Sports in brief: Bowden finds Alabama renewal

Football: The failure was sudden and dramatic and it accomplished the seemingly impossible: sucking the energy and self-confidence from Terry Bowden.

His abrupt exit from Auburn’s football team nearly 11 years ago left the unabashedly ambitious coach full of self-doubt.

“I think I suppressed so much depression and just unhappiness,” said Bowden, preparing for his first season coaching at Division II North Alabama in Florence. “You wake up for at least 30-45 minutes every day and say, ‘Could I have done something different? How did that happen?’

“It crushed me. I was probably unable to handle that degree of failure to the degree that it crushed me.”

It kept the onetime coaching wunderkind – who won his first 20 games as a major college coach – sidelined for nearly a decade, relegated to the safe world of TV studios, broadcasting booths and keyboards.

Now he’s back in the state where he gained fame and infamy, but far removed from both Auburn and the powerful Southeastern Conference. At 53, Bowden has taken over a Division II power tucked away in the northwest corner of the state.

The 1998 season at Auburn was a disaster, with injuries, academic problems and other off-field issues for Bowden’s players. The Tigers started 1-5 and Bowden resigned, maintaining that he bolted only after influential trustee Bobby Lowder told him he would be fired.

Associated Press

Tennis rises from the grave

Tennis: The magazine cover and accompanying story sit on Kurt Kamperman’s desk – a reminder of where his sport has been and where it cannot go again.

“Is Tennis Dying?” the Sports Illustrated cover asks. Inside is a 5,000-word discourse about the slow, sad dismantling of the Great American Tennis Boom, which blossomed in the days of McEnroe, Connors and Evert back in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

Since the dark days of that May 1994 magazine cover, leaders in tennis have recalibrated their formula and repackaged their product.

Helped by the new strategies and the fact that it doesn’t take hundreds of dollars to drum up a game – a good sell in a rough economy – the sport has enjoyed 43 percent growth since 2000, to 18.6 million players, according to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.

“In this economy, to spend 4-5 hours playing a round of golf, it’s a challenge,” said Kamperman, the USTA’s CEO of community events, “where in 90 minutes, you can get to the courts, get a good workout in and you’re back home.”

Associated Press