Category: Sports

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

It’s like ‘Teen Wolf’ sprung to life

From ESPN’s Bill Simmons, an excerpt:

Like many NBA junkies, I monitor Laker games since Kobe reached “you always need to make sure Kobe isn’t feeling it” status about two months ago, when it became apparent that his team stunk and Phil Jackson was fine with Kobe gunning 35 to 40 times a game. I don’t like the Lakers, and I definitely don’t like Kobe that much (except for the “Black Mamba” gimmick, which delights me to no end). But I enjoy the nightly potential of an ESPN Classic-caliber scoring explosion. It’s a form of basketball that’s never been seen at this level — as I wrote two weeks ago, it’s like “Teen Wolf” sprung to life. Not only is Mamba hogging the ball to a historic degree, just about everyone else on the Lakers seems OK with it. It’s their only chance to win.

(One player seems to be resisting: Poor Lamar Odom, who’s going to bludgeon himself to death with Phil Jackson’s blank clipboard soon. When they’re running the offense in which Odom sets up Kobe from the top of the key and then stands in place like a third base coach, I keep waiting for Odom to rear back and fire line drive baseball passes at Kobe to try to knock him unconscious. Frankly, there’s still time.)

So this has evolved into a unique situation: A Hall of Fame scorer in his absolute prime, stuck with teammates best described as deferential, playing with a chip on his shoulder after his last two seasons were marred by fallout from the Shaq trade and ongoing legal troubles, working with a permanently green light to hoist an ungodly amount of shots (nearly 28 a game). Again, everyone’s OK with it. Which means it’s impossible to determine a ceiling for Kobe Games right now. After the 62-point game against Dallas, when I bemoaned Kobe’s lost chance to make history, hundreds of Lakers fans disagreed. The common theme of the e-mails: “Dude, are you crazy? He’s shooting the ball 40 times a game! There will be plenty of chances for him to go for 80!”

You know what? Good point.

Kobe! Kobe!

Well, NewMexiKen yammered when Kobe went out of a game with 62 points, so let’s send him some basketball love. This is from the Lakers Blog:

When Brian Cook and Kobe Bryant combine for 83 points, there’s not much the opposition can do.

Down 14 at the half, Kobe took a potentially season crushing loss at home to the Raptors and turned it into a 122-104 win… and history. 81 points, the second highest total in NBA history behind only Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 in ’62. 55 in the second half, before leaving to a standing ovation and a hug for Phil Jackson with 4.2 seconds left, capping a performance that even he couldn’t have dreamed up. And unlike 62 (you remember 62, right?), this time Kobe wasn’t coming out of the game. Sam Mitchell tried every defense he could think of, but none of them helped as Kobe took a game the Raptors had in hand and made it his. The explosion took (some) of the sting away from the ending of his consecutive free throw streak at 62. To cap off the evening? How about a call from Magic?

There may be critics of 81 (don’t know who yet), but they’re misguided, says Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports. Kobe is rewriting the rules of what’s possible, even if it means overshadowing NFL championship Sunday — no easy feat. Exact comparisons to Chamberlain are tough to make, but it’s very possible Kobe’s feat was more impressive.

Either way, save the box score.  It’s a keeper.

Some thoughts while watching Seattle win

Hurrah for the Seahawks for not pouring Gatorade on their winning coach. It’s a tradition that is old and tired and trite.

Baseball or football, sportscaster Joe Buck never knew a stat or piece of trivia his mouth couldn’t use,

Coaches chewing gum with their mouth open deserve to lose.

The Peyton Manning commercial is one of the best ads ever.

Antonio Davis

Without paying much attention to the details, NewMexiKen figured that if the Knicks Antonio Davis went into the stands, he deserved a suspension. That has to be a cardinal rule. But this report in The New York Times has me reconsidering.

“If I saw him go up there, if I’d have known what was happening, I probably would have went up there with him,” [Coach Larry] Brown said.

Female Boxer Offers Hope to a New Mexico Town Short of Heroes

NewMexiKen would be remiss if I didn’t point out this article from the National section of today’s New York Times:

She is more Cinderella than Cinderella Man and no one’s Million-Dollar Baby, but Monica Lovato, a slip of a super flyweight boxer at 5-foot-5 and 115 pounds, is carrying the hopes of her drug-ravaged hometown on her narrow shoulders.

Heroes have been hard to come by in Espanola, the mile-high seat of Rio Arriba County, where drug overdoses lead the nation in taunting proximity to northern New Mexico’s moneyed enclaves of Santa Fe, Taos and Los Alamos.

Ms. Lovato, 28, who has fought her way out of a tormented family history to a 4-1 record and has been known to relax by jumping out of airplanes, is as much a champion as Espanolans have cheered in some time.

Our very own “Mo cuishle.”

The article is as much about the problems — especially drug-related — in Rio Arriba county as it is about the boxer.

Key quotation: “[W]here a Rio Arriba County commissioner once protested a [drug] crackdown saying, ‘We’re not going to declare war on our own relatives.'”

The Classic Won’t Be a Classic Minus Cuba

From George Vecsey’s column in The New York Times:

But first the Classic needs a gesture of diplomacy, or at least a quiet bureaucratic stamping of papers. The Bush administration has refused permission for Cuba, one of the great baseball powers in the world, to enter the United States to play in the tournament, as part of the longstanding American embargo on trade with Cuba.

The Castro regime has offered to donate any profits from the Classic to Hurricane Katrina victims, but the Bush administration is under intense pressure from Cuban exiles in South Florida to apply the ban against the Cuban team. The Treasury Department is reconsidering the application, while baseball officials nervously await the answer.

As athletes who never had a chance to play in a world competition, [Sadaharu] Oh and [Henry] Aaron seemed concerned that Cuba could be kept out.

“I don’t know anything about politics, but since it is called the World Classic, I hope Cuba will play,” Oh said through an interpreter.

Aaron said: “The world is not the world until it’s complete. I hope Cuba will play. I hope politics doesn’t get involved in this, the way it does everything else.”

This isn’t the worst thing the Bush Administration has done, or the stupidest, but it is certainly the most asinine. No justification for the denial other than catering to the Cuban vote in south Florida. Let Cuba play.

Really, you’d have to be drunk to try this stuff

“The Winter Olympics is based on drunken dares,” the comedian [Jon Stewart] once told HBO’s Bob Costas. ” ‘You go down that.’ ‘No man, I’m not going down that.’ ‘You go down that on this.’ ‘All right.’

“That is the whole thing. You think the luge is a sport? It’s not a sport, it is a bet. ‘Here, have a beer, lie like this.’

“Halfpipe? They just came up with that. Just a bunch of guys getting high in the back. ‘What else can we do on snow?’ ‘Halfpipe.’ ”

Sideline Chatter

Winning is forever; losing is for yesterday

At Three Bed Two Bath, Hugh visits the Indianapolis Zoo the day after the Colts lost to the Steelers:

No one was wearing any Colts paraphernalia. No one. And this in a town in which, in addition to seeing people wearing the obvious jerseys (18 Manning, 32 James, 88 Harrison) you see people wearing 21 Sanders and 63 Saturday — the safety and the center for land’s sake. In fact, the only person I saw wearing a jersey all morning was this guy who was so big, football jerseys are almost the only thing he can wear, he’s not going to be shopping for button-down oxford shirts any time soon.

Cheating in the N.F.L.?

Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner is wondering if the NFL wanted the Colts to win:

I’ve had occasion over the years to deal with the N.F.L. on a number of levels, and I think it’s a pretty remarkable industry (well, okay, a pretty remarkable cartel). But yesterday’s Steelers-Colts game contained three mind-boggling calls (or non-calls) that went against the Steelers, and made me wonder what was happening.

Click link above to read more.

Marilyn and Joe

Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were married 52 years ago today. Their famous marriage lasted 286 days.

Their divorce stemmed from the famous scene in The Seven Year Itch where Marilyn’s skirt billows to show her bare legs. As Richard Ben Cramer tells it in Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life:

The scene they went to witness would produce one of the most famous screen images in history—Marilyn Monroe, in simple summer white, standing on a subway grating, cooling herself with the wind from a train below. But what sent Joe DiMaggio into a fury was the scene around the scene. Fans were yelling and shoving at police barricades as the train (actually a wind machine manned beneath the street by the special effects crew) blew Marilyn’s skirt around her ears. Each time it blew, the crowd would yell, “Higher!” “More!” Her legs were bare from her high heels to her thin white panties. Photographers were stretched out on the pavement, with their lenses pointed up at his wife’s crotch, the glare of their flashbulbs clearly outlining the shadow of her pubic hair. “What the hell is going on here?” Joe growled. The director, Billy Wilder, would recall “the look of death” on DiMaggio’s face. Joe turned and bulled his way through the crowd—on his way back to the bar—with the delighted Winchell trotting at his heels.

That night, there was a famous fight in Marilyn and Joe’s suite on the eleventh floor of the St. Regis. It was famous because none of the guests on that floor could sleep. And famous because Natasha Lytess was so alarmed by Marilyn’s cries that she went next door to intervene. (Joe answered the door, and told her to get lost.) It was famous because the following morning Marilyn told her hairdresser and wardrobe mistress that she had screamed for them in the night. (“Her husband got very, very mad with her, and he beat her up a little bit,” said the hairdresser, Gladys Whitten. “It was on her shoulders, but we covered it up, you know.”) And famous because Milton Greene’s wife, Amy, came to visit at the suite the following day (to try on Marilyn’s mink), and was appalled to see bruises all over her friend’s back.

And that fight would stay famous—as the end of Joe and Marilyn’s famous marriage.

Years later, Marilyn would tell another hairdresser, Sidney Guilaroff, that she’d warned Joe clearly the first time he beat her up. “Don’t ever do that again. I was abused as a child, and I’m not going to stand for it.” But, as Guilaroff would write in his memoir:

“Nevertheless, after watching her film a sexy scene for Seven Year Itch, Marilyn said, ‘Joe slapped me around the hotel room until I screamed, “That’s it!” You know, Sidney, the first time a man beats you up, it makes you angry. When it happens a second time you have to be crazy to stay. So I left him.’ ”

She would file for divorce in Los Angeles, three weeks later.

By 1961 according to Cramer, after Monroe’s marriage to Arthur Miller had ended, she and DiMaggio had reconciled — the Kennedys notwithstanding. By 1962 they planned to re-marry. The wedding was set for Wednesday, August 8, 1962. Very private, very hush-hush.

Five days before the wedding date, on Saturday night, August 3, Marilyn died, a presumed suicide. (According to Cramer no coroner’s inquest was held.) Marilyn Monroe’s funeral was August 8, 1962.

DiMaggio died in 1999.

Coulda Shoulda Woulda

Bill Simmons takes Kobe to task for not scoring 80 points against the Mavs. (He got 62.) An excerpt:

See, sports isn’t only about winning and losing. It’s also about the little challenges along the way. Kobe’s chance to break the non-Wilt record transcended victory or even a little character rehab. After three quarters, he’d outscored the Mavs by himself, something nobody ever remembers happening before. To throw your hands up, high-five your teammates and say, “That’s it, that’s enough” doesn’t just cheat the fans who are at the game, it cheats everyone who loves basketball and spends their evenings flicking channels, waiting to stumble across a lightning-in-a-bottle moment. The outcome was decided, but the story line wasn’t. Kobe took the easy way out. And in doing so, it was just one more manifestation of what has gone wrong with his career. He should have been the next MJ, should have broken the non-Wilt record, should have been the defining player of his generation. Instead, he’s another couldashouldawoulda guy.

Big bucks for Cowboys

NewMexiKen is happy for Oklahoma State, but talk about misplaced priorities:

Billionaire alumnus Boone Pickens announced Tuesday he will donate $165 million to help Oklahoma State toward its goal of creating an athletic village north of the football stadium that already bears his name.

ESPN.com

Whoa, Nellie!

Since I firmly believe Marv Albert should do every big NBA game, Pat Summerall every big NFL game and Keith Jackson every big college football game, no matter how old they are, and only because it feels like a bigger game when any of them is involved, I feel totally comfortable saying this: Listening to Jackson is like driving with my mother at night. In other words, maybe he can’t really see anymore, and he might drive over a few curbs, and maybe he’ll even send a pedestrian diving behind a parking meter … but it’s always exciting, and you always get home safely in the end.

Bill Simmons at ESPN.com, in a live-blogging the Rose Bowl column with multiple laugh-out-loud lines.

Best line of the day, so far

“A slipshod final play, where a crisp one might have allowed for a tying field goal try, left [Matt] Leinart looking dazed and diminished, like a boxing champ who got KO’d in the last round. I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy. Then I remembered his sickeningly charmed life and snapped out of it.”

Robert Weintraub at Slate in a very good summary of the game titled “Don’t Mess With Texas.”

Vince Young

NewMexiKen is told 5-year-old Mack thinks USC made a bad choice going for it on fourth down and two at the Texas 45-yard line with 2:09 left. I disagree. By then everyone knew USC couldn’t stop Vince Young. 45 or 20, it made no difference.

As Joel Achenbach puts it: “The Southern Cal defenders had nothing left, and essentially just applauded, like a good audience, as Young waltzed into the end zone for the national title.”

It truly was a game that lived up to its hype.

And the award for most premature awards goes to …

As NewMexiKen wrote here 13 months ago:

How come these [college football] awards are given before the bowl games? When first established, many of the bowl games were just post season fun. Now, with the BCS especially, the outcome of these games is critical for a team. Why determine awards before the most important game of the season?

Or, in other words, don’t you think Vince Young would win the Heisman if the voting were today?

If you like our football team, you’ll love our chem labs full of Asian students

A fascinating and amusing report on Those Weird College Ads from Mike DeBonis at Slate. He begins:

The 56 universities represented in this year’s bowlapalooza also have the chance to sell themselves to a national audience.

And no, they don’t let their football teams speak for themselves. America’s colleges and universities try to make an impression with “institutional spots”—trade parlance for the promotional television commercials they use to sell themselves. The ads typically run for 30 seconds during halftime. As state-school spokespersons are quick to point out, colleges don’t pay for the airtime—the slots are provided at no cost under most college-football television contracts.

The standard mise-en-scène of the institutional spot will be familiar to any dedicated college-sports watcher: campus greenery, one-on-one pedagogy, chemistry labs, black gowns and mortarboards, and laughing/hugging students of as many colors as possible.

And the award for hard-to-beat:

The season’s most memorable institutional spot won’t be playing during a bowl game. Notre Dame will introduce a new ad for the Fiesta Bowl, but the school will have a tough time encapsulating the smug Golden Domer attitude any better than it does in “Candle.” A girl lights candles at her church, ostensibly for many years, until a thick letter arrives from the Notre Dame admissions office. A glance to the skies confirms just who’s responsible for her shot at a “higher education.” Prayer for personal triumph: It’s not just for end zone celebrations anymore.

It’s show time

An interesting report on bowl games and television ratings from Sam Walker at WSJ.com . It begins:

As college football’s bowl season begins in earnest, it’s time to have a look at the latest rankings. The nation’s top team isn’t USC, it’s the Oregon Ducks. Notre Dame isn’t as strong as it seems, Texas is a big disappointment and West Virginia is a doormat.

We aren’t talking about their performances on the football field, of course. This ranking is a measure of something that’s much less obvious to the public but just as significant to these schools in the long run: how many people watch their bowl games on television.

Link via The Sports Economist.

Easy for you to say

This from Sideline Chatter:

Speaking of long names, wrote Don Banks of SI.com, “Some time before I die, I’d like to see Cardinals fullback Obafemi Ayanbadejo tackled by Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora, preferably after taking a handoff from current Raiders quarterback Marques Tuiasosopo, with Rams tight end Brandon Manumaleuna having missed a block on the play.

“And I’d like John Madden to handle the play-by-play call. Is that asking too much?”