Yesterday Detroit Pershing took down fellow eastside rival Detroit Southeastern to win their first Public School League (PSL) championship in boys' basketball since the 1996 Doughboys. The Catholic High School League (CHSL) will play their girls' championship this weekend and their boys' title tilts next weekend.

Make no mistake, these are great traditions and any suburbanite who's never attended at least one of these tournament championships is missing out on a great day of basketball. It's a great thrill for the players, coaches and fans of the schools participating. It's a healthy exercise in fellowship within your community of schools. Finally, championship tournaments create buzz about school sports, and when is that not a good thing?

So why don't the bigger suburban leagues have a championship tournament? The PSL and Catholic League aren't exactly using dollar bills for scrap paper these days. In fact, these two leagues are hit harder than any of the suburban public schools by the recent economic hardship. ThePSL has had nearly 100 tournaments since 1904 and the Catholic League is less than a generation behind their PSL soul mate.

The suburbs? Zero and counting. In New York City, many of the public schools don't even bother to participate in the New York state tournament because the NYC title means so much more. Thankfully, nearly all our schools participate in the annual MHSAA tournament. We could have the best of both worlds -- why don't we?

Here's the facts. Suburban schools, specifically the Oakland Activities Association (OAA) and Macomb Area Conference (MAC), have a number of schools that could host games as neutral sites. Parking, seating, lockers and security in some of these modern schools is not an issue like it is in the parochial and Detroit public schools.

Let me take it a step further: How much fun would it be to include the OAA and MAC champions in an Operation Friendship Final Four? Are you kidding? A potential quarterfinal, semifinal or finals preview? Clarkston v. Pershing? How fast can you spell 'sold out' on the eve of the MHSAA tournament? Would it not be a great opportunity to share the respective communities with one another through school sports? There's great life lessons to be learned here through b-ball.

Unfortunately, it looks like the OAA could be a candidate to dissolve before an idea like a conference tournament, much less a super-conference Final Four, even takes hold. Maybe a tournament could help hold theOAA together. The MAC isn't going anywhere soon.

I hope someone grabs the ball and get things rolling.

I was listening to WXYT's afternoon drive-time show called The Sports Inferno last week when I became amused with what I heard from New York native /reborn Detroiter Mike Valenti.

"Let's get down to brass taxes..." Valenti said as he began one of his legendary rants about whatever. Don't get me wrong --I enjoy Valenti, because he is like me and simply tells you how he sees it without any holdout -- but he's the classic example of a sports fan with a radio show, a point he'll readily admit. There's nothing wrong with it, either.

What amused me is the 'brass taxes' thing. It's brass tacks. This is an example of how time changes history in subtle ways. Brass tacks was a way of measuring cloth, linen or anything else by the yard on a counter. A person would come in and ask for so much of this or that, and the actual cost would be determined by placing the material on the counter against the ruler held in place with brass tacks, thus the phrase, "Let's get down to brass tacks."
Here's another one: Toe The Line. How many times have you heard it repeated as Tow The Line? Or the oft-heard phrase, "It's a dog-eat-dog world." I've heard that catch-phrase repeated many times as 'Doggy-dog' world.

Here's why I bring this up: History is important. It shows us the right and wrong in the world before us, thus the coined phrase, "Those who do not heed history are doomed to repeat it."
I'm writing a prep basketball history book and I'm waist-deep in the city of Detroit right now. Among the interesting facts I've learned from basketball research as it relates to metro Detroit? The 30-year absence by Detroit's public school teams from the Michigan High School Athletic Association's annual boys' basketball tournament from 1931-1961. The seed of racial mistrust in Detroit is one planted long before riots and failed urban renewal.

Here's another one: School sports might have saved the city before and after the 1967 riots. The divisive busing issue was so strongly contested that many coaches and players from that era were literally scared to travel outside of their neighborhoods, but school sports was a respected rite of passage, almost an institution in Detroit. Rival schools of various religious and ethnic backgrounds might not have gotten along on any day -- save for game day. It was on these days they respected one another, played hard and shook hands after the game. That very well might have kept the city from an all-encompassing implosion that would have made the '67 riots look like a small camp fire easily doused with canteen water.

If you think the Detroit PSL doesn't have friends, consider the Catholic League fought long and hard alongside the PSL schools in the 1970s to get millage and bond requests passed. What would Detroit's schools look like today had it not been for a lil' neighborly love 30 years ago?

And what of the other history not so easily interwoven into prep sports?

The decision to plow through neighborhoods with concrete freeways did little but speed up fears of intermixed, racially-charged neighborhoods. If you look at the pictures of football and basketball, schools and neighborhoods radically changed within a few years. Today our freeways in Detroit do little but expose the worst homes and buildings within eyeshot, because really, who wants to live next to a freeway and have to leave your garage at 55 miles an hour? When's the last time you heard a neighborhood benefited from have an eight-lane ribbon of concrete driven through its heart? And if you think a freeway is bad, what about displacing the many for a hulking auto complex -- remember Poletown?

Finally, I've learned that while Kwame Kilpatrick and Coleman Young weren't great leaders, neither were a lot of their white predecessors, like Charles Bowles, Louis C. Miriani and a laundry list of leaders remembered for their poor decisions as much as any positive accomplishments. The decision to allow auto companies to erect massive auto factories in the middle of neighborhoods without a lick of civil engineering 80-90 years ago has continually crippled a lot of potential re-birth. The refusal to replace trolleys with elevated or tunnel trains, eliminating the trolleys altogether and the final legitimate transit piece, the removal of the Inter-Urban lines. This straddled the city with empty buildings and no motivation to turn them into anything but gravel lots to park suburban cars upon.

There's a ton of unique story lines and historical references that continue to co-exist with us in our daily lives. In that way, Detroit is just as compelling as Chicago, Boston and New York City. We have a lot of things wrong about the Motor City but an open canvas to remake the city, the region and the landscape we call home for the better.

All that and more is possible if we heed history and stay away from brass taxes, whatever those are.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, due August 2009 from Arcadia Publishing.

Last week I umpired a Catholic League doubleheader between visiting Orchard Lake St. Mary's and Birmingham Brother Rice, played behind the Birmingham YMCA Center. Rice took a pair of victories from the Eaglets, who are rich with young talent but not yet blessed with the depth and experience that befitted Coach Bob Riker's Warriors last week. Orchard Lake St. Mary's will be ready when it counts, because they usually always are and are led by good coaches.

In researching my book, Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th of this year, I interviewed hundreds involved on a daily basis within Oakland County's high school sports infrastructure. Naturally, a few good-hearted souls took up the cause to lament the Catholic League's advantage of plucking students from public school boundaries for the betterment of wins and losses in after-school athletics.

I listened and did my job as the dutiful reporter, but a couple of points stuck out to me. First, does anyone else notice that it's never the 0-9 football team that is complained about, just the playoff qualifier from a private school like Rice or Detroit Country Day? Naturally, this is a bit hypocritical, and no public school ever complains about their fate when their team's results are average or worse. Many public districts are openly courting students in today's open-district, open-enrollment, school-of-choice fight for survival. Michigan's economic woes have created a virtual free-for-all within competing districts and private institutions.

But the other point makes me proud to be from Oakland County. Just how lucky are we to be in this county to have so many outstanding public and private schools in one square swath of land called Oakland County? Think about it -- most counties would love to have just one private school the caliber of Novi's Catholic Central, Royal Oak's Shrine High, Madison Heights Bishop Foley or Waterford's Our Lady Of The Lakes, in addition to the aforementioned private schools above. Certainly space prevents me listing all of the worthy candidates on either side.

Then you have tony districts like Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, West Bloomfield, Farmington Hills and Troy. Clarkston, Lake Orion and Oxford are all immaculately maintained with highest standards for achievement and opportunity. The same can be said in Walled Lake, Novi, Northville, Rochester, South Lyon and many other Oakland County public school districts. How many Oakland County schools have played for and won the MHSAA"s football tournament? Last season Farmington and Lake Orion staged perhaps one of the greatest baseball finals in the state's biggest division and it was just the latest example of an Oakland County school shining brightly on the state's big stage.

I could write an entire column on the academic achievements of Oakland County schools in our state and national scope. And yes, Wayne and Macomb counties would argue they have some strong entries into this debate as well.

We get caught up in winning and losing in our hyperactive, American culture -- it's in our blood, I suppose. And yes, I'm doing a bit of cheerleading, but maybe that's what we need in Michigan right now. There hasn't been a lot of good news in the past few years as it relates to the issues that matter most in our region. So it's nice to drive home from a hotly-contested game and realize that competition we stage and officiate produces the opportunity to excel against the best the county has to offer.

As a parent, that's what any parent wants for their children, to be able to offer then the opportunity to get to the highest level of competition and achievement. Oakland County certainly affords a parent or student those opportunities. This alone should make everyone worry less about balls & strikes and safes & outs.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th, 2008 from Arcadia Publishing.