December 2008 - Posts
Charles Barkley has all the diplomacy of a dyspeptic warthog. He doesn’t come at anything from the side. If something annoys him, he just puts his head down and charges. And the first thought when confronted with such a sight is not to ponder whether his motives are pure. You assume he’s stark raving mad and you scamper up the nearest tree to save yourself.
But sometimes Barkley has a point, and this is one of those times. He says that his alma mater, Auburn, should have hired Turner Gill to replace football coach Tommy Tuberville instead of Gene Chizik.
He’s right. There’s a pretty good chance he’s also right when he said that the reason Chizik got the job is because he’s white and Gill isn’t. There are just three blacks left among the 119 had coaches in the highest level of college football. It’s impossible to explain that pathetic number without accepting that there is a racist factor at work.
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Greg Maddux used to annoy the hell out of me. This was 10 or 12 years ago when he was mystifying hitters for great Atlanta teams with an assortment of off-speed stuff and an 88 mph fastball, none of which ever got more than an inch of the plate.
It wasn’t anything personal. My unhappiness was really with the umpiring at the time. The strike zone, which had once stretched from the armpits to the knees and did not venture outside the black border of home plate had gradually grown squat and wide. It was like a letterbox strike zone that didn’t rise above the belt and extended several inches on either side of the plate.
No one was better at exploiting the phantom strike zone off the plate than Maddux. At times it seemed he went entire games without ever throwing what would have been considered an actual strike back in the good old days. I kept thinking that if you had to throw the ball in the strike zone to have it called a strike, Maddux would lose his effectiveness.
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I wrote yesterday that Plaxico Burress’ problems are the result of his own stupidity. The column started a lively discussion on Newsvine, with 150 opinions posted when last I looked. I am not surprised to find that many of the posters had nothing at all to say about Burrress’ stupidity but plenty to say about mine.
Among the issues raised are: I know nothing about Glocks; I also don’t know anything about guns; I’m a godless, commie, liberal, pinko socialist who wants to trample on the Second Amendment; and I wear a hat.
I’ll take the complaints in order of accuracy. It is true, as many readers pointed out, that I don’t know goobers about the .40-caliber Glock with which Burress shot himself early last Saturday in a Manhattan nightclub.
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