March 2008 - Posts
I understand that there are among you some people who won’t be happy until everybody in the NFL has a crew cut, is tattoo-free, is a faithful husband and devoted father, drinks nothing stronger than iced tea, and spends his free time working in soup kitchens, visiting sick kids in hospitals and autographing licensed NFL products for adoring fans.
As laudable as all of those things are, you’ve got to know when to quit with the behavior-control stuff. You already issue fines for having a droopy sock or an untucked jersey or for wearing an unapproved hat on the sidelines. Now you’re going to consider mandating hair length?
Let me ask: Just how lame are you?
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This one is so common, it’s barely news: Chase Tatum, a 34-year-old ex-professional wrestler, was found dead in his home. The probable cause of death is an accidental drug overdose.
For those of you keeping score at home, the toll of wrestlers and former wrestlers who have died before the age of 50 since 1997 is closing in on 70. That is a significant number. As Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford observed last year, it’s the equivalent of 435 premature deaths among NFL players and alumni or 186 major league baseball players and alumni.
This should be seen as a national disgrace, but for some reason, it provokes little more than a yawn. Maybe it’s just because there are so many who die young (There’s a list of the departed here.) we’re used to it.
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The next time you want to call baseball players greedy jerks who think of no one but themselves, consider what the Boston Red Sox are doing for their coaches and the team’s support personnel.
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Let’s hope it’s true, as Mark J. Miller reports in today’s edition of “Scuttlebutt,” that David Stern could order Knicks owner James Dolan to fire the heroically incompetent Isiah Thomas as coach and president of the franchise.
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Isn’t it about time the PGA Tour pulled the plug on John Daly?
There has to be a last straw somewhere in the haystack of sins against the game of golf that Daly has accumulated. Why not the most recent one, today’s failure to answer the bell for the pro-am at Arnold Palmer’s tournament that led to an automatic DQ and also led to two alternates to the tournament losing their chance of playng?
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I’m not sure that any professional team sport has ever had a directive like the one NFL commissioner Roger Goodell delivered today. He wants teams to promise not to cheat.
According to this Mike Maske story from The Washington Post, “Goodell pledged to impose more severe penalties on teams and employees who violate rules governing competition. He also proposed a measure requiring team employees to report ‘actual or suspected’ violations and another that would require each team's principal owner, top football executive and head coach to stipulate annually, under the threat of league discipline, that they complied with the rules and reported violations.”
This is really extraordinary.
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I’m not a fan of cities engaging in corporate welfare for the owners of sports teams, who would seem to have enough money as it is. But if a city is going to hand out tens of millions of dollars to create a couple of hundred part-time minimum-wage jobs taking tickets, serving $6 beers and parking cars, there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way.
Oklahoma City on Tuesday did it the right way. Instead of the city government just handing the money to local businessman Clay Bennett, who owns the Seattle Sonics and wants to move them to his home town, the matter was put to a vote. By a whopping 62-percent majority, the electorate extended a one-penny sales-tax increase for 15 months to pay for improvements to the Ford Center and to build a swank practice facility for the team.
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You’d think a 31-year-old receiver coming off a year in which he set an NFL record for touchdown catches would be a hot property. And yet Randy Moss still doesn’t have a job.
Our Tom Curran has already pointed out that Moss needs the Patriots more than they need him. But where are the other teams lining up to get one of the most talented receivers the game has ever seen?
The Sporting News is reporting that talks between Moss and the Pats on a new contract are stalled. As is usual in such cases, the player thinks he’s worth more than the team is offering. What usually follows next is the player going off in a huff to get the money he feels he deserves.
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