By: Jaycee Cruz
The McMaster basketball team bus arrived in Ottawa and out came McMaster Forward Troy Joseph donning a Toronto Maple Leafs toque, some NCAA headphones, a Long Island University gym bag, and a McMaster Basketball backpack.
Each of those accessories tell us a little bit about the 6’5” forward who decided to forego his final year of eligibility at Long Island University Brooklyn (NCAA Division-1) to play here at McMaster. This isn’t a random transfer up north, but a sort of return home for the Scarborough, Ontario native.
Now the Maple Leafs toque and the NCAA headphones make some sense.
Joseph played 2 seasons playing for the Long Island University (LIU) Blackbirds in Brooklyn, NY. LIU Brooklyn is part of the Northeast Conference (NEC). While playing for LIU, Joseph was part of three NEC championship teams and has experience playing in the NCAA March Madness tournament.
Almost exactly a year ago, Joseph was the leading scorer for an LIU team that lost 73-72 on the road at Indiana University. Joseph scored 16 points on 5-9 shoot- ing (4-7 from 3-point range), one less than Indiana forward Noah Vonleh— a freshman drafted ninth overall in the 2014 NBA Draft.
Joseph brings valuable experience and leadership to this already experienced Marauders squad.
The NCAA transfer has found his transition from LIU to Mac as a difficult, but welcoming at the same time.
“It’s harder than I thought it would be in terms of coming to a new team, understanding their concepts, different rotations and different terminologies. I’m still dealing with that stuff now, but its not that bad,” Joseph said.
“I was in terrible condition at first so it was harder back then but now I’m in better shape. Honestly, it’s just me understanding the team, how the team operates, their terminologies, and all that stuff.”
Despite the growing pains of change, Joseph credits and cites his experience playing NCAA basketball as the reason for his mental strength and relentless work ethic.
“Division-1 was tough, definitely tough. Coaches were tough on me from year one to year four. There were a lot of expectations so it was tough. I liked it though, it has helped me become mentally tough and develop a strong work ethic. My mindset is to keep going, to play hard all the time,” said Joseph.
That’s the one thing NCAA coaches are big on: playing hard all the time and not taking a play off. When I came to Mac, every practice I was applying what I learned and just bringing it over. If Division-1 taught me anything, it was playing hard and being relentless.”
In terms of bonding with his new teammates, Joseph paints a warm picture of the Marauder basketball family off the court. “The team has treated me like I came in with them and knew them for four years. Knowing Aaron [Redpath] and Leon [Alexander] helped; I got close with Taylor [Black] and Rohan [Boney] quickly, and bonded with young guys like Connor [Gilmore] and Dave McCulloch. Dave McCullough’s family and my family knew each other. It was kind of crazy how it happened. I played with Joe for Team Ontario. They took me in like it was nothing,” said Joseph.
Troy Joseph is a unique player on the court bringing what head coach Amos Connolly calls “guard quickness but forward length” making him a mismatch. He is a “wing-forward” type of player who has the ability to guard a forward but play a guard spot. Connolly describes one of Joseph’s standout qualities as being, “his commitment to being a good defender that is willing to be verbal and vocal on the defensive end.”
A lot of coaches preach that student comes first in the term “student-athlete” on purpose. For Joseph, that distinction is something he is aware of. “Troy is committed to being better at school and committed to being better on the court. He’s well-rounded,” said Connolly.
Joseph is expected to be able to attack forwards on the offensive end, but Connolly will use his defensive versatility to cause headaches for opponents. Joseph’s unique skill set gives Mac Basketball a threat on both sides of the ball that can play and guard several positions.
Joseph has two years of eligibility left and will spend them representing the maroon and white wearing the number five. While NCAA transfers have a history of joining a CIS team and dominating the playbook, Joseph is embracing his role and helping push this team further into the national championship conversation.
Yes, the name above is correct; and yes, that is the Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The actor may not actually be an author of this little book, but he is a contributor and overall founder of the company that created the book. The company, HitRECord.org, is an online production company created in 2005 by Levitt and his brother. It's a site where artists can submit their "hit records" (which actually means stuff like drawings, songs, or stories) and other members on the site can “remix” them. On HitRECord, remixing means collaboration: editing someone’s story, adding to a piece of art or making music for a short film. If any of the work becomes profitable, the money is shared with the original artist.
HitRECord has produced short films, songs, videos and stories. Tiny Stories is a collaboration of artwork and thought-provoking haiku-like stories, with the second volume being released in 2012 and a third on its way in 2013.
Tiny Stories was made by artists that needed stories and writers that needed pictures. wirrow, who came up with the original concept for the Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, contributed his own stories and provided artwork.
The stories range from strange to poetic to sad to dark. One piece features a little girl wearing a cape and a caption that reads: "Tell no one about the cape." A poetic story with a couple holding hands says, "Once upon a dream in a blanket of night sky you asked me to tell you a story which began with us holding hands." Another story shows two identical people floating on balloons, both figures sleeping, while the caption reads: "Life and Death both took a break, weary from their burdensome rules. Nobody lived or died that day."
This book is filled with magic on every page and is the perfect book for any writer or as a source of inspiration. Some artists on HitRECord.org have recorded songs based on the stories in the book.
Once these stories latch themselves onto your brain, begging you to expand your mind, begging to inspire you, it’s hard to let this little book go. I keep it by my bedside so that when I need it I can open to a random page and ponder over the words and pictures on the page.
The book begins with this quote, edited by wirrow and originally by Muriel Rukeyser: "The universe is not made of atoms; it's made of [tiny] stories."
Never has a quote been more true for such a perfect book.
The pairing of writer-director Rian Johnson and leading man Joseph Gordon-Levitt seemingly delights in revitalizing old genres. Their first collaboration, 2005’s Brick, transplanted film-noir from the asphalt jungle to a southern California high school. The film’s teenage characters bargained both with the principle and for their lives, all using hardboiled 1940s slang. Now the duo has reunited for Looper, which begins as an old-fashioned gangster movie. With time travel.
Indeed, the screenplay imagines that once time travel is invented in 2074 it is immediately outlawed and falls under the domination of shadowy criminal organizations. The mob harnesses the new technology for one spectacularly uncreative purpose: body disposal. Crime bosses circumvent advanced human tracking systems by zapping their enemies back thirty years, where specialized assassins known as “loopers” wait. The thought of simply transporting victims back to the ice age evidently never occurred to the mafia of the future.
Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, one such looper. He is forced to reevaluate this ingenious, if unnecessarily convoluted, system when his older self (Willis) suddenly materializes in the sights of his futuristic shotgun. Future Joe escapes and his predecessor must race to complete the contract before the mob catches up to him.
The backstory necessary to set-up this pursuit is delivered by Gordon-Levitt in a somewhat clunky voiceover. His matter-of-fact explanations seem more appropriate to a trailer and given Johnson’s impressive ear for dialogue, this exposition could almost certainly have been handled with greater subtlety. The spoon-feeding feels like a concession to filmgoers more accustomed to sequels than original and intelligent science fiction.
Indeed, Johnson presents a distinctive, yet realistic, vision of the near future. In keeping with the film’s time-jumping plot, the production design jumbles past, present, and future. Mob “gat men” fire revolvers from hovering motorcycles, while the time travel apparatus looks like it could be worn by Jacques Cousteau as a diving helmet. Less successful are the special effects applied to bolster Gordon-Levitt’s resemblance to Willis. Although only intermittently distracting, surely both actors portraying the same character requires no more suspension of disbelief than time travel itself.
Look-alikes or not, Gordon Levitt and Willis crackle in their preciously short screen time together. Just as the chase between them is intensifying, they separate and the film settles into a quieter second half. At this point, Johnson shifts his focus from gangsters to another well-worn genre, that of the western. Predicting Willis’ next move, Gordon-Levitt hides out on a farm belonging to a strong-willed woman (Blunt) and her unusual son. The scenario evokes any number of classic westerns, but none more so than 1953’s Hondo, in which John Wayne defends a similarly fatherless farmstead from rampaging Apaches and cavalrymen alike.
It is perhaps only fitting that a time travel adventure should so vividly recall other moments from the cinematic past. Yet Johnson has unquestionably crafted a film that has its own unique appeal. With its genre-bending storytelling, original sci-fi hook, and retro-modern-mash-up aesthetic, Looper is certain to stand the test of time.
