EL HOMBRE KNOWS SPORTS
Back when Allen Iverson was holding the Philadelphia 76ers hostage with his unique brand of bionic wrist shooting, a clever saying circulated among the wily wags who covered the team. It went like this:
“They say there’s no ‘I’ in team, and there’s no “team” in Iverson.”
Great stuff, no? Anyway, the point was pretty clear. So long as A.I. was getting his, it didn’t matter what else was going on. The Sixers would win some with him, and in 2001, Iverson (with a bit of help from Larry Brown) lifted the team to the NBA Finals. But that was the limit for Iverson, whose selfish game never allowed the franchise to surround him with other top-flight players, because they knew they wouldn’t see the ball.
If only Iverson had used his powers for good, he could have been one of the greatest point guards ever to pull on an NBA uniform. Just imagine how others would have lined up to play with a ridiculously quick guard who could penetrate at will, was unstoppable in the open court and looked to pass first. It didn’t happen, and last year, age finally caught up with Iverson. No longer able to carry a team on his narrow shoulders, he was asked to take on secondary roles with first Denver and then Detroit. His response in both cases was an upraised middle finger, and after the season he was cast off into the discount bucket, where only Memphis – make that the Grizzlies’ nitwit owner – was interested in claiming him.
You know what happened from there. Iverson was injured during training camp, and when he got healthy, he blanched at coming off the bench. Memphis dumped him, the Sixers picked him up, and his creaky body turned him into the type of complementary player that used to surround him during his prime. In these cases, players generally drift off into obscurity, either as afterthoughts on rotten teams (like the Sixers) or as reserves on winners. They don’t, however, become All-Stars.
Usually.
It’s impossible to blame Iverson for his ascension to the starting lineup of the Eastern Conference All-Stars. He didn’t concoct a computer program to stuff the e-ballot box – as far as we know. Nor did he go door-to-door soliciting votes. He merely forced his way out of Memphis – where “God” told him to go, if you believe AI’s mid-summer revelation – resurfaced in Philadelphia, shed a few tears, kissed some hardwood and then proved that he isn’t the player he once was.
Since joining the Sixers, Iverson has scored a modest 14.9 ppg and dished out 4.4 apg. He’s playing just under 33 minutes a game (a far cry from the 40-plus he used to average) and has missed some time due to arthritis, not exactly a condition that afflicts younger men. Iverson will be 35 this June, and his days of embarrassing rivals with his signature crossover and jet streaming the opposition in the open court are certainly over. The Sixers knew that when they signed him, as did the rest of the NBA, which passed on his services during the off-season. To his credit, Iverson is coping with his creeping mortality, making concessions to his diminishing physical skills by trying to be more of a (gasp!) team player.
Kudos to him for that, but his willingness to junk the me-first approach that made him equal parts thrilling and maddening is not reason for inclusion among the game’s best. It’s especially not worthy of a spot on the starting five. Iverson achieved that status solely due to fan ignorance that spawned a tidal wave of support. Boston’s Ray Allen received flak from all corners when he called for an end – or at least an amendment – to the process of selecting All-Star participants by fan vote. Those who back the system argued that since the game is an exhibition, staged solely for the fans (and to make a fat profit) the NBA’s loyal customers should choose the participants. That makes sense until you realize that making the All-Star team is more than just an opportunity to spend 48 defense-free minutes. Many players have clauses in their contract that give them bonuses for reaching that milestone. Others are judged Hall of Fame-worthy by the number of times they are selected.
As bad as Iverson’s election was, the fact that Tracy McGrady, who has played all of six games this year and averaged 3.2 ppg, almost received enough votes to join the West’s starting lineup was an even greater travesty. Thank goodness a late surge pushed Steve Nash past McGrady. Why couldn’t Me-Mac have done like Yao Ming and removed himself from the ballot? Ming, who won’t play this season, understood that millions of Chinese fans would have pulled his lever, so he bowed out, gracefully. McGrady lacked that kind of class.
The solution should incorporate fan voting, but it should also let players, coaches and/or media have a voice, the better to eliminate future fiascos like the Iverson selection and the McGrady near-miss. That way, perhaps the game will feature the best of the best, not the products of election fraud.
There’s no ‘I’ in team, and there shouldn’t be an Iverson in the All-Star Game.
* * *
EL HOMBRE SEZ: Golfers descended on Torrey Pines this week for a continuation of the “Who Gives A Crap Tour,” and no matter how much officials protest, Phil Mickelson and Scott Piercy can’t generate the same interest as Mr. Hot Sex. There’s no truth to the rumor PGA bigwigs are offering a $1 million bonus to the first rehab therapist who gives Tiger Woods a clean bill of health…Joel Branstrom, the Kansas high school hoops coach who was pranked by students who promised him Final Four tickets if he made a halfcourt shot (he made it, but they had no tickets for him) will be a guest of the NC2A at this year’s Final Four. After hearing about the organization’s generosity, Texas coach Rick Barnes asked for the same treatment – and wanted to know if he could bring his team with him…Wait a second. Cowboy Quarterback threw a stupid pass? Nooooo way! As much fun as it was to watch Brett Favre blow it in the last seconds of regulation last week against New Orleans (check out the radio call; it’s classic: http://www.nowpublic.com/sports/brett-favre-interception-radio-call-minnesota-radio-rips-favre-2563236.html ), you have to be impressed with his toughness. The Saints treated him like a piñata, and he kept coming back, albeit a little too dramatically. Now, we get to wait months to find out whether he’s returning. That ought to be a lot of fun.
* * *
YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT? It’s amusing to hear people try to figure out how much responsibility Sixers’ coach Eddie Jordan should take for the team’s awful, 15-30 record. The answer? None. When GM Ed Stefanski hired Jordan, he talked about how great it was going to be watching the Sixers run Jordan’s “Princeton Offense.” Stefanski conveniently forgot that the team had no point guard and that its highest-paid player, power forward Elton Brand, is a pick-and-pop type with few of the intuitive basketball skills needed for the scheme. Worse, by giving Andre Iguodala a huge contract and Jason Kapono nearly $13 mil for two years(!), Stefanski created one of the nastiest salary cap situations around. The Sixers may have to trade Iguodala and others for an ugly expiring contract just to get under the cap next year and avoid paying the luxury tax. And somebody wants to blame Jordan for that. Sure, the coach could have won a few more games if he had decided on a rotation earlier, but the team he has been handed is not prepared to run his offense, lacks a go-to scorer, doesn’t play very good defense and shoots poorly from outside. Brand is a shell of his former self, and the Sixers didn’t realize that a big reason he looked so good a few years back with the Clippers is that Sam Cassell was hurt, and Brand took a lot more shots than he usually did – yielding more impressive numbers. Jordan isn’t the best coach, but he has been given a nightmare of a roster. The best thing for the Sixers would be for a regime change. Sell the team, Mr. Snider, and let someone who cares about basketball take over.
* * *
AND ANOTHER THING: The NFL has been largely bulletproof when it comes to marketing itself over the past couple decades, but the league has made a huge mistake with the Pro Bowl, no matter how much commissioner Roger Goodell tries to convince us otherwise. About 48 of the 76 players initially announced to play in the game will be suited up and ready to go Sunday night in Miami, where upper deck tickets are reportedly selling for $20 bucks below asking price. Okay, so the Pro Bowl is a joke anyway, and no one should really care – other than the players, who loved going to Hawaii – whether the market for tickets is suffering. The real travesty is that the league is forcing Pro Bowlers from the Colts and Saints to make a special trip to Miami ahead of their teams and stand on the sidelines for the first half of the game, instead of preparing for the Super Bowl, which is only the main goal of every player in the league, except for Me-O. It’s asinine to torpedo your championship game so that an exhibition can have a little more tube appeal for espn. The NFL can try to spin this any way it wants, but it loses big. Let’s hope Goodell has the brains and guts to reverse field next season.
-EH-
Showing posts with label Tracy McGrady. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tracy McGrady. Show all posts
Friday, January 29, 2010
Thursday, February 19, 2009
How Dare He?
EL HOMBRE KNOWS SPORTS
With so much going on in the world of sports, from the negotiations to broadcast NASCAR’s weekly drama on the Soap Opera Network, to the contrived excitement of the NBA Slam Dunk Contest and Sheriff Buford T. Justice’s inability to make drug charges stick against Snoop Phelps, there was absolutely no reason to join the hysterical media chorus about Alex Rodriguez, his young and stupid cousin and their Cream of Cheat. Why not talk about how NFL Network draft analyst Mike Mayock is going to go nuts over some offensive lineman’s hip drop at this weekend’s Scouting Combine? Or whether Texas Tech actually thinks it can fire its wildly successful head coach and still lure 50,000 people out to the west Texas scrub every other Saturday.
That will all have to wait, and all because of an e-mail sent to me by an esteemed national radio host. Attached to it was a blog post by a Milwaukee talker with the sporting eye of an 80-year old double-cataract myope. This genius has decided that he is the smartest guy in the country, because he has defended Bud Sellout all along, and now he has been vindicated. This is a transparent case of Bratwurst City brotherhood, since Sellout is a former snake oil salesman, er, car dealer from Sudstown. And even though anyone who can honestly say the steroid mess in baseball can be blamed on everybody but the man in charge, is clearly in need of a refresher course on logic, El Hombre is steamed.
Looking for villains in this mess is like trying to find evidence of Mickey Rourke’s hard life and bad career decisions on his battered face. They are everywhere. And blaming Sellout for the whole mess is unfair. Without the strong supporting work of union goons Donald Fehr and Gene Ozra, baseball’s drug mess never could have erupted like the acne on Jose Canseco’s back. Without the willingness of players to risk their long-term health by taking everything from testosterone to infertility drugs to pills designed to fight narcolepsy, the game wouldn’t have been soiled like the Suleman octuplets’ diapers. And without a hero-worshipping group of fans and media, who marveled at the long-ball numbers being cranked out by power-hitting laboratory mutants, the game’s credibility wouldn’t be suffering worse than Joaquin Phoenix’s.
The word is conspiracy, and we were all in on it, at least for a while. And if we’re all guilty in some way, then Sellout is especially culpable, because he was in charge. There was a lot to dislike about Uberfuhrer Steinbrenner during his rein of terror atop the Yankee organization, but he got one thing right from the start: If you want to be the boss, you have to make the difficult decisions and stand by them. That’s what people in charge do. They face down the tough situations, choose to act and then withstand the inevitable criticism. They set the pace and then remain strong when others launch bombs at them. What do you think would have happened in London during WWII if Winston Churchill had remained sequestered in a bunker, when Nazi bombs were pelting every house and pub night after night? There would have been chaos and despair. Instead, Churchill surveyed the wreckage daily, promised things would change and endured the barbs of those who insisted it was his mismanagement that allowed the mess to take place. That’s leadership.
What we have now from Sellout is a cowardice that worsens daily. The commissioner has decided that he is not only innocent of all charges being brought against him in the court of public opinion, but that he needs to convince us that everybody else is guilty. There hasn’t been a leadership breech this grotesque since Neville Chamberlain decided Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy after all and surrendered much of Europe to the tyrant in a quest for “peace in our time.” Sellout is in full sprint, dashing away from his responsibilities as a leader, one of which is accepting the blame for previous mistakes.
The worst part of Sellout’s recent defense strategy is his outrage. How dare he take offense at those who accuse him of ineffectiveness and complicity during the past decade-plus? Where was his voice when the McGwire/Sosa love fest was “saving the game” in 1998? Where was his outrage in the ensuing years when home run totals piled up faster than Andruw Jones’ excess pounds? Why wasn’t he saying then that the union refused to implement a testing program? Why wasn’t he fighting with the same tenacity he is showing now to keep the sport he ran from becoming a cesspool of drug addicts and freak-show performers? Sellout said Monday, “I don’t want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn’t care about it.” Oh, you don’t? Well, then buy some of those high-priced earplugs rock musicians use, Bud, because you’re in for a crapstorm.
Sellout punked out with BALCO Bonds, refusing to take a stand either way on his pursuit of Hank Aaron’s record. He partied like a rap star as McGwire and Sosa injected their way to long-ball heaven. And only when the evidence became too overwhelming to ignore did he get serious about instituting a drug policy. Funny how the players’ association became a lot more malleable once it saw the public was irate over the steroid use. Think testing would have arrived earlier had Sellout pointed some bloodhound journalists to the smoking syringes back in the late ‘90s? You betcha.
So, stop with the outrage, Bud. Don’t tell us how far the sport has come, because it started in a performance-enhanced abyss created by your lack of leadership. For once during your tenure, have the cajones to admit you were wrong about the whole thing. Then again, since Sellout was part of the whole steroid era, it’s possible that part of his anatomy shrunk, just like those of the juicers he worked to protect.
Then again, maybe he didn’t have any in the first place.
* * *
EL HOMBRE SEZ: Great work by Me-Mac, allowing news of his season-ending knee surgery to get out through Stephen Naismith, rather than the Rockets. He is seriously injured, but once again the man came up small, just as he has repeatedly during the post-season. He thinks he’s an elite player in the league, but he’ll find out in ’10 that the market for selfish, injury-prone gunners isn’t too robust…Michigan’s Fab Five has announced it will reunite at a Detroit casino as part of the Final Four in April. Wonder who came up with the appearance money for them, now that Ed Martin isn’t around anymore…The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled last week that cheerleading is a “contact sport,” and that participants who are hurt cannot sue teammates whose actions lead to the injuries. In a related story, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the WNBA has been reclassified as a narcotic sleep aid…In an effort to cut runaway costs, the Ohio State football team is considering traveling to at least one game by bus this season. To make up for the horrible inconvenience, Buckeye administrators have promised the players won’t have to go to class that week. Oh, wait. You mean? Never mind.
* * *
YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT? It may not sit too well with the legions of McNabb haters out there, but the Eagles are showing good judgment and surprising long-view thinking by opening negotiations with Donovan McNabb for a contract extension. McNabb is not perfect, and his lack of a signature, big-game comeback clouds his legacy in town, but he is light years beyond Kevin Kolb and far better than any other quarterback available right now. The Eagles need to re-sign him and then get to work on upgrading the other parts of their offense – O line, running back depth, big-play receiver. The onus remains on McNabb to lead the way and prove he is a championship passer, but throughout his Eagles career, he has proven to be a consistent winner and big producer. That may not be enough for some, but it’s plenty for those who understand that throwing away quality with no reasonable upgrade in sight is bad business. By the way, the list of NFL QBs better than McNabb is pretty darn short: (in no particular order) Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, Kurt Warner.
* * *
ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD: Tiger Woods’ caddie Steve Williams took time off from lobbing cheap shots at Phil Mickelson to predict that his boss might be back on the links as early as a “few weeks” from now. That’s great news for the PGA, which has become as relevant as biathlon during Woods’ recuperation from knee surgery. If you want to see the most compelling argument against Woods as the undisputed greatest golfer of all time, check out the leader board at this week’s PGA event in Los Angeles. You half expect to see Judge Smails and Ty Webb near the top, because the rest of the crew is so weak. Not quite what Jack Nicklaus had to deal with when Tom Watson, Gary Player, Lee Trevino and the like were challenging him. Still, expect Woods’ media cheerleaders to chart his comeback with breathless enthusiasm and continue to stoke the legend machine of their hero.
-EH-
With so much going on in the world of sports, from the negotiations to broadcast NASCAR’s weekly drama on the Soap Opera Network, to the contrived excitement of the NBA Slam Dunk Contest and Sheriff Buford T. Justice’s inability to make drug charges stick against Snoop Phelps, there was absolutely no reason to join the hysterical media chorus about Alex Rodriguez, his young and stupid cousin and their Cream of Cheat. Why not talk about how NFL Network draft analyst Mike Mayock is going to go nuts over some offensive lineman’s hip drop at this weekend’s Scouting Combine? Or whether Texas Tech actually thinks it can fire its wildly successful head coach and still lure 50,000 people out to the west Texas scrub every other Saturday.
That will all have to wait, and all because of an e-mail sent to me by an esteemed national radio host. Attached to it was a blog post by a Milwaukee talker with the sporting eye of an 80-year old double-cataract myope. This genius has decided that he is the smartest guy in the country, because he has defended Bud Sellout all along, and now he has been vindicated. This is a transparent case of Bratwurst City brotherhood, since Sellout is a former snake oil salesman, er, car dealer from Sudstown. And even though anyone who can honestly say the steroid mess in baseball can be blamed on everybody but the man in charge, is clearly in need of a refresher course on logic, El Hombre is steamed.
Looking for villains in this mess is like trying to find evidence of Mickey Rourke’s hard life and bad career decisions on his battered face. They are everywhere. And blaming Sellout for the whole mess is unfair. Without the strong supporting work of union goons Donald Fehr and Gene Ozra, baseball’s drug mess never could have erupted like the acne on Jose Canseco’s back. Without the willingness of players to risk their long-term health by taking everything from testosterone to infertility drugs to pills designed to fight narcolepsy, the game wouldn’t have been soiled like the Suleman octuplets’ diapers. And without a hero-worshipping group of fans and media, who marveled at the long-ball numbers being cranked out by power-hitting laboratory mutants, the game’s credibility wouldn’t be suffering worse than Joaquin Phoenix’s.
The word is conspiracy, and we were all in on it, at least for a while. And if we’re all guilty in some way, then Sellout is especially culpable, because he was in charge. There was a lot to dislike about Uberfuhrer Steinbrenner during his rein of terror atop the Yankee organization, but he got one thing right from the start: If you want to be the boss, you have to make the difficult decisions and stand by them. That’s what people in charge do. They face down the tough situations, choose to act and then withstand the inevitable criticism. They set the pace and then remain strong when others launch bombs at them. What do you think would have happened in London during WWII if Winston Churchill had remained sequestered in a bunker, when Nazi bombs were pelting every house and pub night after night? There would have been chaos and despair. Instead, Churchill surveyed the wreckage daily, promised things would change and endured the barbs of those who insisted it was his mismanagement that allowed the mess to take place. That’s leadership.
What we have now from Sellout is a cowardice that worsens daily. The commissioner has decided that he is not only innocent of all charges being brought against him in the court of public opinion, but that he needs to convince us that everybody else is guilty. There hasn’t been a leadership breech this grotesque since Neville Chamberlain decided Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy after all and surrendered much of Europe to the tyrant in a quest for “peace in our time.” Sellout is in full sprint, dashing away from his responsibilities as a leader, one of which is accepting the blame for previous mistakes.
The worst part of Sellout’s recent defense strategy is his outrage. How dare he take offense at those who accuse him of ineffectiveness and complicity during the past decade-plus? Where was his voice when the McGwire/Sosa love fest was “saving the game” in 1998? Where was his outrage in the ensuing years when home run totals piled up faster than Andruw Jones’ excess pounds? Why wasn’t he saying then that the union refused to implement a testing program? Why wasn’t he fighting with the same tenacity he is showing now to keep the sport he ran from becoming a cesspool of drug addicts and freak-show performers? Sellout said Monday, “I don’t want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn’t care about it.” Oh, you don’t? Well, then buy some of those high-priced earplugs rock musicians use, Bud, because you’re in for a crapstorm.
Sellout punked out with BALCO Bonds, refusing to take a stand either way on his pursuit of Hank Aaron’s record. He partied like a rap star as McGwire and Sosa injected their way to long-ball heaven. And only when the evidence became too overwhelming to ignore did he get serious about instituting a drug policy. Funny how the players’ association became a lot more malleable once it saw the public was irate over the steroid use. Think testing would have arrived earlier had Sellout pointed some bloodhound journalists to the smoking syringes back in the late ‘90s? You betcha.
So, stop with the outrage, Bud. Don’t tell us how far the sport has come, because it started in a performance-enhanced abyss created by your lack of leadership. For once during your tenure, have the cajones to admit you were wrong about the whole thing. Then again, since Sellout was part of the whole steroid era, it’s possible that part of his anatomy shrunk, just like those of the juicers he worked to protect.
Then again, maybe he didn’t have any in the first place.
* * *
EL HOMBRE SEZ: Great work by Me-Mac, allowing news of his season-ending knee surgery to get out through Stephen Naismith, rather than the Rockets. He is seriously injured, but once again the man came up small, just as he has repeatedly during the post-season. He thinks he’s an elite player in the league, but he’ll find out in ’10 that the market for selfish, injury-prone gunners isn’t too robust…Michigan’s Fab Five has announced it will reunite at a Detroit casino as part of the Final Four in April. Wonder who came up with the appearance money for them, now that Ed Martin isn’t around anymore…The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled last week that cheerleading is a “contact sport,” and that participants who are hurt cannot sue teammates whose actions lead to the injuries. In a related story, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the WNBA has been reclassified as a narcotic sleep aid…In an effort to cut runaway costs, the Ohio State football team is considering traveling to at least one game by bus this season. To make up for the horrible inconvenience, Buckeye administrators have promised the players won’t have to go to class that week. Oh, wait. You mean? Never mind.
* * *
YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT? It may not sit too well with the legions of McNabb haters out there, but the Eagles are showing good judgment and surprising long-view thinking by opening negotiations with Donovan McNabb for a contract extension. McNabb is not perfect, and his lack of a signature, big-game comeback clouds his legacy in town, but he is light years beyond Kevin Kolb and far better than any other quarterback available right now. The Eagles need to re-sign him and then get to work on upgrading the other parts of their offense – O line, running back depth, big-play receiver. The onus remains on McNabb to lead the way and prove he is a championship passer, but throughout his Eagles career, he has proven to be a consistent winner and big producer. That may not be enough for some, but it’s plenty for those who understand that throwing away quality with no reasonable upgrade in sight is bad business. By the way, the list of NFL QBs better than McNabb is pretty darn short: (in no particular order) Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, Kurt Warner.
* * *
ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD: Tiger Woods’ caddie Steve Williams took time off from lobbing cheap shots at Phil Mickelson to predict that his boss might be back on the links as early as a “few weeks” from now. That’s great news for the PGA, which has become as relevant as biathlon during Woods’ recuperation from knee surgery. If you want to see the most compelling argument against Woods as the undisputed greatest golfer of all time, check out the leader board at this week’s PGA event in Los Angeles. You half expect to see Judge Smails and Ty Webb near the top, because the rest of the crew is so weak. Not quite what Jack Nicklaus had to deal with when Tom Watson, Gary Player, Lee Trevino and the like were challenging him. Still, expect Woods’ media cheerleaders to chart his comeback with breathless enthusiasm and continue to stoke the legend machine of their hero.
-EH-
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