Forget The Big 3! We Need An iCar!

The Flatster (aka Thomas Friedman, author of The Earth Is Flat) is a paradigm-shifter today. It is obvious, even to a dense, old blogger, that the iPod and iTunes have replaced the CD. The computer has replaced the typewriter. Yada, yada, yada. Today, The Flatster proclaims that something will replace the automobile. If this is a (fair & balanced) paradigm shift, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
While Detroit Slept
By Thomas L. Friedman

As I think about our bailing out Detroit, I can’t help but reflect on what, in my view, is the most important rule of business in today’s integrated and digitized global market, where knowledge and innovation tools are so widely distributed. It’s this: Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you. Just don’t think it won’t be done. If you have an idea in Detroit or Tennessee, promise me that you’ll pursue it, because someone in Denmark or Tel Aviv will do so a second later.

Why do I bring this up? Because someone in the mobility business in Denmark and Tel Aviv is already developing a real-world alternative to Detroit’s business model. I don’t know if this alternative to gasoline-powered cars will work, but I do know that it can be done — and Detroit isn’t doing it. And therefore it will be done, and eventually, I bet, it will be done profitably.

And when it is, our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet.

What business model am I talking about? It is Shai Agassi’s electric car network company, called Better Place. Just last week, the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., announced a partnership with the state of Hawaii to road test its business plan there after already inking similar deals with Israel, Australia, the San Francisco Bay area and, yes, Denmark.

The Better Place electric car charging system involves generating electrons from as much renewable energy — such as wind and solar — as possible and then feeding those clean electrons into a national electric car charging infrastructure. This consists of electricity charging spots with plug-in outlets — the first pilots were opened in Israel this week — plus battery-exchange stations all over the respective country. The whole system is then coordinated by a service control center that integrates and does the billing.

Under the Better Place model, consumers can either buy or lease an electric car from the French automaker Renault or Japanese companies like Nissan (General Motors snubbed Agassi) and then buy miles on their electric car batteries from Better Place the way you now buy an Apple cellphone and the minutes from AT&T. That way Better Place, or any car company that partners with it, benefits from each mile you drive. G.M. sells cars. Better Place is selling mobility miles.

The first Renault and Nissan electric cars are scheduled to hit Denmark and Israel in 2011, when the whole system should be up and running. On Tuesday, Japan’s Ministry of Environment invited Better Place to join the first government-led electric car project along with Honda, Mitsubishi and Subaru. Better Place was the only foreign company invited to participate, working with Japan’s leading auto companies, to build a battery swap station for electric cars in Yokohama, the Detroit of Japan.

What I find exciting about Better Place is that it is building a car company off the new industrial platform of the 21st century, not the one from the 20th — the exact same way that Steve Jobs did to overturn the music business. What did Apple understand first? One, that today’s technology platform would allow anyone with a computer to record music. Two, that the Internet and MP3 players would allow anyone to transfer music in digital form to anyone else. You wouldn’t need CDs or record companies anymore. Apple simply took all those innovations and integrated them into a single music-generating, purchasing and listening system that completely disrupted the music business.

What Agassi, the founder of Better Place, is saying is that there is a new way to generate mobility, not just music, using the same platform. It just takes the right kind of auto battery — the iPod in this story — and the right kind of national plug-in network — the iTunes store — to make the business model work for electric cars at six cents a mile. The average American is paying today around 12 cents a mile for gasoline transportation, which also adds to global warming and strengthens petro-dictators.

Do not expect this innovation to come out of Detroit. Remember, in 1908, the Ford Model-T got better mileage — 25 miles per gallon — than many Ford, G.M. and Chrysler models made in 2008. But don’t be surprised when it comes out of somewhere else. It can be done. It will be done. If we miss the chance to win the race for Car 2.0 because we keep mindlessly bailing out Car 1.0, there will be no one to blame more than Detroit’s new shareholders: we the taxpayers.

[Thomas L. Friedman became The New York Times' foreign-affairs columnist in 1995. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third (The earlier Prizes were awarded in 1983 and 1988.) Pulitzer for this paper. Friedman's latest book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, (2005) won the inaugural Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year award. Friedman received a B.A. degree in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1978 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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A Geriatric Gym Rat At Roane State

Before there was the saga of Ken Mink, there was Mike Flynt, who, in the summer of 2007, returned to Sul Ross State University in West Texas for his senior season, 37 years after he was kicked out of school and off the Lobos' football team. Flynt survived the season (mostly injured) and has gone off to motivational speaking gigs and a book (The Senior written with Don Yaeger). Now, meet 73-year-old Ken Mink in Harriman, TN at Roane State Community College. Mink is a Raider guard this year, but his wife won't let him attend team parties. If this is the (fair & balanced) fountain of youth, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
A 73-Year-Old Gives Basketball A Second Shot
By Jeré Longman

Ken Mink by Shawn Poynter for The New York Times

Before Sunday’s basketball game, Coach Yogi Woods gathered the junior varsity at Lambuth University. Watch out for 73 on the other team, he said. He did not mean the player’s number. He meant his age.

The visitors, Roane State Community College, had a septuagenarian guard, Ken Mink, college basketball’s oldest player, who has started a second career after his first ended a half century ago with a mysterious shaving-cream incident.

If the 6-foot Mink was good enough to play, he was good enough to be guarded, Woods told the Lambuth players. Then he turned to the freshman Kendrick Coleman and said: “If he goes in for a layup, don’t let him have it. If he scores on you, we will never let you forget it.”

This mixture of curiosity and macho dread has greeted Mink all season at colleges throughout Tennessee. After all, how do you defend a guy whose peers are generally pumping iron to supplement their blood levels, not to build their muscles? On Nov. 3, the junior-varsity coach at King College told one of the Roane players, whom he had coached in high school, “If the old guy scores, we’re walking home.”

Late in that game, Mink entered and found himself open in the corner. He gave a pump fake, and the defender ended up draped over him like raccoon coat. Calmly, he hit both free throws. The Hack-a-Mink strategy had failed.

“I thought some teams would play along, humor him,” said Randy Nesbit, the coach of Roane State, located in Harriman, Tenn. “No, they’re not like the Washington Generals. They’re like sharks sensing blood.”

At home games, Mink has been a crowd favorite. Attendance, usually about 100 per game, has on occasion swelled to 400. Mink’s wife, Emilia, 68, wore a retro cheerleader outfit to the season opener, complete with saddle shoes and a poodle skirt. She held up a sign that said, “Ken Can, He’s Our Medicare Man.”

No one has been happier than the guy who runs the Roane concession stand.

“He even put a new item on the menu, polish sausage with peppers and onions,” Nesbit said. “It was just plain hotdogs before.”

For a guy Mink’s age, two-a-days are a likely reference to multivitamins, not double practices. But while shooting around in a neighbor’s driveway in the summer of 2007, he realized he still had his shooting stroke. So he sent e-mail messages to eight tiny colleges near his home in Knoxville, Tenn. Perhaps a small school could use a guy with an old-school push shot.

“You do realize you’re 72?” Emilia Mink asked her husband. “Do you think you can convince someone you’re not?”

Nesbit, the Roane coach, grew intrigued. A former point guard and coach at The Citadel, he kept himself in terrific shape at 50. He was curious about the possibilities of athletic performance at an age when Gatorade has been replaced as the sports drink of choice by Metamucil. Still, he wanted to meet Mink before offering him a spot on the team.

“I think he wanted to make sure Ken wasn’t out on a weekend pass,” Emilia Mink said.

Ken Mink told Nesbit a story of unfinished business: he had played at Lees College in Jackson, KY, only to be expelled from the then-Presbyterian school in 1956 as his sophomore season began. His crime? Mink said he was accused of soaping the coach’s office with shaving cream, slathering the lights and even the coach’s shoes.

He denied it. “I don’t even shave,” he said he told the university president. Apparently, his alibi was not as smooth as his baby face.

“It’s been eating at him all these years,” Emilia Mink said. “Ken likes to finish what he started.”

Marcus Mullins, a student manager on that Lees team, said he remembered Mink as a “good, hard-nosed player, a big raw-boned kid.” (“I used to be 6-2,” Mink said.) While he was not certain of the facts, Mullins said, the university president at the time was a stern man who did not tolerate prankish misbehavior.

“I know there was an incident, and suddenly he was gone,” Mullins said of Mink. “I’m sure he’s telling the truth.”

Mink said he joined the Air Force in November 1956 and played regularly in military tournaments for four years. He then went on to a career as a newspaper editor, continuing to play basketball in recreation leagues. Since retiring in 1999, he and his wife said, Mink has kept active by playing golf, walking, hiking, skiing, even hang gliding. He has published a book, So, You Want Your Kid to be a Sports Superstar, and along with his wife, edits an online travel magazine.

His hair is gray and thinning, but he does look younger than 73. Still, basketball and school have required adjustments. Spanish gave him more trouble this semester than wind sprints, so he replaced it with sociology.

“I’m threatening a 3.0,” he said.

By that, he meant his grade point average. He would kill for that to be his scoring average.

His goal is to score in double digits. Not for each game. For the season. With the holiday break approaching, Mink is 8 points short.

“His productivity has dropped since he shaved his mustache,” Nesbit said.

Still, there is a half-season remaining. Mink travels with his teammates in a vehicle the size of a rental-car bus, taking his own room on the road, receiving scraps of playing time during blowouts. He is writing a book about his season and a rap song for his teammates.

On one hand, his teammates admire the audacity of his effort. “Most 73-year-olds are using walkers,” forward Keith Bauer said. On the other hand, they do not spare him the tart wit of the locker room. When Mink joked that he had friends in high places, guard Philip Helton shot back, “Where, heaven?”

Mink has a nice shooting touch, and he can use his left hand around the basket, but it is the commonness of his talent, not the rarity, that makes him such an inspiring story, Nesbit said.

“He’s not a freak of nature beating Father Time,” Nesbit said. “There’s no special diet. People pull for him because he looks like a 73-year-old man. If people stay active and healthy, a lot could do what he’s doing.”

Sunday, after Roane’s lead had grown to double digits against Lambuth, Mink entered the game with 39.5 seconds remaining. He dribbled against pressure but did not take a shot before the buzzer sounded.

“At least, I didn’t turn the ball over,” he said.

There was no time to celebrate. The players piled in their bus for a long ride home. Final exams would begin in the morning. Earlier this season, teammates invited Mink to a party at a player’s apartment. He asked his wife for permission to attend, and she said no, according to Nesbit. It was just as well.

“If he starts breaking training, it’s all downhill,” Nesbit said.

[Jeré Longman is a reporter for the New York Times who has written about sports for nearly a quarter century, including a three-year stint covering the Eagles for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has written three books: If Football's a Religion, Why Don't We Have a Prayer; Among the Heroes; and The Girls of Summer.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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