I recently posted this on the Gopher Sports Blog

Given the recent struggles of the Minnesota basketball program, it is difficult to look back and remember the success of years past. As we are approaching the 10 year anniversary of the last Gophers basketball team of significance, I would like to take this opportunity to look back on a coaching career filled with many victories, fewer losses, and a scandal that sent a basketball program into the Big Ten basement. Yes, I am going to write about Clem Haskins, the subject of my heterosexual man crush as a teenager.

Before the academic scandal broke out at the U of M, the Gophers spent much of the nineties building a nationally recognized and respected basketball program. Clem Haskins was the mastermind behind building the Gophers program, and he did so by recruiting some of the best basketball players in the state of Minnesota (Sam Jacobson and John Thomas), great players from other states (Quincy Lewis and Voshon Leonard) and ready to contribute junior college transfers (Bobby Jackson).

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Happy 4th Anniversary of the time I went to Kenya for a week and shot a documentary film with 6 of my classmates from the University of St. Thomas, along with the greatest camera man of all time, Brad Jacobson, and my arch nemesis of a professor, Mr. Old Skooley (intentionally misspelled).

As you can see, I decided to start this post with specifics in order to let my speed reading friends get the gyst of this post without wasting too much of their precious time actually reading the entire story. For those of you who are more inclined to read my verbose ramblings, I encourage you to enjoy the rest of this post.

4 years ago this week, I embarked on a trip to Kenya. As mentioned above, myself and 6 students from St. Thomas went to Kenya and filmed a documentary. The topic of our documentary was following a team of American doctors performing and demonstrating heart surgery and catheterization techniques alongside Kenyan doctors. The doctors went to Kenya as part of a team from a Minneapolis based charity called the Children’s Heartlink Foundation. The result of my trip was a 23 minute documentary that was nominated for a regional Emmy award. We lost to a story about Methamphetamines produced by Jason Davis from KSTP channel 5. We got hosed.

Well, actually, we didn’t get hosed at all. It was naive on my part to think that a team of 6 amateur photojournalists could ever compete with professionals and actually win an award. We were outmatched, and I am honored that we were ever nominated.

Actually, I don’t believe that at all. I think that the documentary we produced kicked major ass and I am proud that I was involved with such a great crew. In fact, while researching this article, I came across an IMDB page for the documentary!!! There is even an entry for Jeff Sauer.

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