The good part

 The only thing worse than track is field.

- The late, great Dan Jenkins

Or to put it another way: Sometimes even legendary sportswriters are as wrong as ketchup on a hot dog. Or, I don't know, room-temperature beer, maybe.

See, we're into the second half of the Paris Olympics now, or, as the Blob prefers to call it "the good part." And that's because (with apologies to Mr. Jenkins) track and field has begun.

Track and field is the jewel of the Games, unless it's swimming or gymnastics. Jesse Owens made it so when he outran Adolph Hitler. Abebe Bikila did when he won the marathon in Rome in his bare feet. Emil Zatopek ...Wilma Rudolph ... Kip Keino ... Bob Beamon ... Bruce Jenner ... Lasse Viren and Steve Prefontaine ... Carl Lewis ... FloJo ...  

On and on. There's a reason why almost every movie ever made about the Olympics is about track and field. There's a reason why, when you visit the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic museum in Colorado Springs, there's a whole display devoted to Beamon and his astounding 29-feet, 2 1/2-inch long jump. There's even a tape measure painted on the floor to show you just what 29-2 1/2 looks like.

It looks otherworldly, is how it looks. It looks barely human.

So, yeah, bring on track-and-field, and I'm not just saying that because once upon a time lost in the mists of the ages I was a spectacularly bad middle-school distance runner. I weighed about 12 pounds and had no speed, but I made up for it by also having no endurance. My coach said I had good form, however.

Anyway ...

Anyway, it's not personal bias that makes me look forward to track and field. It's everything else I've mentioned above, plus what happened yesterday on the very first day of the competition. 

Grant Fisher happened.

Grant Fisher is an American distance runner from Michigan. He was competing in the 10,000 meters yesterday when something extraordinary occurred: Dave Wottle possessed his body.

Wottle, you might or might not recall, was the guy in the white painter's cap who surged from ridiculously off the pace -- the guy was dead last on the backstretch -- to steal the 800 meters in Munich back in 1972. Fisher didn't quite do that, but if you squinted just right as the field turned for home you perhaps could see a spectral painter's cap hovering above his dark hair.

OK. So maybe that was just me.

In any event, Fisher was churning along in fifth rounding the last turn, and then he began to Wottle, for want of a better term. Launched a kick from either Dave or the gods that jetted him past everyone and nearly reeled in the eventual winner, Joshua Cheptegei of Uganda. He wound up with the bronze only because Ethiopia's fast-closing Berihu Aregawi out-leaned him at the tape to snatch the silver in a photo finish.

No matter. He was still only the second U.S. medalist in the event in 56 years.

And if it's a stretch to say he came out of nowhere to do it, he could see nowhere from where he was. A former Stanford runner, Fisher finished fifth in the event at the Tokyo Olympics but had never before medaled in an international competition. At 27, he came to Paris with just the 11th-fastest 10,000-meter time in the world in 2024, and Friday he nearly fell after becoming jostled in the early going.

But he didn't.

Instead, he gave us one of those Olympic Moments that make the Games worth watching. I'm guessing he'll be part of NBC's closing montage next week, along with Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, French swimmer and four-for-four gold medalist Leon Marchand and Pommel Horse Millhouse From The Simpsons, aka Stephen Nedoroscik.

Oh, yeah: And that 52-year-old Turkish dude who just sort of showed up in blue jeans and a team shirt -- no goggles no special gear, nothing -- and won a silver in pistol shooting with one hand tucked in his pocket. Looked like your neighbor plinking away at empty beer cans while grilling burgers in his backyard.

That guy is now king of the internet memes.

And Grant Fisher?

Grant Fisher is why the good part of the Games has just begun. Or so it says here.

Faster, higher, more transphobic

 Sometimes I think there's a whole species of Americans out there who wake up every morning thinking "What can I be outraged about today?", and who feel today won't be complete unless they can check off "outrage" on their calendars.

Yesterday: The mocking of the Last Supper in an Olympic opening ceremonies bit even though it wasn't about the Last Supper. Check.

Today: A female boxer from Algeria who SURELY IS ONE OF THEM TRANSGENDERS because she clocked her Italian opponent with a solid right. Check.

That sort of thing.

Anyway, the latest hoo-ha involves the aforementioned Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif, accused of being a guy who was allowed to punch a woman, Angela Carini of Italy, in the nose. This happened 46 seconds into their match and Carini promptly pulled a Roberto Duran, saying she'd had enough and, well, "No mas."

This immediately got the transphobic crowd revved up, including Indiana's own halfwit attorney general, Performance Art Todd Rokita. Performance Art was outraged -- outraged, I say -- that the WOKE LIBERAL INSANITY of the International Olympic Committee let a "dude" beat up a girl.

"Look at the video," he posted on social media. "That's a male."

Well, um, actually, Todd-o, no.

Actually, Khelif is a biological female with an XY chromosome, which is rare but occasionally happens. She's been boxing for several years without everyone getting their panties in a bunch; she competed in the Tokyo Olympics three years ago and lost in the quarterfinals without all the caterwauling. It is true che was barred from competing in an event sponsored by the International Boxing Association because she, and a boxer from Taiwan, were determined to have "advantages" of a genetic nature -- i.e., the aforementioned chromosome. This was not the same thing as saying she was a biological male, which, again, she isn't.

The IOC, it turns out, has its own testing procedures which every athlete has to pass. Khelif passed, just as she did in Tokyo in 2021. It's why Algeria let her compete in the first place, Algeria being a nation that looks upon transgenders about as favorably as Spluttering Outrage Todd does.

If Khelif were a transgender, she wouldn't be representing Algeria in Paris. In fact, she might not even be in Algeria, considering it forbids identifying as transgender. 

Yet Algerian athletic officials have backed her to the hilt. Go figure.

And Carini has discounted reports that she quit in protest over men competing against women.

And I doubt seriously any of this will clear up all the misconceptions and outright BS that sprout like velvet leaf every time the outrage crowd gets its feathers ruffled.

I mean, come on. It's a new day. They gotta have something.

What happens in Vegas ...

 ... shouldn't be in Vegas.

Hat tip for this one belongs to my friend and fellow journalist Andrew Smith, who noted the other day on the Magic Twitter Thingy that the Big Ten men's basketball tournament is scheduled to be held in Las Vegas in 2028. Andrew wanted to know (correctly) if he'd missed the announcement that a Nevada school had joined the Big Ten. Otherwise, why on earth would the Big Ten play its men's tournament in Vegas, which has no connection to the Big Ten?

This is a very good question.

Another question is how you can with a straight face continue all that high-falutin' garbage about prioritizing education when you keep prioritizing cash grabs like this one? What message are you sending about education, or the legitimacy of your product, when you take your conference tournament to the gambling capital of America?

Our conference values academics. You can BET on that!

Welcome to Vegas, student-athletes! Now stay away from those blackjack tables (wink, wink)!

For the love of God. Can these people get any more clueless? Or more venal?

All that junk about academics left the station the first time the Big Investment Firm reached beyond its footprint for East Coast TV money. Revenue streams are all that matter now, not graduation rates or optics. If that weren't true, the Big Investment Firm wouldn't have snapped up four members of the defunct Pac-12 (West Coast TV money!). And it for damn sure wouldn't be taking its tournament to the gambling capital of the world when, little more than a year ago, 26 current student-athletes at Iowa were implicated in a betting scandal.

Optics? They don't care about no stinkin' optics! 

Not when it's Vegas that awaits. And of course the accompanying new conference motto.

The Big Ten: Where Opportunity Is Spelled "Loose Slots."

Not makin' it, not takin' it

 Well, this is embarrassing.

No, not Katie Ledecky, who won her all-time eighth Olympic gold medal in swimming in the 1,500 freestyle, and won by such an absurd margin no one else was even in the frame of the overhead camera when she touched. 

No, not the U.S. women's rugby 7s team, who claimed the Americans' first-ever Olympic medal (a bronze) in a sport that's been a surprise hit at the Paris Games. 

And, no, not the U.S. shooting team -- though it was pretty embarrassing that a country as obsessed with calibration as America failed to medal in any firearms discipline,

No, sir. What I'm talking about here is 3-on-3 basketball.

The U.S. team lost again yesterday, this time to Poland. It's 0-2 now in pool play. And how can that be, given that practically EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US grew up playing 3-on-3 in driveways and on playgrounds all over the damn country.

Now?

Now we're over there losing to Poland, for God's sake. Poland. Yeah, like those guys grew up playing make-it-take-it and call-your-own-fouls and leaning against a chain-link fence waiting for winners.

That was us growing up, not them. That was our game. How did it come to this?

Maybe the problem is we've sent a team of players who aren't exactly household names, basketball-wise. Oh, lots of people remember Jimmer Fredette, who starred for BYU an eon or so ago. But who is Kareem Maddox? Or Dylan Travis? And who is Canyon Barry besides Rick Barry's son (and who shoots free throws underhand just like his Pops)?

Man, forget those guys.

What this team needs is my neighbor Gil from across the street, an uncanny dead-of-winter shooter with a stroke muffled by bulky gloves. 

"Son of a bitch!" I'd shout, every time he'd bottom a J.

"No, MARAVICH!" he'd always reply.

What this team needs is Gil and my buddy Dave from down the street and that one kid -- there was always one -- with the matching head-and-wrist-bands. It needs the guy who could make a halfcourt hook shot on a bet. It needs the descendants of Earl "The Goat" Manigault and Herman "The Helicopter" Knowings and Fly Williams and all those other New York playground legends. Hell, it needs Fly Williams now, since the man's still alive.

Then again, maybe it's the setting that's the problem. It's too civilized.

That's because it's an indoor venue with a pristine regulation court and comfy chairs to sit in and nets on the rims. There's also a 12-second shot clock and honest-to-God officials calling honest-to-God fouls.

No wonder we're losing to Poland.

It's because this isn't real 3-on-3, and everyone knows it. Real 3-on-3 is cracked asphalt and netless rims that hang crooked because too many guys have dangled from them after flushing a dunk. It's backboards with dead spots and nowhere to sit and wait on next, unless it's a sorry-ass bench with all the paint weathered off and nailheads poking up through the wood.

Let's get the Poles in that venue and see how they do.

Let's get 'em, say, on my old home court, whose dimensions were as far from regulation as Earth is from the Klingon Empire. That's because it was just a cement slab jutting out from the driveway. It was like playing basketball in a broom closet once you dribbled from the driveway onto the slab. 

But I knew every angle of it, by God. I even knew the exact spot on the right side of the slab where I could spin the ball behind my head, off the backboard and in. Only trick shot I ever mastered.

Yeah, boy. Let's see the Yanks take on the world from 3029 Castle Drive instead of La Concorde in Paris.

We'll even let 'em take the ball out first. 

Today in dumb ideas

The National Football League, which brought you Let's Pretend We're Not Trying To Kill Our Players and other classic hits, has come up with another burnt-out lightbulb of an idea. Beginning this season, the League is requiring its coaches to submit to in-game interviews from sideline reporters.

I'm sure this will add layers of insight that have been previously unexplored. OK, so no.

No, like many of you, the Blob is trying to figure out what the point is, aside from "There is no point, we're just doing it because basketball does it." Unlike many of you, however, I immediately imagined how this would have played in a day when NFL coaches weren't as media-savvy as they are now ...

"Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Lambeau Field, where it's colder than a well-digger's ass and the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys are playing for the NFL championship. Game-time temperature is minus-13 with a windchill of My Toes Just Turned Black. Let's go down to our sideline reporter Biff Turducken for an in-game chat with Packers coach Vince Lombardi. Biff?"

"Thanks, big guy. Let me squeeze past Jerry Kramer here and grab Coach Lombar-"

"Hey! You stepped on my foot! And who are you, anyway?"

"I'm Biff Turducken, sideline reporter for the Big Deal Network. If I could just slip by here and grab Coach Lombardi for a sec-"

"Hey, Vince! Check this out! Some TV doofus wants to interview you IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAMN GAME!"

(Lombardi whirls around)

"The HELL?? Who let you down here? Out! Out! We're tryin' to win a football game here! Jerry ... Fuzzy ... run the Packer sweep over this guy's ass!"

"But, Coach, you agreed to do this. Just one question, OK?"

(Lombardi grumbles, sighs, walks over)

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. That damn Rozelle. I swear, if the man had a brain he'd be loanin' it out to strangers. OK, so what's your question?"

"How is your team handling this brutal cold, Coach?"

"WHAT?? How do you THINK we're handling it, dumbass? We're freezing to death! I tried to send McGee into the game and found out he'd turned into a McGee-sized Popsicle! I hadda send Mercein in at fullback 'cause all our other fullbacks were frozen solid! You know how long it takes to thaw out a fullback? 'How is your team handling this brutal cold.' Crissakes."

"Well, good luck, Coach. Now back to th- holy (bleep) Nitschke just took my microphone! Now he's trying to shove it up my -- Ow! Ow! That HURTS!!"

(Audio abruptly goes silent. On the screen, the play-by-play man appears)

"Thanks for that informative report, Biff! Now a word from our sponsors."

Wordplay

 And now, on the cusp of August, we interrupt the long slog of the baseball season for some ... fun.

Ever heard of Jason Benetti?

He's the play-by-play voice of the Detroit Tigers, and like everyone this time of year he and the Tigers are desperate for something, anything, to break up the monotony. This is especially true if you're the Tigers, who are 52-57 and 14 games out of first in the AL Central. In other words, they're not going anywhere, especially after offloading their ace pitcher Jack Flaherty at the trade deadline yesterday.

And so ...

What to do, what do.

I know! Let's give Jason a bunch of random words and see if he can get them all into his broadcast!

Which is just what the Tigers did yesterday. 

The words they gave him, according to the website Awful Announcing, included "funkytown", "yellowtail", "Fortnite", "pineapples" and "perpendicular."

God bless the man, he managed to use all of them. And apparently made it sound legit.

Reminds me of all the times my former sister-in-law and her best friend, both of whom were schoolteachers, used to pick a word for me to slip into my column for the next day. Most of the time I remembered to do it; a lot of times, miraculously, I made it sound legit. But Benetti and the Tigers have taken that several stratospheres beyond.

I salute them. Go, you perpendicular pineapples, you.

Snubbing The Snub

 Look, I don't know what Dawn Staley has to do, at this point. Genuflect at Caitlin Clark's feet? Place candles around her picture and burn some incense? Set off on a pilgrimage to Iowa wearing a hair shirt and begging forgiveness at every wide spot in the road along the way?

None of it would be enough, it seems, for the Society of the Chronically Aggrieved. Staley was a honcho on the committee to pick the U.S. women's Olympic basketball team, and the committee didn't pick Clark, and so the Chronically Aggrieved say it was because of jealousy or racism (especially ludicrous, considering almost half the team's white and so is the head coach) or whatever it is they're saying.

Bottom line, they're still carrying on about it. And probably always will.

The alleged Great Snub of Caitlin came up again the other day because Staley went on with Mike Tirico at the Paris Olympics and did her best to say she did not, in fact, have anything against Caitlin Clark. In fact, she said if the Olympic team were picked today, Clark would be a great asset because of the way she's lighting up the WNBA right now.

This of course won't appease radio foofs like Colin Cowherd (and others), who continue to insist it was petty and shortsighted to leave her off the team. From a marketing standpoint, that might be true. But otherwise?

Otherwise, this continued narrative that poor Caitlin is being persecuted by a bunch of mean girls needs to go away, because some of us (OK, me) are sick to death of it.  And that's especially true as it becomes more and more obvious what a load of manure it is.

Look. It's beyond all doubt now that, halfway through her rookie season, Clark already is one of the best players in the WNBA. And that the day is fast coming when she could be the best player.

But the Olympic team wasn't picked yesterday. It was picked when Clark's professional resume wasn't nearly as well-defined as it is now. At the time, she was just a rookie -- albeit the most celebrated rookie in WNBA history -- with a very small sample size and next to no Olympic-level international experience. And Olympic-level international experience was clearly a priority for the committee putting the team together.

So the Great Snub wasn't actually a snub, in the Blob's humble opinion. If everyone knew what they know now and left her off, that would be a snub. But they didn't, so it wasn't.

Of course, you can't convince the chronically aggrieved of that. They have their narrative, and they're sticking to it. Certain people just seem to have a need to feel persecuted these days, by proxy or otherwise. And even if they have to invent the persecution. 

(Consider, for instance, that certain species of Christian outraged by the depiction of the Feast of Dionysius during the Olympic opening ceremonies. Now, it was admittedly weird, but then again, we are talking about the French here. Somehow, though, the certain species of Christian got it in their heads it was a blasphemous depiction of the Last Supper, even though to see it that way you had to seriously suspend disbelief. But that didn't stop them from feeling outraged at a perceived attack on their faith, which perhaps was the whole point.)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah. Caitlin Clark.

Who is indeed a stronger, more confident player than she was a couple of months ago, and not just because her teammates have magically gotten better. If they've gotten better, it's because she's gotten better. That's obvious to anyone who remotely knows what they're seeing.

Dawn Staley does, and so there she was the other night, praising Clark's extraordinary court vision and basketball IQ. And saying, sure, if the team were picked today, she'd likely be on it.

Does that sound petty to you?

Yeah. Me either.