INSIDE: COMICS, OPINIONS & CLASSIFIEDS
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THE BULLETIN • SaTUrday, NovEmBEr 13, 2021
bendbulletin.com/sports
MEN’S COLLEGE
BASKETBALL
NBA COMMENTARY
Coaches vs. Racism
educating youth
Blazers president Chris McGowan announces resignation
WASHINGTON — The
executive director of the
Coaches vs. Racism cam-
paign that brought men’s
college basketball teams
from Michigan and Prairie
View A&M to the nation’s
capital says he found
inspiration for his new
project from Coaches vs.
Cancer.
“We wanted to make
it a full experience, rather
than just a basketball
game. Our vision is to
kind of model it after
Coaches vs. Cancer —
(Dick Vitale) and ESPN
have done a really good
job of keeping the nar-
rative alive of fighting
cancer,” Darryl Woods said
in a telephone interview.
“Cancer is a dreaded dis-
ease, and we look at rac-
ism as a disease. No one is
born with it, but it can be
brought upon you in vari-
ous ways.”
Coach Juwan How-
ard and his No. 6-ranked
Wolverines (1-0) will face
Prairie View A&M (0-2) in
a Big Ten vs. Southwest-
ern Athletic Conference
matchup Saturday night.
The inaugural Coaches
vs. Racism contest is
about more than the
game. Among other as-
sociated events, Michigan
was scheduled to visit the
National Museum of Afri-
can American History and
Culture on Friday.
“Part of our mission
is to educate, especially
with this current gener-
ation,” Woods said. “Our
message is bridging the
racial divide through
sports.”
He said his hope is to
eventually schedule “mul-
tiple games in multiple
cities” under the Coaches
vs. Racism banner, and
include women’s basket-
ball, as well as perhaps
other sports.
— Associated Press
BY JOHN CANZANO
The Oregonian
Craig Mitchelldyer/AP file
Portland Trail Blazers owner Jody Allen, center, watches warmups
with general manager Neil Olshey, left, and president Chris McGowan,
right, before the team’s game against the Denver Nuggets in Portland
in 2019.
Well, it wasn’t the resigna-
tion the franchise deserved
but when Chris McGowan an-
nounced on Friday that he’s de-
cided to leave the Trail Blazers
I wasn’t surprised.
He’s apparently had enough.
McGowan has long been
viewed as a rational, sane,
grounded corner of the dys-
functional NBA operation.
The team president told me on
Friday that his departure had
been in the works for months.
He resigned officially on Nov. 1
and when I asked the question
everyone will naturally ask,
McGowan offered, “My leaving
has nothing to do with that.”
That — is the independent
investigation the organiza-
tion is currently conducting. It
centers around allegations of
a toxic and hostile workplace
fostered by general manager
Neil Olshey.
The Blazers have hired an
independent law firm to re-
view complaints and presum-
ably wash Olshey’s mouth out
with a bar of soap and send
him packing. A franchise
source told me “we are no-
where near” close to complet-
ing the probe and didn’t expect
any other major announce-
ments on Friday.
Olshey stays on the job, for
now.
Jody Allen is still the owner.
Which is only to say that
Trail Blazers, Inc. didn’t get any
happier and healthier with this
personnel move. But we got a
good peek into how uncom-
fortable it must be to work in a
place that doesn’t line up with
your value system. McGowan
knows the optics and timing of
his resignation will raise ques-
tions. He could have stayed
on the job, per his contract,
through June but he threw in
the keys. Don’t miss the signifi-
cance of that.
Said one team source: “Good
for Chris. It’s tough to stick
around when you don’t share
the values of the organization
and it got worse when Jody ar-
rived. It’s just a bunch of bad
people treating good people
really bad.”
See Blazers / B2
PREP FOOTBALL PLAYOFFS
On a hot
streak
After navigating a tough schedule,
La Pine travels to Warrenton for a
Class 3A quarterfinal game Saturday
BY BRIAN RATHBONE • The Bulletin
The state football playoffs just began last
week, but La Pine feels as though it has been
in the postseason since the season began in
Ryan Brennecke/Bulletin file
early September.
La Pine’s Dylan Hankey (20) runs through the Junction City defense during a game earlier this season at La Pine
High School.
When the No. 5 Hawks (6-3) kick off their Class
3A quarterfinal game on the road against No. 4
Warrenton (7-2) at CMH Field in Astoria Satur-
day at 1 p.m., it will be the ninth time in their 10
games that they have faced a team that made the
playoffs.
On a four-game winning streak — which in-
cludes their first playoff win since 2000, 36-6 over
Amity last week — the Hawks have outscored op-
ponents 166-28 and are one of the most feared
teams in the 3A postseason.
“That was the purpose of the tough schedule,”
said La Pine coach Bo DeForest. “Most of the
teams we have played this year are still playing.”
But before the winning streak and before be-
coming the bullies of Friday nights, the Hawks
were a team staring at a losing record through their
first five games, and all three of the losses came
down to a handful of plays and as many points.
In many of those losses, DeForest said, it was his
team losing the game rather than the other team
beating them. In a late-September game against
Henley, a team that advanced to the 4A quarter-
finals, the Hawks turned the ball over four times,
committed untimely penalties, and yet still had a
chance to win until a game-winning drive stalled
inside the 10-yard line.
“If you look at our games in the past and the
games that we have lost, if we play clean in these
then we are winning by multiple touchdowns,” De-
Forest said. “We have shot ourselves in the foot.”
To compound the worry about the potential of
SKIING
Shiffrin ramping
up training
COPPER MOUNTAIN,
Colo. — Mikaela Shiffrin
is once again putting her
mending back through
extreme tests: double
training sessions filled
with twists, turns and
crouching into a tuck po-
sition to generate speed.
Outside of a little stiff-
ness — “Nothing that
is not manageable,” the
two-time Olympic gold
medalist said — every-
thing has checked out just
fine. Another good sign is
that Shiffrin was back out
there at the U.S. Ski Team’s
speed center at Copper
Mountain on Friday, 24
hours after her first dou-
ble dose of practice on
the slopes in weeks.
It’s a long way from
when her training was
hampered by a back ail-
ment she likened to a
muscle spasm or strain.
She remains intent on not
sitting out any upcoming
World Cup races.
One caveat: She will
be careful. There are big
goals ahead, after all, as
the Beijing Games ap-
proach in February.
“I’m moving in the
right direction. So that’s
comforting in a way,”
Shiffrin said. “(The back)
still gets aggravated
sometimes, but that was
a really, really big step
forward (double training
sessios).”
For now, her sched-
ule looks like this: Slalom
races next weekend in
Levi, Finland, followed by
a Nov. 27-28 stop in Kil-
lington, Vermont. Then
speed events at Lake Lou-
ise in Canada in early De-
cember.
— Associated Press
missing the playoffs, La Pine had its first game of
the season canceled due to poor air quality. When
there are only nine regular-season games, missing a
game can ruin playoff chances.
Even the head coach admitted that some were
concerned that perhaps they might be on the out-
side looking in at the 16-team 3A playoff bracket
after some of the early season losses. But DeFor-
est said he did not feel that from his players, who
showed up after losses ready to get back to work.
“Every Monday when we showed up they never
wavered,” DeForest said.
“It was unnecessary worry, kids were already
aware we are a great team. I was afraid that we were
buried in a hole with our schedule.”
See La Pine / B2
2022 WINTER GAMES
U.S. Olympians face uncertain road to Beijing
BY EDDIE PELLS
AP National Writer
DENVER — Making an
Olympic team is hard enough.
This winter, those who earn
their spots on the U.S. squad
might find it takes even more
work to get to Beijing.
Among the slow trickle of
information coming out of
China in advance of February’s
Olympics was news that, with
virtually no flights operating
between North America and
China, Olympians very well
might have to get to Beijing
through a still-undetermined
set of connecting flights that
could more than double their
travel time.
As things stand this month,
most of the 250 or so athletes
who make the U.S. team will
need to take a charter that con-
nects them to Beijing-bound
flights scheduled out of four
cities, none of which are in
North America.
The uncertainty has turned
what is already a logistical chal-
lenge — getting all these Olym-
pians and their thousands of
pounds of equipment to China
— into something even more
complex. And it has turned
what is already an event be-
set with unprecedented chal-
lenges — less freedom of move-
ment, a vaccine mandate and
the prospect of competing in
a country that is poised to re-
strict negative coverage, includ-
ing over widely documented
human-rights abuses — into
something even more difficult.
“We’re very used to being
flexible with our planning and
schedule,” U.S. skier Mikaela
Shiffrin said in a recent in-
terview with The Associated
Press. “But we very rarely don’t
have a plan at all. So that is defi-
nitely another added source of
stress.”
Difficult travel is nothing
new for Olympic athletes, and
their schedules have only be-
come more jumbled in the
wake of the COVID-19 pan-
demic that reshuffled compe-
tition schedules and, with New
Zealand mostly shut down,
made it even harder to find
snow during the offseason.
The U.S. Olympic team’s
sponsor, Delta Airlines, might
still be able to arrange charter
flights directly from the U.S. to
Beijing, but with 11 weeks until
the start of the Games, every-
thing is still up in the air.
As of this week, approved
flights into Beijing are expected
to depart from Tokyo, Seoul,
Hong Kong and Paris. The U.S.
ski and snowboard team’s ten-
tative plan is to charter flights
from Los Angeles to one of
the points in Asia, then switch
to Olympic charters. Further
complicating the issue is that
some of these athletes are in
Europe for the World Cup
season. Without normal com-
mercial options available, the
task of moving them around is
more difficult.
The U.S. Olympic and
Paralympic Committee is ul-
timately in charge of getting
Andy Wong/AP file
Visitors wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus
walk by a statue featuring Winter Olympics figure skating on display at
the Shougang Park in Beijing in May.
the ski team and the rest of the
U.S. teams, outside of hockey,
to Beijing. With an extra con-
nection through Asia, or a stop
in Europe, travel times could
be around double what would
normally be a 12-hour journey
from the U.S. West Coast to
Beijing.
Rick Adams, the USOPC’s
chief of sport performance,
said everyone was aware that
the quick turnaround after
the Tokyo Olympics and the
COVID-19 protocols “would
make planning for Beijing very
complex.”
“That said, we are exploring
all options to get our Olympic
and Paralympic athletes — as
well as support staff — to the
Games safely and efficiently,”
he said.
Much of the travel confusion
stems from U.S. and Chinese
carriers’ decisions to reduce the
number of flights between the
countries from more than 300
a week to single digits.
See Games / B2