After spending the past three days in New York City, I returned home last night to referee a girls' basketball game -- Alexis Goree's jumper at the buzzer enabled Ferndale to nip Birmingham Seaholm 50-48 -- and I was never so happy to get yelled at for 90 minutes in my life.

Don't get me wrong, I love NYC, but home is home. However, if there's one thing that I would bring home from New York and institute immediately in the three-county area, it would be a metropolitan government. If there's a city in the 'Lower 48' as our friends in Canada have nicknamed the United States that's a more rudderless ship than Detroit, please point it out to me. I wake up this morning and read about Detroit's corrupt city council killing a Cobo Hall expansion deal contingent on regional management and simply shake my head at the stupidity the vote represents.

But never mind the race-baiting reasons offered by people like Barbara Rose-Collins for killing the Cobo deal. Her tenure of representation in Washington, D.C. and Detroit is punctuated by missed votes, irresponsible decisions and untimely, ill-advised comments like the ones she made yesterday. In short, she's a loose cannon who represents her own motives over the greater good.

Detroit needs the suburbs and the suburbs need Detroit. Both desperately need a significantly healthier Detroit than the one that's currently limping along the riverside, and a Cobo Hall deal done sooner than later is a step in the right direction.

But there's more to it. The 'burbs need a viable Detroit to survive. Please stop fooling yourselves, Detroit apologists, by telling me of a handful of condos and hotels and restaurants recently opened, and for every eatery that opens, there's two that close and another three that remain shuttered. Detroit is sagging badly. Just ask the Book-Cadillac or Fort Shelby staff, who openly wonder how long their hotels will be open without guests. Try to find a cup of coffee at 8am on a Sunday morning in downtown Detroit; I'll take your phone call after the first 1/2 hour.

Losing the Cobo deal to racially-charged vote-getting is beyond short-sighted. Governor Jennifer Granholm, Oakland County head L. Brooks Patterson and Wayne County leader Bob Ficano have all publicly warned there's little political will to re-fund this project should Detroit reject this deal, one that took a staggering five years -- nearly as long as America was engaged in World War II -- to craft, finalize and agree upon.

In the big scheme of things, this is a relatively small project. Detroit's response? Play the race card. Polarize the region further. Bamboozle the five-year deal in the same amount of time it takes to order a five-dollar foot-long sandwich from Subway. And a crowd of residents was there to cheer the decision.

Wow.

If the citizens of New York City want something, they do it. They decide to do, make the needed sacrifice and get it done. The 2nd Avenue subway line took years to build, but they did it. It came down to a simple mantra: We need it so we're going to build it. All five boroughs are represented and the greater good of the entire city is represented. What's the difference between five boroughs and three counties?

Detroit needs to learn acceptance of the significant resources of the suburbs. You can't live in a cocoon forever. The same greed and benevolence that has killed the good life for so many skilled union auto workers in metro Detroit is in play again with the edict from Detroit's City Council that Detroit residents get all the jobs and contracts for Cobo's repair and expansion. Two stadiums, three casinos and the Cadillac and Shelby hotel projects were accomplished from level-headed leaders who utilized the entire region's resources for the good of region. Yet who benefits most from those projects? The City of Detroit. Demanding exclusivity from residency workforce restrictions does nothing to build back the city, much less erase the racist reputation of the region.

The time has come to represent the greater good of the entire region rather than the vote-hunters from America's most-crippled big city. Metropolitan government would benefit Detroit and the suburbs that surround it more than any state takeover or city council do-good'r ever will.

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

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.

Metro Detroit's appetite for sports might have eyes bigger than its' stomach.

WDFN's abrupt, noon-time decapitation of all local programming on Tuesday, save for 90-second updates every 30 minutes and Pistons' play-by-play, reveals a lot about the local economy, the teams we zealously root for and a time-tested adage WDFN largely ignored in the station's 15 years of local programming.

Obviously the amount of advertising revenue and ratings' share, both procured and projected, didn't justify 1130AM's parent company, Clear Channel, keeping the majority of local sales and on-air talent on the company's payroll. The nationwide media malaise and local depression was too much to bear.

Another key component in the demise of WDFN was signal strength, already weak when 97.1 The Ticket went to a resounding dual AM/FM signal a year ago that combined 1270AM's WXYT with 97.1FM. Before that, it had been WXYT that looked like the fly-by-night competition for much of the time the two stations battled each other for sports supremacy. The station had gone through a handful of platform changes and renamed the station's handle two different times before finally settling on 'The Ticket'.

But the FM stereo upgrade at WXYT changed the tenor of the two-station sports fight. The Ticket gained an all-encompassing signal found nearly everywhere in the three-county metro area and beyond -- at all hours of the day -- while 'Da Fan was tough to find in Southfield after dark when the station powered down the signal. Once WXYT went to FM, the Tigers and Red Wings became crystal clear on FM in the car and WDFN lost a key arrow from the quiver when fighting WXYT for advertising dollars.

Finally, while it made for great radio at times, Detroit's downtown professional teams repeatedly snubbed WDFN when play-by-play contract rights were available for bid. Already leery of WDFN's truculent approach to on-air criticism of both in-game performance and administrative decision-making, the city's sports-minded Big Three tired of the station's oft-juvenile approach to culling fan reaction in promotion and programming and WDFN subsequently never made the breakthrough needed to secure radio rights. That allowed WXYT to remain a potential competitor for advertising dollars when the station was turning over multiple contracts for on-air talent and drawing abysmal ratings.

The Fan was brought to Detroit in 1994 as a mirror image of popular New York City sports radio station WFAN, and Detroit's Fan had the jump on any future competition had it been able to lock up any one of Detroit's three downtown teams. But instead of getting along before going along, WDFN implemented an adversarial approach to sports talk, pitting fans versus the teams without a major play-by-play contract to sustain it. That ultimately cost The Fan's staff of talent when Detroit's economy could no longer sustain two sports talkers.

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries from Arcadia Publishing. Cameron's 2nd title, Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, is due August 2009.

Come see me tomorrow afternoon in Novi's Twelve Oaks Mall at the Borders Express bookstore from 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

I'll be signing copies of my book, Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, and talking football,and a little basketball, too, as you finish your Christmas shopping. It's a great opportunity to get a great gift before the 25th is here!

Later in the evening, I'll be officiating at Royal Oak Shrine's inaugural boys' basketball game at their brand new basketball facility. The Knights will be facing their neighbors to the east, Royal Oak High, a school that used to host some of the bigger Shrine games in both football and basketball when it was better known as Royal Oak Kimball High.

Perhaps no school has needed a new gym more than Shrine, with it's cramped corners that didn't allow for three-point shots and a slew of other inconveniences. However, there's a ton of Catholic League history in that old, cramped barn and the old lady was witness to literally hundreds of old-fashioned Michigan barn-burners over the years. As we welcome the new, we bid adieu to the old, too.

Finally, the rumors continue to fly about The Detroit News & Detroit Free Press editorial staffs suffering greatly due to the economy, the lethargic newspaper climate and the need to shelve the old media platform for today's new, electronically-generated mediums. Yesterday chat rooms and e-mail threads buzzed with news that as many as 300 staffers could be axed from newsrooms and editorial staffs at Detroit's dailies. That and the possibility of the dailies only printing a hard copy on Friday, Saturday and Sundays.

The truth is Detroit's no longer a two-paper town, and it hasn't been for some time. It wasn't a three-paper town nearly 60 years ago when the The Detroit Times folded. If that sounds harsh, book a flight to Hartford, Connecticut and take the Amtrak into New York's Penn Station. You'll be amazed at how many papers are available on the platform of the commuter trains and how thick they are. It literally takes all two hours to get the daily paper digested on your way into the city, and it's like this in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. In Detroit you can race through our papers in 15-20 scant minutes.

That's not to say the writing is poor or the content isn't worthy. It simply means Detroit's newsworthy footprint doesn't match the available advertising resources for revenue to justify a two-paper system.

One aspect I'm optimistic about is a boost in available assignments for freelancers like myself if the online platform goes forward in full. The current hard copy production model is expensive and severely limits cash flow. An online edition, especially an exclusively online platform, would free up a lot of needed liquidity. The catch is the advertising revenue and how to effectively trigger an effective advertising model.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, and his syndicated blog is found exclusively at www.MIPrepZone.com!

My wife and I returned last night from New York City and the weekend's 37th annual American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) conference. I moderated a panel on successful blogging Saturday at the Grand Hyatt, connected to historic Grand Central Station. I take great pride that a healthy number of professional writers represented our metro in New York so admirably. New York City is an unbelievable town, it's my favorite U.S. city to visit and I'm happy to say we added a little something to the journalism world from Detroit.

But I'm thankful to be home, too. It was nice to be on Orchard Lake Road at midnight last night with no honking horns, cabbies with guard rails on all four sides and streets clogged with pedestrians and trash in equal numbers. I'm thankful for green grass. There's hardly any grass in New York City, save for small patches in front of three-story brownstones that could be trimmed with scissors from the junk drawer in your kitchen. It's one of the reasons Central Park stands out in NYC. I'm thankful that our schools have lawns, shrubs, stadiums and fields. Our schools don't have to rent auditoriums and parking isn't confined to a seat on a subway car.

We have a special, unique aspect of our metro we all call Detroit. We're one of the smallest big cities you'll ever see. We're about coney islands and chili fries. We're suburbs and street signs. We're not landlocked. We're not congested and co-mingled beyond recognition. Our schools have names, faces and traditions. New York City has schools called Public School 180, and that gets shortened to PS, who on any given day PS 180 might play PS 148 or PS 127. We have Eisenhower and Chippewa Valley, Pershing and Denby, Troy Athens and Lake Orion. New York City schools rise among concrete jungles, decorated in colorful murals tagged on five-story buildings. Our schools have manicured greens, atriums with doors matching the school's colors and bands that march downtown before football games.

We're not at all like New York City, and in some ways that's sad. Our big city is corrupted and confused, sorely lacking leadership and professional direction. We have no mass transit of any kind, and no, the People Mover doesn't count -- we all know this. The building clocks and neon signs that mark other big cities are missing here. Remember the Goodyear auto production counters perched above our freeways? Gone. The neon letters of General Motors? No more. The Yellow Pages ad seen from the Lodge? It no longer works. We've allowed those aspects of our city to die. We allowed our city, county, regional and state leaders to take us to nowhere. It's truth.

But we also have some things to point to that make us special. We still love high school football, and why shouldn't we love high school football game? We have an excellent high school baseball tradition in this area, with numerous major leaguers coming from metro Detroit. We have beautiful gyms and a basketball heritage most major cities would love to claim. Our schools are clean. They offer gleaming facilities and opportunities that big city institutions can't come close to offering. In our schools, 10 dollars buys you a ticket, a program, a hot dog, popcorn, something to drink and a great game to watch with your neighbors and friends. In New York City, it might get you a trip uptown and back, and a cup of coffee from a cafe you've never seen but passed a million times before.

A fun place to visit, that New York City, but not somewhere I'd want my kids to be kids. New York City takes your childhood and makes you grow up too fast. Metro Detroit isn't New York City. That isn't going to change, and I hope it doesn't any time soon.

I love New York City right where it is. Detroit? We call that home.