One fascinating (to me) part of the story that I didn't get into for space reasons: While sitting on the Anacostia building over the years, Monk and Mann, joined by Darrell Green, lobbied the residents of Sursum Corda, a low-income housing development off North Capitol Street NW, to turn control of that woeful development over to them. The ex-teammates made their pitch to redevelop the property right after the murder of 14 year-old Jahkema Princess Hansen. They did not get the job.

For both the Anacostia and Sursum Corda projects, Monk and Mann used the Bennett Group, a DC-based development firm headed by LuAnn Bennett, wife of a longtime Congressman, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.).

Congress gave the Good Samaritan Foundation at least $775,000 in grants for the training center project.

The Bennett Group's slogan, which pops up every now and then on the firm's web site: "The bottom line for Bennett Group is value. For us, that means delivering projects on time and on budget, without compromising on quality."

That adage doesn't really jibe with what went on at the Carver Theatre site.

***

(AFTER THE JUMP: Capitals announcer blows off Falls Church High School Reunion for Fan Fest? Anacostia High has chance at Worst Season in DC High School History? Will Eastern and Spingarn keep Anacostia from their date with destiny? The Nats no longer need to consult Mapquest on the Road to 100 Losses?)

There are two big get-togethers in the area this weekend: The reunion of the Falls Church High School Class of 1979, and the Washington Capitals Fan Convention.

Because of the latter, Wes Johnson won't be able to attend the former.

Johnson is the Caps longtime P.A. announcer, and far as I can tell the only guy from Falls Church (full disclosure: my alma mater, same class as Johnson) to ever make anything of himself. The only other alum from FCHS to get the spotlight was a Pizza Hut delivery man who jumped the White House fence and got shot in 1995.

Johnson, a professional voice-over artist when not riling up the home fans from his perch in the penalty box, has been working the microphone at Verizon Center since 2000.

He says he favored an understated delivery when he first got the Caps job, but turned into the over-the-top bellower fans now know and love after a gig for a video-game producer in which he had to play an arena announcer... for gladiators.

"For that job, I put my regular voice 'on steroids,'" says Johnson, speaking figuratively in case it's illegal for P.A. guys to be juiced, "and it carried over to what I do with the Caps. And, I've found the arena-announcer-for-gladiators voice works pretty well with hockey, too."

Johnson will spend all Saturday at the Caps event, to be held at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill. Other scheduled special guests include NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, owner Ted Leonsis, general manager George McPhee, head coach Bruce Boudreau and former fan favorites including Rod Langway, Al Iafrate, and the long-absent Dennis Maruk.

Tickets for the Caps event are sold out. If you want to go to the Falls Church High reunion, however, call 703-471-6700.

***

Anacostia has a fighting chance of posting an 0-11 season. That might well have never happened in DC high school football history. Some DCIAA teams this year have added a game to the traditional 10-game maximum slate that has long been in place for prep football.

DC football has long been a game of haves and have nots, and Anacostia is the only one of the have-nots in the public school league to throw in the extra game on this year's schedule.

Anacostia has gotten off to the kind of start that makes the winless, record-breaking season seem very possible:  The Indians are already 0-4 and have suffered some major blowouts, including a 60-0 pounding from Dunbar last week.

But ignominy isn't going to come so easily:  Anacostia has games at the end of the season against Spingarn and Eastern, the reigning kings of DC's Have-Nots.

So far in 2009, Spingarn and Eastern have a combined record of 0-4, and have been outscored 168-12. Both schools will take big time beatings today. Spingarn faces Dunbar, and Eastern, which didn't even field a football team last year, will get grounded and pounded by charter school powerhouse Friendship Collegiate.

But, Eastern has only eight games listed on its schedule this year, and Spingarn nine. So neither has the chance for Historical Badness that Anacostia does.

Cheap Seats Daily will keep an eye on Anacostia as it makes its way along the historic Road to 11 Losses!

***

Speaking of historic losers: Nats lose! Nats lose!

The 7-6 loss to the Dodgers at home gives the their 100th defeat of 2K9.

The Road to 100 Losses is the The Road Traveled for this bunch — three years in a row they've got triple digit defeats. So now the franchise has the same number of 100 loss seasons in Washington as it had in all its years in Montreal! (Anybody who says DC isn't a cursed baseball town hasn't seen "Damn Yankees"!)

One of Riggleman's postgame quotes, meant to praise his boys for not getting blown out like they got blown out on Tuesday, is an unintentional thigh-slapper: "That team's going to be popping champagne any day," Riggleman said, "and we're right there with 'em."

Well, if by "right there with 'em" Riggleman means his Nats, running away with worst-team-in-the-majors honors, are within just 39 1/2 games of the Dodgers, who've won a major-league best 92 games this year, then...OK, Coach, you ARE right there with 'em!

***

Story tips? Wanna Play the Feud? Tube amps for sale? Send to: cheapseats@washingtoncitypaper.com

Over the years, there aren't many things I've written about more than Monk and Mann's training center.

For a decade, the beloved former Redskins said the Carver Theatre building was going to be rebuilt by their non-profit organization, called the Good Samaritan Foundation, and promised that the building would become an epicenter of goodwill in a neighborhood historically lacking in it.

It never happened. But every time I wrote that the training center still wasn't open — almost like "Saturday Night Live"'s repeating that Francisco Franco was "still dead" in every fake newscast — officials of the organization continued insisting that their actions would soon back up Monk and Mann's words.

It's not like they didn't use Good Samaritan Foundation to make themselves look good. Monk's son even spoke of the organization in the speech he gave during Dad's Hall of Fame induction in August 2008.

(AFTER THE JUMP: Still more on the neverending story? Karl Swanson holds no grudge against the Washington Post? Roger Phegley DIDN'T mess up the Bullets forever and ever? Clearing on the Road to 100 Losses?)

And, of course, they used the promise of a job training center on the other side of the river to raise money, literally millions of dollars in federal grants and through gala dinners and celebrity golf tournaments. Congress kicked in at least $775,000 in the 2003 and 2004 federal budgets, which, according to bill granting the sum, would be used “to acquire and renovate a building to expand outreach and mentoring services to at-risk District of Columbia youths.”

Now, we know there won't be a training center.

A charter school bought the property from Monk and Mann's organization and opened it up as a middle school. There isn't even a Good Samaritan Foundation anymore.

To learn yesterday that the training center won't ever happen, after all that talk from such major local figures, and all that money they collected from well-wishers to accomplish their allegedly noble goal, is just amazing. I can't say I didn't see this sort of bailout coming. But I'm stunned.

I hope they come up with a decent explanation for what went wrong.

In the meantime. I'm gonna have to go dig out my copy of the 1988 Super Bowl, with Monk and Mann making huge plays as the Skins crushed the Broncos and gave me the greatest day of my sports fan life. Good god, they were awesome football players.

***

Cleaning out some sports pages:

From Sunday's Post: Karl Swanson still talks to the Washington Post! Who knew?

And, J. Freedom du Lac provides an oral history of the Bullets 1979 trip to China.

The highlight of the proceedings for me comes with du Lac dusting off Roger Phegley.

Phegley, then a first-year forward with the Bullets, delivers period-piece quotes about the voyage, among them: "You'd take a picture of the huge crowd with a Polaroid, and that baby would develop right in front of their faces and the Chinese would just freak out."

Dig!

The story made me reconsider Phegley's local legacy. I've always thought the beginning of the end of the Bullets dynasty — Awesome Trivia: the team made four NBA finals appearance in the same decade a feat matched by only the Celtics and Lakers — came when the Bullets used a 1978 first round pick on the unknown from Bradley.

I mean, Phegley really was a bust with the Bullets.

But, looking back at the detritus chosen shortly after him, and it's tough to make a case that then-Bullets GM Bob Ferry screwed up by picking Phegley. Marty Byrnes, anybody? Frankie Sanders? Buster Matheney?

Sure, it had Larry Bird, but the Class of '78 was for the dogs.

(Here's a photo from the story of Phegley, Abe Pollin, Wes Unseld, Jerry Sachs...and some woman who doesn't rate a mention. If that's Irene Pollin, you know the Post got at least one phone call about the omission.)

Nice to see du Lac getting back to basketball. Back when he was at the Sacramento Bee, du Lac famously broke the news that Chris Webber  was rubbing naughty bits with Tyra Banks. The story got the Kings' serial underaccomplisher to, as Phegley would say, freak out on the media in general and du Lac in particular.

(Full disclosure: When du Lac was the Post's rock critic, he let me review a Jonas Brothers show for the paper, and we've since become friendly enough that he lets me call him "Josh.")

***

Nationals get blanked in Philadelphia.

Now at 50-94, the Nats' Road to 100 Losses starts looking like a driveway.

With the shutout/blowout, the Nats also re-took the Major League lead in Worst Run Differential, having been outscored by opponents by 131 runs on the season.

***

Story tips? Wanna Play the Feud? Tube amps for sale? Send to: cheapseats@washingtoncitypaper.com

They never followed through on that pledge.

The former Redskins raised millions of dollars, both in federal grants and private donations, after saying they would locate the center at the old Carver Theatre building.

The DC Government gave control of the property, at 2405 Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, to the Good Samaritan Foundation, a non-profit group fronted by Monk and Mann, in the belief that it would house the job training operation.

After initially leasing the historic theater site to the foundation,  the city sold it outright to Monk and Mann's group in 2004 for $255,235.

For years before and after the sale, the old theater lot sat vacant, despite all the do-gooder dollars thrown at it.

Neighborhood leaders wondered why such a prime real estate location, near the Metro stop and on the main drag in the business district, went unused and was left to go to seed.

The Good Samaritan Foundation held at least three groundbreaking ceremonies at the site, and put on several fundraising galas and celebrity golf tournaments, with proceeds allegedly earmarked to pay for the job training center.

Construction on the theater stopped and started many times. And through it all, group officials, including the ex-Redskins, insisted the opening of the training center was imminent.

But it never opened.

And it never will. The Howard Road Academy, a public charter school, now houses its middle school campus in the Carver Theatre building. The school newsletter says it opened for classes there last week, with 130 students.

And, according to the school's business office, Howard Road Academy now owns the building.

Earl Murray, president of the Howard Road Academy's board of trustees, says the school paid "just under $3 million" to the Good Samaritan Foundation this summer to buy the site.

"It's a great location," says Murray. "We were looking to expand in the neighborhood, and they were looking for a buyer."

Neither Monk nor Mann have anything to do with the school, Murray says.

The Good Samaritan Foundation is no longer in operation. Monk and Mann now front a group called the Youth Power Center.

So, what happened to the job training center that was promised to the neighborhood by Monk and Mann in 1999?

What happened to the millions of dollars of taxpayers and golfers' money given to Monk and Mann specifically to make the promised job training center happen?

Will that money be returned now that, by all appearances, the Good Samaritan Foundation cashed out on its real estate investment in Anacostia?

What happened?

Cheap Seats Daily is awaiting calls from the Youth Power Center.

The beloved former athletes acquired the public land after promising the locals in 1999 that they'd turn the building into a job training center for poor kids. And over the years they have raised millions of dollars with that same pledge.

They've even hosted at least three groundbreaking ceremonies for the press at the job training center site since 2001, and actually began building on the site a couple years ago.

But no such facility has ever opened.

Perhaps Monk and Mann's group has been doing great deeds over the years at other sites around town while waiting for the Anacostia center to open; its website claims that "[m]ore than 65 students have participated in" its training program since 1997.

That's not a lot of kids per year, for sure, given the publicity and bucks thrown the Good Samaritan Foundation's way.

But, hey, that's more kids than I've helped. So I can't get worked up about that number.

But it's the lack of a training center, after the Good Samaritan Foundation has held so many fundraising events specifically for the training center, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants specifically for the training center, and even boasted about seven-figure donations  given to the group specifically for the training center, that continues to leave me awed.

I spoke with Lawrence Dark, executive director of the Good Samaritan Foundation, over the summer, just as Monk and Mann were holding their annual golf tournament to raise more money for the group. Dark told me at the time that the Anacostia training center would be open “in the next six to eight weeks.”

I'd been told similar stories about opening dates by the Good Samaritan Foundation over the years, and when I asked Dark about the etched-in-stone-ness of this latest deadline after oodles of missed deadlines, he added: “If it doesn’t rain."

And, in fairness to the Good Samaritan Foundation, it's raining as I write this.

And the center still ain't open: I drove by the Carver Theater over the holidays, and saw the front still boarded up and the place looking nowhere near ready for occupancy.

The fundraising continues, however.

Monk had a $200 a head dinner in November, with advertisements saying proceeds would go to the Good Samaritan Foundation. During promotions for this event, however, Monk's charity was also identified as "the Youth Power Center."

And radio ads for Wal-Mart during Redskins game broadcasts this season said that the retail giant would donate a portion of sales of certain items to Monk and Mann's charity, which again was identified as both the Good Samaritan Foundation and the Youth Power Center.

I called Dark up this week and told him I'd driven by the construction site, and asked him about the status of Monk and Mann's training center. He said he was too busy for such a discussion.

"I'm trying to get a grant," he said.