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There are events in every person's life that affect change.

Sometimes these events are small, nearly unnoticeable...Bowling Green point guard Antonio Daniels wasn't so lucky.

On the morning of February 7, 1996, Antonio was awakened at 8:00 AM by Bowling Green State University head basketball coach, Jim Larranaga, and an assistant. Neither of the coaches could look at Antonio, they just kept looking at the floor. Antonio noticed this. Then the phone rang...it was Antonio's mom. She told him the news: Antonio's brother, Chris, was dead. Antonio's only reply was "No." Then he dropped the phone, rolled back over in bed and pulled the covers over his head in shocked disbelief. Chris was one year older than Antonio and was Antonio's hero.

Chris was the starting center for the University of Dayton. They had grown up together, played together, learned the game of basketball together and had been close their whole lives. Antonio considered Dayton for his college career as well, but they didn't seem serious in their recruitment. Still, the two would try to get to the other's games as often as possible, even though their schedules made it difficult. This is why Antonio played basketball two days after his brother's funeral.

The changes in Antonio were noticeable immediately. First physically, he had shaved his head, and changed his jersey number from 10 that he had worn his whole basketball life to 33, his brother's number. Mentally though, the changes were a bit more subtle and took more time to surface.

Bowling Green was playing Eastern Michigan who was ranked 23rd in the nation. The Falcons had been having a mediocre season and since no-one expected Antonio to play, most people wrote the game off. Chris Daniels had an opening in his schedule and was supposed to be at that game to watch Antonio play. This is why Antonio played.

The team seemed to pull together for Eastern, each player had a small black patch with Chris Daniels' #33 on their uniform. The fans were given brown ribbons in memory of Chris and to show their support for Antonio and his family. The Falcons hung tough with the faster and bigger Eagles of Eastern, so tough that the game came down to one last shot. Antonio got the ball, drove the length of the court and hit the shot for the Falcon win. As the buzzer sounded, Antonio made a victory lap of the court and pointed at his jersey, not being cocky, but as if to say, "This was for Chris."

Antonio Daniels has always been a good basketball player. In high school he led his Columbus St. Francis DeSales team in scoring as a senior (21.3 PPG) and averaged almost ten assists a game. He was named Division II player of the year in the state of Ohio as a senior and was well recruited out of high school.

Half-way through his Freshman year at BG, Antonio had already earned the starting point guard spot. He dished out almost four assists a game to go along with his 12.6 points per game average, numbers that earned him Mid-American Conference freshman of the year honors.

His sophomore and junior years saw continued steady play and solid numbers, but Antonio's upward curve had seemed to level off a bit, averaging 10.3 and 16 PPG for his sophomore and junior years respectively. Then Chris died.

Antonio says the death of his brother is the worst thing that has ever happened to him, nothing could be worse. He still thinks of his brother all the time and plays every game for him. Little things that used to affect him don't anymore.

As someone who has watched Antonio play in almost 75% of his collegiate games, this is the change I notice in him most: the little things don't affect him anymore. Antonio used to play with a big smile on his face all the time, now he looks and acts like he is all business...all the time. Antonio has been rock steady in his play this season, scoring over 20 points in six of the Falcons' eight games so far. Not coincidentally, the Falcons' only two losses came in the two sub-20 point games.

Antonio has never been a whiner, but in the past he did tend to hang his head after missing an easy shot, getting beaten off the dribble, or after a questionable call. Now, he plays right through these distractions.

This is Antonio's senior season at BG. In the Falcons' eight games so far he is averaging 21.8 PPG (3rd in MAC) and 7.5 assists (1st in MAC). He has the rare ability to find the open man, and also score from the point guard position. He also has the luxury, at 6'5" (he's always been listed at 6'4", but has grown since arriving at BG), of posting up opposing guards and even some small forwards. Antonio also has some serious hops! During the Falcons' Midnight Madness dunk contest, he took off from the foul-line and clanged the ball off the back of the rim, he jumped too far!

Antonio has NBA aspirations...and these may be well within his reach! After attending a Boston Celtics camp this past summer, Red Auerbach had many positive comments concerning Antonio's game. Antonio also plays in a summer league in Columbus with Jimmy Jackson and a few other NBA players. Antonio was second in the league in scoring this past summer and likes to brag about how he "dumped" 38 on J.J. while holding him to 24.

The death of a loved one is never easy, especially when it's your big brother who is a young, healthy athlete, and not to mention, your hero. Antonio has handled the situation with grace and strength. He may not realize it yet, but he has grown tremendously from this experience. On the court, it has made him a steadier, more intense basketball player. Off the court, when basketball is over, he will have the strength to be able to deal with anything.

© 1996, Grant Cummings

Warren St. John and I have lived parallel lives in many regards. We're the same age. We both have English degrees. We were both "born into" our fan status (which is how, St. John postulates, most fans choose their favorite team). Each of us has been reprimanded for showing too much emotion in press row. Both of us love tailgating. And we both have questioned our reasons for being a fan. The big difference between us is that Warren wrote a fantastic book about all of it while I read it. :-)

An accomplished writer for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Wired Magazine and other respected publications, Warren decided to take a hiatus from his "real job" in order to join, follow, and become a member of the Alabama Crimson Tide's legion of RV fans. Some of these die-hards start their tailgating for a Saturday game on Wednesday!! The number of RV's that attend 'Bama games is astronomical, and it's not just home games. This armada of land yachts travels en masse to road games as well. The owners of these vehicles are the John McLanes of the Die Hard fans... they're as die hard as they come!

Warren even gets bitten by the bug himself and ends up joining the group by getting his own RV, albeit a step or two below some of the million dollar plus rigs driven by several fans.

The appeal of this book for me came from several different directions. It was interesting to compare myself and some of my friends with the characters in this book. There's a lot of sport in this tome, game capsules, nostalgic looks back at Bear Bryant and more, but the real focus, and the real "star" of this book is the Alabama football fan.

I consider myself a pretty big fan, but I also feel a little strange about that sometimes. Warren addresses this and really nails what I like to call the "Snake Man" phenomenon when he writes, "One of the most comforting experiences for anyone who considers himself weird in some way is to find other people in the world who are, in the same way, weirder." Some of us are a little over-the-top sometimes... and I think we all feel better about our own fanaticism when we find someone who's ever farther gone! This book is full of them!

It was also comforting to see the parallel between myself and the couple (and dog) that first befriended Warren in his quest to become an RVer, the Bices. I spent years growing up seeing my dad enjoy the highest highs from BG victories... but I also saw him completely miserable, totally devastated when the team didn't play up to its potential, or came up short in a big game. I never quite understood it, but I was a chip off the old block for years, none-the-less. A BGSU loss would ruin my day, my week, or even my whole off-season... until something changed in me. I'm STILL not sure what caused it, but I learned to revel in the highs and just kind of slough off the lows. The Bices know that trick too.

The Bices somehow manage to enjoy all the upside of winning while limiting the downside of losing. It seems to me that's something akin to the fan's Holy Grail, the equivalent of figuring out how to drink without getting hung over, or to eat to excess without getting sick. Put in pill form, the Bice's unique psychology could earn them billions, but as it is, I'm forced to resort to the only palliative I know -- waiting and suffering until the hope of the next game shines through the gloom of the last.

The book reads fast, the prose is fantastic, and the characters are totally endearing. St. John's love-hate relationship with Alabama radio personality, Paul Finnebaum, made me both hate Finnebaum and feel sorry for him at the same time! The chicken farmer with the million dollar RV and the exec who obsesses about getting back home on his private jet within his own self-set window of opportunity whether he misses the end of the 'Bama game or not... they're just all awesome character sketches!

Get this book to learn a little more about yourself as a fan. St. John not only wrote a funny and incredibly readable look into the life of extreme fandom, he wrote a sociological gem! I'll leave you with one last quote from the book... "Winning never causes the fan to question the pursuit of being a fan, but losing almost always does."

Oh... one more thing... We, as Falcons, need to come up with the BGSU equivalent of 'Bama Bombs!! (Marichino cherries soaked in grain alcohol) I'm thinking dried apricots in Absolut might be a good start!!!

Check out Warren's site @ http://www.rammerjammeryellowhammer.com/

All excerpts re-printed with the permission of the author.

G

Originally I think it was just an experiment to see if I COULD do it. I owned a domain name and had a website, but had never done anything "interactive" with it, so I bought and downloaded some bulletin board software (DCForums) and got it up and running. I didn't really want to talk only with myself though, so I set it up with my dad in mind (BGHoward) and he told a few of his friends about it, billing it as a place to talk about BGSU sports online and it grew from there. http://www.pepperguy.com/ayziggy was the original URL I believe.

It didn't take long and friends told friends and there were 20, 30, then 50 regular members of the site. It looked like there was a need, so I decided to buy another domain name and take the site out on its own. Dad and I went back and forth between gobg.com and ay-ziggy-zoomba.com... I actually won that battle, thinking gobg.com looked funny. :-)

I think I registered the domain name in 2001...pretty early in the year. Dad was sick with his second bout with cancer, but he really enjoyed being involved with things. He was getting so excited about starting a regular column after his surgery to remove the metastatic cancer from his liver. His first one was going to be a how-to article on creating a Falcon helmet out of an old construction worker's helmet. :-)

Well, he never recovered from that surgery... he died on April 27, 2001. I vividly remember going back to the hotel that night in Columbus and posting the news on the site... My dad was one of the biggest early advocates of the site and when he died, I made a promise with myself to keep it going in his honor.

Well, in the past 4 years since dad has been gone, the site has gone through some changes and some amazing growth!! Over 700 registered users, 311,826 visits and 17,287,604 hits in 2004...it boggles my MIND!! The site has changed hosts out of necessity because the traffic was so heavy... I've run out of bandwidth allotment more than once... there have been growing pains, to be sure! Then Mike Williams contacted me and ended up putting together this gorgeous design that makes this the best looking fan-run site on the Internet... fantastic!!

I'm proud of this website. I'm proud that it's fan run, fan owned and fan directed! I have made a lot of contacts, I have scooped the news agencies, YOU ALL have contributed to a site with more information on BG sports than has ever been available in the past!! To think this all grew out of an experiment with HTML!

Having grown this site from its infancy to where it is today, I feel like the site is a reflection on me, I like to think it reflects my character, my values, my vision... maybe that shouldn't be the case, but it is. I don't like to settle for mediocrity... I feel that's what the forums had become... mediocre.

Maybe I set my expectations too high, but I don't think so. I was tired of wading through 25 crappy posts to find anything of substance. "But Grant, that's just the way the Internet is anymore." Well, that's not the way I want this site to be. It's that simple...

...more to come...

As of today, the forums are shut down. I'll bring them back eventually... but I want you all to think about them. Remember that you're a guest here. Yes, it's a site I run FOR YOU... I've always run it for you, I've always done it for BGSU and for the fans, but you know what? When you're a guest in someone else's house and you abuse those privelidges... they can kick you out. (don't anyone give me the "free-speech" bs either, the only speech that's protected on this site is mine...)

Do I sound like a prick right now? Most likely, but I don't really care.

The success of the Falcon football team has brought tons of new visitors to this website. Unfortunately, I fear many of those "new" people don't respect the community that has been established here. AND on the other side of the coin, many of the established members aren't very welcoming of these newcomers.

So... consider yoursleves scolded. I hate to be such an a-hole, but in all honesty, I don't know what else to do. I used to get great satisfaction out of running this site... now all I get is grief and disappointment. I don't know how to change that, so all I can do is bring it to your attention in hopes that I'm not the only one who has noticed these attitudinal changes and that you'll respect the fact that this site is here in memory of my dad; that to disrespect what this site has been is to disrespect his memory (in my mind).

Here's the link to my MS Walk plea once again... And you can email me here to bitch, moan, complain or whatever you feel you need to do.

Sorry I had to do this folks... I feel like a mean step-father, but you have no idea how frustrated I've been lately... I really DON'T want to even log in anymore because of the crap that I've been reading... Keep checking back... the forums WILL be back soon... until then... GO BG and ROLL ALONG!

-- Grant

(Edit: the next morning)
Upon re-reading this, it kind of comes across like I've shut down the forums because I haven't gotten the pledges for the MS Walk that I'd like to have received... in all honesty, that paragraph was added as an aside and really has nothing to do with the decision to make the move (and I have subsequently removed it)... I don't want anyone to feel obligated to give... I WOULD appreciate your support though, and have just been disappointed by the lack of feedback I've gotten this year...

The forum shutdown is soley due to the recent change in attitude and lack of respect for fellow fans... I apologize for that confusion.

As most of you who have been with the site for a while know, my beautiful wife, Maryellen, was diagnosed with MS back in 1999 after waking up blind in one eye. Since then, we've been on a quest to learn all there is to know about the disease and do all we can to help! Most recently, the MS Walk has been added to our list of MUST DO's every year. The walks raise funds for the National MS Society which is the leading charity for MS research and support.

Ay-Ziggy-Zoomba.com has helped support the cause the past couple of years and this year it pushed me to be the #10 fundraiser in the Toledo area!! (not bad when you consider thousands participated!!) WIth your help, I raised $1,145 for the cause. Maryellen raised $1,445, making her #6 on the list! Next year my personal goal is to raise $2000. I'm pretty sure it will happen!

Multiple Sclerosis is a debilitating disease of the nervous system that is caused by the loss of mylen... (Blah blah blah... if you want to know about all that stuff, visit WebMD.com or something). Truth is, MS SUCKS!!! It's something that, when you're living with it, it is ALWAYS there in the back of your mind because you NEVER know what is next or when. It can hit you out of the blue. Maryellen has woken up blind, she has felt like she's had a stroke, she has been hit with vertigo and pain... and none of this is gradual, it's BOOM, there's a new symptom. This is not only hard on the body, but also the mind, because you start wondering what's next.... when... It's hard on the family and friends too... BELIEVE ME! (I've always had a HUGE needle phobia, but I've been giving Maryellen a shot once a week for 4 years now!! I still get queezy and woozy every time. hahaha)

With Jordan's diagnosis comes a new phase in his life. MS treats all its patients differently. Some function w/o anyone ever knowing they have MS for years, others are less fortunate and have more severe symptoms right off the bat. All of that is unknown. What I DO KNOW is that the most important thing Jordan needs is support. From his friends, his coaches, his team, his family and from all of us. I applaud his public statement of having the disease. It's nothing to be ashamed of, and it's nothing that's going to change. What CAN change is the amount of public awareness the disease gets! In fact, I'm going to talk to the coaching staff and some university officials and see if I can't help organize an event, with Jordan's participation, to raise some MORE $ for the National MS Society.

Thanks again for your support the past few years. I will NEVER let you all forget that life is so much more than games. ;-) You should know that by now. DO SOMETHING!!!

I'll sign off with the motto of the MS Walk which goes like this:

Why We Walk...
   We Walk for those who cannot
      We walk for those we love
         We walk for hope
            We walk for a future free of MS

How about those Falcons, huh? I remember just a month or two ago people on the site were talking about single-digit wins this season. As of now, this team is 3-1 with winds against some quality teams and looks to be a much more coherent unit than the past couple of seasons.

I'll admit, during the off-season when we lost Ron Lewis and Chris Hobson and the rumors were spreading like wildfire about Steve Wright being gone too, I was wondering what the heck was going on. Shortly thereafter though, I received an email from Coach Dakich that had the following line in it:

"First of all - reports of the demise of Bowling Green basketball are greatly exaggerated."

The more I heard about the situation, the more I believed him too. This man, Dan Dakich, knows basketball, he knows young men, and he knows the system that he has implemented here at BGSU. It's a system that has received much scrutiny on this site. Here's what I've decided though; The system works WHEN everyone buys into it. The more players you have that AREN'T buying into it, the worse it's going to do.

If you've got a Kevin Netter who was apt to fly off and do his own thing on a whim, or a Ron Lewis who wants to be putting up 25 a game so that he can land a spot on an NBA roster, that's not part of the system. Ron was a hell of a baller, but I saw some things from Ron in his Freshman year that made me realize he wasn't buying into it. He'd be in the huddle rolling his eyes at what the coaches were saying; that's not the guy you want on the floor.

This year's team SEEMS to be of one mind. We've got a bunch of guys from the starting 5 all the way through 3rd year walk-on Pat Phillips who have bought into the system 100%. They don't seem to care who gets the points. They just want the W. They're diving for loose balls. They're getting floor burns. They're only allowing 59.5 points a game! That's DEFENSE baby! Anyone who has played organized basketball (or any sport for that matter) has heard a coach utter the phrase "Defense wins championships."

Now, are we going to go 26 - 1? Doubtful. There will be bumps along the way. But we've got Senior leadership, we've got guys up and down the bench with heart and guts, and most importantly, we've got ONE mindset this year. Larry Brown and the Pistons won the NBA championship last year with ONE mindset, to "do it the right way." I kind of see that in this Falcon team. We may not have the MAC POTY, we may not have a slew of MAC first-teamers, but if we continue on with that one mindset, with everyone buying into coach Dakich's system, we will win the right way!

Reports of the demise of BGSU Basketball WERE greatly exaggerated indeed!! It's easy to armchair quarterback, but it's the coach who knows his team best!

35 years... that would be a nice streak to end... I think we're ALL of one mindset on that!

When my dad died, I started to look at life differently. I started to realize that life isn't something you're working towards, life is something you're actively doing every day and you MUST make the most of it or it will be gone before you can. My dad worked for 25+ years with his sole aspiration being retirement. He was miserable in his job. He started the countdown to retirement years and years ahead of the actual day. He wasn't having any fun. Retirement came and, long story short, dad got cancer and died...never really getting to enjoy what he had only looked forward to for years and years.

Aaron, on the other hand, wasn't waiting around for retirement...he wasn't willing to settle. Aaron could have played immediately at some smaller schools, maybe he could have been a standout there like he was at Sandusky Perkins HS. That's not what he wanted. He didn't want to just "start the retirement countdown" and wait for things to happen later. He took matters into his own hands and actively chased his dream.

Aaron's HS track coach, Shane Burrows said, "(Aaron) had chances to go to smaller schools and probably play right away, but he wanted to play at Bowling Green."

As last evening went on, I started to put myself in the young man's shoes...imagining how he felt yesterday. He probably woke up with butterflies in his stomach for his first day of practice. I'd imagine he was walking on air to and from his classes yesterday, probably not paying a whole lot of attention to his professors as he anticipated putting the pads back on and maybe taking some contact. Aaron probably had one of the best days of his life. He realized his dream...the dream of becoming a Falcon. He went out on top.

I challenge us all to learn from the examples set forth by my dad and by Aaron Richardson. Live EVERY day! Chase your dreams, don't resign yourself to waiting around for things to happen. I owe a debt of gratitude to Aaron for reminding me of this amazingly important life rule.

So, during this time of sadness, think of where your life is at...are you chasing your dreams?? Or are you just tearing one page off of the countdown clock every day instead. Be sad...it's ok, but be proud too!! Aaron Richardson became one of us. It was his dream. Now, he's forever a Falcon! May God rest his soul in peace...