Bob Molinaro writes an entertaining sports column in The Virginian-Pilot; last week, while covering the ACC Tournament in Tampa, he wrote that the ACC Tournament belongs in North Carolina. He’s right. There are certain sporting events that one properly associates with venues. The Triple Crown races don’t meander around the country; the FA Cup Finals in Britain stay put; the major college bowl games have been in place for a long time now. It took WWII and a fear of a bombing attack on a stadium full of people to move the Rose Bowl just one time. The ACC Tournament came out of the Tobacco Road area and it should stay there; it certainly does not belong in Tampa where there is no “ACC presence”.
Having said that, they could play the ACC Tournament in Crow Lake, South Dakota and it wouldn’t be any more out of place there than the A-10 Tournament was in Atlantic City. There are no basketball teams of any renown in Atlantic City; there are no schools of higher education of any renown in Atlantic City; once you get 500 yards inland from the resort hotels, the city is more appealing than Baghdad and Darfur to be sure but then again so is a moonscape. The NCAA threw a fit once when teams were scheduled to play a game in a gym associated with a casino in Connecticut because of the proximity of casino games to the athletes and the fans. In Atlantic City, the players had to be housed in one of the hotels featuring casinos and the fans that went there watched games or gambled or engaged in whatever flavor of drunken debauchery was on tap for that day. For the early round events, the attendance averaged about 5000 fannies in the seats. Put the ACC Tournament in Greensboro or Winston Salem and they’ll draw 5000 fans if the games started at 2:00 AM. This is a bad venue for a college basketball tournament.
While thinking about college basketball, I want to warn you about something you will hear later this week. The NCAA Tournament begins on Thursday and there will surely be an upset somewhere along the way during Thursday’s sixteen games. When that happens, some commentator will think he’s being oh-so-clever when he tells you that the loser did not “Beware, the Ides of March.” It isn’t clever here; it won’t be clever when you hear it on Thursday.
Sometimes there is a sports story that is silly enough to make it onto my list of things to talk about. However, sometimes the story takes more setting up than it is worth; and so without all the details, here are two comments from Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle that will give you all you really need to know:
“Pistons guard Lindsey Hunter is suspended 10 games after testing positive for phentermine, and explains that he grabbed his wife’s diet pills by mistake. ‘We do that at out house.’ Hunter explains. ‘If I’ve got a head cold, I might grab one of her pills.’ That can be dangerous, but on the plus side, Lindsey has never tested positive for pregnancy.”
“The suspension will cost Hunter $205,000, plus whatever it costs him to replace his wife’s pills. Man, for about $50,000 a year you could hire a live-in medicine-cabinet label-reader.”
In the political world, people like to vent about left-leaning newspapers or conservative networks. Those diatribes often call for balance and appeal to the lofty ideals of journalistic neutrality. And all of that is fine and dandy in terms of debate even if it doesn’t actually exist in most places. But let’s not kid ourselves that ESPN is a journalistic organization in any way. I know they put on hours and hours of SportsCenter every day and that they have programs like Outside the Lines. But ESPN is not there to inform about sports; its main purpose is to tell you enough about the sports you care about that you will stay tuned in order for them to tell you “really exciting stuff” about the sports that they will be carrying on ESPN channels. A two-hour SportsCenter usually has about 45 minutes of pure promotional material. As an example, consider the Arena Football League…
The Arena League has been around for 20 years; most recently, it had a TV presence on NBC. As far as ESPN and the SportsCenter folks were concerned, it had all of the importance of curling and/or synchronized swimming. They might tell you about the championship game the day before it was to be played; they would certainly give you the results of that game with maybe 15 seconds of highlights; but that was about it. This year the games are on ESPN because ESPN is also a part owner of the league and all of a sudden, they have studio shows to give you analysis of upcoming games and news from around the league. They have even allowed Ron Jaworski to telecast some of the games. I’m not saying that “Jaws” is bad in the booth because he’s actually pretty good there; the “issue” is that Ron Jaworski is a part owner of one of the Arena League franchises. How does that argument about the ideal of journalistic neutrality go again?
Here’s how you know ESPN has gone in the tank over Arena Football. Go to the ESPN.com website and you will find a way to play fantasy football for the Arena League there. Soon you might expect to see coverage of the Arena League draft? Who will emerge as the Mel Kiper, Jr. of indoor football?
During the halftime of the Super Bowl, people were watching Prince. Even the people who might have wanted to go to the pay-per-view Lingerie Bowl had to stay with the NFL halftime “entertainment” because there was no Lingerie Bowl this year. But organizers say it will be back in 2008; they hope to stage the game in Arizona proximal to the Super Bowl game in the Cardinals’ new stadium. According to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the Lingerie Bowl promoters sent a gift pack containing a football and some lingerie to Mary Manross who happens to be the mayor of Scottsdale Arizona. Evidently, Her Honor was not all that happy with the gift and somehow I don’t think the explanation from the Lingerie Bowl officials is going to make her any the more happy. According to the originator of the Lingerie Bowl, Her Honor will understand the value of having the game in her town “once she sits down and understands the brand and tries on the uniform.” Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think she will.
Finally, Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times is obviously keyed into the whole business of the NCAA Tournament:
“The American Medical Association, getting into March Madness, is expected to declare that the mouth will temporarily be reclassified as a Vitale organ.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…