Bleacher Report - Articles by Burton DeWitt

Price Mike Locksley Paid Too Small for His Crime

Burton DeWitt — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:04:49 -0400

I would have written this a few weeks ago if I anticipated its outcome correctly. Obviously, I did not.

I thought the University of New Mexico was suspending head coach Mike Locksley as a pretense to fully relieving him of his duties, the standard “We’re suspending you without pay until our lawyers tell us how to fire you the cheapest.”

But, on Sunday, Locksley returned to his office in Albuquerque, resuming his duties as if nothing had ever happened.

What happened, of course, was that Locksley attacked receivers coach J.B. Gerald, leaving Gerald with a split lip and the accusation that Locksley punched him.

"It was a heated argument with some grabbing, pushing and shoving," Locksley told the Associated Press about the Sept. 20 altercation. “I did not throw a punch.”

But even if Locksley did not throw a punch, even if all Locksley did was grab and push and shove Gerald, then that should have been enough to lead the termination of Locksley’s contract. Immediately. Permanently.

Sure, coaches have gotten away with worse. Heck, Bobby Knight got away with events like this on a weekly basis. And in some parts of the country, if Paul “Bear” Bryant had come into a house and murdered someone, the family of the victim would not even press charges.

But that does not make any of these actions any less wrong.

Locksley is an employee of the state of New Mexico, much of his salary paid by residents of the state of New Mexico, and he has been entrusted by the state to help educate nearly 100 of its young adults. And Locksley, while on the job, violated the trust the university put in him, lost his temper, and engaged in a physical altercation with another member of his staff.

Yet that’s a leader the state of New Mexico feels comfortable entrusting to its students?

That, like Locksley’s actions, is garbage.

I was horrified when New Mexico Athletic Director Paul Krebs initially decided that Locksley only needed to be reprimanded, as ESPN reported, but a little research showed that a reprimand was required by the university to open further investigations.

When, on Oct. 14, Krebs announced he was suspending Locksley without pay for 10 days, I thought that this was just the first step, that sometime during the 10-day suspension, Paul Krebs would call another press conference and announce the dismissal of Mike Locksley, that the university was enforcing some clause somewhere in his contract that allowed the Lobos to terminate his contract without pay if he violated university policy against violence.

Certainly the good people of New Mexico want better, right?

I guess they don’t.

Of course, what Locksley did was not that dissimilar from what Oakland Raiders head coach Tom Cable is accused of doing.

An assistant with the Raiders filed a police report that Cable punched him on Aug. 5, and like Locksley’s case, that accusation too fell flat, resulting in the case being dismissed before it ever reached trial.

But there is one important difference between Locksley and Cable—Locksley is a state employee paid to educate young men and turn them into adults; Cable is a professional football coach for a private organization dealing with men who, one would want to believe, are already completely adults.

While Cable probably should be fired for many reasons, I can understand the decision not to fire him for that incident, especially after most of the charges failed to yield any evidence. But there is no reason to keep Locksley, no solid one at least.

Sure, Locksley made a mistake. Anyone in that situation could have done the same thing. Tempers rise, emotions flare, clichés become abundant, and for a second you lose control. But do you think for a moment that if that happened at work, if at a meeting you grabbed, pushed, and shoved someone who worked under you, your boss wouldn’t fire you?

And you’re probably not even entrusted to mold young boys into men.

But because Locksley is the head football coach, because he is the big honcho on campus, because he apologized, that makes it all OK.

Yes, Locksley got suspended, but it’s a slap on the wrist.

What’s $29,000 to a man making $750,000 a year?

Okay, Locksley had to miss a game, a game that his team went on to lose, just like the Lobos have done in every other game this season, but that’s a small price to pay.

No, Mike Locksley should have been suspended. Then fired. Permanently. Gone, goodbye. There is no excuse for why Paul Krebs did otherwise.

Of course, someone is going to call me a racist. Articles like this always spark at least one such comment. Someone is going to send me an e-mail saying something to the effect of “If Mike Locksley were not African-American, you would never have written this article.”

And I’m not trying to discourage anyone from sending such an email, because they’re my favorite to deal with.

Because they’re hogwash.

If Urban Meyer had done this, I would have written the same article, would have called for Meyer’s head with the same furor and passion that I’m calling for Locksley’s, because Meyer would have failed to accomplish the one aspect of his job that is most important.

Meyer, just like Locksley, has to be a leader first and foremost, to both his coaching staff and to his players. If he attacks any one of them, then, well, what kind of leader is he?

Not the leader I want teaching my children, that’s for sure.

If Locksley were anyone but the head football coach (or head basketball coach), he would have been fired.

J.B. Gerald? He’s cleaned out his office and is on paid administrative leave, code word for fired, and he was the other party in the altercation with Locksley.

But on Sunday, Locksley returned to work, hopefully a little wiser, but still just as guilty as when he left.

Should Locksley be given another chance? Sure. But not at New Mexico. Not now.

Let someone else take the risk; let someone else see if Locksley has learned his lesson. But New Mexico, for the sake of the students, make him pay a price first.

Something more than $29,000 at least.

Memories of an ESPN Error

Burton DeWitt — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:38:25 -0400

Have you ever had something that's bugged you for years?

Sure, it's meaningless, unimportant, even forgettable for every other person to ever walk the face of the planet, closer to Duke football than it will ever be to Duke basketball, yet somehow, no matter what, you just cannot let it go.

Me? I have a case of this, and I have it bad.

On Mar. 3, 2008, more than 19 months ago, Alex Ovechkin, a left-winger for the Washington Capitals and better known as one of only three ice hockey players anyone in Houston has ever heard of, recorded a hat trick against the Boston Bruins.

Oh, one of those goals, his first, was his 50th of the season.

And that's a very rare feat, but even rarer if your source of news is ESPN.

Now, how can a feat be rarer than itself? Isn't that an oxymoron? Well, sort of.

According to ESPN, and ESPN liked this stat so much that it ran it both on SportsCenter and ESPN.com, trust me, I remember, it was only the fourth time that a player scored his 50th goal and recorded a hat trick in the same game.

The first three were done by Wayne Gretzky, Wayne Gretzky, and Wayne Gretzky, respectively, in 1981-'82, 1983-'84, and 1984-'85.

That is impressive. But it also makes sense that ESPN will tweak history to create a sensationalistic situation.

If you are advertising your next SportsCenter segment, which sounds sexier?

Coming up, can Ovechkin do something that only the great one has ever done before him?

Or...

Coming up, can Ovechkin join Wayne Gretzky, Pavel Bure, and some random dude on the 1970-something Buffalo Sabres in the record books?

Unless you are Pavel Bure or some random dude on the 1970-something Buffalo Sabres, I'd venture a guess that the previous statement sounds a lot sexier.

So what better for ESPN to do than to advertise Ovechkin's achievement as such? And ESPN did.

The network liked it so much that it ran it on SportsCenter that night. And the next morning. And online. And during highlights of Ovechkin's next game.

But as you might have guessed by now, the accuracy of that stat was far from accurate. You might even call it inaccurate.

In 2000, Pavel Bure, then of the Florida Panthers, entered the Nassau Coliseum on 47 goals. His opponent, the New York Islanders, entered literally needing to win every remaining match over the final month of the season, and have the eighth-place team lose every single match, to reach the playoffs.

But the game was close, a lot closer at least than I was to the game. I had tickets on the back row, and that is no exaggeration. Back row tickets are $5 less than second-back row, so we bought them. I mean, not like anyone else will be at the game, so we'll eventually be able to move down.

The entire way to the game, I kept saying that Bure would get his hat trick. “Hat trick to 50! Hat trick to 50!” It was a fun, childish game of song and, had I not been seated in the back seat of the car, dance.

I sang it so much that, when Bure still had not scored with under a minute to go in the second period, I was actually surprised that he was not going to accomplish the feat.

But in the final 10 seconds of the second period, Viktor Koslov intercepted a pass at mid-ice, passed it to Ray Whitney, who back-handed it to an open Bure. With the period all but expired, Bure whipped a one-timer past Kevin Weekes. There was only 1.4 seconds remaining.

The Panthers took a 2-1 lead and Bure was up to 48 goals.

My hopes and dreams now revived, my family moved down to the front section for the final period, the front row of the front section to be exact. The recorded attendance was 10,017, but if there were more than 5,000 people still at the Coliseum, I'll be damned.

Very quickly, maybe even before we reached our seats, the Islanders tied the game at two. And it stayed that way into the final two minutes of the game.

So there we were, 120 seconds to go, and Bure still needed two goals for 50. And then there was 100 seconds to go, and 80...

With about 75 seconds to go, the Panthers issued a line change. Meanwhile, the puck was lose exactly where Bure was coming in. He grabbed the puck, rushed to net, and slapped a wrist-shot past Weekes.

1:10 to go, Florida 3, New York 2. Pavel Bure on 49 goals.

After they won the face-off, the Islanders pulled Weekes to get an extra attacker, leaving an empty net in their defensive zone. It looked like it was going to work, as they got off two great one-timers, both cupped to safety by Florida goaltender Mike Vernon.

Then Bure got loose.

He checked someone, I don't remember who, into the boards right where I was standing. I saw the puck trickle back and there was only Bure to scooped it up.

With no one back to stop him, Bure eased towards the goal and deposited the puck into the back of the net.

Twenty seconds left and Bure had his 50th.

There are some things that we hold onto for no reason, and this is one of them.

I'm sure even Pavel Bure, had he seen the SportsCenter episode or read the article online, thought it strange that ESPN would have forgotten him. Then he moved on.

But I'm not going to move on, not on this one.

I've long since lost count of how many times I've emailed ESPN about this. Every time I submit a correction about anything, like Buster Olney writing that Florida Marlins' manager Fredi Gonzalez is in his second season at the helm when, in reality, he is in his third, I also mention the error in that article from months and soon years ago.

ESPN will never admit its mistake, and at this point, I'm willing to accept it. But until the entire world remembers what I remember, I will not be able to let this go.

This is why I'm holding onto this little piece of nothingness. This is why I will always rub this mistake in ESPN's face.

Meaningless, sure. Unimportant, sure. Forgettable, sure. But even someone has to root for Duke football, too.

Memphis, Not Calipari, Will Be Villified Longer

Burton DeWitt — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:01:35 -0400

Nice try, Gary Parrish. Very nice try.

But if I were to say you were wrong, it would very well diminish the meaning of “wrong” for future generations, and I don’t feel comfortable doing that.

You are past wrong, beyond wrong if you will. You are located somewhere between fool and foolish, probably closer to the previous than the latter.

Okay, you are partially correct, using partially only in the loosest of constructions. Society doesn’t associate certain programs with being corrupt, programs like Ohio State and Oklahoma that had one bad apple and then faded into sustained high-profile mediocrity.

We as society associate those programs with the men who corrupted them, Jim O'Brien and Kelvin Sampson respectively.

But programs that succeed, programs that are glorified, programs that legitimately contend for a national title and then face the wrath of the NCAA and are never heard from again, we put the blame squarely on the program.

When I hear UNLV, I don’t think about its resurgence under Lon Kruger. Hahaha! Please; I think of Jerry Tarkanian and Bill Bayno and three decades of NCAA probing.

And by the way, you associate Tarkanian with Kelvin Sampson and Jim Harrick, who were both explicitly indicted by the NCAA as cheaters. Tarkanian, despite the NCAA spending more money investing UNLV than any other program before or after, was never found to have committed any violations. But that’s for another article, Gary.

No, I’m attacking you, Gary, not for your comments on Tarkanian, but for being a flat-out fool. So from here out, Gary, I’ll stay focused.

Unless something gets tied to the coach, or unless violations are found under the same coach at multiple institutions, society is not going to associate the violations with the coach.

And even then, if there’s enough time between the violations, we’ll still associate them with the school, not the coach.

Go ask any 10 college basketball fans who was the Southern Methodist coach in the 1980s when the school gave Jon Koncak illegal payments and I’ll bet you anything no more than two of them will associate those payments with Dave Bliss’ regime. They, like me, associate it with the wide-spread corruption at SMU during that decade.

Or for that matter, go ask 10 college basketball fans about St. Bonaventure. I’ll bet you anything nine of them remember the school having to forfeit their entire season for playing some guy (whose name was Jamil Terrell) even though that guy only having a welding certificate, but how many can remember the coach who signed him or the school president who gave the go-ahead?

While John Calipari’s reputation will take a hit, even if nothing can get tied back to him, in the long run it is Memphis that will lose credibility.

And there is one reason and one reason only: Memphis is not a major conference school.

We don’t associate Georgia with corruption, as you point out, because Jim Harrick and his son were the criminals. They were the ones who gave their students freebies to stay academically eligible. But Georgia is also a major conference school with a $1 billion television contract behind it.

Why would ESPN or CBS degrade a program that it’s paying nearly $20 million each year?

But Memphis and UNLV and Southern Methodist (at least since 1996) and St. Bonaventure are not major conference schools. They’re in Conference USA and the Mountain West Conference and Conference USA and the Atlantic-10 respectively, low high-major conferences at best and run-of-the-mill mid-majors at worst.

Sure, ESPN and CBS might show them a couple times a year, but never in the most coveted time slots unless they’re playing a major conference foe.

If one of them goes on probation, it’s because that's a bad program, not just because the coach wants to bend every rule.

And sure, there are exceptions, but not many.

Southern California’s athletic department is breaking rules left and right in every sport. So too is Florida State. But we give them the benefit of the doubt.

Southern California gets a pass because the NCAA has not investigated it in football and Tim Floyd has always been a shady character. Florida State took care of its academic scandal internally and has instituted more oversight over Bobby Bowden’s football program.

How much attention has there been on the fact that the Seminoles went on probation in nine other sports for the same scandal?

None if you have been keeping track.

Really, only Alabama among major programs has been associated with being a corrupt program in post-Southwest Conference NCAA history, and that’s really only because of their three major football scandals.

Miami too has spent time unjustly under the national spotlight, as somehow Dennis Erickson avoided the blame for the Hurricanes’ mid-1990s probation, but most of their attention is not for cheating the NCAA but for cheating the law.

No, major programs get associated with the coaches that bring them down, with Kelvin Sampson at Oklahoma and Dave Bliss at Baylor, with Tim Floyd at Southern California and Kelvin Sampson at Indiana. The big contract holders of ESPN and CBS will forever make sure of that.

But when you look at a small school, then the blame can be placed exactly where it needs to be: on the institutions themselves.

I don’t care what any of these coaches have done; I really don’t. If you want me to believe that the institutions did not know that their coaches were cheating, then you might as well put me in a diaper and hand me a bottle. I’m not that naïve.

Sure, they can’t keep track of every little thing, and trust me when I say every little thing is a secondary violation that you and I never hear about. If a school isn’t self-reporting a dozen minor violations a month, then clearly the school isn’t doing its job of self-monitoring.

But if you want me to believe that the athletes at Florida State took it upon themselves from the guidance of one “learning specialist” to set up their illegal test-taking ring, then you’re crazy. It wasn't just the someone in the institution thought he or she could help out a few students and created the situation where they were told to cheat.

No, someone higher up ordered it, even if that name never gets uncovered.

We need to blame the schools, and not just the Memphises and UNLVs of the world. We need to blame the Georgias and the Southern Californias too.

And that’s where you go wrong, Gary.

You think because we did not blame those schools (and we did blame UNLV), we won’t blame Memphis. And we will.

This is not the first time Memphis has gone on probation, and we blamed them the first time. And this is not the first time John Calipari has seen one of his former programs go on probation, and we blamed the school the first time, too.

Sure, Calipari will get his share of the blame, as he should, but much of it will be left on Memphis. And if Calipari wins a national title at Kentucky or takes them to the final four, all will be forgotten.

Which brings me to Kentucky.

Twice, Kentucky has gone on major probation, and the first led to one of only two complete uses of the death penalty ever on a major sport program at a Division I school.

In 1952, the NCAA canceled the Wildcats’ season due to a point shaving scandal under Adolph Rupp.

Then in 1989, the Wildcats almost were given the death penalty again after the NCAA found proof of improper benefits given to two recruits. Kentucky was placed on three years probation and Eddie Sutton was forced to resign.

But do we think of Kentucky as a corrupt program? Do we even think of Rupp or Sutton as corrupt coaches?

Most of us do not. They both won after the scandal to erase our memories

And that’s why Gary skims the line between being foolish and being a fool.

We, as a society, have too short of a memory span. If Kentucky wins soon, we’ll forget everything we think we know about Calipari and the only thing we’ll remember is that Memphis is a corrupt program.

And Calipari will win at Kentucky. That's as clear cut as a Sammy Sosa lie.

So Gary, you’re more than wrong. Just letting you know.

Nice try, but that's as much kudos as I'll give you.

I'm Writing about Brett Favre Because I Want To?

Burton DeWitt — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:53:35 -0400

I promised myself last summer that I was not going to write about Brett Favre.

I did.

It's not that I thought I'd want to write about Brett Favre. The only other time I even sort of wrote about him wasn't really about him—it was about ESPN's media stalk-gala into his every inaction after he asked Roger Goodell for reinstatement papers but Goodell did not sign them last summer.

And I was happy that I did not care.

But now? Now I care. Because now it's personal.

I thought I knew Favre because, well, I'd like to think I'm smarter than he is.

For starters, while I did grapple with retirement for four seasons in my simulation baseball league. When I finally walked away from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays after a disappointing 2025 season, I stayed retired, never once considering a return to competition.

And so you know, I made sure they stayed the Devil Rays.

But still, I thought I was smarter than he ever was. At least, I thought I was smart enough to know what he was thinking.

I knew Favre was not going to retire after the first two tear-stained locker room moments in 2005 and 2006, just like I knew he was going to walk away after leading Green Bay to the 2007-08 NFC Championship Game.

At the same time, I knew Favre wasn't really retiring, because I knew Favre had too much pride to go out after an overtime interception in the playoffs. Just like I knew Favre was done after bruising his shoulder and looking like, well, Kyle Orton down the stretch for the New York Jets.

But when Favre watched deadline after deadline pass last month; when Favre stated at the last deadline that he was going to remain retired; when Favre returned home to Mississippi for good, I thought he was retiring for good, or rather staying retired for good.

And when someone shows me to be wrong, it becomes personal.

I was never a fan of the Minnesota Vikings, so it's not going to be difficult to root against Favre.

But now? Now I hate the Vikings. H-A-T-E.

Hell, I might ever root for Carolina Week 15 when the two go head-to-head, even if the game has NFC South title implications for my Atlanta Falcons.

I don't take being wrong well, and since Favre has already shown me to be wrong once, I'm going to let him make me wrong again: I'm writing this article about him.

I'm writing about Brett Favre so that you know that I now promise never to think any topic is so far beneath me that I will never want to write about it.

If Brett Favre could still somehow interest me after how much he irritated me over the past 15 months, then there cannot be anything that could not someday interest me enough that I'd want to write about it.

Cricket? Maybe I'll just watch and cover the final Ashes match next week.

Australian football? Well, I was going to write next week about St. Kilda's push for a perfect season, just so I could say I've written about a sport I've never truly watched. St. Kilda, the worst team in the Victorian Football League and now the Australian Football League for most of the last 112 years, lost in the final second by two points to Essendon on Sunday, ending their quest to become the first team to ever win the championship unblemished with just two rounds left in the regular season.

Pesapallo? Well, I don't like Finland, so I'll pass on that. Maybe once I get translated to Finnish, I'll care about Finland. But until then, I'll just tell the country to wither away.

Hear that, Fins? Translate me to your language or else I won't write about you.

Okay, maybe I'm getting a little carried away. Just because I decided to write about Brett Favre doesn't mean that I'll eventually write about everything.

For instance, I still have absolutely no desire to write about steroids—doping just doesn't interest me. Ban the cheaters you catch, and if you can't catch them, congrats to them and let's all move on.

But that's about it. What else is there that I know I will never be interested enough in to break down and spill 1,000 words of my guts on it?

I'm still sick of Favre—his entire saga annoys the living bejesus out of me. If Favre went out and withered like Finland, I wouldn't care.

Hell, I'd be happy, because once ESPN stopped its all-access coverage of his funeral, it would stop talking about him until he got inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, or at least until Peyton Manning shattered all of his records.

Despite that, and despite my indifference to Favre and my antipathy to him being in the news, I still am weak enough to care that he unretired.

And it sickens me.

I could have written about Y.E. Yang's mythical final round while Tiger Woods collapsed, how I was so enthralled that even though I had to be in Austin, Texas by 7:30 p.m., I still pulled into a Chili's off of U.S.-290 to watch the final hole and drink a glass of Shiner Bock.

I pulled in at 7:29 p.m.

Speaking of me being wrong, I was wrong that Woods and Yang was the wrong final round pairing, but that's beside the point. That final round was good enough that I'm glad I was wrong in that instance.

Or I could have written about UEFA Champions League qualifying, or, better yet, being a supporter of an English soccer club that's not currently in the top flight and how hard it is to support that team overseas.

But no, I'm not writing about any of that. Because I don't want to. Because I want to write about Brett Favre. Because I'm weak.

God I hate you, Brett Favre. You make me hate myself.

At least I could get 1,000 words out of you. Almost. And there we are.

The World Has Been Robbed Because of Another Archaic Golfing Rule

Burton DeWitt — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:31:53 -0400

I understand the rules are there for a reason, but sometimes the rules should be broken.

Like, for instance, when breaking the rules gives us what everyone wants to see.

Alright, Y.E. Yang probably doesn't want the rules changed, and nothing against him, but there's probably only a few dozen people outside of South Korea who does not want to see Tiger Woods and Padraig Harrington paired together Sunday.

And I'd bet that most of those other people are fellow golfers who would rather Tiger was home so that they could possibly win this tournament.

Yet, for the second consecutive day, Harrington has bogeyed the final hole, dropping him into a tie for second, behind only Woods. And for the second consecutive day, Harrington will not be playing with Woods in the final group because of the so-called “last in, first out” rule.

Put simply, if two golfers are tied entering the third or fourth round of a tournament, the one who finished last will be put in the earliest pairing of all those tied. The first person to finish, Yang in this case, would then be put in the latest pairing.

Generally, it's a good rule. If you make a nice push on Saturday, you should be rewarded by a later tee time than someone who just shot even par. But sometimes, we need to ditch the rules.

Imagine, for a second, if Tom Watson had missed his miraculous Saturday birdie putt on 16 at Turnberry. He would have finished tied for the lead, but in a three-way tie. As the last person in, he would not have been in the final pairing on Sunday.

But Watson averted that, and thus he was right where he should have been on Sunday, playing last, having the honor to hole out on 72 and not worry about who was behind him.

Sure, he missed that birdie putt, but the tragedy would have been if there was still someone behind him trying to join him in the playoff.

We dodged a bullet there.

Yet Sunday at Hazeltine, we won't dodge it. We'll have Tiger paired with Korean Republic journeyman Yang, a 37-year-old sophomore on the PGA Tour who had previously only made two cuts from seven major appearances and won only two tournaments on the world's two largest tours.

Putting Sunday's pairing in perspective, Woods was already a 13-time major champion by the age that Yang turned professional at 32.

The alternative, of course, is Harrington.

Beyond being the defending champion and the only man to have won three majors over the past three years, Harrington has proved to be the only person in the past couple years who can stare Tiger Woods in the eye and play comparably.

Tomorrow, Paddy can play comparably or better, but not together with Woods. Thus we're robbed.

Name one other sport where the two best competitors would be trying to a championship on the same day in the same event, yet they would always be at least 100 yards apart? Any?

Football? Soccer? Baseball? Cricket? I can't think of any.

Sure, in auto racing you'll get that far apart, but at some point you'll be side-by-side.

Just imagine if to win the Kentucky Derby, each horse had to run a mile and a quarter separately, run his own race, and the best time would be declared the winner. Sure, it would take out some of the aspect of poor post position and getting caught in traffic, but it would be silly.

Same if Laszlo Cseh had to swim his final 10 minutes before Michael Phelps did the same for Olympic Gold.

It's crazy.

Yet, in golf, the two best might not be together, and because of the rules of the game, there's nothing we can do to get it right.

Sure, I understand that's it's part of the game. You can't just have 20 people playing together; it would take all day to finish the round.

But when we have the chance to pick and chose and get it right, why can't we?

Again, no disrespect is meant towards Y.E. Yang. Yang has put it three great rounds and deserves to be in contention. Heck, it would be the story of the year, bigger than Kenny Perry at the Masters or David Duval and Phil Mickelson at the U.S. Open or Watson at the Open Championship ever could have been had they won.

A journeyman from a country that loves its golf finally winning the country's first major by going through the two toughest players in the game today, two of the toughest to ever play the game? I can just taste how succulent that story would be.

But until it's done, the better story would be Woods and Harrington playing together on Sunday at Hazeltine.

It would be a different story if Yang was alone in second, Harrington a shot back in third. In that case, I'd understand why Yang was in the final group.

However, that's not the case. They're tied. And because of some archaic rule, one of many the game is built on, Sunday's final pairing won't be the one everyone on both sides of the pond wants.

I wish Yang the best of luck, but I can't say I won't be disappointed. I'm not going to get to watch what I want to watch.

It's too late to fix this year's final round, but let's add a little common sense in for next time. PGA, put a clause in that allows you to alter final round pairings if a more appetizing pairing is available.

You already changed the format of your tournament from match play to stroke play to placate television, so this isn't big. It's just a tweak.

And while we're at it, Augusta National, USGA, and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, why don't you do the same. It's a small sacrifice to create pairings that are so much more desirable.

I know it's a pipe dream, but it's one worth dreaming, especially when Tiger and Paddy on Sunday at Hazeltine is on the line.

Now that's a modern day “Duel in the Sun” I wouldn't miss for the world.

Derrick Thomas a Hall Of Famer Off the Field, Too

Burton DeWitt — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:51:16 -0400

Let me level with you: I don't know how to start this article. I don't. I've thought about it all week, and you know, I just could not figure it out. Maybe I'm just not good enough at what I do, or maybe I'm just not good enough yet, either way, I couldn't figure it out.

How do you capsule in 1,000 words a life that has reached out beyond words and touched lives totaling 1,000 times that many words?

How do you do that without risking understating his impact or, even worse, offending? It's not something we as journalists want to do, but have to do. But enough about me. On to you.

You're probably going to overlook this Hall of Fame class, unless you rooted for one of these players, and to be honest, I don't blame you.

Among the six inductees, there's only two Super Bowl rings and under 100 all-purpose touchdowns. Most years, we have one player who accomplished both.

This rings out as a boring class, a defense-laden potpourri with only one skill position player, and he's been retired since the Miami Dolphins were only a year removed from a second consecutive Super Bowl triumph.

We want offense. We want flash.

But it's a strong class, as strong as any other, and with Derrick Thomas, much more fierce.

To anyone who thinks Thomas is not a Hall of Famer, I'm calling you out. That's just bogus. To anyone who voted against him the past three years while his name has sat on the Hall of Fame fence, I'm calling you out to.

He was a nine-time Pro Bowler, totaling 126.5 sacks, including an NFL-record seven against the Seattle Seahawks in 1990 on the way to 20 during the season.

He forced 45 fumbles, making it look almost routine with that patented chop, John Elway as often a victim as anyone else.

Yet the reason Thomas is a Hall of Famer, beyond anything on the field, is his contributions in the classrooms of Kansas City.

The son of a fighter pilot shot down and killed in Vietnam, Thomas overcame dyslexia to learn how to read, brushes with the law off the field and off the wrestling mat to become one of the greatest humanitarians the NFL has ever known.

He struggled with reading until he met Miriam Williams at Palmetto Junior High, an English teacher who saw past his tough-but-inviting exterior and forced him to bring out his inner intelligence.

He was gifted in every aspect, he just needed someone to bring it out.

She found the student inside of Thomas and he repaid her, graduating from high school and college, as well as continuing reading and learning more about his obsession, the Kennedy murder conspiracy.

Through her, Thomas got his academics and his life together, making him a highly recruited prospect out of talent-rich Dade County, committing to Alabama to play football for the Crimson Tide.

“He had a big heart, and he always remembered where he came from and the people who helped him on the way,” said Wilbert Johnson, his high school wrestling coach at South Miami High School, who stayed friends with Thomas for the rest of his life, even visiting Thomas almost daily while he was in the University of Miami hospital after his car accident.

In 1990, during his second season in the NFL with the Kansas City Chiefs, Derrick Thomas formed the Third and Long Foundation, which has aimed to attack illiteracy in inner-city schools. He thought if he could learn to read, anyone could.

“Out of his dyslexia, he reached out to kids of all ages to make sure they had access to books,” said Leigh Steinberg, Thomas's agent during his NFL career. “He was the Student-Body President of the NFL.”

The Third and Long Foundation has grown over the years and now, as it approaches its 20th year, has reached unprecedented heights.

Through the help of other current and former Chiefs players, including Neil Smith, who took over as the active sponsor of the foundation after Thomas's death in 2000, the program continues to help elementary and middle school students of Kansas City learn to read.

“Derrick wanted Third and Long in every NFL city,” said Betty Brown, president of the foundation, “and through the help of the Neil Smith and so many others, we're keeping his dream alive.”

His contributions continued all throughout the Kansas City community.

Thomas became an active member in the Greater Pentecostal Temple of Kansas City, regularly attending services when the Chiefs weren't out of town, talking to the other children who came out to services and even being baptized.

“When he was baptized, when the ceremony was over, he dashed across the podium, our stage, and got out his checkbook and wrote us a check for $50,000,” said Bishop Donaldson, the pastor of the Greater Pentecostal Temple. “I thought, if only we could have 20 more people like Derrick!”

But there was no one like Derrick. Sure, there were people who have done and accomplished comparable things, but there was only one Derrick.

After his death following complications after an automobile crash shortly after his 33rd birthday in 2000, the family of Derrick Thomas lent his name to the Derrick Thomas Academy, a charter school in Kansas City that works with EdisonLearning, an education company based out of New York City.

The school, which offers free education to 950 underprivileged youths from Kindergarten to 8th grade in urban Kansas City, helps keep these kids off the streets and in class and other extra-curricular activities.

Recently, attendance reached over 90 percent for the first time, more than 20 percent above the national average.

It's certainly achieving its goals, and thus, so has Derrick Thomas.

“Derrick could never really die,” Steinberg said. “That irrepressible spirit, that love, that humanity could never really leave us.

Sure, there were better players in the NFL: a few, but not many. But there was no one off the field who matched Thomas's will to make sure everyone, even those who came from an even tougher situation with more physical, social, and mental difficulties, can overcome and learn to read.

And for that reason, more even than his sacks or Pro Bowls or forced fumbles or safeties, Derrick Thomas deserves to become the 251st person inducted into the Hall of Fame tonight.

“Derrick Thomas was always my favorite player,” said Jeff Wahl, Executive Director of EdisonLearning, as he, like so many else whose life has been touched by Thomas, choked back tears. Edith Morgan, Thomas's mother, had to pat Wahl's back to keep him going.

“His journey is now over; he is now home in Canton.”

Exactly where he's always meant to end up.

For Pete Rose, There's No Such Thing as the "Right Time" for Reinstatement

Burton DeWitt — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:13:23 -0400

It’s that time of year again. Boy, I say that a lot.

A couple of players get inducted into the Hall of Fame; Andre Dawson and Dale Murphy don’t because they played one era before their accomplishments were rendered obsolete; ESPN speculates on who will get in next year; someone mentions that Pete Rose should be reinstated.

Reinstatement? Really? For Rose? Pete Rose?

You must be higher than Ricky Williams in Amsterdam.

Yet according to Bill Madden of the New York Daily News, Bud Selig is considering reinstating Rose after hearing that some of his fellow legendary (but not Hall of Fame) brethren wish to see him forgiven.

As we approach the 20th anniversary of the late Bart Giamatti’s lifetime ban of baseball’s hit king, it seems fitting that baseball revisit whether Rose should be reinstated.

On Aug. 24, 1989, Giamatti ended Rose’s association with Major League Baseball with one decision after evidence that Rose bet on baseball games—including, as Rose would later admit, games he was a part of—surfaced.

Sadly and completely unrelated, eight days later, Giamatti died of a heart attack.

But before he left us, Giamatti made clear what he thought.

“The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is a sad end of a sorry episode,” Giamatti said in a television interview.

“One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts.

“There is absolutely no deal for reinstatement.”

Those harsh, just words live on, at least for the time being.

Even if Rose did not ever bet against himself; even if he never tried to throw a game or ground into an inning-ending double play or put the wrong relief pitcher in when he was a manager; even if the evidence and his belated confession were wrong and he only bet on baseball once, and it was in a game that did not involve him at all, Pete Rose should never be reinstated. Period. End of discussion.

Why is this even under consideration?

Pete Rose, somewhere between accumulating 4,256 hits and 417 wins as the Cincinnati Reds manager and, for a few years, player-manager, committed one of baseball’s two mortal sins. And in committing that one, he made possible committing the other.

Rose, to steal a previously used saying, “engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game.”

A variety. That stained.

To steal more verbiage, the result was a “banishment for life” that brought forward a “sad end.”

The end, as in over, done with, not to be continued or altered ever again.

Seems pretty ironclad to me.

But even in comparison, at least what Mark McGwire did was legal, and it doesn’t look like he will be forgiven anytime soon.

Yet more than anything, or at least anything other than throwing a game, betting on baseball is the sport’s number one sin. It’s unforgivable.

Take, for instance, William Cox.

In 1943, he bought the Philadelphia Phillies, baseball’s worst franchise.

A sprightly 33-year-old businessman, Cox was always up for a little fun.

So what better to do than to bet on the games for a little added excitement?

By the end of the year, he was banned for life and forced to relinquish the team, even though he had apologized and repented for his sin against the sport.

No avail.

Forty-six years later, Cox died.

What push has there been to get him reinstated?

Exactly.

Yet we think Pete Rose has served his time.

Cox bet on baseball, admitted it immediately, and apologized. It has been 66 years, and he’s still as missing as Jesse Orosco’s Astrodome glove.

Rose bet on baseball, vehemently denied it—correction, lied that he did not—waited 15 years, and then apologized. Yet he continues to stay like a mother-in-law, as Michael Wrona would say.

And five years since his confession is enough time to forgive him?

I think not.

It’s not like Pete Rose took steroids while they were legal to gain an edge; it’s not like Pete Rose refused to sign black players during the 1950s while the nation was still divided on racial lines; it’s not like Pete Rose snorted crack every day.

For the rest of this article, I am using both his first and last name so there is no chance you slip off and think I’m talking about someone other than Pete Rose.

Pete Rose bet on baseball—Pete Rose broke the cardinal sin of his profession.

If you give company secrets to your main rival, do you think, even after 20 years, your old boss would bring you back?

Please. Let’s get real for a second.

Pete Rose, the Pete Rose, bet on baseball in games he managed and in games that he could control.

And Pete Rose, the Pete Rose, was banned from baseball. Banned from managing. Banned from having any influence or association with the sport he dominated for two decades.

And rightly so.

I don’t care what Henry Aaron has to say; I don’t care that Henry Aaron thinks that Pete Rose deserves a spot in the Hall of Fame right alongside Henry Aaron and Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice and Joe Gordon.

Just because Henry Aaron says something does not mean he is correct.

No, Pete Rose deserves to be in the Hall of Fame as much as you do. As much as I do.

Every on-field accomplishment, every dugout accomplishment, does not exist—at least not anymore.

Pete Rose committed his sport’s mortal sin, and Pete Rose was forced to pay. No amount of time can undo that.

Not 20 years, not 66 years, not 1,000 years.

Over time, we grow to forgive people for what they did.

We forgave Tom Yawkey for keeping the Red Sox segregated until the end of baseball’s Golden Era because in those days, it wasn’t abnormal.

We’ll eventually forgive Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Jason Giambi—and any other star you name—for taking steroids.

Even baseball has forgiven before, such as when it reinstated Ferguson Jenkins a year after it banned him for repeated drug offenses.

But there are two things baseball never forgives: throwing games and betting on games.

Never.

Those two sins can never be forgiven.

Not after 20 years, not after 66 years, not after 1,000 years.

If Bud Selig reinstates Pete Rose, even if Jesus Christ, Muhammad, the Buddha, and Zoroaster themselves come back and ask Selig to do so, Selig has tarnished the game.

No, wait—that’s not the right word choice.

Selig would have stained the game.

Just like the variety of acts he committed over the 17 years prior.

Sound familiar?

I don’t care who says what; Pete Rose has gotten what he deserves. Any change to his punishment of “banishment for life” would kill one of the last impressions of the late Bart Giamatti.

Selig, for the sanctity of your sport, let Giamatti’s words live. Let them live for eternity, and don’t reinstate Pete Rose.

Don’t reinstate him ever.

No matter how sorry he is—no matter how much he has changed—Pete Rose does not deserve a second chance.

He’ll never deserve it.

Not in 20 years, not in 66 years, not in 1,000 years.

And that is exactly how it is meant to be.

Old Man Watson's Defeat: Only One Person To Blame

Burton DeWitt — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:30:09 -0400

I'm sorry, Tom. I truly am. You were all set to win your record-equalling sixth Open Championship, and I screwed it up.

I'm truly, truly sorry.

At the same time, I'm still waiting for my thanks from Stewart Cink.

Had it not been for me, had I not abandoned my well-conceived final-round strategy of not looking at any Tom Watson putt of more than six feet, Watson would have easily sunk that par chance on the 72nd hole. Easily.

How do you think he drained all those 70-footers the two days before?

By that measure, he also would have made birdies at 3, 5, 8, and 13 and eagles at 7 and 17. I'm sure I'm missing others.

But curiosity bit the cat and Watson missed that birdie putt on the 57th green, and the 59th, the eagle on the 61st, and so many others. Most importantly, he missed the par putt on the 72nd hole that cost him the championship.

I messed it up.

Now, you can say nerves got the better of Old Man Watson, but let's be realistic for just one second.

Watson has won 39 PGA Tour events, including a remarkable eight major championships, the latter being more than anyone not named Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Walter Hagen, Gary Player, and Ben Hogan.

Depending on whether you count pre-World War II Amateurs as majors, you can also add John Ball and Bobby Jones to that list.

That's a who's who of a century of golf.

Are you telling me someone with that experience would buckle under the pressure and so miss-hit an eight-foot putt to win the Claret Jug? Miss-hit it like he's an average Joe playing an average round of drunken mini-golf?

Of course not. Watson did not choke.

I did.

Yes, I screwed it up, just like I did all weekend.

Remember that 45-foot putt he made on the 16th green on Saturday? I looked away for that. Remember that 25-foot putt he missed on the 18th green on Saturday? You know I was watching.

Every time Watson missed the fairway, it was because I was on some forbidden website, and so you know, forbidden means anything but www.sporcle.com. Watson was only at his best when I was sporcling.

If I stood up while Watson was on screen, he'd shank his next shot, or at the very least get an unlucky hop. Happened twice, once on the ninth hole, and again on the 18th fairway. I should have known better.

Cink, I need some thanks for your birdie putt on 18.

I accidentally went to ESPN.com before I went to CBSSports.com, ruining any chance you had of missing that putt.

All those bogeys by Lee Westwood and Mathew Goggin? Visiting CBSSports.com before ESPN.com. A quick look to see if they changed the headlines, and then a peek to watch history unfold.

I messed up, inverted the order, and suddenly Cink was in the clubhouse with a two-under, 278.

I commit a few mistakes in the playoff, and the Claret Jug belonged to the sprightly man from Alabama.

Of course, this isn't the first time I screwed up. Heck, this isn't the first time I screwed up in a major golf championship alone.

Like, for instance, last year when Greg Norman was seven holes from the Open Championship, had the audacity to board an airplane.

By the time we landed, Norman had imploded, and Paddy Harrington had repeated.

You and I both know that if I miss that flight, Norman would have won his third Claret Jug.

Or, for instance, this year's Masters tournament. Had I not decided to rush to Two Rows to get some wings during the final round, there is no way Kenny Perry would have collapsed, but I missed a stroke on the way and Perry's game suffered one.

Before you knew it, Angel Cabrera was chipping it out of the trees like he was Tiger Woods at Southern Hills.

The Green Jacket belongs to South America.

Then there is this year's U.S. Open. David Duval, who may or may not have rented out my family's house for the tournament, was making the traditional Monday charge.

Two fortnights shy of eight years since his last triumph on the PGA Tour, the former top-ranked golfer clawed back on the final nine that morning to within a shot of the lead.

Then he tied for the lead.

Then I stood up and made a photo copy.

Then Duval bogeyed.

Now that I remember it, I'm still waiting for my thanks from Lucas Glover.

And finally, we can look at the Open Championship.

Sure, I already told you about the final round, but let's take a look at the 2nd round.

I updated my Facebook status after Watson's first round to express shock. Watson goes out and bogeys five of the first seven holes on Friday.

I change my status, and he claws back to -5 for the tournament.

Had I not idiotically updated my Facebook status on Thursday, Old Man Watson would have run away with the title, destroyed the field by a half-dozen shots.

Instead, I cost him five valuable shots.

And I continued to cost him well into the weekend, all the way through his bogey on the final hole of the playoff.

My bad, Tom. I'm truly sorry. I wanted you to equal the record of six Claret Jugs set by Harry Vardon as much as the next bloke.

I'm truly, truly sorry.

Stewart, I think you owe me a gratitude or two, and a photo with the Claret Jug.

Sign it and express your thanks for my part in your conquest. It's the right thing to do.

There's no way you'd be the Open Champion without my help.

Facebook Is a Secondary, Not Primary, News Source

Burton DeWitt — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:22 -0400

Gregg Doyel of CBSSports.com has made a crusade against Twitter, and I cannot say I blame him. What is Twitter other than 140 characters of bumbling idiocy masquerading as “tweets?”

Okay, I have a Twitter account, or had, not sure anymore. I beat the fad by six months because a friend asked me to set up an account. I never used it. I'm not a hypocrite.

But for all Twitter is, it serves its purposes. It promotes news sources and the like, and blah, blah, blah.

Yet, what is Facebook? A news service? Please! Never! Who would think of breaking a news story on Facebook?

Well, other Stephane Chevalier.

You have never heard of Chevalier; don't kid yourself. He's not that noteworthy of an individual.

Chevalier is the assistant horse trainer to Saudi-based Jerry Barton, who, according to DubaiRaceNight.com, is the private trainer for Prince Sultan Al Kabeer and King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz.

I'm sure he did not mean to be the person who broke the story, but as it was, he did. Facebook was the medium.

Pat Cummings, who runs DubaiRaceNight.com, wrote “Big City Man, winner of the 2009 Dubai Golden Shaheen (G1) died this week following a workout at Hollywood Park in California, reported his former assistant trainer Stephane Chevalier, via Facebook.”

That made me vomit.

Not just because a great champion horse has passed on, but because the assistant trainer, nay, former assistant trainer was the only one willing to report on it, and he had to do so through facebook.

Facebook? To announce the death? Of a champion?

Call me old-fashioned, but that just is not right. It's not even close to right.

Just think of the precedent this could set.

Imagine if Hank Steinbrenner, sick of Joe Girardi, decided to axe the New York Yankees' manager on Facebook?

Who needs the expense of a press conference when you can post a note on a site that's main colors are blue and white anyway, the same as the Yankees.

Or, imagine, without laughing, if Congress casted all its votes on Facebook. Create a closed group and each member could cast his vote from his living room. Then the speaker could go over to Twitter and post the "Aye" and "Nay" count.

Actually, that's not a bad idea; it would save our country thousands in electricity bills.

And while we're at it, maybe we can vote in all our elections on Facebook and skip having to tune into CNN to see the results.

Facebook, after all, is now apparently for news release.

Am I making too big of a deal about this? Yeah, sure, I can see that.

But still, is this really what we want?

Facebook is supposed to be a social tool to help people meet and interact with their friends. It has grown into being a tool to meet people with similar interests, including professional interaction.

What it was never meant to be and, until now at least, has never been utilized as, was a source to announce pertinent information to the world.

The death of a champion race horse, at least so it seemed, had been a solemn enough event to reserve announcement to the established media.

But like Big City Man, that respect has died today.

We are now moving into unchartered territory, to steal the cliché, where news is at our fingertips, to steal another cliché. All we need is a Twitter account and a Facebook account, and we know everything.

Just in the past two weeks, for instance, I learned of Michael Jackson's passing on Facebook and Billy Mays's passing on a chatroom while watching Frasier on justin.tv (call me a nerd; I don't care).

Even going back a couple months, Facebook was where I learned of the death of champion pacer Maltese Artist in May and former Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro in 2007.

But with each of those deaths, there was one major difference: some normal source announced it first.

Jackson's doctor did not go online and post a Tweet about the singer's passing; besides being illegal, that would have just been sick.

Mays's wife did not go on Facebook and update her status to reflect where her prayers were.

Imagine, just for a moment, how that would have been?

Facebook is not meant to be an organ to release news, especially to announce a death.

Just in horse racing, there are a dozen places where you can take that story and give it the respect it deserves.

Sure, maybe Chevalier did not want this to get a lot of news, but I doubt it. Why would the former assistant trainer of a champion horse post something on Facebook if he did not want it to get out to the public?

Obviously, if that were the intent, it failed.

The intent must have been to publicize it further, and Chevalier has achieved his goal. Even though it's not the best way, it's the easiest.

Pat Cummings wrote about it and now I have too.

But it's still wrong.

The horse deserved more than just a Facebook memorial; the horse deserved a lot more.

So Rest In Peace, Big City Man. I'm sorry we could not see you sprint to a win at Del Mar next month just like you did on World Cup night at Nad Al Sheba in March.

You will be missed.

That wasn't so hard, was it?

From now on, please, let's keep Facebook as a secondary news tool, one to spread condolences and news stories, not to start them. Especially if it's something this sad.

For the horse's sake, the athlete's sake, I think a more dignified memorial is in order.

Then again, it could be worse. The death could have been announced on Twitter.

NBC Sets New Low at Wimbledon

Burton DeWitt — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:01:07 -0400

NBC did it, again. Congrats, I did not think it was possible.

After providing terrible coverage of Roland Garros, NBC had to one-up itself at Wimbledon.

Sure, I'll cut NBC some slack for airing matches on tape delay while equally important matches were going on live; I'm used to that by now. If I want to watch something live, that is what justin.tv is for, right?

But what I won't cut NBC any slack for is its disrespectful coverage of doubles.

Okay, it was slightly better than at Roland Garros, when NBC flat-out did not air the men's doubles final after the women's singles final, because, well, NBC at least aired the gentlemen's doubles final at Wimbledon.

But the compliments end there.

There was no excuse for NBC airing this match on about 10 minutes tape delay just so they could squeeze in an extra interview or three with Venus and Serena Williams. It's not like they couldn't air those interviews on some changeover during the match.

Oh wait, my bad. That interview would be outdated by the time they brought Serena into the studio for another interview, causing NBC to just not air the first game of the fourth set of the championship between Bob and Mike Bryan and Nenad Zimonjic and Daniel Nestor.

There was no excuse for NBC not knowing how old Nenad Zimonjic is and then finally figuring out his age an entire set later. It's not that hard to do a little research the night before you are supposed to commentate on a match, right?

And there was no excuse for John McEnroe to go off-topic for games at a time on some side story that had nothing to do with the match at hand. It got so bad at one point that even McEnroe realized he was disrespecting the match.

“This has become an interesting game while I was boring you with that story,” he said after Bob and Mike Bryan lost consecutive points on their serve to bring the match to a rare deuce game.

McEnroe actually started commentating on the match after that, at least attempting to care about four people he quite possibly has not seen play since the Olympics.

Oh, need I forget in the third set, when Ted Robinson, the man who as play-by-play announcer should actually be paying attention, made the stunning observation that “there's not much between them right now, no breaks, slim tiebreakers”

Wow, never thought a 7-3 tiebreaker was “slim.”

When the team actually was talking about doubles tennis, they showed a great supply of ignorance.

Like, for instance, when Mary Carillo decided to speak, something the world would be much better if she chose to do less often.

“Australia is the only place besides Wimbledon where they show doubles the respect it deserves,“ Carillo said, a noble observation. “They put the doubles on center court at a time when people are still around to watch it.”

Wimbledon puts the Gentlemen's doubles final on Centre Court right after the Ladies' singles final each second Saturday. Australia puts the Men's doubles final right after the Women's singles final on Rod Laver.

That respect they don't show at Roland Garros.

Oh wait, they do.

In Paris, they put the Men's doubles final on Philippe Chatrier right after the Women's singles final.

You would think NBC would know that since it was in Paris for Roland Garros.

Oh wait, everyone with NBC left right after Svetlana Kuznetsova won her second major championship.

But none of these were the icing on the cake; none were even close.

Sure, they showed an unwavering amount of disrespect and ignorance, but they also made us cringe when Carillo, McEnroe, and Robinson said them.

This? This made me laugh, and I hope it made you laugh too.

McEnroe was trying to talk up the talents of the doubles specialists, and I applaud him for that. But that doesn't enable him to say something crazy, does it?

"If Roger [Federer] and Rafa [Nadal] played together in doubles, would they be able to beat the Bryan Brothers?” McEnroe asked, a question that doesn't need answering.

Nonetheless, he felt he could answer himself.

“I don't think so.”

What?!? Seriously?!? Are you high?!?

The two best singles players in the world would destroy the best doubles players as long as they had enough chemistry so as not to kill each.

Fact, end of story, thanks for trying.

No disrespect for the Bryan Brothers intended, but if Federer and Nadal played together in doubles, they would smoke Bob and Mike. In straight sets. Without breaking a sweat.

Thank you, come again.

Take, for instance, Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Wawrinka has spent barely a month of his life in the top 100 in the world in men's doubles; Federer has only played sporadically since winning his first major singles championship in 2003. Both were in the top ten in singles.

They won the title, dropping only one set from five matches.

Among their victims? The Bryan Brothers, as well as doubles specialists Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes of India.

Neither pair took as much as a set from Federer and Wawrinka.

Or, how about we look at James Blake and go all the way back to Thursday.

Blake playing doubles? At Wimbledon? How funny. Do you think this is still 2002?

Yet Blake, who until this year would play doubles in only three or four tournaments over the year, decided to partner with Mardy Fish at Wimbledon and they made it all the way to the semifinals.

And once he got there, he and Fish took the defending champions to five sets before bowing out to Zimonjic and Nestor after a classic 10-8 final set.

But John McEnroe would not know about singles players doing well in doubles. Why should he? Not like he ever played doubles.

Oh wait, he did.

McEnroe was a number one player early in his career in doubles before focusing more on singles.

Nonetheless, he continued playing doubles sporadically in the middle of his career before returning with more focus near the end.

At Wimbledon in 1992, McEnroe and singles specialist Michael Stich beat top-ranked John Fitzgerald and Anders Jarryd in the second round in straight sets.

Two singles specialists beating the top pair in the world? Hmm...

Three more straight sets wins later, McEnroe and Stich fought off doubles specialists Jim Grabb and Richey Reneberg to win the longest fifth-set final in Wimbledon history, 19-17.

Yet, according to McEnroe, if Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were to play together, they would be prohibitive underdogs to Bob and Mike Bryan? Yeah right.

Again, no disrespect intended to the Bryan Brothers; they are the deserved number ones at their trade.

But would they beat Roger and Rafa? I don't think so.

Sure, they could, but I would not bet on it. More often than not, Federer and Nadal would smoke Bryan and Bryan.

Unless, of course, Federer and Nadal's chemistry is so bad that they try to kill each other. Then, but only then, would the betting lines shift.

Paulick's Broken Promise

Burton DeWitt — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:52:10 -0400

(originally posted on FinalHalfAFurlong.blogspot.com)

I respect Ray Paulick; I really do. His insider knowledge and understanding of the sport from both a business and spectator aspect is almost unmatched in any field, let alone thoroughbred racing.

But that alone does not exempt him from criticism.

Over the past few weeks, Paulick has engaged in an ESPN-about-Brett-Favre-like rant over the special session of the Kentucky legislature called by governor Steve Beshear.

And Paulick has featured everything.

Since the Belmont Stakes weekend ended 15 days ago, Paulick has written four editorials on the subject, posted another by Murray D. West that was sent directly to Paulick, and submitted two open letters to the legislature.

As if that were not enough, Paulick also spent Monday “live blogging” from the meeting of the Kentucky Senate’s Appropriations and Revenue Committee.

If that doesn't have “Brett Favre” written all over it, you tell me what does.

To go with all these editorials from Paulick's pen (or, dare I say keypad?), he has posted at least five articles pertaining to the vote nearly every day.

Now please, don't get me wrong. I want the bill to pass as much as the next fan of racing. Sure, the actual horsemen and horsewomen may want it to pass a little more than I do—they have incentive—but that is trivial. I want the bill to pass.

Or, now that it is dead, I wanted it to pass.

But, at the same time, I want the fair, open-minded, well-rounded journalism I have come to expect off of Ray Paulick's keypad.

For just over one year, and it is funny that his one-year anniversary running the Paulick Report should coincide with this mess, Paulick has provided insight into everything.

From his own words, he “Broke [his] share of stories over the past year: Curlin going to Lane’s End for stud duty; the Ernie Paragallo horse abuse case in New York; the efforts of “old guard” Breeders' Cup board members to keep NetJets chairman and longtime horse owner and breeder Richard Santulli, along with Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm owner John Sikura, off the organization’s operating board; layoffs at Churchill Downs and Blood-Horse magazine, along with the elimination of several turf writers at big city daily newspapers; Halsey Minor’s efforts to buy Hialeah from John Brunetti, and Minor’s attempt to purchase many of the Magna tracks out of bankruptcy; and the Thoroughbred Owners of California’s decision to bid for Santa Anita from the same bankruptcy proceedings.”

That's not too shabby for 12 months work.

Each story dug deeper and deeper into the industry's make-up and rattled us.

Ernie Paragallo made us want to vomit; the dropping of horse racing coverage at the Washington Post made us want to cry; Magna's bankruptcy ended three years of investor manipulation and fraudulent, selfish actions by Frank Stronach and made us smile a bitter smile.

Paulick's way with words made us want to read more, to dig deeper. He was a know-it-all, which in investigative journalism, is not a bad thing. And gosh-darnit, some of his articles on Magna were the best things this side of Gary Smith.

But now? Now, I don't know what to think.

For half a month, Ray Paulick has been publishing one-sided, biased, redundant dribble, begging his readers to contact various state representatives, in order to get the state of Kentucky to allow slot machines, or VLT's, at race tracks.

And for half a month, Paulick has made almost no reference to counter-arguments.

Basically none, whatsoever.

No mention that slot machines are arguably the most addicting and brainless form of gambling there is.

No mention of the people who become so focused on the machine that they don't realize that they've just spent $10,000 in the matter of an hour.

No mention of the rationale behind the bus-full of people who traveled half way across the state from Middlesboro to Frankfort to stand outside the capitol and protest.

No mention of basically any thought that could possibly detract from the desire to pass the slot legislation.

Well, I take that back.

Paulick does mentionthe counter-arguments, sort of, in his “live blogging” of the hearings, and I italicize mention for a reason.

While discussing the testimony from David Edmunds of the Family Foundation, Paulick issues nasty, snide remarks, some of which even fall in poor taste. The worst almost shows Paulick as endorsing suicide.

Paulick blogs, “[Edmunds's] biggest concern seems to be an increase in the suicide rate if VLTs are allowed (oh, wait, they already allowed, just not in Kentucky). That’s the last straw: Edmunds tells us that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. No, Mr. Edmunds, you are the definition of insanity.”

Ray Paulick, 12 months after starting the Paulick Report with the intent “to offer independent coverage of an industry that, for the most part, has been given a free pass from the press,” has himself become a part of that media, expecting a free pass from everyone who reads him and shrugging off and ignoring those who are opposed.

When he started the site, Paulick wanted to “be the first and last stop for anyone seeking up-to-date information regarding the Thoroughbred industry;” he wanted the Paulick Report to “relevant, intuitive and independent...to revolutionize the news coverage of the Thoroughbred industry with quality reporting of the large reservoir of uncovered news.”

But this story is not uncovered and, live-blogging aside, not revolutionizing the media of this industry. Add in Paulick's unbashful bias, it's not even quality.

I respect Ray Paulick—I respect Ray Paulick a lot. I really do.

I respect his website and his insight into the sport from every conceivable angle.

But at the same time, I cannot help but be eternally disappointed when Paulick calls someone “insane” because that person is concerned about suicide rates, especially when the tone is as arrogant as Paulick's was at the time.

Ray—can I call you just Ray?—I love your site; it is one of the best things in our industry. Please don't become corrupted.

You've done a great thing bringing the world of horse racing, or rather, the continent of thoroughbred racing, all to one page. You have made horse racing just as accessible as anything else, made it one click of the mouse away.

Don't slip into mindless, juvenile name-calling. Don't sound and be unprofessional.

I've done it before and I've paid mightily for it. It's really not worth it.

Ray—or Mr. Paulick if you don't want me calling you Ray—stick to your guns, offer the “relevant, intuitive and independent...news coverage of the Thoroughbred industry with quality reporting," the same quality reporting that you promised 53 weeks ago and delivered for 51 weeks.

Then, and only then, will you have the website you set out to create.

Roger Federer and Pete Sampras: The Most Prolific—Not Greatest—of All Time

Burton DeWitt — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:58:48 -0400

Well, he's the best, the greatest, the champion of all time, the legend. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Let the babbling commence.

NBC couldn't stress the fact that Federer is the greatest of all time any more than I'm stressing the word “fact.”

“You certainly are the greatest,” NBC commentator John McEnroe said to Federer, long after the rest of the crew had made the same conclusion in complete unanimity.

Federer, now the holder of 14 Grand Slam titles, had not just equaled Pete Sampras's mark, but had also completed the career Grand Slam. His win over Robin Soderling in straight sets completed the quest once thought a foregone conclusion.

Sampras never won at Roland Garros, losing in the semifinals in his best performance on the red clay of Paris. Yevgeny Kafelnikov destroyed the overmatched Sampras in straight sets.

Federer? He's been to the finals of every slam at least four times.

But it's wrong to measure historic greatness by Grand Slam titles, as wrong as it was to call Sampras the greatest champion until today.

Sampras was a one-dimensional player who dominated an era without any strong and consistent all-around players.

Other than Andre Agassi, who was a great player when he was not being a nutcase, Sampras's slam victories came over the likes of Cedric Pioline twice, Todd Martin, an old Boris Becker, Carlos Moya, Goran Ivanisevic twice, Patrick Rafter, Jim Courier on the Wimbledon lawn, and Michael Chang.

While these were all good players, who other than Boris Becker and Jim Courier was ever part of the “Who's Who?” of tennis? Sure, Moya and Rafter both made it to the top of the rankings, but so did Marcelo Rios.

Just in the open era alone, Stefan Edberg, Ivan Lendl, and Mats Wilander, who battled each other for the better part of a decade, have more of a claim.

Lendl made eight consecutive U.S. Open finals during the 1980s, a sign of consistency heretofore unmatched.

And during that streak, he played the likes of Becker, Wilander, Edberg, McEnroe, and Jimmy Connors in the finals alone, beating McEnroe and Wilander.

He also reached a Grand Slam final every year from 1981 to 1991 and the year-end championship finals every year from 1980 to 1988, winning it five times.

Lendl's running forehand has long been considered one of the greatest of all-time, strong and controlled, nothing ever too difficult for him to hit a winner. Yet because he played in the toughest decade of the open era, we discount him because he could not win 14 Slams?

Do you really think Federer or Sampras would have won 14 Grand Slam titles playing during the 1980s?

Doubt it.

I'd guess Sampras would have won less than five and Federer's total would be more in line with Lendl's eight.

Speculation, I know, but let's just keep this in perspective.

Moreover, how about all the professional players before 1968?

Pancho Gonzalez won two U.S. Championship titles in the 1940s before turning professional. He then spent eight consecutive years as the top-ranked player, remaining one of the greatest players into his 40s.

When the open era returned, he was already 40. Nonetheless, he made the semifinals at Roland Garros, defeating the defending champion in the process.

At the age of 41, he played the longest match in the history of Wimbledon, winning in five sets over Arthur Ashe's college roommate, Charlie Pasarell.

He dropped the first set 22-24 and took the final set 11-9.

That match is widely recognized for spawning tiebreak games to keep sets from going on indefinitely.

But Gonzalez cannot be the greatest of all time. He only has two Grand Slam titles.

And there's no way I can hold this article to 1000 words and describe the greatness of Max Decugis, Henri Cochet, Rene Lacoste, Bill Tilden, Fred Perry, Don Budge, Frank Sedgman, or Ken Rosewall.

And we must not forget Rod Laver, who won the calendar year Grand Slam both as an amateur in 1962 and a professional in 1969.

He won 11 Grand Slams despite missing the five best years of his career from 1963 to 1967 while dominating the professional ranks.

With the dearth of top-level players on the amateur circuit and no comparable newcomers in the middle of the decade, Laver would have easily won another 10 Grand Slam titles, if not more, had he been able to play those years.

Easily.

Judge greatness on something as asinine as total Grand Slam titles, and you hand that honor to Pete Sampras. No offense to Sampras, but he just does not rank up. He lacks the all-around game to even contend with people like Federer or Rafael Nadal.

Sure, Federer and Sampras are the most prolific champions of the open era, but the greatest of all time? That is debatable.

It's definitely not a certainty, no matter what John McEnroe wants to say. At best, it's a possibility.

Punishing the champions before the 1960s for trying to make a living just isn't the way to do it.

Suzanne Lenglen, still widely regarded as the greatest woman to ever play the game now more than 70 years after she died, put it best.

“I have worked as hard at my career as any man or woman has worked at any career,” the great champion said after turning professional. “And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 - not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study - tennis.”

So she turned professional, like so many men before and after her, so that she could continue to perform and bring enjoyment to the thousands of men and women who watched her in the stands.

As a result, she could not compete in what are now the Grand Slam tournaments.

To discount a player based on a statistic as arbitrary as Grand Slam titles is bogus; it is dumb.

Sure, you can call Federer or Sampras the most prolific. But greatest?

Not in a heart beat.

“Today we've seen Roger Federer become the greatest of all time,” an NBC commentator said today right before they went to re-air the final set of the 2008 Wimbledon Gentlemen's Singles final between Federer and Nadal.

He then called that match the greatest match ever played.

Funny, I'd say Pancho Gonzalez holds claim to both of those. But I can at least understand the latter.

Last year's match was a great struggle between two of the greatest who ever played; Pancho beat a mediocre journeyman.

Beat a mediocre journeyman, just like Federer did today against Robin Soderling.

Gimmicky Hole Still Just As Gimmicky As the Tiger Diagnosed It

Burton DeWitt — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:17:20 -0400

It's that time of the year again, the time where you might actually watch a golf tournament that is not a major.

I know, I know, you'll watch when Tiger is in contention. And you'll root for Tiger, or against him, or both, it does not matter. But in your eyes, if Tiger has a chance to win, the tournament is basically a major.

Yet every May, right after you decide to watch horse racing for the only time that year, you'll tune into a non-major golf tournament even if Tiger is not in contention because you want to see people suffer.

You sick, sick individual.

I don't know why we all love the 17th green at Sawgrass. I really don't.

Okay, so it's basically an island and god knows how many people have pissed away hundreds of thousands of dollars into the lake.

Like, for instance, Sean O'Hair, who enters this year's PLAYERS Championship off of a win at Quail Hollow last week.

In 2007, O'Hair was in second place on Sunday, chasing down Phil Mickelson, when he found water on the Island Green. Then he found water again.

Instead of having a chance for a title and at the very least the $972,000 second place paycheck, O'Hair fell to 11th and $225,000.

Simply, O'Hair surrendered nearly three-quarters of $1 million.

Sure, it's pocket change for many of the world's top golfers, but it's also not only the top golfers who have fallen victim to this gimmick.

Quite possibly the most legendary happening on the Island Green occurred in 1998, when Steve Lowery got his ball on the green, only for it to be picked up by a seagull and dropped in the water.

Luckily, Lowery was able to invoke Rule 18-1 and replace the ball where it had stopped on the green without penalty.

Each year, about 120,000 balls, including those hit by professionals, land in the lake surrounding 17 at Sawgrass. O'Hair's two clankers were among a record 94 hit into the pond during that year's championship, including 50 during the swirling wind of the first round.

Paul Goydos lost the championship last year when he found the water in a sudden death playoff against Sergio Garcia, one of two balls he hit into the water on 17 in 2008's tournament.

Major champions like Bob Tway and Mark Calcavecchia have all had trouble on the hole, speaking out against it. But no criticism rings as loud as Tiger's.

“It’s a wonderful hole,” Woods said before the 2007 Championship, “but I don’t agree with it being the 17th or 71st hole of a championship because I think it’s a little gimmicky in that sense.”

Gimmicky? That's being nice.

What other hole on tour can you hit an almost perfect shot on it with perfect conditions and still find the water, only to have to basically redo the shot until you get it just right?

Sure, more often than not these guys find the green; they are professionals after all. But at the same time, come on.

This is not the type of hole a major tournament needs.

Okay, the PLAYERS Championship is not technically a major.

It does not technically have the same history or prestige as the Masters Tournament, United States Open, the Open Championship, or the PGA Championship.

But to make up for it, it has all the same participants, the frugal entry requirements, the special, set amount of points awarded for the World Golf Rankings, and the insanely high purse.

The only notch against it is that it was once won by journeyman kiwi Craig Perks, who two years later could not make a cut on the PGA Tour even if he was allowed to use mulligans.

Simply, it's as close to a major as possible.

But unlike the courses used in any given year for the four official major championships, Sawgrass has that one hole that asks people to lose the championship.

No matter what golfer you are, you do not want to be coming home, two holes from a title, and have to deal with that hole. You just don't.

It's like mandating that Derek Jeter may only win the World Series by singling through the hole between first and second. A home run? Sspphh, it'll be ruled a flyout.

It's like ruling that Rafael Nadal can only win Roland Garros by a backhand volley. An ace? A forehand? They'll just call it a let.

It's like forcing Ronaldinho to win the World Cup on a free-kick strike 15 feet outside the box, or Lewis Hamilton winning the Monaco Grand Prix only by passing Robert Kubica to the left at the swimming pool, or Kobe Bryant winning the NBA title with a swish-three at the buzzer in Game Six.

I'm sure you get the point.

Golf is a game of choice. At least, it normally is.

Do you lay up, or do you go for the green in two?

Do you drive the trees, or do you hit safely around past the bunker on the right side?

Do you hit a five-iron and try to carry the stream or do you lay up and pitch it on during the next shot?

But at Sawgrass, the only choice is which club do you use. You figure out the wind and try to find a way to get it safely on the green.

Sure, it's a par three; you're going to try to get it on the green anyway, but usually you at least have some safety.

Miss to the right? Miss to the left? Miss short? Long? At Sawgrass, it's all the same. There's no safety net.

You misjudge the wind? Water.

You got a little too much of the ball? Water.

You're John Daly and someone flashes a camera? Water, and a withdrawal with a back injury.

All this hole is is one big gimmick, but it's a gimmick we'll gladly watch.

For the past few years, there has been live streaming coverage on-line of solely the 17th hole. Broadcast networks switch to the hole to show any shot that found or almost found water. Crowds congregate around the fabled hole and pretend like they're upset when someone actually finds the water.

But really, they're all rooting for it.

If they were not, they would not be there watching.

You can't win a championship on the 71st hole; I get that. But you should have the opportunity.

At Sawgrass, the only thing you can do is lose it.

And that, at least in my book, is a gimmick.

So I'll watch the PLAYERS Championship because I watch golf, but for no other reason. I'll cringe whenever anyone finds the water on 17 and pray that maybe next year this great tournament won't include such a gimmicky penultimate hole.

Unless, of course, this time Sergio finds water and it costs him thousands.

There's nothing better than hearing Sergio whine and blame someone else when he messes up.

That is a gimmick I can cheer for.

Mine That Bird No Upset Compared to Chris Antley in 1999

Burton DeWitt — Sun, 03 May 2009 19:15:28 -0400

Mine That Bird should not have been in the Derby, flat-out had no business being there.

Shipped in from Sunland Park, a tiny B-circuit in New Mexico, after twice losing a race there. Twice.

I wrote last week on a forum, “If Bennie Woolley enters him in the Derby, he should lose his license! Permanently!”

The horse had no form, none whatsoever.

Heck, if the race was ran on the pages of the Daily Racing Form, Mine That Bird might still be out on the track, trying vainly to finish.

But, of course, it's not, and Mine That Bird and Calvin Borel skidded the rail in the slop to a stunning, six and ¾ length victory, the largest winning margin in the Kentucky Derby since Texas-bred Assault in 1946.

Assault went on to win the Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes, becoming the 7th Triple Crown winner in American thoroughbred racing.

And I've heard all sorts of comparisons since.

A guy who accidentally got placed in the first tier of the New York Marathon, and winning it; a boxer losing a bunch of fights to nobodies, then being brought into a fight with the world champion in a supposed walkover and winning; a Floridian winning the Iditarod while on vacation to Alaska.

Or, my personal favorite.

It's like Charleston Southern going to the Swamp and beating the Florida Gators by four touchdowns.

And you know what, I don't think any of those are too far from the truth. This horse had no business being in this field, at all.

Maybe I'm bitter because I lost a bit of money on my first trip to Churchill Downs; maybe it's because of what I wrote last week about the trainer; maybe I'm just in denial, but I'm not going to write anymore about this race. I'm done with my trip to Louisville.

No, the rest of the turf media can write about that.

I want to talk about the human aspect of the sport, and there's no better time to do that then now.

This year was the 10th anniversary of Charismatic's 31-1 shocker in the 125th Kentucky Derby. Sure, it was not of the same calibre of “shocker” as this year, but it's up there.

D. Wayne Lukas's three-year old chestnut colt had not done much.

He had been entered in a claiming race just a few months before and needed to win the Lexington Stakes at Keeneland just 14 days before the Kentucky Derby in order to secure enough graded stakes earnings to even get a spot in the Derby field.

But none of that deals with the human aspect of the Kentucky Derby. That's just an interesting sidenote.

Charismatic's jockey, Chris Antley, is a story in and of himself. A lesson, a message. He's everything a jockey wants to be, and nothing. He's a tragedy and a hero, a martyr and a villain.

It doesn't really matter which part of the story I start with. It really doesn't. It's still the same person. So I'll start with 1999, but work in both directions.

There Antley was again, at the top of his game. Again, the key word.

In 1991, Antley piloted Strike the Gold to triumph in the Run for the Roses. It was just another in a string of big victories for the 25-year old jockey from South Florida.

He had previously won such Grade I stakes as the Manhattan Handicap, the Wood Memorial Stakes, and the Carter Handicap, dominating the New York scene.

Antley also left the state from time to time, winning major stakes at tracks like Ak-Sar-Ben in Nebraska, Monmouth in New Jersey, Keeneland in Kentucky, and Hawthorne in Illinois.

But by 1999, that was all in the past. Gone. Only 33, he was already washed up, scrambling for mounts, nobody's top call jockey.

He had battled weight and drug problems. If he was sober enough to get to the track, he was hardly close enough to his weight to actually be a top rider.

The scant 108 pounds, the amount a jockey is expected to weigh, was a near-impossible challenge.

While he once won nine races on one card, now there were times he'd be lucky to win nine races in a month.

In 1985, the young apprentice won more races than any other jockey in the country. In 1997, he decided to retire.

“I didn't like me,” Antley said in 1999 in retrospect of his early retirement. “I clung to my persona around the race track that I was always the bad boy.

“That was how I felt about myself.”

To say Antley was down and out would be an understatement. He was past either of those conditions.

Then, miraculously, Antley got things together. Miraculously indeed.

He entered drug rehab in Nov., 1997, and possibly he would be able to get his life together after all.

By late 1998, Antley was more than seven years removed from the top of his sport. However, he decided to return.

He started galloping horses out at Hollywood Park in California at the beginning of July. Once he got his weight down, he decided to ride again.

And luckily, at least for both of them, Lukas gave Antley a shot on Charismatic, and it paid off big-time.

After his win in the Derby, Antley guided Charismatic to another long-shot win in the Preakness Stakes, putting him one win away from capping his great comeback with a Triple Crown triumph.

No horse had won all three legs of the Triple Crown since Affirmed became the 11th in 1978; 21 years later, here was Chris Antley.

And everything was going brilliantly in the Belmont. The world seemed poised for a Triple Crown winner as Dave Johnson bellowed on ABC “And down the stretch they come!”

But the fragility of a horse, whether a champion like Charismatic or a nobody like, well, Charismatic just a couple months before, can never be underestimated. Never.

Charismatic turned for home with a great chance to take the win. At the eighth poll, he even surged to the lead.

Then, Antley felt something different. Charismatic's gallop was not the same. There was something wrong with his left front hoof.

Antley eased Charismatic and slowed him down as quick as he could, finally getting the horse to be slow enough that he could jump off right past the wire and keep control of Charismatic so he did not run off and injure it anymore.

He lifted the hoof off the ground and held it until medical attention could be found.

Antley, instead of winning the Triple Crown, became even more of a hero than anyone could have ever dreamed. While we will never know the alternative, it is possible that Antley saved Charismatic's life.

But every hero has to fall at some point.

The thing about Antley is, just like after he won the Derby in 1991, the fall would be sudden. Unlike before, however, this time it would be permanent.

In March 2000, Antley would again walk away from his sport, this time to deal with renovating his house. A few months later, his wife became pregnant with the couple's first child.

Then, on July 26, Antley was arrested for drunk driving. He was sentenced to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but he never once went.

This was only the beginning.

On September 28, his wife, who was in New York working for NBC, called police fearing something was wrong because she could not get in touch with her husband at their home in Pasadena, Calif.

The police went to Antley's house and found him and a friend with methamphetamine and marijuana. He was arrested, but no charges were filed because it was deemed an inadmissible search and seizure.

16 months after returning to the pinnacle of his sport, this time as a jovial, happy-go-lucky, lively jockey, Antley was teetering with self-destruction for the second time in three years.

Everyone around him realized that something was wrong as he continued to spin into a depression that required him to drink almost 24-7.

His wife scheduled a couple interventions, and even fellow jockey Gary Stevens came out to try and help Antley out of it at the beginning of November.

“He was very quiet, very sad, and very paranoid,” Stevens said later. “For whatever reason, he was living in a 24-hour-a-day nightmare that he couldn't wake up from.”

Nobody around could disagree.

“When I left, Chris was crying and I was crying.

“I didn't think I'd ever see Chris again.”

And Stevens was right.

Antley died less than a month later, on Dec. 2, 2000 in his California home. He was only 34.

Police originally investigated into it being a homicide, but ruled on Jan. 11, 2001 that the former jockey had died as a result of an overdose.

Just a few hours after the ruling, Antley's wife gave birth to Violet Grace Antley, Antley's first daughter.

Take whatever lesson you want out of that story; there are so many. There's no need for me to preach because I don't know which part touches you the most.

But I'd be wrong not to tell you which touches me.

It has been 10 years since Chris Antley won the Kentucky Derby and eight and a half since he died, but it's the 10 that speaks to me.

No matter how down I become, no matter how far I fall from my pinnacle, glory can always be just a few months away. Antley rose almost overnight to recapture his glory.

If you think Mine That Bird was a shocking upset, then you are forgetting 1999. That might have been the biggest upset of them all.

Not Charismatic, but Chris Antley.

That's an underdog I'm not ashamed to remember.

Horse Racing's 15 Best/Funniest/Strangest/Most Insulting Names

Burton DeWitt — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:05:20 -0400

As we get ready for the Kentucky Derby, I'm taking you through the 15 best horse names I have been able to find. I understand that there are probably countless other names just as good as these, but with over 750,000 registered names among United States thoroughbreds alone, it is impossible to make a definitive list. So sue me.

Begin Slideshow

Horse Racing Needs to Embrace Criticism

Burton DeWitt — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:49:43 -0400

Don't kid yourself; you don't care about horse racing. At the very least, you don't care about it 362 days a year.

You might, might, watch the Kentucky Derby. Fine.

If you don't have plans, heck, you might, might, even watch the Preakness.

And if, but only if, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winners are the same, you'll watch the Belmont Stakes. You'll cheer for that horse, hoping he'll win the Triple Crown.

Then, then, then what? When he loses? You'll just forget his name.

Forget it like you forgot who scored the winning goal against the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics.

Forget it like you forgot who took off her shirt, leaving just her sports bra, after beating China in the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup.

Forget it like you forgot that girl you sat next to in homeroom who never remembered your name, or maybe it was a boy, not that it matters.

You don't care about horse racing; you probably never did, and you definitely won't again. At least, that's what Gregg Doyel and the rest of the mainstream media want you to think.

They want you to think horse racing is all about Eight Belles' collapse a quarter-mile past the wire in the 2008 Kentucky Derby.

They want you to think horse racing is all about the brown screen that was used to “shield” people from the veterinarians when they destroyed George Washington right there on the Monmouth Park track after he broke his sesamoid and dislocated his ankle in the stretch of the Breeders' Cup Classic.

They want you to think horse racing is death and murder. They want the Eight Belles tragedy not to be inspiration for improvement, but as propaganda to kill the sport.

The last thing they want is the industry to work out of this, to use these deaths to turn things around. They don't want to be wrong.

And, in many ways, they're not. At least Gregg Doyel is not.

Horse racing is dead, gone, vanished, getting smaller and smaller each year.

Bay Meadows and the Woodlands closed last year against one new track opening; Hollywood Park, Beulah Park, River Downs, Aqueduct, Fort Erie, Fairmount Park, and even Pimlico have all had similar rumors swirling around them recently. Who knows how many of those tracks will survive more than a few more years.

Coverage, like the tracks, has vanished.

While ESPN once televised races as far from the spotlight as the Remington Park Derby in Oklahoma and the Apple Blossom Handicap at Oaklawn in Hot Springs, Ark., now it has cut its coverage to a few major races leading up to the Kentucky Derby and the Breeders' Cup Classic.

And just how large “few” is continues to shrink each year.

Last year, it picked up one of the biggest races in the country, the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont, and put it on ESPNEWS, because Curlin was racing in it to set the career earnings record.

That's dedication.

And this year, ESPN cut its coverage of the Kentucky Derby significantly, eliminating Wednesday's post position draw and the entire Friday coverage. The Friday coverage, of course, includes the Kentucky Oaks, the second-biggest horse wagering event of the year.

Moreover, the Worldwide Leader is not even heading to Pimlico this year for the Preakness, instead just simulcasting 10-and-a-half hours of coverage from Horse Racing TV onto ESPN360.com.

But what has caused this? Surely this cannot all be a reaction to Eight Belles. God knows, if people were that turned off from horses dying, the sport would have ceased after Ruffian's demise in her famous “Battle of the Sexes” match race against Foolish Pleasure in 1975.

Or, since Ruffian did not do the trick, the frightening and horrific fall of champion Go For Wand in the stretch of the 1990 Breeders' Cup Distaff would certainly have ended the sport once and for all.

In what was destined to be the greatest race ever run, Go For Wand and Bayakoa battled nose-and-nose for one-and-one-sixteenth miles before Go For Wand, who was no more than a head in front, fell at the sixteenth pole and rolled over herself.

She got up like a champion and hobbled uselessly to the finish line before she was destroyed in front of millions watching on NBC.

"I could see her out of the corner of my eye after I had fell and hit the ground, and I could see her leg was flopping," jockey Randy Romero said. "She's trying to run to get to the wire. Still trying to run.”

"Here they are, dueling, one a mirror of the other throughout the entire race," said race announcer Tom Durkin. "Go For Wand on the inside, Bayakoa on the outside.

“A wrong step, a turn, a twist, and Go For Wand will go down.”

That easily, just a wrong step, and a champion was destroyed.

But the problem was not that Go For Wand was destroyed, or euthanized if you cannot handle the impact of “destroyed.” She had to be destroyed after that fall so that she would not suffer.

The problem was that horse racing did not learn.

Go For Wand started a chain reaction of bad luck, not dissimilar to the recent breakdowns since 2006.

Two other horses died in Breeders' Cup races that same day, although the deaths were slightly less gruesome.

In the Breeders' Cup Sprint, Mr. Nickerson suffered a fatal heart attack and Shaker Knit fell over the collapsed Mr. Nickerson. Shaker Knit was not able to be saved.

Then, in 1993, Union City broke down during the Preakness Stakes and was destroyed. There were rumors beforehand that the horse was not fit to run, allegations that trainer D. Wayne Lukas denies to this day.

The horse who went on to win the Preakness, Prairie Bayou, would then break down during the Belmont Stakes before being destroyed later in the day.

And in 1995, only the brilliant jockeying of Mike Smith prevented Holy Bull from going down in the Donn Handicap at Gulfstream Park. Smith sensed something was wrong early and pulled the defending three-year old champion up, probably saving his life.

Holy Bull was retired after the race due to a severe ligament strain in his leg.

Even then, even in 1995, it was obvious something was wrong.

Breeding had become such a science that every horse was meticulously planned to garner the most possible speed.

Native Dancer began showing up two or three times in every horse's genealogical pool, generally through his progeny Northern Dancer or Mr. Prospector, or more frequently, both.

The inbreeding only magnified flaws, increasing the likelihood of passing along disfavorable traits.

Native Dancer had extremely weak ankles, missing time as both a three-year-old and four-year-old due to ankle injuries. A further injury near the end of his abbreviated four-year-old campaign forced Alfred Vanderbilt to retire his champion to stud in 1954.

But it's also not fair to blame it all on the breeders.

Trainers take these horses and extract all they can get out them to have them ready to run beyond what they are capable of doing.

Look, for instance, at Rick Dutrow, trainer of Big Brown.

Even if he did not use steroids on Big Brown, Dutrow has admitted to frequently using drugs on almost all of his horses to get an edge. He has hardly been alone.

Imagine for just a moment if the bones in your leg were about one-fifth their current size. Now imagine you are running as fast as you possibly can for about a mile.

But that's not fast enough.

So, in order to go faster, you are revved up on drugs of all sorts.

That's just a brutal thought.

I'm sure you cannot begin to imagine the pain Derek Redmond was in when he broke down during the 400-meter semifinal at the 1992 Summer Olympic games in Barcelona. Can you begin to imagine just how bad it would have been if he had the physical makeup of a horse?

But again, I'm placing all the blame on just one group of people.

The blame belongs on the industry as a whole. Everyone. Trainers, breeders, owners, race tracks, heck, even the media. Every gosh-darn soul.

If, somehow, they were all willing to come together, to work out the kinks together, maybe the sport could not just survive, but thrive.

The sport won't ever die completely; the state of Kentucky would not allow it.

The number of jobs it provides people in the state, approximated at 100,000, or nearly five percent of the workforce, is just too much for the state to allow it to disappear.

But there's still a huge difference between survival and thriving.

Horse racing needs an overarching governing body that has power to regulate, that has power to enforce its rulings.

Sure, the graded stakes committee can decide that any state that does not ban steroids will lose all its graded stakes, but what exactly does that mean?

Only 19 of the 33 states that currently have thoroughbred race meets have at least one graded stakes, and in the general scheme of things, graded stakes have almost no bearing whatsoever.

What's really the incentive to ban steroids?

Horse racing needs a governing body that will regulate everything.

Every aspect of every segment of the industry.

There needs to be a regulatory committee on breeding that will set limits on how inbred a horse is allowed to be.

There need to be standardized procedures across the country. There's no excuse for California giving Patrick Valenzuela a lifetime ban on riding in the state, only for Valenzuela to move and secure jockey licenses in New Mexico and Louisiana with almost no questions asked.

Punishments need to be uniform and handed down from a central authority, not spread out over 33 different jurisdictions and even more sub-jurisdictions within each state.

Again, why was Paco Lopez banned from riding at Calder Race Course in South Florida for three months, but allowed to drive up to Tampa Bay Downs and be in the irons during the interim?

The industry needs to realize that there are problems, and it needs to accept the blame. Everyone does.

But, at the same time, no one does accept it.

Like D. Wayne Lukas when Union City went down in the 1993 Preakness, all anyone in the industry ever does is deny that anything is wrong.

Magna, the largest racetrack operator in the country, filed for bankruptcy after it defaulted on dozens of loans to various banks and its parent company. But god forbid Magna were to accept any of the blame for its poor operations.

When Eight Belles went down, it was a tragedy that just happened. Same with every horse before it. At least, that's what the industry wants you to think.

The industry needs transparency. People need to know that the sport is controlled, that there are standards, and that something is being done to prevent future tragedies.

But most importantly, people want someone to blame.

And if the industry wants to survive, it's going to have to embrace that blame with open arms. Accept it. Use it.

Come out and say, “It is our fault Eight Belles died. We messed up. But by golly, here are the steps we are taking to make sure this does not happen again.”

Horse racing needs to come together under one brand and work to make the sport work again.

Right now, it's broken and invisible. But it's fixable.

Open it up. Create an organization that is run by both people from within the industry and overseen by people from outside. Make these uniform policies and publicize them. Come down hard on those who violate your rules.

Right now, horse racing can be repaired. The industry can thrive.

But people need to know it is learning and working to make things better.

A couple more Eight Belles, however, and maybe then the sport, like its fallen filly, will also be destroyed.

The Real NFL Draft Grades

Burton DeWitt — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:47:41 -0400

I’m grading the only way the NFL draft should be graded...based on the quality of the player’s name.

As you will see, there is absolutely no bias in these ratings whatsoever.

(Go Rice Owls!)

Arizona Cardinals – Grade: C+

Adding “Beanie” Wells and LaRod Stephens-Howling is about it. Herman Johnson sounds like it should be a dirty name, but I have no idea what a Herman is. Honestly, I think I’m being a bit generous with a C+

Atlanta Falcons – Grade: A-

Peria Jerry might be the coolest name of the first round. They got great value selecting Lawrence Sidbury, Jr. in the fourth round. How often can you get a butler that late? The rest of the draft is mediocre, but come on, Peria Jerry alone gets them into the coveted A-range.

Baltimore Ravens – Grade: A

Two words: Lardarius Webb.

Buffalo Bills – Grade: D+

They got Nic Harris from Oklahoma and Cary Harris from USC, even though they had the chance to draft Victor Harris of Virginia Tech. I’ve seen blacker names in hockey.

Carolina Panthers – Grade: A+

This is a great collection. Corvey Irvin is fun to say, and he’s probably one of the worst. Everette Brown, Sherrod Martin, and Tony Fiammetta all were drafted by round four. Then the Panthers found late round gems in Duke Robinson and Captain Munnerlyn. I mean...seriously, a Duke and a Captain?

Chicago Bears – Grade: B

Al Afalava is nice, and Johnny Knox is pretty baller, but the depth is seriously lacking.

Cincinnati Bengals – Grade: B-

If you have 11 picks, you should hit somewhere. Fui Vakapuna is another cute one, and I would never mess with anyone named Bernard Scott. But what kind of crap is Jonathan Luigs? Freddie Brown sounds like that kid in middle school who ends up being a mailman after flunking out of community college (no offense to either). And Rey Maualuga is not a cool name, no matter how many times I misspell it.

Cleveland Browns – Grade: A-

Mohamed Massaquoi has Larry Munson bonus points. Got to love Coye Francies. Alex Mack sounds like a center, which is nice if you are a center.

Dallas Cowboys – Grade: C

Buehler? Buehler? Buehler?

Denver Broncos – Grade: C+

Kenny McKinley is solid, and Darcel McBath makes me laugh for some reason, but too many David Bruton’s and Seth Olsen’s make this class just too dull for my tastes.

Detroit Lions – Grade: D-

Lydon Murtha is just a bad name. Sammie Lee Hill might be the winner here, and it’s hardly a winner. Still, a D- proves that the Lions are moving up.

Green Bay Packers – Grade: D+

They drafted Brad Jones, who is better known as the goalkeeper of a bad soccer team.

Houston Texans – Grade: A+++

James Casey went to Rice. I see no problem with this draft.

Indianapolis Colts – Grade: B-

Austin Collie is a mix of one of the five most liberal cities in the country and a pet dog. Fili Moala and Jerraud Powers are the only things that rescue this from D-range.

Jacksonville Jaguars – Grade: A+++

Jarrett Dillard went to Rice. I see no problem with this draft.

Kansas City Chiefs – Grade: B

They drafted South Carolina kicker Ryan Succup, who played alongside Smelley and Stoney at South Carolina. Yeah, their cornerback was stoned, their quarterback smelled, and their kicker was a suck up.

Miami Dolphins – Grade: C-

Vontae Davis is a beast. Patrick Turner, J.D. Folson, Pat White, and Chris Clemons are not. Although, Clemons is from Clemson. Try typing that three times fast.

Minnesota Vikings – Grade: A+

They only have five picks, but the Vikings understand the draft. Percy Harvin, Phil Loadholt, Asher Allen, Jasper Brinkley, and Jamarca Sanford—one of the best classes ever.

New England Patriots – Grade: B+

No one person stands out, but there’s a lot of depth here. Sebastian Vollmer, Tyrone McKenzioe, Rich Ohrnberger, Myron Pryor, and Julian Edelman are all fairly decent names.

New Orleans Saints – Grade: F

Chip Vaughn sounds like he should be a golfer, Stanley Arnoux sounds like a banker, and they only had four picks. This draft was awful.

New York Giants – Grade: B+

Ramses Barden. Jesus, an Egyptian Pharoah? They also took the aforementioned Stoner from South Carolina. Not bad.

New York Jets – Grade: D

They avoid an F only because they add to the ever growing list of ways to spell Sean (see Shonn Greene).

Oakland Raiders – Grade: A+

Al Davis is a genius. Stryker Sulak is by far the best name in this year’s draft. Slade Norris is a very close third. What more do you need?

Philadelphia Eagles – Grade: A-

I like the selection of Cornelius Ingram in the third round. Victor Harris sounds tough. Moise Fokou has a last name you should yell aloud whenever you have fine company around. Oh, they also got Fenuki Tupou and Paul Fanaika. But no matter how good this class is, Andy Reid will still find a way to screw it up.

Pittsburgh Steelers – Grade: A-

If I had a choice between being locked in a room with a dude named Evander Hood and hiring Mike Tyson and Michael Jackson to babysit my children, I’d look into that second, less risky opportunity.

San Diego Chargers – Grade: C+

Gartrell is a baller first name, but Larry and Louis are not.

San Francisco 49ers – Grade: A

Mike Singletary’s first draft class is very deep. Michael Crabtree, Glen Coffee, and Ricky Jean-Francois will provide immediate dividends, but none of them stock up to TE Bear Pascoe. You find me a name that puts Bear Pascoe to shame, and I’ll let your wife kick me in my groin without my jock strap.

Seattle Supersonics – Grade: Inc.

N/A

St. Louis Rams – Grade: B

If ever there was a linebacker who earned his name, it is James Laurinaitis. Brooks Foster is a mid round steal, and Chris Ogbonnaya is a great final selection.

Tampa Bay Bucs – Grade: F-

Honestly, I don’t care who they draft. I’m still going to hate them.

Tennessee Titans – Grade: A+

They drafted Dominique Edison who shares a last name with the most important man of the past 150 years. Sen’Derrick Marks, Gerald McRath, and James McCourtney all have more capital letters than words in their names.

Washington Redskins – Grade: C

Brian Orakpo isn’t that good of a name. Marko Mitchell redeems it.

Angel Cabrera's Win, Not Perry's Collapse, Story of 2009 Masters

Burton DeWitt — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:50:03 -0400

There it was, on the front page of ESPN.com, Cabrera holding a thumbs-up and a caption that made it seem like he won by default.

“The '09 Masters will be remembered not for Angel Cabrera's playoff win, but for Kenny Perry's epic collapse and his grace in defeat,” someone for ESPN wrote.

Bogus, ESPN.

Kenny Perry's collapse was appalling. It was awful. Okay. But to say that his demise will be remembered far more than Angel Cabrera's win? Bogus.

Bogus, ESPN.

Sure, Perry's collapse ranks as one of the worst in modern major history, but it is not what we will remember this Masters for. Maybe for a year or two, but not forever.

We remember Jean Van de Velde at the 1999 Open Championship. We remember Greg Norman at the 1996 Masters Tournament. We remember Roberto DeVicenzo at the 1968 Masters Tournament.

But for losers, that is about it.

Unless I prod you about it, would remember that Nick Faldo won the 1989 Masters Tournament or that Scott Hoch missed a two-foot tap-in that would have won him the Green Jacket on the first playoff hole?

Yes, that collapse is just as memorable, but it's not the first thing that comes to mind. You think Faldo: Three-time champion. Then, finally, when you look back at each of the tournaments, Scott Hoch comes to mind.

But that does not excuse the sorry excuse for a finish that Kenny Perry delivered.

He should have won the Green Jacket. It was his. More so than anyone else since Hoch added a “c” to the beginning of his name 20 years ago.

You could almost imagine three decades down the road seeing a “Masters Classic” flashback and hearing “Kenny Perry: Masters Champion!”

There he was, walking down towards the 70th green having played the best golf of anyone in the tournament. The par-three 16th, forever synonymous with Jack Nicklaus after he hit within three feet on his way to a record sixth Green Jacket in 1986, was about to get a new sponsor.

That tee shot by Perry, so perfect, so storybook, stuck within a foot of the hole. A statement. Almost as if Perry heard everyone talking about his chance to become the oldest major champion and oldest Masters champion.

Nicklaus's 1986 title at the age of 46, of course, was the oldest ever at Augusta, and the third-oldest in any major.

But Perry's tee-shot was a statement, a statement to Jack: “I may be two years older, but I'm also two feet closer.”

Then, something went wrong.

Kenny Perry, who had been smooth and steady all week and especially all day, lost his calm.

His approach shots on both the 17th and 18th holes were erratic.

On the 17th, he went long. Needing to go up and down to save par, he shot it over the green. Perry bogeyed and his lead was down to just a shot.

A terrible drive on the last found Perry in the bunker down the left side of the fairway. Two terrible shots later, he was finally on the green with a putt for the title.

His title.

Fifteen feet, a Phil Mickelson putt when it was his time in 2004.

But it was not Perry's time. Not today. He did not have the mind to win.

Meanwhile, during all of this, Angel Cabrera played the back nine of his life, right along-side Perry.

He was down and out, gone, goodbye, after a bogey at 10 put him down to nine under par.

Then, then I don't know. Cabrera just found it.

Smooth and steady, just like Perry, but it never stopped.

Birdies on 13, 15 and 16 got Cabrera within two shots of the lead. Pars on 17 and 18 got him into a playoff.

His tee shot on 16 will be forgotten, but it should not be. Cabrera nailed it within eight feet. While not Perry-esque, it still set up a makeable birdie putt. And heck, that putt may have won him the title.

Cabrera was clutch coming in, even during the playoff. After finding the trees on the first playoff hole, the 18th, his second shot slashed through the woods and onto the fairway. His approach landed again within eight feet. Perry, again, was under two feet from the hole.

Par, this time, and we play a 74th hole. Chad Campbell, the forgotten third part of the playoff, was eliminated when his six-foot par putt clipped the cup, but did not fall in.

One more chance for Perry to fall apart, this time on the 10th. He did, going well left on his approach and chipping it well past the hole to set up an impossible par putt.

Cabrera stuck it on the green and two putted for his first Green Jacket and second major championship.

And now, no more about Perry.

Angel Cabrera won the Green Jacket. He earned it. He played lights out. He played with the resolve of a major champion.

When things got tough, when things looked down and out, Cabrera found his game. Can't say as much about Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson on Sunday.

Sure, they both played great, but every time it looked like they were getting into contention, something went awry. Mickelson found the water on the par three 12th, leading to a double-bogey; Woods ended with a Perry, bogeys on 17 and 18.

But Cabrera fought himself back into contention, smooth and steady, and eventually it was he who won the championship.

And you know what, I'm going to remember that a lot longer than I'll remember that Kenny Perry blew it. Just like I remember Nick Faldo's three Green Jackets a lot quicker than I remember Scott Hoch's choke on the 73rd green.

It is once in a blue moon that you remember the losers, and it takes something more than three bogeys over four holes.

It takes a triple-bogey with a three-shot lead on the final hole; it takes an 11-shot turnaround after losing multiple previous times in utter heartbreak; it takes signing the wrong score when the correct score would have put you in a playoff.

That trumps winning.

But Kenny Perry's collapse? No way. Maybe right now it does, but posterity won't give two hoots.

Just like posterity won't see Kenny Perry donning a Green Jacket.

The flashbacks will say "Angel Cabrera: Masters Champion!" Just the way it should be.

Why the NCAA May Have Just Crossed the Line from Absurd to WTF

Burton DeWitt — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:53:49 -0400

This is the NCAA. This is the NCAA you and I pretend to love because, really, what would we do without college football? You breathe and die by the fall, right? I know I do.

But I also know that this is the NCAA.

This is the beast that once ruled a college baseball player ineligible for writing a book about surviving brain cancer.

This is the beast that ruled that money and equipment Jeremy Bloom made as a professional skier made him ineligible to play college football, but former Florida Marlins’ third baseman Josh Booty could go to college and play quarterback at Louisiana State.

This is the beast that spent 20 years trying to pin something to Jerry Tarkanian, using endless resources to put the UNLV men’s basketball program under more scrutiny than any program before it. The NCAA could never tie the Shark to anything.

Meanwhile, it let Southern Methodist off scot-free for paying Jon Koncak $5,000 to attend the university. I doubt it would have let the Shark go if it could have found that Tarkanian did so much as buy a piece of Bazooka gum for one of his players.

This is the beast that has now forced North Carolina State to send a cease-and-desist letter to a student at the school for making a Facebook group asking a prospect to commit.

You read that correctly.

N.C. State freshman Taylor Moseley made a Facebook group titled “John Wall PLEASE come to NC STATE!” And, by doing so, he has made illegal contact with a recruit as a representative of the university.

Let that soak in. Let it. I’ll write it once more.

Should I repeat that a third time, or do you get the point?

A Facebook group. By a student. Who pays the university for the right to be there. Not a coach. Not a teammate. Not a booster. But a student—a poor, wretched little freshman.

Apparently, it violates NCAA rules for people to write their opinions.

Somewhere in that big, 508-page book (hidden maybe—I don’t know, I’m not Jim Calhoun so I have not read it) is something that bans students from writing what they want to happen.

Good grief, no wonder Calhoun got confused when he may or may not have made a couple of extra phone calls.

Good grief, indeed.

But at the same time, this story makes me happy because I’ve always wanted a cease-and-desist letter. I’ve always wanted to be sued for speaking. And N.C. State, you have just given me the ability.

John Wall, please come to William Marsh Rice University. God knows our basketball team will be so much better with you here. Heck, it would make my college experience much more complete.

Compliance department, I am a junior undergraduate at Rice majoring in history. I live at Baker College. I’m sure you can find my email address through the Rice’s webmail. I’m waiting for the lawsuit. Oh, my name is Burton DeWitt, in case you did not see it at the top of the page.

And all that is bogus.

Do I want John Wall to come to Rice? Sure, I’m not opposed to having a better basketball team. I’m really not. It would be very cool indeed.

But, good grief. Seriously. This is just too far. This is just a tad-bit too far. Facebook? Really?!? Now, I’m actually embarrassed for the NCAA.

Of everything I’ve ever seen the NCAA do: cancel half a season of Baylor basketball after everyone associated with the scandal was two years gone; give Todd Bozeman an eight-year show cause penalty and not say a word to Woody Hayes or Bobby Knight or John Chaney for violence; encourage state schools to drop sports otherwise unavailable in order to maintain 85-man football teams, this is the worst. This is just sick.

This is just ridiculous.

So sue me, Rice, please, when the NCAA goes after you. I dare you. And NCAA, please start an investigation into Rice’s recruiting. We all know that clearly this is a program that is out of control, what with fans left and right trying to bring in players through online publication. God forbid Wall actually enrolls because of my article.

What, with the Zimbabwean State about to implode and a soccer player in Iraq getting shot while trying to score a goal, this is definitely a matter of immediate concern.

It’s almost as ridiculous as Utah senator Orrin Hatch proposing Congress launch investigations into the Bowl Championship Series on the country’s dime.

Almost.

How about, Orrin, you launch an investigation into the NCAA? Look into its practices regarding recruiting. Look at what it has the power to do.

If you want to break up the NCAA as an illegal trust, why go so far as to look at the BCS when the NCAA can force its members to sue students over something they wrote. Something that hurt no one.

Well, no one except the NCAA’s feelings, as sensitive as they might be. God knows it won’t hurt any other school’s chance to land John Wall. At the very least, for his sake, I hope a Facebook group would not convince him where he wants to get an education.

So, John Wall, please come play basketball for Rice! Please.

Wait, what’s that, an email? A cease-and-desist email? What a great Easter gift that would be.

I’m waiting, Rice. I’m waiting.

What are you, chicken?

Nick Adenhart: Any Way You Look at It, It's Murder

Burton DeWitt — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:55:44 -0400

I don't want to know what was going through Andrew Gallo's mind. I don't want to know why the wrong men died.

It's hard to say someone deserved to die, but if anyone did, it was Gallo. Ostracize me, I don't care. Come on, you know you want to. You know you want to call me sick; you want to stop reading this right now and vomit. You know you want to.

But you also won't. Because you know I am right. You know Andrew Gallo killed Nick Adenhart and two other people. You know killed is the only correct word.

Andrew Gallo had a history of driving drunk. A history. This wasn't one stupid mistake. This wasn't one case of being an idiot. This was a man committing multiple crimes. At once. That killed three people. This was a man who deserves to be dead.

Gallo was not just arrested once before for drinking. He was arrested at least four times due to alcohol-related charges. Four. Including at least one case of driving under the influence. At least. Anything he did before he turned 18 in 2005 is not public record.

Yet, because of our sorrow for Adenhart, because of how much we wanted to cry when we saw Scott Boras, in tears, cry out “He's a great kid!,” because of our struggles to accept the full scope of what happened, we don't look at the problem. We look over the man who created this.

I'm not going to allow that.

So, for the next 750 words, I'm going to repeat myself. I'm not going to stop. You need to see this. You need to think about this.

Think, please, about exactly what Gallo did. Think.

He chose to get drunk, very drunk, well above the 0.08 that is the legal limit in California.

He chose to get behind the wheel of a car, the wheel of a car he had no legal to right to get behind because of previous violations, the wheel of a car that because of him not having a license he thus was not insured to drive.

He chose to go somewhere in the vicinity of 60 miles-per-hour on a city street, 15 miles-per-hour above the listed limit.

He chose to run a red light, probably not even realizing it was red.

Then, after he murdered two men and one woman, he chose to run away and hide.

Coward.

Do you really want to share your planet with that? Do you? Are you that sick?

Now, it is possible that these are all rumors. It is possible that Gallo was not drunk, even though he appeared inebriated when arrested. Maybe the witnesses were wrong when they said it was Gallo who ran the red light. Maybe Gallo's license was not really suspended. Maybe they arrested the wrong man.

I'm all for innocent until proven guilty.

But if these facts are true, if Gallo really was everything the media has reported him to be, I do not see how he cannot be charged with murder.

In most states, I can see it. Most states do not allow murder charges in DUI cases under the guise that there was no mens rea. For those who do not know, mens rea means “guilty mind.” In order to be convicted of a felony, there had to be some intent to commit the crime.

But California is different. California sees that the combination of everything a driver does when he gets behind the wheel drunk composes the guilty mindset. He must be cognizant of the risk and he has chosen to take the risk of killing someone.

So, it is possible that Gallo will be charged with murder. Possible, but not necessarily likely.

Doesn't that make you feel a little better?

Now, I do not normally ask you for anything. Sure, I asked you to stick with me, but I knew you would. I knew I pissed you off enough in the first two paragraphs that you were not going to leave. I knew I made your stomach turn. But now, I need your help. Need.

Please write to your state representative. Please. I beg you. Let him or her know how outraged you are. Let him or her know that you want your state to make DUI manslaughter eligible to be murder.

Let him or her know that you want the families to be able to feel that justice has been served, even though they will never be able to be repaid for their loss. Let them at least have justice.

Regardless how severe the punishment is for manslaughter (some states have penalties as long as 40 years in such cases), the term manslaughter does not grant justice. It just does not.

If I'm running with a knife in my hands and carelessly stab someone, that is manslaughter. If I hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk that I did not see, that is manslaughter. In neither case did I choose to kill someone.

When I make a conscious choice to violate the law and someone dies, that is murder, even if I am inebriated. And I should have to pay. Only through being convicted of murder can justice be paid.

We have a chance to take this tragedy and make someone substantial out of it. If we don't want this to happen again we must. If we don't, it could be you, it could be your son, it could be your spouse next. Splat. Gone. Dead. It's gross; it's harsh; it's true. Splat. Vomit now.

So please write to your state representative. Please. I really do beg of you. Please. If you never listen to anything else I ever say; if you never read another article I ever write, please listen just this once. Let your representative know what you think. Let him or her know you want justice.

My letter is in the mail again.

Print Media to Blame for Horse Racing Becoming Irrelevant

Burton DeWitt — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:17:09 -0400

Everyone has his theory as to why horse racing has become irrelevant: it does not transplant well to television; it’s a sport for degenerates; it’s too dangerous; the tracks are poorly managed.

And you know what, each theory has a bit of truth.

But it is not the real problem.

Baseball did not transplant well to television, was filled with degenerates, has stadiums in dangerous parts of towns, and has gone through eons of poor management, yet has survived. Horse racing, like boxing, has not. And it really is simple.

The level of print journalism in horse racing has been set so low, it is impossible to trust anyone. Sure, the sport has had Joe Hirsch and Bill Nack, but Hirsch is dead and Nack retired.

Now? Now we’re stuck people like Mike Welsch.

I don’t mean to pick on Mr. Welsch; I really don’t. He just has the misfortune of being the latest glaring example. Welsch’s coverage of Gulfstream Park for the Daily Racing Form is syndicated out to CBSSports.com, ESPN.com, and NTRA.com, and probably other lesser-known sites. Yet, despite being one of the more visible writers in the industry, he does not even know some of the more basic policies of his sport’s governing bodies.

Saturday night, Welsch wrote, “Until Saturday, when Levine finally posted his first victory of the meet and did so in a graded stakes when Buddy’s Humor splashed to a three-quarter-length victory over Presious Passion in Gulfstream Park’s $150,000 Pan American.

“The complexion of the Pan American changed earlier in the day after heavy downpours forced track management to switch the Grade three, 1 1/2-mile marathon to 1 1/4 miles over a sloppy main track.”

Of course, I don’t expect you to catch the mistake; you think horse racing is irrelevant, as you rightly should. But it is mistakes like these that hurt the industry.

If a graded stakes scheduled for the turf is moved off the lawn and onto the main track, it receives a one-level grade decrease. In this case, the Grade three Pan American Handicap would have become ungraded.

Welsch did not know this basic rule.
I contacted the Daily Racing Form, as I do whenever I come across one of these mistakes.

They ignored me.

In the past, I’ve even contacted CBSSports.com editor Craig Stanke. Stanke told me to leave it be; CBSSports.com lets the Daily Racing Form syndicate to its site and it would be too much work to even begin to edit the material. I don’t blame him. CBS would have to hire a full-time staff to dissect the Daily Racing Form’s rubbish.

The Daily Racing Form, the mainstream news source of the sport, has made horse racing irrelevant. It continues to do so with each edition.

Now other things have contributed. Until recently, there actually was such a thing as a turf writer. Prominent newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Washington Post recently laid off their long-time turf columnists. Of course, the PI would then lay off most of the rest of its staff went it went internet-only a few weeks later.

ESPN.com still employs a few respectable turf writers independently of its syndication deal with the Daily Racing Form, such as New York Time’s turf and college sports columnist Bill Finley, but the staff continues to dwindle.

Horse racing coverage in major papers has disappeared or been reduced to only the pari-mutuel results. The Miami Herald rarely writes more than one sentence for each race and provides the payouts. Of course, you first have to find the track in the middle of pari-mutuel results for at least a half-dozen greyhound and jai alai payouts as well.

But for most of the country, it’s the incompetent writers of the Daily Racing Form that bring horse racing news to the public. And that’s a shame.

Now, I understand horse racing has been on the decline for decades; I’m not ignorant. Maybe even with more competent staff, we as an industry would be just as thick in mud as we are now. Maybe we would have the government hanging over our backs and PETA down our throats and maybe nobody would care. Maybe nothing would be different.

But I’d like to think it would be at least a little better.

In 2003, Seabiscuit, a well-written, popular history of one of the country’s most popular and heroic horses of the radio age, brought horse racing back into the nation’s eye. Based on the award-winning and best-selling book by Laura Hillenbrand and adapted for the screen by Gary Ross, Seabiscuit captured our hearts.

The hysteria carried over into 2004, making Smarty Jones’s attempt to becoming the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978 the most attended Belmont Stakes ever and most-watched race in years.

Yet the good writing continues to be few and far between.

At this point, the damage has been done. Unless we get a gelding triple crown winner who can race 15 times a year for five years, we’re not going to be able to duplicate the attention.

Even Curlin could not generate much mainstream interest. His race to break Cigar’s career earnings record was relegated to ESPNEWS. I watched it, but I doubt you did. Did you even know Curlin set the record?

Horse racing, in order to be taken seriously, needs a more competent media base. It needs writers on the inside who are able to take their stories to the public. It needs more people like Ray Paulick—people who truly understand horse racing as both an industry and a sport—people that understand the importance of conveying their message to the public.

Paulick’s website, aptly named the Paulick Report, contains a mixture of headline links to major stories in the sport and industry, and articles he has written that provide a uniquely well informed understanding of a particular issue. A former editor for both of the sport’s two main weeklies, Bloodhorse Magazine and the Thoroughbred Times, Paulick has more knowledge of the sport than quite possibly anyone else in the business.

But does his writing get onto ESPN? Once in a blue moon.

Horse racing’s main problem is its print media. How can you gain interest in a sport where you can’t trust a thing you have read? It takes too much effort.

And if there is one thing the internet age has granted us, it is the ability to learn without exerting too much effort.

So I beg the Daily Racing Form to please, for the sake of your sport, for the sake of our sport, please require some level of competence. It is not asking a lot. Employ writers who at least know what everything means.

I don’t mean to pick of Mike Welsch; I really don’t. God knows he’s far from the most grievous offender. Heck, I’m willing to even grant him a pass. A mistake is a mistake. But an editor should have caught this.

And when no editor caught it and I did, one should have at least listened to me.

When you let quality slide, you make your product less desirable. When your product is not desirable already, you turn away even your loyal supporters.

Daily Racing Form, build up support by creating standards. Have writers who understand the sport and know its rules. Push them.

Then, maybe, we’ll begin to recoup some of our lost audience.

Or don’t, and watch this be the last Preakness run in Maryland. Watch Hollywood Park close within the next few years. Watch Aqueduct shutter. Why would you care?

Daily Racing Form, you don’t think the blood is on your hands, but it is. And it is staining everyone around you.

Root for a One-Legged Wrestler? Not Over My Boy!

Burton DeWitt — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:58:03 -0400

Great stories are great. Great stories are fun. Unless they have to go through your team.

Arizona State wrestler Anthony Robles was born without a right hip bone, meaning he also was born without a right leg.

Maybe you have heard the story? It was reported all around the country: ESPN, Fox Sports, even Gregg Doyel of CBSSports.com wrote about him. I almost did myself, but his loss at the 2008 NCAA Wrestling Tournament, one match shy of being an All-American, left me too disappointed. He deserved his story to wait.

While Robles still has not clinched All-American status at this year’s NCAA Tournament, (he needs to win either his next match on Friday morning or the two matches after that if he were to lose) he still has put together an impressive showing. He has dispatched two Big Ten wrestlers in the first two rounds, including fifth-seeded Charlie Falck of the top-ranked Iowa Hawkeyes.

If he were to beat fourth-seeded Brandon Precin of Northwestern, which would be his third consecutive win over a Big Ten wrestler, the 12th-seeded Robles will be an All-American. He will also be in the semifinals of the 125 pound weight class at the NCAA Wrestling Tournament.

More simply, he will be two wins from a national title.

And as great as that is, it almost never happened.

On May 13, Arizona State Athletic Director Lisa Love made an unexpected announcement. Love stated that in order to save $1.1 million annually, the Sun Devils were dropping three sports, wrestling among them. Arizona State was joining PAC-10 brethren Oregon in dropping wrestling in 2008.

The Arizona State Sun Devils, winners of the 1988 NCAA Team Championship and the only school not from the states of Iowa, Minnesota or Oklahoma to win the team championship since 1967, would suddenly be without a wrestling program.

Anthony Robles, the man with no right leg, would be without a sport.

But Arizona State still has a wrestling program. Arizona State still has a wrestling program and it is kicking.

Just a few days after Love cut the wrestling program, she stated that if the three sports could raise enough money to be self-sufficient, Arizona State would reinstate the programs.

You know how long it took? Any idea?

Ten days after Arizona State cut wrestling, it reinstated the program. In a week-and-a-half, fans, boosters, friends, and parents raised $8 million. That is just crazy.

It took two months to save swimming. Tennis never made it.

But that is what wrestling fans do.

Wrestling is probably the only sport with enough of a community that people will routinely donate huge amounts of money to save a program at a rival school or even a school on the other side of the country. I myself proudly wear my “Save Fresno State Wrestling” shirt whenever it is clean. I’m still bitter of the failure of our efforts.

I have never been within 100 miles of Fresno in my life. We love the competition that much that we’ll spend our money to keep our product around, even where we’ll never visit.

That’s just what wrestlers do.

And that’s just what saved Anthony Robles’s career as a Sun Devil.

But the other thing you need to know about wrestlers is loyalty. A wrestler is always loyal.

My team is Northwestern. I bleed the purple and white on the mat. I’ve ordered six school’s CSTV packages to watch or listen to Northwestern wrestling matches since Northwestern does not broadcast its own matches, at least not online.

Now, the great story meets my team, and I’m stuck in a pickle.

Do I root for the kid born without the right leg? Or do I root for Northwestern?

The one thing you need to know about me is I’m not good at making decisions.

Robles and Precin, Precin and Robles. Sophomore and junior, junior and sophomore. What do I do? Can I pick between them? I guess I must.

In wrestling, you never root against someone. Never. You respect the effort he, or in some cases, she, has put in to reach this point.

You respect the days, nights, weeks he has gone without eating, the extra laps he has run to make weight, the rigor he trains with.

You root for your guy, not against the other. You respect the other guy too much.

But this, this is hard. A great story vs. your team always is.

In 2006, George Mason played the University of Florida in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four, creating a similar predicament.

What did I do? Remove all the green and yellow from my room. Having green couches, it was not an easy task.

But I did it.

Now, I won’t go that far this time. I’m not removing the red and gold. But I have to root for Precin.

I’m sorry, story; I’m sorry.

The Robles story is nice, but I must root for Precin. I must root for my boy.

I hope Robles takes third; God knows if he does, I may write him the full story he deserves. But not tonight.

Not with a national championship on the line.

Tonight, I hope Precin continues his quest for an individual championship. I hope he does.

It’s a good story, but for one night, it just is not for me.

Second Chances, Forgiveness, Not Applicable for Everyone

Burton DeWitt — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:19:52 -0400

This is good news. Well, it's bad news, but for me it's good news.

I've never believed in second chances, at least not when you do something this unethical. Now I have a second story to back me up.

No, I'm not talking about Michael Vick. Sure, what he did was wrong, bad, evil, sure, but it never once made me question if he were human. Sick, demented, yes, but at least a little bit human. Just a little bit.

But Jamar Hornsby is not human. At the very least, I wish he were not. I don't want him in my species. I don't want him on my planet.

That may sound harsh, that may sound evil, but it's not. Not after what he has done.

Hornsby had quite a few run-ins with authority even before he stole a dead girl's credit card and tried to use it. Quite a few.

He was a five-star recruit out of Sandlewood High School in Jacksonville, Fla. in 2006 when he signed a letter of intent to play football at the University of Florida. He was heavily recruited by almost every major school in the country and almost committed to Michigan. The Wolverines even offered him the coveted number one jersey, the same jersey worn by legendary receivers Anthony Carter and Braylon Edwards.

He could play almost any position: wide receiver, safety, cornerback, heck, the scouts thought he was big enough to even be a dominant linebacker. This boy could play.

Somewhere, everything went wrong.

As a sophomore, Hornsby was suspended five games for selling his ticket allotment to make money.

“I know I’ll never do something like that again,” he said.

And he never did. Everything he did was nothing like that.

In April 2007, Hornsby was arrested for throwing a man onto the hood of his car during a fight.

The University still was willing to give Hornsby a third chance.

That's when he decided to leave the human race.

On October 12, 2007, just after midnight, Michael Guilford and Ashley Slonina died instantaneously when Guilford's motorcycle hit the meridian at extremely high speeds. Guilford was 19 and Slonina was 20.

Guilford had gained some minor notoriety the previous December and January for his exploits on the practice field.

A walk-on for the University of Florida, Guilford spent all his time as the scout team quarterback. In the lead-up to the 2007 BCS National Championship Game against Ohio State, he played the role of Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Troy Smith.

Slonina was a longtime friend of Hornsby.

Somehow, Hornsby ended up with her credit card. Okay.

One day after she died and Hornsby's teammate died, Hornsby decided to use that credit.

He used it 70 times, totaling up over $3,000 in charges.

One day after his teammate died. One day after his friend died.

There are many people I'm willing to forgive. Many. I'm willing to forgive the men who murdered my grandfather; I'm willing to forgive the cowards who took down Columbine High School almost 10 years ago; I'm willing to forgive the soldiers who followed Hitler's or Pol Pot's or Pinochet's every word. Time can heal awful decisions.

But time cannot heal this. At least not to me. If you kill someone who is already dead, you're just not human.

Take Dave Bliss, for example.

The former Baylor men's basketball coach oversaw one of the worst scandals ever to plague collegiate sports, if not the worst. Southern Methodist? Nobody died over that.

At Baylor, Carlton Dotson, a Baylor basketball player, murdered his teammate, walk-on Patrick Dennehy. How does Bliss get involved? Dennehy was not really a walk-on.

Bliss gave Dennehy an illegal scholarship. The team had already reached its limit, so Bliss paid for Dennehy to attend against NCAA regulations.

Then, after the media got involved, Bliss ordered his assistant coaches and players to say that Dennehy paid for his education by dealing drugs. He said a dead boy, a boy he was supposed to turn into a man, paid for his education by dealing drugs. He said that to the boy's mother and stepfather.

I can forgive Carlton Dotson; he made a fatal mistake. I cannot forgive Dave Bliss; I cannot forgive what he did to a dead boy.

Dotson did a human act, a vile, immoral, evil act. But it still was a human act. And time can allow him to be forgiven, even possibly one day by Dennehy's mother and step-father. Valorie and Brian Brabazon do not have to forgive him if they do not want to, but they have the ability. He does not deserve forgiveness, but that is the Brabazon's choice.

But what Bliss did is just incomprehensible. I have never seen anything like it; it is not human. And I pray Dennehy's family never forgives him. Personally, I don't see how forgiveness is possible.

Jamar Hornsby is no different.

His teammate died. One of his friends died. And the next day, he is using his friend's credit card so he does not have to spend money. He is stealing from the dead.

That's not human. That does not deserve a second chance.

For once, thankfully, at least someone agreed. Urban Meyer kicked him off the team. Goodbye, gone, see ya.

But Hornsby still existed.

After playing at a junior college for the past year, Hornsby signed a letter of intent this past February to play football at Ole Miss.

Yes, someone found it moral and dignified to give this monster a free education and allow him into an institute of higher learning, all in hopes of winning at football. All less than a year after the last time he spent a dead girl's money. And Hornsby wasted no time showing why he did not deserve a second chance.

On March 1, Hornsby was arrested and charged with felony assault and petit larceny after he beat a man at a McDonald's drive-through with brass knuckles.

Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt said he will wait until there are more details before he makes a decision on Hornsby, but in all likelihood Hornsby is done at Ole Miss.

Even if Nutt does not make the correct choice, Hornsby faces up to 20 years in prison on the aggravated assault charge and another four for violating the probation he received for using a dead girl's credit card.

Either way, the lesson has been learned.

Some people deserve a second chance. Some deserve to be forgiven. But when you kill the dead, you're done. You don't deserve another go. Only an idiot would give it to you.

Until now, I've had Dave Bliss to back me up. Now I have someone who is just as sick.

NFL, take back Michael Vick. Give him another go. If he blows it, fine, he's done. But give him another chance. Odds are he will blow it. He made a mistake, an evil mistake, but a human mistake.

As long as you are human you can feel remorse.

But don't ever give Dave Bliss or Jamar Hornsby another chance. Don't ever forgive them. There is no logically human way to explain what they did.

How either of them could do that to someone who just died is inconceivable. It's cruel. I want it not to be human.

As far as I'm concerned, it's not.

Middlesbrough's Relegation Battle on Verge of Failure

Burton DeWitt — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:18:11 -0500

It’s been more than half a year since Middlesbrough went to Anfield and almost secured the biggest shocker of the season. Sure, it was only the second match of the campaign, but Boro never win crucial matches.

Manager Gareth Southgate predicted a trip to Europe before the season. After an opening victory at the Riverside against Tottenham Hotspur, fans of the northeast club sensed maybe this could be their year.

The first 85 minutes at Liverpool were nothing short of brilliant.

Middlesbrough played stellar defense in the first half, keeping Liverpool from testing young goalkeeper Ross Turnbull. Regular keeper Brad Jones had been injured during warmups. Liverpool, however, controlled possession, keeping Boro from having any real opportunities.

The clubs entered halftime scoreless.

Boro went a goal ahead in the 70th minute on a Mido shot from about 30 meters out, putting the Teessiders less than half an hour from their first away victory against Liverpool since 1976. But Liverpool fought back, nearly tying the match twice before the Red’s Jamie Carragher issued a cross that bounced off Boro’s Emmanuel Pogatetz and into the back of the net in the 86th minute.

With just seconds left in stoppage time, Xabi Alonso passed from midfield to Steven Gerrard, who took the ball on one bounce and deposited it in the top left corner of the net. Turnbull had no chance at it.

And Boro’s season went downhill from there.

Now, here we are, the final day of February. Boro has not won a league match since it stunned Aston Villa at Villa Park 1-2 last November. Hull City is the only other Premier League side not to win yet in 2009.

Over the string of 14 matches, Boro has found only five of a possible 42 points, watching themselves drop from mid-table to 19th, one point ahead of West Bromwich Albion. In fact, Boro have been so anemic they succumbed 3-0 at the Hawthorns to West Brom back in January.

Yet, by the grace of god, Boro remains only two points from safety.

In one of the craziest seasons ever, the bottom seven remain separated by only two wins with still 12 fixtures to go. No club is more than one victory from safety.

But not everyone can be saved.

Hull City has been terrible after a brave September, dropping from the top-three to 13th. They are only seven points clear of West Brom and six from Middlesbrough and Blackburn. The Tigers appear bound for relegation unless they find the form nobody thought they were capable of early on.

Stoke City, who along with Hull were promoted from the Championship last season, are currently 17th, but they have the second-worst goal differential after West Brom. Bookmakers Paddypower paid out on Stoke getting relegated after their first fixture, no doubt playing off of their decision to pay out Derby County last year after their sixth match.

Many thought Portsmouth could contend for a top-four finish before the season. But Portsmouth never found the form that led them the FA Cup last year. During the transfer window, they sold striker Jermain Defoe to the Spurs and midfielder Lassana Diarra to Real Madrid. The potential is there for another Wimbledon-like fall.

I could keep going, as I still have not had the opportunity to discuss Blackburn, West Bromwich Albion, or even Newcastle, but I do not need to. I want to discuss Middlesbrough.

Back in August, Paul Doyle of The Guardian wrote some brilliant prose. Doyle called Boro the “most mediocre” club in football, an “oxymoronic kind of club.” They beat Manchester United, they beat Arsenal, then they go out and fall to Aston Villa and West Ham without much of a fight.

Eventually, Doyle writes with an obvious sigh, “Boro are brilliant, Boro are boring, Boro are weird.

“But it generally evens itself out in the end and they finish in mid-table, just like the previous season.”

Yet, somehow, this year has been different.

No doubt, Boro have been all three.

Their performance in Anfield last August proved how brilliant they could be. Their string of 0-0 draws were boring. The fact that their last win came away against Aston Villa, who is currently sitting one point behind Chelsea and comfortably in fourth, shows just how weird Boro are.

But at the same time, they have not been weird enough.

Left-midfielder Stewart Downing, who led the Boro last year with ten league goals, has yet to score in a Premier League match. His goal against West Ham in Upton Park during the FA Cup's fifth-round match three weeks ago was his first of any sort all year.

The club has not been able to find a capable replacement to Lee Cattermole, who Southgate sold to Wigan before the year. Gary O’Neil has been injured on and off all campaign while his counterpart Mohamed Shawky has contributed more to the tabloids than he has on the pitch.

Shawky has been vocally critical of Southgate’s treatment of Mido, who, like Shawky, is an Egyptian national.

Julio Arca has not been able to find his rhythm. Didier Digard will be likely be out for the rest of the season.

Which brings us to Mido.

The striker spent most of the season as a mid-match sub, scoring four goals off the bench. But Mido thought he was star and demanded a transfer. Boro loaned him to Wigan in January.

In a case that is symbolic of just how bad the season has been for Boro, ESPN.com listed Mido as Middlesbrough’s leading goal scorer last Saturday, tied with Afonso Alves. What is the irony? Boro were playing Wigan for whom Mido now plays.

And unless Middlesbrough finds the back of the net, Mido’s four goals may remain tops on the club.

Alves has been a huge waste of finances. Southgate paid a club-record, 12 million pounds for the Brazilian striker 13 months ago, but he has not lived up to his price tag.

He has struggled this year to get open, and his ball control is nothing greater than mediocre. While Tuncay Sanli creates miracles, Alves seems to pray and wait for one.

Boro caught one of its few breaks in September, and it is barely a break. Tuncay was thought to have torn his MCL playing for Turkey in a World Cup qualifying match. Luckily, the injury was not that severe, and Tuncay missed only six weeks instead of four months.

Defensively, Middlesbrough has been banged up, but with Justin Hoyte and Robert Huth back, the side has secured three clean sheets from their past five matches.

Both goalkeepers have looked like solid replacements for Mark Schwarzer, who was sold after more than a decade at the Riverside.

Yet the Boro are still in 19th, only one point from last but only two from safety.

No doubt, Boro have the talent to rise, to survive. They’ve shown it.

After securing a 1-1 draw at Upton Park in a fifth-round FA Cup tie, Middlesbrough won the replay against West Ham 2-0. Downing scored again in the fifth minute before Tuncay made it 2-0 in the 20th.

Downing’s free kick strike showed that he might have, finally, woken up, and that he finally found the form that made him a hot commodity. For the first seven months of the year, he certainly has not shown it.

Now Middlesbrough are through to the sixth round of the FA Cup for the fourth consecutive year, a feat that only they and Chelsea can claim. But at the same time, there is an eerie resemblance to the 1996-97 campaign.

That year, Middlesbrough made their first ever FA Cup final. That year, Middlesbrough got relegated.

This year, there’s enough talent that hopefully, it’s not really a concern. But Boro need to win immediately.

We saw what the club were capable of in August when Middlesbrough came within five minutes of beating Liverpool at Anfield. We saw just how well they could play in every facet.

But after 14 league matches without a victory, it’s easy to forget that it’s possible.

Saturday, Middlesbrough gets their chance to avenge the defeat. Here are a struggling Liverpool side that are just as in need of a victory as Middlesbrough.

Here are a side that are desperate.

Call me crazy, call it a hunch, but don’t call me an idiot. Anyone who watches Middlesbrough football knows that this is the type of match that the Boro wins. The worse the odds, the better the chance.

If Boro can secure four points from their next two matches – Saturday’s home fixture against Liverpool and Wednesday’s return match of the season opener to Tottenham – they will avoid relegation. There’s no doubt.

But if Middlesbrough can’t win at least one, the climb will be much harder.

If Middlesbrough does not win at least one, the climb will be impossible.

Safin-Federer: Tale of Two Matches

Burton DeWitt — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:22:38 -0500

There were two tennis matches played late Friday night in Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, and I’m not including Jelena Dokic’s three-set thriller over Caroline Wozniaki.

The marquee match, the rematch, whatever you want to call it, between former world number one Roger Federer and former world number one Marat Safin was both matches: the awful first two sets and the remarkable third one.

In the first set, Federer played sloppy-but-consistent while Safin was erratic on nearly ever other point, missing wildly on his serve, backhand, and especially forehand. But the third set was a different breed: a showcase of two of the most talented players of all time playing the type of tennis that at one point rose both to the top.

And if we really want to know all that Friday’s match was about, we need to ignore the first two sets.

Federer jumped out to a quick, devastating two set lead, converting three of his four break chance opportunities and only twice falling behind 15-30 or worse on his serve. Safin never had a break point.

He closed out the first set with a break at love followed by hold at love. He was nearly as dominant in the second set, breaking Safin in Safin’s last two service games.

Those two sets took merely 59 minutes.

And then Safin turned it on.

After committing 23 unforced errors in the first 17 games, Safin committed only 10 in final set. He never faced break point and only once even had a 15-30 service point and never went to deuce.

Moreover, Safin found his serve.

Despite hovering around 50 percent first-serve percentage throughout the entire match, including an ungodly 43 percent in the first set, Safin had much better control in the third, finding the corners even on his second serves and keeping Federer off-balance. During nearly every point in the final set, Safin had Federer on his toes.

Somehow, Federer ran down most of those would-be winners, making Safin have to fight for each point he won. Nobody else, not even Rafael Nadal, could have played such flawless defense as Federer did.

But it also made for a lot of great, sustained rallies and some terse, critical moments.

Safin gained control of his forehand. While it was never brilliant, the miss-hits almost vanished.

During the first two sets, Safin frequently went long with even routine forehands, losing his patience at the end of both sets. He never lost control in the third set, staying cool and not trying to be too aggressive with his weakest shot.

Just as noticeable, his backhand was golden.

Safin continually placed the ball right inside the line on his cross-court backhands, forcing Federer out wide. Rarely was there a sustained rally where Safin was not in control at some point.

And most importantly, Safin kept his head.

Even though he had numerous close calls go against him in the final set—he challenged three line calls, winning two, and probably should have challenged a fourth—Safin kept his cool. Even though he did miss a crucial backhand into the net at deuce on Federer’s serve in the tenth game, Safin kept his cool. Even though Federer seemed to have an answer to every shot Safin made, Safin kept his cool.

But Safin still lost the set because the tennis played by Federer was just as remarkable, if not more so.

Federer really did have an answer to everything Safin did, or at least everything that was not one of Safin’s 14 aces in the match.

He really did run down everything. Everything. Every time Safin was in control of the point, in control of a game, Federer would hit the most stunning defensive passing shot that snuck right inside or on the line.

Federer did not control the net, coming up only a dozen times throughout the match, but his ground strokes were dead-on almost without fault.

Besides a string of three consecutive long backhands in the 11th game of the third set, Federer did not have consecutive unforced errors in any one game at any point after the middle of the first set.

And although he finished with two more unforced errors than winners, 28 to 26, at one error every seven points, it was still a lower unforced error-per-point rate than the epic five-set semifinal during the 2005 Australian Open. In that match, Safin fought off Federer’s match point in the fourth set tie-breaker on the way to a 9-7 win in the fifth set and a championship over Lleyton Hewitt two nights later.

The defensive tennis Federer played coupled with his unnerving ability to win every crucial point kept him in the set even as Safin played the best tennis he’s played in four years.

To say that Federer romped, to say that Federer rolled over Safin is to discount the third set in which the two were near-equals.

In the tie-breaker, Safin, serving down 3-1, was called for a controversial foot fault on his second serve, giving Federer the point and sending the Russian into a confrontation with the linesman and the chair umpire.

Yet, unlike the normal Safin, he kept his cool and promptly won the next two points on Federer’s serve before holding twice to take a 5-4 lead. Safin hit three winners on those four points.

But Federer was not going to roll over and play a fourth set.

The second-ranked Swiss champion won the next two points through his serve, the second with his ninth ace of the night, earning match point.

Throughout the entire match, every time Federer needed a big serve, he got one. It was uncanny. Safin played flawless tennis and could never muster a break point. It would have almost been unfitting if he ever did.

There really is nothing else to call it but unreal. The shots Federer hit, off-balance from the edge of the court after Safin had done everything right were just not fair. No one, not even Andre Agassi, Pancho Gonzalez, Bjorn Borg, Don Budge, no one, could have broken Federer in that third set.

Safin served with his back against the wall for the last time, ripping a Federer return to the far side of the court and charging towards the net. Federer just whipped it straight down the line a little past a stunned Safin and watched it drop gently in.

Game, set, and match.

I’m not going to say this was a classic match—three setters in men’s tennis at a grand slam rarely are. But there is no denying this was a classic set.

Marat Safin played some outstanding tennis and lost the set. And it was not surprising.

Federer, who is always honest in his post-match interviews, recognized what had happened.

“I played well from the start,” he said. “I didn’t give him a whole a lot.”

Federer’s play was so flawless, so reminiscent of three years ago when he was untouchable, that it approached perfection.

“There was moments where he [Safin] did play very well for like, I would say, maybe in the third set I think he played great.”

And that’s where it lies.

Federer did not stomp over Safin like the media is playing it out. Safin definitely did not self-destruct.

Maybe in the first two sets he did.

But in the final set, Federer and Safin played near-perfect tennis, and that is what we need to look at.

One set is not enough for this match to be remembered in history, but it is enough to remind us just how good a rivalry Marat Safin and Roger Federer should have been. That third set should have been happening three or five times a match, six times a year, not once in a blue moon.

Safin is over the hill and hinting about retirement, but at least for one hour, he looked like the world number one of old. Strike that, number two behind Federer.

That third set was great tennis, probably the greatest display of tennis we are going to see in this championship.

And trust me, if that is the greatest set of tennis of the championship, nobody has been cheated. It’s hard to top that.

The only thing we’ve been cheated out of was a complete match like that.

But I’ll take what I’ve been given. I doubt we’ll ever see it from Safin again.

And even from Federer, moments like that are now fleeting.

Fox's BCS Coverage Makes Move to ESPN Make Sense

Burton DeWitt — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:52:47 -0500

The only thing more disastrous than Bob Stoops’s red-zone offensive playcalling Thursday night was Fox’s coverage of the Bowl Championship Series. And it was disastrous.

Starting with the obvious, Thom Brennaman proved that he makes Al Michaels and John Madden appear intelligent.

Take, for instance, in the pregame show, when he introduced us to “Dolphins Stadium,” even though there’s no such place as “Dolphins Stadium.” For those who care for accuracy, the game was played in “Dolphin Stadium.”

Or, in the first quarter, when Brennaman said the Gators had third down and 10, even though it was only second down. Of course, he would later top this gaffe when he would mess up the down six times in one series.

With the score tied at 7-7, Oklahoma was down to the Florida three-yard line with 2nd-and-goal. But Brennaman was convinced it was third down, even though the chains said second down.

Color commentator Charles Davis, who was not afraid to throw in his own mistakes, just went along with everything Brennaman said as Brennaman continued to make a fool of himself. When Florida stopped the Sooners on what was really 3rd-and-goal, Brennaman yelled, “Huge stop for the Gator defense on 4th-and-goal!”

Brennaman finally caught himself after that play, downplaying his mistake by saying, “Now it’s fourth down!”

Nice catch, Thom.

His counting mistakes weren’t limited to just downs, saying that “14 points” were put on the board when the score was 7-6.

Later on, he said Florida had four seconds on the playclock. The Fox graphic popped up two seconds later as the play clock switched from “five” to “four.”

And Brennaman showed he could expand his horizons to rule mistakes. Just before halftime, he said “the clock doesn’t stop for the two-minute warning [in college football].” However, this is because there is no such thing as a two-minute warning in college football, which as worded he claimed there was.

Yet, even the most incompetent play-by-play commentator can be tempered if matched with a good color analyst. Davis most certainly was not.

Besides letting his partner make a fool of himself, Davis found it hard to keep himself from saying some of the dumbest remarks of the season. Midway through the third quarter, Davis enlightened his viewers with the observation, “When it goes from 1st-and-10 to 2nd-and-10, the defense’s odds of forcing a stop increases.”

In fact, the only remark that was dumber this season than Davis’s was uttered by Brennaman during the same game. Brennaman, while exclaiming his praise for Tim Tebow as the model American, tried to describe how he inspired the rest of his teammate’s after the loss to Ole Miss.

He did so by saying, “when Major Wright hits you, you feel it in a major wrong way,” which did not hurt his credibility only because he had already lost all of it earlier when he mistook the down.

That was just one of countless times that Brennaman expressed his love for Tebow. It got to the point where even Gator fans cringed whenever Tebow made a play out of anticipation for what lustful comment Brennaman would have next.

For one of the most competitive national championship games of the BCS era, Fox’s commentating definitely put a damper on the mood.

Even the technical team could not get things correct over the five bowl games televised by the network.

As pointed out by the blog “Every Day Should Be Saturday,” Fox put a picture of Tim Tebow up for the starting lineups. The problem? It was during the Orange Bowl on Jan. 2 between Cincinnati and Virginia Tech, with his picture replacing that of Cincinnati left tackle Khalil El-Amin. That is a mistake that should never happen.

Fox had its share of clock glitches, too, especially in the Cotton Bowl Classic, also on Jan. 2. For nearly the entire game, Fox had to speed its on-screen clock up in order to catch up with the game clock. Someone from the station kept forgetting to start the graphic clock each time the official started the game clock.

But all these other errors aside, Fox needs to ask itself why Brennaman was calling this game? With other more competent announcers such as Kenny Albert, Dick Stockton, or the equally enthusiastic Matt Vasgersian at its disposal, Fox has insisted the past three seasons on having Brennaman call the game.

Did all of these announcers turn down the chance to call one of the fourth-most-watched American sporting events of the year?

And after last night, there is no way anyone can think it was the correct decision.

Regardless if the BCS conferences made a mistake by sending the coverage over to cable network ESPN starting in the 2011 season for slightly more money, they did not make a mistake in keeping it away from Fox.

The coverage for the last three years has drifted between embarrassing and unbearable. Thursday night clearly ran head-first into the latter.

It was never before as awful as Thursday night, but it was always bad. That was just icing on the tombstone.

Coach of the Year Voting was Off the Mark

Burton DeWitt — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 08:15:55 -0500

Each year, I’m more and more convinced that the NFL’s Coach of the Year Award goes to the most improved team without regard to actual coaching ability.

As expected, the Coach of the Year Award came down to Tony Sparano of the Miami Dolphins and Mike Smith of the Atlanta Falcons, who took over teams with a combined five wins in 2007 and turned out a pair of 11-5 records.

As expected, the man who did the best job in football got absolutely none.

Sparano and Smith’s accomplishments aside, how was Gary Kubiak was not even a candidate? You want to know why? His team did not improve in the standings.

Okay, Bill Belichick got one vote even though his team dropped from 16-0 to 11-5, but that was after Tom Brady went down during Week One. Oh, and the Patriots are routinely under the spotlight.

Houston? If it were not for this article, I doubt you’d remember that its season was doomed from the start.

As the Texans were preparing for its Week Two game against the Baltimore Ravens in Reliant Stadium, Hurricane Ike was moving across the Gulf of Mexico towards Galveston as a Category two storm.

The NFL made the decision to postpone the game, eventually rescheduling it for Week 10, Baltimore’s bye-week. The Texans moved their game against Cincinnati from Week 10 to Week eight, the bye for both teams.

Ike tore through the Houston metropolitan area with winds that were one mile-per-hour shy of being considered a major hurricane. Street lights went down, trees were uprooted across main street, windows were shattered out of almost every major building, houses were destroyed.

One of my friends who stayed had part of her roof dislodged, water pouring in as she lay down every towel and sheet to sop up the water to keep her floors from rotting.

Least of all, the roof of the Reliant Stadium, a retractable-dome stadium, had a few measly panels blown out.

And the players came back to all of this.

Well, sort-of. The team played its next two games on the road, having already lost at Pittsburgh. And those two teams had both made the playoffs in 2007.

Couple that with a collapse in the homecoming on October 5 against the Indianapolis Colts, and the Texans were 0-4 with 30 percent of Houston proper and nearly half of the greater Houston area still without power.

Comparisons were being made to the Saints lost season of 2005. After Hurricane Katrina, the Saints were forced to play home games in three different states, one of which you could barely call a home game. Their Week Two game against the New York Giants was played in Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands.

To further the allusion that the Saints were the home team, one of the end zones was painted Black and Gold while the same colors were put over the blue padding around the same end zone.

The rest of their home games alternated between the Alamodome in San Antonio and Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La.

The Saints collapsed after a 2-2 start, finishing 3-13 and firing Jim Haslett. Their only win during that stretch oddly enough came in their return to the Meadowlands, this time as the road team, against the New York Jets.

While I’m not going to compare Ike to Katrina in terms of its affect on a city, as what Ike did to Houston pales miserably, but in terms of people affected and lives altered, the storms rank side-by-side among the most potent in modern U.S. History. No doubt, comparing the seasons seemed accurate after Week Five.

The team rattled off three consecutive wins, including an improbable win against the Dolphins in which they had to complete two fourth downs, the latter coming with only three seconds remaining, in order to score the season-saving touchdown.

On fourth-and-two on the Dolphins three yard line, Matt Schaub kept it himself on a designed draw to put the Texans ahead and break the resolve of the much-improved Dolphins.

Yet as soon as the three-game winning streak was snapped, the team saw its season come to a crashing halt. In consecutive days, the Texans lost quarterback Matt Schaub and linebacker Zac Diles, the latter for the rest of the season. Diles at the time was leading the team in tackles.

Schaub had torn his medial collateral ligament in his left knee and would miss the next five games.

Diles broke his leg in a freak non-contact drill after apparently accidentally kicking himself while jogging.

The Texans slumped to 3-7 and .500 seemed a pipe-dream away.

But Kubiak kept the team together.

After six seasons of generally awful play, the Texans found an offensive line for the first time in the franchise’s history. For all sixteen games, the team started the same five people, giving a continuity that had been far from present before. In 2006, for instance, the team started eight different combinations over the course of the season. They surrendered only 32 sacks, the second-least in franchise history.

Moreover, the team found a running back, as rookie Steve Slaton stepped in, even as all the other halfbacks around him got hurt, rushing for an NFL rookie-high 1282 yards. In what seems to be a trend, he too failed to register even a single vote for NFL Rookie of the Year, which went to Atlanta Falcons Quarterback Matt Ryan.

By the way, the Coach of the Year award went to Atlanta head coach Mike Smith. I told you, trend.

The defense struggled, surrendering 394 points, sixth-most in the NFL. The offense only scored 366, 17th-best in the league. Of the 21 teams to win at least eight games, only the Washington Redskins and Denver Broncos had a worse point differential than the Texans. Two teams with losing records, the Buffalo Bills and Green Bay Packers, were substantially better.

But despite everything: despite not having a defense, despite losing their quarterback for a third of the season, despite losing their leading tackler for half the season, despite getting off to an 0-4 start against tough teams, they overcame it. Most importantly, they survived and overcame Hurricane Ike.

And after the precedent New Orleans set, that last thing is key.

Kubiak kept the team together. He led them down the field against the Dolphins when it looked like the Texans and Lions matchup Week Seven would be both team’s only chance to avoid an 0-16 season. He got them to 8-8, beating Tennessee and knocking Chicago out of playoff contention in the process.

Kubiak beat Hurricane Ike.

Sure, it has been done before.

Don Shula beat Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The Dolphins Week One game against the New England Patriots in Joe Robbie Stadium was moved to Week Seven, costing the Dolphins the benefits of a bye week. Still, they started 6-0 and made it all the way to the AFC Championship Game.

But that team had an established, Hall-of-Fame quarterback, two high end wide receivers, a solid, deep defense with a great secondary, and a very good, very young offensive line.

The 2008 Houston Texans had none of that and still managed to win eight games in the toughest division in football. And you’re telling me Gary Kubiak didn’t even deserve a whisper for Coach of the Year? Pathetic.

You can go on and on about Mike Smith and Tony Sparano until your head hurts, but that’s not all-inclusive. Just because the Texans finished 2008 as it did 2007 should not eliminate Kubiak from the conversation.

After everything they went through, it should only propel him.

It did not, and that’s a joke. A pathetic, insulting joke.

Tom Brady Fans Need To Get a Grip on Reality

Burton DeWitt — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:49:09 -0400

[The following is a retort to an article in the Oct. 3, 2008 issue of the Rice Thresher, which can be found here.]

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: I don’t care about the National Football League. I do not care for the immaturity of Chad Ocho Cinco and Jeremy Shockey. I do not care for Roger Goodell, for Al Davis, for John Madden, nor Chris Berman. I don’t. They all work to make the game much less entertaining than the college version.

But I also don’t care for inaccurate reporting.

Even if I were to assume that Tom Brady is the best quarterback in football and the most popular player in football, the previous being something that may not be too far from the truth, to claim that he has “carried the NFL on his shoulders since the turn of the millennium” as Prem Ramkumar has, is so ludicrous that I can’t help but laugh.

It’s not even close to the truth.

Just looking at the television ratings, it’s easy to tell that Tom Brady is not the most popular quarterback in the league.

With the exception of last year's Super Bowl, in which New England attempted to become only the third undefeated team in NFL history after the 1929 Green Bay Packers and 1972 Miami Dolphins, the Patriots' Super Bowls ranked in the lower half in terms of household ratings and market share this millennium.

The Rams-Patriots Super Bowl after the 2001 season is one of the least ratings-dominant Super Bowls of all time, sporting a 40.4 household rating. It had a lower rating than even the blowout Tampa Bay-Oakland Super Bowl after the 2002 season, which had a 40.7 mark.

Each rating point represents one percent of the households that own televisions in the United States. Currently, Nielsen Media Research estimates that there are currently 112.8 million homes with televisions, an amount that goes up a little more than one percent each year.

The Patriots' next two triumphs in Super Bowls XXXVIII and XXXIX were hardly more impressive, scoring a 41.4 and 41.1 rating respectively.

Super Bowl XL between Pittsburgh and Seattle? A 41.6. And the year after, with Peyton Manning and no Tom Brady? A 42.6.

Not sure how any of that proves Ramkumar’s thesis.

Additionally, if I were to look at the NFC Championship game last year, which was in prime-time, and the AFC Championship game from the 2006 season, which also was in prime-time, there would not be any doubt as to which person is the most popular quarterback in the league.

Brett Favre versus Eli Manning in the NFC Championship game in 2007 scored a 29.0 household rating. Tom Brady versus Peyton Manning in the AFC Championship game one year earlier scored a 26.4.

Am I expected to believe that nearly 3 million more households became football fans in one year because of Tom Brady’s performance in defeat in the 2006 AFC Championship game? Or is Brett Favre slightly more popular?

Jersey sales would confirm such suspicions, or at the very least that Brady is not No. 1.

In the just less than five months from Apr. 1 to Aug. 26, Favre had the most-sold NFL jersey. True, he was traded to a new team, promoting sales in both his archaic Green Bay Packers jersey and just-released New York Jets jersey, but that trade does not account for Brady finishing fourth.

Both Tony Romo and Eli Manning, two other quarterbacks returning to the same team as they played on in 2007, had greater quantity of jersey sales than Brady. Peyton Manning, Eli’s older brother, rounded out the top five, surprisingly behind Brady.

The older Manning had finished sixth in 2007, one spot behind Vince Young. No other quarterback finished in the top five that year, not even the man who supposedly is carrying the NFL on his shoulders.

Others in the top five were running backs LaDanian Tomlinson and Reggie Bush of San Diego and New Orleans respectively, inside linebacker Brian Urlacher of Chicago, and strong safety Troy Polamalu of Pittsburgh.

And none of this takes care of the fact that the least valuable television contract the NFL has is with CBS, which was scheduled to air nine of the Patriots 16 games this year.

The deal, which was made in 2005, allows CBS to air AFC road games and one Super Bowl every three seasons, as well as four other playoff games each season. CBS pays the NFL $622.5 million.

By comparison, FOX pays $712.5 million a year for the NFC version of CBS's package, a deal that nets the network only two Patriots games this year.

NBC's Sunday Night and ESPN's Monday Night packages each cost more than CBS's. They get three and one Patriot games, respectively.

The NFL Network, which the league owns and operates, has the rights to the other game.

The NFL makes more television money for games not involving Brady than for those involving him.

Sure, last year was great—last year was fun if you are a fan of the NFL. And yes, Tom Brady did lift the NFL to heights it had not seen since the millennium began. But none of that proves that he has been the best quarterback in the NFL since 2001.

He might be, but it doesn’t prove it.

Yet Ramkumar makes such an assertion and takes it one step further: He claims that Brady is also the most popular quarterback in the league and has carried it through the first eight years of this millennium.

He goes on to state that whomever wins the Super Bowl this year will not be viewed as a legitimate champion because he would not have had to go through Brady.

So let’s start rewriting the record books.

We must first take away two of Padraig Harrington’s major golf titles because Tiger Woods wasn’t in the field. Clearly we must also strike every tournament Venus Williams and Serena Williams have won because they came after Martina Hingis retired the first time due to injury.

Every World Series winner between 1942 and 1945? Goodbye, Ted Williams was fighting World War II. And don’t get me started on the Dallas Cowboys of the early 1990s—if Bo Jackson doesn’t destroy his hip playing for the Los Angeles Raiders in the playoffs, none of those teams would have come close.

And before I forget, let’s give Spectacular Bid the Triple Crown in 1979 since he ran with a hoof he injured after stepping on a safety pin that morning, the Chicago Bulls the Houston Rockets’ two titles won while Michael Jordan was playing basketball, and Ayrton Senna the seven World Championships won by Michael Schumacher after Senna died at Imola in 1994. Lord, please forgive any other sports injustice I may be forgetting.

You see how ludicrous that would be?

But it’s not nearly as ludicrous as claiming that Brady has “carried the NFL on his shoulders” when you consider that none of the numbers defend that.

Sure, Brady has sometimes helped, but I doubt the NFL would be much less profitable without him. In fact, judging by the facts, it might be more.

Oklahoma and Southern California Will Play for the BCS Title

Burton DeWitt — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:17:36 -0400

Pen it in now. Jot it down. Permanent ink. It's not going to change.

Oklahoma will play Southern California for the national title. It's set. Plan your trip to Miami.

Not Georgia, not Florida, not Wake Forest, not Wisconsin. Not East Carolina or Fresno State, not Boise State or Brigham Young.

Oklahoma and Southern California. No point to play it out. It's set.

I'm not saying these are the two best teams in the country. They might be, although I doubt it. Georgia is deeper and more talented than either could dream of being. But it does not matter.

After everything else has settled...

After conference play and conference championship games, rivalry week and the upsets.

After Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Washington, and Clemson begin their search for new head coaches.

After Larry Munson has uttered what may be his final words as Georgia play-by-play announcer.

After Tim Tebow wins his second Heisman Trophy, maybe.

We will have Oklahoma and Southern California, one and two, not necessarily in that order, but both in the BCS National Championship Game. Both playing for all the marbles.

Who is going to beat Oklahoma?

Maybe Missouri, if the Tigers can reach the conference title game.

Texas is too fragile and unproven in the secondary and too weak at linebacker to stop the Oklahoma assault that has already hung 50 on Chattanooga, Cincinnati, and Washington.

Texas Tech, well, this is possible. The Red Raiders are more talented defensively than any team Mike Leach has ever coached, but they're not that talented. Not talented enough to go to Norman and slow Oklahoma, that's for sure.

Besides that, there aren't really any games that should even cause the Sooners to blink. Bob Stoops is not going to let Colorado happen again. There are not going to be any 27-24 stunners. He's too good of a coach.

Who is going to beat Southern California? Who?

Talk about an advantageous schedule. California, Oregon, and Arizona State, the three-best teams in the PAC-10 besides the Trojans, all come to the Coliseum.

No PAC-10 team other than Stanford has defeated Southern California in the Coliseum under Pete Carroll. That's a scary thought. Why should that change now?

California's defense should be much better than the injured squad that surrendered its most points per game since 2001. Heck, besides its no-show Saturday in what was a 9 A.M. kickoff pacific time at Maryland, the team has been in synch on both sides of the ball.

Oregon has overachieved so far. Can Nathan Costa be ready for a defense with the size, speed, depth, and skill of Southern California the first Saturday in October?

And Arizona State? No way. Dennis Erickson single-handedly coached this team to 10 wins last year. Still, the team was run out of Tempe when Southern California came to town, 44-24.

The only challenging road game is the finale at UCLA. There is no telling what UCLA will show up on any given weekend, whether it will be the team that takes down Tennessee or the laughingstock that goes down 59-0 to Brigham Young.

So mark it in.

Oklahoma and Southern California. Southern California and Oklahoma. Undefeated, one and two. All the way.

Who else will run the table?

Georgia? Too unlikely. Look at the depth in the SEC. Georgia struggled to beat Steve Spurrier's South Carolina squad, the same South Carolina squad that went down to Vanderbilt nine days earlier.

Florida? Too many questions. How will the defense handle SEC speed? Will Tim Tebow avoid injury? Can Urban Meyer out-coach his colleagues out of halftime?

LSU? Auburn? Alabama? They all have to beat up on each other.

Texas? The defense is too shaky.

Missouri? What defense?

Wisconsin? First, the Badgers have to beat Fresno State. Then they have to take care of Ohio State and Penn State consecutive Saturdays in Madison.

South Florida? Wake Forest? Does it matter if they go undefeated? It does not.

Sure, one of these teams could run the table. One of these teams could jump into the title picture if it does. But it is not likely. It's almost as unlikely as Southern California or Oklahoma losing any of its remaining games.

They just have much more talent than any of the teams they're scheduled to play.

It is not their fault. They are just better.

Looking at the schedules, looking at the rosters, there is only one game for each team that there's more than a possibility that they'll lose: January 8 in Miami Gardens, Fla.

Nowhere else can either of these two schools lose. Not this year.

So jot it down in permanent ink. There won't be any need to change it.

Right or wrong, it is all we are left with.

Lack of Television Coverage of Paralympics Is a Crime

Burton DeWitt — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 08:55:47 -0400

Will someone slap me in the face? Please? Will someone bring me back to reality?

Not tomorrow or next week, not after Hurricane Ike destroys my apartment in the upcoming 24 hours, not on Saturday when I find out, but now. Slap me back to reality.

Maybe I've been brainwashed; maybe I've been lied to. Or, maybe, but unlikely, I am just missing something. The first two seem the likeliest.

This, the United States of America. This, the greatest, freest nation in the world. This, the superpower of the world, a leading power militarily, economically, communicationally, technologically, you name it.

And nowhere in it can I watch the Summer Paralympic Games.

Not on NBC, not on its subsidiaries, not online, except for one event a night, that event usually being swimming or track. Nowhere.

You couldn't watch Erin Popovich, the American swimming sensation who won seven gold medals in Athens in 2004. Those, in addition to the three from Sydney and four she has won so far in Beijing give her 14 gold medals, the same amount as Michael Phelps.

Popovich was born with achondroplasia, a genetic disorder that restricts the growth of her limbs. Does that make her any less deserving of our attention?

You couldn't watch Jennifer Schuble, the American cyclist who won gold in the women's 500 meter time trial.

Schuble suffered two traumatic brain injuries, one while in commission officer training at West Point in 1996. She picked up the sport after the 2004 Summer Paralympics, becoming the best in the world in an ungodly short time.

You couldn't watch Jessica Long win two more gold medals to the three she won in Athens.

You couldn't watch Jerome Singleton take the silver in the men's 100 meter sprint.

You couldn't watch the men's goalball team stun top-seeded Slovakia in the quarterfinals, keeping alive longshot medal hopes in the sport designed for legally and totally blind persons.

If you were in Canada or Britain or China, or, well, any other major nation, you possibly could. You also probably would have heard when your athletes won.

The CBC in Canada is airing two hours of tape-delayed coverage on each of the four weekend days. It is also providing streaming video online.

The BBC in Great Britain is airing daily coverage, much of it live, both on air and online.

In the host China, up to 10 hours a day of coverage is being broadcast on the state-owned television networks.

NBC? Nothing.

Yes, I know that NBC is not a state-owned network. I know it has to make a profit, and the Paralympics will not do much to aid that attempt. Yet, NBC could do something.

NBC could sell or give the rights to the Paralympics, the rights it owns exclusively, to ESPN or another entity that would air the games.

NBC could air the events in poor time slots on its subsidiaries.

NBC could stream the events online for subscription. They already have access to the official Paralympic feed, so why not allow people to view it online.

But NBC has done just as much as nothing. It has put one event online each night on universalsports.com. It has made arrangements to air on tape delay a few events, not now, but in October, on the satellite network Universal HD. It has agreed to air one two-hour segment on NBC in October comprising the entire games.

The entire Paralympic games, all 471 medal events, in one small segment. Boy, that works.

And as I've already said, I understand the economic reasons behind everything. I get it. But NBC could at least do something.

There is a reason the United States is behind China and Great Britain in the gold medal count. There is a reason the United States has won barely more total medals than the Ukraine or Spain.

Nobody here knows that they are going on.

Sure, you probably have heard of the Paralympics. At the very least, you should have heard of them. But did you know that they are currently going on, that they've been going on for the past week?

I doubt it.

If anyone televised it, whether it was NBC or ESPN, or even a fringe network like Versus, you can bet people will pay attention. In a world with enough people crazed for sports, we'll watch.

We'll watch, that is, if it is on.

And if it is on, some little boy or girl who is handicapped, whether mentally or physically, whether genetically or through some accident—it does not matter—will watch and say, “I want to be the next Erin Popovich.”

The same little boys or girls who last month watched Michael Phelps and wanted to be the next him, even though they know in their hearts that it can never be.

It's depressing to want something that you know you can never get, ever, no matter if everything goes your way.

And you can bet your behind that little kids in Canada and Great Britain and China have watched the Paralympics and become inspired to become a world champion.

The same world champion as Michael Phelps or Nastia Liukin or Serena and Venus Williams.

In the general scheme of it, there's no real difference between Phelps and Popovich: both have won 14 gold medals and are the best short-distance swimmers in the world.

Well, let me retract that last statement.

There's one real difference between the two. Thanks to NBC, no one saw any of Popovich's remarkable achievements. No little boy or girl is going to idolize her.

And trust me, they should. There are no better athletes in the world.

There are Olympic equals, but none that are better.