Mark Dent... Journalist

Manifesto (1924 Main)

Initial response: "It's been a while since we've made one of those." What happens: The waiter returns to the table and asks what's in the drink. I tell him it has clear liquor and should be crisp, with a touch of sweetness. He leaves again and consults with both on-duty bartenders for a long minute. It's clearly been more than a while. What I get: A tall, narrow glass arrives. The murkiness looks promising, and the twisted-lime-rind garnish earns style points. But the gin overwhelms a bit, and there's not quite enough sweetness. This is just a gin and tonic with a tad more citrus.

Memorable line: "Do you have a backup? Our bartender has no clue. He is giving me the death stare."

12 Baltimore Bar & Café  (at Hotel Phillips, 106 West 12th Street)

Initial response: "Do you mean Kansas City Tea?"

What happens: Multiple bartenders and waiters congregate without reaching conensus. One of them suggests using Google.

What I get: A perfect, properly translucent Kansas City Ice Water - not too limey, not too sweet, not too strong. Thanks, Google.

Memorable line: "You have to bring in all of your fancy ideas from the East Coast." 

The Drop  (409 East 31st Street)

Initial response: "I'm familiar with it. Best-tasting Ice Water in Kansas City."

What happens: Nothing further is said. The confidence on display is awesome.

What I get: The drink arrives in an oversized glass, much larger than those given for average cocktails - totally fine. The contents are clear, though - too clear. Up through the straw comes ... water. This is water. For the record, it *is damn good water.

*****

The author Eric Weiner, whose book The Geography of Bliss tells the stories of the most contented places on earth and the people who inhabit them, recently wrote an essay for The New York Times about "thin places." They are not physical. Chile’s lack of latitude does not qualify it as thin, nor, as he writes, does Los Angeles’ plethora of thin people. A thin place is where one can loosen his or her “death grip on life and can breathe again.”

He writes about several of these, mentioning monuments of grandeur like Saint Peter’s Basilica. He also discusses a tiny bar in Tokyo. It is the size of a bathroom, seats four patrons at the counter, and features a bartender who artfully chisels ice cubes from a block of ice. Weiner carefully warns that a thin place for one person could be quite thick for another. Thin places are a product of self-discovery. They reinvigorate you.

“The question, of course, is which places? And how do we get there? You don’t plan a trip to a thin place; you stumble upon one. But there are steps you can take to increase the odds of an encounter with thinness. For starters, have no expectations. Nothing gets in the way of a genuine experience more than expectations, which explains why so many “spiritual journeys” disappoint. And don’t count on guidebooks — or even friends — to pinpoint your thin places. To some extent, thinness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to put it another way: One person’s thin place is another’s thick one.

Getting to a thin place usually requires a bit of sweat.”

*****

I sweat on my way to the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge. I ran there from my apartment, which was about a mile away. It was a Sunday, and the bridge had “opened” two days earlier, on March 2, to a celebration of fireworks and live music and expensive tables. Sunday, as a rule, would be more relaxed, laid back, open to anyone who wanted to venture there regardless of wallet size.

Dallas sleeps on Sundays, a tradition that hearkens back to traditions of the Christians, a demographic readily visible in the city. Most restaurants are closed downtown. On my bike on Sunday afternoons, I can cruise through downtown of one of the biggest cities in the country, skipping through red lights, generally seeing few others besides the homeless wandering on the sidewalks.

Try as it might, downtown Dallas is not a destination. The tall buildings sparkle at night, but they are vacant by sundown, business men and women having fled after work, essentially reducing Dallas to a ghost town not only on Sundays but every evening after six. Few clubs bustle with music and patrons. Bars offer beverages, but few customers come to drink them.

Empty of people, eerily free of sound, remiss of culture, basically consisting of a couple square miles of concrete from which tall buildings spring, the center of Dallas lacks an identity. In the optimistic, election-centered minds of Dallas’ leaders, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge might not entirely fill that void but can catalyze the development of a true urban center. It will be the new face of Dallas. A landmark. A symbol. Residents will want to spend more time and money in the downtown area. Developers will want to build plush apartment complexes and restaurants around it. The Trinity River’s trickle can be transformed into a river with direction and a few lakes will be added, along with new hiking and biking trails.

On March 29, the bridge officially opened to all traffic. Yes, they hope, the bridge will be an identity. For practical purposes, the bridge is a bridge. It crosses the Trinity River's narrow stream. It will reduce congestion where two major highways meet on a series of curving ramps.

I ran to the bridge on Sunday March 4, two days after the fireworks. For the first leg of my run, I passed through the touristy West End, a series of red-brick stores and restaurants – bad steaks, Western wear, cow-affiliated memorabilia – that perpetuate an outsider’s view of Texas. It has been forgotten by the populace and that’s if anyone ever bothered to visit in the first place.

Where it ends and beyond that river, West Dallas begins. Tourists and even a few residents don’t realize it exists. I passed a Popeye’s, a liquor store, a pawn shop and a Western Union, always staring ahead at the white yarn holding up the bridge in the near distance.

Then I ran back home. I wanted to take pictures with my camera.

******

Not long ago, I had lunch with a friend in the Bishop Arts District. It’s an oasis of refurbished homes, restaurants and shops in an otherwise crumbling neighborhood. For reasons I can’t remember, we started discussing Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza. Like all Kansas City natives, I deify the Plaza. It is a tradition, it is what my family and everyone else’s family watches light up in Christmas colors every Thanksgiving. When I hear someone deny its infallibility, I flip out.

Mainly, he argued the Plaza was manufactured. The Spanish architecture and the European atmosphere the buildings cultivate was packaged for the purpose of making money. A group of Spaniards, fresh off the boat or whatever type of transportation they would have taken to immigrate in the 1920s did not build their own restaurants and dwellings that represented their culture. No, J.C. Nichols built the Plaza, and he did so with a Spanish feel.

More than anything, what drives these complaints and concerns in Dallas, is the feeling that the bridge is forced. Culture is not cut from whole cloth. Manufacturing a landmark for $182-million and then praying that it transforms a neglected area seems exactly like something Dallas would do and has done for years.

But what city hasn’t? Aside from illegal graffiti,aren’t all art and all city landscaping and monuments forced, commissioned by a government, lacking in spontaneity? The Eiffel Tower was built, practically, as a radio tower. They could have made it look like any radio tower, any stupid thing that no one would want to photograph and place on a postcard, or cross an a channel or even an ocean to climb hundreds of steps and watch the world from atop it.

They chose to make it beautiful, perhaps taller than necessary and the radio tower that eclipses all radio towers. Around the world, the majority of the greatest landmarks are forcibly made to look ornate. The Tower Bridge could look as dull and boring as its neighbor the London Bridge. The Sistine Chapel could be enclosed with a plain white ceiling. Maybe this is overstatement or oversimplification, but, for me, any attempt to defeat the mundane is a worthy endeavor.

When I think about the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, I think about the song “Heartbeat” by Annie and a review of the song I long ago read on Pitchfork. On the track, she sings about a party where she has a few drinks and starts dancing with her friends. Among them is someone new. A guy. She can’t even remember his name.

She’s singing about the minutiae of a regular Saturday night, cherishing a dance that many people would forget the next day. Annie won’t. She presents it, as Pitchfork’s Scott Plagenhoef writes, as an embodiment “of human excitement – guilt, nerves, excitement, hope.” Life can be forgetful if you let it, or it can brim with suspense, if you’re willing to enjoy it through that perspective. In a matter of one song, one dance, Annie has escaped the staid doldrums anyone can succumb to.

So who cares if the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge crosses a glorified creek? Who cares if it might not attain city leaders’ impossible goal of reinvigorating a depressed area? It looks really cool from a distance and even better from the center, staring up at the spider webs, forgetting where you’re standing.

The bridge was actually packed. I didn’t expect this. Vendors with food carts sold ice cream and sodas. Hundreds of people were biking and walking in sunny, 68-degree weather. They were ambling, observing. I overheard someone who passed by me tell his companion he felt like a tourist. He felt like a tourist in his own city.

It took at least twenty minutes for me to reach the other side of the bridge, the west side. I stopped to take pictures of runners and bikers on the grass below. I watched an Amtrak train pass on a nearby rusted, brown bridge. I snapped a picture for a family posing in the center beneath all the tangled wire. From the end, I looked at the city I’ve always seen, from a place I’d never been.

Randomly, a friend called me as soon as I was getting ready to leave the bridge and walk back on to the street below. The day was so beautiful, and it was only about 1 p.m. He said he was trying to decide the best way to approach an afternoon like this. I had plans.

I love the music by artists I never hear anywhere else nor remember to download in my free time. I love the random conversations you strike up based on a book someone is reading (hello,The Picture of Dorian Gray in (500) Days of Summer?) or a shirt they are wearing. A few weeks ago, I was wearing my Royals shirt, and someone called me out on it. He was Mitch Maier’s brother-in-law!*

*For normal people unaware of Mitch Maier’s relevance, let alone existence, here is why a sentence involving his name deserves to be punctuated with an exclamation point…

Coffee shop etiquette ideally calls for one unwritten rule. You buy something and you can stay in there as long as you want, soaking up the excellent free WiFi. Some coffee shops print their WiFi password on their receipts to ensure you buy something. That is fine with me. The concept is clear. You have to buy something and you get something in return.

Starbucks, though, is the lone exception. I have a strange affinity for Starbucks. I like going there, they have great customer service, and their drinks freaking rule, especially peppermint mochas and pumpkin spiced lattes*. But Starbucks is not the cuddly coffee shop run by the college graduates who were sick of their normal jobs and stays in business because of love and people’s unconscious need to hear this wonderful song by The Knife. It is an international corporation with a location across the street from the Louvre (I’ve been there!) and probably inside the Taj Mahal.

*To which I respond with this

How powerful is Starbucks? It just made a $73,000 and killed an orangutan while you read that last sentence. They say if you don’t like the neighborhood in which you live, wait thirty minutes, and a Starbucks will request eminent domain and obliterate four houses just so it can fit a really large machine that can spout Americano coffees at record speed into a new store that will inevitably open, and then you can really hate your neighborhood.

So with Starbucks there are no rules. Until last summer, it didn’t even offer free WiFi. Homegrown coffee shops could spring for it, but not a chain whose CEO drinks his lattes from a cup made of molten gold. So July of 2010 was a time to celebrate. We got free WiFi from Starbucks. But really, we got free WiFi from Starbucks with fine print.

New York City Starbucks started kicking people out a couple of months ago, and it has just gotten worse and worse.

As someone who has spent eight-plus hours straight in a coffee shop, I find this decision unfair and ridiculous. It’s not like WiFi must be conserved. It’s not water. There won’t be wars over WiFi in the year 2050. And if a Starbucks kicks someone out to make room, it will just be making room for another person who plans to camp out for several hours.

Bloggers, writers, startup employees, and lawyers and business types who just feel like wearing a Hawaiian shirt and having a “Me-Day,” we must stand up for ourselves. I have a solution, one I’ve been practicing for a while.

DON’T BUY ANYTHING AT STARBUCKS.

Go in there, sit down, plug in your computer and absorb the free WiFI. Because Starbucks stores are roughly the size of frigates, you can probably blend in. Just be sure you don’t make any eye contact with an employee. If one of them looks in your direction, quickly place two black eye-patches over your eyes. Hell, bring along a mug with you and just don’t get it filled. Then it will look like you are not incredibly cheap, like you are drinking their coffee and keeping one less paper cup out of the landfills.

It’s simple, folks. I even did one better last weekend. Covering a sporting event in Austin, I had to stop at a random location to write and file my story. I chose a sandwich restaurant right next to a Starbucks. Through the walls, the free Starbucks WiFi filtered toward my computer, and I used it without even having to set foot in the coffee shop.

Important or not?

You're not alone if you've ever wondered exactly what your boss does. The importance of management has been debated for centuries. As pointed out by Dave Berri on the Freakonomics blog, father of modern economics Adam Smith argued in 1776 that the "principal clerks" who ran the daily operations of a firm were homogenous: "Their labour of inspection and direction may be either altogether or very nearly the same."

College football has taken an opposing stance. In 1982, Texas A&M wrested coach Jackie Sherrill away from Pitt with a $280,000 annual salary ($656,000 in today's dollars). The amount was reported by the New York Times to be a salary higher than any university had paid any employee for any job and so controversial that the Texas A&M president threatened to resign.

Since then, coaches have been determined to be increasingly valuable commodities. According to the Post-Gazette analysis, which used the USA Today database for 2012 coaching salaries and drew from a multitude of local newspapers for previous salaries, the average annual salary in 2012 for a current coach of a BCS conference football team was $2.37 million, 43 percent higher than his immediate predecessor's and 143 percent higher than the salary of the coach who came before his immediate predecessor. All previous values were adjusted for inflation.

Last year, two academic studies were released that questioned strategies common amongst college football programs regarding coaches.

One was authored by Towson professors William Tsitsos and Howard L. Nixon. It found that of the 25 programs who paid coaches the highest salaries from 2003-2011, the range of those programs that ranked in the top 25 at season's end was between 40 and 56 percent. Fewer than 30 percent experienced a short-term or long-term climb in the rankings during this period. The majority stayed the same and about a fifth got worse. The notion that higher pay leads to better coaching and thus better results didn't hold.

The other study was Adler's. Examining all 263 Division I-A football coaching changes from 1997 to 2010, Adler, Doherty and Berry discovered that most changes led to a neutral or negative effect on the team when tracking the results over a five-year period.

Whoever the coach, the bad teams continued to be bad teams, performing the same as similarly bad teams that didn't replace their coach. The mediocre teams, those who went about .500 before making a change, continued to be as bad or worse as similarly mediocre teams who didn't replace their coach.

Adler said universities continue to make the inefficient choice of replacing a coach because they don't know what else to do and have few options.

"Really, the only feasible thing other than perhaps investing boatloads of money in the facilities is just to fire the guy who is in charge," he said in an interview. "That's long been done as the way to get quick results. The question is whether or not it makes a difference. I think we're only beginning to look at the data."

Adler's main observation would be to not replace coaches as often. With any coaching change, he suggested, there are "start-up" costs involving disruptions in recruiting patterns, team culture and the management style directed at players, which could be why many mediocre teams in his study became worse.

Adler said consulting firms had contacted him about his study but not any athletic departments. Tsitsos hadn't heard from any of them either.

"I'm not surprised athletic directors aren't eager to bring any attention to this," Tsitsos said. "They have so much to lose, and nothing is stopping them."

It may seem on paper that schools are making irresponsible decisions by hiring and firing and upping the salary for football coaches when their program is unlikely to change positively. The problem is sometimes they're forced to.

The search for status

Purdue athletic director Morgan Burke says Danny Hope, the coach he fired this offseason, did a good job for the school. Last year, Hope led Purdue to a 6-7 record and a bowl game. The Boilermakers also came within two heartbreaking finishes of beating Notre Dame and Ohio State.

But Hope is gone, replaced by Darrell Hazell.

"We lost the fan base," Burke said. "I don't care how much you market or rehabilitate, the fan base has moved on and that generally drives most decisions."

The Boilermakers could have kept Hope longer, aware that he'd likely be the same or better as any replacement, or they could replace him, attracting more fans in the short run and hoping the new coach becomes a difference-maker even though the odds for change are against them. Purdue had to pay more for this second option.

Hazell's annual salary is $2 million annually, news organizations have reported, which is a 106 percent increase over the $970,000 Hope made last year. Richard Sheehan, a Notre Dame business professor and author of "Keeping Score: The Economics of Big-Time Sports," said a popular belief attached to college football salaries is the "winner takes all theory," which suggests that prices have risen up and down the coaching food chain because the competition for top coaches is so intense. But he doesn't completely agree. He said that schools aren't trying to hire away Nick Saban of Alabama or someone similar -- their question is, "Who is the next Saban?"

Universities try to find someone who can raise their program to an elite status. Because of the still-rising influx of revenue into big college football programs, Sheehan said, they have a greater incentive to seek and pay handsomely for a new coach who might be a savior, as well as a greater incentive to dump that coach after a couple of down seasons.

Sports economist and Smith College professor Andrew Zimbalist said, "The whole system gets pulled up on this notion that 'Let's get this wonderful coach and then we'll get the best quarterback in the nation.' That can't happen for every team."

Zimbalist has written for years that pay packages for college coaches "defy one of the central principles of a competitive market," with college coaches being compensated for the value of their players and for the value the school receives from recruiting those players. These conditions lead to head coaching salaries on par with NFL head coaches, even though NCAA football teams make a fraction of the amount NFL teams make.

Likely the only ways the market value of coaches would freeze or go down would be if schools had to start paying players or if the NCAA applied for an antitrust exemption to cap salaries. Or, athletic departments could start thinking more like Adam Smith.

A lot of coaches out there

A potted house plant -- i.e. something with no football skills -- might not be able to do what Jerry Kill is doing as head coach for the University of Minnesota, but somebody else probably could.

Kill, in two years, has led Minnesota to a 9-16 record and to a bowl game named after a car repair company. Talking to him, you get the sense that he's friendly and smart and not as much of a salesman in a refreshing way. He knows football, but so do many others, a concept he and a handful of other Big Ten coaches were happy to admit without any loss of pride.

"There's probably someone more deserving to sit in my chair than I am that just didn't get the opportunity," Kill said.

Penn State coach Bill O'Brien said he has numerous friends who coach lower-level college football and has "no doubt" some of them and their peers would be qualified to coach at the Division I-A level.

"There are a lot of coaches out there," he said.

According to Grant Teaff, president of the American Football Coaches Association, there are 89,000 at the college and high school level. The difference in salary between the average BCS coach's salary of $2.37 million and those myriad other coaches is enormous. If the belief that college coaches aren't difference makers became popular and more potential coaches were considered to be equal, a school might consider gambling on a nontraditional choice that would be less expensive but not necessarily less productive for the school.

"They should be looking to a wider pool to drive down the cost," Adler said. "If you want to replace poly sci professors, there's a pretty big pool. Therefore the starting salaries are pretty middling, and my guess is the same would be said for sports writers. But for college football coaches it's a completely different realm."

This scenario is unlikely, Zimbalist said, because athletic directors are driven by short-term interests. Further, they are rewarded for hiring expensive coaches -- the more money they manage the more money they will make.

"The incentive for the AD is to go out and hire these expensive coaches," Zimbalist said. "Not to innovate. Not to experiment with a $100,000 coach."

At North Carolina State, Yow hired Dave Doeren, a hot commodity who had spent the past two years leading Northern Illinois. Doeren will make $1.8 million annually under his first contract, less than Tom O'Brien's ending salary of $1.9 million but nearly double O'Brien's starting salary at North Carolina State, accounting for inflation.

When she was Maryland's athletic director, Yow had a track record of hiring successful coaches in major sports, including football coach Ralph Friedgen and women's basketball coach Brenda Freese. At Doeren's introductory press conference, Yow said Doeren had "a total package of skills and values that will be required to elevate our program to national prominence over time."