Yes, I know what I said at the end of my David Stern screed in yesterday's paper, about being "as unhappy at the start of a new season as I have been in years.'' And yes, I'm bleary-eyed this morning from watching TNT's preseason special, then the Spurs-Blazers game with the banner being unveiled, then the Lakers-Rockets game with Kobe getting booed in intros at Staples Center, then cheered after scoring a couple of baskets in a row. Sad. I was more willing to deny myself of sleep for the first night of eight months of NBA basketball than I was for the World Series. Also, as you surely noticed, more willing to blog about this than about that. Sorry.

It would be dishonorable for me to make predictions now, with the season already started, so I won't. Too bad, because, I must remind you, I picked the two Finals teams last season. But no way do I get that lucky two years in a row. You wouldn't buy who I was picking anyway: Dallas Mavericks vs. ... Washington Wizards. Both of whom should have at least made their conference finals last season, except that the Mavs choked and the two most significant players on the Wizards got hurt right before the playoffs. Nope, I know you're still not buying it. That's why I'm not predicting it, OK?

Anyway, about opening night and more:

* Excellent bounce-back by Stern on the Knicks situation. It's as if he re-read his comments from recent weeks -- or finally grasped the fallout from them -- and said to himself, "I really didn't come strong enough on it, did I?''

* Give Magic Johnson a lot of credit, for going on the "Inside the NBA'' set while the Kobe-trade talk was reaching new heights, and not only not backing off of any questions about it, but also taking shots at both Kobe and the team he serves as a VP. His point: Kobe blew it four years ago by not mending fences with Shaq, and the Lakers blew it by giving in to him. Not exactly news, but pretty important for Magic to say it.

* Not too much pressure on Andrew Bynum, now known dually as the guy the Lakers wouldn't trade for Jason Kidd, and as the guy Kobe gutted via cameraphone for those two fans last summer. (Yes, the actual video is no longer available, and neither is the site the two "entrepreneurs'' created to market it.) So, with so many eyes on him last night, another damning video surfaces on TNT -- of Phil Jackson chewing him out for arriving a half-hour late. Maybe, just maybe, Kobe wasn't exactly wrong about this.

* The Spurs, the most monochromatic champion of all time in any sport, even managed to put on a dull ring ceremony. Including a perfunctory thank-you speech to the fans from Tim Duncan. Not that he wasn't sincere or heartfelt, it was just ... completely devoid of expression or emotion. It was him, and the franchise, to a T. Oddly enough, the game was hit-or-miss until tipoff on being sold out, which instantly brings Duncan's declaration that these are "the best fans in the NBA'' into doubt.

* On the other hand, the Spurs managed to sign Duncan to a cap-friendly $40 million extension. How can you not appreciate that?

* Portland's going to be good one day, but not this year, and not just because they don't have Greg Oden. They're really talented, are very well coached, and can probably hang with teams most of every game and in the standings for decent stretches. But they're so young, and they aren't even close to meshing yet. They gave the Spurs a nice run. Amazingly, they don't seem to miss Zach Randolph or Steve Francis at all.

* Speaking of Franchise: chained to the Houston bench last night. I continue to repeat: What happened to his career?

* The Rockets, with Rick Adelman coaching them and with Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady playing the way they did, have a chance to make a deep run into the playoffs. The Lakers, as they stand right now, have no chance.

* Available only on League Pass and on upper-tier sports packages: a real rout by Utah at Golden State. The Warriors were barely a .500 team last year, after all, insane playoff run and all. Still, a respectable showing considering that an earthquake struck late in the first quarter.

* Tonight, Wizards open at Indiana. Even better, on Friday they're the home-opening guest of The Cover Boys, aka The Consensus East Champs, aka the Celtics. Meanwhile, tonight the Cavaliers raise their "We Disgraced the 2007 NBA Finals'' banner.

* In closing, a choice between Kobe and A-Rod for who is currently the biggest pig in professional sports.

Posted by David Steele at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

Woke up this morning to wall-to-wall coverage of Manny Ramirez's "it's not the end of the world'' comment from yesterday afternoon. On Mike and Mike in the Morning on ESPN Radio and ESPN2, the two were talking about it, calling experts about it and taking calls and e-mails about it. My first instinct was to defend Ramirez, because it seemed, once again, as if fans, especially Red Sox fans (and you know who you are and how you are) were pinning the blame on Ramirez when the Red Sox lose and pretty much taking him for granted when they win (for example, in 2004, when he was the World Series MVP and a monster day in and day out throughout the playoffs, the mantle of hero was pinned on Mr. Bloody Sock).

Also, the depictions of him as some kind of baseball idiot savant, some kind of RBI-producing Rain Man, always has struck me as demeaning and patronizing, and ignorant of how, crazy as it sounds, he didn't come out of the womb swinging a bat (to paraphrase an old Isiah Thomas quote) and actually worked hard throughout his life to get to the majors and become one of the most devastating hitters of this era.

But that's neither here nor there. With all this ranting and raving about millionaire ballplayers who don't bleed hard enough for their team (pun completely intended), I figured it was worth it to see how the Boston papers were handling this controversy. And lo and behold, here in today's Boston Globe ... ready for this? Some perspective. And evidence that the one killer quote was pulled completely out of context, and blown way the hell out of proportion.

And for me to say that, someone who despises when athletes hide behind the "quoted out of context'' line, that's saying something. But Ramirez's quote was neatly snipped and removed from any context, any flow of his thoughts, any larger picture or point.

Here's what the Globe quoted him as saying, in the sixth and seventh paragraphs of its story on the breaking of his lengthy silence with the reporters, on the off-day of the ALCS:

"We're just going to go have fun and play the game," he said. "That's it. If we go play hard and the thing doesn't come like it's supposed to come, we'll move on. We'll come next year. Why should we panic? We've got a great team. If it doesn't happen, good. We'll come next year and try to do it again.

"We're confident every day. It doesn't matter how things go for you. We're not going to give up. We're just going to go and play the game, like I've said, and move on. If it doesn't happen, so who cares? There's always next year. It's not like the end of the world or something." 

Is it just me, or does the whole bit about not panicking, having confidence in what a great team this is, and not giving up sort of change the way everything else sounds?

I think it's just me. Or maybe no one has really seen or heard the surrounding quotes.

Or what preceded it: it seems that this dovetailed out of a huge (and, to me, pointless) discussion of his watching and raising his arms after his home run in Game 4, while the Sox were being pounded. Apparently, the Indians didn't like. Why they should have cared isn't clear, since they won the game and are one win away from the Series, but those "unwritten rules'' (these rules; unfortunately, we're making you pay to read this) say they're supposed to care. Ask Casey Blake.

So this all starts with Ramirez having to defend his being happy that he didn't let his team get shut out in a playoff game, and spirals into him saying he wasn't going to lose his mind over the possible outcome to Game 5, into one sentence from that speech being ripped from the midst of it and used to beat him over the head in a nationwide forum on his professionalism.

Then there's this, from that same Globe story:

Ramírez, unlike some of his teammates, hasn't slowed this offseason. He started hot in the ALDS and continued hot in the ALCS. He has been on base in 19 of his 31 postseason plate appearances. He has hit four home runs, tying David Ortiz for the most by a member of the Red Sox in one postseason. He is hitting .429 with a .613 on-base percentage and a 1.000 slugging percentage. He has 10 walks. He is patient, taking pitches, and at the same time, he is mashing the ball.

But dammit, he's being too flashy while he does it. And he's not offering to sacrifice a kidney for the Red Sox to win tonight.

Posted by David Steele at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
                    

Cris Collinsworth, on the halftime show of NBC’s Sunday night game, said that this year’s New England Patriots are "the best team I’ve ever seen.’’ That’s right. Collinsworth, who played in two Super Bowls seven years apart against 49ers teams led by Bill Walsh and Joe Montana, and who played during the era of the 1985 Bears, threw down the history card six games into this regular season.

Here we go again.

It started long ago, but it’s way out of hand now. Did you know that there is already talk that Devin Hester, after 22 career regular-season games, is the best return man in NFL history? That Reggie Bush, 18 games into his career, was the biggest draft bust in NFL history? That Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz are the best 1-2 hitting duo in baseball history? (Yes, Ramirez himself is the one who said it, but lots of writers lapped it up.) That Josh Beckett is the best big-game pitcher in baseball history?

We ridicule Bill Walton for his habit of going way over the top on his observations (personal favorite from a few years ago: "Robert Horry defends the inbounds pass better than any big man in NBA history’’). But face it. We are all Bill Walton.

We obviously have learned nothing from the Rose Bowl of two years ago (USC, the greatest college football team of all time – hold it … never mind). And we’re obviously learning nothing from the Colorado Rockies, who are actually accomplishing something for the ages. This is legitimate, un-subjective, exaggeration-proof history we’re viewing; this is something that can’t be blown out of proportion.

This is also proof that it’s wisest to let an actual season – or, in some cases a couple of seasons, or a decent chunk of a career – play out before we anoint a team or player or coach as deity or loser. Because anything can happen. In the case of the Patriots, it’s the NFL. The season is just too long. At this point it would be a shock if the Patriots didn’t win the Super Bowl and a bigger shock if they didn’t even get there. But it’s happened like that already. Just two years ago, right, Indianapolis?

It’s not necessary. It’s not fun, either. Is the point of all these venues and outlets for sports ideas and opinions strictly to get the most outrageous opinion that comes to mind out into the open and get people arguing about it? Is it to become the name everyone is talking about ("Wow, did you hear what Collinsworth said?’’)? Once upon a time, Collinsworth was above all that.

Maybe the Patriots will prove themselves to be the best NFL team ever assembled. But if you’re saying that in October, then you’re just being irresponsible, and personally I’m tired of being beaten over the head 24 hours a day by irresponsibility. If you’re that giddy over your team with two-thirds of the season left to play, please, for all our sakes, try to hold it in a little bit longer.

Posted by David Steele at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
                    

Greetings from the San Francisco Bay Area, site of the Ravens-49ers game Sunday -- and home of BALCO, where another elite athlete getting busted for performance-enhancing drugs only made it to the bottom of the front page of the paper that broke nearly every major story about the place.

That's nothing against my former employers, the S.F. Chronicle, because they called it on Marion Jones years ago. It just so happened that word of her confession came through The Washington Post yesterday. She's already made the walk of shame to the courthouse in White Plains, N.Y., today, and very soon will plead guilty to, among other things, lying to investigators about her drug use. Or, to put it another way, to use the Barry Bonds Ploy, the old "I thought it was flaxseed oil'' routine. Which, by the way, has worked well for Barry Bonds, since he hasn't made the walk of shame yet.

(The other obvious Bonds comparison: They appeared to have made their choices for the same reason -- to catch up to the competition. They both were among the best in the world before they started using; Jones was a teenage prodigy, but apparently either plateaued or saw that she was going to plateau in the face of other runners who were using. Next thing you know, she and her colleagues are getting "nutritional supplements'' from Victor Conte, which seemed perfectly legal, mainly because testing procedures at the time couldn't detect them. As a friend and colleague said last night, watch what you say today about some athlete being "clean,'' because you don't know what's been invented already that won't be able to be detected for another five or 10 years.)

Apparently we won't have to wait long before Jones, the American's Golden Girl from 2000 in Sydney, with three golds and two bronzes, gets her medals yanked and her records vacated by the International Olympic Committee, and sees her career ended for good when the World Anti-Doping Agency gets through with her.

Let the asterisks shower begin, again. Told you to be careful how you threw those things around, because you don't know where they'll land. Yeah, yeah, the home-run record -- but now, the reputation of the United States in track and field on the Olympic stage, then, now and probably forever. She's only one of the most decorated American athletes of all time.

If nothing else, though, Marion Jones will go down as one of the most accomplished liars to come through the scene in any sport. Just as smooth, engaging, endearing and convincing as you please. Flash the grin, look dead in your eye, flip on the sincerity and let the falsehoods fly. Sold it so well, a lot of very respectable people in this business mounted heated defenses of her at every turn, talking about how she was being persecuted because she was a big name. (Shocking, then, that when time came to really come clean publicly, it was in the form of a leaked letter to her family and friends, without facing the public she bamboozled all those years.)

I was unfortunate enough to witness a lot of it in the buildup toward Sydney, at Sydney, at between-Games competitions and at the track and field trials for the 2004 Games. Do you vaguely remember the World Track and Field Championships this past summer in Japan? Probably not, because it was barely on TV and barely covered in the papers or elsewhere, and much of the reason given had to do with steroids taint. It was the same way eight years ago. And check out this load of bull-hooey from the Golden Girl, back then in 1999: "Over the last couple of weeks, our beautiful and lovely sport has been marred by all of this.'' She forgot to include: "Marred by people like me.''

But Jones, we now know, has been full of it for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time.

Yet even as we watch her career and reputation crumble, you have to wonder: one by one, the feds are picking off all the major BALCO figures, one way or another -- and they still can't pin anything on Bonds. That completely defies logic. It's like Eliot Ness chasing and chasing Al Capone and getting everyone surrounding and attached to him, and Capone still thumbing his nose at him, going to operas and strolling through hotel lobbies and giving that half-scowl, half-sneer to everyone. OK, I have no idea if he really did that; that scenario was lifted straight from DeNiro in The Untouchables.

The one bright light in all of this: today, even in her moment of international humiliation, would you rather be Marion Jones, or Travis Henry? Or, worse, Travis Henry's kids?

Meanwhile, in another totally unrelated story ... who would you rather be today, Isiah Thomas or Bob Barker?

Posted by David Steele at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

A New York federal court jury just found that Knicks general manager and head coach Isiah Thomas sexually harassed a former team vice president, and that his Madison Square Garden superiors allowed it to go on and then fired the V.P. after she complained to them about it. (A pre-emptive warning: pretty much every link herein has language and content unsuitable to many.)

The headline above is a major understatement. Training camp starts this week, as with all NBA teams, and the Knicks are in the toilet.

It's hard to think of another pro sports organization that's come off looking worse than this trial made the Knicks look. And that's saying a lot, with all the franchises tainted by steroid allegations and failed drug tests and defensive coach signal-stealing. Treating women who work for the team, from cheerleaders to interns to executives, like dirt, makes all of that pale in comparison. According to reports of the testimony in the trial, that's exactly what went on constantly, and the offenders extend from players like Stephon Marbury, to Thomas, right to the very top, chairman James Dolan. Check the tons of coverage from the various New York papers: Newsday, the Times, the Daily News, the Post.

And as a bonus, Thomas did a video deposition that not only hurt his defense, but did severe damage to the perpetually-damaged reputation and image of black men all over America. A personal note to Isiah, a Hall of Fame player, an engaging personality and informative interview and probably target of slightly-exaggerated criticism over his coaching and GM work over the years: Speak for yourself. You don't speak for me, or the millions of other men who don't regularly refer to our women as "b-----s'' under any circumstances. By the way, Don Imus is sending you a case of champagne. I guess you know why.

I mean, dammit, we have to answer questions about Michael Vick all year, and now this?

I probably wouldn't care that much more about this than about any of the other sordid incidents taking place all year long, except that the Knicks were my first favorite team when I was a kid, the Frazier-Reed-Bradley-Red Holzman Knicks. Even after becoming a Bullets fan, I wasn't going to let go of the Knicks. And, of course, full disclosure, I covered them in the mid-90s when Riley, Ewing, Starks and Mase played. If this sort of culture was going on back then, I don't know of anyone who was aware of it. Then again, Dolan and his cronies hadn't taken over yet. Ewing may have been dogging it up at the Gold club in years past, but as far as anyone knew this wasn't going on in-house, with stars and interns.

Thus, the Knicks take a late lead as the most repulsive pro sports franchise in the land. But it's only October.

Posted by David Steele at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)