September 2007 - Posts
Major League Baseball set an attendance record this year. The average team drew more than 2.5 million fans on the year and more than 32,600 per game.
Please don’t tell me that the game is in trouble. Games that are in trouble don’t set attendance records, especially at major league prices.
So let’s stop with the doom and gloom pieces, and, please, the next time a player tests positive for drugs, treat it like you do in the NFL – a couple of paragraphs and let’s move on to other news. CONTINUED >>
What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard an analyst say? I want to know.
Fill this space up with the dumb lines that are passed off as cogent insight.
I don’t care about who said it – I prefer not to know. The object isn’t to insult people who are working hard – or even those who are hardly working – for a living by attempting to sound intelligent without offending anyone for three and four hours at a stretch, which is impossible to start with.
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For some reason, the media paid scant attention to the NFL’s directive to its teams about cheerleaders. Concerned that they might distract the players from the most important job on the planet, the No Fun League has told teams that cheerleaders can’t stretch and warm up in close proximity to the visiting team.
It was a case of barely covering the barely covered. And I have no idea why, because of all the constipated rules of an organization that acts as if Pat Robertson, John Ashcroft and James Dobson sit on the rules committee, this one takes the rice cake.
But that’s the rule: No fair distracting the visitors with stretching cheerleaders. It’s only a matter of time before Roger Goodell issues a dress code for cheerleaders – skirts no more than two inches above the knee, no bare midriffs, baggy V-neck sweaters over shirts that button at the collar – and appoints a Mother Superior armed with a yardstick to do uniform checks before the game.
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In writing about the latest rumors that have Alex Rodriguez considering leaving New York for the Cubs, I had to get into his performance in the postseason. Other than a great ALDS against Minnesota in 2004, it’s not been good. In the past two years, he has just three hits and no RBIs. This is not the stuff legends are made of.
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We’re told as kids that cheaters never prosper, but as we grow up we have our doubts. This is no less true in sports, where the game’s narrative for too long has been about cheaters.
What’s strange is how few people seem to catch the moral of the story, which is that in the stories we tell, the cheaters always get caught.
Floyd Landis, the defrocked champion of the 2006 Tour de France, is the latest example. Though he fought with every bit of tenacity $2 million worth of legal fees will buy, a three-judge panel in France decided he’s guilty as charged of doping during the race.
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Charlie Weis was the picture of confidence during his first two years at Notre Dame. But now, after three straight brutal losses in which his team has yet to finish a game with positive rushing yardage, he’s grasping at straws.
He’s not in danger of losing his job, not with nine years left on the 10-year contract extension Notre Dame was so eager to get his signature on. But he is in danger of losing his team.
I’ll give him credit for being willing to risk that in order to turn this season around. But, just as I had doubts about the little game he played before the season-opening blowout loss to Georgia Tech with his choice of a starting quarterback, I’ve got doubts about his latest gambit.
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We spend a lot of time talking about how poorly behaved athletes are. But unless your name is Michael Vick, it’s hard to do anything more disgusting than what students at Rutgers the State Embarrassment of New Jersey did last week when Navy came to play football in Piscataway.
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If Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick is found to have ordered the taping of Jets’ defensive signals against NFL rules, he’s a cheater. And if NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell finds that is the case, Belichick should get the same penalty that players who cheat by using drugs get. He should be suspended for four games for what would be his first offense.
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The FedEx Cup isn’t working out that well for the PGA Tour, but there’s an easy way to fix it - dynamite.
It’s the only way. There’s too many things wrong with this event whose rules are indecipherable, whose object isn’t totally clear and whose $10-million grand prize is bogus. It’s stupid, it’s incomprehensible and it’s a playoff even the players don’t want to play.
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Tiki Barber has taken a lot of criticism for the way he went about his retirement last year and for his criticism of his head coach, Tom Coughlin. He’s going to take some more when his book “Tiki: My Life in the Game and Beyond” hits the shelves.
He doesn’t deserve it. The fault for all the disappointing years the Giants have had since Bill Parcells left 15 years ago isn’t Tiki’s fault; it’s ownership’s.
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It’s just a qualifying tournament, with the top two teams from the Americas getting slots in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But for the first time in at least 10 years, the United States once again has a national basketball team that’s worthy of the country that invented the game.
Team USA not only won the tournament, they did what American basketball teams had forgotten how to do in international competition – they kicked butt. LeBron James, who had been doing his playmaker thing, led the team in scoring in the final victory over a team that had become their nemesis – Argentina.
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