Same-old, same-old

 I wouldn't know Florida football coach Billy Napier if he cut in front of me at the grocery store. So this is not where you come to find out if he can actually coach 'em up down there in Gainesville.

I do know one thing, though: The man can arm-wrestle the obvious right down to the ground.

This after Coach Billy acknowledged that high-stakes college football is "a cutthroat business", which is a bit like saying water is wet. In this instance, though, Napier was specifically referring to the transfer portal, and how it's being illegally used to tamper with other programs' players. According to Napier, it's a damn epidemic.

 "There's no doubt tampering is real," Napier told Alex Scarborough of ESPN. "... And I think that until there's something done about it, I think you'll continue to see it."

Of course you will. The transfer portal, after all, is hardly the midwife for this sort of thing.

It's just another way for coaches to do what desperate coaches (i.e.: all of 'em) have been doing since Knute Rockne and Fielding Yost first bad-mouthed each other. Tampering is as old as the single wing, and you'll teach a fish to do algebra before it's curtailed by the NCAA. 

Long before anyone dreamed up the transfer portal, see, coaches have been poaching each other’s players. No one calls it that, however, because the players in question aren't yet players, but recruits. And it's perfectly legal to continue pursuing them long after they've plighted their troth to dear old Big Ticket U.

That’s because a recruit’s commitment isn't actually a commitment until he signs that National Letter of Intent. And so coaches from Big Ticket's rivals can keep right on wooing him.

Officially, after all, it's not tampering. It's just business -- as Billy Napier says, a cutthroat business.

In spite of that, there actually used to be a time when there were gentleman's agreements between coaches that, once a kid committed, you left him alone and moved on to the next stud on your list. Hard to believe, but it happened.

Of course, there was also a time when Atari was state-of-the-art gaming. Time marches on, and all that.

In which case I suppose it left me behind.

That's because I hear coaches complain about how the transfer portal and the NIL facilitate tampering with another program's players, and I don't see a hell of a lot of difference between that and tampering with another program's recruits. I understand that it is different, but to me it's all the same ethical shadiness at work.

I mean, if you're not going to honor a kid's commitment during the recruiting process, why would anyone expect you to stop there?

My question for today.

Get that weak history outta here

 ... or to put it another way: "The Spirit of  '04 Cryin' Out Loud."

History and symmetry and the pleasing storyline, they all fell down and went boom last night in Boston. This is what happens when the script writers go out on strike.

Had they not been walking the picket lines out there in Hollywood, see, they'd have had the Celtics completing the reverse-sweep in Game 7 against the Heat. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, the dynamic duo, would have been cast as GOATs instead of goats. Johnny Damon and Curt Schilling and Big Papi, all the 2004 Red Sox heroes, would have been in attendance to see the Celts duplicate their historic comeback from three-games-to-none down against the Yankees in the '04 ALCS.

Instead ... 

Well, instead, Game 7 looked like this: Heat 103, Celtics 84.

Get that weak s*** outta here, history. Deja whoops, and all that.

How the Celtics could be such a no-show in a Game 7 in their own house -- especially in this Game 7 -- is a mystery better left to philosophers and mystics, I suppose. But it happened.

Heat 103, Celtics 84 happened. Jayson and Jaylen bricking a combined 36 of 49 shots (including 13 of 15 three-point attempts) happened. The Celts shooting a horrendous 9-of-42 from three-point, and 32-of-82 from everywhere, happened.

That's 21.4 percent and 39 percent, respectively, if you're doing the math. They might as well have been shooting bowling balls instead of basketballs, or throwing darts at a wallet photo of King George III from a half-mile off. In the middle of a nor'easter.

And this after the Celtics lost the first three games of the series and, like their spiritual brethren over in Fenway, improbably emerged from the grave.

The Heat baked them like an apple pie in the first three games, and then the Celtics won the next three, the first two by 17 and 13 points. In Game 6, Derrick White's putback at the horn sent it back to Boston for Game 7 and seemed to affirm that the Celtics were as destined as those '04 Sox.

And then ...

And then the Boston Massacre, NBA division.

Jimmy Butler became Playoff Jimmy again, dropping 28 on the Destineds. Caleb Martin added 26 and 10 rebounds. Bam Adebayo had a double-double, 12 and 10. Duncan Robinson came off the bench to score 10. The Heat shot 50 percent from three-point (14-of-28), outrebounded Boston 49-40, made seven steals, forced 15 turnovers -- eight of them from Jaylen Brown.

I am not a Celtics fan (or a Heat fan), but I can imagine what they were all thinking last night, watching this. I figure it's one of three things.

1. "Cripes, if you were gonna lose, whyncha just lose three games ago and get it over with?"

2. "Larry 'n' them woulda nevah cratered like this in a Game 7 in the Gahden. Ne-vah."

And, of course, last but not least:

3. "Well, at least it wasn't the Yankees."

A few (or more) day after thoughts

 When the thing was done he stopped the car precisely on the yard of brick, and then -- finally; FINALLY -- the Champ Perpetually In Waiting got to do what he'd been aching to do for a dozen bitter years. 

He got to go crowd-surfing.

As America watched and the 300,00 inside motorsport's holiest cathedral howled and banged their palms together, he bailed out of his seat, ran over to the fence, and -- wait, what's he doing now?

Not climbing the fence, like some knockoff Helio. No, he's ducking under it, then hopping the low fence that separates the fence from that immense cliff of grandstand, and ... oh, look, he's wading into this dense mass of  humanity, letting it swallow him, flow around him, buffet him with a thousand reaching hands.

This is how Josef Newgarden celebrated winning the Indianapolis 500.

This is how he celebrated being The Guy Who Did after so long being The Guy Who Will.

Sunday was his 12th 500 and he's been one of the designated faces of his sport for several years, winning two IndyCar titles for the name-in-lights monolith that is Team Penske. But something always happened to him on the last Sunday in May, and it was never good. Never good until going on 4:30 yesterday afternoon, when he was 2,000 yards from home on the last lap of a 500 that gone on too long and too bizarrely. 

What happened was, he got a run on defending champ and leader Marcus Ericsson coming off turn two.

Halfway down the backstretch he flogged his car past him, as Ericsson snake-danced to steal his air the way he'd snake-danced to shake Pato O'Ward a year ago.

Deja vu all over again. Until it wasn't.

Newgarden passed him and then snake-danced himself down the main straightaway toward the checkers, as Ericsson desperately tried to re-pass him. He failed by less than half a second.

And then Newgarden was climbing out of the car and going under the fence and running back and forth through that sea of reaching hands, and, listen, if this was something we'd never seen here before .... well, that was pretty much the narrative of the day.

Never before, after all, had we seen the race red-flagged three times in the last 15 laps.

Never before had we seen it come down to a one-lap sprint to the checkers.

Never before, after all the times Josef Newgarden had been a favorite to win, did the win finally come on a day when he probably wasn't expected to win.

While the Ganassi and McLaren stables blazed around the joint, the Penske rides were pokey all month, which accounted for Newgarden coming to the green from the middle of Row 6. But on this day he had a fast car from jump, and the laps rolled by, and stuff began to happen. And pretty soon you blinked and he was in third place, right up there with Ericsson and Pato O'Ward and Felix Rosenqvist and the rest of the frontrunners.

His day, at long last. His day, when for so long it looked like Alex Palou's day or O'Ward's or Ericsson's or even that of Santino Ferrucci, who gave the No. 14 stars-and-stripes livery of  A.J. Foyt a hell of a drive before finishing third.

Some other stuff:

* Welcome to the day of "I Went To The Indianapolis 500 And The Daytona 500 Broke Out."

Because, really, this was some yee-ha business down there at the end, when (just like Daytona!) people kept running into each other and stopping the race because they'd sprayed the track with auto parts. 

The first red flag came out when Rosenqvist got up in the marbles off turn one, banged the wall and spun down to the inside of the track, where Kyle Kirkwood clipped him and sailed into the fence in turn two. One of his tires went whirling over the fence, narrowly missing the grandstand and landing on a car in the parking lot like a thunderbolt from some angry Firestone god.

Kirkwood, meanwhile, wound up sliding down the track upside-down, a wild-looking ride he walked away from without a scratch.

The other two red flags were, like so many of Daytona's, avoidable in one case and simply stupid in the other.

The first happened when O'Ward tried to go under Ericsson in turn three, got squeezed and wound up in the wall, ending a day that for a long time looked like his. Then, almost as an afterthought, he was rear-ended by rookie Augustin Canapino, who got clipped by another back-marker and snapped a brake line. 

Then, as the yellow came out, Simon Pagenaud ran into the back of Scott McLaughlin, which brought out the red flag again.

And the third red flag?

The dumbest of all. 

When the green dropped with four laps to run, the leaders barely were in the first turn before Ed Carpenter and rookie Benjamin Pederson got together trying to go three (or four) wide with Marco Andretti and Graham Rahal. All four were deep in the pack, raising the obvious question of why a bunch of back-markers were trying to go three (or four) wide.

"Because I coulda finished, I don't know, 16th or something," is not an acceptable answer.

*  Welcome, also, to the day of  "We Drive Really Fast, But For God's Sake Don't Let Us Try To Park."

Which is to say, you'd think guys (and gals) good enough to negotiate 500 miles at 220-plus could get in and out of the pits without running into something.

Not yesterday, they couldn't. 

It was a cavalcade of shenanigans in the pit area all day, with drivers overrunning their pit boxes and sliding around and either narrowly missing or crashing into one another.

Katherine Legge lost it in the pits. Rinus Veekay got sideways and hit Alex Palou as both were exiting, which sent Palou into the pit wall and subsequently to the back of the field -- one of the day's biggest what-ifs, because Palou was the hottest shoe of the day and proved it by getting all the way back to fourth by the end.

Oh, and a tire nearly got away from one of Ferrucci's changers on his last and most critical stop. More shenanigans.

And, finally ...

* Welcome to "Live From Saturday Night At The Local Half-Mile, It's Trophy Dash Time."

Which is not the way you're supposed to decide the Indianapolis 500, some would say. That includes Marcus Ericsson, who got hung out to dry on that dash-for-cash and wasn't at all happy about it.

The Blob's position on this is he had a point. 

The Blob's other position is, what would you have rather seen? Ericsson walking it across the line under yellow, or the hectic drama of that last lap?

I'll take Door No. 2.

It is, after all, the Greatest Spectacle In Racing. And that last lap was, if perhaps ill-advised, Spectacle.

And your winner is ...

 Look, I know how it goes, down there in the Mecca of Speed. Sentiment will get you a boot in the glutes.

That's the bone truth of these ancient two-and-a-half miles of ring road at the corner of 16th Street and Georgetown Road, and everyone knows it. It's a hard old place crowded with ghosts, and they walk there as a reminder that hopes and dreams and, yes, sentiment more often than not get ground to dust there.

Which is to say, I want Tony Kanaan to win the Indianapolis 500 today.

Which is also to say I'm not going to pick him. 

I want TK to win the 107th running because it's his last running, and because he's one of the best people in motorsports, and. also because I was a sportswriter for most of my life. We are a selfish lot, you see. TK winning his last 500?

Hell. That's the Column That Writes Itself of myth and legend.

It's also why you can probably forget about it, because the sportswriting gods are rarely so accommodating. He's got one of those McLaren rocket ships under him, and he starts way up there on the outside of Row 3, but ... well, it comes down to this: We couldn't get that lucky.

So who then?

If you want to be cagey about it, you might pick Santino Ferrucci, who drives for A.J. Foyt and starts on the inside of the second row. Ferrucci has never started the 500 on such a lofty perch, which bodes well because he always finishes better than he starts. In four previous 500s he's started 23rd, 19th, 23rd and 15th; he's finished seventh, fourth, sixth and 10th.

Plus, winning for A.J. would be another Column That Writes Itself. But I've already told you about the sportswriting gods.

And so let's keep looking, because there's a lot to look at. There's Scott Dixon, the best IndyCar driver of his generation, starting on the outside of Row 2 and 14 years overdue for his second bottle of milk. There's two-time winner Takuma Sato next to TK in the middle of Row 3, with one of Chip Ganassi's dominant rides under him. There's defending champ Marcus Ericsson one row back, and 2016 winner Alexander Rossi next to Sato on the inside of Row 3, and Alex Palou on the pole.

Palou is going to win this race someday, and it could well be today. After all, the stars are aligned for him: A dominant win in the Indy Grand Prix two weeks ago, then the fastest pole run since Arie Luyendyk in that different time that was 1996. A win today completes the May trifecta.

I'm going to regret not picking him. I can feel it already.

But today I'm riding with Pato O'Ward, whose McLaren goes off in the middle of Row 2. I'm picking him because in three previous starts he's never finished lower than sixth, and he's gotten closer every year: Sixth in 2020, fourth in 2021, chasing Ericsson to the checkers in second last year. And today he's starting fifth in car No. 5, if you're into the numerology thing.

I am not. I'm simply guessing he'll be up there at the finish again today, and sooner or later a guy who's up there at the finish is going to draw the winning card.

Of course, if that sort of logic weren't deeply flawed, I'd be much better at the picking the winner than I am. And I'm not very good at it.

Still ...

 I stand by my pick.

Pato for the win. 

 

Dog days

 ... or, lame duck days. 

It's Choose Your Own Species time out in Oakland, Calif., and that is a sad deal for anyone with a working appreciation for baseball  lore. The Oakland A's are about to become the Las Vegas A's thanks to their garden slug of an owner, and it's enough to uncurl Rollie Fingers' fabled 'stache. That the A's of Rollie and Reggie and Catfish Hunter and Joe Rudi have now become the Nays is the worst kind of betrayal, of both the fan base and history.

As of this morning the A's stand 10-43 on the current campaign, and they're schlepping a nine-game losing streak into Memorial Day weekend. Five days before June rolls in, they're already 23-and-a-half games out of first in the AL West. And if geography got drunk and the A's were suddenly in the AL East, they'd be 28 games adrift of the front-running Tampa Bay Rays.

I  can't imagine how it must feel to be an A's fan these days. And that's saying something considering I'm a fan of the eternally pitiful Pittsburgh Pirates.

At least the owner of my Cruds is just a penny-strangling Scrooge, and not a seemingly vindictive SOB like the Garden Slug (whose straight name is John Fisher). Not content with just fleeing the fan base that got to see the glory days of Rollie and Reggie 'n' them, the Garden Slug decided to give it an extra kick on his way out the door. It's about as unconscionable as unconscionable gets.

Hey, Oakland, guess what? I'm gettin' outta Dodge. You can keep your s***hole of a ballpark that's only a s***hole because, as the anchor tenant, I refused to put any dough into it. And as a parting gift, here's a garbage Triple A team to watch as I head out the door.

Adios, mother(bleepers)!

Yeesh. Upon further review, "garden slug" might be too generous.

Surely we can assign a more vile creature to this sort of cruelty, as the dog days settle into Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum two months early. Or as the lame duck days do.

Choose your species. Both work, sadly.

Name game time!

The deposed owner of the Washington Commanders, Disgustin' Dan Snyder, predictably has left some lovely parting gifts for Josh Harris and the new ownership group. And by "lovely parting gifts", I do not mean the kind they used to dole out on "The Price Is Right."

I mean parting gifts like, "Oh, yeah, and our nickname? It might be a problem."

According to this piece from Eric Blum of Deadspin, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office denied the Washington NFL team's application  to trademark the Commanders nickname. That's because two other sports entities -- including the annual Army-Navy football game, called the Commanders Classic -- have dibs on the name.

It's a par-for-the-course screwup by Disgustin' Dan and the rest of his Disgustin' regime, and it could mean the franchise might have to change its nickname for the third time in four years.

Granted, it probably won't happen. All the application rejection means is the Commanders might have a harder time fighting people who want to sell knockoff Washington Commanders gear. But should Harris and Co. want to change the name again, a piece of advice: Don't pick something as generic and boring as "Commanders."

"Oh, no," you're saying. "I suppose this means you have a few suggestions."

Well, now that you mention it ...

How about the Washington Fightin' Appropriators?

It's both highly relevant and a true reflection of how things work in Washington D.C., where Congress critters never met a pet project at which they wouldn't throw bales of taxpayer cash. No one appropriates the hell out of a thing like an elected official. It's their favorite pastime, narrowly beating out schmoozing donors and shivving bills they don't like by letting them die in committee.

Speaking of which, how about the Washington Fightin' Bills?

This one has the advantage of a ready-made mascot: The cartoon bill from "How A Bill Becomes Law." His name, of course, would be "Bill", and he could prance up and down the sideline waving his scary Fountain Pen of Death at opposing players.

The downside is this nickname also would lend itself to ready-made headlines should the Fightin' Bills turn out to be a giant can of Alpo. "Bills Tabled Again" comes to mind. So do  "Bears Vote Down Bills" and "Chiefs Line-Item Veto Bills To Death On Arrowhead Stadium Floor."

Also, the Buffalo Bills might object. Just a hunch.

Some other ideas:

* The Washington Fightin' Memorials.

With a rotating cast of mascots Memorializing Sammy Baugh, Sonny Jurgensen, Joe Theismann and other franchise greats. The logo could be a bas relief of the Lincoln Memorial, with a bas relief of the Jefferson Memorial for the alternate unis.

* The Washington K-Street Kommandos.

A nod to that great Washington tradition, accepting wads of cash from lobbyists in return for some favorable legislatin'. The logo could be a dollar sign above a handshake on a green background. The mascot could be a pig wearing a barrel -- pork barrel, get it? -- named Quid Pro Quo.

* The Washington Fightin' Traffics.

A salute to, what else, D.C.'s infamous traffic. Featuring Road Rage Ronnie, a snarly guy stomping around with a steering wheel and fake steam coming from his ears. Every home game, the team could burst onto the field to either "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC, or a soundtrack of blaring car horns.

And last but not least ...

* The D.C. Comics.

Obvious patent issues with this one. But how perfect would it be should the Washingtons haul off and go 3-14 some year?

I say go for it.

Florida the underdog

 You can blame the Florida Atlantic Owls for what happened last night in the Sunshine State. As every sibling has always said about every other sibling, they started it.

The Owls get to the Final Four, see, and pretty soon every sports entity in Florida is infected with the We Believe virus. You could say it's gone viral, but that would be redundant.

In any case, last night in a hockey arena west of Fort Lauderdale, the Spirit of the Owl was with the Florida Panthers. They beat Carolina on Matthew Tkachuk's goal with 4.3 seconds left to complete a 4-0 sweep of the Hurricanes in the NHL Eastern Conference final, and now are off to the Stanley Cup Final for only the second time in franchise history. 

They're also the living embodiment of an old, old Stanley maxim: A hot goalie and a hot forward will take you deep when playoff time rolls around.

The hot forward is Tkachuk, who of course scored the series winner because he's scored every winning goal for the Panthers in the playoffs, or so it seems. The hot goalie is Sergei Bobrovsky, who shut out the 'Canes in Game 3, won Game 2 in overtime 2-1 and won 3-2 in four overtimes in Game 1.

This means he surrendered just three goals in almost 12 periods of hockey in Games 1 and 2. That's a day's work and then some.

It also means the Panthers swept their presumed betters for the second time in the playoffs. Carolina won its division with the second-best record (52-21-9) in the NHL. This after the Panthers gave the boot in the first round to the Boston Bruins, who merely had the best regular season in league history at 65-12-5.

The Panthers, meanwhile, finished fourth in the Atlantic Division, at 42-32-8. That put them 43 points behind the Bruins and 21 behind the 'Canes. 

But, wait there's more!

Let's jump to the NBA Eastern Conference finals, where Playoff Jimmy Butler, Playoff Erik Spoelstra and the Miami Heat are about to erase a Boston Celtics team that needed a win in Game 4 to avoid a sweep. The Heat, who were a beige 44-38 in the regular season, knocked out the team with the NBA's best record (Milwaukee) in five games in the first round; now they're poised to eliminate the team with the second-best record.

Oh, yeah. And those dependably sorry Miami Marlins?

The Spirit of the Owl kinda-sorta moves in them, too.

After finishing 24 games under .500 and 32 out of first in the NL East last year, they're playing .500 baseball and are tied for second in the division with the Mets, five-and-a-half games adrift of Atlanta. 

And so Florida, a southern state run by a ham-fisted bully who likes to pick on underdogs, is suddenly Underdog Central. Oh, the irony.

Hat tip now from the Spirit of the Owl.

"Any time," he says.

Turn of fortune

 It's the home office for "Wait, what?", this square-jawed old place. A century plus 24 years it's been around, two-and-a-half miles of tar-and-gravel and then tire-eating brick and then scrubbed asphalt, always the same and never the same. Perfectly symmetrical, and yet no two corners are alike.

No two corners. Or, no two turns of fortune.

And so there was Graham Rahal Sunday afternoon, face in his hands, after teammate Jack Harvey knocked him out of the Indianapolis 500 by a fraction of a fraction of a second.

And here he was Tuesday, back into the race for the 16th straight time, thanks to a couple of those turns of fortune and the sort of corporate generosity too little seen these days.

The first turn of fortune happened when Stefan Wilson got punted by Katherine Legge in Monday's practice, hit the wall a mighty lick and got carted off to the hospital with a fractured vertebra.

The second happened when Dreyer & Reinbold, for whom Wilson qualified 25th last weekend, decided to borrow Graham Rahal from Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing to fill Wilson's seat, seeing how Graham wasn't doing anything on race day.

And the corporate generosity?

That came from Honda, which decided to reward Rahal's career-long loyalty to the brand by releasing him to drive for D&R, which runs rival Chevrolet engines.

Understand, this was no small concession on Honda's part. Engine rivalries are the fiercest rivalries in motorsport, and date practically to the dawn of time. Scroll back to the turn of the last century, and here's Alexander Winton racing Henry Ford to see which of their two namesake creations was fastest.

The Ford beat the Winton, and off we went. Through Ford vs. Winton and Ford vs. Offenhauser and Cosworth vs. Chevy, and right on up to Chevy vs. Honda.

So, yeah, add Honda's release of Graham Rahal to the "Wait, what?" list.

And figure Jack Harvey is feeling better about things, because elation came hard Sunday after he put his teammate on the sideline.

And figure Stefan Wilson is as bummed as Graham Rahal was Sunday, because making the 500 without actually getting to race in the 500 is as cold as it gets even for Indy, whose cruel streak is always close to hand. 

No two corners. No two turns of fortune.

Baseball 2, Avians 0

 I don't know if the good Lord is a baseball fan. If he is, I hope he's rooting for the Oakland A's these days, seeing how their scuzzball owner is about to move the team to Las Vegas, and is giving fans in Oakland one last kick in the nuts for old times' sake on his way out the door.

You let the stadium fall apart AND you put a trash Triple A team on the field as a parting gift? Classy.

But I digress.

("Constantly," you're saying)

My real point here is, I don't know if the Almighty likes baseball, but apparently he's pretty hot at birds these days. Because it hasn't been a good two weeks for the latter.

Last week, see, Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Zac Gallen killed a bird in mid-flight while warming up in the outfield prior to a game (against the A's, ironically). 

Last night, Cleveland Guardians rookie Will Brennan smoked a liner that killed a bird wandering the infield grass in Cleveland.

Imagine that bird's last thoughts.

Oh, look, here are some nice grubs. And I think there's a worm down here, too! This is gonna be a feas-

So, Baseball 2, Avians 0. And a warning to any future bird-killers from those of us who know our Hitchcock:

You're winning now. But remember Tippi Hedren.

Dream matchu-

 Somewhere today a network executive is putting Nikola Jokic's picture on a dartboard.

Somewhere in the same building, another network exec wants Jamal Murray FIRED, immediately, before realizing Jamal Murray doesn't work for him. 

Somewhere else, also in the same building, yet another suit is kicking the air with his Bruno Maglis, shaking his fists, screaming something that comes out sounding like this: "GAAAAH!"

This is because the Denver Nuggets beat the Los Angeles Lakers again last night.

It means the Nuggets are going to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history.

It means there won't be the Dream Matchup, aka the Lakers vs. the Celtics, is now the Dream Matchu- DAMMIT!.

Instead, we're gonna get the Nuggets vs. the Heat.

Or so one would assume, now that Miami is about to sweep the C's out the door, just as the Nuggets swept LeBron and the Lakers. At least the suits caught that break; how much worse would the torture be if the Lakers and Celtics had drawn this out, teasing, teasing, oh, look it's gonna happen ...

And then lost in Game 7.

Nah, this is better, ripping that Band-Aid right off. Despite all the LeBron/Anthony Davis/Lakers chatter, the Nuggets were the better team and proved it every night. And even if the Celtics would somehow win Game 4 and keep the torture going for one more night, they're over like Atari. Because the Heat are better, too.

And so, there goes Celtics-Lakers. There goes LeBron and A.D. vs. the Lakers old, old nemesis, and promos featuring clips of Larry and Magic in the old Gah-den, and Russell and Wilt in the Fabulous Forum. There goes history, by God, and a Finals even the lowest mutt on the marketing staff could sell.

But you know what?

Nuggets-Heat is going to be a hell of a Finals.

Jimmy Butler vs. Jamal. The Joker vs. Bam Adebayo. 

Come on, boys and girls. You can sell this, right?

Heart and heartbreak

 May showed up in Indianapolis a little after 5 p.m. Sunday, when Jack Harvey rode the edge of a razor for ten miles, and Graham Rahal had to stop talking. Everything the month is and was and ever will be was right there in that moment.

Harvey, turning failure into triumph by the width of an eyelash after missing out by that same eyelash minutes before.

Rahal, knocked out of the Indianapolis 500 by Harvey at the very very very last second, having to walk away from an interview because, dammit ... hell ... crap-crap-crap- CRAP.

He was saying all the right things about class and not being good enough and how this place is hard, so hard, and then he had to turn away, because no one wants to see a grown man cry on national TV. He walked over to his car, sat down on the sidepod and buried his face in his hands.

You want to know what May looks like in Indy? 

It looks like that.

It looks like Graham Rahal weeping and holding his young daughter close, and, a few feet away, fellow Rahal/Letterman/Lanigan jockey Jack Harvey sounding dismayed for having knocked his teammate out of the biggest motorsport event on planet Earth. 

"It's not a good feeling, to be honest with you," he said.

But it was the very essence of Indy. 

In the next hour, the Fast Six would do their deal, and Alex Palou would wind up screaming for joy when Felix Rosenqvist failed to dislodge him from the pole with the last run of the day. But this day, this month, was defined by Harvey and Rahal, a split-screen look at the heart and heartbreak that has always been its bedrock core.

The heart, of course, was Harvey, who may just this morning be realizing what he did. Ten minutes before midnight struck, he went out and pedaled as fast as he could, and came up just short. The speed just wasn't there, as he suspected.

But because he had come up just short, they decided to give it one last shot without letting the engine cool. Why the hell not? It was a minute to 5 p.m. and they had nothing to lose except to lose again, so off Harvey went while Graham Rahal sat helplessly in his own ride.

And Harvey did it. Put together four laps that were nothing but pure raw nerve, because even the slightest bobble would have doomed him. As it was, he made the field -- and knocked out Rahal -- by just 0.0044 seconds.

And then didn't know how to feel about it, because over there Graham Rahal was sitting on that sidepod with his face in his hands.

You know how the Speedway folks always like to use the tagline, "This is May"?

This is May.

Throwback heaven

 There are a couple of TVs above the bar in one of our favorite eateries, and on one of them, on this cool Saturday night in May, Brooks Koepka is lashing golf balls through the rain at the PGA tournament, the second major of the year.

On the other is a ghost.

Is that ... is that North Wilkesboro Speedway I see? And the NASCAR boys rumbling around its humble little half-mile of asphalt again?

Sure is.

It's NASCAR, it's North Wilkesboro, and the dead walk, after a quarter century and change. The series, having gotten too big for its britches (and a fair amount of  its past), ran its last race there in April 1996. Last time I saw pictures of the place, it was a literal ghost: Faded Coca-Cola signs and rusting bleachers and sun-bleached asphalt, and nothing but the moaning wind and echoes of long-gone Saturday night features to cut the silence.

Funny thing about the past, though.

You can forget about it -- try to erase it, even -- but like chalk on a summer sidewalk, its imprint remains, growing fainter each time it rains but always there, if only in the mind's eye. It never really leaves you, and sooner or later the time will come when you need it again.

This is that time for NASCAR.

It's still the most popular motorsports series in America, but it's a shadow of what it was 26 years ago when it decided places like North Wilkesboro and Rockingham were too low-rent for it. The sport was a big swaggering money pump then, all puffed up with the sort of delusions money always feeds. By the late '90s, its TV and attendance numbers had convinced even rational people that it had become the nation's fourth (or fifth) major sport.

It never was, of course. What it was, what all motorsport is when you get down to the bare wood of it, was a niche sport riding an enormous bubble. And like all bubbles, it eventually burst.

Not quite two decades later, its No. 2 marquee event, the Brickyard 400, was running in front of vast swatches of empty seats. And it struggled to sell out what had been one of its hottest tickets, the night race at Bristol.

Enter North Wilkesboro.

Enter a bunch of local true believers, Bennie Parsons' widow among them, who saw value in both North Wilkesboro and NASCAR's past, and wouldn't let it die. Eventually the governor of North Carolina got involved, and Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Marcus Smith -- son of Bruton, the man who took NASCAR away from North Wilkesboro and to this day the most hated man in the county.

And now here came Saturday night, and there NASCAR was. Runnin' that humble little tick-over-a-half-mile again.

It's an admission, at least in these quarters, that the sport is willing to embrace the past it once held at arm's length, and not because of some newfound appreciation for it. Because it needs it.

North Wilkesboro, after all, is plunked down in the Carolina mountains, right spang in the middle of what used to be bootlegging country. And it was bootleggers who in a real sense were NASCAR’s midwives, and who sustained it in its early years. The most famous of them, the late Junior Johnson, lived almost literally in  North Wilkesboro’s backyard.

NASCAR used to run away from all that like its hair was on fire. But now?

Now it's running its All-Star race today right in the beating heart of it. And you know what the winner will get?

A trophy shaped like a moonshine still.

The past, come 'round again.

The Weakness

 You'll want to tune in the Preakness this afternoon, because by post time the field may be down to Kentucky Derby winner Mage and Mister Ed. Or, I don't know, My Friend Flicka.

If you're one of the millions of Americans who stop paying attention to horse racing as soon as the Derby's over, you might have missed what's gone on in Maryland this week. Horses have been bailing on the second leg of the Triple Crown like it's the Glue Factory Stakes. As of this morning, the field is down to Mage and six challengers.

That makes this the smallest Preakness field in 37 years. It's also the first time in 75 years only one Derby horse (Mage) will be in the field at Pimlico.

As Sports Illustrated writer Pat Forde points out here, that's mainly because the Triple Crown schedule is a DeSoto in a Tesla world.

Modern thoroughbreds, Forde tells us, don't run every two weeks anymore, as they must in the Triple Crown. Mage, for instance, had run its three 2023 starts prior to the Derby four, four and five weeks apart. That's about average these days for stakes thoroughbreds.

All of this, of course, comes against the backdrop of horses dropping like flies these days -- including seven at Churchill Downs the week of the Derby. That makes owners, trainers and vets less inclined than ever to push their valuable assets. Even the Derby favorite, Forte, was pulled the morning of the race because of a minor foot injury. That same injury will keep him out of the Preakness today, too.

In other words, everyone's erring on the side of extreme caution these days. Or at least everyone responsible is.

In the meantime, here comes the Weakness. Er, Preakness.

I've got Mage, Trigger and National Velvet in my trifecta. You?

Gone GOAT

I followed Jim Brown around a golf course once.

It was 30 years ago and Brown was in the city for the Mad Anthonys Hoosier Celebrities golf tournament, and he knew just how to play it. Which is to say, the course marshals kept having to move him along because he kept stopping to sign autographs and shake hands with kids ("How you doin', little man?" he said to one blonde-headed tyke), and talk to pesky local reporters.

"I don't do much of this anymore," he said, explaining he had a business to run, and it was a vital business, because it was about saving young lives that were being snuffed out by gang violence in the most desperate reaches of American society.

Almost 30 years past his playing days, he was still an imposing cement block of a man, wearing a red, green and black African kuffi on his head. He'd launched his business, Amer-I-Can, five years before, with the aim of getting inner-city youth, ex-cons and gang members off the streets and into educational programs designed to give them a path to productive lives. And he was deadly serious about it.

It was an extension of the social conscience Brown first exhibited in the 1960s, when he abruptly walked away from pro football after Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell tried to strong-arm into reporting to camp. Brown, merely 30 then, was having none of it -- just as he had none of it when he became a key figure in the civil-rights movement after leaving football in 1965.

Now he's gone, passing Thursday night at 87. And it hardly seems possible, because the one defining image of Jim Brown was his invulnerability, his seeming imperviousness to the slings and arrows that afflict all the normal humans who play football for a living.

He was, quite simply, the greatest running back ever, and (according to some) the greatest football player, period. At 232 pounds, he was a not a throwback but a throw forward, built for a time not yet envisioned in the 1950s and 1960s. As big or bigger than some of the linebackers he regularly met head-on, he could run you down or simply outrun you. The poison was yours to pick.

And, sure, we can play the old parlor trick of comparing Brown's era to the modern era, when players are bigger, faster and stronger by a quantum than they were when Brown was bringing the pain for the Browns. The more accurate measurement is how much a player dominates his contemporaries -- and in that, Brown stands alone.

In nine seasons he led the league in rushing eight times, rushing for 1,527 yards in a 12-game season and 1,863 in a 14-game season. Fifty-eight times in 118 games, he went over 100 yards rushing. Seven times, in nine seasons -- most of them 12-game seasons -- he ran for more than 1,000 yards. When he left football in 1965, he left with 12,312 yards and a career average of just over half a first down per carry (5.2 yards).

He also had a dark side. You can't talk about Jim Brown without talking about his treatment of women, which was abominable. Arrested multiple times for beating spouses and girlfriends, it was as much a part of his legacy as the rest of it, and one without which any assessment of the man is incomplete. If he was a social justice warrior, he clearly had a blind spot where women were concerned.

Yet he was indisputably the GOAT, in more arenas than one. Taken in whole, his life was both decorated and consequential, and he put his fame as an athlete to far more useful purposes than most. 

Me, I just remember that day at the golf course, the marshals moving Brown along, the fathers bringing their sons to see someone the sons didn't know from Adam, but whom the fathers could never forget.

"This is the greatest running back in history," some of them would say, or words to that effect.

No argument here.

Grownups ruin everything

 Saw a piece by Vanessa Yurkovich of CNN the other day and posted it to my Twitter page, and it sparked an interesting discussion. Or lament, to be more accurate.

The piece was about youth sports, and how it's getting harder and harder to find umpires/referees/officials to work them, and coaches to coach them. According to the story, the number of Babe Ruth softball and baseball umpires has declined by almost a third since 2017, and, between 2018 and 2022, youth sports in general have lost nearly 20,000 officials just at the high school level.

A lot of that, the story says, is because of idiot grownups who can't keep their mouths shut.

This is not especially news, as youth umpire/official/coach abuse has been a regular feature of the sporting landscape for several years now. Sometimes it involves merely verbal abuse. In some cases, though, it involves actual physical abuse, grownups coming out of the bleachers to pound on some poor kid who's just trying to make a little walking-around money.

Or, worse, getting into full-on brawls with other grownups, while their kids look on in bewilderment. We've all seen the video.

Some of my friends and former colleagues who weighed in on my post have their own tales. One mentioned a Little League game at a local park with what looked like a parent umping  and base coaches having to make fair/foul calls. Another said he was glad his kids were grown and he no longer had to be a travel coach. 

Grownups ruin everything. We've known that forever, but the reminders are all too prevalent these days.

Know what I wish?

When I'm in full unicorn-fantasy mode, I wish this: That the kids would become the grownups when their parents behave like children.

It'll never happen, of course, because kids are kids and they're taught to listen to their coaches and respect their elders, at least if they're raised right. But wouldn't you love to see the following at some Little League game, just one time?

Obnoxious parent: Hey, Pizza Face! Are you blind? How can you (expletive) call that? .You're an (expletive) (expletive)! Did your mom have any kids that lived?

Obnoxious Parent's kid and all of his or her teammates, in perfect unison: SHUT UP!

Beautiful.

Of course, their coach would probably put the kibosh on that. Unless of course I was their coach, in which case I would not only encourage it but join in.

I suppose that's why I would be a lousy candidate to coach youth sports.

The larger point here, however, is the games belong to the kids, or should, and the kids need to start taking them back. Maybe stage a walkout if Mom or Dad can't keep his or her mouth shut. Tell Mom or Dad they're embarrassing you and ruining the game for you. A nice icy Mom or Dad stare when Mom or Dad start in might do the trick.

Hey. Someone's gotta be the adult here. Might as well be the kids.

Who, frankly, never seem to get nearly as upset over a bad call or a loss. That's because it's a kid's game, not Game 7 of the World Series or the Super Bowl or the World Cup. All the kids want to know is whether or not Coach is gonna spring for ice cream again.

In other words: The kids are the role models here. Be like 'em, grownups.

To the Spurs go the Victor

 I see what everyone sees in Victor Wembanyama. I've got eyes and YouTube like all y'all.

.He's a 7-foot-5 Next Gen baller who does things you've never seen any other 7-5 player do: Hit stepback threes, take guys off the dribble out on the floor, handle the ball like a guard. He's Kevin Durant, only half-a-foot taller.

He's also built like Kevin Durant was when he came out of college at Texas. 

In other words, he's a yardstick with feet, all knees and elbows and stick-figure arms and legs. When he turns sideways, he's undetectable by radar. B-2 bomber, meet the B-2 Bomber.

Which is the Blob's only reservation about him.

 Someone who looks that unnervingly frail is Redi-Med Anthony Davis waiting to happen, or so it seems to me. Wembanyama steps onto an NBA court looking like he looks, someone's going to break him in half. 

Of course, he won't ever step onto an NBA court looking like he looks. Not if the San Antonio Spurs have any say in it. 

The Spurs drew the golden ticket in the NBA lottery the other night, and now Victor's theirs with the No. 1 pick. And now the real work begins because the first thing the Spurs likely will do with their Victor-y is get him in the weight room and load him up with protein shakes. 

The only question is whether or not Wembanyama is willing to do the work necessary to turn his otherworldly skill set into greatness.

The last prospect to create this sort of stir was LeBron James, who rode into the league on a hype tsunami that makes Wembanyama's look like a ripple. He lived up to it and then some, becoming the NBA's alltime leading scorer and the greatest basketball player in history unless Michael Jordan is. 

At 38, he's got the Lakers back in the conference finals again. And he's doing that because his workout regimen is legendary and always has been.

Put the work in, and greatness will follow. That's the LeBron James lesson, the Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant lesson, the lesson of every player who ever wound up in Springfield, Mass., in the Hall of Fame.

This includes Kevin Durant, who'll be there on the first ballot someday. And who now is 6-10 and 240 sculpted pounds -- a far cry from the 215-pound spindle he was as a phenom at Texas.

Do the work, greatness follows.

Words to take to heart now, if you're Victor Wembanyama.

Cruds break!

 (And, as always, those who are SICK AND TIRED OF THE STUPID PIRATES are excused. But this does not mean you're not responsible for this material. I mean it! This is my job!)

(Donald Sutherland, "Animal House.")

Now where was I?

Oh, yeah. My Cruds.

I know them, see, so I knew they were just having us all on when they got off to a gaudy 20-8 start and were, for a trembling moment, the second-best team in baseball. Even then, I could see the smoke and mirrors. Even then, I knew they weren't that good. They weren't fooling me.

Because you know what?

Since winning 20 of their first 28 games, the Cruds have now lost 12 of their last 14. 

They're two games behind Milwaukee in the NL Central and fifth overall in the National League, a fortnite after being No. 1.

By the end of this week, the Blob predicts, they'll be back home under .500 again.

"Wow. What happened to them?" someone asked me the other day.

"They finally realized they were the Pirates," I replied.

Truth.

All aboard the carousel

 So I guess the lesson in today's NBA is "Don't lose big."

This upon the news that the 76ers have fired Doc Rivers, who committed the unpardonable sin of losing Game 7 to the Celtics by 30 the other day.

This coming on the heels of the Phoenix Suns firing Monty Williams after his team, down Chris Paul and Deandre Ayton, lost the deciding game in their series by 20 to the top-seeded Nuggets.

And this following, as day follows night, the Milwaukee Bucks firing Mike Budenholzer after HIS team, down Giannis Antetokounmpo, lost in five games to eight-seed Miami in the first round.

Combined wins this season for the Sixers, Suns and Bucks: 157.

Combined losses: 89.

Doesn't mean a thing. 

Doesn't mean a thing, because if the swift dismissal of Rivers, Williams and Budenholzer tells us anything, it's that the eons-long NBA regular season is a six-month waste of time. Management could care less. It's what you do in the playoffs that matters. Everything else is just marking time and counting your pile from 41 home dates.

Rivers, for example?

He coached the Sixers this season to their most wins (54) in 22 years. It was his 16th straight winning season as a coach; under his hand, the Sixers this year were one of three teams in the entire league that ranked in the top ten in both offensive and defensive efficiency.

However ...

However, the Sixers' Game 7 collapse against the favored Celtics was Rivers' fifth straight Game 7 loss, and his ninth straight loss in a conference semifinal. So ...

So, he's on the street, same as Williams and Budenholzer. And you know what's unintentionally comic about that?

Both Williams and Budenholzer are expected to be candidates to replace him in Philly.

And don't be shocked if Doc winds up in either Phoenix or Milwaukee.

You've heard of the coaching carousel?

All aboard.

The Cup runneth under

 We're down to the final four in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and I've gotta say, I'm underwhelmed. Let's go to the particulars, shall we?

* In the East, it's the Carolina Hurricanes against the Florida Panthers, "meh" against vitamin-fortified "meh." Seriously, I don't know anything about these teams, except that the Hurricanes were once the Hartford Whalers and had that way-cool logo, and the Panthers got run in four in the  1996 Stanley Cup Final by Joe Sakic, Patrick Roy and the Colorado Avalanche.

Oh, and their fans like to throw rubber rats on the ice, for some odd reason.

The Panthers haven't been back to a Final since '96, while the Hurricanes hoisted the Cup in 2006. It was the first major pro championship for the state of North Carolina, even if half the population likely thought the Cup looked like one of Dale Earnhardt's old engine blocks.

I guess this means I'm picking the 'Canes. 

* In the West, meanwhile, we've got the Dallas Stars and the Vegas Golden Knights. I can't think of a matchup that fills me with less Deeply Care. The Stars have no stars a non-puckhead would recognize -- they don't even have Mike Modano anymore -- and Vegas has Jonathan Marchessault and a bunch of guys.

Also, they eliminated Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and the Edmonton Oilers (aka: Canada), which took the entertainment value of Stanley from 60 to zero in six seconds. So to hell with 'em.

That said, I'm picking Vegas to win. That's who the smart people are picking, and I always listen to the smart people.

That would set up a Vegas-Carolina Final, a 6-year-old expansion team vs. a team relocated to the middle of NASCAR country. Boy howdy.

Where are the Canadian teams? (Oh, right, they've been MIA for 30 years). Where are the Original Six teams? And, speaking of which, where in God's name are the Boston Bruins, who wrecked the league this winter with a record 65 wins and 135 points?

Oh, yeah. They got knocked out in the first round by the rat-throwers. 

So it's a couple of non-hockey country teams, with the even more dismaying possibility of  Dallas-Miami (Florida). Dallas-Miami is not a Stanley Cup Final, for God's sake. It's a Thanksgiving Day NFL game.

I guess this means root like hell (or heck, in this case) for Carolina and Vegas. And just write it down as the year the Cup runneth under.

Gun crazy

 This is all coming to a bad end, and it doesn't take 20/20 SeerVision to see it. I don't know what to say about that, except that America is the land of the free and the home of the batshite crazy.

More on that in a bit.

For now, let's check in on NBA star Ja Morant, shall we?

Oh, look, there he is in a car, waving what looks to be a handgun around while he sings along to a rap song. Live on Instagram, y'all!

This was two months after he was caught on video waving a gun around in a nightclub.

This was after he was sued by a high school kid after Morant and a friend punched him during a pickup game, and Ja went in the house and came back with -- gee, what a surprise -- a gun tucked into his waistband.

Sense a theme here?

The theme is Ja loves his guns, maybe more than basketball, maybe more than the life basketball has built for him. After the nightclub incident the NBA suspended him and he said all the right things about realizing he has much to lose and how he needed to be "more responsible, more smarter and staying away from all the bad decisions."

Not two months later he was back to waving guns around on video -- even though the nightclub incident cost him $39 mill in incentives when he was left off the All-NBA teams.

Now the Grizzlies have suspended him from all team activities, and you've got to think his endorsement deals with Nike and Powerade are in peril, too. Once burned, twice shy, and all that. Especially when it's twice in two months.

And so all I can see, again, is a bad end. Because if you're partial to waving guns around, and you surround yourself with shady friends -- every one of the aforementioned incidents involved the same running buddy, Davonte Pack -- sooner or later that gun's gonna go off. Inadvertently or otherwise.

And when the shooting stops, who winds up lying on the ground with his life running out of him? Ja? Someone else?

It’s easy to suggest someone Ja Morant respects sit him down and lay out that scenario, and tell him to for God's sake put the damn guns away before someone gets hurt or he blows up his career. But, as I alluded at the start of this, look where we live.

America the crazy. America the geared up. An America with a sick fetish for calibration in all its forms, fueled by a misbegotten reading of a constitutional amendment and the creepy near-worship thereof.

In this America, families send out Christmas cards featuring Mom, Dad and kiddos proudly displaying the family firepower. Peace on Earth and goodwill toward Armalite, in other words. Merry Christmas from the Johnsons (or else!). Baby Jesus, the manger and the three wise men, coming with gold, frankincense and a pile of high-volume clips.

I see this, and I wonder if I'm the only one who gets how twisted it is. I know I'm not, but it sure feels that way sometimes. Because one day some guy drove into an outlet mall parking lot in Texas, got out and opened fire for the hell of it, killing eight people. And I'm reading this poor sick bastard -- and I mean "sick" in the clinical sense -- allegedly owned 42 weapons of various types.

Apparently he expected some stiff resistance from the moms, dads and kids shopping for bargains.

Meanwhile, because it's Texas, the politicians wring their hands as long as decency requires, and then go back to passing laws making it easier for Joe Mall Shooter to do his thing. In March, for instance, the Texas lege abolished the law restricting handgun ownership to those 21 or older. So now even colleges and universities in the state can't legally keep 19-year-old freshmen from packing heat on campus.

Insane. Absolutely insane.

Know what else is insane?

It's some fool named Will Cain going on the Magic Twitter Thingy to wonder why Ja was suspended, because the Second Amendment and blah-blah-blah. 

Seriously. He went there.

Lord help us.

Trigger happy

 Hey, I get that it's a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world today. But I didn't think it meant this lately.

I mean, seriously, Phoenix Suns. Seriously.

Forty-eight hours after the Suns bowed out of the NBA playoffs in Game 6 of the conference semifinals, head coach Monty Williams was told to hit the bricks. Owner Mat Ishbia, not content with interfering with game play a few nights earlier, decided to interfere with Williams' employment almost immediately after being eliminated by the West's top seed, Denver. Apparently he didn't like that they got blown out by 25 in the deciding game.

Couple things about that.

1. The Suns were playing without starters Chris Paul and Deandre Ayton, both out with injuries.

2. The Nuggets were playing with two-time MVP Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, the league's dynamic duo so far in the playoffs. 

So the Nuggets, who won eight more games than the Suns during the regular season, prevailed as everyone expected. Except, apparently, Mat Ishbia.

It seems Ishbia, who bought the team in February, thought his almost immediate acquisition of Kevin Durant made the Suns a lock for the NBA Finals. In fairness, so did a lot of other folks who frankly should have known better.

And Williams?

All he did in four years in Phoenix was turn a pile of rubble into a perennial contender. They were the winningest team in the NBA the last three seasons, and Williams was named Coach of the Year two seasons ago, when the Suns reached the Finals and lost to the Milwaukee Bucks.

Who just fired their coach, Mike Budenholzer, after the Bucks lost in five games to the Heat in the first round. The Bucks, who won a league-best 58 games largely on the back of Giannis Antetokounmpo, were playing without him.

This despite Budenholzer bringing the Bucks their first title in 50 years, coaching them to the league's best record in three of his five seasons and winning a combined 310 games in the regular season and playoffs -- more than any other team in the NBA.

In the playoff loss to the Heat, he drew fire for being badly outcoached by Erik Spoelstra, who generally outcoaches everyone. Part of that might have had something to do with Budenholzer losing his brother in a car accident before Game 4, which, you know, might have been a tad distracting.

In any event, he's out. And Williams is out. And Ishbia and the Bucks ownership group share the prize for coldest and most trigger-happy firings of this and probably several seasons.

Impulse control is not a thing for much of anyone these days. But this was like walking onto a used car lot, pointing at a hot-pink 1982 Ford Escort and saying, "I'll take that one."

And I can't help wondering now what Ishbia and the Bucks owners would have done with a guy who missed the playoffs the last four years and never won more than 34 games in any of those years. He'd likely have been gone after the first of those years, if not sooner.

Or maybe the Impulse Boys would have restrained themselves for once.

After all, the guy in question is named Gregg Popovich. And you can find him in the Hall of Fame these days.

'Dog days

 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. When did the NBA playoffs become the NCAA Tournament?

Last night's results: Lakers 122, Warriors 101. Heat 96, Knicks 92.

Lakers boot the defending NBA champs in six games. Ditto the Heat to the allegedly resurgent Knicks.

In other words, two survivors of the NBA play-in games are now in their respective conference finals, and the only question is, which one is Florida Atlantic and which one is Miami? 

("Miami is Miami," you're saying)

Wise guy.

Seriously, what's in the water in Florida? The Owls, the Hurricanes, and now the Heat. And did you think you'd ever see the day when the Lakers were an underdog?

That's exactly what they are, though, having finished a meh 43-39 and beaten the Timberwolves in overtime in the play-in round to lock down the seventh seed in the West. They cobbled together something that worked toward the end of the season (Rui Hachimura? Austin Reaves? Who are these guys?), and LeBron has been LeBron, and Anthony Davis has been ANTHONY DAVIS and not, you know, RediMed Anthony Davis.

AD went for 17 points and 20 rebounds last night in disposing of the Warriors. LeBron put up a 32-9-9 stat line. Which means the two of them combined for 49 points, 29 rebounds and 12 assists. Yikes.

And the Heat?

Well, they opened the playoffs by beating the Bulls to secure the eighth and final playoff berth. Then they turned around and knocked out the Bucks, the No. 1 seed, eliminating in just five games a team that won 14 more games than the Heat did in the regular season.

They did it because Playoff Jimmy Butler has been Supernova Playoff Jimmy so far, and because they have the best and most frequently underappreciated coach in the NBA, Erik Spoelstra, who knows how to win in the playoffs. Playoff Jimmy and Playoff Spo are even doing it without their best outside shooter, Tyler Herro, who's out for the duration.

Now it's on to the conference finals. And don't think there won't be more 'dog days ahead.

As Da Tournament showed us, what you never know, you never know.

Emmy-worthy

 OK. So the annual Release of the NFL Schedule is a big deal for some folks.

(See? I even used capitals)

I mean, who doesn't live for the moment when Joe Fan can look at his team's schedule and excitedly say "OMG! We play the TEXANS in Week 10!"?

In other words, the Release is mostly a big deal for the teams themselves. The fans care, but they don't, you know, CARE. Like, so much they throw schedule release parties (like the teams do) or employ Emmy-worthy production values in releasing their schedules (like the teams do).

That said ...

The Broncos win the Emmy this year. I mean, just watch this.

Gold, Jerry! Gold!

Viking funeral(s)

And now Joe Kapp.

Joe Kapp, who threw the football like a loaf of bread and lowered his head and ran over guys when you could still lower your head and run over guys, and behaved like no NFL quarterback you ever saw. He played quarterback the way a longshoreman would, is what he did.

Or an ironworker. Or a coal miner. Or Joe Szymanski from the local works, sweatin' out third trick in that maw of hell they called a steel mill.

Blue-collar all the way, that was Joe Kapp. And this week he passed, and two months ago Bud Grant the Emperor of the North passed, and the question is, why is God so hot at the Minnesota Vikings?

Because, listen, Grant roaming the sideline in his parka and Kapp manning the offense with two clenched fists were the Vikings, back in the day.Bud never won a Super Bowl, and Joe lost the only one he played in to the Chiefs and their yippy chihuahua of a coach, Hank Stram. But you knew you'd been in a fight when you played them.

Most iconic photo in Vikings history, aside from Bud and his great stone face on the sideline?

Joe Kapp calling signals with a dusting of snow atop his helmet, like snow on a Halloween pumpkin. 

And now he's gone. And Bud Grant is gone. And, dammit, I'm not 13 or 14 years old anymore, watching Joe and Bud and Alan Page and Jim Marshall beat up on my poor Bears every Sunday afternoon in the fall.

Never mind the Vikings, Lord. Why are you so hot at me?

Explaining the inexplicable, Part Deux

 Well, then. I guess West Virginia University is OK with embarrassing itself.

Because, as the Blob opined yesterday, it would have to show Bob Huggins the street if it didn't want to do that.

Instead it excused its basketball coach going on talk radio and slurring students at Xavier University as "Catholic f*****s,"  and we all know how to fill in the *'s. Gays and Catholics, that's a hell of a twofer slur for Hugs. As a friend quipped, it's the insult equivalent of a double-word score in Scrabble.

"But, Mr. Blob," you're saying. "West Virginia didn't excuse anything. It's cutting his pay by $1 million! It's suspending him for three games! And he has to undergo some pretty meaningful sensitivity training, too."

Well, yes, I suppose so. I mean, I don't know how Huggins, who pulled down a yearly salary of $4.2 million, can possibly get by on the $3.2 mill he'll now be making. And the Mountaineers will surely suffer for the three games Hugs will sit -- the first three games of the season, when WVU faces heavyweights Missouri State, Monmouth and Jacksonville State.

Oh, the humanity.

Of course, Hugs' sensitivity training will likely be somewhat more extensive than a moderator saying "Don't do that s*** again, Bob," and Bob replying "OK." And school president Gordon Gee and athletic director Wren Baker did release a statement saying "any incidents of similar derogatory and offensive language will result in immediate termination."

In other words, he's on double secret probation. 

In further other words, this is Gee's and Baker's version of  "If you do this ONE MORE TIME, Bob, you're really going to get it! Just try me, mister!"

What all this amounts to, all joking aside, is a slap on the wrist that was purely and simply a business decision. College athletics, as everyone knows by now, is big bidness. Huggins, a West Virginia grad, has been good for that bidness. Therefore it was a flight of fancy to think WVU was going to fire him, even if it should have.

And, yeah, sure, the university said all the right things about partnering with the university's LGBTQ+ Center to develop annual training sessions, and to require Huggins to meet with LGBTQ+ leaders from around the state. And blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda. 

Performance art, all of it. This was, after all, Gordon Gee laying all this out -- the same bozo who was forced out at Ohio State after saying the "fathers" at Notre Dame were "holy on Sunday and holy hell the rest of the week. You just can't trust those damn Catholics on a Thursday or Friday."

In case you were wondering where Hugs gets it.

No, sir. The bottom line here is West Virginia will keep its successful and lucrative men's basketball program intact. That was the goal, and the goal was achieved.

No matter what you or I think.

Explaining the inexplicable

I don't know West Virginia basketball coach Bob Huggins from a box of Huggies. Let's open with that this morning.

I don't know Huggins, so I don't know if he's a drinking man, although a DUI helped cost him his gig at Cincinnati two decades ago. And therefore the thought that popped into my head the other day was probably unfair, even if it was also unavoidable:

Was Bob Huggins drunk?

Because I don't know what else could explain what he said on the radio the other day that's got him in hot water. It was so profoundly stupid and reckless that intoxication seemed the only viable explanation. I mean, not just the F-word (not THE F-word, the homophobic F-word), but Catholic F-word?

Wow. Just ... wow.

Hell  of a day when you can go on talk radio and insult not just gay people but, by inference, the largest Christian religion in the world. Yet that's what Hugs did when he called Xavier University "Catholic f*****s" on Bill Cunningham's show. And did it not just once, but twice.

Now his job's in jeopardy, presumably, and it should be. You can say any damn-fool thing you want in America, and half the country does now because it thinks it's clever or The Truth or some other bullshite thing. But that doesn't mean your bosses have to put up with it.

I've read the Constitution, see. Nothing in there about a business having to employ idiots and bigots if it doesn't want to.

This especially would seem to apply to an institution of higher learning, which WVU reputedly is. And so you've got to figure Hugs is gone. And, as night follows day, here will come the usual suspects making their usual noises about Free Speech and Wokeness and, I don't know, maybe Drag Queens, too, because that seems to be the usual suspects' newest weird obsession. And all of it will hugely miss the point.

Which is, there used to be something called manners. And professionalism. And when you signed on to work for someone, those were expected of you. It was an implicit condition of employment that you not to say or do anything that embarrasses either your employer or yourself.

Hugs did both with his twofer slur the other day.

Now it's up to his university not to embarrass itself, and show him the street.

Crime and mis-punishment

 They'll lighten Nikola Jokic's wallet by $25,000 for trying to put the ball in play the other night, but, hey, AT LEAST HE DIDN'T GET SUSPENDED. That's the preferred take on this, apparently, painting the NBA as restrained and proportional instead of, you know, ridiculous.

Did I say ridiculous?

Ridiculous is 25 bills because a fan -- in this case, a team owner -- literally tried to take Jokic's ball and go home.

Ridiculous is the ball going out of bounds and Suns owner Mat Ishbia picking it up and  trying to keep it as Jokic reached for it, which resulted in Jokic bumping him with an elbow.

Down went Ishbia in a flop worthy of Bill Laimbeer. Springing into action was the NBA, still spooked by the Malice in the Palace two decades ago, deciding between suspending Jokic and fining him because he touched a fan. 

(In this case, and we can't say this enough, a team owner.)

Here's what I think: I think the team owner should have been ejected from the premises, but of course I believe in unicorns and fairy dust, too.

I think, more realistically, the Association should have suspended and/or fined him, not Jokic.

I think, as much as you cannot, absolutely cannot, touch a fan if you're a player, you also can't interfere with game play if you're a fan. One should be as forbidden as the other. And if you grab the ball and even momentarily resist giving it back to an inbounding player, you are interfering with game play.

That's what Mat Ishbia did. Sorry he fell down and went boom, but that's not the primary offense here. That's not the punishable offense.

Even if the NBA clearly thinks so. 

Mad Ants-less

(Wrote this for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. And, as always, I'll add a plea to support local news, because local news is important and it's being strangled to death by the hedge-fund vultures who feed without conscience on local papers these days. So, subscribe here. I promise you won't regret it.)

Ron Howard in that corridor. That’s what sticks now.

Ron Howard, Mr. Mad Ant, leaning against one wall while I leaned against the other, talking softly about expectations and winning and all the grinding work that comes with getting one to meet the other. Ron Howard, on that night in 2014 when he put a hand on a championship trophy and gave birth to a banner that would soon hang in the dim rafters of the Allen County Memorial Coliseum, a banner that would announce that the Fort Wayne Mad Ants were your G-League champions.

That was the pinnacle, Ron Howard in that corridor.  Yesterday was … something else.

Yesterday was something for which the clock started ticking eight years ago, when the Indiana Pacers bought the Mad Ants and made them their developmental team. You knew the Ants were headed out of town the moment that happened, if you were at all a thinking person. You knew the day would come when the Pacers would move their farm team a lot closer to the big city, especially when it became apparent Fort Wayne wasn’t going to pony up for a more compact arena downtown.

Noblesville, one of the moneyed communities in Indy’s orbit, did, as it turned out. Why it will only be a 3,500-seat arena is a question that remains unanswered, except that perhaps the Pacers understand their farm team isn’t going to draw much more than that.

What they’re thinking about, more likely, is that the Ants – or whatever they’ll be called now – won’t be 130 miles up the road now. They’ll be right in the backyard. Which will make the logistics of moving players back and forth a lot simpler.

And the city they’re leaving behind?

It’s a city with pro buckets in its blood, and anyone with a morsel of institutional knowledge knows it. Before the Mad Ants there was the Fury of the Continental Basketball Association, and before that there were the Fort Wayne Pistons, one of the seminal franchises of the NBA. The league, in fact, was born in Pistons owner Fred Zollner’s kitchen on Forest Park Boulevard, commissioner Maurice Podoloff presiding. Less than a decade later the Pistons fled to Detroit, as the Fort Waynes and Rochesters and Minneapolises got left behind.

Decades later came the Fury, and what a crazy-fun show that was. It was Gerald Oliver and Memor’awl Magic, Jimmy “Wild Wild West” Carruth and Jay Edwards. Damon Bailey played here, and Brook Steppe. Lloyd “Sweet Pea” Daniels, who once asked radio announcer and media relations rep Rob Brown if he needed a passport to go to Idaho. And of course former coach Mo McHone, who once caught the plastic head of a golf club in a most unfortunate anatomical place.

And the Mad Ants?

Joey Meyer coached them, once upon a time. Duane Ticknor, who taught them how to win. And Conner Henry, who wrung a 34-16 record out of them in 2014, and turned them into champions.

But the  loyal fan base remained also a tiny one, with so much else competing for the entertainment dollar. And then the Pacers came and the color scheme went from yellow-and-red to blue-and-gold, and the fierce red Mad Ant became the soft and squishy blue-and-gold Ant.

And the clock began to tick.

Pro buckets may come back to Fort Wayne someday, in some form or fashion. But for now, a city with a rich history in that arena will go dark and quiet.

Ron Howard in that corridor.

Only a memory now. A memory, and a requiem.

Blue mood

 So I find out over the weekend that Vida Blue is dead at 73, and, damn, that can't be right. Wasn't it just yesterday he was 22 and ringing up the entire American League?

Sure it was.

Sure, the people who say 1971 was 52 years ago are lying through their incisors, because Vida Blue is out there on the mound. Here's Joe Rudi and Sal Bando and Reg-gie and Bert Campaneris. Catfish Hunter is over there in the bullpen, awaiting his next start, and Rollie Fingers is twirling his Snidely Whiplash moustache, and the mod, hairy, party-on Oakland A's are confounding the buttoned-up Cincinnati Reds.

Vida Blue was the child wonder in all of that, and '71 was his year. A year after pitching a no-hitter at 21, the kid went 24-8 with a 1.81 ERA and 301 strikeouts. He pitched an astounding 24 complete games, eight of them shutouts. At the end of the season, he became one of only 11 pitchers in the history of the game to win both the American League Cy Young and MVP awards.

After that there was a falling out with Charlie Finley and stints with the Giants and Royals, and a brief stretch in prison in the early '80s when he got caught with a tenth of an ounce of cocaine -- not an unusual occurrence in those years. But he came back in '85, and later became a mentor to other pitchers, most notably Dave Stewart.

He died Saturday in a San Francisco hospital, way too damn young. Cancer got him. But before that he got three World Series rings and six All-Star appearances and that unforgettable summer of '71, when he was young and had a left arm touched by the gods, and all of the American League was swinging and missing.

That year is long gone now. And I feel old again, knowing the man is, too.

World class

 This began in the shadows.

It began at his brother's elbow in a cramped room at South Side High School, family and friends and coaches crowding close, all the oxygen squeezed out of it as the filled space heated up fast on this last day of February. 

Everyone watched as Jamar Beasley picked up a blue-and-gold pen. A yellow tag with a red arrow instructed him to "Sign here." He pressed pen to paper, and his signature spilled across the designated line.

On side of him, looking on, was his mother. 

On the other, leaning in close, was his younger brother, DaMarcus.

He was watching Jamar, a senior in high school, sign a contract with the New England Revolution of MLS, and here the shadows begin to recede. Someone nodded toward DaMarcus and whispered he was going to be even better than his brother. 

Twenty-five years, a whole quarter century,  have spun by since then. Whoever whispered those words -- and the details are lost to time -- proved to be a prophet and then some.

Because he went on, DaMarcus did, to play in the MSL  with his brother. He went on to play in the World Cup at 20, helping the U.S. reach the quarterfinals for the first time in 72 years. He went on to play in four World Cups, more than any American ever, and to accumulate a record 126 national team caps and 17 goals, and to score 46 goals and play in 422 games for everyone from PSV Eindhoven to Manchester City to Glasgow Rangers to the Houston Dynamo of MLS.

Where he received a standing ovation when he subbed out of his last professional game.

For all of that, two days ago, DaMarcus Beasley went down to Texas to be inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

 Half of Fort Wayne, it seemed, followed him there. His father, Henry, slipped the red HOF jacket on his son's shoulders. Which was entirely appropriate, because DaMarcus will tell you everything he did was because of his parents and his brother and his aunts and his uncles and ... well, pretty much everyone who shoehorned his or her way into that tiny room 25 years ago.

That was his brother's day. 

Saturday was DaMarcus'.

But it was all one, we see now. All one.

Dead roses

 Mage, a 15-1 shot with Hall of Fame jock Javier Castellanos up, surged past Two Phil's in the stretch to win the Kentucky Derby yesterday, and everyone wondered where that horse came from, and why didn't they put a stack o' green on his nose, and. well, you just never know in this sport of kings (so-called).

Me?

I think they should have given Mage his blanket of roses just for being alive.

Seems that was a hell of an accomplishment in its own right this week, with thoroughbreds -- perhaps too Thoroughly Bred these days -- dropping like bluebottle flies. Seven of 'em died this week at Churchill Downs, including two on Saturday in the Derby undercard. Five others were scratched from the Derby itself, four for health reasons.

That of course included the 3-1 favorite, Forte, whom the vets nixed because of a bruised foot that had him looking not quite right during a couple of Saturday morning lopes.

Forte's corner, naturally, thought he looked fine. But the docs pretty clearly decided an abundance of caution was best, given the week's significant carnage.

So out Forte went. And maybe he'd have been fine and outrun the field and got the blanket of roses himself -- or maybe he puts the bruised foot wrong and the leg snaps and we're talking about eight dead thoroughbreds instead of seven.

Look. As the Blob frequently (and usually humorously) admits, it doesn't know withers from Bill Withers about horse racing. But I do notice things, and I notice an awful lot of racehorses are turning up dead these days. And I suspect a lot of that is because someone whose job it is to develop stakes winners are jacking them up in ways that ought to be better policed.

So hooray for the vets at Churchill Downs for pulling Forte. And hooray for Mage, because for all its darkness, thoroughbred racing frequently gives us storylines we can't resist.

Mage, for instance, didn't even race as a 2-year-old, and came to Derby Day with just three previous starts. Castellano, meanwhile, was 0-for-15 in the Derby, despite being one of his era's most accomplished jocks. He's 45 years old now, and yesterday was his day, bringing Mage from well off the pace with a stirring sprint that began as the field turned for home.

It was a hell of a Run for the Roses -- dimmed, of course, by all the week's dead roses.

Years and years ago, one of the best ever to do it, W.C. Heinz, wrote a legendary piece about the death of a racehorse named Air Lift, who broke his leg in his first start and had to be put down. Those of us who value the sportswriting craft can still cite Heinz's last paragraph, almost word-for-word:

" ... They worked quickly, the two vets removing the broken bones as evidence for the insurance company, the crowd silently watching. Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rushed for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain running off his hide, dead an hour and a quarter after his first start, Air Lift, son of Bold Venture, full brother of Assault." 

Were he alive and writing about horse racing today, W.C. Heinz would have had to write something like that seven times this week. Seven. Times.

Something to think about this day, once you’re done thinking about mint juleps and women in silly hats, and men in their seersucker suits.

Derby time!

 And now the Blob's eagerly awaited Guide To The Kentucky Derby From A Guy Who Doesn't Know A Fetlock From A Padlock, in which we discuss the Twin Spires (Look! Two of 'em!), and mint juleps (The Robitussin of mixed drinks!), and why Kentucky colonels never get promoted to general (Too many mint juleps!).

Here we go ...

1. Gray Horse Alert

Based on the Blob's ridiculous but firmly held belief that gray horses are frequently slower than erosion, we regret to inform you that one of the favorites, Tapit Trice, is as gray as a winter's day. So are Hit Show, Rocket Can and King Russell.

The until-today favorite, on other hand, is not gray. His name is Forte, and he's kind of a bondo-bay color. He was going off at 3-1, but this morning he was scratched because of a bruised foot.

I say drop a wad on him anyway.

2. Where is Calvin Borel?

Everyone's favorite overly-excitable jock retired in 2016, so, sadly, he will not be aboard a Derby horse today. But if he were, it probably wouldn't be Tapit Trice, Hit Show, Rocket Can or King Russell.

I'm thinking he'd be riding Raise Cain. It sounds like the kind of horse he'd be aboard, and he goes off at 50-1 besides. Perfect.

3. Where is that guy with the white hair?

You know the one. Bob Baffle, Butter, something like that (actually: Baffert). Well, he's not here either. They kicked Butter out of the Derby two years ago for doping his horses, and the six-time Derby-winning trainer is still banned. 

So he won't have a Derby horse again this year. Not even Raise Cain or one of those gray mutts.

4. Who are the Irish horses?

That would be Not Here and Oh, Sure, Carry On Without Me Ya Feckers. In other words, there are no Irish horses in the field this year.

There are, however, two Japanese horses. Their names are Toshiro Mifune and Ken Watanabe.

Just kidding. Those are two Japanese actors.

Derma Sotogake and Mandarin Hero are the two Japanese horses, and Derma Sotogake is the one people are eyeing because he won the UAE Derby by 5 1/2 lengths. Unfortunately, winners of the UAE Derby are 0-for-18 lifetime in the Derby. So he's got that not going for him.

Then again, Derma Sotogake's trainer, Hidetaka Otonashi, is don't-give-a-damn years old (68), which might explain why he showed up drunk to the Kentucky Derby trainers dinner the other night.

I like him already.

5. And your Derby winner is ...

The Blob says put all your money on Cyclone Mischief, a 30-1 shot. 

Why? I don't know why. He's pretty?

Of course, he could be a can of Alpo, too. He's coming off  third-place finish in the Florida Derby. His best Brisnet Speed rating, whatever that is, is 99. His trainer, Dale Romans, is 0-for-11 in the Derby; his owners, Albaugh Family Stables, are 0-for-3 in the Derby.

One of his owners, though, is the splendidly named Castleton Lyons.

Castleton Lyons!

Sounds like a winner to me. I say take out a second mortgage on him.

Gambling jones, Part Deux

 The Blob is not one for I-told-you-so's, except when it is. And this is one of those times.

 And so: I told you so.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when the NFL suspended five players for betting on sports and the Blob said, see, this is what happens when you crawl in bed with Bet MGM and DraftKings and the rest of the Vegas crowd? And where the Shield now has an actual franchise?

Well ... it's happened again, boys and girls.

This time it was the University of Alabama firing its baseball coach, Brad Bohannon, during an investigation into "suspicious betting activity" surrounding the Crimson Tide's game against LSU last week.

A bettor in Ohio, it seems, got caught on surveillance video placing bets on the game while in communication with Bohannon. Why some guy in Ohio is betting on Alabama baseball is the answered question here, except to wonder what kind of loser bets on Alabama baseball to begin with.

At any rate, this is what the proliferation of sportsbooks has wrought, and it won't be the last time it wreaks it. You climb in bed with gamblers, you get up with scandal.  The NFL is finding that out, and now so are college athletics. You can impose the strictest rules  you like regarding your workforce betting  on sports, but it's damn near impossible to take you seriously when out of the other side of your mouth you're trumpeting "the official sportsbook" of your league.

Hard to convince folks you run a clean game when you tacitly endorse betting on that game. That you forbid league personnel from doing so is a distinction too fine to discern for some folks -- most notably, on occasion, those same personnel.

In other words: We haven't heard the end of this stuff. Fact is, we've barely heard the beginning.

Writing good

 Forgive the Blob if it goes off on a non-Sportsball World toot today, climbing aboard the stump for some old-fashioned geezer ranting about writing and what it is, and most of all what it isn't.

I say this because I saw another of those ads the other day for some artificial intelligence (AI) program that will do your writing for you, if writing is your job. Except it doesn't frame it that way, of course.

The way it frames it is this Skynet deal will enable you to more quickly pump out Blobs or whatever copy it is your job to write. The question, of course, is if Skynet is doing the writing, what are you doing? Playing World of Warcraft on the company dime?

You're certainly not "writing" Blobs or anything else. So why are you there?

As Stephen King once said: If you want to write, write. If you'd rather take the lazy way out and just load all the pertinent facts and figures and stylistic flourishes into some AI program, fine. But don't take credit for the finished product, because it's not yours.

And, hey, maybe that's not exactly how this works. I don't know. As someone who spent an inordinate amount of time in his career cursing at his STUPID BLEEPING LAPTOP, I claim no standing in the technological realm.

But what these ads do seem to promise is reduced toil on the part of the "writer." And that means it isn't writing at all.

Look. I don't know much, but I did do a little writing in my 40 years in press boxes, so I do know a few things. I know writing is a process -- a uniquely human process -- not a widget factory. As such, it's hard, and it's supposed to be hard. To paraphrase Tom Hanks in "A League Of Their Own," it's the hard that makes it writing.

Every deadline warrior I know, and I've known some pretty good ones, has experienced that moment of terror when you stare at an empty screen and the screen stares back at you. All you can see is that tiny goddamn cursor, mocking you with every blink

Blink. Come on, Jim Murray, dazzle us with your verbiage. Blink, blink. Whassa matter, Shakespeare, words won't come? 

And then the kicker: Man, do you suck.

Of course, when the words do come, finally, there's an enormous sense of either satisfaction or relief.  It's hard to say which, or at least it always was for me. It's why when I finally wrapped the column and hit send, I'd break out the best deadline quote I ever heard: "Yours might be better, but mine's done."

Of course, if all I did was load data into some AI program ...

Well. I can imagine opening the paper the next day and seeing some vague parody of my style under the byline "By Skynet." And my column bug would be a headshot of Arnold Schwarzenegger at the end of "Terminator," his face half-melted and one red eyeball glaring at the reader.

What a treat.

The Shunshine State

 Those giant-slayin' Florida Panthers whupped the Toronto Maple Leafs on the road last night in Game 1 of the conference semis, which no doubt made a lot of folks in south Florida happy. And maybe it eased their fears a bit, too, seeing how they seem so a-skeered of the Maple Leafs and their fans. 

"Hey! We're not a-skeered!" Panthers Fan just protested.

So you'll let any old fan into Games 3 and 4 in Miami, and not just U.S. citizens the way the Panthers have planned?

"Hell, no, we won't!" Panthers Fan responds. "This is Florida, the Shunshine State! We're into xenophobia, homophobia, history-o-phobia and inclusion-o-phobia! Just like our beloved governor, Ron 'il Duce' DeSantis!"

Lot of phobias goin' on these days down in il Duce's magic kingdom, to be sure. Including Magic Kingdom-o-phobia, come to think of it.

So I guess the Panthers being afraid of Maple Leafs fans taking over their building fits right into the prevailing Florida ethos, which accounts for the restrictive ticket policy. It won't keep every Maple Leafs fan out of the building, but the Panthers hope it will at least cut down on those schemin' Canadian snowbirds -- even if their hefty Florida presence helps fill the coffers of the Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning each winter.

To say it's lame and gutless and a glaring admission that the Panthers don't think much of their fan base is almost too obvious to say, but we'll say it anyway. It is lame and gutless and all the rest. I could add it's also part and parcel of the Fear The Other culture il Duce has cultivated in Florida, but that seems too deep a dive.

No, this is mainly about fan bases, and how teams try to prop up weak ones. This may be casting aspersion on Panthers fans, but if they'd show up and fill the joint, they wouldn't have to worry about a mass incursion of Leafs fans. 

You can do that, right, Panthers Fan?

Hello? Panthers Fan?

The irrelevance of position

 Fair bit of chatter out there yesterday about Steph Curry, and where he fits into the Pantheon of Basketball Greats, and more specifically whether or not he fits into it as a point guard, which is how he's listed.

All this is because he dropped 50 on the Sacramento Kings the other day in Game 7 of their firsr-round playoff series, putting the Golden State Warriors on his back as surely as any player in any era ever did. It was one of the all-time Game 7 performances, which prompted all the legacy talk.

Also the point guard talk.

The Blob's take is you can list him as a palace guard for all it matters these days.

Basketball in 2023 has only one position in it, and you can list it as "H." Everyone is an "H" now, which stands for "Hybrid." Centers and forwards and shooting guards and point guards are your father's NBA. They don't really exist anymore in a game that looks nothing like it did even 25 years ago.

So the Blob says Steph Curry is not a point guard, because point guards don't win Game 7's with a 50-spot. Point guards win Game 7's with 15 assists, because their main job is to run the break and distribute, not to score. It's why Magic Johnson is the greatest point guard of all time, because no one ran the break and distributed better than he did.

Curry, on the other hand, is a scorer -- the best perimeter scorer ever, in the Blob's humble opinion -- who handles the ball a lot. He's what Michael Jordan was and what Luka Doncic, Ja Morant, Trae Young, James Harden and a number of others are now.

Speaking of Harden ...

Well, he averaged 10.7 assists per game this season, which is the kind of number your best point guards used to put up.

Last night, however, he went for 45 points against the Celtics as the 76ers took Game 1 in Boston without an injured Joel Embiid. Which means Harden was a scorer just as surely as Curry was when their teams needed scorers.

Point guards?

In 2023, no one's a point guard -- or more accurately, everyone is. The days of Kareem and Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon playing with their backs to the basket on the low blocks have gone the way of '80s hair bands; even the big men play out on the floor now, functioning as distributors as much as scorers and rebounders. Or maybe you haven't caught Nikola Jokic's act -- a 6-11 center who averaged 24.5 points,11.8 boards and 9.8 assists this season. 

Seven-footers dish now. They shoot 3s (Jokic made 57 threes this season; Embiid 66). They even bring the ball up, as Jokic does frequently for Denver.

Positions in basketball are irrelevant now, in other words. Or at least positions in the way those of us of a certain age(d) grew up understanding them.

It's why the Kareem's skyhook -- the most unstoppable shot in NBA history -- is practically a museum piece now. Also the mid-range jumper. Also the guy who consistently uses the glass except by accident.

The certain age(d) among us can grumble all we want about that. But then, our fathers used to grumble about the dunk, too. So there you go.

Madness on ice

 The Stanley Cup playoffs are the best playoffs, because all it takes is a goalie who suddenly starts stopping pucks like beachballs and you've got Madness on Ice. If they had a tagline, it would be "The Stanley Cup Playoffs: Wait, WHAT?"

For instance, remember the mighty Boston Bruins, who skated through the NHL like it was the ECHL this season, winning more games (65) and scoring more points (135) than any team in the 106-year history of the league?

Wait, WHAT?

That's right, boys and girls. What you could almost see coming, because it's the Stanley Cup playoffs, happened last night. The Florida Panthers, who finished 23 wins and 43 points behind the invincible Bruins, won in overtime in Game 7 to knock out the Invincibles. 

Carter Verhaeghe's goal 8:35 into OT ended it, after which the entire city of Boston presumably was treated for shock. If it wasn't the biggest upset in Stanley Cup playoff history, it was certainly in the front row of the team photo.

The Invincibles, which lost just 12 games during the regular season, lost the last three in their first-round series, blowing a 3-1 lead in a Mount Rushmore gag job. Unbelievably, three of the Bruins four losses came on their home ice, where they were 34-4-3 in the regular season. 

Meanwhile, out west ...

Wait, WHAT?

Right again, kiddies. In yet another epic upset, the two-year-old Seattle Kraken -- in their first-ever playoff series -- showed the defending Stanley Cup champions the door, beating the Colorado Avalanche 2-1 in Game 7. Like the Panthers, the Kraken did it on the road, following another "Wait, WHAT?" trend: Road teams were 31-18 in the first round of the playoffs.

And so the defending Cup champs and the team that couldn't lose for winning are out before May. And an expansion team and a team that couldn't win for losing (the Toronto Maple Leafs) are still alive.

In other words, buckle up, folks. More "Wait, WHAT?" is coming.