Column: Mayo’s trip about more than hoops

Published 11:09 pm Sunday, November 26, 2006

Dalton High School product Whitney Mayo has spent the last week in the nexus of the entertainment industry — and the Tennessee Tech freshman is hoping this is just her first exposure to some of the brighter lights.

An aspiring sideline reporter, Mayo and her teammates on the women’s basketball team traveled to Malibu, Calif., a postcard-perfect 27-mile strip of Pacific coastline on the west side of Los Angeles County. There the Lady Eaglettes played two games against host Pepperdine and Virginia Tech, losing both to fall to 1-3 on the season.

But make no mistake, there are worse places to spend a holiday.

It was Mayo’s first trip to California. “She was very excited about that,” her father, Bill, said Saturday. Mayo also was excited about touring Universal Studios and seeing Rodeo Drive, one of the most prodigious shopping districts in the world.

Bill, Lisa and their children Cameron and Hannah missed Whitney at the table with them this Thanksgiving, but were glad she had the chance to absorb new experiences 2,221.4 miles from the Carpet Capital.

“We’re thankful,” Bill said simply.

Whitney has been hampered by a sore ankle during Tennessee Tech’s first four games of the season. She hurt the ankle “about two weeks” before the Lady Eaglettes’ season-opening 92-75 win over Lambuth on Nov. 13, Bill said.

The injury has limited Mayo to 1.5 minutes in two games, but she buried one of her signature 3-pointers this weekend — a sign she’s on the mend.

With luck, Whitney might be back in Los Angeles in the future and reporting on the sidelines for a game like Saturday night’s Notre Dame-USC showdown. She’s studying communications in Cookeville with that objective in mind.

“That’s her dream,” Bill said. “She wants to be in front of the cameras on ESPN. She loves football and it’s something she’s always wanted to do.”

REST IN PEACE: I was troubled by the suicide of former Philadelphia Eagles hard-hitting safety Andre Waters three days before Thanksgiving. Waters, 44, had just completed his first year as defensive coordinator at Fort Valley State.

Simply, “Dirty Waters” once was the nastiest player on the nastiest defense in the land. You didn’t only lose to the Eagles’ rough-house “Gang Green” defenses of the late 1980s and early 1990s, you usually got hurt doing so.

Waters earned the reputation as one of the league’s dirtiest players, yet was as respected for his talents as he was reviled for some of his tactics. The reality is that Waters wasn’t so much a dirty player as he was the most inclined and least inhibited to come in and deliver a late hit.

They teach kids to hit ‘em and hit ‘em hard in Belle Glade, Fla., the deplorably impoverished environment that grew Waters and former New Orleans Saints hell-raising linebacker Rickey Jackson. Locals call it “The Muck,” and you don’t get from the center of the Florida Everglades to the center of the NFL by playing the game meekly.

Waters was as self-made a player as the NFL has seen in the last 20 years. Fatherless and dirt poor as a youth, he went from the youngest of 11 children on “The Muck” to a scrawny defensive back at Pahokee High School to non-scholarship player at tiny Division II Cheyney (Pa.) to an undrafted linchpin of Buddy Ryan’s “46” defense in Philadelphia.

What a country.

As a boy, Waters once spent Thanksgiving on his aunt’s farm in a rural part of central Florida, not far from where he would take his own life. Waters asked his aunt if he could take home one of her ducks as a pet. “Not until you get off The Muck, boy,” his aunt told him. He never forgot that.

Quietly pious, Waters was said to have a delicate side in sharp contrast to the image he sculpted on the field, and wanted to go into small-college coaching to make an impact on young people’s lives.

Three members of that fearsome “Gang Green” defense — Waters, the great Reggie White and Jerome Brown — are now dead and gone. None saw 45 years old. Each left plenty of memories. And may they all be at peace.

A FEW WORDS ON “FOOTBALL NIGHT IN AMERICA”: With Bob Costas involved, it’s usually got to be good, right?

Not quite.

NBC’s Sunday night pregame highlight show is a bloated, flyblown mess with seven different cooks — Costas, Sterling Sharpe, Jerome Bettis and Peter King among them — mucking up a simple dish. It shouldn’t be hard to bungle a highlight show, but NBC has managed to do just that after eight seasons away from the NFL.

ESPN occasionally takes it on the chin in this column space, and justifiably so. But ESPN’s “NFL Primetime” — a Sunday night highlight show that enjoyed a terrific 19-year run at the Worldwide Leader — is “Masterpiece Theatre” compared to “Football Night in America.”

Say what you will about ESPN, but “Primetime” was one of the few things it got right. By the end of its run, “Primetime” was practically a lost world unto itself compared to the rest of the dreck that passes for viewing on the network.



Keith A. Cerniglia is a sports writer for The Daily Citizen.