All hail the horseman

 D. Wayne Lukas went to the Big Shedrow In The Sky over the weekend, and if you don't know who that is it's because you never dropped coin on the nose of Glue Shu Pork in the sixth at Keeneland or some such thing. Because that was D. Wayne's world, and he owned it.

He was a high school basketball coach who became one of the top horsemen of his age, and no one ever loved or cared for or knew the quirks of high-strung thoroughbreds better. The man trained mounts that won 15 Triple Crown races in his long career, including seven Preakness and four Kentucky Derby wins. If he'd been so inclined he could have carpeted his spread with the red roses and black-eyed susans his horses collected in those wins.

D. Wayne wasn't so inclined, however. He leaned more toward the rhythms of barn and stable and pasture, and loamy expanses of dirt. Almost until the day he died at 89, he was up with the dawn and on a horse to do the work, because the work was all. 

He was close friends with the other Rushmore trainer of this era, Bob Baffert, and best buds with Bob Knight and other like-minded folks. Knight, in fact, once called him the "Babe Ruth of thoroughbred racing."

If not that, he was damn close. Like his pal Knight, he was relentless, driven and obsessed with detail. Unlike him, the athletes he was charged with overseeing required more finesse to bring out their best.

From the Associated Press obit: "The whole secret of this game, I think, is being able to read the horse: Read what he needs, what he doesn't need, what he can't do, what he can do,"  Lukas said in May before his 34th and final Preakness Stakes. "That's the whole key. Everybody's got a blacksmith, everybody's got the same bed available, the feed man. We all can hire a good jockey. We all can hire a pretty good exercise rider if we've got the means, so what the hell is the difference? The horse is the difference and what we do with him in reading him."

In which case, D. Wayne Lukas was as literate as the next guy. And far more so than almost all of them.

That other guy

 Aaron Judge mashed his 29th and 30th home runs of the season yesterday, as the New York Yankees swatted the hopeless Oakland/Sacramento/Hooterville A's 12-2. 

Now, I don't know if 30 bombs by the Fourth of July is the same as corn being knee-high by the Fourth of July, but I do know Judge is breathing rarified air these days. The two-homer day was the 44th of his career, moving him into third on the Yankees' alltime list ahead of Lou Gehrig. Just ahead sits Mickey Mantle with 46 two-homer days; way, waaaay ahead is (of course) Babe Ruth, who hit two homers in a game a ridiculous 68 times.

The Blob can't add two plus two and come up with four more than about half the time, but by my calculation 30 home runs in his first 83 games means Judge is working on a 59-homer season. This is significant, but not half as significant as this: Even at his currently robust clip, Judge does not lead the American League in round-trippers.

No, sir. That honor belongs to Caleb John Raleigh, who goes by "Cal." And is a 28-year-old catcher for the Seattle Mariners who, until this summer, had made his mark in the bigs not as a big bopper but as a big stopper.

Won a Gold Glove last season, Cal did. Even won the AL Platinum Glove Award as the best defensive player in the league.

So far this season, though, with the Fourth still four days off, he's given 32 baseballs the long ride. The Mariners have 79 games left, same as the Yankees. This means Cal Raleigh is working on a 62-homer season.

And if at this point you're asking, "Who the hell is this guy?", there are several answers. One, for sure, would be "That other guy," as in, "That other guy who's not Aaron Judge."

Beyond that?

Well, let's start with the fact Cal Raleigh hails from Cullowhee, N.C., and he played his high school ball at Smoky Mountain High School in nearby Sylva. Went on to star at Florida State. Played for the Harwich Mariners in the Cape Cod League one summer. Arrived in the Show in 2021, and, before last weekend's games, he had a career batting average of .227 with 125 homers and 320 RBI.

Last season he batted just .220, with a slugging percentage of .489. But he hit 34 homers and drove in 100 runs, both of which were career highs.

This season?

Thirty-two dingers, as noted. Also 69 RBI. Also a .275 average and a .643 slugging percentage.

Oh, yeah. And one other tidbit about Cal Raleigh: According to Wikipedia, his nickname is "The Big Dumper." Which doesn't sound entirely complimentary, but what do I know?

Besides more about Cal Raleigh than I did before this morning, that is.

Untimely

 Sometimes the world is a cold, cold place, and, well, surprise, surprise, surprise. You want fair, the county's got one. Comes around every summer, or so I hear.

In the meantime, let us contemplate the life of Dave Parker.

Which ended the other day after 74 years, and wasn't that a hell of thing. Back in the day, see, they called him the Cobra, and he was a 6-foot-5 specimen of humanity who sent baseballs on some prodigious rides. In 19 seasons in the majors -- 11 of them with the stately Pittsburgh Pirates before they devolved into the laugh-a-minute Cruds -- he hit 339 homers, drove in 1,493 runs and won back-to-back NL batting titles in 1977 and '78.

He also won two World Series rings -- one with the Buccos in '79, and one with the Oakland A's ten years later.

Those '79 Pirates, of course, are who I remember best. That was the "We Are Fam-a-lee" bunch, and they were something to see in those silly pillbox caps of theirs. They had Pops Stargell as a kind of Father Christmas, and the young Cobra, and a skinny, bespectacled reliever named Kent Tekulve who threw a mean submarine ball but looked more like nerdy prey for the school bully.

He might ring you up, or he might get his lunch money stolen and his books kicked into the gutter. Always looked like even-money one or the other.

Anyway, Dave Parker has left all that, and here comes the cold, cold part: In not much more than a month, he was scheduled to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Now someone else will give his acceptance speech, and the Cobra will be helpless to do anything but watch from somewhere beyond the mortal coil.

I don't know how much more unfair the world can get than that. Or how much more untimely a death can be.

I also don't know how the people who vote for the Hall of Fame can be more addle-pated, because this on them. Had they voted in Parker years ago the way they should have, he'd have still been around to thank everyone. But of course they horse-assed around until he was an old man, and (as it turned out) too late.

Shame on those chumps.

And here's to the Cobra, swingin' for the fences in the Great Beyond. May the current cheapo Pirates ownership un-padlock its wallet and put up a statue of the man to join Pops, Roberto and Honus Wagner standing silent vigil outside PNC Park.

Tennessee vs. Spaceman Spiff

 (In which the Blob again books passage from Sportsball World to Bizarre Acid-Trip Real World. You know the drill.)

So the other day I'm reading a blog post from Charles Pierce, an H.L. Mencken of sorts for our utterly mad modern times. And he included an item from the great state of Tennessee, where Davy Crockett was born on a mountaintop and everyone else seems to have crawled fully formed from the primordial ooze.

I say this because it seems the Trumpian creatures running the show there are off on another save-our-children-from-ideas toot, in the standard not-hysterical-at-all manner. They're clearing school library shelves of harmful concepts like Very Hungry Caterpillars (brainchild of the subversive Eric Carle) and Magic Tree Houses (take a bow, Mary Pope Osborne) and Giving Trees (hello there, Shel Silverstein, nice to see you on the book-banners' dartboard again).

Also, Calvin and Hobbes, by that notorious Commie, Bill Watterson.

This is where I drop the gloves and start swingin'.

Calvin and Hobbes, see, is the Blob's all-time favorite comic strip that isn't The Far Side. Back in my sportswriter days, I papered my dumpster of a cubicle with C-and-H strips. Two in particular were my faves.

One had Calvin writing what he called a "fictional autobiography", in which the story of his life was enlivened by the non-fact that he had a flamethrower.

The other was a drawing Calvin made of Martians attacking Indianapolis.

I don't know why either would get Tennesseans so wound up. I mean, isn't Indianapolis one of the Titans' blood enemies?

I guess we can put it down to the fact that certain Tennessee politicos have either had their senses of humor surgically removed, or never had a sense of humor to begin with. Good lord, what a dour bunch of brooding nutjobs. If this were 1692, they'd no doubt be burning poor Watterson at the stake for corrupting Our Children with a mischievous 6-year-old and his stuffed tiger.

Apparently they think exposing them to the admittedly subversive Calvin would put all sorts of unapproved notions in their heads. Why, just look at the little psycho: He hates school, disobeys his parents, torments little girls and has an extremely vivid imagination that regularly gets him sent to the principal's office.

The latter, of course, is the most dangerous of Calvin's subversions. It means he has an active mind that goes where grownups can't follow. Nothing more terrifies the brooding nutjobs, and the politicos who represent them. It's why in certain extremist precincts they're death on Harry Potter, fantasy board games and the musical "Wicked" -- which, after all, is about a witch.

Calvin, on the other hand, only pretends he's A) a rampaging dinosaur; B) Captain Stupendous; and C) Spaceman Spiff.

Who's constantly fighting the hideous space aliens he imagines his teachers, principals and parents to be. In other words, authority figures.

Apparently this means if Our Children are allowed access to Spaceman Spiff, they'll grow up to be Abbie Hoffman. Seriously, that's the reasoning that's going on here.

Which of course is not reasoning at all, but its polar opposite.

Then again, that's me saying this.

Me, who thought the idea of Calvin with a flamethrower was hilarious. 

Best keep me away from your kids. Fair warning.

Skin, thinned

 Hey, I'm as appreciative as the next guy that pro golfer Collin Morikawa has given folks like me permission to write whatever we want. It means I can write the following about Collin Morikawa:

The man seems a trifle touchy these days.

Which is to say, his skin is thin enough to see through. At least where the media is concerned.

His discontent with the people who cover his and his fellow golfers' tournaments (and thereby help publicize them) has become a thing now, dating back to earlier in the year when he said he didn't owe anyone anything and the media duly, and accurately, quoted him. Now he's gotten into it with Adam Schupak of Golfweek, who approached Morikawa to ask about a recent caddie change during the pro-am for the Rocket Classic.

"Ask me anything you want in my press conference later, I'm with my pro-am partners now," said.

A reasonable response. Which Schupak quoted in his report.

And which Morikawa took issue with in the ensuing presser.

"I read the article you wrote," he told Schupak. "Look, I'm not here to tell people how to do their jobs, but I don't get why you would make me sound bad because you put out my quote that (I was) playing with pro-am partners out front."

Now, I wasn't there, so I don't know how Schupak reacted. But I can guess what he was thinking, and I'm betting it was what several other people said out loud on social media: "What the hell are you talking about, Collin?"

They said that because ... well, because what the hell was he talking about? Nothing about what Morikawa was quoted as saying -- a reasonable request reasonably made -- could possibly be construed as making him look bad in any known universe. Except, apparently, the one in which Morikawa resides.

No, what made Collin Morikawa look bad everywhere outside the Morikawa multiverse was Morikawa himself making a whole thing about it. He launched into this whole spiel about how people pay a lot of money to play in the pro-ams and that's important for the tournament and how dare Schupak put out a quote that not only "put me down" but belittled the importance of the pro-am. 

Or so his implication seemed to be.

Fun fact to know and tell: There is no indication Schupak was remotely peeved about being asked to wait until the presser to ask his caddie question.

Second fun fact to know and tell: Therefore, he had no reason to try to make Morikawa look bad, assuming Morikawa's theory was right.

Third fun fact to know and tell: It wasn't.

No, it was just another instance of a professional athlete trying to tell people (i.e., the media) how to do their jobs. Which is what every professional athlete is doing when he says he's not trying to tell people how to do their jobs.

"You can write whatever you want, this is America, but don't put me down like that ..." Morikawa said.

In other words: You can write whatever you want. Just not that.

Got it, Collin.

OK. So not really.

The forever season

 OK, Blobophiles, listen up. Today is pop-quiz day ("Aw, gee, Mr. Blob"), and so no hall passes will be issued, no one will pretend he's suddenly come down with bubonic plague, and no copying off your neighbor unless your neighbor is poor old lint-for-brains Merle back there.

Ready?

First question: Which is longer, the NBA season or ...

1. The Pleistocene Age

2. The Ming Dynasty

3. The Hundred Years War

4. "Titanic", the director's cut

Second question: If the Mavericks, as expected, select 18-year-old Cooper Flagg as the No. 1 pick in tonight's NBA draft, how old will Cooper Flagg be when the season ends next year?

1. 38

2. 45

3. Older than dirt

4. Older than the hills

Third (and last) question: If a baby is born on the first day of the NBA season, what will he/she be doing at the end of the season?

1. Attending first grade

2.  Graduating from high school

3. Doing his/her residency in thoracic medicine

4. Being honored for 40 years service at that Tire Barn out by the interstate

In other words ...

In other words, the NBA season is ridiculously, preposterously long. And all so a bunch of folks with more money than they know what to do with can make even more money than they know what to do with.

The Blob makes it a practice never to be in sync with radio blowhole Colin Cowherd, on the assumption it's one of the first signs of cognitive decline. But the other day Cowherd went on the air to say the NBA season is JUST TOO DAMN LONG, and, doggone it, I'm in full agreement.

I blame my age (70) and my habit of killing brain cells with an occasional cocktail or three for this lapse. Obviously I must be heading down the same unraveling mental trail our current President is blazing so well these days.

Anyway, yes, the NBA is JUST TOO DAMN LONG. It begins before Halloween, and, this year, ended on Sunday, the 22nd of June. The 22nd of June. You know what was nearly half over on that date? The baseball season.

The baseball season.

Partly this is because the NBA playoffs themselves last longer than a politician's stump speech. The Indiana Pacers, for instance, played their first game on April 19, beating the Milwaukee Bucks 117-98. They played their last game on Sunday.

That's more than two months.

That's 76 days after Florida snipped the nets in college buckets.

That's so long Milwaukee might not even be there anymore. Maybe it is, but I haven't checked lately.

In any event, this is beyond absurd. The back-in-my-day crowd likes to sneer at today's NBA players as pampered sissies compared to the he-men of yore, but what the codgers forget is how much shorter the NBA season was then. When I was growing up, Bill Russell 'n' them used to wrap up the title sometime in mid-April. Now the playoffs don't even begin until then.

So what to do?

Probably nothing. The folks with more money than they know what to do with aren't going to be disposed to make less, no matter what sort of Everest O' Cash they've summited. Saner people would either lop six-to-ten games off the regular season or make the first two rounds of the playoffs best-of-five instead of best-of-seven, but the saner people are not in charge. The money men are.

Me? I'd eliminate the play-in games and go best-of-five in the first two rounds. The play-in games give two extra teams per conference a shot at the playoffs, which means only 10 of the 30 teams are eliminated outright after an 82-game regular season. That's just wrong.

No, 16 teams in the playoffs are enough. If you want to be one of those 16, play harder during the regular season. You've got 82 chances to do so.

I know, I know. Losin' my marbles, right?

That good old Vegas hustle

 The Oakland/Sacramento/Hooterville A's broke ground yesterday on their new $1.75 billion ballpark in Las Vegas, and all the standard dignitaries were present. It was quite the gathering.

State and local honchos were there, fresh from fleecing the taxpayers for $380 million of the total. Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was there, too -- which must have provoked gales of laughter from Arnold Rothstein and the rest of the gang in the Great Fix In the Sky, because listening to Manfred get almost giddy about bringing baseball to the gambling capital of America was the greatest knee-slapper ever.

Who else? Oh, yeah, Rollie Fingers and Dave Stewart from the Oakland A's glory days, curious additions considering the A's just turned their backs on all that. And of course the man most responsible for the back-turning: A's owner John Fisher, who spent a good space of time crapping all over Oakland by letting both the team's ballpark and the team itself go to rack and ruin.

"We are Vegas' team!" ol' Carpetbag Johnny proclaimed.

Considering the way he treated the A's (and their fans) when they were Oakland's team, that almost sounded like a threat.

See, Carpetbag Johnny's bringin' baseball to Lost Wages, but woe betide the citizenry if it isn't properly appreciative of the gesture. And that could happen -- and not just because of that $380 million tax bill.

It's because Vegas can smell a hustle from a mile off, and Carpetbag Johnny fairly reeks of it. For one thing, he's notorious for doing things on the cheap. That'll fly like a bowling ball in Vegas, whose one abiding characteristic is it does nothing on the cheap.

If the city's gonna get major-league baseball, it had better be MAJOR-LEAGUE BASEBALL. But what are they getting with the A's?

Only one of biggest cheapo outfits in MLB.

As of this morning they're 32-48 and in last place in the AL West by seven-and-a-half games. This ties them with Pittsburgh, the Blob's stubbornly cruddy Cruds, for the third worst record in the majors. Only the hideous Chicago What Sox (25-54) and the indescribably hideous Colorado Rockheads (18-60) are worse.

And here's the kicker: The Rockheads are actually 5-5 on their last 10 games, and 9-10 since June 1. The A's are 2-8 in their last 10 and 9-12 in June.

In other words, they're losers with a great big neon "L." And they've been losers for awhile; since 2021, when they finished third in the division with an 86-76 record, they've gone 211-355. That's a .374 clip.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Won't moving the team to Vegas mean a chunky influx of fresh revenue for Fisher? And won't he use it to put a winning team on the field again? A team Vegas can get behind, because we all know how much Vegas loves winners?"

Maybe.

Then again ...

Then again, it's John Fisher. My money's on another good old Vegas hustle.

The big what-if

 Seven minutes.

Seven minutes in Oklahoma City last night, and Tyrese Haliburton already had nine points. He was already 3-for-4 from Threeville. He had Game 7 Legend on speed dial, because already you could look 41 minutes into the future and see him doing something wondrous again, a last-second parabola splashing home to give the Indiana Pacers an NBA championship and touch off an almighty clamor in heaven from Roger Brown and Mel Daniels and George McGinnis and all the other OG Pacers champs.

Seven minutes.

Which was all Tyrese Haliburton got to play last night.

Because down there in the court, out by the 3-point arc, Haliburton jab-stepped in, stepped back and then drove hard for the tin. And went down almost immediately, screaming in pain, his right Achilles in shreds and his Game 7, his playoffs, his season over.

And for all practical purposes, so was his team's.

Oh, they didn't go away, these Pacers, because going away is not in their DNA. TJ McConnell stepped into the Haliburton void and did what he could, going for 16 points, six rebounds and three assists in 28 minutes. Bennedict Mathurin stepped up, too, with a 24-13 double-double in 33 minutes off the bench. Pascal Siakam added 16 and Andrew Nembhard 15.

And Indiana led at halftime, 48-47.

But without Haliburton, they couldn't sustain it. Oklahoma City -- the best team in the NBA this season, winners of 68 games -- had league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren, and they rolled over the Pacers like a tidal wave.

SGA finished with 29 points, five rebounds, 12 assists, two blocked shots and a steal. Williams scored 20 with four boards, four dimes and two steals. Holmgren went for 18 points, eight boards and five blocks. They scored 67 of the Thunder's 103 points in the 103-91 win, as the Thunder took command by outscoring the Pacers 34-20 in the third quarter.

So first NBA title for the franchise in Oke City, and playoff MVP hardware for SGA, and validation for the notion that good people playing beautiful basketball remains a formula for success in the NBA.

And the Pacers?

They won 18 fewer games than the Thunder, and still took the Finals to seven games for the first time in nine years. Erased the team with the league's second-best record (Cleveland) in five games. Erased the New York Knicks in six. Won with miraculous last-second shots ...and with full-throttle flurries that left opponents' tongues painting the floor ... and with epic comebacks no team without their plus-size portion of grit could possibly have achieved.

What they did, in the end, was put together the greatest playoff run in the franchise's NBA history. What they did was take Indiana, the Basketball State, on a ride it will not soon forget.

No, they couldn't bring home the title, not without Haliburton, not without the injury that will forever be the big what-if in all of this. But they left with the Thunder's skin under the fingernails clawing for it.

Because that, to paraphrase Sean Connery in "The Untouchables," is the Indiana way. Damn right it is.

Baseball the weird

 I don't know if it qualifies as an official thing, but there's something about baseball players that turns them into your average household doofus far more often than it should.

They are, theoretically, highly conditioned professional athletes. But sometimes they get hurt in ways not even Doofus Dan could manage.

Case in point: Atlanta Braves pitcher Chris Sale.

Who went on the DL this week because -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- he fractured his left rib cage. And not because he decided to moonlight as a NASCAR driver and Joey Logano or someone T-boned him. Nah, nothing like that.

Sale did it making a diving stop of a Juan Soto grounder in the ninth inning the other night and throwing him out to help the Bravos beat the Mets. Got up, dusted himself off, felt fine until his workout the next day, when he said something didn't feel right.

A fractured rib cage will do that to you. Which is the kind of injury you'd expect an 80-year-old diving for a ball would suffer, not a 36-year-old professional athlete.

But now Sale joins the pantheon of other nutso injuries, like Vince Coleman getting eaten by a tarp roller, and Rickey Henderson getting frostbite because he left an ice pack on his foot too long, and Tigers pitcher Joel Zumaya missing three starts because he injured his right wrist playing Guitar Hero.

Sale?

Heck, it wasn't even the first time he'd suffered a rib deal. In 2022 he missed the first three months of the season with a stress fracture of his right ribcage. And it's not like he introduced bizarre rib injuries to baseball.

No, that might have been Carlos Correa of the Astros, who in 2019 missed some time because of soreness that turned out to be a broken rib. And how'd he break it?

While getting a massage.

Baseball is weird, man. So weird.

Get off their lawn

(In which once again ... well, you know the routine)

 Masked men who were either federal agents or survivalists playing dress-up (who can tell these days?) showed up outside Dodger Stadium yesterday, and, well, bandwagon fans gonna bandwagon, I guess. You win the World Series, and suddenly everyone wants to hitch a ride.

And, OK, so the feds/cosplayers weren't there to cheer on the Dodgers, but (they said) to process detainees. Again, who can tell these days? They could have been wearing Shohei Ohtani jerseys under all that gear. Or maybe they were just looking for a Dodger Dog after weeks of living on MREs and C-rations out there in the woods.

Anyway, they rolled up in a bunch of white, unmarked vans and SUVs, and stadium security immediately told them to get lost.  Said the parking lot was not open, and they were on private property, besides. And so make like a tree and leave.

Eventually they did -- but not before protestors showed up to protest.

Seems Americans, or at least some of them, don't cotton to armed desperadoes in unmarked vans whisking their friends and neighbors off to some gulag without so much as a by-your-leave. We're funny that way.

Then again, maybe the desperadoes really were Dodgers fans. Anything's possible in a country where law enforcement no longer has to dress or act like law enforcement, and indeed aren't even burdened with the law part. Now they can ignore it as they see fit.

But, hey, if they do bleed Dodger blue, good on them. Don that Ohtani jersey under the Kevlar. Break out the throwback Ron Cey duds. Have a Dodger Dog and a beer, and fire a few rubber bullets in the air when Freddie Freeman cranks another one into the seats.

That's America, by golly.

Just make sure you stay off its lawn. Our out of the parking lot.

To the finish

Well, of course.

Like this could end -- should end -- any other way?

And so Indiana 108, Oklahoma City 91 in Game 6 of the NBA Finals, a beatdown straight out of the K-Tel Epic Beatdown collection or something, and on to Game 7 we go. First Game 7 the Finals have seen in nine years. A narrative even bat-blind seers like the Blob saw coming once the Pacers stole Game 1, because it took no special insight to understand that if the Thunder came to Indy with a chance to wrap it up, there was no way the Pacers weren't going to send the Thunder back to Oke City in sandwich bags.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander 'n them hoisting the Larry O'Brien Trophy in howling, rocking Gainsbridge Fieldhouse? In front of that roiling sea of yellow shirts, all those Yes 'Cers we-birthed-this-damn-game Hoosiers?

Rrrrright. Pigs would land at LaGuardia first.

So Game 6 commenced, and pretty soon Pascal Siakam was rockin' a 16-13 double-double, and Tyrese Haliburton, strained calf or no, was dishin' dimes. He and Andrew Nembhard were droppin' threes. Obi Toppin (20 points, six boards) and T.J. McConnell (12, nine, six assists and four steals) were leading a 48-point assault from the Pacers' bench. 

And it was no contest. The Yes 'Cers led by 22 at the break, burying the Thunder 36-17 in the second quarter in a 64-point half. They led by 30 after three quarters. They led by 31 early in the fourth before taking their foot off the gas.

The 17-point final margin, as they say, was not reflective.

Now it's back to Oke City for a Game 7 that feels like destiny, and God only knows what happens next. Logic and the flow of the series says the best team in the league this seasons regains its footing and rolls the way Indiana rolled in Game 6. Heart and soul and every straining hope in our basketball state believes maybe, maybe, the Pacers find a way again.

As the Blob has been known to say: Onward. To the finish this time.

Malice aforethought

 Some days the inner contrarian just won't stay in his box. He can be a real jerk that way.

For two days, see, I've been reading about the Brawl In The Hall, or the Fandango In The Fieldhouse, or whatever you want to call that dust-up between the Indiana Fever and the Connecticut Sun the other night. And I'm reading all the homer takes about Sophie Cunningham "standing up" for Caitlin Clark, who once again was at the center of the maelstrom.

Sophie jersey sales have gone through the roof, I'm reading. Folks apparently were loving that she instigated a hair-pulling fight with Jacy Sheldon of the Sun toward the end of the Fever's 88-71 victory.

And here's where the contrarian comes out to play.

He's saying, "Why?"

"Why", as in, "Why all the love for Sophie Cunningham pulling a cheap shot straight out of the Bill Laimbeer collection?"

Because that's what I see when I watch Cunningham take down Sheldon on a hard drive to the bucket. I see Laimbeer, legendary agent provocateur and general asshat, taking down Kevin McHale or someone. I see Laimbeer pulling similar bullshite on numerous occasions, which is why he deservedly was the most hated man in the NBA outside  Detroit.

Now, Cunningham is not that in the WNBA. Hardly so. But just as Detroit celebrated Laimbeer's villainy because, dammit, at least he's our villain, Cunningham today is a hero in Indiana if not so much in ... well, Connecticut, for starters.

Heroism, like villainy, is in the eye of the beholder. Always has been.

Cunningham's entry into that realm began because, surprise, surprise, Our Caitlin got knocked around again. Sheldon poked her in the eye while guarding her, which Caitlin naturally took offense to. Words were exchanged. Mini-shoves. And then here came Marina Mabrey of the Sun, barreling into the scrum and chest-bumping an off-balance Clark to the floor.

Sheldon drew a flagrant 1 foul for the eye poke. Clark, Mabrey and Tina Charles drew technical fouls. That Mabrey wasn't immediately ejected drew howls of outrage here in Indiana, and puzzlement at the very least everywhere else.

Even in hockey, after all, the third man in a fight generally draws a stiff sentence. Not so in the WNBA -- whose acronym apparently stands for "We Never Bring Accuracy."

(A quick aside, since we're being all contrarian: A look at the replay indicates Clark legitimately was knocked down in this instance. But she sure seems to get sent sprawling a lot from contact that doesn't look like it should send her sprawling. In other words, she kind of sells it sometimes. In further, more blunt words, sometimes she flops.)

Now, then. Where were we?

Right. Cunningham, the takedown, the whole "standing up for Caitlin" narrative.

There's only one thing wrong with that, the way the contrarian sees it.

That whole Sheldon eye-poke/Mabrey knockdown business happened in the third quarter. Cunningham's alleged defense of Clark didn't happen until 46 seconds remained in a 17-point game that was long over.

If that was action/reaction, it sure took its sweet time about it.

"I do not understand," Sun coach Rachid Meziane told Brian Haenchen of the Indy Star. "When you are winning a game by 17 points and you are doing this ... For me, it's just disrespectful to do that foul when you're winning the game by 17 points. Completely stupid."

Know what?

The inner contrarian says he's right.

Stanley the snowbird

 OK, so, FINE, then. Let the Florida Panthers keep Lord Stanley.

(He said, a trifle peevishly)

(Wondering if Lord Stanley is just another Canadian snowbird now)

(Also wondering why Canada can't have nice things anymore, even with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl 'n' them running the procurement department)

But enough parentheticals.

Time now to give the Blob's grudging due to the best team in professional hockey, which only got better by adding Boston Bruins graybeard Brad Marchand to the roster. And which therefore brushed aside the Edmonton Oilers in six games instead of seven in their Stanley Cup Final rematch.

They were a demonstrably better team this time around than in 2024, and they proved it rather emphatically, claiming the Cup with thumping wins in Games 5 and 6. In Edmonton in game 5, the Panthers won 5-2 to go up 3-2 in the series; in the clincher last night in Sunrise, Fla., they breezed 5-1.

That's a 10-3 spread with Stanley on the line, an appropriate ending to a series Florida dominated after the first two games. They lost in overtime and won in double OT in Games 1 and 2, but it was all Panthers after that: In their final three wins they outscored the Oilers 16-4, and, except for Edmonton's miracle comeback from three goals down in Game 4, the margin would have been wider than that.

So, yeah, the best team won. The only upset here was Florida center Sam Bennett winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as MVP and not the 37-year-old Marchand.

All the graybeard did, after all, was put up 10 goals and 10 assists in the playoffs -- including six goals and two game-winners in the Final. In the mix, seemingly, for every crucial Panthers goal, he anchored a line that was plus-17 in the playoffs.

Conn Smythe numbers for sure. But, oh, well.

Oh, well, Florida wins again, so once more we'll get the bizarre sight of Snowbird Stanley being paraded around South Beach and environs. OK, so it's bizarre to me, grumpy old man that I am. 

If I had my way, the Stanley Cup would never be allowed south of the Mason-Dixon Line. And get off my lawn and watch where you're going you damn fool, besides.

Anyway, here's to the Panthers, the unrepentant sunbathers. Drink mojitos out of Stanley. Take it the beach and rub sunscreen on it. See if I care.

(He said, still a trifle peevishly) 

Welp

They got enough right, or so it seemed. So ... it seemed.

Pascal Siakam with 28 points, six boards, five assists, three steals and two blocked shots?

Check.

Forty-three points off the bench, led by T.J. McConnell (18) and Obi Toppin (12)?

Check.

A 50-45 advantage on the glass, including 18 offensive boards?

Check.

And last but hardly least ...

Another stirring comeback from 18 down in the second quarter, a signature Indiana Pacers meme?

Check.

But the final score in Game 5 of the NBA Finals was Oklahoma City 120, Indiana 109, which was about what everyone figured. Jalen Williams (a playoff high 40 points) and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (31) went for 71 of Oke City's 120. They also combined for eight rebounds, 14 assists, three steals and four blocks. And if the Thunder were outboarded this time, they still punished Indiana with second chances, because 19 of their 45 rebounds were on the offensive glass.

You can't give a team as good as the Thunder that many do-overs. It's like the "thank you, sir, may I have another" scene in "Animal House," and the Pacers are Kevin Bacon.

Of course, it didn't help that Tyrese Haliburton re-injured his leg early and Andrew Nembhard was a no-show, because without them the Pacers' latest miracle finish was finished before it started. Haliburton was 0-for-6 from the field and finished with four points; Nembhard managed just seven. And together, they were 0-for-6 from Threeville.

The Pacers' firepower from the arc, plus their ball movement, is what fuels them. Without them -- and without a healthy Haliburton to ignite the ball-movement part -- they are no match for the Thunder.

And so Thunder by 11, and now they're a win away from finishing it, and, welp, so it goes. Back to Indy we go for Game 6, where the Basketball State surely will not allow a bunch of interlopers to celebrate a championship on its hallowed turf. The plotline the series has been following since Game 2 still holds, at least for now: A seven-game fight to the finish.

Onward.

Hacker Hell

 The record books will say J.J. Spaun won the U.S. Open yesterday at drenched Oakmont in Pennsylvania, dunking a 64-foot Rand McNally job on the 18th green to seal it. He went birdie-birdie on his last two holes to win by two strokes over a Scot named Robert MacIntyre.

So raise a glass this day to J.J., who'd won only one other time on tour and at once became one of the more unlikely U.S. Open champs in memory.

Of course, the record books do not tell the whole story.

The rest of it is J.J. Spaun having to share the podium with the golf gods.

They were the real winners of this major, delighting as they did in torturing the world's best golfers  with lousy weather -- it rained all day Sunday, a fitting end to the week -- and the usual jumped-up course "improvements" for which the U.S. Open is notorious. The result was a Hacker Hell that was even more hellish than usual, and resulted in only J.J. Spaun finishing under par.

And Spaun barely cleared that bar, finishing at 1-under. If he doesn't drop the cross-country putt on 18, he wins a major championship at even par.

I don't know about you. But this sounds more like a number Weekend Wilbur shoots to win the Crack Me Another Cold One Open at Whispering Landfill Golf Club.

Of course, these things will happen when you trick up a course with everything but land mines and punji sticks.

At Oakmont, the greens were slicker than a politician's smile, and the rough was your basic Brazilian rainforest. Throw in the Dial-A-Monsoon weather, and it made for some pretty hideous golf.

Example: The last-place finisher in the Open, a gentleman named Philip Barbaree Jr., shot 24-over par. Made the cut, then finished 75-82 on the weekend. That's 17-over in 36 holes if you're keeping score at home.

Among those of whom you've heard, the previously peerless Scottie Scheffler was over-served with peer, finishing 4-over without a round under par. Rory McIlroy shot plus-7 and was plus-10 going into Sunday, when he put up a 67 to save a little face.

Rory at least fared better than defending Open champ Bryson DeChambeau, who went 78-77 and easily missed the cut. Ludvig Aberg (72-76), Patrick Cantlay (76-72) and Justin Thomas (76-76) also went home early, just to name a few.

And then there was Shane  Lowry of Ireland, McIlroy's fast friend, whom Oakmont seemed especially delighted to punch around. Lowry opened with a 78, and, as if to show us we hadn't seen nothin' yet, followed it with a 79. Outta there.

But not before pronouncing perhaps the proper benediction for this week.

"F*** this place," a microphone caught him saying, after lipping out another gimme putt.

Well, now.

Cruds alert!

 Time again to check in with baseball's mightiest Cruds, and, no, I'm not talking about my Pittsburgh Cruds (who remain pretty Cruddy), or even the Chicago What Sox (who remain the Cruddiest team in the American League, even though their Cruddiness seems less spectacular than a year ago.)

No, sir, boys and girls. I'm talking about the new lords of Cruddiness, still on track to out-Cruddy even the historically Cruddy 2024 What Sox.

Let's hear it for those mavens of miserableness, the Colorado Rockheads!

Who yesterday gave us a heapin' helpin' of Cruddiness, as they continue to plumb depths of awfulness not seen since the late 19th century. 

The Rockheads, see, lost their 57th game last night, and they're now 44 games under .500. At 13-57 for the campaign, they're the losingest team through 70 games since the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who were 12-58 through 70 games on their way to 20-134, the worst season in baseball history.

But wait, there's more!

On the same night they reached back to the McKinley years, see, they also hit another milestone. Pretty much head-on, as it turns out.

Which is to say, they set a franchise record for swinging and missing.

Three Atlanta Braves pitchers struck the Rockheads out 19 times, led by starter Spencer Strider, who needed only six innings to fan 13 batters. Relievers Rafael Montero and Dylan Lee rung up six more Rockheads, meaning only eight of the requisite 27 outs did not end with a third strike at the plate.

Now that's futility. Even for the Rockheads, which surely is saying something.

The poor dears are 28 games out of first in the NL West and a staggering 23 games out of next-to-last, and we're still 2 1/2 weeks from the Fourth of July. No imagination exists that can envision what the Rockheads' clubhouse must be like right now. I expect them to petition baseball commissioner Rob Manfred to please-please-puh-LEEZE let them go home now and call it a season.

Manfred being the staunch defender of baseball protocol he is (cough-cough), I suspect he'd just tell them to play on.

"You gotta show up, but you don't have to swing at any pitches if you don't want to,"  he'd probably say. "In fact, based on the other night, it's probably best you don't."

Ouch. Now that would be kickin' a guy when he's down.

Like, way, waaaay down.

An America sighting

 A Hoosier rustic's letter home, June 15, 2025 ...

Dear Ma and Pa:

Went downtown to this big ol' No Kings rally yesterday, and, lordy, were there a gob-lot of people. It was gray but warm and tryin' hard not to rain -- just this little no-account mist, as if God was bein' stubborn about it -- and they handed me this little American flag, and I raised it high because I love my country and don't cotton to what all those crazy people in Washington are tryin' to turn it into.

Anyway, here's what I saw:

I saw America.

I saw men and women, young people and old, wavin' flags and signs and whoopin' it up on the courthouse green and for three or four blocks in either direction. Several thousand of 'em, from the look of it.

I saw gay people and straight people and white people and black people, including a couple of ministers in their preachin' robes.

I saw old men wearing Vietnam Veteran caps, and other old men wearing Army and Air Force veteran caps.

I saw a man wearing a foam taco on his head, on account of the chief crazy person in Washington hates it when you call him "taco." I hear that stands for "Trump Always Chickens Out," and I'm guessin' that drives our too-big-for-his-britches President right up a wall.

What else did I see?

I saw signs, Ma and Pa, and some of 'em were darn clever. "You Know It's Bad If The Introverts Are Here," one of 'em said. "No One Is Illegal On Stolen Lands," said another, which is darn hard to argue with considerin' we did steal America from the Indians. Guy in a many-colored shirt was walkin' around with a "Kindness Is Strength" sign; another guy was holdin' up a sign with a picture of a king eatin' a taco, which was pretty darn funny if you ask me.

Of course, there were also a lotta "No Kings" signs -- includin' one with a cross on it that said "Jesus Is My King." Which you had to appreciate the irony of, on account of our wanna-be king's always thumpin' the Bible even though the big phony's never read a line of it.

I saw other signs, too, and American flags and Mexican flags and Palestinian flags, which was OK by me because here in America we have Mexicans and Palestinians and Irish and Italians and every nationality under the sun. It's what makes America great, way I see it. It's what makes it America.

What also makes it America is what I saw up by the courthouse: Piles of bags and plastic bins filled to burstin' with food and household items that all those people linin' the streets had brought to donate to the less fortunate. Buncha generous folk, I have to say. We used to be known for that sort of thing, and it was good to see a lot of us still are.

Good to see, also, that those same lot of us don't like the meanness and outright bully-boyin' President Crazy and the rest of the crazy people have brought to our country. We used to be a welcomin' force for good in the world, and seems now we're just a buncha gangsters puttin' the arm on our allies and squeezin' 'em for every dime we can get. 

Guess that's why all those vets were downtown yesterday. 'Cause that sure ain't the America they fought and bled and in some cases died for.

Speakin' of which, there was a woman handin' out American flag stickers who had a faded picture of a serviceman next to a picture of President Crazy hobnobbin' with that Jeffrey Epstein fella. She said the serviceman was her brother, who went to Vietnam back in '68. Apparently it messed him up bad, because 20 years after he returned from 'Nam, the woman said, he killed himself.

"I've had enough of this," she said, referrin' to the current craziness.

Know what, Ma and Pa?

Lookin' around at all those people who showed up yesterday, it appears she ain't alone.

A very Patton episode

 They're calling for thunderstorms and buckets of rain in Washington D.C. today, and I for one am kinda bummed by that. It means Fearless Leader's Big Boy Birthday Parade might get washed out, and that means we wouldn't get to see tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue for the first time since 1932, when they were greasing their treads with the living guts of the Bonus Army or some such thing.

(And, OK, so that's an exaggeration. But Doug MacArthur deploying troops against starving World War I vets and their families remains one of the more shameful episodes in American history, and several of the vets and at least one child did die that day. So it doesn't stretch the truth all that much.)

Anywa- 

I'm sorry, what?

Where's the Blob's standard disclaimer when it exits Sportsball World stage right?

Ah, you don't need it. Besides, I've got other fish to fry here.

Mainly, I've got the Big Boy himself trotting out his birthday gift to himself ("Wow, Ma, look at all those tanks and humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles! How cool!" you imagine him saying), and how it would be a shame if it didn't come off. It would also be a shame if Fearless Leader didn't crank his narcissism to the turbo setting and insert himself into his own parade.

I mean, you can just see it, can't you?

From the Washington Post, June 15, 2025: "The centerpiece of the parade was the President of the United States rolling past the White House atop a vintage M-4 Sherman tank, wearing a chest full of medals.  On his head he wore the shiny four-star-general helmet George C. Scott wore in the Oscar-winning film "Patton"; on his hip  was one of George S. Patton's famous pearl-handled revolvers. He carried a riding crop in one gloved hand ..."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "But that's just ridiculous. For one thing, they couldn't find a riding crop small enough."

OK, point taken. But if we're gonna do ridiculous here -- and nothing's more ridiculous than a $45-million parade to ego-stroke Fearless Leader's many insecurities -- we might as well go all the way, right?

So, yeah, let this Very Patton Episode of the Second Trump Regime play out.

Put Fearless Leader atop that tank. Let him fire a round or two at the ghosts of the Bonus Army, and grease his treads with the living guts of a few Fake News socialist/Commie reporters. Let him stand by the side of the road in his shiny helmet and riding boots and jodhpurs and say "Goddamn, I'm proud of these men!" like George C. did in "Patton."

It's the Big Boy's birthday, after all. Shouldn't he get to do Big Boy things?

Even if Dwight D. Eisenhower once said the United States copying the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes with military parades would make us look weak and silly?

Pffft. Eisenhower. What did that guy know about anything?

Right back at ya

 You can talk a lot of ... stuff about the Indiana Pacers getting Pacered last night in Indianapolis, but let's begin with two words: Of course.

Of course Oklahoma City bounced back to steal Game 4, because that's been the rhythm of these NBA Finals and why change now?

Of course Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was the architect of the bounce-back, because he's the league MVP and isn't that what league MVP's do?

Of course the Pacers, who won the fourth quarter by 14 in Game 3, lost it by 14 in Game 4, because, again, that's been the rhythm of this series. Through four games, every action has had an equal and opposite reaction.

And so the Pacers filch Game 1 after trailing all night, and the Thunder filch Game 4 after trailing a good part of the night. And so the Thunder rakes Indiana by 16 in Game 2, and the Pacers dominate the final quarter to win by nine in Game 3.

In Game 4, they had matters in hand until they didn't, and you can say the Yes 'Cers plain blew it just as you could say the Thunder plain blew it in Game 1. But you can also say SGA simply did SGA things when it mattered most, just as Tyrese Haliburton and Co. simply did Haliburton and Co. things when it mattered most in Game 1.

Either way, the facts are these: In a game the Pacers led by 10 late in the third quarter and by four with 3:20 to play, the Thunder outscored them 12-1 the rest of the way to win by seven, 111-104, and SGA had 11 of those 12 points. In the final 4:38, he scored 15 of his game-high 35.

And now the series is headed back to Oke City all even, and right back at ya, Indiana. Your serve.

Oilered

 The Blob has long maintained the Stanley Cup Final is the best of all Finals, because you JUST NEVER KNOW. A three-games-to-none lead in the best-of-seven? Ha! Nothing. A 3-0 lead at home in Game Four?

Ha! A cruel hoax.

And so here came the defending Cup champion Florida Panthers last night, fresh off a 6-1 lamination in Game 3 in which they both beat the Edmonton Oilers and beat them up, just like the latter-day Broad Street Bullies they are. And here they were up 3-0 after a period in Game 4, and, hey, boys, let's break out the good stuff, 'cause we're about to have a 3-1 stranglehold on the series and it's time to get good and oiled.

Instead ...

Well. Instead, in true you-just-never-know style, they got Oilered.

Because bang, bang, bang, bang, Edmonton put four in a row in the basket, and the Oilers led 4-3, and do-you-believe-in-miracles and all that. And then it was do-you-believe-in-miracles again as San Reinhart, with 20 seconds left in regulation, finally snuck the biscuit past Oilers' goalie Calvin Pickard -- who came on after Stuart Skinner gave up those three first-period goals, and who basically went Full Ken Dryden on the Panthers thereafter.

So it was 4-4, and on to overtime they went.

And then Leon Draisaitl lit the lamp in OT, his 11th goal of the 2025 playoffs and a record fourth overtime winner. And Edmonton had a series-tying W no one had seen the like of in 106 years.

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. Last time a team a team rallied from a deficit of at least three goals to win a Stanley Cup Final, the year was 1919, before F. Scott Fitzgerald invented the Jazz Age. The Montreal Canadians pulled it off, also in overtime, against the Seattle Metropolitans.

The Seattle Metropolitans! Man, it's been ages since I saw anyone rocking Seattle Metropolitans gear.

At any rate, it's back to Edmonton for Game 5, and, Stanley being Stanley, you know what that probably means: The South Beach Bullies will rise again, win in overtime (because why not?), and head back to their home base with a chance to wrap it up in six games.

Either that, or Calvin Pickard will go both Full Ken Dryden and, I don't know, Full Gump Worsley maybe, and Leon Draisaitl will score two overtime goals. And it'll the Oilers who will be one win away.

I mean, this is Stanley. Could happen, right?

Open-ing miracle

 I wouldn't know J.J. Spaun if he nestled a wedge in the back of my head, but I do know this: There are a lot of golfers out there who haven't done what he did yesterday.

What he did was cruise around Oakmont Country Club out there in Pennsylvania without making bogey, and without a three-putt. Nary a one.

"Oh, come on, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Lots of golfers have done that. Scottie Scheffler probably does it without getting out of bed in the morning."

Yeah, but ...

Yeah, but he didn't do it at Oakmont. And he didn't do it in the U.S. Open, which Spaun leads by stroke over someone named Thriston Lawrence after putting up an opening 66.

The U,S. Open, see, is the major whose goal, according to the folks in charge, is be "a true test of golf," or words to that effect. Translated into non-euphemistic English, what that really means is "let's trick this puppy up with a bunch of windmills and clown mouths so we can make Scottie Scheffler look like Joe Schmo from Buffalo."

Which he did, kind of, coming in with a 3-over 73 that put him right on the projected cut line. Right there with him is Bryson DeChambeau, among others; on the far side of the projected cut are, among others, Rory McIlroy (74),  Hideki Matsuyama (74), Tony Finau (76) and Shane Lowry, who took 79 wacks to get around.

Mainly this is because, yes, Oakmont has been shamelessly tricked up for the Open. The rough alone is ridiculous; it looks like a stand of winter wheat, and if your ball goes in there you might stumble on Jimmy Hoffa or Amelia Earhart first. And the greens?

Your basic marble countertops. Breathe on that 6-footer and it'll roll all the way to Philadelphia.

And, no, I don't know why the lords of golf insist on doing this every year. If America doesn't want to watch Scottie shoot 90-under on some junior-league muni track, it also doesn't want to watch him hack it around out there in the jungles of Oakmont. If America wanted that, it would simply grab its own sticks, head over to Linoleum Hills Golf Club  and spray snap-hooks around the way it does every weekend.

Although I suppose there will be some added drama today as Scottie tries to stay ahead of the cut and Rory tries to avoid missing it. Also as Oakmont, insulted by J.J. Spaun's first-round 66, tries to turn it into a second-round 76.

Me, I just want Thriston Lawrence to put up another low number. Whoever he is.

Home, and cookin'

 Sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn't.

-- Old Lodgeskins, "Little Big Man"

Which is to say, this looks like a fight to the finish now. And the Blob was wrong, wrong, wrong again.

Figured after watching Oklahoma City dismantle the Indiana Pacers in Game 2 of the NBA Finals my prediction -- Thunder in five -- might still be on target, but of course I didn't figure on Old Lodgeskins' magic. Or, in this case, that ol' Jimmy Chitwood, rim-on-the-side-of-a-barn, sun-setting-over-cornfields magic.

In other words, Hoosiers gonna Hoosier. Or "Hoosiers" gonna Hoosier. Something.

Anyway, it was Pacers 116, Thunder 107 in Indianapolis last night. And if this didn't look like much of a series before, it does now.

And it's about time.

That's because after the Pacers flat stole Game 1 and were floor-waxed by 16 in Game 2, the Finals came back to the Basketball State as an imposter. Yes, the series was tied at a game apiece. But it felt like 2-0, Thunder.

And then ...

And then, well, last night happened. 

Down five with a quarter to play, the Pacers outscored the Thunder 32-18 in the fourth to win going away, led by the usual suspects and one not-quite-as-usual suspect. Tyrese Haliburton was Tyrese Haliburton -- his line was 22 points, nine rebounds and 11 boards -- and Pascal Siakam was Pascal Siakam, going for 21 points, six boards and four assists. But once again Indiana went to its bench for the clincher.

That was Bennedict Mathurin, a 6-5 shooting guard who'd played 27 minutes and scored 19 points in the first two games. Last night that glancing blow turned into a left hook out of the Joe Frazier collection: 27 points on 9-of-12 shooting in 22 minutes. Along with T.J. McConnell's 10-point, five-assist, five-steal night, it was another banner evening for the Pacers reserves.

And the Thunder?

They got big numbers from their big three, but virtually nothing else. Jalen Williams (26 points, six rebounds, three assists), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (24, eight and four) and Chet Holmgren (a 20/10 double-double) combined for 70 points, 24 boards and nine assists. The rest of the team?

Thirty-seven, 18 and six.

It wasn't enough. And it's not going to be enough, because this deal is going six games now and likely the full seven, and as usual momentum is a rumor. The Thunder were in control; now they're not. The Pacers were cookin' at home in Game 3; in Game 4 ... well, who knows?

Because sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn't. Truth.

The President and the Marine

 (In which the Blob once again escapes the Sportsball World enclosure. You know the drill.)

Sooner or later, if you're of sound mind these days, you stop wondering if the President of the United States has lost his. That's because we passed that mile marker some time ago, and wondering has become unnecessary.

Yes, our Fearless Leader is cuckoo. Nutso. A couple of sandwiches shy of a picnic.

Choose your adjective or metaphor, they all apply during a time when an American president essentially has decided it's A-OK to declare war on his own people. Strip it down to the bare wood, jettison the party-line hysteria, and that's what we've got here now. Bottom line, President Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump has pre-emptively ordered several thousand National Guardsmen and U.S. Marines to L.A. -- the Marines, for God's sake -- in order to stop the citizenry from protesting his policies.

The Regime shall not be opposed, and no overreaction is over-reactive enough to ensure it. Overreaction is, in fact, its default position, as it always is with extremist ideologies.

Me, I'm wondering what Smedley Darlington Butler would think of all this.

Butler was a United States Marine -- a Marine's Marine, not to put too fine a point on it -- who did the usual Marine's dirty work serving his nation's imperial ambitions during the early part of the 20th century. He helped squelch a nascent independent republic in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. And he went on to defend American business interests in China during the Boxer Rebellion, and in Haiti, Mexico and Central America during the so-called Banana Wars.

Along the way, he became the youngest major general in Marine Corps history, and won two Medals of Honor. At the time of his death in 1940, he was the most decorated Marine in history.

Looking back on it all prior to that, however, he became disillusioned (and not a little disgusted) by some of the things he did and the reasons for which he did them. Eventually he became an antiwar activist at odds with the Corps, and in 1935 wrote "War Is A Racket," in which he claimed to have been "high-class muscle" for Wall Street and the banks.

"There are only two things we should fight for," Butler once said. "One is the defense of our homes. The other is the Bill of Rights."

Now the President of the United States has deployed Butler's Marine Corps for something entirely removed from either of those. If not diametrically opposed to them.

I don't know exactly what Smedley Darlington Butler is doing in his grave right now. But I imagine it's rather strenuous.

The wrong fight

 Simone Biles stretches the tape measure at 4 feet, 8 inches on a good day, but you wouldn't want to throw down with her. She's won 11 Olympic gymnastics medals; she's hurdled roadblocks both physical and mental that would leave an alpha male crumpled in a corner weeping; and all of that means she's fearless in a way most humans are not.

Humans, like, oh, say, Riley Gaines.

She's the former college swimmer who was beaten by a transgender and used it as fuel to become the darling of the political right, which sees her as a courageous advocate for girls and women's sports. In this precinct, however, she just seems like a mean girl (of which the right seems to have an inexhaustible supply) who's still butt-hurt about getting beat.

In other words, this is either about her mettle, or her medals.  

Simone Biles has both, and that's a bad deal for poor Riley. Also a bad deal for Riley was her going Full Mean Girl recently, making fun of the Minnesota State High School League for congratulating Champlin Park High on its softball state championship.  Champlin Park, you see, has a pitcher who either is or isn't -- oh, no! -- one of those icky transgenders.

Riley obviously came down on the "is" side of the equation, even though that's still being debated in court. Called the pitcher a "boy."

It takes an ultra level of nastiness for a grownup to pick on a high school kid, especially publicly, and I can say that with some authority because I covered high school sports as an ink-stained wretch for four decades. Grownups who do that are garbage. They're the lowest species of life form the planet can offer -- and, yes, in case you're asking, I've seen a specimen or two in my time.

The good news is, they frequently attract attention from those they'd rather not.

Which is what happened to poor Riley, because her Mean Girl-ness landed her on Simone Biles' radar. And Biles promptly took her to the woodshed on social media.

Here's what she posted:  

You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! But instead… You bully them… 

Whoa.

Of course, Riley fired back by mentioning Biles' testimony about sicko doctor Larry Nassar abusing her and many other gymnasts, apparently trying to make a point about what happens when men exploit women athletes. It was the wrong response in the wrong fight to pick, because the analogy was both laughable and disgusting. 

Trying to draw some sort of sinister parallel between sexual abuse of women and transgender athletes just trying to fit into a world that too often rejects them? Seriously, Mean Girl?

The Blob has long maintained that the anti-transgender-athlete movement, if it can be called that, is just bigotry with its hair combed and its shoes shined. This is largely because the "problem" of transgender athletes is mostly an invented one, given that there are so few transgender athletes and even fewer who excel. The overboard hysteria the Riley Gaineses of the world have whipped up thus reveals far more than intended, it seems to me.

As it apparently seems to Simone Biles, too.

Welcome to the New Age

 ... as, you know, Imagine Dragons likes to say.

(And, no, the Blob is not going to make some awful pun involving "Radioactive" and "college athletics.")

(OK, so it might, but at least you've gotten fair warning)

("Oh, just shut up and get on with it," you're saying now)

Fine. I'll shut up and get on with it.

I'll introduce you to Judge Claudia Wilken, who on Friday formally turned college athletics professional. That's when she approved a multibillion-dollar settlement between a bunch of NCAA suits and a bunch of other suits representing all Division I athletes. The way is now clear for universities to begin directly paying their student-athletes instead of quasi-directly paying them via the corrupted (and largely lawless) NIL structure.

So goodbye, sis-boom-bah; hello, sis-boom-buy. Welcome to the New Age.

I wish I could mourn this the way so many other lovers of college sports will mourn it. But I can't.

Oh, in a sense I can, because I remember the glory days of college athletics, when "student-athletes" were paid under the table by sleazy alums instead of, ugh, right out in the open via official contracts. The games seemed so much purer then, on account of we didn't know what we didn't know. We could still watch Texas beat Arkansas in '69 or Notre Dame tie Michigan State in '66 with a reasonable assurance that everyone was playing only for free room, board and educatin'.

If there were $1,000 handshakes and fully-loaded Trans-Ams being exchanged, we didn't want to hear about it. Because then we'd have to think about it.

Now?

Now the college kids are going to be full-blown pros. And if I can kinda-sorta mourn that, I can't really, because the powers-that-be in big-boy college sports brought this on themselves.

The road to Friday, see, began a good ways back. And it's been leading to it straight as an arrow since.

It began, perhaps, the first time a school took money from some apparel company and slapped the company's logo on its student-athletes, thereby turning them into unwitting billboards for said company. The school got the dough for being Nike's or Adidas's or UnderArmour's advertisers; the billboards got zippo.

Or maybe, just maybe, the road to Friday began when the networks started throwing large green at the NCAA and its big conferences to air their various lawn-implement bowls  and Final Fours. The student-athletes -- the product, in other words -- didn't see any of that jack, either. And pretty soon they were playing games at all manner of bizarre times because that's the way the networks wanted it, and the NCAA couldn't say no because it was being paid to say yes.

It wasn't too much longer before college athletics, particularly top-tier football and men's basketball, were awash in what the Blob euphemistically calls "eff you" money. And it was the student-athletes who were getting effed. As State Tech U. increasingly became State Tech Inc., a for-profit entity driven by imperatives wholly separate from the academic mission, the generators of that profit still got the usual room/board/educatin' deal they'd been getting since the days of leather helmets and the flying wedge. 

Every year, that imbalance became more glaring. And every year, State Tech Inc. became even more Inc.-ish, as corporate as IBM or Microsoft but still denying that, unlike IBM or Microsoft, their employees were not employees but humble college students pursuing a degree.

Eventually, the cognitive dissonance simply got too great.  And here came the lawsuits and the NIL money and then, finally, Friday.

All because the NCAA and its member schools got greedy. All because more was never enough, even as it became too much for them to remember their mission and to set some boundaries accordingly.

Hard for me to truly mourn such self-immolation. Not hard at all for me to thoroughly damn them for it, however. 

Schooled

 Welp. Guess we all know now.

We know why the Oklahoma City Thunder won 68 games and lost only 14 this season.

We know why Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was your league MVP.

We know that when the Thunder rolls, it rolls, out there on the Great Plains.

SGA, Jalen Williams and the rest of 'em showed us just how it rolls last night in Game 2 of the NBA Finals, in which the Thunder schooled the Indiana Pacers by 16 and educated the large portion of America that was unfamiliar with them, Oklahoma City not exactly being the center of the universe. 

The final was 123-107, and, really, folks, it wasn't that close. Oke City had the Pacers down 25 in the first half and led by 18 at the break, largely due to a crushing 19-2 second-quarter run. The Pacers never recovered as the Thunder went gallivanting off into the sunset.

SGA?

Stacked another 34 points atop the 38 he scored in Game 1, along with five rebounds, eight assists, four steals and and a blocked shot.

Holmgren?

Awoke from his Game 1 slumber to add 15 and six boards.

Williams?

Nineteen points, five rebounds and five assists.

Just about everything the Pacers did better to steal Game 1, the Thunder did better this time. Even the P's bench, a reliable strength in this magical playoff run, was outshone by the Thunder reserves -- in particular, Alex Caruso and Andrew Wiggins, who ruined Indiana with 20 and 18 points respectively, and were a combined 9-of-16 from the 3-point arc.

Indiana did put all five starters in doubles again, and Tyrese Haliburton did what he could with a 17-point, three-rebound, six-assist, two-steal, one-block night. But the Pacers turned it over 15 times and looked helpless on the defensive end at times, as SGA, Holmgren, Williams and the rest consistently beat them off the dribble up top and made a freeway of the paint.

Not-so-fun-fact to know and tell, if you're from the Hoosier heartland: In the first two Finals games, the Thunder has led all but the last 0.3 seconds in Game 1, and led the last 38 minutes and three seconds of Game 2.

That's a sliver more than 86 minutes of the 96 played so far.

Yikes.

And also, on to Indiana, where that old basketball mojo better be geared up. Save our Pacers, Jimmy Chitwood.

All hail the Fort

 It was George S. Patton, or maybe just George C. Scott at the end of the movie, who told the story about the Roman general enjoying his triumph while a slave whispered a sobering reminder in his ear.

"All glory," said the slave, according to one or both of the Georges, "is fleeting."

All glory is fleeting. 

Brothers and sisters, don't we know that here in the Fort. 

This after our fair city got a bit of fleeting national run the other day, but not for anything good, like Promenade Park or Zesto's. No, sir. It was because the local ABC affiliate, WPTA 21, screwed up and prematurely cut into Game 1 of the NBA Finals with a bump for its 11 p.m. newscast.

An Indiana TV station mistakenly jumping away from the Indiana Pacers' comeback against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the last minute of the game? How epic an "oops" was that?

And so 21's goof turned up on the website Awful Announcing, and Sports Illustrated ran a piece about it on its site, and some national sportsblab shows mentioned it. But just to show you how fleeting glory really is, SI's piece didn't even get the city's name right.

Called us "Fort Worth", for God's sake. Not "Fort Wayne."

Which means once again we get no respect, even when we're getting no respect. To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield.

Anyway, this gets the Blob's notoriously twisted imagination churning, a malady that unfortunately is both chronic and inoperable. What if, I'm thinking, some proud Fort Wayner called SI to complain about it getting the city's name wrong? How would that conversation go?

Something like this, perhaps ...

"Hello?"

"Yeah, uh, this is Harvey Schmuckengruber from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and I got a bone to pick with you guys. You did a real nice story about 21 flubbing up the end of the game the other night, but you got our name wrong. Dammit, we're not Fort Worth! We're Fort Wayne! When are you national clowns gonna get that right?"

"I apologize, sir. I understand, sort of, how galling it must be for the entire nation to be laughing at the wrong city. You've earned the right to your own laughingstock-ness. It shouldn't be appropriated by Fort Worth or any other Fort."

"Well ... thanks. I figured you'd understand. And, listen, I don't mean to get so upset, but, da- doggone it, Fort Wayne doesn't land on the national news very often, so when we do it means a lot to us. And even though we've got a lot of good stuff going for us, if it takes a moment of sheer gooberness to turn the nation's spotlight on us, it's OUR gooberness."

"Completely agree. And we'll be running a correction so you can claim your rightful due to that, um, gooberness, as you call it."

"Good. I mean, if Fort Worth wants credit for screwing something up, let Fort Worthers screw it up themselves. I mean, it's Texas, for God's sake. They pretty much hold the patent on screwing up down there. But do me a favor, will you?"

"What's that, Mr. Schmuckengruber?"

"When Fort Worth does screw up, please don't call it Fort Wayne. We do have our pride, ya know."

Welcome to Funville

 The big news out of pro football this morning comes to us for Pittsburgh, where the yinzers are no doubt a sixer of Iron City deep already at the very thought of the Big News.

To paraphrase Neil Armstrong: "Tranquility Base here. A-Aron has landed."

A-Aron, of course, being Aaron Rodgers, washed 41-year-old quarterback, who signed a one-year deal with the Steelers yesterday after weeks of playing his usual A-Aron mind games. Well, if you're not gonna sign me, I'll just retire. OK, maybe I won't. OK, maybe I will. OK, maybe ...

You get the idea.

Anyway, A-Aron has finally decided to play at least one more year, and, listen, Steelers fans haven't been this stoked about a quarterback since Dick Shiner. OK, so I'm being a smartass. They actually haven't been this stoked about a quarterback since Kent Nix.

OK, I'll stop now.

But the truth is, the yinzers are likely way divided about bringing A-Aron and all his weirdness and drama into the hallowed Steeler pantheon. If they can squeeze one more quasi-vintage Aaron Rodgers season out of the husk of his carcass, the Steelers could actually have an offense. And surely even a 41-year-old Rodgers will be an upgrade over Kenny Pickett or Mason Rudolph, right?

Plus, in April the Steelers drafted Will Howard, last seen leading Ohio State to the national championship. Just think what a great mentor A-Aron will be for the promising young lad!

(Brief pause to let the laughter die down)

(Longer pause to let the laughter die down)

(Come on, you guys. Take a breath before you pass out.)

Now where was I?

Oh, yeah. Aaron Rodgers in Pittsburgh, home of six Super Bowl trophies. Welcome to Funville, folks.

A-Aron likely won't deliver a seventh Lombardi Trophy, but, come on, what happened to him with the Jets can't possibly happen again, can it? First he missed all of 2023 after being injured, like, four snaps into the season; then he played like a washed 40-year-old last year as the Jets went 5-12.

That's not gonna happen with the Steelers, though, right? Um, right?

Nah, no way, now that he's 41 and not 40, that he takes another step back. No way, if the Steelers hit a mid-season slump, that  A-Aron kicks up a fuss, griping about his receivers or his O-line or saying the team should hire fellow weirdo Elon Musk to come in and clear-cut the entire franchise. 

Nah. That would never happen, right?

Um, right?

Aaaaand ... AGAIN

Grab your red pen and circle June 5 on your calendar, because history may not see its like again. OK, so maaayyybe it will, but let's acknowledge its singularity while we can.

June 5, see, is the date an entire state exclaimed, in unison, "Omigod omigod Oh. My. GOD!"

It was the date the Indiana Pacers, thieves in the June night, flat-out stole yet another basketball game.

It was the date Tyrese Haliburton, Mr. May/June the way Reggie Jackson was Mr. October, plunged home another cold-blooded dagger with the game clock down to slivers.

This time the sliver actually was a sliver of a sliver -- 0.3 seconds --but, hey, no worries, brah. Out there in Oklahoma City, Haliburton rose up, launched another sub-orbital flight, and watched it splash down right dead center to tear the heart out of another hostile crowd.

Indiana 111, Oke City 110, thank you very much. Pacers draw first blood in an NBA Finals they're not supposed to win. Another ridiculous comeback, another game-tying or game-winning shot for Haliburton -- he's got four now in these playoffs -- and more evidence that perhaps the basketball gods have gotten drunk and watched "Hoosiers" for the 332nd time.

Fun fact so say "Omigod omigod Oh. My. GOD!" about: When Haliburton's latest dagger dropped, it was the only time in the entire game the Pacers led. They trailed the Thunder for 47 minutes and 59.7 seconds of a game that followed the form chart precisely until ... well, until it didn't.

The home team led by 15, 94-79, with just under ten minutes to play, league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was going off -- he'd finish with 38 points -- and the Pacers looked like the willing foils they were predicted to be. This game was gone. The Thunder had it locked in a sealed vault in a sealed bomb shelter 15 feet below ground. 

Except.

Except weird things happen to the Pacers in the last ten minutes of these games, some sort of alarm that compels them to kick the covers away and get crackin'. And, sure enough, here it came again: The P's scored 32 points in the last 9:42, the Thunder scored just half that, and omigod omigod Oh. My. GOD.

The formula was the usual alchemy, for this latest miracle: Balance, regular visits to Threeville and a deep bench that delivered the way a deep bench should. All five starters scored in double figures, led by Pascal Siakam's 19-and-10 double-double. Myles Turner added 15, Andrew Nembhard and Haliburton 14 each and Aaron Nesmith with 10 plus a dozen boards.

Obi Toppin added another 17 off a bench that, sure enough, outscored the Thunder bench 39-28. Ditto the scoring from distance, where the Pacers bottomed 18 threes and shot 46.2 percent while the Thunder made just 11.

If you're keeping score at home or the office, that's a combined bench/three-ball advantage of 32 points for Indiana.

So does this mean the Pacers are gonna win the whole ball of enchilada wax now?

No. It means they won Game 1. It means, the way these narratives spin out, that the Thunder likely will come back and bury them in Game 2 to even the series. It means a Finals well begun is only that.

But, oh, how well begun it was.

Head 1, Heart 0

 OK, so let's get this out there right from the top, as the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder prepare to face off in Game 1 of the NBA Finals tonight: I do not think the Pacers are going to win the title.

I think the Thunder is going to win it in five games.

I think the Thunder, who've been the best team in the league all season, have too many weapons, too much firepower, too many questions for which the Pacers will not have enough answers.

I think, in making this pick, I threw my heart into the ring with my head, and my head won. And so I hate my head now with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. 

However.

However, I also think this: If the Thunder don't win in five games, they'll have to go the full seven to clinch it.

I think this because I can't see the the Thunder hoisting the Big Trophy in Gainsbridge Fieldhouse, and not just because it would be sacrilege tantamount to Coach Dale not letting Jimmy Chitwood take the last shot. A bunch of johnny-come-latelys celebrating in the very beating heart of basketball? James Naismith forbid.

No, I think if the Thunder don't end it in Game 5 in Oke City, they're not going to do it in Indianapolis in Game 6. The Pacers, and all those baying Hoosier basketballheads, will not let them celebrate on their floor. Tyrese Haliburton will go off like a Roman candle. Pascal Siakam will drop a 30-spot. Aaron Nesmith will go 8-for-6 from distance or some such thing.

And the Thunder will have to save the champagne for their own fans. Which, if you think about it, is how it ought to be.

Of course, how it really ought to be is the Pacers winning it all in front of their fans. But that's a bridge too far for my head, if not for my heart.

Stupid head. Stupid, stupid head.

O Canada! (Maybe)

Leon Draisaitl found the back of the net off a feed from Connor McDavid last night in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final, and you know what that means. It means Canada is back, baby.

"Oh, come on, now," you're saying now. "It means no such thing and you know it."

OK, so it doesn't. What it means is, the Edmonton Oilers took Game 1 of the Final in overtime on the Oilers' home ice. And that's pretty much all it means.

After all, it'll take three more Ws for the Oilers to bring the Cup back to Canada for the first time in 32 years, and anyone who knows the difference between icing and icing on a birthday cake knows what a hill that is to climb in the Final. And no one is a better example of that than these very same Oilers.

Remember last year?

You should, because it was Edmonton vs. Florida just like this year, and the Panthers won in seven games. Like the Oilers last night, they also won Game 1 on their home ice. They also won Games 2 and 3. And then ...

Well. And then, one measly win away from Stanley, they couldn't close the deal. 

Edmonton won Game 4 in Edmonton to stave off elimination. Then they went down to Florida and won Game 5. Then they came back to Edmonton and won Game 6.

By then, the Stanley Cup had earned more frequent flyer miles than George Clooney's rootless company hatchet man from "Up In The Air." Its handlers had flown it from Miami to Edmonton, then back to Miami, then back to Edmonton. And then they had to load it onto the plane after Game 6 to fly it back to Miami again. 

That's a lot of free beverage service for one hallowed sports trophy.

It was also a lot of  paging back through the history book to see if a team had ever gone down 3-0 in a Stanley Cup Final and came back to win. The answer was yes, but you had to go all the way back to 1942 to find it. The '42 Toronto Maple Leafs were the answer, beating the Detroit Red Wings in seven games after losing the first three. 

They were the the only team in history ever to do that, and they're still the only team in history ever to do that. Because of course the Oilers lost Game 7 in Miami and the Panthers finally claimed the Cup.

That won't happen again now, unless the Oilers go up 3-0. Which they could, but probably won't. Unlike last year they have home-ice advantage this time around, but just like last year Florida still is the favorite. And if the Panthers win again, it will once again violate the sensibilities of hockey codgers like the Blob -- who think the Cup should never stray south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and when it does Lord Stanley and Eddie Shore and the rest of the celestial crowd become apoplectic.

So, please, Oilers. Get those three more wins, hard as it will be. Save Stanley from South Beach not just for Canada's sake,  but for all our sakes.

The firing line

 You've heard that thing everyone says when a coach in a high stakes job gets the gate, and it's one of the few times everyone is right: It's a big ol' what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world out there.

But what do you say when you have done something for somebody lately, and you still get pink-slipped?

That happened to New York Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau yesterday, and it's a head-scratcher to be sure. Or maybe it's just the Knicks Knicks-ing it up again, as they've pretty much done since Pat Riley and Patrick Ewing were turning the NBA into Greco-Roman wrestling back in the 1990s.

Because what had Thibodeau done for the Knickerbockers lately?

Let's go to the scorecard, courtesy of  ESPN's Chris Herring and Shams Charania:

*  He just finished helming them to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in a quarter century.

* Did it with a reworked lineup that booted the defending NBA champion Boston Celtics in the conference semis.

* Coached the Knicks to back-to-back 50-win seasons for the first time in 30 years.

* Passed the aforementioned Riley to become the fourth-winningest coach in franchise history. 

Oh, and did we mention he just signed a three-year extension last summer?

Yet the Knicks suits canned him anyway, abruptly reversing their own course. Trotted out the usual firing line, in which they thanked Thibodeau for all his hard work blah-blah-blah but they'd decided to go in a different direction.

To which a Knicks fan today is completely entitled to say this: "What direction would that be? Backward?"

In retrospect, maybe Thibodeau's mistake was being too successful without being, you know, successful. By which I mean, he got the Knicks to a place they hadn't been in 25 years, but he couldn't get them beyond that. At least, not yet.

"Yet," however, is not a word the front office could live with. The brain trust's eyes had grown bigger than its stomach, and so, three days after losing in six games to a demonstrably better team (the Indiana Pacers), they put their most successful coach since Riley on the street.

It looked, smelled and felt like a classic knee-jerk reaction, and it most assuredly was not what a franchise on the cusp of the NBA Finals generally does. It's what a franchise does that doesn't understand you've gotta get to the cusp first. The rest, if you're doing it right, comes later, gator.

Look. I get it. It's the era of the superteam, when a franchise supposedly can go from zero to the big prize simply by filling its roster with vagabond LeBrons and Kevin Durants and Anthony Davises. Thing is, it hardly ever works; with the exception of the Heat with LeBron and Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade, and the Warriors with Steph and Draymond and KD, the big prize mostly avoids that approach. And the Warriors were already a championship club when KD came aboard.

No, it's usually building a team one astute draft pick or trade at a time that gets it done. Witness the Celtics last year. Witness the Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder, who'll square off in Game 1 of the Finals tomorrow night as franchises that didn't opt for the superteam quick fix.

For that matter, witness Thibodeau's Knicks. Same deal.

Also, no deal, as of yesterday. A Knicks-ing they will go.

America's Bagman

 Golf is a good walk spoiled.

-- Mark Twain (allegedly)

So, OK, then. Guess that means Max Homa is a man after Twain's own mischievous heart, right? 

Spoiled a good walk for 38 holes yesterday trying to qualify for next week's U.S. Open, Max did, and came up just short. It would have been only 36 holes, but he jacked around and got himself into a playoff for the last spot, so it took two more holes to officially eliminate himself. He won't be playing next week.

Me, I think they should let him in, anyway. This is because Max Homa did something yesterday none of these other slugs ever do.

He carried his own sticks.

For 38 holes, he was America's Bagman, trudging up and down the fairways and greens like a sherpa hauling gear up Everest. Played what every Bogey Joe at Moonscape Hills Golf Club would call "man golf", which is golf without caddies or golf carts or those little two-wheeled pull thingys.

Now, I don't know what the Bogey Joes call the latter at Moonscape, where they cut the greens with a cheese grater and the fairways turn into shredded wheat by the end of June. But as a Triple Bogey Joe who lugs his own antique sticks, I think "wuss golf" might work.

Or maybe I'm just bitter because my wedges never nestle, and my drives always wind up under a tree a state or two over. It's possible.

At any rate, Homa was our patron saint this week, and God love him for it. Because if the best part of professional golf might be watching the best golfers in the world drain Rand McNally putts every week, the worst part is listening to them whine because some photog's motor drive went off at the wrong time, or the greens weren't carpet-perfect, or the courtesy car was late.

They are a pampered lot, these folks.

That's been particularly evident this year, with more and more golfers shunning the media after sketchy rounds, and Collin Morikawa doubling down on that by saying he doesn't owe anybody anything. And then there was Lexi Thompson, who missed the cut at the U.S. Women's Open and drew criticism for slow play -- criticism she finally had to address in an Instagram post because she refused media requests all week.

Which is why her pace of play blew up into an issue in the first place.

Had she simply gone in front of the media and said "OK, guys, here's the deal," she'd have gotten out in front of the controversy and put it to bed. So she really had no one to blame but herself that it became a whole thing.

But back to Max Homa.

Watching him walk for 38 holes bent double beneath his bag immediately made him Everyman, even if he was only doing it because he'd just fired his caddie and didn't have time to scrounge up another. Doesn't matter. For one glorious moment, we were all Max Homa, and he was us.

Well. Except for the part about him being way better, that is.

A market share

 So I'm thinking this morning about the impending Small Market NBA Finals between Indiana and Oklahoma City, and how it'll be the 25th largest TV market in the land (Indianapolis) against the 47th (Oke City), and what the suits at ESPN must be thinking about all of that.

I'm guessing they're thinking hemlock or a bullet. 

I'm guessing, yes, they're contemplating the best way to end it all, because this is surely not going to break any viewership records and thus fill ESPN's already overstuffed coffers with EVEN MORE CASH. Or maybe more people will tune in than the suits think. The product -- two teams that play an immensely appealing brand of basketball -- would suggest as much.

Me, I'm not dwelling on market share. I'm dwelling on a market share -- i.e., sharing what the Blob imagines the conversation must be like at the Worldwide Leader these days ...

(Fade in on a conference room in Bristol, Conn., the headquarters of ESPN. The table is mahogany. The carpet is thicker than U.S. Open rough. Framed photos of Stephen A. Smith and Mike Greenberg sit on a credenza in one corner; a handful of men and women in well-appointed business suits sit in well-appointed chairs around the table.)

Suit No. 1: Well, isn't THIS a fine kettle of fish. The state of Indiana vs. the state of Oklahoma. We coulda had the Lakers vs. the  Celtics or Knicks, but, noooo. Instead we get Yokel City vs. Yahoo Town. Thanks, God.

Suit No. 2: Hey, not so harsh, Elitist Boy. Hayseeds like basketball, too. Heck, Indiana's practically made it a state religion. Those goobers act like they invented the damn game.

Suit No. 3: Yeah, it could be worse. What if Adam Silver had granted Albuquerque a franchise? And what if Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams had landed there? Then we'd have to sell America the 48th largest TV market in the country instead of the 47th.

Suit No. 1: Well, thanks for THAT inspiring thought, Chuckles the Clown. Who invited you to this meeting, anyway? 

Suit No. 3 (a trifle smugly): Same guy who invited you.

Suit No. 1: Hey, I CALLED this meeting. I invited me. Yeesh. Last time I put my email on blast.

Suit No. 2: Boys, boys. Let's get back on track. How are we gonna sell the Flyover Finals to the two coasts? In other words, to the only people who matter to us?

Suit No. 4: I know! We can sell the basketball!

(General laughter around the table)

Suit No. 1 (still laughing): Oh, man. Please don't tell me I invited YOU to this meeting, too.

Suit No. 2: Actually, that's not such a bad idea. I mean, we can't sell the celebs. Who counts as a celeb in Oke City? The Oak Ridge Boys? And America is going to get tired reaally fast of shots of John Mellencamp in the crowd at Indy.

Suit No. 5: Although Caitlin Clark might be there, too ...

(Brief pause as the Suits consider this)

The Suits: True.

Suit No. 1: OK, let's wrap this up. Here's the plan: We sell this the way Fox sells the Daytona 500 as the Great American Race. Welcome to the Great American Finals, America! Celebrate the gooberness! Then we throw in a bunch of stand-alones of the American flag and pickup trucks and those things that pick corn.

Suit No. 2: Combines?

Suit No. 1: Right. Combines. And tractors and sunsets over waving fields of wheat and stoic guys in overalls with faces so craggy they could have been carved from solid rock. S*** like that. And some down-homey music like that tune they play over and over and over again in Ken Burns' Civil War series.

Suit No. 4: Ashokan Farewell?

Suit No. 1: Right. And then we close it out with a clip of two kids shooting at a hoop nailed to a barn, like in "Hoosiers." In fact we could hire the guy who played Jimmy Chitwood to do the voice-over.

(Brief pause as everyone considers this.)

The Suits (in unison): I like it!

(A slight rustle from the credenza in the corner. It's Stephen A. and Greeny, turning their faces to the wall.)

A Final(s) reckoning

Well, now. I guess the market for those "Game 7" Knicks caps just cratered, didn't it?

Orange lettering on a blue crown, they showed up on the Magic Interwhatsis the day before Game 6 of the NBA Eastern Conference finals, all neatly lined up for sale. Which suggested the Big Apple was in full swagger after their Knicks clocked the Indiana Pacers by 17 in Game 5 to save their season.

At last the anointed team had asserted its superiority. Or so the narrative seemed to go in New York.

Oh, me, oh, my. And "ahem" and "uhhh" and all that.

What Knickerbocker Knation forgot, see, is that -- and we can't repeat this loudly enough -- THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS MOMENTUM IN THE NBA PLAYOFFS. Clocker becomes the clock-ee with alarming frequency. Thus a team that left its mojo somewhere over Pennsylvania on the way to New York for Game 5 retrieved it on the way back to Indiana for Game 6.

Pennsylvania, it seems, was only hanging onto it for safekeeping.

Because Game 6 began in front of a howling home crowd in Gainsbridge Fieldhouse, and before long the Pacers were pressuring the basketball and making shots and doing all the things they didn't do in Game 5. The Knicks turned it over 17 times against the Pacers' ball pressure; Indiana got 10 of those 17 on straight-up steals. They missed 23 of their 32 attempts from Threeville. They were outscored by 13 in the second half.

And the home team?

Shot 54.1 percent and 51.5 percent (17-of-33) from the arc. Put seven players in double figures. Got 36 points off its bench, including 18 from Obi Toppin and 11 from Thomas Bryant. 

Oh, yeah. And won by 17, 125-108, to advance to the NBA Finals for the first time in 25 years.

It was a 34-point swing from Game 5, and if Knicks Knation forgot Big Mo is a no-show in the playoffs, it is likely aware of it now. It might also be aware (though loathe to admit it) that the reason the Pacers were up 3-1 in the series going to Game 5 to begin with is they were simply the better team. 

They had more go-to's. A deeper bench. And they played at a tempo the Knicks simply couldn't match from one game to the next.

Some possibly relevant numbers: In Game 6, three players scored 65 of their 108 points -- OG Anunoby (24), Karl-Anthony Towns (22) and Jalen Brunson (19). Their bench contributed just 20 points, 12 of which came from Landry Shamet. The 16-point edge in bench points was almost exactly the margin of victory for Indiana.

Call it a Final(s) reckoning.

Call Indiana your Eastern Conference champs, and now Oklahoma City awaits, the best team in the league this season and likely your champions-in-waiting. Or so the boys in Vegas figure it.

And the Knicks?

Well, maybe those "Game 7" hats will wind up in the hands of some needy kids overseas, like all those "Buffalo Bills Super Bowl Champs" T-shirts used to.

More chutzpah gone wrong, that.

Spellin' bee time!

 And now exciting news from the Blob's favorite kinda-sorta sporting event, the National Spellin' Bee (OK, so it's "Spelling", but the Blob likes "Spellin'" better): The odds-on favorite did not lose, tie with eight other people or finish second the way he did last year.

No, this time 13-year-old Faizan Zaki from Allen, Texas, stuck the landing, taking home the big trophy that so narrowly eluded him in 2024. He sealed the deal by correctly spelling  "eclaircissement", which the Blob as usual claims is a totally made-up word the National Spellin' Bee people threw in there just to narrow the field.

"Hey, I know!" I can hear them saying. "Let's stick a bunch of extra letters on the end of 'eclair.' That's sure to throw the little goobers off."

Same goes for "commelina," which Faizan botched in a fit of overconfidence after the other two finalists had missed their words. That prolonged the Bee a couple more words before Faizan finally nailed "eclairwhatever."

Commelina. I mean, come on, people. If you're gonna make up words, at least don't have them sound like Disney characters.

If I'm running the show, that would never happen. No, I'd throw in a few Klingon words, like "bat'leth" or "gagh." Or some Chaucerian English, like "unnethe" or "Ynogh." Or maybe a couple of words with 12 consonants, one vowel and a random parentheses or two.

Then, in the final round, I'd hit them with the biggie: "cannolipar'laszmenta'arianism."

Which I'll decide means "The Klingon study of the ethical dilemma of leaving the gun and taking the cannoli."

That'll learn the little goobers.