Category: Sports

Commentary and news about sports and sports teams — and media coverage of them.

Class act

Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun after yesterday’s loss to George Mason, as reported in a fine column by Michael Wilbon:

“I can only imagine, and probably better than most, the feeling they must have on that campus and in that locker room,” Calhoun said. “Those kids, many of whom were passed over by the Big East schools and others . . . I tip my hat to their conviction, to staying with what they have, to the incredible coaching job that [Larranaga] did. I feel a great deal of inner joy, honestly, about what they must be going through right now, something they probably never could have imagined. We have imagined it, and we’ve done it. But they could never have imagined that.”

Every kid who ever took a shot imagines it, but few on George Mason’s team could have expected it. Nice of Calhoun to appreciate their joy.

Commissioner Rice?

From an editorial in the Los Angeles Times:

“If that job comes open, I’m gone.” That’s what Condoleezza Rice told Ebony magazine last November when she was asked about her oft-repeated desire to become commissioner of the National Football League. With Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s announcement Monday that he plans to step down in July, it may be time for President Bush to look for another secretary of State.

Foreign affairs is one thing, but let’s not screw around with the NFL.

Ray Meyer

NewMexiKen would be remiss to allow the death of basketball coach Ray Meyer at age 92 to pass without mentioning the time the DePaul coach dropped by our high school cafeteria to recruit a classmate. All these years later I can still remember the scene and how awestruck we all were — nudging each other and whispering. Meyer was already a legend, having coached basketball’s first big man, 6-10 George Mikan.

Our classmate went on to play for DePaul; at 6-10, he was the tallest player there since Mikan (1941-1945).

Teeing Off in Indian Country

From a report in The New York Times:

Today, there are more than 50 tribal-owned courses in some 17 states, with several more under construction. From the San Carlos Apache tribe’s Apache Stronghold Golf Club in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona to the Mohicans’ Pine Hills Golf and Supper Club in the Wisconsin woods, tribal courses have changed Indian country’s physical and cultural landscape, helped diversify the tribes’ casino-dependent economies and given American golf some of its finest new playgrounds.

In nearly every case, the courses sit near the tribes’ casinos, whose profits have allowed some American Indian nations to pay in cash for their golf ventures, which run about $5 million to $9 million.

But many of the tribal courses are so good that they are hardly seen as mere casino amenities. Twin Warriors Golf Club, on the Santa Ana Pueblo north of Albuquerque, is ranked 49th on Golf Digest’s 2006 list of the best 100 publicly accessible courses in America. Thirty miles north, near Española, N.M., the Santa Clara Pueblo’s Black Mesa Golf Club was named the 62nd best modern (post-1960) design by Golfweek, which also gave the 93rd spot to the Barona Band of Mission Indians’ Barona Creek Golf Club near San Diego.

“I think the tribal courses are probably the single most impressive force in golf architecture over the last 10 years,” said Ron Whitten, Golf Digest’s architecture critic. “I’ve been impressed with every one.”

Nowhere in America has tribal golf had more impact than in New Mexico, which has the equivalent of nine 18-hole courses on six reservations. By any impartial golf standard, they are uniformly challenging and well-maintained and have a restorative solitude. All but one are found roughly between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, at 5,000 to 7,000 feet, built along mountain foothills or near the banks of the Rio Grande in the fragrant piñón-and-juniper high desert, which still surprises some tourists who come expecting arid desolation.

There’s more worth reading in this well-done article.

By the way, those who know far more about golf than I, don’t consider Twin Warriors, good as it is, to be the best public course near Albuquerque. First place usually goes to Paako Ridge (not mentioned in the article because it isn’t Indian-owned).

Olympic heroes

“In his first interview since the Olympics Bode Miller says that he has received many letters calling him a disgrace to the country. To give you an idea of how bad it is — most of the letters came from Tonya Harding.”

Conan O’Brien

Winning a pool in 20 easy steps

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (registration required):

2. Fill your bracket out backwards.

That’s right, backwards.

“After thinking hard about the tournament and potential matchups, decide first who you think is most likely to win the whole shebang,” says Yale professor Edward Kaplan, who co-authored a mathematical analysis of NCAA tournament pools. “Pen that team in as your winner, then work backwards, [writing it in for the previous five rounds].

“Next, decide your pick for the loser in the championship game, then the two losing Final Four teams. Keep working backwards until you have filled in the entire draw.”

3. Make sure your national champion has at least one former McDonald’s All-American on its roster. Only one winner since 1979 hasn’t.

And my personal favorite:

11. Listen extra carefully to what Dick Vitale, Billy Packer and Jay Bilas have to say the next few days about who’ll win, why they’ll win and how they’ll win.

Then, do the exact opposite.

Greatest moment in basketball commentary history

Billy Packer, NewMexiKen’s least favorite sports commentator, devotes his whole life to the game, gets to the big CBS selection show Sunday evening and, true to form, blows it. Commenting on the Washington bracket, Packer says he likes the 8-9 game between Arizona and Wisconsin.

Only problem, the Arizona-Wisconsin game is in the Minneapolis bracket, which CBS hasn’t gotten to yet.

Other NewMexiKen takes on Packer are here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

(All of them at one click.)

Curious Guy: Malcolm Gladwell

There’s lots of great stuff in the exchange between Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons, but it’s hard to top Gladwell’s take down of Las Vegas:

Simmons: Second question: Can you explain in one paragraph why you’re against Vegas?

Gladwell: Where to start? You get there. You can’t get a cab. Last time I waited 30 minutes in line at the airport. You get to your hotel, you wait another 45 minutes to check in. Its 120 degrees outside, and inside its 45 degrees and all you can think about is there’s about to be a epidemic of Legionnaires Disease. The food is terrible. Everyone loses money — everyone. The amount of plastic surgery is terrifying. There are large packs of enormous, glassy-eyed people in stretch pants, pulling the levers on slot machines. (By the way, greatest and most under-appreciated gambling story ever: William Bennett, he of one bestseller after another lecturing Americans on moral values and virtue and the bankruptcy of our culture, turns out not only to be a degenerate gambler, but a gambler who only played the slots. The slots! Had he been a great poker player — even a decent poker player — I’m in his corner. But the slots?) I digress. Back to Vegas: Why would I want to see Celine Dion, ever (and I’m Canadian)? Or white mutant tigers? Or the Village People? Or Tony Orlando and Dawn? I have more fun walking to the laundromat from my apartment in New York than I do in Vegas.

The entire exchange, beginning yesterday, is terrific. Just so you know, it is mostly a discussion of sports and sports management.

Prom date

Grace Needleman of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, is reporting a major free-agent signing — Red Sox GM Theo Epstein as her senior prom date on May 6.

Needleman, who brought a “Will you go to the prom with me?” sign to Red Sox training camp in Fort Myers, Fla., says Epstein gave her his autograph and told her yes.

“I’m not really picky, and I don’t need anything special,” Needleman, 17, told ESPN2’s “Cold Pizza” of her dating requirements. “Limo? It will be a great entrance anyway, so it won’t really matter what car we bring.”

Sideline Chatter

Curious Guy

Malcolm Gladwell from an exchange with ESPN’s Bill Simmons:

As for your (very kind) question about my writing, I’m not sure I can answer that either, except to say that I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it didn’t much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the racing form. I feel the same way about writing. I’m happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I’m now to the point where I’m suspicious of people who don’t love what they do in the same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he’d picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that’s true, isn’t that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer’s version of Lent that I’m unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I’ve always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it’s the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods.

This whole exchange, which continues tomorrow, is fascinating.

Wonderlic scores

For last year’s top five NFL draft picks:

1. Alex Smith, 49ers: 40
2. Ronnie Brown, Dolphins: 23
3. Braylon Edwards, Browns: 27
4. Cedric Benson, Bears: 19
5. Carnell “Cadillac” Williams, Buccaneers: 22

Word is Matt Leinart got a 35. 50 is best possible.

Unrelated to the Wonderlic, but just this fascinating tidbit I read while surfing the NFL draft. Virginia tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson, who some think will go second overall (after Reggie Bush), weighed 312 pounds at the NFL combine — and he’s known for his quickness.

First woman elected to Baseball Hall of Fame

Effa Manley became the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame when the former Newark Eagles executive was among 17 people from the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues chosen Monday by a special committee. Manley co-owned the Eagles with her husband, Abe, and ran the business end of the team for more than a decade. The Eagles won the Negro Leagues World Series in 1946 — one year before Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier.

Manley used the game to advance civil rights causes with events such as an Anti-Lynching Day at the ballpark. She died in 1981 at age 84.

Buck O’Neil and Minnie Minoso, the only living members among the 39 candidates on the ballot, were not elected by the 12-person panel.

AP via SI.com

So, how do you score?

Word around was that Vince Young the Texas quarterback got just 6 correct on the 50 question Wonderlic test for the NFL combine. Now they’re saying he took it again and got 16. Here from ESPN.com are 15 sample questions (with the answers at the bottom; it’s self-scoring).

So, how do you score?

NewMexiKen was 15 for 15 but suspects that most NFL teams would still prefer Vince Young.

A little background:

Each year, about 2.5 million job applicants, in every line of work, take the Wonderlic. The average NFL combiner scores about the same as the average applicant for any other job, a 21 [of 50]. A 20 indicates the test-taker has an IQ of 100, which is average. (ESPN.com)

10 of 50 is considered literacy.

What she said

And NBC can blame only itself. For years it has packaged the international sporting event as a made-in-America variety show, so overselling the personalities and melodrama that it is sometimes hard to distinguish the Games from any other prime-time fare. The weepy triumph-over-adversity vignettes (mothers with failing kidneys, dead grandmothers, home schooling in New Hampshire) are now so common on television that NBC’s profiles of athletes, minireality shows tarted up with gauzy camera work and stirring soundtracks, look like something on ABC, “Extreme Makeover: Turin Edition.”

Alessandra Stanley in a review of the Olympic coverage entitled, ‘Idol’ Is What the Televised Olympics Try to Be, and There’s No Curling.

Cohen Didn’t Act the Part, so of Course She Didn’t Get the Part

From Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times on silver-medalist Sasha Cohen:

“I think I was not nervous, but apprehensive, knowing that I missed a lutz and flip in the warmup,” she said. “You know, when you go out there and have all the people watching — and you know that your practice hasn’t gone completely right, it’s hard to feel like you’re getting churros at Disneyland.”

Hard for silver medalists, perhaps, but easy for champions.

When their team is trailing by a basket in the final seconds, champions want the ball. Just ask Michael Jordan.

When their team trails by two runs in the bottom of the ninth, champions want the bat. Just ask Derek Jeter.

When the going gets tough, for champions, that is Disneyland.

The legacy of Sasha Cohen is that she sees it differently, and thus America will see her differently.

Once thought to be Tim Duncan, she is instead Chris Webber.

Once destined to be Joe Montana, she is instead Peyton Manning.

Looks great in everything but sweat.

It’s an interesting column.

Two exceptional films

The past two evenings NewMexiKen has been ignoring the Winter Olympics (and American Idol, if it’s even on) to watch DVDs. I’ve made some good choices, choosing two complex but rewarding films.

Last night it was 21 Grams with Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts. This movie has perhaps the most convulted chronology of any film I’ve ever seen (The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind nothwithstanding.) The dramatic story and the extraordinary acting of all three — and others — is, I think, greatly harmed as a result of this shuffling of time. It’s not that it’s so difficult to figure out what happens (happened); rather one simply asks why not just tell the story that way. The filmmaker’s art is important, but it should not be more important than the film itself. Still, the performances are remarkable, and the film is provocative.

The Constant Gardener stars Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz (nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar). Last September when I first saw this film I wrote that it, “is a gripping, harrowing film adapted from John le Carre’s novel of corporate greed and political corruption set in Kenya. Fiennes is superb as the too timid British diplomat and Rachel Weisz brilliant as his radical wife Tessa.” I stand by that assessment, and if anything I liked this film better the second time through. I haven’t seen the Oscar-nominated performances for best actor, but Fiennes surely deserved to be included. Excellent.

So now I’ll go watch the women figure skaters (preferably with the commentary off). NewMexiKen was able to view the 1994 Winter Olympics women’s skating finals on Russian TV. (The Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding year.) It was wonderful. The single commentator (speaking in Russian, of course) was low key and generally quiet, but the ambient noises of the crowd, the music and skates on ice could be heard well. Every performance was shown in its entirety, one after the other. It was incredible, almost like being there.

Update: Actually NBC did a nice job in its coverage, especially of the last six skaters.

Woods Shows Ames What Can Happen

From a story in the Los Angeles Times:

On Tuesday, Stephen Ames told reporters this about his chance against Woods in the first round of the Accenture Match Play Championship: “Anything can happen, especially where he’s hitting the ball.”

On Wednesday, Woods birdied his first six holes at La Costa and defeated Ames, 9 and 8, the quickest and most lopsided match in the tournament’s history.

After his epic victory, Woods produced some equally epic answers, true classics in their brevity, beginning when he was asked if had read Ames’ comments.

“Yes.”

So what was his reaction when he saw them?

“Nine and 8.”

Wouldn’t it be cool

… if the Olympic figure skating judges gave their opinions like Simon, Paula and Randy on American Idol?

This and some other ideas via Sideline Chatter:

SI.com’s Pete McEntegart says NBC could spice up its Winter Olympics ratings just by borrowing some other sure-fire TV tricks, such as:

• “More [events with] guns: If there’s anything to be learned from the vice president’s hunting accident, it’s that firearms are a ratings bonanza.

• “Allow competitors to vote each other out: We’re guessing that Bode Miller would be sent packing to his personal RV in less time than it takes him to chug a beer.

• “Don’t run from ‘American Idol’ — learn from it: Figure-skating judges [should] start giving their critiques out loud and on camera. Then we’ll really see some tears in the kiss-and-cry room.”