I was not sure I would be writing today. Hence my comments on income taxes in yesterday’s rant. Yesterday was my long-suffering wife’s birthday and we ventured out to Baltimore for the day and had dinner there. I expected it to be a late night but we got back at a reasonable hour so I have time this morning to write before a hectic afternoon/evening today. This morning I found in my e-mail a single line from a former colleague about Tiger Woods’ loss in the Masters and its nullification of his Grand Slam possibilities this year. Would that I had thought of this yesterday:
“Tiger must be having the first bite of his Grand Slam at Denny’s this morning.”
Do you remember last year when Hope Solo was less than diplomatic in her criticism of her coach for benching her and for her replacement’s “ineptitude” in goal for the US Women’s Soccer team? The coach got fired; the team lost their game; commentators claimed that Solo had been ostracized from the team and had caused a giant rift there. Well, that rift cannot have been so gigantic because Hope Solo is back on the US Women’s Soccer team as it prepares for the Olympics in Beijing. That would seem to indicate to me that the rest of the team has accepted that she is there. By the way, it also says to me that Hope Solo is something more than a second-rate goaltender because if she were it would have to have been easier to find a replacement for her given the events of last year.
A gentleman in Greensboro, NC won $100K in a fantasy sport contest. It was a fantasy fishing contest – - there are no typos in this sentence. In a press release after his win, this gentleman said:
“It’s still hard to believe that I won. My wife … is still in shock. It’s easy to enter, and it’s fun to play. It makes following the FLW pro bass anglers even that more exciting.”
No peeking or googling allowed now. Answer these three questions:
1. What does “FLW” stand for?
2. Why is fishing a spectator sport?
3. What could possibly make “following the FLW pro bass anglers” less exciting than it is?
When ESPN put Stephan A. Smith on the air with his daily TV show, Quite Frankly, I said at the time that I thought that it was possible that a daily show would hurt Smith. Like him or not for his bombast, Stephen A. Smith is a good journalist who will ask the tough questions and find the difficult stories. Smith had loads of good sources inside the NBA and I thought the daily grind of an ESPN TV show might erode them. Well, in the past two years, Smith has lost his TV show; he has given up his column in the Philadelphia Inquirer and now his radio program on ESPN Radio has gone silent. I really hope Stephen A. Smith comes back from this bad period because he is a very good sports journalist.
Bryant Gumbel is out as the play-by-play man for NFL games on NFL Network. Quite frankly, I will not miss him in that role very much. I did not find him to be either entertaining or informative on those telecasts and that pretty much covers the range of things you want from a play-by-play announcer in a football game. According to NFLN, Gumbel resigned; I have read speculation that he was fired. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that NFLN finds a good play-by-play announcer to team with Cris Colinsworth (who is very good at color analysis) for those telecasts. From my previous opinions about football announcers, it would make me very happy if NFLN put either Ian Eagle or Pam Ward into that slot.
One other note about NFLN today, Dave Darling reported in the Orlando Sentinel that NFLN president, Stan Bornstein said at the NFL owners meeting that the network would shut down before it accepted being put into a premium cable package by the big cable TV companies. Said Bornstein:
“We’re all about mass distribution and wide availability of our product, and there’s no reason we want to make this an elitist product.”
To which Dave Darling’s comment was:
“Ah. That explains why your network is available only on satellite dishes in most markets.”
The TV ratings for the NCAA Men’s basketball final game came in at 12.1. That is a significant number even though it is down slightly from 2007. For the Women’s basketball final game the TV ratings were 3.0, which is about what the XFL drew in the middle of its single season on TV. Nevertheless, the women’s number is a good one because it is up significantly from last year and it was achieved on cable TV not network TV. That is a good sign.
But leave it to the NCAA and its member institutions to find something wrong enough to complain about. It seems that some of the member institutions think there were too many beer commercials on the CBS-TV coverage of all the men’s tournament games. About a hundred of these schools sent a letter to Dr. Myles Brand asking him how there could be so many beer commercials in light of the NCAA guidelines that “exclude those advertisements and advertisers … that do not appear to be in the best interests of higher education and student-athletes.” I cannot wait to hear Dr. Myles Brand’s peroration on this subject…
I think it would be even more interesting to ask Dr. Myles Brand and the one hundred or so signatories to this letter a different question:
With so many participants in NCAA men’s basketball who leave school after a year or two and without their degrees, why do you insist on calling them student-athletes?
Finally, since today is actually the day you need to file your income tax returns let me offer up a situation that seems contradictory to me:
The President always says that we should pay less in taxes – - but if we actually do that, the IRS will send us to jail.
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…