Category: Sports

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

Winter Olympics thoughts

Amazing victory for speedskater Shani Davis. I don’t know how anyone can skate so fast with such a heavy chip on his shoulder.

Love the technological ability of NBC to match two skiers or ski jumpers (from individual runs) in one picture. I walked in while they were superimposing two ski jumpers and thought the Olympics had been moved to Brokeback Mountain.

Apolo Anton Ohno seemed gracious about winning just a bronze medal, but Bob Costas was awfully disappointed. If Ohno didn’t win, surely it most have been those nasty Korean tactics that denied him his due.

No ‘I’ in team

Oscar Robertson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar each provide their take on Kobe’s 81.

The conclusion of each:

Oscar — I know, you’ve heard a lot of this from us old-school players. And you’ll continue to hear it. I, for one, care too much about the game to settle for the highlight reel that N.B.A. basketball has become today. I believe Kobe does as well.

Kareem — Kobe’s 81-point game should without a doubt stand alongside Wilt’s 100 as one of the greatest individual feats in league history, and who’s to say he won’t one day break Wilt’s 44-year old record? The world will be watching and waiting.

How do you say, ‘Do you believe in miracles?’ in Switzerland

The Swiss called their Olympic upset of the Czechs the biggest victory in their country’s history.

How wrong they turned out to be.

Switzerland stunned defending Olympic champion Canada on Saturday with a 2-0 victory that shook up the men’s hockey tournament at the Turin Games.

AP via The New York Times

Answer: Galuben Sie an Wunder? or Croyez-vous aux miracles?

(There are four official languages in Switzerland. About two-thirds speak German, 20% French, 8% Italian and less than one percent Romansch.)

Jim Brown

… was born on this date in 1936. That would make him 70 today.

Brown was listed as the 4th greatest athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. (Which makes him the second greatest athlete born on this date. It’s Michael Jordan’s birthday, too.)

“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning sports columnist Red Smith.

Read the entire ESPN essay on Jim Brown: Brown was hard to bring down.

Follow Me

NewMexiKen only today read an article about Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski in The New York Times Sports Magazine (published February 5th).

The article, “Follow Me,” by Michael Sokolove, is excellent. It discusses Coach K’s abilities and techniques (he gets up to $100,000 for a lecture) in a context of basketball, but it is not an article about basketball. It is about leadership and management skills.

Highly recommended.

Key quote: “So what is the secret to Krzyzewski’s success? For starters, he coaches the way a woman would. Really.”

They Still Are Playing Copycat at Their Age

Brothers Chiang Hock Woo, 48, and Chiang Hock Tew, 46, each got their first holes in one on the same 147-yard hole recently at a country club in Singapore, Bloomberg news service reported. As Hock Tew approached the green, he saw his brother’s ball lodged between the flag and the pin and assumed his ball had gone through the green.

“I peeked into the hole and to my surprise my ball was at the bottom,” said Hock Tew, a 13-handicap.

Morning Briefing, which has more hole-in-one trivia. (The longest recorded is 447-yards.)

It May Be Flighty, But This Sport Is Truly a Guy Thing

Ski jumping — in its pure form and paired with cross-country skiing in the Nordic combined — is the only Winter Olympic event in which women do not compete. There just aren’t that many at the top level. Maybe it’s because they have the good sense not to zoom down a ramp up to 70 mph, fly the length of a football field without wings, then land and come to a stop without brakes.
…

Ski jumping isn’t just a male thing. It’s an oddball male thing. You have to be a little bit different to get into this sport, which explains why among the competitors gathered at these Games you’ll find a Slovenian who owns a two-foot boa constrictor (Rok Benkovic), an Italian who kept his ski-jumping activities a secret from his parents until they read about it in the newspaper (Alessio Bolognani) and an Austrian soldier whose motto is “Only dead fish swim with the current” (Martin Koch).

J.D. Adande in the Los Angeles Times

Disney Loses a Voice, Pulls Rabbit Out of NBC’s Hat

OswaldIn the first known swap of a primo sportscaster for a geriatric cartoon critter, Walt Disney Co. is trading ABC’s Al Michaels to NBC for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Oswald who?

It turns out the big-eared bunny was one of Walt Disney’s first animated characters, a star in his own right before Mickey Mouse was even a gleam in his creator’s eye. But Disney lost the rabbit after he found out that Universal Studios, now part of NBC Universal, owned the rights to develop the character.

Now Oswald will be returning to Disney, it was announced Thursday. In exchange for the rabbit and other concessions, ABC parent Disney agreed to let Michaels, the longtime voice of Monday Night Football, jump to NBC Universal’s NBC network, where he will remain teamed with partner John Madden.

Los Angeles Times

The Interference Penalty

The Sports Prof agrees with ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. that there ought to be two kinds of interference penalties in the NFL. NewMexiKen agrees. Here’s some of what he says:

In football, there are two types of roughing the kicker penalties and two types of facemask penalties. Call them “lite” and “regular” or “you just nicked the guy” or “you dadgum plowed him over.” However you slice it, if it’s at the ticky-tack end of the continuum, your team gets a smaller penalty and not necessarily a game-changing one.

That seems about right. If you simply bump a kicker on fourth and nine, it’s a five-yard penalty but it’s not an automatic first down. If you flatten the guy, you get more yards tacked on and an automatic first down.

Interestingly, right now the same logic doesn’t apply to the pass interference penalty. Brush a guy fifty-two yards downfield and the penalty is at the spot of the foul, which, translated into layman’s terms, means that it’s a fifty-two yard penalty. Clock the guy at the same spot, and, yes, it’s the same fifty-two yard penalty.

A billion people watching

Not on this planet. Oscarbeat by Steve Pond takes a serious look at the numbers. Two excerpts:

In the current issue of Sports Illustrated, columnist Steve Rushin nicely dismantles the billion figure as it applies to the Super Bowl. It turns out a media research firm measured the worldwide audience for last year’s game and came up with a figure of 93 million, only about 2 million of them from outside North America.

The U.S. audience for the Oscars was 42.1 million last year, though it’s been significantly higher in years past. In the rest of the world, the telecast begins at inconvenient hours (5:00 p.m. in Los Angeles is 1:00 a.m. in England) or tape-delayed and presented in an edited form after the winners are already known.

What he said

But there are two cities in America where there simply should not be a band imported to play at a quintessential American event, which is how the NFL packages the Super Bowl: Nashville and Detroit.

A whole lot of folks here were upset over the Stones being picked to play when Detroit has an unparalleled and historic stable of artists across the music spectrum. The two things associated with Detroit are cars and music, yet the NFL favored a European band, meaning the league passed on all of Motown, not to mention locals such as Madonna, Anita Baker, Eminem and Kid Rock.

The great Smokey Robinson performed across the street from Ford Field on Friday night, so chances are he was available. And if Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder can do pregame and the national anthem, then why not reward them with the honor of doing the big show? Seeing Aretha perform in Detroit is, for some of us, the equivalent of seeing Frank Sinatra perform in New York or Michael Jordan perform in Chicago.

It makes me wonder if some artists, particularly in the R&B tradition, are being forced to pay for Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction from a couple of years ago.

Michael WIlbon

‘Burque Men in Burkas Can’t Fill Their Shirts or The Pit

Jon at Albloggerque has a great take on the choreography of basketball and why today’s uniforms are harming the aesthetic of the game.

Read it all but here’s the jist:

But when it comes right down to it, there is more to sport than winning. It has to be enjoyable to watch. And basketball has a special place in sports. For one thing bball is the most like dance. The ball is the melody and the players, like dancers, leap and streak into a multitude of jazz variations of that one theme: the flight of the basketball. It flies from player to player, end to end, riff to rumble, and eventually we watch someone with artistry and deftness stick it just right.

Part of the beauty of it is watching the athletes themselves. Their physiques are totally awesome. At least we think they are…because we really can’t see them for all that loose and shapeless clothing.

We just called it a gym

This is a snapshot (on a rare for this winter rainy morning) of the Union School District Multipurpose Activity Center in Tulsa. Union High SchoolThe facility seats 5,662 and cost $22 million in a school district with 13,500 students in grades 6-12 and 11 elementary schools. (It was completed in 2003.) Union is often ranked among the top high school teams in the country, especially in football. More info.

Reel obnoxious

A pro fisherman, Michael Iaconelli, ranked sixth on GQ magazine’s list of 10 most hated athletes — but it wasn’t for lack of trying to be like the No. 1 guy, banished Eagles receiver Terrell Owens.

As fellow angler Denny Brauer told the magazine: “When he catches one, you’ve got the fist pumps, the running around the boat, the lying flat on the boat. He’ll stare at the fish, yell at it, point at it. He’ll shake his finger at it.”

Fortunately, Sharpies can’t write on slimy fish scales.

(Oh, yes, the entire top 10: 1, Owens; 2, baseball’s Barry Bonds; 3, auto racing’s Kurt Busch; 4, baseball’s Curt Schilling; 5, Kobe Bryant; 6, Iaconelli; 7, basketball’s Bonzi Wells; 8, golf’s Phil Mickelson; 9, baseball’s A.J. Pierzynski; 10, tennis’ Lleyton Hewitt.)

Sideline Chatter

Sideline Chatter also has a good lead story about how the Raptors Jalen Rose quieted an obnoxious Denver crowd.