The Sports Curmudgeon

Last weekend, my sister-in-law, who has only the most passing interest in sports imaginable, came to visit. She brought with her something from TV Guide, which purported to be the “25 most awesome sports moments of the last 15 years”. She figured that since I was a sports fan, I could guess what they were and even get them in close to the proper order. As I’ve told readers for years, I do not read minds; and to come close to whatever TV Guide might come up with for such a list would demand the ability to read the mind of the author and whomever was the final editor of the piece. My cousin, who is also a big time sports fan, was also with me last weekend; and between the two of us, we came up with Christian Laettner’s winning shot against Kentucky and Cal Ripken’s record-breaking game as two of the top things that deserved to be at or near the top of any listing of the most awesome moments of the last 15 years.

Those were #4 and #5 respectively. And so we were challenged to come up with what was higher on the list. After a little thinking, we came up with Michael Jordan hitting the final shot against the Utah Jazz to give the Bulls their sixth NBA championship. That was #3 on the list. And at that point, I realized that this was TV Guide making the list and so there was going to be no logic to what was on the list and off the list.

Never – and I mean NEVER - would I have guessed that #2 on the list would have been Tiger Woods winning his first Masters. Yes, that was an accomplishment. But how might that be different from any of his subsequent wins at Augusta National? Unless of course, this is TV Guide making the list and having no clue what might and might not be an “awesome moment in sports”.

Still we had not revealed #1 on the list and so after some real mind wandering, my cousin said half-jokingly and half-incredulously that it might be Lance Armstrong winning his first or his last Tour de France. My reaction was that the author ought to be drawn and quartered if that was indeed #1. So, how can I order up a drawing and quartering? The first of Lance Armstrong’s victories in the Tour de France was defined to be the numero uno event on the list of the most awesome sports moments of the last 15 years. You’ll have to excuse me for a moment; I need to regain my composure…

I’ve said many times that Cal Ripken’s record-breaking skein of games played was as much a testament to will as it was to skill. I believed then and I continue to believe now that Michael Jordan pushed off on that final shot that he hit to win that sixth championship. I’m not sure that Christian Laettner can make that same shot more than 30% of the time. Nonetheless, all of those events and dozens of others were far more awesome than Lance Armstrong winning his first Tour de France multiplied by Tiger Woods winning one of his Masters Tournaments.

At that point, I knew we had no chance in this universe – or any parallel universe connected to ours via some wormhole – to conjure up the rest of the list. So here are those entries with a short comment on each:

Number Six: Kerri Strug vaulting and landing on her injured ankle in the 1996 Olympics. A nice feelgood moment with all of the sporting significance of body odor and athlete’s foot. Keri Strug is probably a wonderful young woman, and this won her team a gold medal, but “awesome”? Not in my book…

Number Seven: Adam Vinateiri kicking the field goal to tie the game and send it into overtime in what has come to be known as the “Tuck Rule Game”. Certainly deserves to be on this list somewhere because of the controversy generated by the referee’s call that got the game to the point where Vinatieri had the opportunity to try this kick. In addition, that kick sort of propelled the Patriots into their dominance and their dynastic stature.

Number Eight: Curt Schilling pitching with his bloody sock in the ALCS. Yes, that was a big sports story because of the context of the game in which he did that. But more has been made of that small bloodstain on the sock than any other bloodstain since the Shroud of Turin…

Number Nine: Phil Mickelson winning his first Masters. I think the TV Guide people have a thing with the Masters. Is the editor or publisher a member of Augusta National and a “runnin’ buddy” with Hootie Johnson? Folks, there are other golf tournaments on TV in case you haven’t noticed.

Number Ten: Serena Williams completing the “Serena Slam”. When Serena won the Australian Open and held the four major championships at the same time, that was a big moment for women’s tennis; in fact, it probably launched it ahead of men’s tennis at the time and that lead has yet to be erased. This should be on the list somewhere.

Number Eleven: Jack Morris pitches a ten inning shutout in game seven to give the Twins a World Series victory. I forgot that this was in 1991 so I never had this on my list of “possible awesome moments”. But since it fell within the 15-year window of this stupid listing, it surely belongs at a level higher than this.

Number Twelve: Afleet Alex wins this year’s Preakness after almost falling to his knees at the top of the stretch. That was an amazing recovery and an even more amazing stretch run after the recovery. But it does not begin to compare with some of the really awesome moments of horse racing history and so I have a problem putting it anywhere on such a list.

Number Thirteen: Dale Earnhardt wins the Daytona 500 for the first time after nineteen unsuccessful attempts. I guess there are NASCAR fans who think that this is an earth-shattering moment; I don’t. We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

Number Fourteen: Patrick Roy stopping a specific shot on goal in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals in 1993. Yeah, right!

Number Fifteen: Dan Jansen winning an Olympic gold medal in speed skating at the Winter Olympics in 1994. Well, at least it’s on the list behind the save by Patrick Roy in the middle of a game in the midst of a Stanley Cup Final Series. That’s about the best thing I can say about the placement of this non-event.

Number Sixteen: Brianna Scurry’s goaltending that set up the US Women’s Soccer Team to win the World Cup against China with the penalty kick that caused Brandi Chastain to rip off her jersey and flash her sports bra. I don’t know if this was an “awesome game”, but that moment of victory with Chastain partially undressed and mobbed by her teammates is certainly one that is etched into the mind of many sports fans.

Number Seventeen: Michael Phelps at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. There was certainly lots of hype surrounding this young man and what he might accomplish at the games. But it was anti-climatic at best and hopelessly overblown to most folks.

Number Eighteen: Illinois erases a 15-point deficit in the final 4 minutes of an NCAA basketball tournament game to move on to the Final Four. That was the biggest comeback in NCAA Tournament history and it was a spectacular comeback. It belongs on this list and it belongs ahead of at least a half-dozen of the silly entries on this list ahead of it.

Number Nineteen: Jackie Joyner-Kersee winning her final gold medal in the 1996 Olympics with a final long jump on her injured leg. Why this one is at #19 while Kerri Strug’s vault is at #6 will have to remain a mystery for the ages. Those two events are mirror images of one another. If one is #6, the other should be #6 (a). I’d have neither in the Top 100, but that’s just me…

Number Twenty: Mark Messier leads the NY Rangers to their first Stanley Cup in over 50 years. This is on the list because it is the NY Rangers; if it had been Mark Messier leading the Columbus Bluejackets to the Stanley Cup championship for the first time ever, this event would not have cracked TV Guide’s Top 1000.

Number Twenty-one: Brad Friedel’s goalkeeping allows the US soccer team to defeat Mexico in the 2002 World Cup. I watched the game; I remember the game; I enjoyed the game. Was it awesome? Pardon me whilst I yawn…

Number Twenty-two: Paul Hamm wins a gold medal in the 2004 Olympics after landing on his butt after a vault attempt. Let’s see, he won a gold medal even though he had an earlier screw-up of monumental proportion. Imagine how tense the competition might have been if he hadn’t screwed up that vault. Only something like TV Guide could think this was an awesome moment.

Number Twenty-three: The Music City Miracle. Actually, I was sure this would be in the Top 10 early in out deliberations about what was on this list. After hearing what made the list, I was actually surprised that the author/editor actually remembered that his had actually happened.

Number Twenty-four: Robert Horry’s winning three-pointer against the Pistons in Game 5 of this year’s NBA Finals. I have no problem with putting that on the list; Horry has done lots of these things in NBA playoff scenarios and so you need to pick one and put it on the list. The author/editor chose to pick the most recent one. Whatever.

Number Twenty-five: Charlotte Smith hits a three point shot at the buzzer to win the women’s NCAA basketball championship for UNC in 1994. Why do I think that this was shoehorned onto the list just to get a women’s basketball entry there? Outside the UNC athletic department and the Charlotte Smith nuclear family, I suspect this is not remembered by a whole lot of folks…

Missing from the list are the Buffalo Bills missing out on a Super Bowl victory because a final second field goal sailed “wide right”. That miss produced the closest score in Super Bowl history – and a record that can only be tied so long as the scoring system for NFL football stays the same. As an awesome moment, that has to rank up there with a save in one Stanley Cup Final Series game, no?

Missing from the list is Mark McGuire hitting his 70th home run – or the one that broke Roger Maris’ record which had stood for more than 35 years – and/or Barry Bonds breaking that record with 73 home runs soon after that. That’s less awesome than Paul Hamm landing on his butt in the Olympics?

Missing from the list is - - well you could go on and on. The problem here is that it seems clear that lots of different sports all had to find a way onto the list and so lots of other sporting moments got no mention. And I still believe that we only missed out on the consensus #1 awesome moment in sports in the last 15 years because of the casting of a show. Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction caused a huge hullabaloo, but how awesome might it have been had that been Roseanne Barr on stage?

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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I read the following sentence in a report somewhere:

“The NHL will not have an All Star Game in 2006.”

I have not bothered to look in a thousand places to confirm that statement because if it is true, then I’m happy; and if it is not true, then I wish that it were true. And more than that, if the NHL manages to play out its 2005/06 season without an All Star Game, I’d like for the NHL to become a role model for all the other leagues.

That’s right; I think it is high time to cancel – not postpone but cancel – each and every All-Star Game in each and every professional sport. All Star Games represent an idea whose time has come and whose time has long passed. Get rid of all of them.

The NFL Pro Bowl happens after the season is over in Honolulu. Any player who participates can get a week in Hawaii on someone else’s nickel with or without his wife and kids – if you catch my drift here. I’ve been to Hawaii; it’s not like being banished to Siberia to have to go there and spend a week and play a game for about three hours and get a bonus for doing so. Even under those circumstances, lots of players opt not to go. The best players in the game may or may not show up even in these idyllic conditions. Even they know that this game is a farce and is best ignored.

So why argue with them? I don’t know a single sports fan who says at the conclusion of the Super Bowl that he/she is looking forward to the Pro Bowl next weekend and wouldn’t it be a great idea to reprise this wonderful party we’ve been having all day next weekend. If those words have ever been spoken, it would have to have been by someone in an advanced state of inebriation or by the Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of Honolulu. Get rid of this nonsense.

The NHL All Star Game isn’t even hockey as it relates to the product that the league puts on the ice on a day-to-day basis. An All Star Team that scores a mere five goals in a game is more likely to be blown out of the arena than anything else. Teams that score five goals in an NHL game are rarely blown out of the arena. So, either the All Star Game is not representative of NHL hockey or the play of the regular teams is so inferior to that of the All Star Teams who practice not at all, that you have to wonder why anyone would go and see that inferior product and pay some heavy bread for that “privilege”. Get that garbage out of here.

The NBA All Star Game is merely an excuse for a weekend of partying by rich young athletes and by the league honchos as they wine and dine with their corporate partners who use the weekend as rewards for sales folks and junior execs. More people care about the Slam Dunk contest than the All Star Game. No one cares about the “Rookies/Sophomores Game”. No one plays any defense – unless you consider it good defense to watch your man blow by you and to keep your eyes on him as he soars up for a dunk. The game is a primary example of a travishamockery; put it out of its misery; put a wooden stake in its heart.

The baseball All Star Game is far and away the best of the lot because baseball has much more of an individual component to it than the other sports mentioned above. And the All Star Game used to be interesting – if not riveting. But now it’s merely a three-day break in the schedule with a stupid Home Run Derby and a “travel day” sandwiching a game that involves pitchers going about an inning at most and line-up shuffling of gargantuan proportions. Other than the bonuses that players get via their contracts for All Star appearances, it is pretty obvious that most of them really don’t care about playing that game. As with the Pro Bowl, why argue with them. Just stop doing this.

Of course, there are those other leagues who feel that having an All Star Game is the cachet they need in order to try to pretend that they are a major player in the sporting firmament. There is probably a minuscule niche market for All Star Games involving minor league baseball and hockey and Major League Soccer and lacrosse and the like. That niche market does not include me and if each and every one of those All Star Games were to dry up and blow away tomorrow, I wouldn’t even know the difference. That’s how important they are in the sporting firmament.

The NHL has taken a lot of heat over the past year of so because of its tortuous labor negotiations. Here’s a chance for them to reclaim some positive attention. Cancel this All Star Game and then announce that there will never again be an NHL All Star Game. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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I don’t know what to think. On one hand, my inclination is to whack the goofs at the NCAA upside the head for their latest move because it is either a complete flip-flop on what they had previously considered a moral imperative or it is merely hypocritical. On the other hand, maybe some folks there have finally figured out that all of their rhetoric over the past couple of decades hasn’t solved their problems and so maybe it is time to move on. Are they being disingenuous or are they experiencing an awakening to reality? I don’t read minds so here are some facts and my judgments.

Since the dawn of time – or so it seems – the NCAA has been opposed to gambling of just about any kind and has been REALLY opposed to any gambling that involves collegiate sports. Recently, gambling among college students in general has gone through a huge growth spurt and the NCAA has not liked that even a little bit. The NCAA and some of its cronies on Capitol Hill have fussed and fumed about the evils of gambling and threatened to take action to “eliminate” gambling on college sports. Let me repeat myself here so any new readers don’t get the wrong impression. Legislation cannot and will not eliminate gambling on college sports. Legislation might be able to put the Las Vegas books out of business, but it won’t affect any of the offshore books. And as to the effectiveness of legislation as a tool to eliminate gambling, existing legislation in just about every jurisdiction in the US has not put many local bookmakers out of business. Folks, prohibition did not work; legislating sports gambling out of existence will work no better.

But to hear the fussing and fuming during those hearings and press conferences, you would have concluded that the NCAA pictured all of the Las Vegas bookmakers having horns and tails. And obviously, they chose to live in the searing desert heat because of their demonic nature, no? In light of that history, an AP report ran on CBS Sportsline.com yesterday that was simply stunning. Rachael Newman-Baker, the NCAA director of gambling activities, (I’m confident that does NOT mean she runs the bracket pool for the NCAA office workers!) announced that she and her colleagues wanted to re-establish contact with the Las Vegas oddsmakers for alerts to situations where there is unusually heavy wagering on a college sporting event or where something caused the books to take the game down off the board. She said that this concept was presented to the NCAA management council last week.

This is such a huge turnaround for the NCAA that it is difficult to explain. You may recall that the NCAA went berserk when two teams – I forget which two – scheduled a game in the arena that borders the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. And that casino does no sports betting at all let alone college sports betting. Recalling that one incident, I remember all the rhetoric about how all gambling was evil and how exposing people to gambling was enabling behavior and how wrong it was to place those scholar-athletes in the way of temptation because there were slot machines less than 100 yards away from where they would play a basketball game. Horror of horrors, the scholar-athletes may have had to walk through the casino to get to the locker rooms!

The Las Vegas books have always been “the archenemy” from the NCAA perspective because they take wagers on college sports and have done so for years. And they are not apologetic about that which makes the NCAA even more angry and self-righteous. Now the NCAA wants to make nice with the oddsmakers and that’s unusual.

Maybe someone in the NCAA hierarchy has figured out that if you want to be knowledgeable about gambling on college sports, it might be a good idea to ally yourselves with people who have an even greater interest in keeping the games from being fixed than does the NCAA. The oddsmakers have a lot more at risk if there is point-shaving going on than does the entirety of the NCAA bureaucracy. In fact, the last couple of times that point-shaving activities have been detected and acted upon by the law enforcement authorities, the tip-off came from the legal betting operations in Las Vegas. In those cases, games were on the board and the books expected a few thousand dollars to be wagered on them. Instead, they found multiple tens of thousands of dollars being put down and that many of the bets were several thousand dollars in magnitude. The books aren’t perfect by any means; but when they see deviations from their expectations which are that large and when those deviations repeatedly involve one specific team, that makes them stop and wonder - - and place a call to the FBI.

For all their bluster, the NCAA anti-gambling folks who are dedicated to enforcing the NCAA’s high ground stance on the evils of gambling haven’t exactly cracked any gambling rings on their own. They haven’t found any of the point-shaving activities; it wasn’t the NCAA sleuths who found out that Adrian McPherson had gotten in over his head gambling while he was the QB on the Florida State football team; they didn’t find out that Rick Neuheisel was cleaning up annually on an NCAA Bracket Pool until his bragging about his winnings made the news. They don’t have the manpower or the expertise to track down “gambling wrongdoing”. As I said about them once before, they couldn’t track a wounded yak across a glacier.

But now, they want to try to work constructively with the Las Vegas oddsmakers on these kinds of things and that is one place where there is information that might lead to the uncovering of “gambling wrongdoing”. Robert Walker is the sports book director at the MGM Mirage casinos in Las Vegas and he believes that this overture by the NCAA will be welcomed by most of the Las Vegas gambling industry folks. Walker summarized the importance of a “fair game” to the industry by describing the perspective of the betting public:

“It’s imperative that the public knows they have a 50-50 chance of winning and that both teams are trying. Otherwise, it’s WWF (sic) wrestling out there … I think the NCAA is on the right page when they say they want to work with us because we do really have the same goal. There’s nothing worse than finding out you are on the wrong end of a scandal.”

Let me add parenthetically here that the NCAA cronies on Capitol Hill already recognize that there is nothing worse than finding out you are on the wrong side of a scandal, so that base is probably covered already.

So, is this progress or is this hypocrisy? I’m willing to call it progress. But I don’t want any folks out there to worry that soft-heartedness and brain scrambling has set in here in Curmudgeon Central. I’m willing to call this progress because at the same time that the NCAA has made this positive move, they have simultaneously announced some silly and feckless things they are going to do. I don’t think that’s a smokescreen; I think they are just being their own normal stupid selves. And I am willing to give them sufficient intellect to have figured out that if all this was to work as a grand sham, they would need to put together a nice neat package without the stupidity attached to it. That’s why I think it’s progress.

Where’s the stupidity, you ask? Let’s start with Ms. Newman-Baker’s words in that AP report. She said – and it is reported almost as a throwaway thought – that the NCAA has not yet decided how it will communicate with the Las Vegas books. Say what? The gambling mavens in the NCAA came up with a plan and took it to the NCAA management council where it was approved. This plan calls for a 180-degree shift in position for a hide-bound organization and the approved plan did not include how to contact the Las Vegas books? That was the essential element of this new grand plan! Let me offer a suggestion to these geniuses:

1. Start with a phone call or two. Make an appointment to meet with some folks for preliminary discussions.

2. Buy a plane ticket to Las Vegas.

[I run a small consulting company. The consulting services above are offered pro bono. If the NCAA is paying any other consultant to advise them on matters such as this, that consultant is really good at stifling the giggles during client meetings because this just ain’t hard folks and collecting money to give that kind of advice borders on stealing.]

The NCAA never does anything simply. The only organization I can think of immediately that routinely goes about its business in a similarly byzantine manner is the United Nations. And so it is perfectly in character for the NCAA to spend some time pondering whether or not to contact the Las Vegas books directly or to use the casino regulators in Nevada as interlocutors.

Memo to the NCAA: The more people involved here, the more expertise you have at the table. When you make your phone calls to set up some meetings, call the regulators too. Don’t call the regulators “instead of the books”, call them “in addition to the books.”

Other stupid activities were also announced. The NCAA says it is going to begin to do background checks on referees for NCAA hockey games and baseball games because there is gambling action taken on some of these games. That’s not a bad idea but here is the silliness. The NCAA says that it also has been doing background checks on the basketball officials who do the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. Now that is really stupid because those are the same officials who have been doing your games all season long. And here’s a news flash for the NCAA gambling mavens; it is a lot more risky to try to shave points in a high profile tournament game than it is a mid-week basketball game between two ordinary teams where the TV coverage will be limited to a couple of small markets.

Oh, by the way the NCAA didn’t mention this but I have to assume that it has also been doing background checks on the people who officiate college football games too. In case they hadn’t noticed, there is also just a bit of wagering activity on NCAA football games…

And the final uselessly silly announcement by the NCAA – which is so in character with their approach to most issues – is that the anti-gambling folks there will develop a new website to educate the scholar-athletes about the NCAA’s rules that prohibit all forms of gambling. [Forget the hyperbole here; I doubt that they could enforce a rule that prevented a scholar-athlete who is over 21 years old from buying a state run lottery ticket.] Don’t you just know that will be the hottest website on the Internet in terms of hits per hour… That will rank right up there popularity with Professor Flibbertyjib’s website devoted to his lifelong research into athlete’s foot outbreaks in the woodpecker population of North America. The noise of the mouse-clicks here will be deafening.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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