 years and wouldn’t for another 10.The North American Soccer League required each team to have at least three U.S. or Canadian players on the field at all times; a lot of those were goalkeepers and naturalized Europeans. American field players were miles behind the rest of the world, athletically and technically.

Soccer has certainly grown over the past 35 years. The U.S. has qualified for every World Cup since 1990. It’s best players now hold their own in the best leagues in the world. For the most part, though, I would have to say we still don’t get it.

My theory is that soccer is just too random and too unstructured for Americans to fully comprehend or appreciate. Soccer is a game with very few rules, and the ones it does have are often arbitrarily applied. It is officiated by a single referee responsible for a playing area larger than an American football field, with players scattered from one end to the the other and sideline to sideline. Yes, he has two assistants, and those assistants have been given more responsibility in recent years, but the referee is still in charge. What he says go. Unlike American timed sports, where an impersonal scoreboard clock ticks down the final seconds of a football or basketball game, the referee alone decides the moment a soccer match ends. His decisions carry enormous weight. By sending a player off or awarding a penalty kick, he alters the game in a way not even a baseball umpire or basketball referee can.

Every time a flag drops in an American football game, seven or eight guys in striped shirts get together to decide whether there was a penalty or not. In soccer, one man blows a whistle and that’s pretty much it.

Americans are bottom-line kind of people. They want results. All that dribbling and passing and juggling is swell but if it comes to naught 99 times out of 100, we figure we might as well go to the ballet. And about half the goals that are scored look like accidents. The ball gets blasted into a crowd, it ricochets off two or three players and goes in the net off a defender.

Every sport is a form of performance art, but soccer is more free-form than most, certainly more free-form than baseball or football and even more than professional basketball. It is a game of both structure and creativity, and we Americans seem to have trouble wrapping our minds around it.

For me, soccer is a little like a David Lynch movie. I don’t always understand it, but I can’t stop watching.

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June 11, 2014 · 9:41 pm

Hard red winter wheat

Wheat harvest began on the family farm today. We are luckier than many Oklahoma wheat farmers; it has been dry this year, but not as dry as it’s been further north, west and south. We’ll have a crop. Maybe not a great crop, but a crop.

The hard red winter wheat grown in Oklahoma and the rest of the southern plains is descended from a tough strain, sometimes called Turkey red, brought to this country in the mid-19th century by Mennonite immigrants from the Crimea. According to tradition, the first kernels were smuggled into the United States inside two little girls’ dolls. From those two dolls, the story goes, came America’s amber waves of grain.

Hard red winter wheat is planted in the fall and used for grazing during the winter and early spring. Or was, before the prolonged drought and crop failures of recent years played havoc with the cattle business. The wheat grown in Oklahoma is used mostly for bread and baking.

Further north, wheat is planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, and generally used for pastas.

So there you have it. Nothing too exciting. But for the next several weeks farmers in the western half of the state, those lucky enough to have crop, will be working day and night to bring in their crops of what and barley so the rest of us can east toast every morning.

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June 9, 2014 · 8:09 pm

Three counties could decide Oklahoma’s next U.S. Senator

The Republican primary coming up June 24, and the runoff likely to follow, could be Oklahoma’s most important election in a decade. The supposed frontrunners, T.W. Shannon and James Lankford, are young men who could easily represent the state in Washington for the next quarter century. Sure, there will be a general election in November with two other names on the ballot, but the Republican primary is the election that matters.

And it will be largely decided by just three of Oklahoma’s 77 counties.

Oklahoma, Tulsa and Cleveland counties account for nearly half of the state’s 860,000 registered Republicans. Add Canadian County and the total goes above 50 percent.

Notwithstanding early strength in the northern tier of counties, the Oklahoma GOP has always been an urban party. It is one reason it had so much difficulty in the the first sixty years of statehood. Up until about 1970, a Democrat could win a statewide general election without carrying Oklahoma or Tulsa counties. Those days are long gone.

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June 7, 2014 · 11:55 am

The story that never goes away

In late 1999, I was assigned to pick up the Tulsa World’s coverage of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission. As part of that assignment, I was to begin collecting materials for our own files.

At that time, most newspapers’ primary research resources were microfilm of past copies and “clip files.” The latter were so-called because each day’s editions were cut up, or “clipped,” and the individual stories placed in envelopes filed by subject. In newspaper parlance, these stories are known as “clips.” Thus, clip files.

Our clip files on Tulsa’s May 31-June 1, 1921 clip file was sparse, to say the least. The oldest clip was from 1949, was just one paragraph long, and had the riot’s date wrong. There was nothing particularly unusual about this, by the way. Our files contained very few clips on any subject that predated World War II, and the ones we did have seemed to be completely random. Our pre-war photo collection was even scantier and more haphazard.

By the time I became involved with researching and writing about the riot, quite a lot of work had been done preserving the oral history, going back to the early 1970s. Comparatively little, on the other hand, had been toward compiling and analyzing contemporary written accounts of the riot. Because my background was in newspapers, and because part of my assignment was to compile an archive for the newspaper, that is where I began.

I knew the basic outline of the story, but really didn’t know what I would find once I started digging into the microfilm. The commonly held belief, I knew, was that the city’s two daily newspapers at the time, the morning World and afternoon Tribune, had written little or nothing about the riot, and whatever they did report was almost certainly unreliable. But our executive editor, Joe Worley, told me to find what I could and let the chips fall.

What I found was a treasure trove of information, although sometimes in form that only someone familiar with newspapers — and especially the World and the Tribune — could fully appreciate. The World, with a small staff, put out four editions the night and morning of the riot, and while the reporting was sometimes confused and contradictory it was plentiful. The riot dominated the front pages of the newspapers throughout the summer of 1921.

Over the last 14 1/2 years, I’ve read every issue of the World from June 1, 1920 through the end of 1921, and ever 1921 issue of the Tribune. Those, in turn, have led me to city and county records, state archives, countless publications and innumerable on-line archives.

This much I’ve learned: the story is both simpler and more complex than most people imagine.

My friend Michelle Place at the Tulsa Historical Society said recently that THS still gets more inquiries about the riot than any other subject. I can believe this. It is a fascinating, maddening subject I think about, research or write about almost every day.

For me, it has become a story that never goes away.

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June 4, 2014 · 8:35 pm

June 4, 2014 Oklahoma’s most unlikely congressman

Americans grumble about how crazy the members of Congress sometimes act, but Oklahoma had one who was downright certifiable.

His name was Manuel Herrick, and he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1920 through an improbable fluke and Herrick’s own persistence.

Herrick’s mother believed him to be literally the second coming of Jesus Christ, and called him “Emmanuel.” Manuel, as he preferred to be called, was similarly delusional. In 1893, after he was arrested trying to rob a train, Herrick was ruled insane and institutionalized. When he got out, he tried to establish himself as a preacher but no church would have him. He ran for a number of local offices in Noble County, where the Herrick family had settled in 1892, with no success. In 1918 he received a total of 56 votes as an independent candidate for Oklahoma’s Eighth Congressional District.

In 1920, Herrick filed as a Republican. He had little chance against the Republican incumbent, Dick Morgan. Morgan, in fact, was so popular no other Republican bothered to file against him. There was just one problem: Morgan died on the last day of the filing while traveling out of state. Herrick became the GOP’s candidate, and in the Republican landslide of 1920, he won with relative ease.

In Washington, Herrick created a furor by announcing he intended to conduct a beauty contest in order to chose his wife; he wound up being sued by one of the women when no marriage proposal ensued. Herrick was defeated in 1922 and spent the next decade vainly trying to regain his place in Congress. He later moved to California, where he made one final bid for Congress.

In 1952, Manual Herrick froze to death in a blizzard.

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