Depending on how you look at it, either I’ve been denied access to US sports information for the last month or so or I’ve been given the chance to free my mind of such confining thoughts and images. I prefer the former. But when one is traveling in Morocco and Turkey, one catches only fleeting glimpses of US sports and soon one comes to realize that the rest of the world does not care very much about issues that many of us follow with great passion. When I travel abroad, I like to look at the attire of the “natives” and see if any/many of them wear gear with US sports team logos on them. In Morocco, only one team in one sport was in evidence and that team’s logo showed up in four different metropolitan areas. That would be the New York Yankees; their logos and presence were everywhere. I asked our guide why that was the case and he said he didn’t know anything about the NY Yankees; I asked a shop owner who was wearing a Yankees’ cap and had a Yankees’ pennant on the all of his shop and he said that it was because they were champions.
I guess front-running fans are a worldwide phenomenon. I didn’t have the heart to tell the shop owner that it had been a while since the Yankees were actually – you know – champions.
In Turkey, baseball and football might as well not exist. I did not see a single team logo from either sport in 10 days in that country. Basketball is big in Turkey – not as big as soccer to be sure – but it is something that Turks play and there are indigenous Turkish leagues. And since the Utah Jazz have a “graduate” of the Turkish system on the squad, Mehmet Okur, there is a focus on the Utah Jazz and their progress through the NBA Playoffs. There are English language newspapers in Turkey – something we never found in Morocco – and these have small sports sections. Other than the Utah Jazz, the focus of the rest of the sports sections in these papers seem to be European soccer tournaments, European golf and the visit of Queen Elizabeth to the US to see the Kentucky Derby.
It was not until I had gotten home that I learned about a proposal to move back the three-point-line in NCAA basketball games by a foot. That’s an improvement, but it is not the end of the rule tinkering that needs to be done with the three point shot. I’ve suggested to the “rules mavens” several times that they need to stop awarding three points for a “Hail Mary” shot at the end of a game or at the end of a half. The purpose of the three-point-line was to open up the game offensively and give teams a way to play other than trying to pound the ball inside. Well, the “Hail Mary” shot has exactly nothing at all to do with that objective and should not be rewarded with a premium value. There are lots of ways to make this limitation; but so far, the “rules mavens” haven’t seen fit to apply any of them.
Mercifully, I heard exactly NOTHING about the NFL Draft whilst on my travels. And from that situation, I am now more confident than ever about my instinct that the NFL Draft is nothing much more than a “made-for-TV” concocted event. Forget all the hype leading up to the draft from January until April; just focus on the TV, radio and print coverage of the draft on the weekend of the event. Absent a huge controversy that could have immense Constitutional implications, networks will spend less time reporting on the Presidential elections in 2008 and analyzing the trends in the voting that led to the manifest results than ESPN spent on “Draft Weekend”. There is a need for perspective here. I try to be as apolitical as possible in these rants, but I feel the need to make a completely non-partisan statement here:
Any Presidential election is significantly more important than every NFL Draft.
Since I’ve edged up to the realm of politics, I saw that the SF 49ers signed RB, Frank Gore, to a four-year extension to his contract. Just a guess, but I suspect that his “cousin”, Al Gore, must have been wishing for a four-year extension of his deal in Washington too…
It wasn’t until I got home that I learned about the NFL dropping the hammer of Thor on Pacman Jones and Chris Henry. Frankly, I have no sympathy for either of these guys; playing professional football is not an inalienable right endowed to them by The Creator; it’s a privilege and their antisocial behaviors abused that privilege. I saw where the lawyers for Pacman argued to the NFL that umpty-doodle NFL players have been arrested for “stuff” since the year 2000 and none of them had gotten such a severe penalty. I wonder if they also pointed out that Pacman leads the NFL in “police incidents” with ten; something tells me they didn’t.
I also didn’t know anything at all about Michael Vick giving/leasing a house he owned to someone who seemingly was involved in dogfighting activities.
Memo to Michael: This is not a good way to augment your product endorsement potential. Lots more people have dogs as pets than think dogfighting is a worthy endeavor.
Evidently, Falcons’ owner, Arthur Blank, pulled a Neville Chamberlain here and gave Vick a stern warning about being involved in stuff like this. It might be very interesting to see what the NFL Front Office might have to say to Michael Vick if – remember I said IF – it turns out there is credible evidence to suggest that Vick was involved in the dogfighting activities or if he knew they were going on in his house and ”condoned” them by allowing them to continue.
We know that Michael Vick had his “water bottle incident” and now he has this dogfighting incident; we also know that his younger brother Marcus has had more than a couple of run-ins with the law. Just wondering here, is there a third brother in the Vick family and is he named Con?
Oh, and since Dallas Mavericks’ owner, Mark Cuban, is on record saying that publicity is good for the NBA no matter what the subject – he said that bout the Kobe Bryant incident in Colorado no less – let me give the Mavs some publicity and say that they gagged up a hairball in the playoffs and have to be the most embarrassing 67-win team in the history of the league. Hope that helps, Mr. Cuban…
Finally, an item from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald:
“Andrea Jaeger is now a Dominican nun at age 41. She is currently the world’s top-ranked tennis-playing nun, partly because every other nun is an old woman who doesn’t play tennis.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…