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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
Benson keeping
WAC ship afloatYOU keep an eye on those WAC teams that just left town, and let me know how that works out.
(They are, as cowboy guy George Strait once warbled, "gone as a girl can get." And you thought I only knew Barry Manilow lyrics.)
Or, you could choose to focus on the University of Hawaii, on athletic director Herman Frazier, to see what UH's next move is in this time of potential crisis.
But instead, as SMU, Tulsa and Rice amble off into that Central time zone sunset, I'm looking at one man.
The Commish. Karl Benson.
If it had to come to this, then I have to see what he does now.
It is the responsibility of the commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference to be its ultimate champion, yes, but Benson has always gone above and beyond that call. Nobody confronts doom with a smile the way Benson does. No one spins like him, nobody believes.
This is the WAC we're talking about, remember. Its geography has been ridiculed. Its level of play has, but for a few exceptional cases, been on the nation's lower end. Its television deals haven't been great. It had already fallen apart once.
And almost every member institution had greener pastures on its mind, was just a couple of key phone calls away from jumping ship. (The rest of the WAC isn't so much mad today as regretting it got beaten to the punch.)
And yet somehow, up to this point, Benson had been able to hold everything together through sheer will and unbelievable optimism.
You have to admire the man.
He could find opportunity at the bottom of an avalanche.
He'd see the silver lining if he was swept away in a funnel cloud.
He'd stand in front of a tsunami and hold out his hand to say "stop."
And for five years, he did.
This is a guy who, while in the middle of a publicity blitz for the Bracket Buster events designed specifically to enhance "mid-majors," stubbornly insisted there was no such thing.
Nobody would run down his conference, even while helping it.
He wouldn't let you call the WAC "mid-" anything (even if it was).
This is the commissioner who, as several members of his conference had one eye on the door if not one foot out of it, went around asking everyone to voluntarily agree to a penalty in the millions of dollars if they were to leave the league.
(Uh ... no thanks. But good luck with that.)
Still, Benson pushed on.
He called the WAC an "incredible" conference.
You can't find anyone outside the conference to say that.
You almost can't find anyone inside the conference to say that.
Proof? Well, yesterday was it, the scary scenario everyone had dreaded, waited for, since it happened last.
So I'm watching Benson now. I can't wait to see how he bounces back, how he handles this.
He would have made a great employee at the old Star-Bulletin, reporting to work each day under a death watch, insisting the tide was about to turn.
And we all saw how that one turned out.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com
