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Friday, July 26, 2013

Under The Mat: Title IX, and the end of Auburn wrestling

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The 1980-81 Auburn wrestling Team won the SEC Championship, and was the first SEC team to finish top 10 in the country. It was also the last wrestling team Auburn ever fielded. (1980 Glomerata)
Karen Hoppa sits behind her desk on the second floor of the Auburn Soccer and Track & Field Complex, in an office that could only belong to a head women’s soccer coach.
She’s surrounded by memorabilia representing her past teams, from photos across her desk to a line of soccer balls covered in player signatures on top of her computer desk’s cabinet frame.
Behind her is a window overlooking a shining green field, where her current team will continue spring practice later in the afternoon.
It’s the Tigers’ home pitch, featuring a small video scoreboard and a bleacher stand that comfortably fits 1,500 members of Auburn soccer’s cult fan base. The turf is strong enough to hold its shape through Tiger practices and games. It’s the perfect home for a rising soccer program in the South.
If it wasn’t for Title IX, which helped jump start women’s athletics programs across the country 41 years ago, it’s possible none of these soccer facilities would have even been built.
Unfortunately, also thanks to Title IX, the women at Auburn don’t have anyone to share it with.
“That is the negative side of Title IX, and I hate that part,” Hoppa says. “I think there’s got to be a different solution than cutting men’s sports. They cut Vandy men’s soccer a few years ago and I just think that was terrible, because they had a really good program and those guys need a place to play.”
There is no varsity men’s soccer team at Auburn, just like how there is no wrestling, men’s volleyball or men’s gymnastics team.
Title IX, a part of the United States Education Amendments of 1972, demands that no one be discriminated against due to sex in consideration of federal financial assistance. In effect, the law requires schools to award a proportionate number of athletic scholarships to females as it does to males.
The easiest way for programs, thus far, to meet that criteria has been to lower the bar on the number of scholarships it offers to men by cutting men’s varsity programs.
While women’s soccer participation has grown from just 22 Division-I schools supporting teams in 1981 to 315 programs featuring teams in 2011, other men’s sports have fallen off, with wrestling dropping from 146 Division-I teams in 1981 to 80 Division-I teams in 2011.
It’s a threat that men’s teams in non-revenue sports at every school operate under every year, and it dampers any hope of more men’s programs being added until the law is tweaked.
There is a men’s soccer presence on Auburn’s campus outside of the student club team. Hoppa sees what might have been members of a varsity men’s soccer team almost every day, in a group of male scout team players. Given their anatomical advantage, Hoppa invites them to practice to push her girls’ strength and athleticism.
But they have no game to practice for. There is no conference championship to chase. There are no Friday nights under the lights.
“A lot of them were really high level players,” Hoppa says. “Some of them even got scholarship offers to play, but they wanted to come to Auburn. So those guys got left out.”
Even sitting in her office atop a first-class facility devoted to her team, the soccer community-member in Hoppa sees that something is still missing.
“I hate that side of it.”

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Tom Milkovich (1978 Glomerata)
Tom Milkovich came south to Auburn in 1977 to build a program from the ground up.
Milkovich was an all-time wrestling great in the Midwest, hailing from the First Family of wrestling in Ohio, winning three state championships in three undefeated seasons in high school under his father, Mike Milkovich, Sr., at Maple Heights High.
In college at Michigan State, Tom Milkovich was named a three-time All-American, a national champion and four-time conference champion.
Milkovich inherited a team at Auburn that had just finished last place at the SEC tournament in 1976-77. But by the end of Milkovich’s fourth season of coaching on the Plains, in 1980-81, the Tigers had finished the season ranked No. 9 in the country, becoming the first SEC team to ever crack the top ten.
“We had it going on,” Tom says. “Not only did we have a good team, but we had a great following. One crowd was 6-to-7,000 people that we had at a wrestling match. It was just growing by leaps and bounds.”
Tom Milkovich didn’t come down to Auburn alone. He brought Jamie Milkovich, his younger cousin, fresh out of his high school career at Maple Heights under the tutelage of Mike Sr., to spend his four-year college career at Auburn.
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(1978 Glomerata.)
“I was on an All-Star team when Tom came to the All-Star match and said, ‘You know, I think I’m going to get the job at Auburn,’” Jamie says. “So I got all the guys from Cleveland around me and said, ‘Listen, my cousin’s getting a job in the South. How many of you are with me?’ And like seven guys raised their hand — and those were our first recruits.”
By the end of his senior year, Jamie was Auburn’s all-time wins leader, amassing 98 career wins in four years on the Plains.
“One of the things we really did was make wrestling glamorous,” Jamie Milkovich says. “We put cheerleaders out there; we never had cheerleaders before. The prettiest girls on the campus, and we gave them cheerleading outfits. We made it a show. And it really caught on.”
Wrestling was booming in Auburn, thanks to a set of cousins from Ohio — one the young, upstart head coach and the other a star on the team.
Jamie remembers how the two would drum up interest, throwing an oldwrestling mat up on the roof of a van and driving around to all the fraternity houses. They’d gather up the guys, unroll the mat in the yard, and show them all wrestling moves.
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(1977 Glomerata)
Later, they’d organize intramural wrestling tournaments between all the fraternities, and the sororities would show up to cheer. They had the auxiliary gym rocking, Jamie recalls.
Throughout the Milkovich cousins’ four years at Auburn, the sport grew immensely on campus, and the program made several breakthroughs, including facing Tennessee in the first ever nationally televised wrestling meet, broadcast by an upstart ESPN.
But the biggest moment of the Milkovich era came in an upset win at home over Oklahoma.
“In 1980, the University of Oklahoma was ranked No. 1, and we hosted them at the Memorial Coliseum back then, and we beat them,” Jamie says. “The place was packed and everybody ran onto the mat, and it was really the pinnacle.
“A team from Auburn was never supposed to even be in the same gymnasium as the University of Oklahoma in wrestling.”
The Tigers went on to win the SEC championship. They finished the season ranked in the top 10 nationally. Tom was continuing to bring in star recruits from wrestling hotbeds up North, while helping to build the local high school programs in Alabama. Jamie, with his collegiate career finished, was preparing to stick around and join Tom’s coaching staff as an assistant.
The stage was set. Auburn was going to become a wrestling powerhouse in the South for years to come.
Then, suddenly, it all disappeared.

The first time Meredith Jenkins heard about Title IX, she was a junior at Melbourne High School in 1987 in Melbourne, Fla.
“I played soccer, and we didn’t have girls’ soccer in the high schools growing up in Florida,” Jenkins says. “But we had a really good program. We played a lot of club teams and won a lot of tournaments. So we went to the school board and asked to have soccer, and they didn’t want it. But we had a lawyer as a father and he suggested that this might be something under Title IX.
“We got girls soccer,” Jenkins laughs, “and we won the state championship that year.”
Now, Jenkins deals with Title IX almost every day, as a Senior Women’s Athletic Director at Auburn.
Jenkins says that program budgeting comes down to financial restraints as much as it does Title IX compliance, but she admits that Title IX’s impact may have resulted in some unintended consequences.
“I worry about some sports,” Jenkins says. “Look at wrestling. And men’s swimming; We have a great men’s swimming program and you look across the country at how many have been dropped in the past 10 years — That was not the intent of Title IX. It wasn’t to drop men’s sports and cut opportunities to men. It was just to make sure women had opportunities. But, I can’t speak for those places, but I’m sure it comes down to dollars.”
Either way, Jenkins has seen Title IX have a tremendous effect on the women’s side of college athletics during her career, as has Auburn soccer coach Karen Hoppa.
“The good thing is, from a career standpoint, it’s really helped,” Hoppa says.
After graduating high school in 1987, Hoppa played out her college soccer career at the University of Central Florida. Upon graduation, she joined the UCF coaching staff as the Golden Knight’s top assistant — but was only paid $2,500 a year, and had to work other jobs, like coach high school boys’ soccer and club teams, to get by until she was named UCF’s head coach in 1993.
Now, Hoppa says, thanks to the growth in women’s sports spurred by Title IX, there is a more viable career path in place for women to navigate in athletics.
“You have an opportunity to have an entry-level position at a college and then work your way up, just like (former Auburn assistant) Amy Berbary,” Hoppa says. “She left to be the head coach at Indiana. She was a high school coach for a couple years, then she got the assistant job at Dayton, worked her way up to here, and now she’s the head coach at Indiana.
“When I graduated high school, you couldn’t even fathom that. But that was always her career goal, to work her way up. And I couldn’t even fathom that. It wasn’t even an option. So I do think that it’s really neat that now we do have those types of opportunities for women.”

“I was offered the job at the University of Michigan,” says Tom, going back to the spring of 1981. “So I came back to Auburn, and the athletic director at the time was Lee Hayley, and I told Coach Hayley, ‘Coach, they’ve offered me the head coaching position at Michigan.’ I knew some of the other SEC schools had dropped the sport, and I wanted to know what was going to happen at Auburn.”
Tom says that Hayley reassured him in that meeting that the athletic department was excited about the wrestling program, and that Hayley promised Tom and Jamie that no one would touch the wrestling program as long as he was the athletic director.
With that reassurance, how could they leave the Southern paradise they had found?
“We had a lot over there by Chewacla State Park,” Jamie says. “We had two lots over there. I said, ‘Tom, do you really want to leave this to go back up to Michigan? Just because it’s the Big 10?’ He said, ‘Jamie, you’re right, we can’t leave this.’
“And we went and told Michigan we weren’t coming.”
But winds of change were blowing on the Plains.
“It wasn’t two months later or so that Pat Dye was then hired as the athletic director,” Tom says, “and the first thing they did was they dropped the wrestling program.”
The Michigan vacancy had already been filled.
Tom hasn’t found a coaching job at the collegiate level since.
(1979 Glomerata.)
via1979_zps4802798cAnd Auburn hasn’t competed in varsity wrestling since. Auburn hasn’t given out a scholarship, awarded a letter, or competed in a match in varsity wrestling in over 32 years.
That means Auburn can’t continue the legacy of former greats, either, like the legendary Arnold “Swede” Umbach, who laid the foundation for the Auburn wrestling program well before the short Milkovich renaissance of the late 1970′s.
“We had 37 years of wrestling at Auburn,” Tom says. “We had a guy named Swede Umbach who gave his entire life to that university, and the development of the wrestling program, and it meant nothing to them. Swede Umbach was the dean of wrestling in the South. A lot of those colleges started because of Swede Umbach.
“There isn’t a single thing left except for a trophy for Ray Downey. That’s it. And you had all these great kids that went to the school there.”

swede
“Swede Umbach was the dean of wrestling in the South.” — Tom Milkoivch (Plainsman 1973)
Now, Tom Milkovich lives in Florida, close to his legendary father, Mike Sr., for whom the Maple Heights school system back in Ohio has since named a middle school after.
Tom has retired from teaching and coaching full-time in Ohio, and now just coaches wrestling at nearby Coral Shores High School in Florida. With the rest of his time, he goes fishing in the Florida Keys. And diving for lobsters.
The Milkovich cousins and the Auburn wrestling community tried to save the program back when it was cut. At first, Auburn said the cut was due to a lack of funding, so Tom went out and found some funding.
“We raised close to $1 million from several sources,” Tom says. “We were going to operate off of the percentage in the bank that we had. Each year we could have raised about $120,000, I could imagine, to support the program, and they still wouldn’t do it.”
According to Jamie, supporters had pledged several fold of what the program would have required to sustain itself.
“Our budget back then was only $26,000,” Jamie says. “We had donors obligating over $100,000, and they still said ‘We can’t do it.’ I think they didn’t want to admit that it was a Title IX thing, because they couldn’t, but it was. That was really a sad thing for us, because we had really developed a good program.”
The next year, most of the team with eligibility remaining transferred to other schools and continued to wrestle. Several would find success at other schools, and two of them would go on to win national championships.
According to Tom and Jamie’s math, if that team had stayed together in 1981-82, based on the points the wrestlers earned elsewhere during that season, Auburn would have finished No. 2 in the country.
“I don’t blame Pat Dye at all,” Tom says. “I blame the fact that women’s sports needed to be added — and I have nothing against women’s sports. I was very happy for them, but I wasn’t very happy that they cut my sport at the expense of women’s sports.”
When both cousins moved back to Ohio in 1981, Jamie took over the job at Maple Heights for his uncle, Mike Sr. He has coached there ever since.
“For me it wasn’t really just a loss for the wrestling program, because I really grew to love the South and specifically Alabama and Auburn and I really thought I’d be spending the rest of my life there,” Jamie says. “Then all of a sudden, I came back up to Cleveland, and still for 32 years I’m coaching at the high school I went to. So it was a loss to me on a lot of levels.
“There was this beautiful place in the South, and it was like I discovered paradise down there.”
The old wrestling team had a reunion in Auburn in 2002. That’s the last time Jamie has been back to his alma mater.
“There’s nothing to come back to,” Jamie says. “There’s no match to meet up at. It’s one thing meeting at a football game. That’s fun. But you’re wrestlers. There’s no big match against Alabama that we can come back to meet at. It’s really a loss.”
Still, both have kept fond memories of the time they headed to the Deep South on a mission to rebuild a struggling program — and ended up finding a second home in the process.
“Even though people feel like Auburn did us wrong by dropping it, those were the best four years of my life and I still love the university,” Jamie says. “I rooted for them when Cam Newton was playing, all that.”
Both Milkovich cousins return to the state of Alabama every year for a high school wrestling clinic hosted by former Auburn wrestler Mark Snider at Hewitt-Trussville High School. It is there, at the high school level, that they hope to see a resurgence of wrestling talent and interest in the South.
Currently, one Southeastern Conference school, Missouri, supports a varsity wrestling program.
“I have never forgotten my time at Auburn,” Tom says. “I love the university, and I love the people that were there. They made it my home and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was the greatest place I thought I had ever seen in my life, and I’d have taken Auburn University over any university anyway.”

Monday, July 22, 2013

Former Mt. Blue coach Ward set standard

BY TERRY DEVEREAUX Correspondent 

BY TERRY DEVEREAUX
Correspondent
Former Mt. Blue High School wrestling coach, Tom Ward, will be one of five individuals inducted into the Maine Amateur Wrestling Alliance Hall of Fame during a ceremony at Hyde School in Bath on Saturday, Aug. 3.
Ward became Mt Blue's first-ever state wrestling champion when he won the 155-pound Class B title in 1972. He went on to wrestle four years at the University of Maine at Orono, where he was team captain his senior year. As successful as he was as a competitor, it was as a coach where Ward made his mark.
He began his coaching career as an assistant at Rumford High School and was instrumental in the Panther's 1978 state championship performance.
In 1979, Ward returned to Mt. Blue as a physical education teacher and took over the wrestling program. He led the Cougars to back-to-back state Class A championships in 1983 and 1984. It was the last time that an Eastern team has won the Class A title.
Conditioning was a hallmark of Ward's Mt. Blue teams.
"I learned how important conditioning was when I was in college," Ward said. "I swore my kids wouldn't lose because the other guy was in better shape than they were."
Maranacook Community High School football coach Joe Emery, who wrestled for Ward on those state championship teams, said Ward was his favorite coach.
"You knew he cared a lot about you and he got the best out of everybody," Emery said. "He taught us that whatever we do in sports or in life that we do it with passion. He is what I aspire to be as a coach."
Ward stepped down as the Mt. Blue wrestling coach after the 1985 season.
"At that point, I was the athletic director and assistant principal at Mt Blue," Ward said. "I really hated to give up coaching, but I just couldn't do it all."
Ward later took the principal position at Dirigo High School where he helped start the Dirigo wrestling team along with coach Hal Watson. His administrative career included stints as principal at Mt. Blue and Marshwood High School in South Berwick. He recently resigned at Superintendent at RSU 10 to take the helm at RSU 9. Mt. Blue High School is part of RSU 9.
Bob O'Connor, who recently retired as wrestling coach at Mt. Blue was a senior on the 1979 team that Ward coached.
"His passion for wrestling was evident and I looked forward to going to practice every day," O'Connor said. "He always told us wrestling was a sport that what you get out of it will only be what you put into it."
Others being inducted into the hall of fame include former wrestlers Jon Kane of Deering High School, Rusty Smith of Dexter High School, Maynard Pelletier of Fort Kent High School and Doug Gilbert of Rumford High School. Gilbert is now the head coach at Dirigo High School.
Foxcroft Academy's Luis Ayala will be honored as Coach of the Year while Gardiner's Daniel Del Gallo will be recognized as Wrestler of the Year. Topsham's Bob Ewing will receive the Person of the Year award.
The ceremony will begin with a dinner at 4 p.m. Tickets to the event may be ordered by calling Mark Nowak at (207) 729-1767. Tickets are $25 each and must be ordered by Thursday.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

The canvas is Brown's art

Mike Brown may be near the end of his mixed martial arts career, but he still has that drive.

By Steve Craig scraig@pressherald.com
Staff Writer
It has been nine years since Mike Brown's last fight in New England.

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Mike Brown, a former state wrestling champion at Bonny Eagle High, long ago found his niche in mixed martial arts, growing with the sport as it gained popularity.
The Associated Press
UFC 146: Brown v Pineda
click image to enlarge
Mike Brown, right, will be fighting in New England for the first time in nine years when he takes on Steven Siler during a UFC card in Boston on Aug. 17.
Getty/Zuffa LLC

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS BELOW

BACK IN THE UFC
WHO: Mike Brown vs. Steven Siler
WHEN: Aug. 17
WHERE: TD Bank Garden
In that time he's risen from relative unknown to world champion in the sport of mixed martial arts.
He's gone from teaching self-defense seminars to police officers for $25 a head to help cover his own training costs to coaching aspiring professionals at one of the world's top MMA gyms.
At age 37 the kid from Standish who won a state wrestling title at Bonny Eagle High in 1992 sees the end of his fighting career getting closer by the day.
"I'm old. I'm definitely the oldest lighter weight fighter in the UFC," Brown said.
But he isn't finished. The passion that fueled him during his efficiency-apartment, hot-plate cooking days is still strong.
"You do feel like a bit of a gladiator sometimes when you walk out to the bright lights and 10 or 15,000 people are going crazy," Brown said. "It's quite the rush and there's a lot on the line. Money is on the line. Your manhood, your ego, they're on the line. And your health. You can really get hurt."
It is close to 15 months and one neck surgery to fuse two vertebrae at the base of his neck since Brown experienced that rush in a three-round unanimous decision victory over Daniel Pineda at UFC 146 in Las Vegas.
Prior to the Pineda fight, Brown was giving serious thought to retiring. Instead, shortly after the victory he signed a five-fight agreement with the UFC.
"I don't think I'll fight five more times but I performed great in my last fight and felt good and had fun in there," Brown said. "That's my gauge. As long as I'm having fun."
Brown gets back into the octagon Aug. 17 against Steven Siler as part of UFC on Fox Sports 1 at the TD Garden in Boston. The UFC, or Ultimate Fighting Championship, is regarded as the world's premier MMA organization.
"He wanted one more fight. I have a lot of respect for the guy," said the UFC president, Dana White. "He was a champion. He wanted one more fight and we're going to give it to him."
Brown enters with a 26-8 record and the distinction of being the former World Extreme Cagefighting (WEC) featherweight (145-pound) champion.
Brown was 6-2 in WEC bouts, including two successful defenses of his featherweight title. At the time the WEC was owned by Zuffa, LLC, the parent company of the UFC, and was the top organization for lighter weight fighters. In October 2010 the two outfits merged under the UFC banner.
The bout against Siler will be Brown's fifth straight with the UFC. Siler, 26, originally from Anaheim, Calif., is 22-10 and five inches taller than the 5-foot-6 Brown.
Brown was originally scheduled to fight Akira Corassani of Sweden. No matter his opponent, he'll make $30,000 to show up and another $30,000 to win, with the chance of additional bonuses.
"The thing is you make the most money you've ever made at the end of your career. Every time you fight it's usually the most money you've ever made," Brown said. "For me, if I win, it will be the most money I've ever made."
SUPPORT IN THE EARLY DAYS
Cape Elizabeth police detective Paul Fenton, a trained defensive tactics instructor, jumped on the MMA fan bandwagon at a time when mainstream media thought the sport barbaric, the average person didn't know UFC from UFO, and most states -- Maine included -- refused to sanction fights.
But Fenton, 40, could see it was gaining traction. He also figured "there were going to be both good guys and bad guys who practiced MMA," and law enforcement better learn the basics, too.

Brown was serving as an assistant wrestling coach at the University of Southern Maine after competing collegiately at Norwich. He was in the fledgling stages of his own MMA career.
"He was trying to make some money to pay for his own training," Fenton said. "We approached Mike about instructing us in wrestling. That was 12-plus years ago."
Fenton and Brown now consider themselves brothers, bound by MMA, their Maine roots and, according to Fenton, Brown's intense loyalty.
"Mike was just such a genuine guy. We bonded and then we became great friends," Fenton said. "I've been fortunate to be a part of the evolution of Mike's career but Mike never changed."
It was Fenton who organized the seminar, with police officers paying $25 each to help Brown earn some extra cash. At the time Brown was living in a small apartment and commuting regularly to the Boston area to get better training as he fought in low-budget shows in places like Revere and Swansea, Mass.
The sport was just beginning to take off. Rules were ever-changing and the fighters themselves were often a mystery, coming from diverse martial arts background.
"The beginning of the sport was really nuts. That's what made me fall in love with it," Brown said. "At first the UFC really only had two rules: no biting, no eye-gouging.
"It took a lot more (courage) to fight then. Literally you could end up fighting a ninja. It was the fear of the unknown."
Brown won nine of his first 10 fights against an array of now mostly forgotten fighters. Then he lost back-to-back fights in 2004, the second to the current UFC star, Joe Lauzon of Brockton, Mass.
That fight would be his last in New England and signaled an important career change.
A FRIEND TO OTHERS
Since 2005 Brown has lived in Boca Raton, Fla., a short drive from the American Top Team gym in Coconut Creek.
Divorced many years ago, Brown lives with his girlfriend of three years. He does not have children. His mother, Kimberly McGowan, died early in his MMA career.
His connection to Maine is primarily through visits with close friends like Fenton and regular conversations with his stepfather, Mike Emmons of Saco, and his former high school wrestling coach, Ted Reese.
In an hour-long phone interview between twice-a-day training sessions, Brown said it was necessary for him to move from Maine to advance in his sport.
"Back then MMA wasn't even legal in Maine so there was very little of it up there," Brown said. "American Top Team offered me a chance to train. It's one of the best gyms in the world and I've been there ever since. Now I'm starting to coach some of the younger pros."
Brown took his newfound skills to Tokyo, winning two of his three fights.
Then he went on a 10-match winning streak that spanned three years and included a win in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and his upset TKO win over Urijah Faber to claim the WEC featherweight crown.
He defended his title twice, the second time with a convincing rematch win against Faber.
Fenton is one of the seven members of the Combat Sports Authority of Maine, which oversees the state's increasingly popular MMA shows as well as boxing promotions.
He was asked if he thinks Brown is given enough credit for his accomplishments.
"I think some people do. The sport's still growing," Fenton said. "Now people have the understanding a little more about how successful he has been."
In many ways, Brown is still a fan at heart. He is excited by front-row seats to MMA fights, perks like riding in a limousine from the airport, and has a video library of every UFC show. Fenton said his friend is still a little surprised that anyone would ask for his autograph.
As Brown's career was spiraling upward, one of his favorite sayings was, "We're doing it. We're doing it," Fenton said.
Fenton said his friend is still driving "a crappy Ford Focus" that smells of gym sweat and that Brown's Florida home is often used as a rent-free flophouse for fledgling fighters new to the American Top Team gym. Where other fighters often resell their allotment of tickets at raised prices with the cost of a T-shirt added on, Brown complains he can't get his friends free seats and gives his T-shirts away.
"He's done very well for himself. He's just a very frugal guy. He's a Mainer and that's a part of Mike that we love," Fenton said.
Since the WEC-UFC merger, injuries and losses in his first two UFC fights stalled Brown's career.
But consecutive wins has Brown thinking positively. He knows another title shot is probably not in his future "but that's always what you strive for, what drives you. You always set goals and right now I just want to put a streak together. I've won two straight and I want to make it three. Then make new goals."
As both the upcoming fight and the inevitable end of a long career get closer, Fenton said Brown has tweaked his favorite saying.
"Now he's saying, 'We're still doing it. We're still doing it.' "
Steve Craig can be contacted at 791-6413 or at:
scraig@mainetoday.com