A narrative derailed

 Team Spoon beat Team Coop 129-122 last night in the WNBA All-Star game, and, hey, look, none of those mean black girls (or mean white girls) punched out Caitlin Clark. Why, there's even a picture here of All-Star game MVP Jonquel Jones holding the trophy in one arm and hugging Caitlin with the other.

And when Caitlin dropped back-to-back logo threes on her way to 17 points?

Paige Bueckers from Team Coop -- one Clark's "rivals" who allegedly are just eaten up with jealousy of her -- didn't sneer or make a snippy comment or turn green with envy.

Nah. She just laughed and said "You goin' for MVP? Damn!"

This was bad news for the yapping sports talk poodles and other media poop-stirrers who've been working overtime to sell the narrative that poor Caitlin's being roughed up and persecuted by (choose one or all) hate-filled lesbians; hate-filled black lesbians; or  hate-filled established stars who can't stand that this relative newcomer is stealing their starlight with fame she doesn't deserve.

So they're playing rough with her because it's a jealousy thing or a black-white thing or a gay-straight thing, and not because, well, it's a rough league and has been for a long time -- mainly because the officiating stinks like Christmas leftovers in March.

It's a narrative that ignores the fact CC sometimes brings it on herself, because she's a platinum-grade chirper and an enthusiastic seller of fouls. And then chirps at the officials when they don't buy, which is why she's one tech away from a game's suspension.

None of this is criticism, mind you, at least explicitly. After all, Clark's hardly the first player, nor will she be the last, to bring a certain combativeness to her work. You could even argue it's part of why she's so good.

But when the media and grandstanding politicians choose to refract that through a black-white, gay-straight lens, they're using Clark to push an agenda, not reality. And that rightly ticks her off.

"I think there's just like a false characterization of who I am sometimes," she said in an ESPN interview Friday. "And I get it, like as a reporter or blogger, you can write an opinion piece and that's your job and whatever, but at the same time, you don't know me. We've never had a conversation.

"I get people have a job to do, but at the same time, like don't make accusations about my character and who I am when you don't know me."

Absolutely. And the villains in this manufactured narrative could say exactly the same thing.

Perhaps last night they did.

Brickyard memories

It's either a measure of my own squishy mind, or the continuing diminishment of one of NASCAR's crown jewels, that the Brickyard 400 just flat snuck up on me this week.

It was Thursday before I realized the stock cars were at Indy again this weekend, and that's a hell of a note for someone who spent the first 20 Brickyards sweating through his shirts in the midsummer IMS heat. Covered Jeff Gordon's first win at Indy in the first Brickyard, and covered his last win there in the 20th. Not that I was going for symmetry or anything.

In any event, they're runnin' the big track again today, and it's not Gordon or Dale Earnhardt or Jimmie Johnson bringing them to the green. It's some kid named Carson Hocevar, who hails from Portage, Mich., just south of Kalamazoo. Carson Hocevar is 23 years old, which is the same age Gordon was when he won the first Brickyard in 1994.

Not that I was going for symmetry or anything.

Anyway, I know next to nothing about Carson Hocevar, except that if you'd asked me I'd have guessed he centered the second line for the Montreal Canadiens or someone. I also know next to nothing about the team he drives for -- Spire Motorsports -- except that it's not Hendrick or Gibbs or Penske or Michael Jordan's team.

What I do know is I'll probably watch it anyway, on account of those 20 years I covered it and the memories they stir. Which I suppose means this is as good a time as any to resurrect what I wrote two years ago on the 30th anniversary of the first Brickyard ...

Thirty years on now, and ye gods, time is a mighty river. It rolls and rolls and now it's 2024, and 1994 seems as far away sometimes as Model Ts and bathtub gin.

It  is not, of course. I know this even though Rick Mast is 67 years old now and owns an environmental cleanup service down in  Rockbridge Baths, Va., and he hasn't strapped into a stock car in 22 years.

Rick Mast, you see, brought the field to the green as the polesitter in the first Brickyard 400 on the first Saturday in August in 1994. This weekend the Brickyard turns 30, but Rick Mast is where this all starts for me, because I was there for the first one and somewhere I have a photo of Mast in his black-and-white No. 1 diving into the first turn on the first lap. 

If I dug that photo out of whatever box it's in now, it would all come back to me: The 250,000 Mass O' Humanity; the newness; the blare of Detroit iron rocketing off those cliffs of grandstand running the length of the most famous main straightaway in motorsport. 

I close my eyes now, and I see a forest of Confederate stars-and-bars fluttering above the campers along 25th Street, because NASCAR gonna NASCAR. I see the thin smoke rising from the morning campfires. And I see the men and women in their Dale Earnhardt Goodwrench shirts and Ricky Rudd Tide shirts and Terry Labonte Kellogg's Corn Flakes shirts watching the morning bacon sizzle, and cracking open the first cold one of the day. 

Oh, it was some show, that first Brickyard. The Journal Gazette sent four (or was it five?) of us down to cover the thing, and all four (five?) of us crammed into one tiny hotel room clear across town from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was just about the only lodging left in the whole blessed town.

Out at the track, meanwhile, there was this prevailing sense of wonder ("Holy gee, Martha! Stock cars at Indy!") to everything, and not a little out-of-body weirdness. It wasn't just looking up and seeing Rudd or Earnhardt or Rusty Wallace rumble out of the garage area in their Fords or Chevies or Pontiacs. It was looking up and seeing Indy 500 veterans Danny Sullivan and Gary Bettenhausen and Stan Fox wheeling stock cars around, and A.J. Foyt trying to stick a Barney-the-Dinosaur-purple car in the show.

Eighty-six entries showed up looking to get in the field, and some of them were driven by  ancients. Fifty-two-year-old Morgan Shepherd was there. Fifty-seven-year-old H.B. Bailey.  And then there was 66-year-old Hershel McGriff, who'd started racing when he came back from the war in 1945.

Everyone wanted in on this, in other words. Everyone was acutely aware history was riding shotgun with them in a way it perhaps never would again -- and that included me with my little cheapo camera, and all the other media who crammed into the tiny cinderblock building  that served (inadequately) as the media center then.

What we all got from that first Brickyard was not only history but a decent race besides, and none of us then understood how rare a thing the latter would become. The stock-car boys barreled down those long, long straightaways and through the squared-off, one-groove turns, and there were some fascinating storylines. 

Who could forget the Battlin' Bodines, Geoff and Brett, who wrecked one another and then went public with their brotherly feud? And who could forget the finish, when it got down to Ernie Irvan, Rusty Wallace and young Jeff Gordon?

Irvan was leading when he had a tire go down, opening the door for Gordon, who grew up eight miles down the road in Pittsboro. The kid blazed home to the checkers, and it was as if the narrative was ordained by the racing gods: (Almost) hometown boy wins the first Brickyard 400.

Now it's 30 years later, and Jeff Gordon is a 53-year-old racing exec and elder statesman. And I haven't been to a Brickyard 400 since 2015, long after the shine wore off and the multitudes stopped coming because the racing frankly stinks, becoming a really loud parade of sponsor billboards more often than not ...

But 30 years ago?

Well, I've got this photo here to remind me how different it was. And hanging in my closet I've got an inaugural Brickyard 400 polo I bought that weekend, with a gold-and-purple crest that forever reminds me of the date: Aug. 6, 1994 ... 

Time like a mighty river, carving its path.

Writer-ly sins

I once wrote a line in a column that spoofed a player's unusual name with bathroom humor unworthy of a sixth-grade boy. So I know how it feels when you try too hard to be clever or deep or, heaven forbid, writer-ly, and wind up stepping in a big ol' pile of goo.

"You're better than this," my sports editor told me at the time.

He was absolutely right. I was.

And Nancy Armour is better, too.

By now social media has been all up in our faces with its usual performative outrage about what Armour wrote the other day in a USA Today column about Caitlin Clark. The gist was that Clark's own performative victimhood -- i.e., her flopping -- was inciting death threats and possible violence against black players in the WNBA from the lint brains who see white folk as the new persecuted class.

It's an interesting theory, but one that tightropes the rational in the Blob's opinion. And Armour didn't help her cause by pointing out that the WNBA All-Star Game was in Chicago this weekend, and Chicago was Emmett Till's hometown, and there's a display there right now about Till and what his life would have been like had he not been brutally lynched in Mississippi in 1955.

So here's a national columnist trying to make her point about possible threats to black basketball players by invoking one of the most notorious acts of racial violence in American history. It was not only a bridge too far; it was the saboteurs blowing up the bridge over the River Kwai at the end of the movie.

It was, in short, a big pile of goo, and Armour stepped in it. So much so, she issued a statement the next day admitting the Till reference was "unartful" while defending her original point.

Which, again, in the Blob's opinion, contains a grain of truth, but perhaps only a grain.  Plus it contributes to the damaging and largely phony black-vs.-white narrative the media and certain performance-art politicians (Come on down, Marlin Stutzman!) seem hell-bent on pushing about the WNBA.

Look. I don't know Nancy well, but I met her at several sporting events, and she always struck me as a kind, soft-spoken and incredibly intelligent person.  Someone who doesn't deserve the venom she's drawing from the usual buttheads for whom mining outrage is not only their brand, but their only discernible talent.

As one of my dearest friends and former colleagues pointed out with his usual laser perception, a good copy editor might have saved Armour from herself, or at the very least  have said, "Whoa, Nance, Emmett Till? Really?" But, as this friend also pointed out, the vandals who've either destroyed or gelded so many media entities these days -- including Gannett, for whom Nancy Armour works -- have laid waste to copy desks in the process.

You reap what you sow, in other words. Nice goin', dummies.

And Nancy Armour?

Yeah, she blew it this time. But you know how they say if 10,000 monkeys typed for 10,000 years, one of them would produce the works of Shakespeare?

Same applies to columnists, only in reverse. If you write 10,000 columns, sooner or later you're gonna write one that clanks. And Armour's written about 9,999 that didn't.

Even if, human nature being what it is, they only remember the one that sucked.

Today in irony

 Which involves our illustrious fear-mongering senator, James "Jimbo" "The Fear-Mongerer" Banks, who posted a photo of his ownself with NCAA president Charlie Baker that highlighted the pleasant chat they had about, among other things, how to "protect girls sports."

Protect them from what, he didn't have to say. Because by now we all know what.

It's those evil transgenders, who are invading girls and women's with their sick gender-confusin' transgender-in'. Not that Banks, butt-hurt former swimmer Riley Gaines or any of the other bigots have anything against transgenders, mind you. Oh, heavens, no.

Now for the irony.

The irony is the guy Banks is so proudly posing with is on record as saying there only 10 or so known transgenders competing in NCAA athletics. Ten out of 554,298 athletes circa the 2024-25 academic year.

In other words, Banks said he discussed this issue with a guy who says it's not really an issue, and has the numbers to back it up.

So we're back to the original question: Protect girls and women's sports from what?

Because claiming you're protecting them from transgenders is like claiming you're protecting Nebraska from killer whales. That is all.

Autumn whispers

 Listen close this fine summer morning, and you can hear it coming. Coming on little cleated feet, to cadge from Sandberg.

Football, boys and girls. And here you thought autumn was a ways off yet. 

To be sure it's a mere whisper of a whisper just now, a stir in the breeze under July's fierce sun. But sooner than you think -- so much sooner -- the little cleated feet will be clackety-clacking into our ordered lives again, and then the clackety-clack will become a CLACKETY-CLACK, and pretty soon it will be a CLACKETY-CLACKETY-CLACKETY-CLACK that fills the world.

I know this because ESPN's website is telling me this morning that NFL training camps are officially open.

I know it because the major college football conferences are beginning to roll out their annual preseason media ragers again.

I know it because I dreamed it last night.

Dreamed I was covering a high school football game between a local school (I won't name it, but the team wore orange) and some school I'd never heard of, and the local team's quarterback was throwing touchdown passes and catching touchdown passes, and a bunch of college coaches were there to watch him.

As dreams will do, the details have gone tattery around the edges here in the light of day. So I don't remember who the coaches were, only that they were big-deal guys. I've also lost the quarterback's name. the name of the school the orange team was playing (only that it was weird), or what the final score was (although the orange team won big).

What I do remember is the quarterback looked a little like Arch Manning, only he wasn't Arch Manning. And I remember he threw 54 passes and only completed 21, but four or five were for touchdowns -- including one that seemed to cover half-a-mile in the air before hitting the receiver in stride. Also, Not Arch Manning caught six passes for 72 yards, though I don't remember seeing him do it.

In other words, it was as ridiculous as dreams tend to be.

But it stayed with me long after I awoke, and now I'm thinking about football. About training camps opening up. About all those high school Friday nights -- including the night I got locked in some area school's stadium and had to climb an eight-foot fence to get out. And about our college mercenaries telling a mob of phones and tape recorders about the great season their latest whistle stop will have -- if in fact they can remember which whistle stop it is.

Yeah, we're gonna kick some prime booty here in Columbus this year. Wait, did I say Columbus? I meant Corvallis. Or maybe College Station. One of those "C" places.

Whatever, dude. In any event, I dreamed of football last night, and when I got up this morning it was 53 degrees outside and the windows were open and it felt almost ... kinda-sorta ... a wee bit like autumn. Like a Friday night, or a Saturday afternoon, or a Monday/Thursday/Sunday night.

And I know if I walk into a supermarket in the next few days, I'm going to see pumpkin spice Cheerios or something on the shelves. I know it.

The Republic of the SEC

 SEC commissioner Greg Sankey dropped a warhead the other day at the conference's preseason football soiree, and all the Blob has to say is, it's not like we haven't seen this before. Bunch of southerners talking about secession?  Old news, baby.

Yet that's what we've got here, because the warhead Sankey dropped was admitting that, hell, yes, the SEC might just go out on its own, and for much the same reasoning South used back in 18 and 61: Because a Union isn't working for them. The Union, in this case, being the NCAA.

Which admittedly has made total hash of college athletics here in the new age of NIL and unrestricted transfer portal warfare, to the extent that the college game is now just the pro game without any guardrails. The high-end talent goes where the money is, and, unlike the NFL or NBA or MLB, it can go there two, three, four times in four years if it wants to.

Free agency on that other level at least has some rules. Not so in the NCWildWest.

Which is why the SEC, or at least its leadership class, is seriously contemplating telling the NCAA to go fly a kite. And to form, I don't know, the Democratic Republic of the SEC or the Kingdom of Sis-Boom-Bah or the Confederate State U.'s of America or some such thing.

This of course would blow the current college construct to matchsticks, and it's a measure of just what a cluster that construct has become that a good chunk of America would say, "It's about damn time." And unlike that previous secession, it wouldn't carry the seeds of its own destruction from the jump.

The SEC could pull it off, see. It has the beefiest network in its corner (ESPN); its TV numbers are consequently the biggest; and you can't dial up March Madness, the College Football Playoff, or any other tournament in the revenue sports without tripping over six or eight SEC schools.

So, yeah. The Democratic Republic of the SEC could do its own thing -- and by its own rules, which it no doubt figures it could enforce better than the NCAA enforces its rules. If in fact it actually has any worth the name anymore.

A noble sentiment. But what happens then?

This is where the reception gets a bit fuzzy.

If the SEC goes out on its own, how long would it be before the other super conference -- the Big We-Can't-Count Ten -- breaks away, too? And if that happens, whither the Big 12, the ACC and so on? And speaking of the ACC, what would Notre Dame do if its longstanding deal with NBC either didn't survive the big shakeup, or would at least be significantly altered? 

What if Stonewall Jackson had been at Gettysburg?

Questions upon questions. For instance, if the SEC breaks away, would it stage its own March Madness? Its own CFP? Would it entice schools from the NCAA to participate with cash on the barrelhead and other incentives? And if it did, would the NCAA retaliate by trying to poach SEC schools for its tournaments by saying, fine, play with yourselves if you like, but wouldn't you rather be national champs?

Because you know the NCAA would claim whoever won its March Madness or CFP would be the REAL national champions, and not just champions of the Democratic Republic of the SEC.

"Nuh-uh!" you could imagine Sankey and the SEC responding.

 And there we'd be, with two different schools calling themselves national champs. Why, we'd be right back to the days (in football at least) when the AP poll declared one team the national champion, and the coaches' poll declared another team the national champion.

Voila: Dueling "We're No. 1!" bumper stickers.

Which actually was kinda fun, come to think of it.

Hmm.

The LeBron Watch

 So, then ...

Spain won the World Cup over a bunch of butt-hurt toddlers from Argentina.

A guy named Ryan Fox won The Open Championship by dunking a birdie putt on the 72nd hole ... after playing Royal Birkdale12-under across the last three days ... to become the first New Zealander to win the Open since Bob Charles way back in 1963.

The Boston Red Sox have won 14 straight games. Some guy is winning a bike race over in France. Caitlin Clark put up 45 points and 10 assists for the Indiana Fever the other night.

And still we don't know where LeBron James will be playing basketball this season.

"So?" you're saying now.

Also, "Is this like The Decision, only more annoying because LeBron's 41 years old now and it really doesn't matter where he plays basketball next year?"

Also, "In other words, who cares?"

The Blob's answers, in order: "What do you mean 'so'?" ... "Maybe" ... "'Who cares'? I'll tell you who cares -- Adam Silver."

Who is, of course, the commissioner of the NBA, and who the other day issued a public statement about the free agent negotiations of a single player. I can't say if this was unprecedented, but it was fairly extraordinary. And it demonstrated once again that LeBron James is one of the two or three greatest players in the history of basketball, and certainly the most significant player of his generation.

What Silver said, essentially, is LeBron needs to quit screwing around and tell everyone where his landing spot is for next season, which presumably will be his last. That's because where he lands will impact NBA scheduling, his auld-lang-syne season obviously requiring premo TV dates. So it would be nice to know which team to pencil in for those dates.

"Come on, LeBron," Silver said. "Poop or get off the pot."

OK, so he didn't actually say that. But the sentiment was there.

In response, of course, LeBron's close friend Rich Paul said King James will not be rushed, by Adam Silver or anyone else. He'll decide when he decides, and he'll go public with it when he goes public. This assumes he hasn't already decided where he's going, which a lot of NBA watchers suspect he has.

So perhaps this really is a sequel to The Decision, a ruinous public relations splatter that made LeBron appear incredibly self-absorbed, not to say high-and-mighty and I'm-LeBron-and-the-rest-of-you-peons-aren't, and who knows what all.

"What an a**hole!" was America's reaction.

And now?

"What an a**hole!" is both America's and Adam Silver's reaction.

(And, OK, again, Adam Silver never said that. But I'll put good coin down that he's thinking it, or something like it.)

In any event, LeBron ain't sayin' nothin', and there's nothin' even the commissioner of the NBA can do about it. Which makes the Blob imagine all sorts of ridiculous news items ...

NEW YORK, August 15 -- With LeBron James still not revealing where he'll play this season, NBA commissioner Adam Silver is busily working the phones trying to figure it out on his own.

"Is it you?" he asked the Philadelphia 76ers.

"Is it you?" he asked the Cleveland Cavaliers.

"Is it you?" he asked the Miami Heat, the Golden State Warriors, the New York Knicks, even the old Syracuse Nationals and Rochester Royals.

All of them declined to comment.

"Oh, come on, you guys!" Silver reportedly cried.

Or perhaps there'll be this ...

LOS ANGELES, September 3 -- LeBron James called a news conference today to finally announce where he'll be playing this season, as the entire NBA waited with baited breath.

"Looks like I'll be taking my talents to ... the Kentucky Colonels!" James announced.

And then, with an exaggerated wink: "Nah. Just messin' with ya. I just wanted to see if I could get you all out here."

"What an a**hole!" the assembled media cried.

"What an a**hole!" concurred Adam Silver.

And this time he meant it.