Skip Prosser is dead. Completely out of nowhere came that thunderbolt a few hours ago. And now, it seems fair and appropriate to ask the question on everybody's mind even before this horrific news:

Is this the worst week you can remember in sports, ever?

I know, technically, it has been more than a week since the avalanche began with Michael Vick's indictment. But between then and now, we've seen the NBA ref scandal, the almost-daily Tour de France disgraces, the acceleration of the Barry Bonds mess, a first-base coach killed by a line drive, and even a couple more depressing extra chapters to already-miserable tales: reprimands in the Pat Tillman cover-up, and Mike Nifong taking another step toward completely 'fessing up.

And now, the death of a coach about whom I personally have never, ever heard an unkind word spoken. So now, just add college basketball to the list of sports you have to watch with either a knot in your stomach or a lump in your throat.

I'm only in my early 40s, so I go back only so far. But the weeks that stand out for me, as ones in which it seemed as if the misery would never stop, are the week Len Bias died in June 1986 (and as if that wasn't bad enough, amazingly a week later the Cleveland Browns' Don Rogers also died of a cocaine overdose), and the week of Sept. 11, 2001. But those were singular tragic events with massive impact on their own. This has just been an endless procession, day after day of depressing events that make you want to turn off the TV, afraid of what you'll hear or see next, that make you question why you care about sports as much as you do if it's going to hurt this much and suck away this much of your happiness.

I'm not alone on this, am I? And are there other weeks anyone out there can remember as generating those feelings?

I really wish that getting absorbed in the Cal celebration was enough, as Peter Schmuck suggested. But it ain't working. It wasn't quite getting it done before today, and now, definitely not.

Posted by David Steele at 5:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
                    

Wake the kids and gather them around the computer screen, because they need to learn this important lesson: If you want to be a celebrity and have your major character flaws and social irresponsibility laughed off, be a pre-teen pop music or movie star instead of a pro athlete. Then, your criminal behavior won't be treated like a national crisis and a poor example for the youth -- it will be played for yuks and giggles.

For example: this report, filed by CNN (!) and aired this morning on Channel 45's morning news show. It's about Lindsay Lohan's arrest a couple of days ago. Sort of. You'd think it was a promo for her next movie, about a wild, free-spirited teen who just can't stay out of trouble, the little tow-headed scamp.

What it is about, is how Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum dressed her figure in prison stripes, with fans posing next to it. And how her arrest made her cancel her appearance on Leno, so that Rob Schneider could imitate her. And about how her clever fashion accessory, the ankle-bracelet alcohol monitor, not only wasn't as cute as you'd think, but apparently wasn't very effective. And how fans in the street just can't keep their out-of-control young bombshells straight -- they couldn't pick Lohan out of a collection of mugs of Paris, Britney and Nicole. And how her police mug shot at least wasn't as crazed-looking as James Brown's or Nick Nolte's.

Knee-slapping fun all around!

And this is for a barely 21-year-old multiple offender and repeat-rehab failure (she had just gotten sprung less than two weeks ago) who was caught speeding down a California highway in pursuit of her ex-personal assistant's mother, drunk and with cocaine in her pocket, according to police. Imagine if she had plowed into a family's minivan and killed them all. It would've been a laff riot!

Better yet -- imagine if (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) she had been caught owning a house where dogs were trained to fight to the death and were electrocuted, hanged, drowned and slammed to the ground when they lost? Oh, the fun a cable news network could have with those shenanigans! Girls gone wild, part XXVII, you know what I mean?

How the family of the Worldwide Leader hasn't thought of this is amazing. Lighten up the grave, gravity-laden Michael Vick coverage with a zany montage of his chuckle-inducing bouts with the boys in blue. Play up how he's just a fast-living, freewheeling ingénue whose hijinks while trying to shake his goody-two-shoes image gets eaten up by his always-adoring fans. What a crack-up that would be!

Somewhere, Darryl Strawberry (not to mention generations of players hit with moralizing finger-wagging and lecturing before and after him) is watching this all and grimacing.

So, remember: You can act 12 different kinds of fool and come up with as many creative ways to break laws as your illegal substance-addled mind can conceive, and a large part of the public (and, shamefully, media) will smirk, joke and chuckle at your plight. As long as you're cute enough, blond enough and precocious enough, that is. Just don't pick up a ball and try any of that, because you'll then become the scourge of decent society and be vilified like you'd never imagine.

Now that I think of it, wouldn't that be a great movie -- a new version of "Freaky Friday,'' one of Lohan's signature flicks, except with Vick playing the Jamie Lee Curtis role? Through some kind of kooky magic trick, Vick and Lohan switch bodies and personalities for a day, so that Vick sees what it's like to live her life, and Lohan gets to live his life. He can get the fluffy celeb treatment when he screws up, and she can get called a thug and a lowlife and a piece of human garbage and a word that starts with "n'', and have people proclaim that because of her, they'll never spend another dime on movies again, because the whole business is full of people like her who'd be in the penitentiary if they weren't lucky enough to be able to recite some lines in front of a camera.

I'd camp out on line to get a ticket to that.

Posted by David Steele at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
                    

Technically, I'm off from the column for a few weeks, and the blog will be less frequent, mainly when events dictate. But this event dictated it.

The last 45 minutes of David Stern's news conference today on the Tim Donaghy scandal was as riveting as anything you'll see on TV, not just during this dead time of year in sports, but any time. The first 15 or 20 minutes was hard to sort through -- the main points he made were that the NBA had questions for and about Donaghy before they were informed on June 20 that he was part of an FBI investigation into betting on games, and that he believed at this point that this was "an isolated incident.'' But it picked up dramatically once he finished filling the media in on the the background and started taking questions.

Unfortunately, he couldn't -- not didn't, couldn't -- allay any concerns that this doesn't run deeper than it has run so far, or that the league's credibility won't suffer terribly. One reporter did reference the old point-shaving scandals in college basketball in New York and other places in the 1950s, and Stern said that eventually, the game recovered and is red-hot now. But it's 50 years later, and the entire landscape of the sport changed before it took on its current popularity.

Left in the air was the true extent of the organized crime ties in this story -- Stern said there was only so much he could say about that, and did point out that he once had gotten a warning from the sports books in Vegas about questionable point spreads "20 years ago,'' and that while there was a subtle difference between legal betting in Vegas and the world of illegal betting, there was little difference in terms of how off-limits it all was in terms of officials. But there probably were more questions that could be answered by the FBI than by Stern.

He did use the term "rogue'' in describing how he felt it was only Donaghy, and that he felt the way any major institution can be victimized by a "rogue'' criminal despite all the safeguards in place (like a rogue FBI or CIA agent, or judge). He did have to acknowledge that his belief that it's only Donaghy is limited to what he knows at this very moment. That's all he can possibly know, and he didn't give a sense that he believed it did go deeper. But there's no way that can relieve any fears.

He said he was committed to being more "transparent'' about the refs, although he believed the way the NBA protected officials was not necessarily wrong, but just needed to be opened up more. Very frustrating, though, were reports that Donaghy had been questioned and disciplined for off-the-court incidents of anger and even betting. That goes to the core of one of my biggest issues with this whole thing: scrutiny and discipline of players is always and always will be painfully transparent -- in the interest of ensuring public confidence in the league's image and integrity, the NBA makes sure we know if, say, Rasheed Wallace or Ron Artest or Stephen Jackson are in any sort of trouble.

But that never is the case with officials -- they are defended relentlessly and their misdeeds protected from public view, and the heavy fines dealt out to players and executives (hello, Mark Cuban) who complain about officiating. Improving transparency shouldn't be hard when there really has been none so far; if the NBA raises it to the level of the transparency to the moves made against the players, that would be a start.

On that topic, it will bother me until the end of time that the NBA -- led by Stern, unabashedly responding to the outcry from the public, sponsors and advertisers who were just as short-sighted -- spent way, way, WAY more time worrying about the image and conduct of the players, and instituting dress codes and laying down the law after arrests and brawls, even putting a needless age limit in place, while a scandal involving an official betting on games and possibly fixing them in connecting with the mob floated right on by everybody. The players were demonized at the exact same time an official was flouting the integrity on which the game's very existence rests. Shame on all of them. The head of the players' union, by the way, was wondering the same thing, according to this column in yesterday's New York Times (subscription required). 

Also significant from today: While acknowledging the other allegations against Donaghy and the justification for allowing him to resign (Stern said he did not fire him because he did not want to play any role in compromising the FBI investigation), he did not go as far as saying he knew of evidence that games were fixed. He did not think at this point he needs to go to game film to find ways Donaghy might have compromised the game results, but he didn't rule it out, either. And he said he knows the basics of how Donaghy was able to violate the rule about officials betting on games, but didn't say how he did it.

Overall, Stern did about as well as anyone could be expected in a crisis like this, given that there really never has been a crisis like this in any other sport. Roger Goodell is still new enough that you can't guess how he'd handle something like this, but it's not a stretch to say that Bud Selig wouldn't have done 1/100th as well. Selig struggled last week to explain why he was at the ballpark in Milwaukee when Barry Bonds was playing, and he's exposed himself too many times in front of Congress to give us a reason to believe he would handle something like this well.

The start of the news conference showed us Stern as uncomfortable in a public situation as anyone has ever seen him, and I can say I've attended plenty of his news conferences and sessions over the years, the annual ones at All-Star games and the Finals, at appearances at playoff games, regular-season games at various locations, during labor negotiations and the 1999 lockout, and during controversies. I spoke to him almost too often 10 years ago when Latrell Sprewell choked P.J. Carlesimo, and that remains one of the more unpleasant situations he's ever dealt with, including the brawl in Auburn Hills. He'd never looked downright queasy the way he did in the first 15 or 20 minutes today.

The back-and-forth with the media (always a strength of his) was incredibly engaging, and showed every emotion within him: pain, frustration, anger, even occasional confidence in what had been done to prevent it even when those things had failed. At that point, he looked as if he wanted to be there, as opposed to how he'd looked at the start. He wished he didn't have to be there, but he felt he had to answer questions, so he did, reasonably well.

The truth is, though, that there was nothing he could say that would answer all the questions, because he and the league are as accountable on this as Donaghy is.

Posted by David Steele at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

My favorite comment from yesterday's posting about Michael Vick came from Lori, who was so fired up, she sent it twice. Still, she said that if Vick continues to play, she'll never watch the NFL again. (The Tyson line was good, too, especially since at this point, Vick might be able to beat Tyson. Thanks, Lori.)

Some of the comments here have been a little extreme, and you don't have to look far, to other message boards, to see even harsher remarks, many of which go way over the line. But this one gets right to the heart of this situation:

How much, as a fan, are you willing to put up with from this league?

I touched on this a little in my column for tomorrow, but while the NFL's rep is damaged, every other sport had taken a hit in the bank account when a scandal comes along, or when players or anyone else connected with the sport messes up. Baseball brags about its attendance, but its TV ratings for its big events (All-Star Game, World Series) continue to plunge. (That's not even counting the damage from the 1994 strike it clumsily tried to undo.) And we've been over it too many times how bad the NBA has suffered from its reputation as a league of "thugs'' (God, I hate that word now). Ratings are bad for the Finals and attendances has been all over the place.

The NFL, though, never suffers from anything. In fact, it took until players were getting arrested literally every week in the past year before there was anything close to a public backlash. Fans are still unable to kick the habit, no matter how much they say they are offended. For the longest time, they were willing to believe that this wasn't a league issue, it was an individual player issue. Now we know otherwise, and now it's one of the marquee players involved.

Is this the year fans stop buying tickets? Stop going to games? Stop devoting their Sunday afternoons and nights, and Thursdays and Saturdays and whatever days the games are on, to the NFL? Do they dismiss it as something they should spend time, money and emotion on because incidents like this one offend them so much? Or are you willing to give it the benefit of the doubt you don't give the other sports?

The real underlying reason, of course, that Paul Tagliabue got away with ignoring the problem is because it never once affected the bottom line. Attendance was great, ratings were great, big sponsors didn't pull out, merchandise didn't slip - nothing. Fans kept it all afloat, while screaming about the character issues that were driving them away from the NBA and baseball.

Now that the NFL is at the biggest image-related crossroads it's ever been at, what do you do? Will you talk about how disgusted you are, or will you back it up?

Posted by David Steele at 6:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
                    

Not that this is a scientific survey, a clear-cut mandate or a perfect gauge of the public's opinions -- but the very early, very raw numbers tell us that the NFL has a monster P.R. issue to deal with now that Michael Vick has been indicted on federal dog-fighting related charges.

* Within the first hour of ESPN.com breaking the story (about 5:15 today), the number of comments on the story was approaching 300.

* The number of readers responding to a seven-question poll about Vick on the site was approaching 6,000.

* It had shoved a number of significant stories off the site's main page: the toxicology reports on wrestler Chris Benoit, Daunte Culpepper being released, and basketball officials in China drawing a line in the sand with the Milwaukee Bucks over draft pick Yi Jianlian. It's even temporarily silenced the clamor over Gary Sheffield (although the controversial interview itself airs tonight on HBO). 

* As of now, six message-board threads have been started on the Vick indictment on CBS Sportsline.com. Fox Sports' Web site has 19 pages of comments and growing. Three "Fanhouse'' blogs on AOL Sports went up even before the site had posted the AP version of the story. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a slew of staff-written stories up, starting on the site's front page.

And that's with the news barely an hour and a half old, and it doesn't factor in talk radio. It will only get worse. If it was any other league but the NFL, it would be devastated, in danger of never recovering. Even with it being the Nonstick Football League, this is going to stick.

Posted by David Steele at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)
                    

Thanks to all the readers who have responded to Sunday's column about the Dodgers' doc on HBO, and the idea of doing the same for the Colts. The reactions are split, between the older fans who want the memories revived, and the younger ones who are tired of hearing about it and are loyal to the Ravens.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what would make the flick so good. This is the eternal struggle of fans here. It swarmed to the surface the week of the Colts playoff game, but it never really goes away, and it doesn't take more than a flight-of-fancy column to bring it all up again. This doesn't happen in New York between, say, old Dodgers fans and new Mets fans, and I feel safe in saying it didn't even happen in 1969, when the Mets won a World Series for a generation of fans after the Dodgers left town. What's going on here is unique in all of sports. That, in a way, is an answer to the readers who pleaded to let the story die finally. It's never going to die. C'mon, the Dodgers thing was 50 years ago, and that has new life every time someone else does a movie or writes a book or goes on a talk show.

Meanwhile, on HBO last night, there was a movie about the Cubs. And you know there have been a couple of dozen books about the Red Sox just since breaking the Curse in '04, to go with the all the documentaries and the usual hollering and screaming about the pain of being a Sox fan. Isn't it a little annoying, being treated as if such fans have some kind of monopoly on suffering because of the market size they're in?

Anyway, on other subjects pondered while still trying to shake off this summer cold, or my allergies, or whatever the hell it is (anybody got any herbs or potions or homemade treatments they can send me?):

* The "on pace'' talk is in full swing. Junior passed Frank Robinson with his 587th homer last night, and A-Rod closed to within four homers of 500. Once upon a time, Griffey was assumed to be "on pace'' to pass Hank Aaron, and now, obviously, it's not going to happen. Now A-Rod is "on pace'' to pass Barry Bonds, as well as Aaron. Meanwhile, Bonds hasn't passed Aaron yet himself; he didn't play in Chicago last night (check his comment on the game at the bottom), and has been stuck on 751 for two weeks. Point is: it's really, really, really hard to get to 756. Bonds has been cheating (allegedly), and he's struggling like mad to make it at age 42. Griffey never came close. Everyone's assuming it's just a matter of time for A-Rod. Why?

* I wonder who will be the first commentator to seriously check into whether Gary Sheffield is right, rather than searching for proof that he's wrong? I mean, Sheffield has said it, and Kenny Lofton has backed him up. There have been no more than a handful of black players on the Yankees during the Joe Torre years, just as there have been no more than a handful on any team in the last decade since the numbers started shrinking. If two of them come out and say this about the manager, and none has come out to contradict it (the decade-old stories about Strawberry at the victory parade should at least be updated), wouldn't some instinct within the head of any real journalist think, "Where there's smoke, there's fire''? Or do four rings turn you into a made man, or give you some sort of lifetime of immunity?

* Now, Beckham might not even make it to his belated American debut Saturday, because of an ankle injury. Don't worry, though. Just as the stretcher comes out, he'll stop writhing in pain, jump up and join the action. It's what soccer players do.

* If it were anybody but Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson, he'd get a one-game suspension, two at the most, for their court cases. That's the precedent. But their precedent -- you know, Auburn Hills -- multiplied the penalties. It's hard to blame David Stern on this. He has to answer questions about them constantly, and isn't getting anyone to listen to the idea that the NBA shouldn't be judged by two of the lowest common denominators. To too many people, the brawl defines the NBA. It's the same principle that made him kick out Amare Stoudemire for leaving the bench in the playoffs.

* The sad thing is, Artest has a good heart somewhere in there: he is, at this moment, on a players' union mission to feed kids in Kenya. On the other hand, he put his hands on his wife, with their child in the house at the time. Both acts count when making up your mind on him.

* Summer international hoops news: James Gist (Maryland) and Joey Dorsey (Douglass High, Baltimore) are on the U.S. Pan American Games team, and Greivis Vasquez is suiting up for Venezuela in the FIBA Americas tournament later this month -- also known as the Beijing Olympics qualifier, with the USA team (featuring Carmelo Anthony).

* One last basketball note: Joe Smith, now a Bull. You can hardly knock a career that's going into its 13th season. Still, he's on his seventh different team and has been on two teams twice. That has to be a record for a former No. 1 overall pick.

Posted by David Steele at 7:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
                    

Tony LaRussa, of all people, inadvertently touched on a reason very few people, if any, have given over the years to why the baseball All-Star Game has lost so much of its earlier luster.

In the post-game press conference carried by ESPN News last  night, the NL manager was asked about whether it was fun or interesting or unique to see a player like Ichiro on a night like this, since he played in a different league. LaRussa's answer, essentially, was that he's seen Ichiro plenty of times on TV, so it wasn't as if he was unfamiliar with him. Then he went ahead praising the kind of player he is - so his bigger point kind of disappeared.

That's the problem. With all due respect to colleague and "O, by the Way'' pinch-hitter Milton Kent, for me it's never been so much the interleague play aspect that's diluted the impact of this game. It's that once upon a time (alert: prepare for an old-coot rant), the only time you saw teams and players from the other league during the season was in the one or two nationally-televised games on the weekend, on Saturday afternoon or Monday night, if the networks were doing Monday night baseball that season. Or, on "This Week in Baseball'', when it was narrated by Mel Allen.

If you lived here and saw Orioles games on TV, you didn't see NL games except when the networks picked them as the game of the week. So when All-Star time came around, it was more than seeing Pete Rose face Jim Palmer, it was just seeing Pete Rose and Willie Stargell and Tom Seaver and Lou Brock and the like, period. It's hard to remember when you really couldn't get all the games you could ever want every night, not to mention highlights all night and all morning, but that's how it was, just a quarter-century ago.

You know what else? Gas was only 50 cents a gallon, and we listened to music on record players instead of these newfangled i-thingamajigs. Sorry, lost my train of thought.

Anyway ... to be honest, I can't blame the lack of interest in the All-Star Game on the very premise I'm making - there are a lot of other reasons to not be all that excited about the game, none bigger than the constant bitching and moaning about who "belongs'' in the game. But an event like the All-Star Game can't be that special if you've seen everything the player can do millions of times, the mystery is removed, and you realize you'd rather see it when the game means something rather than in an exhibition (never mind the inauthentic "this time it counts'' routine, the false importance forced into this by the idiotic tie game from a few years back).

It's still a nice event, I suppose, but it just isn't as important as it used to be. That's life. It's not necessarily a reason not to pay attention to it, but don't feel as if you're doing something wrong if you don't.

Meanwhile ...

* Also noted in that same postgame press conference: yes, that reader who pointed it out earlier this season is right - LaRussa is looking more like Harvey Keitel every day.

* Couldn't they have figured out how to get more left-handers into the home run contest Monday? Why have a contest in that ballpark if you have almost no chance of hitting any into the water? This is where Bonds and Griffey would have been huge additions.

* By the way, it didn't seem to bother anybody at all that Griffey backed out of the contest, but we got beaten over the head for an entire weekend with the insult and disrespect Bonds displayed to the fans by not participating. Is there a player in any sport with more of a free pass than Ken Griffey Jr., just because he's not Barry? Well, more than Griffey and Roger Clemens.

* As much as the increased scrutiny of  NFL player conduct is needed, this business of players being pulled over, very public arrests and arraignments being made, then the charges either getting dropped, or not getting filed at all, or being beaten fairly easily in court, is unnerving. First Tank Johnson, now Steve McNair. I'm not saying there's anything sinister about it, just putting it out there. Now there's this, from Pacman Jones. Granted, Tank and Pacman dug their own holes previously - but guns in the house and shootings in the club aren't, and never will be, the same as being pulled over for something extremely subjective. Certain readers out there know what I mean. Actually, I hope all readers out there know.

* On that topic, Brian Urlacher continues to float under the radar. As does Bill Maas. Again, just putting it out there. And while we're putting things out there, let's put this out there, too: brawl at the end of an Indy Car race last weekend, with one racer's father getting involved. Not unlike the scuffles that take place every other week after NASCAR races. Good thing it didn't happen on a basketball court, though, because then it would be a real scandal, probably getting Congress involved.

* Most fascinating yet ultimately meaningless spectacle of the summer: NBA summer league in Vegas, every day on NBA TV and now, today, on Comcast (Wizards v. Pistons). Unfortunately, no more Greg Oden (reg. req.), but still lots of Kevin Durant, the other draftees and assorted players you were wondering what had happened to.

* Stevie Francis, bought out in Portland as expected, according to the Washington Post's NBA blog. Now, maybe, will we see him resurrected as a player, instead of as a moody headache with a bloated contract? The bloated contract is out of the picture now.

Posted by David Steele at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
                    

Sacre bleu! Ay caramba! And whatever other condescending, mildly racist foreign phrases that would fit the situation. The point is, Tony Parker and Eva Longoria are now officially man and wife. They got it done today in Paris, in a civil ceremony officiated by the mayor. The real, star-studded church ceremony will take place tomorrow, on the day they've been publicizing for months, 7-7-07. According to this story, French law dictates that a mariage isn't official until a civil ceremony is conducted.

In an interview in Le Parisien (if you're fluent in the language or your computer is equipped with good translation software, here's the paper), Parker calls himself "the luckiest guy in the world.'' If that dress she wore to the ceremony is any indication (she changed into another one for the actual event), he's not lying.

According to this, three of the other four Desperate Housewives will attend tomorrow, all but Marcia Cross. You experts on the show out there, you know which one she is; I don't. Meanwhile, Parker becomes the first European player to win NBA Finals MVP and then marry a super-fine TV star. (It almost was Magic Johnson, except for the part about being European and marrying a TV star.)

The best news: they reportedly had all their pre-nuptial celebrations in St. Tropez, including a bachelor party for Parker. And by all reports, Pacman Jones wasn't anywhere near it.

Posted by David Steele at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

Take that headline whatever way you like. Kobe Bryant did say yesterday, at his youth basketball camp in L.A., that he spoke in person two weeks ago to the G.M. he had previously ridiculed, Mitch Kupchak, and apologized for - well, for having ridiculed him to a couple of total strangers in a parking lot while they recorded it on their cell phone.

Said Kobe: " 'I went in just to tell [Kupchak], "You know what, man? I'm sorry that thing came out like that. You never want that to happen." I just felt like as a man, that was important to say that to him. I could have easily picked up the phone and called him, but that's not something that I wanted to do. I wanted to go down and see him face-to-face and tell him that face-to-face.'"

As opposed to face-to-cell phone, or face-to-YouTube. Or, as in the case of the original trade-me, don't-trade-me, yeah-trade-me of last month, face-to-radio-host's-face.

By the way, we're talking about this video, if you haven't seen the clip yet (warning: adult language).

Speaking of video: alert Twilight Zone fans caught the episode that I referenced in this posting in late May, and in this column, earlier this week on the annual SciFi network marathon. Unfortunately, I missed it, but I got an excited phone call asking me if I had seen "the Kobe episode.''

Calling the episode by that name would probably work better than my original suggestion: that we call Kobe by the name of the kid in the episode - who, if you haven't seen it, completely destroys the town he lives in because when somebody does something that doesn't make him happy, or if they don't think good thoughts about him, he makes them pay in the worst way. (To answer the questions asked in that posting: his name is Anthony, and he's played by Billy Mumy, who also played Will Robinson in Lost in Space.)

Which is why you can imagine, in that meeting two weeks ago, Kupchak starting the conversation by saying: "It's good that you made fun of me to those two guys in the parking lot! That was real good, Kobe, it's good that you did that! It's good that you cursed and demanded that we trade Andrew Bynum! That's a good suggestion, real good! Isn't it good that he did that, Mr. Buss?''

Of course, the G.M. of the Lakers probably didn't actually say that. But it doesn't matter because, as Milton Kent pointed out in yesterday's O, By the Way, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers did it for him.

Between Kobe, Paris Hilton and the mayor messing with a TV anchor without the TV anchor telling her station, don't you wish you were spending this summer in La-La land? It's a lot less humid there, too.

Posted by David Steele at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Sorry about the recent gaps in the blog entries. I've been a little under the weather since returning from the post-Perlozzo firing Orioles trip to San Diego. Have you ever had that really bad head congestion, where you feel pressure all over your head including in your ears, so much that you can't even hear straight, and you're constantly coughing up this thick, multi-colored stuff and going through a whole box of tissues in one day and wiping goo out of the corners of your eyes?

Pretty disgusting, wasn't it? Didn't want to read that first thing in the morning, did you? Sure, but you watched that damn hot-dog eating contest yesterday. God, I'm getting nauseous just thinking about it.

Please tell me that you agree with me that the line has to be drawn at this "sport.'' That this does not require live national TV coverage, that ESPN can find enough programming to fill its four networks without resorting to this, that poker and rodeo and Arena football and ultimate fighting satisfy our desire for pseudo-sports without subjecting us to a gluttony contest.

And, by the way, that this is one reason our enemies hate us. I mean, we celebrate our nation's independence by lining people up and seeing how much crap they can force into their stomachs before they throw up, and sell tickets to it and televise it? What do the refugees fleeing Darfur think when they get to a military base, get fed and clothed and treated for their injuries, then sit on their cots and turn on cable and see people eating for entertainment purposes - not worms and maggots like in Fear Factor, but real, edible, (semi-)nourishing food?

I vehemently oppose this, both on moral and gastrointestinal grounds.

This phenomenon has grown way out of control. It used to be kind of a funny human-interest story, an extension of the kind of stuff they do at county fairs, pretty innocuous. Nathan's, of course, I can't hate on them; they make great dogs, and they've had their contest at Coney Island for years. It was just a routine slice of New York life. Then it went big-time, I'm not sure when, but all of a sudden there were eating celebrities (Takeru Kobayashi and The Black Widow) and regional variations, like the crabcake- eating contest at the harbor, which we cover every year. The police should come and shut it down. It's a waste of good crabcakes. Literally a waste, the way most of the contestants bow out, bent over a trash bin.

C'mon, you can tell by my photo up there on the upper right-hand side that I enjoy food. But that's the point - I enjoy food, not the act of shoveling it in until I can't hold any more down. Kobayashi was being treated like a hero, getting more coverage than Paris Hilton in the days leading up to yesterday's contest, his competitive-eating injury being covered like it was Tejada's wrist. And now this Joey Chestnut mook beats Kobayashi, sets a world record and "brings the title home'' to America, and he's being treated like Lance Armstrong. Uh oh, hold on, I'm feeling sick again ...

And they ran highlights on SportsCenter, focusing largely on the too-detailed moment when Kobayashi conceded the crown and the record, which I don't even want to think about anymore, much less describe. I can't believe they didn't come up with a graphic for it, like the "Chasing Aaron'' thing they do for Bonds. You know, a little circle in the corner with Kobayashi stuffing meat and buns in his mouth, then leaning over in a bucket, and spinning it around and morphing it into Chestnut cramming stuff in his hole, then leaning over, and the number "66'' popping up.

Stupid, isn't it? Well, not as stupid as the fact that ESPN Classic showed a marathon of past Nathan's contests last night.

You all have your own favorite proofs of the decline of American society - violent TV shows, explicit song lyrics, pay-per-view porn, graphic video games, 24-hour Anna Nicole coverage, blah blah blah. I'll take eat-til-you-puke competitions being presented as big-time events on The Worldwide Leader, and not look back.

Posted by David Steele at 8:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)