It is time to put aside my disdain for the sport of soccer and instead show it the respect that it commands as the World Cup gets kicked off.
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By Rob LaBrie
It’s the greatest night of his life. The young man anticipates his name being called, but never truly believes it until the announcement comes from David Stern. The Boston Celtics are the team he’ll be playing for. Sounds like a pretty good deal; not too far away from home and he’ll be playing for a team that can win. In fact, with him on the team, they’ll be dominating for sure.
The next day, he heads up to Boston for a while with his father to go scout the place out and meet some important figures on the team. He flies home the next night and arrives at College Park, where his dorm is located, around 11 p.m., still slightly draft drunk as so much has been packed into a couple days. He relaxes for a little while with friends until around 2 a.m. The young man is sick of his friends constantly drilling him on his new team and new found fame, sounding like all the reporters he’s had to face. He heads out in his new Nissan 300ZX. He comes back around 3 a.m. He stays up for a few hours, high on cocaine, talking to his teammate, Terry Long. At 6 a.m., he collapses on his couch for the deepest of sleeps. Len Bias is dead at age 22.
Major League Baseball must be held accountable, regardless of myriad cultural reasons attributed to children’s lack of interest in baseball, predominantly in the inner city neighborhoods, for its lack of investment in them.
Barry Bonds has done it. He has beaten the one man who we truly can say was “bigger than the game”. Bonds has hit 715 homers as of today, one more than Babe Ruth’s career total of 714. This is something that has only been achieved once in baseball history, but with steroid allegations looming, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for this milestone outside of the Bay Area.
We fans can feel cheated all we want. We can feel that we were deceived and that we wasted money to see Victor Conte’s chemistry project bash baseballs into McCovey’s Cove. However, we are not the victims here. The game of baseball is not the victim here, because it is the fans who decide what the game truly is. If we keep paying our money to see games and celebrating the game and its athletes, baseball will be fine. The real victim here is the big-headed one himself, Barry Bonds.
It’s a ground ball to second, pathetic, rolling meagerly toward inevitable doom. I watch. The scene appears to be moving in slow motion. A serene calm has invaded my senses, the worst has arrived and will eventually pass, just as the moment would, fleetingly, fatefully. Pokey Reese immaculately scoops the ball from the depths, measuring up the impossible as he aims a throw towards first base. Just as they had done for the last four games, one man didn’t just represent a whole, he elevated above, forming an impossible force, an immovable will, a historical comeback. The throw is perfect. The Red Sox begin to celebrate on a field polluted by ghosts, victorious. The deed is done.
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Playing In Championship Form
Heat and Mavs to Clash in NBA Finals
I believe sportscaster Keith Jackson said it best when he yelled “whoa nelly!” There couldn’t be more fitting words to describe to these NBA conference finals and the playoffs in general. In the East, the Miami Heat came into the conference finals looking to finally remove the proverbial “monkey” from their back and move past the Detroit Pistons. Mission accomplished. The boys from “Wade County” move on to the NBA finals for the first time in franchise history. Out in the West, the now defensive minded Dallas Mavericks took on the small yet resilient Phoenix Suns. Dallas, coming off an epic seven game war, took on the battle tested Suns and finally knocked them out. Mark Cuban’s crew also moves on to the NBA finals for the first time.
by Trevor Freeman
“As the thirty-fifth pick approaches, Erik once again leans into the speaker phone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A’s are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.”
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Some Friendly Advice
I thought there were many interesting stories this week in sports and I figured I would chip in my two-cents. They are arranged in order from least important to most important (in my opinion).
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Small Ball Takes All
The Western Conference Finals have been different this year.
No Shaq. No Duncan. No Stoudemire. Something is wrong with this picture.
When the Western Conference Finals were determined last week, I was quite bewildered. The more offensive minded teams, the Dallas Mavericks and the Phoenix Suns, were moving on to compete for a championship. The strategy of just “pounding it inside” to either Tim Duncan, Elton Brand, or Chris Kaman failed to thwart the surge of the victors. Tim Duncan had ridiculous numbers but was unable to score in regulation, resulting in the Spurs loss in the Game 7 overtime. Elton Brand had his way against Phoenix, shooting between 60-80% from the field but could not pull out needed victories. Finally, Chris Kaman was a monster on the offensive boards, but whether hampered by shoulder injuries or not, did not have any impact as the series went on.
The Eastern Conference picture was no different. The last two teams remaining were the Detroit Pistons and the Miami Heat. The Pistons do not rely on a dominant center; Ben Wallace is more like a moving wall and never scores while Rasheed is a poor man’s Kevin Garnett who can shoot and is more athletic than a center. The Miami Heat, on the other hand, have a dominant center…or at least he used to be. Shaq has had a roller coaster of a season. He really has not been himself and often finds himself in foul trouble. Shaq is no longer consistent, often having difficulty producing his typical numbers of 20 points, 10 rebounds. Yes, the Diesel is running out of gas, and Wade is carrying the team.
This ultimately leads me to one question: Is small ball the future of the NBA?
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Thanks for staying- Joe
Sure a lot of people hate him. At times, he’s an angry old man who chases Big Ten officials down and scolds them like a schoolchild. But a lot of people love him too. Alex Ferguson tries to look at 2005’s Coach of the Year, and work out why there’s a love affair at all.