When wrong becomes right

It just keeps getting better for Phil Mickelson, who last week set fire to himself by aligning himself with gangsters even while admitting they were gangsters. 

Now Saudi Arabia's proposed Super-Duper Golf League (a Super-Duper embellishment of the actual name) has evaporated like a drop of water on an August sidewalk, and Lefty's sponsors are deserting him in droves. But not for the reason you think.

They're deserting him not because he aligned himself with, as he called them, "scary mother****ers". Oh, no. They're deserting him because he CALLED them "scary mother****ers."

Weirdly and suddenly, this transforms Mickelson from bad guy to victim, because, well, when he said what he said about the Saudis, he was only speaking the truth. What made it contemptible was that he was willing to buddy up to them anyway for his own purposes.

Now the contempt must shift to the sponsors who are dropping him, because they have revealed themselves to be craven toadies for oppressors and butchers. Among the perps are KPMG, a major business player in Saudi Arabia for three decades; Callaway, Mickelson's golf sponsor who disavowed Mickelson's comments instead of applauding them the way it should have; and American Express, the title sponsor of the Desert Classic tournament for whom Mickelson was the host and whose foundation was the tournament's charity.

But, hey. I'm sure their business dealings with the Saudis are quite lucrative.

And may they choke on all that dough.

And now, racing

 So remember last Sunday, when the Blob wrote in this space that the Daytona 500 was its annual first robin of spring, an occasion to metaphorically power down the windows, hang an elbow in the breeze and crank the road tunes to full blare?

Well ... today is the Blob's official start of the racing season.

Today the green drops down in St. Petersburg, Fla., and the 2022 IndyCar season shrieks to life. It's always an occasion for the Blob, whose bias toward the open-wheel crowd always has been shamelessly transparent. It is the best of American motorsports, and the Blob will entertain no argument otherwise.

That's especially true now.

It's true because IndyCar is coming off its most entertaining season in memory, and it was the kids who made it so. The wily vets -- Scott Dixon, Will Power, et al -- were, and are,  still around, but it was the kids who crafted the season's narrative: Series champion Alex Palou, Colton Herta, Pato O'Ward, Rinus VeeKay, Scott McLaughlin, on and on.

None of them were older than 24. All of them, together, made the 2021 season unbelievably competitive; seven different drivers won the first seven races, and nine drivers won at least one race in the 16-race schedule. The season came down to the very last weekend, when Palou finished fourth at Long Beach to claim the title.

Today, they begin the scrap again. McLaughlin sits on the pole, with Power alongside. Herta and VeeKay start right behind them in Row 2. Then there's former F1 pilot and fan favorite Romain Grosjean and Simon Pagenaud in Row 3, Dixon and Marcus Ericsson in Row 4, and two-time series champ Josef Newgarden and Palou in Row 5.

O'Ward starts on the outside of Row 8, but he likely won't stay there long.

Present and accounted for, all of them. Candidates for the title, all of them.

Drop the green, baby. Let's go.

A preview of Madness

 I have no idea what happens when the calendar kicks over to March on Tuesday, and that is a marvelous thing to contemplate. No one wants order in March. We want chaos, and NCAA brackets reduced to cinders, and a rending of garments that is mostly a false front for sheer delight.

Oh, man, why did I pick Kansas to beat Bucknell? Now my bracket is landfill! Also ... go Bucknell!

That sort of deal.

We want madness with our March Madness, or it's just not Madness. And if yesterday is any indication, we're going to get plenty of it when the curtain goes up on the NCAA Tournament in less than three weeks.

What happened yesterday was seven of the top ten teams in the nation got blackjacked -- including No. 1 Gonzaga, which lost by 10 to St. Mary's. Arkansas beat Kentucky. Baylor beat Kansas. Tennessee beat Auburn. Arizona lost to Colorado, Texas Tech lost to TCU, and Purdue stepped in it again, losing to unranked Michigan State in East Lansing.'

This makes the Purdues 24-5 and drops them a game behind front-running Wisconsin in the Big Ten. It also firms up the Blob's suspicions about them, which is that March could go one of two ways for them.

One, they play like they played against Illinois twice or Rutgers the second time or Iowa twice or Florida State or Villanova, and they get to the Final Four for the first time in 42 years.

Two, they play like they played at Michigan or at Indiana or at Rutgers the first time or against Maryland at home (a fortunate 62-61 escape), and some St. Mary's or Arkansas knocks them out in the second round.

I think it's 50-50 between the two. I could be wrong, of course. I frequently am, particularly in March.

Point is, everyone has players these days, and so chalk is not nearly as dependable as it used to be. This makes it much harder to stay inside the lines on your bracket. It's also what makes Da Tournament great.

Seven of the top ten going down, in late February?

Go, chaos.

Stick to ... well, you know

 I lost track of Charlie Weis when Kansas gave him the gate as their football coach in 2014, so I don't know where he is now or what he's doing. But I do know what he hasn't been doing.

Boning up on political theory.

I know this because yesterday Mr. Schematic Advantage weighed in on the invasion of Ukraine by Russia's criminal mastermind Vladimir Putin, and he was ... well, let's say at a disadvantage.

Here's what Charlie tweeted: As I watch Russia continue their invasion of Ukraine this morning, I ask if Americans that want socialism are watching? Do you want to be a part of something like this?

Altogether now: I'm sorry, what? 

Look. I'll give Weis the benefit of the doubt here, because he's likely spent a lot of his time over the years drawing up plays for Tom Brady and Brady Quinn, and hasn't had a lot of time to study socialism. Same goes for Tommy Tuberville, who somehow got himself elected to the Senate despite having no qualifications other than beating Alabama seven times when he coached Auburn from 1999 to 2008.

Tuberville's contribution to the Ukraine dialogue was to tweet about the evils of communism, apparently having missed the breakup of the Soviet Union 30 years ago.

That neither he nor Weis would not know what socialism and communism are -- and, more to the point, what they aren't -- only makes them no different from a whole lot of right-leaning folks these days. But it's most assuredly not what Russia is.

In fact, Russia is almost exactly the opposite; for want of a better term, it's a neo-fascist state run by corrupt oligarchs and a brutal ex-KGB goon, masquerading as a democratic republic. Its invasion of Ukraine is reflective of that, because, according to people with some actual expertise, part of Putin's motivation is a wholly un-socialistic desire to prop up Russia's fossil fuel-based economy. 

The point here is the usual suspects who cry "Stick to sports!" when a LeBron James or Colin Kaepernick comment on political matters are conspicuously silent when a Weis or Tuberville do so. It's all about whose ox is being gored -- even if their oxen have no clue what they're talking about.

Stick to sports?

Yeah, OK. You first.

The available weapon

 In Barcelona this week, the Formula One crowd is testing for the 2022 season, a shakedown that may or may not provide a clue to the narrative ahead. 

Right now, the narrative being suggested is that Ferrari is going to be a force again. Charles Leclerc set fast time for two days running; Ferrari teammate Carlos Sainz then hopped in the car and put up the fifth quickest time, behind LeClerc, Pierre Gasly of AlphaTauri, Daniel Ricciardo of McLaren and George Russell of Mercedes. The two Ferrari drivers put 149 laps on their ride in the second day of testing.

As for the narrative ...

Well, what's happening Ukraine right now already has partly shaped it.

What's happening there is the present overlaying the past like a double exposure, because its pattern is distressingly familiar. Tanks and troops overwhelming defenses in 2022; tanks and troops overwhelming defenses in 1939. Missiles falling on Kyiv in 2022; Stukas descending on Warsaw in 1939.

Naked aggression then. Naked aggression now.

It truly is all of a piece, right down to the justification aggressors always trot out to put a shine on their crimes. In 2022, Putin claims Russia is merely defending itself against a threat on its borders, and protecting breakaway Russian provinces. In 1938 and 1939,  Hitler claimed the same things about the Sudetenland and Poland.

What F1 has to do with this is very little, other than what it can do. And so yesterday it announced there would be no Russian Grand Prix in Moscow this season -- just as soccer has announced it will move its Champions League final from St. Petersburg to Paris.

This is pathetic stuff, matched against tanks and missiles. But is it the only weapon available to Sportsball World, and so it will wield it.

More telling could be the coordinated sanctions being applied to Russian money and Russian resources by the United States and its allies. And, of course, by the tens of thousands of people even now flooding Moscow's streets to protest Putin's thuggery.

 Russians in the streets brought down the czar once upon a time, despite brutal efforts to suppress them. Now they're in the streets again, and brutal efforts to suppress them are again being employed.

The present, overlaying the past.

More MLB lunacy

 Ay-yi-yi. I swear, if Major League Baseball were "Casey At The Bat," more than the air would be shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

 So would his head.

Because, listen, if this isn't MLB hitting itself in the head with its own bat, I don't know what is. Its latest act of self-harm came down yesterday, when MLB officials reiterated the Feb. 28 deadline to get a deal done was a hard and fast one.

If there's no deal by end of business Monday, they'll start canceling regular-season games. And those games will not be made up.

So now there won't be a 162-game season because of this nonsense. 

And I say "won't be" because there won't be a deal by Monday, either. That's ridiculous on its face. Furthermore, MLB knows it. 

So this is just more gamesmanship by the owners, as spring training sites remain silent. It's an attempt to shift the blame for the continuing impasse to the players, because the public has rightly placed the lion's share of it at the owners' feet. After all, they're the ones who went nuclear by imposing a lockout before negotiations had even begun.

And what are they all arguing (i.e.: posturing) about?

Literally whether hundreds of millions of dollars should be even more hundreds of millions of dollars. Even the dispute over minimum MLB salaries is a squabble over hundreds of thousands.

Bottom line: Everyone's already rich here, the owners especially. So most of what this is about, in the Blob's opinion, is disposable income. And everyone's already making more of that than they reasonably could dispose of in a lifetime.

Meanwhile, the NCAA Tournament is coming up. And the NBA stretch run. And the NFL combine and draft.

Which means most of Sportsball World won't even notice if baseball remains dark.

Go ahead, boys. Hit yourselves again.

That beeping sound you hear ...

 ... is Phil Mickelson backing up, fast, after he said he wanted to climb in bed with a bunch of sociopaths to put pressure on the PGA Tour to reform itself.

Namely, to stop making so damn much money off the players, who make a whole lot of damn money themselves.

Anyway, since air hit that quote the other day, some stuff has happened, and it's all been bad for Lefty. Thinking he was leading some sort of charge, he was undoubtedly quite shocked to look behind him and see no one following. PGA Tour player after PGA Tour player said he had zero interest in the Super Tour. This included all of the top 12 players in the world. 

Meanwhile, the PGA Tour yesterday issued a bald ultimatum: The Tour was moving forward without regard for the Super Tour, and it was time for the players to make a decision: With us, or against us?

And, well ...

Well. Suddenly Lefty was out there on an island, all by himself. Alone, that is, except for Greg Norman, who's fronting the Super Tour for the journalist-killing-and-dismembering Saudis. 

Not a very hospitable island, in other words. And so Phil walked back what he said about the Saudis -- whom he'd actually acknowledged were a bunch of sociopaths, which made it sound even worse when he said he was nonetheless casting his lot with them.

No more. This week Mickelson threw himself on the mercy of the court of public opinion, saying it was rilly, rilly bad what he said, and how he wasn't going to join the Super Tour after all. In fact, he's apparently taking some time off from golf.

Norman, however, is still fully engaged with the butchers of Jamal Khashoggi.

Sleep well, Greg.