January 2009 - Posts
TAMPA – Town is finally filling up with fans, and a lot of them hang out in hopeful knots in front of the headquarters hotels and the media center, standing for hours at a time in the hopes of seeing someone vaguely famous.
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TAMPA -- You’re never quite sure what to believe when people start talking about celebrities they know. But I’m going to take Jey the Barber at his word – for the moment, at least -- when he says he’s down here from Pittsburgh at the request of his Pittsburgh Steelers clients and pals who can’t go a day during Super Bowl Week without getting their hair touched up.
Jey – that’s how he spells it – is the nom de trim of Justin Drewery, who turned up at the same hotel I’m in with his friend, Don Matthews. Jey was wearing a Steelers hat, and I was heading out to do a fan story, so I asked him if he was in town for the game.
He’s 28, bright and personable, and he was wearing a do-rag under his cap that covered braids that hung down to his collar in the back. He said his clients helped pay his way down here so he could be available to tend to their hair so they’d look nice for the TV cameras every day.
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TAMPA, Fla. - Super Bowl Week is supposed to be a time of wretched excess. But two days into Super Bowl Week, Tampa was still looking for the first hints of the crowds to come.
Even some media organizations seemed to be delaying their arrival. Broadcast locations in “Radio Row” in the Media Center remained empty. The crowd seemed down at Media Day. Cabbies were complaining that business was too slow for their liking.
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Back in the days when people cared about boxing, reformers would from time to time look at Muhammad Ali as his motor skills declined and conclude that the sport should be banned.
I always argued that Ali was fully at peace with his condition, which affected his motor skills but not his mind. In any event, I said that if you were going to ban boxing, you should ban football first.
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Just when Cowboys fans thought things couldn’t get any worse, they learn that Tony Romo has decided to be a better leader next year.
“I'm definitely going to take a more active approach with that as we move forward from last year to this season,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “I'll be very excited to get back out there and be with the guys and figure out a way to improve and get better and do the things we need to do to win. Period."
In sports, unlike in gift-giving, it’s not the thought that counts; it’s the performance. Offseason declarations, whether pious or impious, don’t mean squat.
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As soon as I hear the story about Myron Rolle passing up the NFL for one year to pursue a Rhodes Scholarship, I swear I could hear a background chorus: “Why can’t more athletes be like Myron?”
You may just as well ask why can’t everyone be like him. In either case, the answer is simple: If everybody were like Rolle, he wouldn’t be special. He’d be just like everybody else and therefore as ordinary as grass on a prairie. Guys like him have to be rare. Otherwise, we wouldn’t appreciate him.
And let’s do just that. Let’s celebrate Myron Rolle, who graduated in pre-med at Florida State in 2 ½ years while playing football at the highest possible level. He had a choice of going into the NL draft this year or to Oxford University. He made the only decision one would expect of such an extraordinary person. He passed up the money for a year and picked Oxford.
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If you haven’t read John Tamanaha’s column on the pusillanimous AP pollees who wouldn’t do the right thing and vote Utah No. 1, read it now. It’s required reading for all the knuckleheads who still think computers and polls are the right way to determine the champion of college football’s flagship sport.
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Lots of things can mess up a football team – injuries, bad coaching, disruptive players, mistakes, sloppy play. But to really screw up a team, it takes an owner who thinks he knows more than the professionals he hired to run the team.
Exhibit A is Al Davis in Oakland. Exhibit B is Bill Ford in Detroit. Exhibit C has been the Bidwill family in Arizona. But with the Cardinals in the playoffs, there’s a new Barney Fife in the town sheriff’s office – Woody Johnson.
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