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The Wigwam Weekly - March 26, 2021
DerekJohnson
Administrator, Swaye's Wigwam Posts: 62,606 
Editor's note: Normally, The Wigwam Weekly appears in Swaye's Wigwam (private board for those who donate $129/yr). But once every 6-8 weeks, it will appear on the main board at Hardcore Husky. This is one of those weeks.
I hereby award the Post of the Week honors to.... myself!
In a thread where @BennyBeaver was once again chiming in with his usual nonsense just to be a jackass, it occurred to me that Benny is a lot like Ruprecht from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I posted a gif of this scene where Ruprecht is overturning vases just to show that he can. That's our Benny.
MASS EXODUS FROM THE HOP
So there's now a logjam of players fleeing the UW basketball program. Can you cite any other time in college basketball history that a program recruits two of the nation's top ten prep stars and two years later the team is the WORST in Division I, half the roster is fleeing the ship and the AD won't fire the head coach? The 2021-22 season is setting up to be a complete misery. In a time where the UW athletic department has been pressuring their donors to be "all in", they are already setting themselves up for a lame duck season of epic proportions. This is every bit as bad as the Mariners gutting their roster and signaling to their fans that this will be a 5-year rebuilding program (after two decades of rebuilding). But at least the Mariners offer a vague pretense of winning at some fuzzy date in the distant future. The UW basketball program is a dumpster fire on roller skates and the athletic director can't or won't do anything to salvage the near future. And given the current political climate, a woman AD is not going to be fired by a woman university president unless there is a massive scandal. That isn't going to happen. So the basketball program is screwed for the foreseeable future. Do you trust Jen Cohen to fix it? (This is not a rhetorical question, dear readers). It's hard to find evidence to give fans optimism.
I reflected last week about how I've interviewed hundreds of Husky players but have never spoken with Tony Parrish. This led me to remember the only player I interviewed where I was star-struck and did a subpar job. That would've been the great running back Napoleon Kaufman. I interviewed Nip (or was it Nap?) twice and both times I sounded like a clumsy DJ conducting an interview on a low-wattage college radio station on a Tuesday afternoon. I remember one exchange that went something like this:
Derek: Then there was that opening kickoff of the 1992 Rose Bowl where you got shoe-stringed tackled at midfield.
Napoleon: I remember that well.
Derek: It would've been so cool if you could have gone all the way!
Derek's inner voice: Derek, WTF are you doing?
Anyway, Napoleon was the alpha and the omega for this guy as far as Husky football players go. I loved everything about him.
One story he told me was from his freshman year at Washington. Here he was, this hotshot recruit from Lompoc that everybody in America wanted. One day in practice he was standing near the 10-yard line about to field a kick during a drill. He muffed it and the ball bounded off to the side. Napoleon casually jogged over to pick it up. But head coach Don James happened to be standing about twenty feet away and witnessed the loafing. James unleashed a verbal tirade at his star recruit, and this shocked Napoleon. It showed that there wouldn't be any favoritism especially when not doing things "the right way".
At the time Napoleon told me that story, he'd already abruptly left the Oakland Raiders in the prime of his career and was a preacher at his Well Christian Church in California. He started the church in 2003 inside a tiny building in San Ramon with 15 families as his congregation. By the time I interviewed him in 2006 and 2007, he had grown his church considerably. By 2007, he was a far humbler person that he was during his UW days. He said that he looked back at that time with Coach James as one of those learning moments we all have in life.
Here's a quick tribute video to Napoleon's time at Washington.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RWB2cK0jUc
Alanna Dergan
I hereby award the Post of the Week honors to.... myself!
In a thread where @BennyBeaver was once again chiming in with his usual nonsense just to be a jackass, it occurred to me that Benny is a lot like Ruprecht from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I posted a gif of this scene where Ruprecht is overturning vases just to show that he can. That's our Benny.
MASS EXODUS FROM THE HOP
So there's now a logjam of players fleeing the UW basketball program. Can you cite any other time in college basketball history that a program recruits two of the nation's top ten prep stars and two years later the team is the WORST in Division I, half the roster is fleeing the ship and the AD won't fire the head coach? The 2021-22 season is setting up to be a complete misery. In a time where the UW athletic department has been pressuring their donors to be "all in", they are already setting themselves up for a lame duck season of epic proportions. This is every bit as bad as the Mariners gutting their roster and signaling to their fans that this will be a 5-year rebuilding program (after two decades of rebuilding). But at least the Mariners offer a vague pretense of winning at some fuzzy date in the distant future. The UW basketball program is a dumpster fire on roller skates and the athletic director can't or won't do anything to salvage the near future. And given the current political climate, a woman AD is not going to be fired by a woman university president unless there is a massive scandal. That isn't going to happen. So the basketball program is screwed for the foreseeable future. Do you trust Jen Cohen to fix it? (This is not a rhetorical question, dear readers). It's hard to find evidence to give fans optimism.
I reflected last week about how I've interviewed hundreds of Husky players but have never spoken with Tony Parrish. This led me to remember the only player I interviewed where I was star-struck and did a subpar job. That would've been the great running back Napoleon Kaufman. I interviewed Nip (or was it Nap?) twice and both times I sounded like a clumsy DJ conducting an interview on a low-wattage college radio station on a Tuesday afternoon. I remember one exchange that went something like this:
Derek: Then there was that opening kickoff of the 1992 Rose Bowl where you got shoe-stringed tackled at midfield.
Napoleon: I remember that well.
Derek: It would've been so cool if you could have gone all the way!
Derek's inner voice: Derek, WTF are you doing?
Anyway, Napoleon was the alpha and the omega for this guy as far as Husky football players go. I loved everything about him.
One story he told me was from his freshman year at Washington. Here he was, this hotshot recruit from Lompoc that everybody in America wanted. One day in practice he was standing near the 10-yard line about to field a kick during a drill. He muffed it and the ball bounded off to the side. Napoleon casually jogged over to pick it up. But head coach Don James happened to be standing about twenty feet away and witnessed the loafing. James unleashed a verbal tirade at his star recruit, and this shocked Napoleon. It showed that there wouldn't be any favoritism especially when not doing things "the right way".
At the time Napoleon told me that story, he'd already abruptly left the Oakland Raiders in the prime of his career and was a preacher at his Well Christian Church in California. He started the church in 2003 inside a tiny building in San Ramon with 15 families as his congregation. By the time I interviewed him in 2006 and 2007, he had grown his church considerably. By 2007, he was a far humbler person that he was during his UW days. He said that he looked back at that time with Coach James as one of those learning moments we all have in life.
Here's a quick tribute video to Napoleon's time at Washington.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RWB2cK0jUcAlanna Dergan
Comments
edit: Yep, the men's bball program should be abandoned. It's a train wreck.
FO, G
I didn't read it but your enthusiasm is something I like
Nail meet hammer. Game set match. Jen seat is as cool as the ice cubes in your freezer.
Nice picture selection though.