The Sports Curmudgeon®

A court is going to decide whether or not Floyd Landis should be stripped of his Tour de France title because he had excess testosterone in his system or if the testing procedures used to make that determination were sufficiently flawed to render them useless. Please notice what the court – in the form of a jury of Landis’ “peers” – is going to try to decide; they will not decide if he took an improper drug; they will not decide if he took such a drug knowingly; they will not decide if he was framed by some unholy cabal of French cycling maniacs who cannot bear to see another American win the Tour de France. This jury, which I have to believe has been carefully weeded to assure it has no scientists or medical technologists on it, will make a determination about something they know absolutely nothing about.

The theory is that because they know nothing about any of this stuff, they will be objective in their decision-making. The reality is that because they know nothing about any of this stuff they will be ignorant in their decision-making. And I can’t find a whole lot of dictionaries nor thesauruses that make “objective” and “ignorant” into synonyms.

I point this out so that no one gets any sense of closure or finality from whatever comes from the jury. Neither side should be a winner here. The anti-doping agencies and sport governing bodies have blundered through this matter as badly as someone on Dancing With The Stars in clown shoes; Floyd Landis has had umpteen explanations for how such a bizarre test result may have happened and all of them fall either into the category of “the dog ate my homework” or “there’s a vast right wing conspiracy out there…”

Speaking of juries, there is a legal concept called jury nullification. As I understand it, this happens when a jury hears a case and believes that the defendant is guilty of the charges in the case but decides to exonerate the defendant anyway because the jury feels the law is “inappropriate” for some reason. [I’m sure that description would not suffice on a final exam at Harvard Law School, but I don’t think I’ve done huge violence to the concept either.] The NBA needed a “jury nullification” decision earlier this week regarding the Phoenix Suns leaving the bench area during an on-court altercation. David Stern’s ruling was absolutely correct in terms of the letter of the law; what the Suns’ players did was clearly in violation of the rule. However, they did not enter the fray; they did not incite any further problems; their dismissal from Game 5 could be a pivotal part of the series and that would reward the aggressor – and his team – in the incident. The NBA needed jury nullification but when the ‘jury” is the same guy who pushed to get the rule passed in the first place and who is trying to be tough on actions that damage the league’s image, it’s hard to get him to think in terms of “nullification…

Dwight Perry had a great item in his Sideline Chatter column in the Seattle Times yesterday:

“Q: What to you call the two police officers who escorted ex-NBA player Marvin Barnes into court to face charges of cocaine possession?

“A: Bearers of Bad News.”

I am not one who advocates or minimizes the severity of DWI situations. Nor do I think that baseball teams who stock their clubhouses with beer for players to drink after games – prior to their driving home – are just “taking care of loyal employees” and giving them a treat. Having said that, I think that the rush to ban alcohol from locker rooms and club houses has a hollow ring to it when you consider that those same baseball clubs will sell virtually all the beer that a fan can buy knowing full well that most of those inebriated fans are going to leave the park and get in a car and… Pardon me if I reserve my hosannas of praise for the time when teams ban alcohol from their clubhouses AND they limit beer sales in the grandstands.

And back to the NBA for a moment here… The league said that Don Nelson may no longer bring a beer with him into the post-game interview setting. He’s been doing that for decades and there was never a problem. It’s almost as if the NBA is trying to deny the existence of beer with regard to its product. Now, I wonder what might happen if Nelson were to take an empty can of whatever soft drink is the NBA corporate partner, poured a can of beer into that soda can, and took the soda can into the post-game interview setting…?

Al Capp had a character in the old L’il Abner comic strip called Joe Btfslpk. He was the world’s most unlucky person; wherever he went, there was a cloud over his head and it was raining on him; he was so unlucky, he didn’t even have a vowel in his name. Joe Btfslpk needs to meet the NCAA’s new Vice President for Education Services, Robert Vowels. They ought to have about five things to talk about…

Every once in a while, I’d love to be able to listen in on the conversation between an agent and his client after some kind of bad news has just been delivered to the client by the employer. One such circumstance presented itself earlier this week when ESPN announced that SportsCenter anchor – and often annoying presence – Stuart Scott will be part of the coverage of the National Spelling Bee in the role of a “sideline reporter”. Even for the most important sporting events, sideline reporters are about as useful as a catsup stain on a silk necktie; for the National Spelling Bee… I’d love to have heard the conversation between Scott and his agent just after that decision came down.

Finally, Sir Charles Barkley had this to say on TNT regarding his ongoing struggles with his weight:

“I bought a StairMaster. I stare at it every day.”

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

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I know that the college football season doesn’t start until three-and-a-half months from now, but there are some items there that deserve some attention. Once football practice begins in earnest and the adrenaline in anticipation of the season begins to flow, there will be prognostications on which coaches are on the hot seat this year. I think that Clemson coach, Tommy Bowden, needs to be on that list and it has nothing to do with the team record in the past couple of years or his relationship to Bobby Bowden or anything else. Here’s the deal. In the entirety of the “Ted Roof Era” at Duke, the Blue Devils have beaten exactly ONE Division I-A team and that was Clemson. (Yes, Roof won two games as interim coach in 2003 against ACC teams and that’s probably what got him the job in the first place.) Ted Roof has won a total of three games at Duke as the permanent head coach; his only other victories have been against The Citadel and Virginia Military. That alone should put Tommy Bowden on a perpetual hot seat.

The University of Florida won the national championship game last year as you may recall. Nonetheless, the Gators schedule for 2007 has some marshmallow-soft out of conference games including season opening games against Western Kentucky and Troy and another late season “interlude” with Florida Atlantic. I know that the SEC teams all have very difficult in conference schedules, but might not the folks in Florida seek a minor upgrade to their out of conference opponents one of these days?

Just an aside here but whilst grocery shopping last week to replenish our larder after being away for a month, I noticed that there were some Wheaties boxes with the Florida basketball team on the box. You may recall they too were national champs last year. That got me to thinking; I wonder if General Mills even bothered to send a single box of that type to the Columbus Ohio region?

Back to college football, Florida is not the only SEC team with marshmallows on the schedule. The SEC teams as a whole will play nine game next year against Division I-AA opponents. That’s more than any other conference in the country. Boy, I’ll bet those games will be nailbiters…

As a point of reference, the PAC-10 teams as a group will only play two games against Division 1-AA opponents. That’s two more than they ought to play; but that’s a whole lot better than nine…

Another DL, Tank Tyler, from NC State was a high draft pick in this year’s NFL draft. Last year, the Wolfpack sent three defensive linemen to the NFL as first round picks – albeit one of them plays as an outside linebacker. That makes four NFL caliber defensive linemen in two seasons from the same team and that team still could not finish with a winning record in conference. I think it’s becoming clear why NC State made a coaching change at the end of last season.

Similarly, the LSU Tigers provided four players to the NFL in this year’s first round of the draft. Unless there’s been some record revision in the past couple of days, LSU did not even with its division of the SEC last season. Someone somewhere ought to be asking the LSU coaching staff how that could happen.

The Big Ten is starting its own TV network this year. When it announced its lineup of games in prime time, I wondered if they had gone out of their way to put uninteresting games in prime time as a way to gain exposure for some programs. Consider these matchups; unless you are an alum of one of these schools or have a child at one of these schools, would you rearrange your schedule to see any of these? Would you choose to watch any of them in lieu of using the time to alphabetize the herbs and spices in your kitchen?

Indiana State at Indiana (Sept 1st)

Syracuse at Iowa (Sept 8th)

Duke at Northwestern (Sept 15th)

Illinois at Minnesota (Nov 3rd)

Campbell University – the Fighting Camels of course – will reinstate intercollegiate football in the 2008 season; I believe they dropped football in 1952 so this represents the end of a 56-year hiatus. They broke ground on a new stadium this spring and will open their new football era against Birmingham Southern in August 2008. Initial seating capacity for the stadium will be 1200, but there are plans for expansion…

Oregon lost its offensive coordinator to LSU and hired the offensive coordinator from the University of New Hampshire to replace him. UNH has been an offensive powerhouse at the Division 1-AA level in recent times averaging over 400 yards per game in seven of the last eight years so this could be one of those situations where a coordinator gets to take his ideas and his concepts to the next level of competition to see how they work there. It ought to be interesting to check out the Oregon offense in the next couple of years. But here is what I wondered when I read the announcement of this hiring:

Did the Oregon folks check very carefully to assure themselves that this guy was actually involved in the football program at UNH? This sort of “wakes up the echoes” of a bad situation in the past…

I have a public service announcement for you today. May 16 is “Turn Beauty Inside Out Day”. I don’t know if this is such a wonderful idea because a former secretary with whom I worked for about 15 years always used to say:

“Beauty is only skin deep - - but the ugly goes clear down to the bone.”

Finally, a note from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald:

“Submitting to you, in the category, Some Things Are So Ridiculous On Their Own They Require No Punchline: ESPN will televise the USA Rock Paper Scissors League championship.”

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

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As I was doing my background reading for these rants and to catch up on things, I ran across an obituary written by Mark Heisler in the LA Times. George Kiseda passed away and sports journalism is definitely the worse for his passing. If you never got to read George Kiseda, it is your loss; if you did read him, you recognize what the world now lacks. RIP, George Kiseda. Here is the obituary; I commend it to your reading:

Yesterday, I had a few snarky things to say about the excessive coverage of the NFL Draft – and I don’t intend to retract any of them. In fact, I have a suggestion to improve the coverage by subtracting from the coverage. After the draft there are about 2 million items written wherein somebody gives each team a “report card grade” on draft day. There is no way that any draft can be totally evaluated in the first 72 hours of the afterglow; Tom Brady as a 6th round pick did not demonstrate his significant value for several years; Ryan Leaf as an overall #2 pick did not demonstrate his abject worthlessness to an NFL franchise for several years. So here’s my idea:

Take all the instant report card columns written and put them in a time capsule.

Five years later, dig them out and grade the columns – not the draft – on how insightful and accurate the columns were.

Then fire anyone from their current job who got a C or below as a grade.

And just when you thought things couldn’t get all that worse comes news from ESPN that they will cover – live and in color – the 2007 baseball draft. Are you kidding me? At least with the football draft, a fan would have had the opportunity to see most of the top prospects actually play in real football games – assuming that fan invested the time to watch a lot of college football. That doesn’t mean the football draft is rational in any way; it means that the fans may actually know the players being considered by the teams.

In the case of baseball, they are going to be drafting kids in high school. When a team announces that in the nineteenth round they’ve selected Joey Sweetcheeks from Pigsknuckle, Kentucky, there will no one outside the county where Joey plays who will have ever heard of him let alone seen him play. He’s probably going to be listed as a shortstop – since that’s where most amateur baseball teams play their best athletes – but you won’t know if he fields like Ozzie Smith or like Edward Scissorhands.

There used to be some infomercials that featured a woman with a buzz haircut who kept screaming to “Stop the insanity!” I have no idea what she was trying to sell – demonstrating the true value of infomercials – but we need her to make a comeback. We need to “Stop the insanity!” when it comes to what is put on the air in terms of peripherals to sporting events. And the baseball draft for 2007 crosses over the line into the realm of the insane.

Tony Kornheiser said on Pardon the Interruption recently that Donovan McNabb and Brett Favre were both divas. I hadn’t looked at it that way before, but he’s absolutely correct in that assessment. The latest tizzy regarding Favre and whether or not he wanted to be traded from Green Bay wasn’t even up to the level of a tempest in a teapot. For about the last three years, it seems to me that instead of Brett Favre being “all about winning”, Brett Favre has become “all about Brett Favre”. He’s now played the retirement or not card and he’s played the maybe I should be traded card; what’s next?

How about just going out and playing football?

The same goes for Donovan McNabb. Yes, I do think he was victimized by Terrell Owens two seasons ago; and yes, I do believe that he is a person who has too much class to retaliate in kind with regard to people such as Terrell Owens. But once again, enough is enough. The Eagles used their top draft pick to take a QB who is several years away from even hoping to play in the NFL. Was that a good idea? Probably not. But this is not the backdrop to some kind of psychodrama starring Donovan McNabb and his parents and his publicist and a random cast of hundreds. It happened; deal with it. Here’s an idea for Donovan McNabb:

How about just going out and playing football?

Speaking of divas/prima donnas, I read somewhere that Warren Sapp lost 50 lbs in this off-season. Don’t worry; he won’t be trying to make a position switch to WR; that would take a loss of at least another 150 lbs. Regarding the loss of 50 lbs of fat, I sure hope that Sally Struthers isn’t the first person to find it…

MLB issued a ruling that denied Johnny Pesky a seat in the Red Sox dugout during games because the rules say only six coaches are allowed. Johnny Pesky is not a coach; he’s part of the fabric of the Boston Red Sox franchise; he’s in his late 80’s and is still a recognized and respected figure in the Boston area. But MLB has it rules and so it needs to enforce those rules - - I guess.

Now we can only hope that the NFL might take a lesson from MLB here. Suppose they had a rule saying that no more than three people can be in the broadcast boot at any time when an NFL game is on the air. That would eliminate the parade of “C-List celebrities” that ESPN insists on foisting upon all of us during MNF. That would be a positive outcome and a rule I’d gladly see the NFL enforce.

Finally, here’s Golden State Warriors’ forward, Al Harrington, on the pressure of the NBA playoffs:

“Everything is magnetized by ten.”

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

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Depending on how you look at it, either I’ve been denied access to US sports information for the last month or so or I’ve been given the chance to free my mind of such confining thoughts and images. I prefer the former. But when one is traveling in Morocco and Turkey, one catches only fleeting glimpses of US sports and soon one comes to realize that the rest of the world does not care very much about issues that many of us follow with great passion. When I travel abroad, I like to look at the attire of the “natives” and see if any/many of them wear gear with US sports team logos on them. In Morocco, only one team in one sport was in evidence and that team’s logo showed up in four different metropolitan areas. That would be the New York Yankees; their logos and presence were everywhere. I asked our guide why that was the case and he said he didn’t know anything about the NY Yankees; I asked a shop owner who was wearing a Yankees’ cap and had a Yankees’ pennant on the all of his shop and he said that it was because they were champions.

I guess front-running fans are a worldwide phenomenon. I didn’t have the heart to tell the shop owner that it had been a while since the Yankees were actually – you know – champions.

In Turkey, baseball and football might as well not exist. I did not see a single team logo from either sport in 10 days in that country. Basketball is big in Turkey – not as big as soccer to be sure – but it is something that Turks play and there are indigenous Turkish leagues. And since the Utah Jazz have a “graduate” of the Turkish system on the squad, Mehmet Okur, there is a focus on the Utah Jazz and their progress through the NBA Playoffs. There are English language newspapers in Turkey – something we never found in Morocco – and these have small sports sections. Other than the Utah Jazz, the focus of the rest of the sports sections in these papers seem to be European soccer tournaments, European golf and the visit of Queen Elizabeth to the US to see the Kentucky Derby.

It was not until I had gotten home that I learned about a proposal to move back the three-point-line in NCAA basketball games by a foot. That’s an improvement, but it is not the end of the rule tinkering that needs to be done with the three point shot. I’ve suggested to the “rules mavens” several times that they need to stop awarding three points for a “Hail Mary” shot at the end of a game or at the end of a half. The purpose of the three-point-line was to open up the game offensively and give teams a way to play other than trying to pound the ball inside. Well, the “Hail Mary” shot has exactly nothing at all to do with that objective and should not be rewarded with a premium value. There are lots of ways to make this limitation; but so far, the “rules mavens” haven’t seen fit to apply any of them.

Mercifully, I heard exactly NOTHING about the NFL Draft whilst on my travels. And from that situation, I am now more confident than ever about my instinct that the NFL Draft is nothing much more than a “made-for-TV” concocted event. Forget all the hype leading up to the draft from January until April; just focus on the TV, radio and print coverage of the draft on the weekend of the event. Absent a huge controversy that could have immense Constitutional implications, networks will spend less time reporting on the Presidential elections in 2008 and analyzing the trends in the voting that led to the manifest results than ESPN spent on “Draft Weekend”. There is a need for perspective here. I try to be as apolitical as possible in these rants, but I feel the need to make a completely non-partisan statement here:

Any Presidential election is significantly more important than every NFL Draft.

Since I’ve edged up to the realm of politics, I saw that the SF 49ers signed RB, Frank Gore, to a four-year extension to his contract. Just a guess, but I suspect that his “cousin”, Al Gore, must have been wishing for a four-year extension of his deal in Washington too…

It wasn’t until I got home that I learned about the NFL dropping the hammer of Thor on Pacman Jones and Chris Henry. Frankly, I have no sympathy for either of these guys; playing professional football is not an inalienable right endowed to them by The Creator; it’s a privilege and their antisocial behaviors abused that privilege. I saw where the lawyers for Pacman argued to the NFL that umpty-doodle NFL players have been arrested for “stuff” since the year 2000 and none of them had gotten such a severe penalty. I wonder if they also pointed out that Pacman leads the NFL in “police incidents” with ten; something tells me they didn’t.

I also didn’t know anything at all about Michael Vick giving/leasing a house he owned to someone who seemingly was involved in dogfighting activities.

Memo to Michael: This is not a good way to augment your product endorsement potential. Lots more people have dogs as pets than think dogfighting is a worthy endeavor.

Evidently, Falcons’ owner, Arthur Blank, pulled a Neville Chamberlain here and gave Vick a stern warning about being involved in stuff like this. It might be very interesting to see what the NFL Front Office might have to say to Michael Vick if – remember I said IF – it turns out there is credible evidence to suggest that Vick was involved in the dogfighting activities or if he knew they were going on in his house and ”condoned” them by allowing them to continue.

We know that Michael Vick had his “water bottle incident” and now he has this dogfighting incident; we also know that his younger brother Marcus has had more than a couple of run-ins with the law. Just wondering here, is there a third brother in the Vick family and is he named Con?

Oh, and since Dallas Mavericks’ owner, Mark Cuban, is on record saying that publicity is good for the NBA no matter what the subject – he said that bout the Kobe Bryant incident in Colorado no less – let me give the Mavs some publicity and say that they gagged up a hairball in the playoffs and have to be the most embarrassing 67-win team in the history of the league. Hope that helps, Mr. Cuban…

Finally, an item from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald:

“Andrea Jaeger is now a Dominican nun at age 41. She is currently the world’s top-ranked tennis-playing nun, partly because every other nun is an old woman who doesn’t play tennis.”

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

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Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am back on the air - although not at full strength. A week ago Friday night (May 4th) I had a severe bout of pain in a remote Turkish town called Selcuk. After the fact, we seem to have determined that it was the passing of a kidney stone but unfortunately it came on the heels of a case of the Turkish version of “Montezuma’s Revenge” and so my entire system was “off-center”. Flying home was eventful, but we made it.

I have been to see my doctor three times between Tuesday and Friday and we have done a CT Scan and caught a small kidney stone on film; we know that one of them has been responsible for some of this. But given the duration of the pains and the varying intensities, I probably am working on my second Kidney stone in ten days and possibly my third.

If you have never passed a kidney stone, give thanks to whatever Supreme Being you worship in whatever manner you find appropriate. If you deny the existence of a Supreme Being, then knock on wood. This is NOT something you want to experience for yourself.

I’ll be writing next week but I can’t promise that I’ll write every day because I’m not sure that there isn’t another of those little buggers sitting in my kidney waiting to take a grand journey.

Later…

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