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Dick Cavett’s desk jockey déjà vu
Dick Cavett hasn’t hosted an actual talk show in a long time but occasionally he still settles behind a desk or a table to do a faux version for charity. A few years ago Turner Classic Movies featured him in a special tete-a-tete he did with Mel Brooks. TCM’s also showed some of his classic interviews with Hollywood legends. He also has DVDs out of his best programs with film and rock icons. The following piece appeared before the TCM specials. You’ll find several more stories by me about Cavett, whom I’ve had the chance to interview multiple times.
Dick Cavett’s desk jockey déjà vu
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
“The Dick Cavett Show. Ladies and gentlemen, Dick Cavett …… ”
That intro, silent for a generation, is back, thanks to Turner Classic Movies. The cable channel (Cox 55) is presenting interviews the Nebraska native comic, author, actor and talk-show host did with screen giants on his ABC late-night The Dick Cavett Show of the late 1960s, early 1970s. On Thursday nights this month and next, TCM resurrects these originals just as a new DVD is out with him and Hollywood legends.
In this spirit of revival, TCM’s produced an hour special, recreating Cavett’s old show. In it, he goes one-on-one with comic dynamo Mel Brooks before a live studio audience. The TCM special marks his desk jockey return of sorts. The Dick Cavett Show’s many incarnations over 30 years ranged from daytime and late-night runs on ABC to versions on CBS, PBS, USA and CNBC. A radio gig in 1998 was his last.
Cavett, born in Gibbon, raised in Lincoln, educated at Yale and schooled in comedy by some of the greats, displays the same ease and wit with Brooks as he did in his exchanges with Golden Age legends. Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Robert Mitchum and Alfred Hitchcock headline the guests he adroitly draws out and trades barbs with in the TCM re-airs.
It must be surreal for the 69-year-old to relive his talk show past. Indeed, as he glides on stage for the special, wearing a perplexed face, the first thing he utters, with senatorial incredulity, is, “That was dééjàà …… something, all over again.” The timing’s just right. “It puts me right back stage at our studio on 58th in New York, right next to the Zip Your Fly sign,” he says, switching from highbrow to low.
A call to his place in Manhattan finds him begging off an interview for another hour. He explains it’s so he has time to finish a letter to the New York Times in which he chides a staffer for her “absolutely, unforgivably erroneous, mean-spirited crappy review” of the special. It’s not the first time he’s taken on a Times’ scribe. His last diatribe, he says, was “to my amazement, spread …… all over the front page of the Sunday entertainment section.”
On the call back, he’s ready to get nostalgic about Hollywood royalty. The thought of those full-blooded figures reminds him today’s stars are, by comparison, “almost entirely” devoid of gravity or grandiosity. “Who would be Tracy or Fonda or Mitchum today? Who do we have? They just aren’t there,” he says. “Cagney (James), there’s nothing like him around. De Niro is about it.” He can’t put his finger on what this means, except, “ …… that’s something gone wrong in the gene pool or something.”
The mention of his odd 1973 show with Marlon Brando, then fronting the American Indian Movement, reminds Cavett how dismissive the actor was of his own craft. “Yes, because of his silly notion he kept peddling all his life that acting was a kind of offhand profession that anybody could do,” he says. “I don’t know if it was on the show or off, but he said, ‘You know, when they ask — Did you pee on the toilet seat? You lie and say no, and that’s acting and that’s all acting is.’ I know I did say to him, ‘In other words, I could have been as good a Stanley Kowalski as you?’ That kind of stopped him for a moment.”
Mitchum, “his eyelids at half-mast,” affected similar disdain for acting, despite all evidence to the contrary. “Yeah, he talked about walking through parts. That it was not really a manly profession,” Cavett says, “but Mitchum was a superb actor and anybody who thinks he wasn’t let’s see them get up and do what he did. He could have done Macbeth. I had to use pliers virtually to get him to admit he wrote poetry. I saw some of it and it was wonderful. He wrote music for some other things as well …… the score to the first movie he produced himself, Thunder Road.”
Of his hero Groucho, whom he did several shows with, Cavett says, “I knew a lot about him going in, so I wasn’t surprised by much, except by how much he liked to read and he was virtually always funny.” Groucho’s perfect one-liners came so fast and often, he says, “somebody should have been around” to record them.
A highlight for Cavett was writing for Groucho, among many temp hosts of The Tonight Show after Paar quit and before Johnny took over. “Groucho was the thrill, of course, for us writers or ‘the Shakespeares’ as he called us.”
Cavett first met Groucho and Woody Allen only a day apart. At the time Cavett wrote and coordinated on-air talent for Paar. Woody was a standup in New York clubs. “I was sent by the Paar show to scout this young man who they said had written for Sid Caesar when he was 17. I just thought, ‘I’ve got to know this guy.’ We met at the Blue Angel where he was appearing and vomiting back stage from stage fright, the master [emcee] making him go on and the audience sitting there talking during his fledgling act. He was a dud. His material was the greatest I’d ever heard. Genius.”
For those who only know the guarded sophisticate filmmaker Allen is today, Cavett says they “will be amazed he was ever a standup comic, in a period of his life he hated, and went on talk shows. Pure gold.”
Cavett, whose sardonic tone and neurotic persona make him a kind of WASPish Woody, would have killed to have been a staff writer, as Allen and Brooks were, for Caesar, whose stable included Neil Simon, Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart. “By the time I got to New York, damnit, Show of Shows was no longer,” Cavett says. He expresses similar regret to Brooks on the special: “God, I wish I’d been in the room with those guys.” When Cavett tells Mel he imagines those writing sessions as times when “countless gems were flying around the room,” Brooks deflates him with, “They could be counted. A lot of bulls*** flew across the room.”
Brooks played a wild, 2,500-year-old brewmeister to Cavett’s deadpan reporter in Ballantine Beer radio spots that Cavett says showcased Brooks’ “God-given, outrageous, eccentric comic talent.” The crazy Jew and placid Gentile played off each other well. During the special, Brooks ribs the host for being “spectacularly Gentile. You should be in a wax museum as THE Gentile.”
Cavett says there are enough star segments from his old show for more DVD-TCM revivals. His interviews with jazz greats will be on a forthcoming DVD. Still mourning the July death of his wife of 40 years, actress Carrie Nye, Cavett busies himself as much as he can. There’s still that letter to get out and so he excuses himself with his trademark, “I’ll be seeing ya.” We’ll be seeing you, too, Dick.
Check tunerclassicmovies.com for Cavett on TCM.
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Dick Cavett gets personal, still gets laughs
A celebrity I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing a half-dozen times or so in the last decade, Dick Cavett, breezed through Omaha in June and I didn’t even know it or else I would have tried to arrange interviewing him again. It never gets old. Neither seemingly does he. But I can solace in the fact that I did just happen to interview him by phone shortly before that in advance of his appearance at the Great American Comedy Festival in Norfolk, Neb., the hometown of his late friend and fellow talk show host, Johnny Carson. You can find my story on the festival, including some Cavett snippets, on this blog. The story I’m posting here I wrote based on a public speaking appearance he gave here a half-dozen years ago or. He addressed his battle with depression at a fund raiser for Community Alliance, a local mental health recovery organization. He managed to tell his story and to be funny at the same time. The blog also features the other Cavett stories I’ve completed over the years, including two major feature profiles. I look forward to whenever our paths cross again.
Dick Cavett gets personal, still gets laughs
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
On his recent Omaha visit, Dick Cavett revealed glimpses of himself as entertainer, raconteur, pundit and recovering clinical depression patient.
At the October 19 Omaha Press Club “Face on the Bar Room Floor” event, Cavett adroitly made with the quips and rejoinders that made him a talk show-meister from the late 1960s into the ‘90s. He only alluded to his depression. However, in a talk for the Community Alliance’s “Breaking the Silence” dinner the next night at the Holiday Inn Central, he described his odyssey with mental illness as “lots of pills” and “years on the couch.”
Amid the gloom, he said, “it’s so awful and so inexplicable and whatever you do to try and imagine it, you can’t. If there were a magic wand across the room on the table that would make you happy and give you everything you want, it would be too much trouble…to pick it up.”
His career as a host stalled after a manic-depressive episode prevented him from fulfilling a contract to front a radio program. He felt so low, he said, “that it became just too awful to get out of bed in that familiar way.”
His wife, actress Carrie Nye, has been a major support in his treatment and recovery. “She’s been very intuitive and very good about it. She’s the one who said, ‘You’ve got to turn yourself in,’ and because of that I did. It’s good to have somebody there.” Married since 1964, the couple has overseen the restoration of Tick Hall, their historic Montauk, Long Island home ravaged by fire in 1997.
In interviews, Cavett segues from anecdotes about his career to observations about his illness. He said depression poses many questions, is easily misunderstood, inflicts pain on others and takes a toll on the libido. Quoting Mort Sahl, he said, “Sex is great, if memory serves.”
It’s much how he was on his ABC show and later public-cable TV variations of it. He was the hip alternative to Johnny and Merv. While steeped in show biz history, the politically aware Cavett was more plugged into current events than his older counterparts. They favored small talk and shop talk to his substance and represented more middle-of-the-road mainstream views than his counterculture leanings.
Not that the former standup doesn’t cut up. His eloquent banter, filled with asides and non sequitirs, is not above the ribald. In what may be a first for an Omaha society speaking engagement, he ended his remarks, albeit as the punchline to a Groucho Marx joke, with, “f_ _ _ you.”
His ABC show was an eclectic melange of Vegas variety acts, extended interviews with serious artists and self-promoters hawking everything from faith to politics to pet projects. The sardonic Cavett wasn’t above name-dropping or gossip. Indeed, he still sprinkles his comments with juicy tidbits. Rare among TV personalities, he’s been willing to be himself or as close as TV allows. As he’s said, “It’s not you that does the show, it’s the show you that does it. When you go on, you take the show you with you, and when you go off, it’s the you-you, you take home.”
Wry, reflective and smart as hell, the ad-libber loves going off script, whether ruminating on “the anatomical roots” of Truman Capote’s “ridiculous voice” or the correct usages of forte or the unusual way Jack Benny stood while peeing. He’s also self-deprecating enough to acede a compulsion for trivia and minutae. “Annoying little things like that have me very unpopular in conversation,” he said.
By Jim Horan, ©Omaha Press Club
Then there’s his mellifluous bass voice. He uses it to underline the ironic musings and quips he delivers as the studied sophisticate and the mischevious brat that are equal parts of him. His dulcet tones can also resound with warm regard and sage insight, as in the University of Nebraska TV/radio spots he’s lent his voice to for years.
Vulnerable, if not as confessional as Jack Paar, who gave him his big TV break, Cavett’s unafraid to expose his serious and silly sides, often in the same monologue or interview. He doesn’t treat interviews as bits to hurry through, funny-up or dumb-down. As an emcee, he had conversations with guests, engaging them and, by extension, audiences, with exchanges that probed, grated, charmed and cajoled.
He negotiated answers with squirrely Marlon Brando. He told LSD prophet Timothy Leary “You’re full of crap.” He put Norman Mailer’s ego in its place with “Would you like another chair to contain your giant intellect?”He waxed poetic with John Neihardt. He never could draw out Spiro Agnew.
When not challenging taking public figures, the forever star struck Cavett bowed in the presence of their brilliance. One of his many booking coups was getting a reluctant Kate Hepburn for a studio interview, minus an audience. His nerves calmed when he noted “a slight tremor in her down stage cheek.” To his relief, “she was nervous as hell,” too.
A childhood molestation may have “chased” him into emotional distress. His depression first manifested itself at Yale. As a pro, he recalled the inexplicable apathy he felt on the eve of a Laurence Olivier interview, which he struggled through. “I just wanted to go home and get under my bed.” A curious thing about depression, he said, is its affective symptoms overwhelm the victim, but largely remain unseen. “It doesn’t look nearly as bad as you think it does.” That masking can obscure detection.
The gravity that earned Cavett an egg-head label explains why he never resonated with the masses the way fellow Nebraskan Johnny Carson did.
“I hated it whenever it came up and I wanted to say, If anyone thinks I’m an intellectual than the country’s in a very sad state. When people would say, ‘You’re trying to do a more literary show, aren’t you?’ — I’d say, ‘Oh, Jesus, no — I’m trying to do an entertainment show.’”
His comic persona is a complex of Bob Hope’s topical wisecracks, Jack Benny’s relaxed delivery, Paar’s anxious energy, Woody Allen’s neurotic analysis and Groucho’s irreverent bombast. There’s also a lot of Carson in him. Cavett was inspired by Carson, 10 years his senior, from the time he saw the Great Carsoni’s magic act. He followed a similar path as Carson, for whom he became a joke writer.
Their careers paralleled each other’s. He recalled a venerable on-air radio talent at Lincoln’s KFOR saying, ‘You know, Dick, you’re going to get up and out of here the way Johnny did.’ It was a poignant moment because it was a man in his middle-age saying, ‘I’m as far as I’m going to get and I have faced up to that, but you and Johnny…’ I didn’t know what to say.”
Cavett, who as a boy saw Hope perform at the Lincoln Colisieum, couldn’t imagine one day having the icon on his own show. Or being an intimate of Groucho’s. Or joining Carson as a TV desk jockey. Perhaps it was their shared background, but Carson had “a tremendous affection for me,” he said, “and it took someone else to point it out to me. It embarrased me.” Two Nebraskans hosting competing network talk shows, yet Cavett said, “I don’t think we ever did discuss how curious it was. I wish we had.”
Well aware they head “The List” of Nebraskans to find fame as TV performers, he speculates there’s “something about the place” to account for so many legends, but can’t pin it down.
Sharing Carson’s fondness for Nebraska, Cavett often returns. He re-enacted his talk show on stage one night last April for a Lincoln Public Library fundraiser. He’s long made driveabouts through the Sand Hills as a kind of pilgrimmage. “It’s one of the most gorgeous places in the world and it’s a blessing tourists don’t know about it or just don’t get it.”
As folklorist Roger Welsch roasted his old friend and classmate at the Press Club, Cavett interjected, in his best Jack Benny, “Now cut that out” and “Please tell at least one true story.“When Welsch ended with, “He left Nebraska, but he’s never gotten over it and Nebraska’s never gotten over you,” Cavett replied, “Now that’s more like it.”
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Psychiatrist-Public Health Educator Mindy Thompson Fullilove Maps the Root Causes of America’s Inner City Decline and Paths to Restoration
America’s inner cities are sick. Have been for a long time. They’re long overdue for a sweeping public health approach that gets to some of the root causes of their decliine over the past 40-some years. North Omaha (really northeast Omaha) is a case in point. It’s long been in need of a transformation and one finally is underway after years of neglect, half-starts, spotty redevelopment, counterproductive urban renewal efforts, and rampant disinvestment. Psychiatrist and public health educator Mindy Thompson Fullilove has done much research, writing, and speaking about what’s happened to drag down inner cities and what’s needed to bring them back and I wrote the following piece on the eve of a presentation she gave in Omaha. I interviewed her in advance of her talk. I did attend her program, and though I didn’t do a followup story to report what she said I can tell you she covered many of the same points she made with me in our session.
Psychiatrist-Public Health Educator Mindy Thompson Fullilove Maps the Root Causes of America’s Inner City Decline and Paths to Restoration
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared iin The Reader (www.thereader.com)
The low standard of living found in segments of Omaha’s inner city mirrors adverse urban conditions across America. Poverty, low test scores, unemployment, gang violence, teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and STDs, distressed/devalued properties all occur at disproportionately high rates in these sectors.
Psychiatrist Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a public health educator at Columbia ((N.Y.) University, studies the causes and consequences of marginalized communities. A pair of talks she’s giving in Omaha next week, one for the public and one for health professionals, will echo local efforts addressing economic-educational-health disparities, infectious diseases and inner city redevelopment.
By training and disposition Fullilove looks for the connections in things. Much of her research focuses on linkages between the collapse of America’s urban core and the corollary decline in health — physical, psychological, emotional, environmental, economic — endemic there. She blames much of the blight on fallout from late ‘40s through mid-‘70s urban renewal projects.
Many longtime Omaha residents rue the North Freeway for driving a stake through the heart of a once cohesive, stable community. Hundreds of homes and dozens of businesses were razed to build it. Critics say this physical-symbolic barrier divided and damaged an area already reeling from late ‘60s riots that destroyed the North 24th St. business district, which only hastened white flight.
These interrelated phenomena, Thompson Fullilove believes, caused widespread carnage in cities like Omaha — displacing families, disrupting lives, rupturing communities, dragging down quality of life, property values, self-esteem and hope. In her view urban renewal was part of policies that “destroyed neighborhoods” — as many as 2,500 nationwide by her calculation — in the guise of progress.
“Many of the ways in which we built at that time involved demolishment of a neighborhood,” she said by phone. “There were these very large projects put in so that the old grid of the city was fused into sort of super blocks and huge things built on them like cultural centers or universities that made a fundamental change in the flow of the city. A lot of these projects were really not very thoughtful and didn’t work. So we’re living with the aftermath of very bad urban development, much of which is now coming down and being replaced.”The kind of severing of neighborhoods that occurred when freeway projects cut through the heart inner cities
Witness the sprawling Logan Fontenelle public housing project that came down a few years ago in northeast Omaha. In the early ‘70s, large tracts of land dotted with homes and businesses in far east Omaha were cleared for airport expansion. Anytime people are forced to move from their home it’s a major stress that can dislocate them from family, friends, jobs, neighborhood, community.
“Displacement is always accompanied by violence,” said Thompson Fullilove. “When people are displaced they need help to get back on their feet but if there’s never any help then things can get worse and worse. You get anger, hostility, and then people, instead of being able to solve problems, are just trying to survive.”
She said when people live outside social networks-support systems, epidemics like AIDS, STDs or gun violence emerge and grow entrenched. Often she said, people displaced from their homes also get displaced from blue-collar jobs. “People have no way to make a living and no social network to fall back on, so it’s really a double whammy,” she said. The results? “Terrible crime as people try to do work in the underground economy.” Thus, the drug trade thrives, gangs go unchecked. Some observers say Omaha’s African American community is still hurting from the packinghouse/manufacturing/railroad jobs lost in the ‘60s-‘70s.
She said today’s info service-high tech economy leaves many workers behind. “You have to get people to learn skills, you have to get people more education and you have to be inventing what they’re going to work at, and all these require a stable, engaged city as a center of exchange not a city of haves against have-nots,” she said. “Until cities are places of development, we’re in bad trouble as a nation.”
A term she uses to describe displacement’s trauma, “root shock,” is also the title of a book she authored examining how the ripple effects of urban renewal impact whole swaths of cities and persist long after the bulldozers leave.
“It has a ripple both in time and in space,” she said. “So tearing up a neighborhood has ripples for a whole metropolitan area and it also has ripples over time for generations of people who live in that area. Also, when you demolish a big area it creates a ripple of destruction on the other side of the area you demolish — you also decrease the value and the stability of the properties. And as those properties decline in value and really fall apart the properties next to them fall apart, and then the properties next to them fall apart. So you can actually take a drive in a place where there was urban renewal and find the leading edge of the destruction, typically a couple of neighborhoods over from where the urban renewal was done and, sometimes, even further.”
She said the decline extended to downtowns.
“Many neighborhoods demolished for urban renewal were near downtown or part of the downtown,” she said, “so demolishing a lively neighborhood which added to the strength of a downtown shopping center contributed to the collapse of many American downtowns, which are only slowly coming back.”
Like a disease introduced into a larger host, she said as urban decline spread it compromised the health of entire cities.
“It installed something that was dysfunctional in a critical part of the landscape of the city,” she said, “Although we think of all the terrible things that happened to the African Americans who actually lived in many affected neighborhoods, the worst consequence is that we made our cities weaker, so the whole nation lives with that grievous error. Cities are important for our nation because they really are the economic engine. So undermining the cities the way we did weakened our whole economic prosperity. You might say one of the seeds of this current economic crisis is in the destruction of our cities.”
From her perspective, America hasn’t corrected these problems — “what we’re doing instead is continuing to use versions of the same process.” She said even where a city center may enjoy a renaissance “it’s being rebuilt with the goal of attracting people from the suburbs to come back to the city.” That’s gentrification. “So the goal is not to make the city a welcoming place for all people that might like to live there. As opposed to figuring out how do you make a city which is a place of exchange, you’re making a city a place of exclusion,” she said, “and that’s just as destructive as urban renewal.”
She notes there‘s not yet widespread understanding among policymakers, developers and stakeholders of processes that diminish-threaten public health. She’s hopeful conferences like one she was at earlier this month in NYC, Housing, Health and Serial Displacement, “really open up this conversation, because I think if we’re going to have exciting cities in the United States it requires really a new approach to how you build cities, not just pushing people out.” She and her husband, community organizer and sociomedical sciences expert Robert Fullilove, work with urbanists on strategies for sustainable, inclusive, built environments.
Through the couple’s think tank, Community Research Group, they study and advocate holistic, public health approaches to urban living dynamics that view cities as ecosystems with interdependent neighborhoods-communities. What happens in one district, affects the rest. If one area suffers, the whole’s infected.
“You can’t undermine stable living conditions in a neighborhood or a community without bringing down the quality of life of everybody in the area, and it’s a very large area that then gets affected,” Thompson Fullilove said. “The foundation of health is good living conditions. Health is sort of our ability to enjoy our lives.”
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Kenton Keith’s long and winding journey to football redemption
This is a story of one who got away. If you grow up playing football in Nebraska and show real potential to play in college it’s sort of assumed or ordained that you will wind up playing for the University of Nebraska, whether as a recruited scholarship or walk-on student-athlete. The Cornhuskers nearly always get the cream of the state’s football crop to come to Lincoln. But once in a while and with greater frequency these days NU loses out on a real gem who decides for various reasons, sometimes because the brain trust in Lincoln doesn’t recognize or appreciate the local talent, to play their college ball elsewhere. The Huskers have lost out on some stellar players that way in the last decade, including several who went on to excel in college and to make it all the way to the NFL. This is a profile of one of these who got away – Kenton Keith of Omaha. The running back thought he had showed enough in high school to get the Huskers to bite but it didn’t happen. Well, actually, NU did show initial interest but then a shakeup there found him in the lurch, without the scholarship offer he’d expected. The rest is history. He went on to star at New Mexico State and after toiling in the Canadian Football League he made it in the NFL with the Indianapolis Colts, where he helped the club win a division title as a solid number two back. Things unraveled a bit for him after that but he had already found his football redemption by proving he could play at the highest level. Xavier Omon and Danny Woodhead followed him as in-state backs ignored by Nebraska and finding college stardom and making NFL rosters. Woodhead, of course, has become a popular and valuable contributor with the Patriots.
Kenton Keith’s long and winding journey to football redemption
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
Omaha native Kenton Keith’s circuitous path to football nirvana took him to the gridiron wilderness of New Mexico and Canada before he made it to the NFL. When he landed a roster spot last off-season with the defending Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts it marked the end of a nine-year odyssey for the fleet tailback.
“You can look at my football life and almost understand how my whole life has been. Nothing was given me. Everything was hard-earned. I always had to play against the odds and God has blessed me for every hurdle that I got over,” he said.
It all began in 1998. As a senior at Omaha Benson High School Keith was a prime target of elite Division I schools. He’d narrowed his choices to Nebraska and Penn State. He leaned toward the Huskers, where his father, Percy Keith, played. Tom Osborne was a close family friend.
“Everything was so perfect at one time,” Keith, 27, said.
Once Oz resigned, Keith said Frank Solich and Co. backed away from him late in the recruiting game. Other schools that once coveted Keith suddenly gave him “the cold shoulder” too. Why would a kid branded a phenom for his exploits with the North Omaha Bears and Benson and for his rare combo of speed, size and instinct find himself a pariah? Keith said his stock fell as a result of a Benson administrator labeling him a gang member and a poor student.
The truth, Keith said. is “I was busting my butt to make my grades right and they were actually already good.” He said he was never in a gang, only a rap music group. Music is still a huge part of his life.
He ended up with but two scholarship offers — from NAIA Morningside and D-I New Mexico State. A last gasp effort by NU, including a call from Oz, did not sway his decision to play for the Aggies down in Las Cruces, N.M., far from family, friends, media centers and NFL scouts.
The way NU did him left Keith “discouraged and upset.” “A lot of stuff happened between me and Nebraska that nobody knows about,” he said.
Instead of being embittered, he said, “I made the best of it I could.” After a stellar if injury-plagued four-year career at NMSU, Keith went undrafted by the NFL in 2001. He was devastated. He quit football before the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the CFL called in 2002. He spent a year-and-a-half on the team’s practice squad. Then, in 2003, his chance finally came and he blew up the league. Three-and-a-half productive seasons and one failed NFL tryout (with the New York Jets) later, he’s now a contributor for the most watched team in all pro sports.
Despite the many “backstreets” he took to get there, he never doubted he could play with the big boys. “I always knew what I could do,” he said.
He’s not only “beaten the odds” but proven a valuable addition. Signed as a free agent in January, he enjoyed a strong training camp and by the Sept. 6 opener the 5’11, 209-pound rookie established himself as the No. 2 back behind Joseph Addai. Keith saw spot relief duty the first three games. Then, when Addai got dinged in the Sept. 30 game versus Denver, Keith came in to gain 80 yards on 10 carries as the Colts won 38-20. With Addai out nursing an injury, Keith started the Oct. 7 Tampa Bay game and showed his dependability and durability by rushing for 121 yards on 28 carries and one touchdown and catching five passes for 37 more yards in a 33-14 Indy win.
In the next two games Keith also saw significant action. In a 29-7 win over Jacksonville he split time with Addai — gaining 56 yards and a touchdown on 15 carries. In a 31-7 win over Carolina he tallied 36 yards rushing. His playing time decreased in Indy’s Nov. 4 marquee showdown with New England. But in a near comeback over San Diego last Sunday night he got the call on a critical second-half drive and responded. His running set up the Colts in the red zone and he converted a dump pass into an 7-yard TD reception to draw Indy within seven. For the season he’s totaled 369 yards rushing and three TDs, averaging a solid 4.6 yards per attempt, and he’s added 62 yards receiving and one more score.
He’s shown glimpses in the NFL of the breakaway ability he’s always possessed.
“I’ve always been told I’m a big play type of guy. I don’t know if I really look to do it, it just always happens,” he said. “I think my vision is what separates me from a lot of runners. I read people’s body language to see where I can go…turn. If a guy is committed to one side, then there’s no way he can get back to the cutback if you can get there first.
“I think it’s just something that you feel. It’s almost like you can feel it before you can see it. It’s weird, man.”
He’s put his moves on hold for now, content playing it safe getting “positive yards and first downs. It’s almost like when you’re playing the backup role and you’re just put in for one game you don’t want to do anything wrong,” he said. “I’ve been getting to the secondary a lot…and I think maybe there’s been times where I could have put a move on somebody and taken it outside and gone the distance. I mean, that’s going to come soon when I get a little bit more comfortable.”
He’s “95 percent comfortable” with the playbook now. The “learning process,” he said, is more challenging than any physical adjustment he’s had to make. To his surprise the 7-2 Colts are smaller than his former Roughriders’ teammates. But the Colts speed and the game’s tempo, he said, are faster than up north.
For Keith, who’s mostly played on mediocre teams, the Colts’ winning attitude is a breath of fresh air. He doesn’t know when his next major playing time will come, but he’s sure he’ll be ready when it does.
“I really believe the way you practice is how you’re going to play…so I try to make sure I practice real hard and stay mentally focused out there.”
Whatever happens, he’s glad he stuck this long and winding journey out. “It seems like it’s a big reward for the way things have been going throughout my football career,” he said. “God blessed me to come here with the Colts and to be like a perfect fit for what this team needed.”
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Jana Murrell: Working Towards a New Standard of Beauty
Jana Murrell was somewhat of a trendsetter when I did this mini-profile on her in 2005. She was the first Miss Nebraska who was not Caucasian (though she is biracial she identifies as African-American) and she competed with several other women of color in the Miss USA pageant that year. Since then more African-American women have become pageant winners and finalists both here and nationally. She went on to compete in other national pageants, including Miss Earth USA. She was an on-camera television traffic reporter for a time at KETV in Omaha. But all along she was studying for her Ph.D. in physical therapy. She went on to work as Essence Pageant emcee and director of operations. And I just read where she’s newly engaged to be married. She and other women of color have helped redefine standards of beauty in America that are more diverse and inclusive and that’s a good thing. Black is beautiful, baby. So is brown and every other hue.
Jana Murrell: Working Towards a New Standard of Beauty
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
After years of neglect, women of color are fast emerging as new cultural icons of beauty in America. Reigning Miss Nebraska USA Jana Murrell, a 23-year-old African-American from Omaha competing in the Miss USA 2005 pageant being broadcast April 11 by NBC, is part of this barrier-breaking trend. “I think it’s about time,” said Murrell, gesturing in her best spokesmodel way at her North Omaha home. “You know, it’s really hard to change the public’s opinion of beauty from the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl that’s kind of been IT forever. So, for us to be able to make that change is something pretty powerful. I’m glad society’s being more accepting and more open to different kinds of beauty. Beauty’s everywhere.”
Murrell is one of several women of color competing in the 54th annual event, which takes place at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore, MD.
Currently on break from her physical therapy doctorate studies at Creighton University, where she was a 2000 Presidential Diversity scholarship recipient, Murrell defies beauty pageant contestant stereotypes in many ways. The product of an interracial family, the mocha-complexioned, 5-foot-11 Murrell, whose blue eyes change to green, gray and blue-green depending on the light, embodies expectation-bending with her fairly exotic look and eclectic resume. A former competitive athlete who teaches step aerobics, Murrell is also a perennial Dean’s List student. She’s equally comfortable rehabbing patients in a set of scrubs to gliding down a runway in a swimsuit or evening gown to working out in sweats to making an elegant public appearance in a smart ensemble. This combination tomboy, girly girl and nerd enjoys how her versatility keeps people guessing. Her biracial makeup is another expression of her multi-dimensional identity.
“What I like best, which I think actually could help me at Miss USA, is that you can’t tell what I am. A lot of people come up and ask me, ‘What are you?’ And I like that. I like being different looking,” Murrell said. “I like that our society is becoming so mixed and integrated and such a melting pot that sometimes you can’t tell what people are anymore. And when you can’t tell what they are, you can’t label them. They’re just people. Now, beauty is just beauty. Not black or white…”
However, she said she still runs up against old attitudes that beg the question, “’What’s it like being a black Miss Nebraska?’” And I’m like, ‘Why don’t you ask me what it’s like being me?’ Or, ‘Why do I have to be the black Miss Nebraska? Why can’t I be Miss Nebraska?’” Good point.
The North High graduate entered her first Miss Nebraska USA pageant only a few years ago. She finished as first-runnerup twice, before winning the crown and sash in Norfolk, Neb. last fall. Always looking for new ways to challenge herself, she views the pageant thing as an opportunity to improve herself and to test the fashion/entertainment waters. She’s “dabbled” in modeling. An agent once urged her to go to New York, but her mother nixed that. School came first. With her long-term professional track charted — Murrell plans working with patients suffering from neurological disorders — she has the security of a career awaiting her. But with a year off from school to fulfill her title’s goodwill obligations, she hopes Miss USA provides a forum for being seen and discovered.
“If I meet the people I would like to meet and get the chances I would like to get,” she said, “then this is the time I can really pursue that and see what happens. It’s kind of like my last chance to really go for that.”
Speaking from Baltimore on the eve of Miss USA, Murrell was prepping for a telecast number in the “little red” Tadashi dress contestants wear. She said the many pre-pageant activities make for 16-hour days. There are meet-and-greet events, photo shoots, tapings, fittings, fashion shows, rehearsals. “It’s fast-paced, go-go-go. You don’t get a lot of sleep. But it’s a lot of fun. I’m still feeling really prepared and ready and confident. And I still feel like I might do it,” she said. Win, or finish high, she means. No Miss Nebraska has ever won and the last semi-finalist from here was in 1980. Whatever happens, she’ll have plenty of family on hand, including her parents. “I’ll have quite a little cheering section.”
She’s struck up a few friendships with contestants. Away from the cameras, she said, the vibe among the women “is like a big slumber party.” Besides meeting some Baltimore Ravens players for a staged game of flag football, she hasn’t hooked-up with any big names or door-opener types yet. Hobnobbing with The Donald, as in pageant principal Donald Trump, is sure to be a highlight as will be pressing-the-flesh with celebrity judge Sugar Ray Leonard. Even if someone doesn’t make her an offer she can’t refuse, Murrell can take solace in the fact “we’re the pageant that’s still on TV,” referring to the rival Miss America pageant’s relative decline.
Related articles
- Miss Nebraska 2012 pageant gets under way (examiner.com)
- Mariah Cook crowned Miss Nebraska 2012 (examiner.com)
- Miss Maryland Takes Second In Miss USA Pageant (baltimore.cbslocal.com)
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