Today in weirdo news

Look, we all know Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh is a couple of sandwiches shy of a picnic. I mean, come on, when he was a big-deal NFL coach, he wore $8 pants. He once ate cold cereal with Gatorade instead of milk. One time, he slept over at a recruit's house.

Comes now the latest evidence that the Prince of Ann Arbor is a certified weirdo, courtesy of Matt Hayes of the Bleacher Report. In his Michigan football preview, he includes an anecdote from former UM quarterback Wilton Speight, who says Harbaugh once pulled him aside and told him not to eat chicken.

 

"Why?" Speight asked.

 

"Because it's a nervous bird," Harbaugh replied, presumably from his home base on Mars.

 

He went on to expound upon his theory that eating chicken, especially the white meat, was making human beings sick, or some such thing. And that we'd all be better off if we just ate beef or pork.

 

Presumably Harbaugh was not aware that pork markets itself as "the other white meat."

 

Anyway ... there you have it. It should be noted that this anecdote, like a lot of anecdotes, may or may not have a whiff of urban legend to it. But let's be real here. It sure sounds like Harbaugh, doesn't it? 

 

Don't eat chicken, people, even though your doctor would probably tell you it's better for you than either beef or pork. Load up on cheeseburgers and pork chops instead. You'll be turning handsprings at 90, like Jack freaking LaLanne. 

 

Yeesh. God only knows what he thinks about fish.

Tour de quiz

The Tour de France, also known as That One Bicycle Race, ended yesterday on the Champs Elysees, and of course about 12 people on this side of the Atlantic noticed. This is because we are a provincial lot, we Americans, and if there are no Americans up there on the podium, we tend to pay attention to sports that do involve Americans on the podium.

Like, I don't know, professional cornhole, perhaps.

(No, really. I'm not making that up. There actually is such a thing. And, no, I have no earthly idea why).

Anyway ... That One Bicycle Race ended yesterday, and over here we were all so wrought up over professional cornhole or NASCAR or the Greater Velveeta-On-Rye Open, most of us couldn't name the winner on a bet. And so, as a public service, the Blob offers a short multiple-choice quiz to see if anyone can actually identify the winner.

The winner of That One Bicycle Race was ...

A. Pee Wee Herman.

B. Lance Armstrong (secretly entered as a French rider, LeRance Armoire).

C. Some guy named Schwinn.

D. Your paperboy.

E. Eddie the bike messenger.

F. That dude at the gym who ties up the stationary bike for two hours and then never wipes it down when he's done.

The correct answer is "G," for "None of the above."

The correct answer is "Geraint Thomas," who is Welsh, and who rides for Team Sky, and, really, that's pretty much all I know about him.

But he won the flowers and that bowl they give the winner, so he must ride a bike real good. And so hooray for him.

Dog days

Checking out the baseball standings this a.m., and the exciting news for all Blobophiles is, no, that's not a preface to yet another Blob about the by-now wearisome Battle for the Cellar.

("Stop it, stop it, STOP IT with the posts about your stupid Pira-- Oh. All right. Carry on, then," you're saying).

Besides ... the Battle is over for now. The Pirates, for some unaccountable reason, have actually begun impersonating a baseball team, while the Reds continue to be the Reds, if slightly less hopeless than previously. Still, the Pirates are now actually in third place in the NL Central, a game ahead of (what?) the Cardinals. And they're now eight-and-a-half games ahead of the Reds, so--

("Stop it! STOP!")

OK, OK. I'm done.

No, I was checking out the baseball standings, and what I actually noticed is that the Baltimore Orioles, who are plumbing perhaps historic levels of awfulness this sad summer, are 41 1/2 games behind the first-place Red Sox in the AL East. And it's not even August yet.

Talk about your dog days. There's still 57 games left in their season as of this morning. Which means even if they won every single game from here on out, and the Red Sox inexplicably lost every single game, the O's wouldn't catch the Beaneaters until sometime in the middle of September.

What must the mood be like in that clubhouse right now? Fifty-seven games left in the season. That's two full months and change. And even if they caught fire -- which for the O's would mean, oh, winning half their remaining games -- it would still be a fight to even get out of the cellar, on account of they're 17 games behind even the next lowliest outfit in the East, the Toronto Blue Jays.

Seventeen games out of next to last. Think about that.

Now think about what the O's must all be thinking about right now.

I think I know:

1. Golf.

2. Fishing.

3. Hunting.

4. Christmas trip to Disneyland with the fam.

5. Snorkeling in Aruba/St. Kitts/St. Bart's.

6. More golf.

Anything but baseball, in other words.

OK. So they probably are thinking about baseball in at least one respect.

"Are we done yet?"

Stained

Milwaukee Brewers All-Star pitcher Josh Hader was roundly booed in San Francisco last night, but not because he silenced the Giants bats in an inning-and-a-third of peerless relief. He was booed because, almost a decade ago, he was a dumb high school kid.

No, really. That's why.

It seems that back in 2011, when Hader was 17 years old, he did what a lot of 17-year-olds do: He acted the fool on Twitter. Unfortunately, in this case acting the fool involved a lot of vile racist and homophobic tweets. Being 17, Hader didn't understand the eternal nature of Twitter. Once you put something out there, it's out there forever.

And so during the All-Star break, when he should have just been soaking up the kid-on-Christmas-morning ambience of the whole event, Hader found himself answering for things that happened almost literally in another lifetime. This being America in 2018 -- a time perspective forgot -- he's continuing to answer for it. And probably will for a good while.

He's accepted that, to his credit. The Brewers have, too.

“This is hanging over Josh. He feels this every day," Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell said last night. "So that’s not going to go away after today. We’re on the road, it’s something different. But he’s hurting. So I don’t think that’s going to go away today.”

In other words, he's going to continue to get what amounts to a life sentence of shaming. And that in itself deserves to be shamed.

Look. There are people in this country who deserve to get called out every day for being racist or homophobic or misogynist. One of them resides in the White House. Many more are the nitwits who keep calling the cops because people of color are doing something suspicious, like Walking While Black or Sitting In a Restaurant While Black or Doing Their Jobs While Black.

Those people are getting exactly the shaming on social media they deserve.  So are the men who insist on using their positions of power to sexually harass women, or worse. The backlash against this -- that it's all the fault of rampant "political correctness" -- is both laughable and disgusting, given that what the backlashers call "political correctness" is nothing more than expecting people to behave like civilized human beings. That a big chunk of society at last finds it unacceptable to behave otherwise is one bright spot in an age when America seems to be marching resolutely backward in all other areas.

That said ...

That said, the shaming of Josh Hader is a bridge too far.

First of all, all those offensive tweets happened years ago, and who knows of whom they were a product. I don't know what Josh Hader's home environment was like growing up. I do know that the sorts of things Hader was tweeting are not the product of nature, but nurture. They are learned behaviors.

Also, high school kids are frequently knuckleheads. So there's that, too.

In any event, there is overwhelming evidence that in these intervening seven years, Hader has successfully unlearned those learned behaviors. His teammates say so. Everyone around him says so. And Hader himself has bashed his teenage self to a fare-thee-well, and apologized for his actions. Unless some other evidence shows up to indicate he hasn't changed, that ought to be the end of it.

Of course, it's not. Of course, Hader still had to undergo sensitivity training mandated by Major League Baseball, a frankly absurd state of affairs. And of course, he'll still be the target of boobirds on the road -- unlike at home, where his first appearance after the All-Star break elicited a standing ovation.

That shouldn't have happened, either.

So what should happen?

Oh, I don't know. How about nothing?

Anthem worship

This just in from the National Anthem front, in which black football players kneeling quietly with their heads bowed during the National Anthem became an issue mainly because President Donald J. Trump, Fake Patriot, decided to make it one.

Goodness. The shiny objects an unscrupulous man will use to distract us while he sells us out to hostile regimes. And it's working!

Anyway ... the news from the self-appointed Anthem Police is that it's not just kneeling that's regarded as disrespectful. Apparently you have to stand a certain way now, or you're whizzing all over the  anthem, and the flag, and the troops, and, I don't know, maybe even Mom and apple pie.

Courtesy of Deadspin, here is the tale of one Laurie Vandenberg, a baseball fan in Alaska who went to a minor-league game and was irked that one of the players stood with his hands behind his back during the anthem, finding it as disrespectful as kneeling. So she confronted both the player, Kona Quiggle, and a couple of team execs, threatening to shame them on Facebook, which she did.

Blessedly, the team execs treated Anthem Cop Laurie's concerns with the seriousness they deserved, which is to say not very seriously. They said they had no issue with the way Quiggle was standing for the anthem, and planned to do, well, nothing about it. And Quiggle himself explained he was standing that way -- in the military it's known as parade rest -- to honor a friend who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

What's appalling about this is that the guy even felt compelled to explain himself. It directly contradicts everything for which his friend died, and everything the anthem and the flag and all the other nonsense the anthem cops have chosen to wrap up in it represents. What business is it of theirs how Quiggle or anyone else chooses to stand, sit or kneel for the national anthem? And why should their opinion -- or that of Our Only Available President -- be the official word in that matter?

I thought the whole point of America is that there should be no official word in these matters. I thought that's what we were all standing (or, yes, kneeling) to honor. Silly me.

Look. The Blob has long been on record as saying it finds nothing inherently disrespectful in football players choosing to kneel during the anthem to call attention to racial injustice in this country. They're not mooning the flag or shaking their fists at it or cursing at it. They're not disrupting it by trying to drown it out. They're simply kneeling, as you would in church.

Myself, I, too, stand with my hands behind my back during the anthem. I always have, not because I'm consciously honoring the military, but because it feels more genuine (and therefore more respectful).These days I also tend to bow my head in prayer for a nation that's clearly lost its mind, given that this sort of lunacy has actually become a political issue. I suppose that would be seen as disrespectful by the anthem police, too.

Well, it's not. And do you know why it's not?

Because when I stand for the national anthem, it's only my opinion of how and why I do it that matters. I really don't care what you or Laurie Vandenberg or the charlatan in the White House thinks.

In America, freedom is never having to explain yourself in these matters, or answer to any self-appointed arbiter's idea of what is properly respectful of that freedom. Who doesn't get that?

Well. Other than the self-appointed arbiters, that is.

Your dumb baseball moment for today

... comes to us from St. Louis, where Cardinals' rookie pitcher Daniel "Greatest Name In Baseball" Poncedeleon had a no-hitter going through seven innings against the Cincinnati Reds. And then, well, didn't.

This is because the Cardinals' interim manager, Mike Schildt, lifted Poncedeleon after the seventh, because he'd thrown 116 pitches and baseball today is obsessed with pitch counts. Poncedeleon was well over his, so even though he clearly wasn't struggling, Schildt yanked him and sent in the Cardinals' rag-armed bullpen.

Who promptly surrendered two runs in the last two innings and allowed the Reds to escape with a 2-1 win.

"We weren't in a situation where he would have been able to finish that game with a no-hitter,'' Schildt said later, articulating the prevailing wisdom (or lack of same). "It was his time.''

Somewhere Old Hoss Radbourn, who once pitched 73 complete games in a single season, just elbowed Walter Johnson, who pitched 30 or more complete games seven times in a career that lasted 21 seasons. They both rolled their eyes and laughed.

A big fat W for golf

OK, OK. So maybe he'll do it. Maybe. Just ... maybe.

Maybe Tiger Woods is not finished, despite the Blob's serial eulogies of the man, despite its many posts throwing shovelfuls of dirt on his grave. That's the news from windblown Carnoustie over there in Scotland, where Tiger, a 42-year-old man of many surgically-repaired parts, shot a 71 Sunday and tied for fifth in the British Open, behind playing partner Francesco Molinari.

Molinari is the first Italian ever to win the British Open, but never mind that. The more significant achievement was Tiger Woods actually hanging with the big boys in a major again, even briefly taking a Sunday lead for the first time in almost a decade.

Alas, he couldn't hold. But the Blob's long-standing prediction that he was done winning majors, for any number of perfectly legitimate reasons, suddenly doesn't look like the sure thing it once was.

This is because, even recognizing that Tiger Woods is the king of his era and perhaps any era, I underestimated just what a unique talent he was, and apparently still is. And I'm prepared now to concede that perhaps he isn't finished winning majors, that if he can be in the mix in a major that means he can win a major, and perhaps more than one.

I still think his back will eventually betray him again. But maybe not soon enough to stop him from reaching back and tapping into his old self again, the self the world of golf still thinks it sees in him. And that is nothing but good news for the game itself, because even now no one draws the crowds or jacks the ratings the way Tiger does.

You're always loathe to say "He's back," because that always sounds like you're jinxing whoever "he" is. And given Tiger's age and infirmities, it's just as decent a bet he misses the cut in the PGA as contends again. But for now ... yes, he's back.

And all of golf rejoices.

Cognitive dissonance alert

Which of course involves Our Only Available President, who is something of a maestro in the area of cognitive dissonance, not to say perhaps the greatest practitioner of hypocrisy who's ever sat in the White House.

Patriot Boy again had his shorts in a wad yesterday over one of his favorite themes, Making Those (Uppity) (Black) Football Players Stand For The National Anthem, finding it disgraceful that the NFL decided to revisit its plan to address the issue. The  president wants those Football Players to be forced to honor America (and American, ahem, freedom) in the manner he's decided is fit, or else be suspended.

This, of course, from the man who honored America last week by symbolically dipping our flag to a murderous thug who orchestrated a cyber-attack on an American election. Who's going to invite said murderous thug to visit him in Washington, which is a little like inviting the guy who just robbed your house over for dinner and drinks.

And he (and his followers) get all worked up because a bunch of football players kneel quietly during the national anthem? As if they're the ones disrespecting America?

The Blob cannot roll its eyes any further into its head. What a country. What. A. Country.

Backup plan

You can say this about the Nash-unal FOOTball League, as Howard Cosell used to enunciate it: It never puts a plan in place without carefully considering every potential ramification, good and bad.

OK, so the Blob misspoke, as Our Only Available President/Russian Toady would say. What I meant to say is the NFL almost always puts a plan in place without carefully considering every potential ramification, good and bad.

This upon the news that the Shield has taken a knee in regards to players taking a knee during the national anthem. In the wake of the Dolphins getting blowback for proposing to punish any player who dared exercise his constitutional right to protest, the NFL has temporarily shelved its plan, which would ban players from kneeling on the field but allow them to stay in the locker room during the anthem if they chose.

Apparently league officials have decided to back up and talk the whole thing over with the NFLPA first. Why they didn't do this before implementing their plan to begin with, of course, is an excellent question. You'd think that would be No. 1 on the to-do list when you're going to institute a policy that is solely directed at the players, but, nah. That's not how the Shield rolls.

I guess they owe the Dolphins a debt of gratitude, in that case, for pointing out the flaw in their plan. Yes, it's true, your employer has every right to impose arbitrary rules without consulting you, as the league and the Dolphins chose to do. Whether your employer should, however -- especially when it comes to punishing something as fundamentally American as lawful protest -- is a separate issue.

It says here your employer shouldn't. Or, at the very least, should discuss it with those it will impact first.

That seems only fair. And, in its way, fundamentally American, too.

Your movie minute for today

Lots of great moments last night at the ESPY awards -- Jim Kelly's wrenching speech; honoring dirtbag Larry Nassar's many victims with the Arthur Ashe award -- but host Danica Patrick didn't figure in many of them.

She was, um, OK. Not great. Her monologue kinda, you know, got sideways entering the turn and ate the wall. Or whatever other suitable motorsports analogy you want to make.

But this?

Now this was great. Especially Helio Castroneves' scenery-chewing "Why? Why??"

Enjoy.

Mid-summer. Classic.

And so, because it was that kind of night, and that time of year, the Blob turned back the clock last night.

Grabbed the radio. Went out on the deck. Tuned in the MLB All-Star Game as a gentle evening breeze sighed in the treetops and this marvelous dome of sky, scrubbed clean of even the scrap of a cloud, went from blue to deeper blue to the royal purple of twilight.

A star winked on, here or there. The game, turned low, muttered softly, the porch-swing cadence of baseball on the radio taking you back to other summer nights in other places, to things that used to be but either no longer are or no longer are so readily accessed.

It's easy to bash baseball these days, and the Blob has done more than its share. The 2018 version of the game is not particularly appealing, at least on the major-league level. There are too many strikeouts, because there are too many good arms and too few players willing to wait them out. Plate discipline has gone the way of the dodo bird. Everyone wants to hit bombs now, and they swing accordingly.

The All-Star Game last night was a reflection of that, as only it could be. A record 10 baseballs went flying out of Nationals Park in D.C., the last two from Alex Bregman and George Springer of the Astros, who provided the American League an 8-6 win in extra innings. It was the AL's sixth straight win in the Mid-Summer Classic.

And yet ... and yet ...

And yet, some things remain timeless, in our most timeless game.  Three strikes and you're out. Four balls and take your base. The sheer democracy of being able to argue your case with the blues. The sheer authoritarianism of the blues always having the last word in that court of appeal.

The perfectly struck ball, arrowing surely into an empty swatch of green, and the way the kid who struck it lights up like Christmas morning at the sight of it.

And so there came a time last night when Jose Altuve of the Astros caught a pitch and drove it into an unattended space, and wound up on first base. I was inside watching on TV by that time, having gotten my nostalgia fix for another summer. The camera zoomed in on Altuve, safely aboard on first. His arms were in the air. And the smile on his face ...

Well. Altuve is a professional, same as they all were in this game last night. They get paid great sums of money to do what they do. Every day, in small ways and big, we are reminded that baseball on their level is a business, and purely so.

But the All-Star Game is our reminder, every year, that it is also still a kid's game. Players swing and miss and grab their heads in mock dismay, grinning all the time. Umpires and opponents fraternize shamelessly with one another. And there on first stood Altuve all lit up like Christmas morning, grinning a kid's grin because he'd just singled in the All-Star Game, and he gets paid absurdly well to do that sort of thing. And life was as good as it could be because of that.

I can't believe they pay me to play baseball: That's the old cliché, right?

Take another look at Jose Altuve. On this night at least, it was no cliché.

It was home truth.

A little trade talk

Big news from the NBA this a.m., where the San Antonio Spurs and the Toronto Raptors have agreed to a deal that will send Kawhi Leonard north and DeMar DeRozan south.

As a public service, the Blob will now boil the deal down to its essence.

KAWHI: What? But I don't want to go to Toronto!

DEMAR: What? But I don't want to go to San Antonio!

THE SPURS: Too bad.

THE RAPTORS: Too bad.

The end.

Wuss alert

Once upon a time -- OK, so about 30 years ago, when I could still hoop a (very) little -- I used to play pickup ball at the Y. Every Tuesday and sometimes Thursday, 6 a.m., with a bunch of other 30-somethings.

We were all dads. None of us thought we were MJ or Kobe. It was good times.

Anyway, one morning, one of the guys -- a big-as-a-house former football player/heavyweight wrestler with whom I went to high school -- set a pick. I ran spang into it, having violated the first rule of basketball, which is always keep your head up. It was like hitting a brick wall.

No, really. I literally bounced off him and hit the floor. Had we been in an episode of the campy old "Batman" series, the word "Splat!" would have appeared on the screen.

I'll give you two guesses what happened next:

1. I got up, shook my head and laughed while the guy I ran into -- a genial giant named Rick -- rushed over to see if I was OK, genuinely feeling awful about setting a blind pick.

2. I got up, called the cops and had Rick charged with aggravated assault.

OK, OK. So that was too easy. Of course it was "1."

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, that is not what happened here.

Yes, that's right. This ... wuss ... actually did call the cops.

Best part about this whole deal is how obviously puzzled/annoyed the poor officers are. I'm sorry, what? You called us because why?  You do realize this is BASKETBALL, right? A little pushing, a little shoving, a hard screen here or there?

Yeesh. Suck it up, buttercup.

At least you didn't run into Rick.

Karma, or ...

There are days when I hate Grassy Knoll Guy. OK., so that's not quite true.

I hate Grassy Knoll Guy every day.

He always rears his head at the worst possible times, whispering his paranoia in my ear, spoiling the magic at every turn. If it seems too good to be true, it usually is, he says. And, Come on, you don't think that was the plan all along?

Which brings me to last night, Washington, D.C., and The Plan All Along.

If you missed it they held the All-Star Game Home Run Derby in D.C. last night, an event that generally holds little wonder for the Blob. I mean, it's a bunch of long-ball artists dining out on room-service lobs expressly designed to be mashed. Of course they hit 'em a country mile. Why wouldn't they?

Anyway, last night Kyle Schwarber of the Cubs came to the final round with an 18-9 lead over Bryce Harper of the hometown Nationals, whose designated pitcher was his father. And so of course you know what happened next: Harper clubbed nine of his last 10 balls out of the park to tie it, then won it in overtime.

Grassy Knoll Guy would tell you this was the Plan, because Harper was only entered in the Derby to begin with because he's the local star and he's likely playing his final season in a Nats uniform. So this was his salute to the fans for all the good times in Washington.

I suppose that could be true.

But the Blob, being an incurable romantic, prefers to see what happened last night as simply karma at work. That it wasn't scripted at all, but merely happenstance lining up with the perfect storyline in some wonderfully mystical way.

"Ha!" Grassy Knoll Guy sneers.

Oh, shut up.

Stuff we like, American division

Heard it again this a.m., that America is really, really, really about to fall in love with soccer, or already has, or will by 2026, which is when the United States, Canada and Mexico will co-host the World Cup.

I don't know. Maybe that's true this time. Considering all the devices upon which you can follow stuff these days, maybe millions upon millions of people in the U.S. really were following the World Cup this time, at least on their laptops or phones or what have you.

All I know is what my wife, Julie, said the other night when we repaired to the bar for a nightcap after eating dinner.

"Why are they playing basketball?" she said.

Which was her way of pointing out that it's mid-July and the TVs over the bar, both of them, were tuned to the NBA Summer League, which is essentially pickup games for rooks and the Nos. 9-12 players on NBA rosters. More and more we're seeing these games now, as the major sports entities increasingly become vehicles for 1) the NFL, 2) the NFL draft, 3) NFL training camps, and 4) LeBron James/Steph Curry/Russell Westbrook/James Harden. Practically nothing else seems to exist anymore.

This includes the World Cup, which the French won yesterday with a 4-2 victory over gutty Croatia, making every human with a soul wish he or she was in Paris last night. I watched the second half in a sports bar while eating lunch. Most of the TVs were tuned to it. Only three of us were sitting there actually watching it.

And, yes, I know, that's an exceedingly poor metric upon which to judge. I guarantee you that, around the country, there were thousands of gathering places packed to the rafters yesterday with people watching the final. So maybe the guy on the radio this morning was right. Maybe we really did cross some sort of Rubicon as a nation in this World Cup, and have become mad for soccer.

On the other hand, apparently we are also mad for the NBA Summer League. Which, where I was yesterday, was on almost all the TVs that weren't tuned to the World Cup final.

I don't know what that says about our sports sensibilities as a nation. But I do think it means we might have a ways to go yet before we truly become soccer mad -- if in fact we ever do.

Guess we'll see.

The Petty Bowl

And, no, not Richard Petty, or his son Kyle Petty, or any and all other NASCAR Pettys.

We're talkin' petty, small "p", which is the subject of a contest the Annoying Terrell Owens (a Blob trademark) and the Pro Football Hall of Fame are currently waging. It's not the Super Bowl, this Petty Bowl. It's not even the Pro Bowl. But it's some battle of wits-less we've got going on here.

On one side is Annoying Terrell, who, apparently miffed he wasn't the first-ballot HOFer he frankly should have been, became the first the first inductee in history to turn down the HOF's invitation to attend the induction ceremonies. Instead he will give his induction speech at his college alma mater, Tennessee-Chattanooga, where presumably no one will be listening but Annoying Terrell and his family and friends, and perhaps a passersby or two.

("Who is that man and why is he standing at a podium talking?" the passersby might think).

This is, yes, incredibly petty of Annoying Terrell, if perfectly in character. He was kind of a jerk when he played, and now he's being kind of a jerk about this.

OK, not "kind of a jerk." A jerk, period.

The Hall of Fame could have responded to this by going high, the way you'd expect a Hall of Fame to. Instead, it chose to join Annoying Terrell in a race to the bottom.

Last week, see, the HOF honchos announced it would not honor Terrell at the ceremony. He'll get his bust, and he'll get his canary-yellow jacket in the mail, but there'll no mention of him at the ceremony, no career highlights on the videoboard, nothing. It'll be as if he doesn't exist.

Some people think the HOF has to do that to ensure future Annoyings won't pull the same stunt Annoying Terrell did. The Blob thinks it's incredibly petty, and beneath the HOF. Sort of like "You're gonna take your ball and go home? Fine! See if we care! Who needs ya, ya big baby!"

Which, of course, only reveals that the HOF is being a bunch of big babies, too.

Somebody find a playpen for these people. The Petty Bowl needs a venue, after all.

Market forces

By now, one supposes, the backlash should be in full cry, and from all the usual suspects. This is how it seems to work in this strange perverse age. You drop the N-word in the middle of a conference call, and your professional life blows up because of it, and you stand a good chance of becoming a martyr for  those who pine for the glorious good old days.

When, you know, you could fling the N-word around and no one would call you on it. Damn political correctness anyway -- except, of course, when someone on the political left calls a spade a spade where Our Only Available President is concerned.

I don't know good ol' Papa John Schnatter except by reputation, as a grandstanding blowhard who sells bad pizza, hates political protest by black football players and talked the usual alarmist CEO talk about Obamacare before admitting it was not actually going to be the end of his business after all. What I do know is he's no martyr.

He's simply a shining example of what many in America consider a bedrock principle: Market forces.

It isn't political correctness run amok, after all, that has triggered the fallout of the last week. Since it got out that Schnatter dropped the nuke of all racial slurs, team after team has dropped partnerships with Papa John's, the University of Louisville has disassociated itself from him and taken the company's name off its football stadium, and he's stepped down as CEO. The company has also taken his face off the company logo.

This is not because they're a bunch of over-reactive meanies. It's because he was costing them money.

The bottom line in all of this, see, is the bottom line. When Schnatter stepped down as CEO, Papa John's stock went up. When the company announced it was removing his face from the company logo, stocks rose another 3.1 percent.

In other words, Schnatter had become, not a martyr, but a financial liability. Stockholders don't like financial liabilities. Schnatter hangs around, the stock tanks. The company puts him on the sideline, the stock rises. And so ... sorry, John. Drop us a postcard sometime, won't you?

The encouraging thing about that: Despite all efforts by the current administration and congressional leadership to transport us back to the 1950s in the Wayback Machine, it's still 2018 out here. To be sure, racism and racist language remain far too pervasive in American society, and even emboldened by the Trumpian mindset.  But at the very least, we can now say it's bad for business.

You can call that political correctness if you like. Looks more like progress to me.

A mayfly's life

DeMarco Murray announced Friday he was hanging it up as an NFL running back, which is notable only in the fact that, as the NFL actuarial tables go, it's not notable at all.

He is, after all, a running back. He's 30 years old. And he's been subjected to the NFL's accelerating blunt-force trauma for seven seasons.

In other words, DeMarco Murray is used up.

No position in football better illustrates how destructive professional football is to the human body, and more significantly to the human brain. Murray, a three-time Pro Bowler who led the NFL in rushing for the Dallas Cowboys just four seasons ago, did not specifically mention the last in his statement yesterday. But by now every player in the NFL surely thinks about it every time he steps onto the field.

None of them wants to wind up like Mike Webster, Junior Seau, Dave Duerson -- all the sad cases whose minds went dark well before their time. Not all that long after he retired, Brett Favre confessed he sometimes couldn't remember the details of his kids' sporting events he attended. Tony Dorsett and Jim McMahon struggled to remember how to get home sometimes when they went out. On and on and on.

And Murray?

He's getting out, one suspects, at least partly because his opportunities to be a feature back have dried up. The Titans, for whom he started 31 consecutive games, released him in the offseason. This after an injury-plagued season in which he rushed for a career-low 659 yards and had lost "explosiveness."

Which is just another way of saying, yes, he was used up. After seven years, 7,174 yards, 49 touchdowns and 1,604 carries. At the age of 30.

Which is about when the actuarial tables say running backs begin to fall off the table in terms of production. And which soon could become the new 40 -- i.e., an age virtually no one plays beyond as players more and more realize the terrible price the game exacts.

Yes, these guys get paid a lot of money to endure that price. But these days especially, you wonder if any amount of money is enough.

Wearin' of the checks

Look, the Blob has no beef with the French. I love me some croissants. I love me some coq au vin. Paris is an amazing city, especially the Musee d'Orsay and Le Maquis, this little neighborhood restaurant  just down the hill from Sacre Coeur that my wife and I once stumbled on.

And, yes, the French play some beautiful soccer.

Nonetheless, I'll be rooting for Croatia to win the World Cup Sunday.

I'll be rooting for Croatia not because I have a drop of Croat blood in my veins -- I don't, as far as I know -- but because the Blob has an incurable streak of sentimentality that compels it to root for the little guy 99 percent of the time. And let's face it, Croatia is the little guy here.

The entire country is about the size of West Virginia, for one thing. You could fit its entire population (4.2 million) in New York City twice, and fully a third of its population lives in or around the capital city of Zagreb. And it hasn't had its own identity in the last 500 years, having first been a part of the Habsburg Empire and then a part of Yugoslavia before declaring its independence in 1991.

That makes Croatia just 27 years old. And yet it's already finished third in one World Cup, and has made the World Cup final for the first time in the young nation's history. Considering England, whom it beat in the semifinals, hasn't reached a final in 52 years, that's a pretty remarkable track record.

Plus, Croatia has the most awesome color scheme: red-and-white checks. Their fans even paint their faces in red-and-white checks. You gotta love that.

So, go Croatia. I might even paint my face in red-and-white checks in your honor.

OK, so I won't. But it's the thought that counts, right?

Indoor voices

Comes now the news that Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne is beginning talks with another start-up indoor football league, and this takes the Blob back some.

I was around for the first iteration of indoor football in Fort Wayne, you see. Also the second, third and fourth iterations.

This makes the Blob deeply skeptical about the entire enterprise, on account of indoor football is a niche sport that, on a level designed for markets the size of Fort Wayne, is always going to be problematical. Either you get scammed by quick-buck artists or you wind up with chronically under-capitalized ownership that can't pay its bills or in some cases its players. Both have happened in Fort Wayne; both have made the principals involved on the Coliseum side rightly cautious of jumping into this pool again.

Cautious, but not cowed.

This is not to say the product itself isn't attractive. It is, and it had a fiercely passionate core fan base in Fort Wayne. That was not the issue. The issue was the size of that core fan base (very small) and how the teams managed to augment it.

The first version of the Freedom, Fort Wayne's initial foray into the minor-league niche-ery of indoor football, drew extremely well, for instance. But it had to paper the house with free tickets to do so. Subsequent attempts didn't draw nearly as well, and had other issues endemic to the product.

The second attempt (the Fusion) lasted one season before the team's owner was kicked out of the league for basically being a con man. The same thing happened to the third attempt. The fourth attempt lasted less than one season; it had to cancel its last home game because its opponent went out of business.

None of that is an anomaly in minor-league indoor football, mind you. It's pretty much the nature of the beast.

This newest venture is tentatively named the National Gridiron League, which hopes to begin play next March with a dozen teams. It will be a single-owner entity with potential local investors, and Coliseum officials seem to think the overall structure is solid.

I know what I think.

I think I hear "single owner," and I immediately think "Isiah Thomas."

Who bought the venerable Continental Basketball Association during one of his hiatuses from running NBA franchises into the ground. And who destroyed a league that been around for decades in less than 18 months.

Please, God. Not again.

Car talk

Details are now emerging about the Process, and no, not that other Process, although the team that popularized the term -- the Philadelphia 76ers -- did get in on the LeBron James Pitchathon, too.

No, this Process is subtitled How Magic Johnson Landed LeBron, and it includes this quirky tidbit: Apparently Magic arrived an hour early for his scheduled meeting with Bron, and waited in his car outside James' California home like ... oh, I don't know. A stalker, maybe?

Process server?

Benson and Stabler on a stakeout?

All sorts of fun analogies here, but the Blob, in its endless search for even more details,  wants to know exactly how Magic spent that hour waiting in his car.  Did he drink bad coffee and wonder why Munch and Fin didn't draw this gig? Watch old episodes of The Magic Hour (all eight weeks of them) on his phone? Marvel at how LeBron had just as cool a house as he had?

We take you now to the entirely imaginary transcript ...

Sometime on June 30. Inside a car parked outside LeBron James' California home.

MAGIC JOHNSON (taking a sip of coffee): Damn, this stuff is nasty! How do Benson and Stabler stand it?

(Rustling papers)

MAGIC (under his breath): Hey, LeBron ... Hey! LeBron! ... Beautiful home, you have here, LeBron ... Heeeeey! It's my man, the King!

(Brief pause)

Ooh. That's bad. That's reaaaally bad, Magic.

(More rustling papers)

MAGIC: OK, let's see here. LeBron, you and I are both champions, blah-blah ... know what it takes to build a winner, blah-blah ... young team, perfect mentor ... bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Business interests. Bullshit, bullshit. Film industry, family, you could own this town ... bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

 (Brief pause)

Hmmm. "Own this town." Maybe I need to add something there.

(Rustling papers)

"And never ... mind ... what Kobe says ... or any .. of the idiots ... who think he was better than you are."

(Brief pause)

MAGIC: Ah. Perfect. Now what time is it?

(Brief pause)

MAGIC: Damn. Still 55 minutes to go.

Statuesque

First, a confession: The Blob is shamefully late to this party. It realizes this. It apologizes.

It's been a couple of weeks, give or take, since Sammy Sosa came out and advocated for another statue to be erected outside Wrigley Field. This was not an unreasonable request, because there's plenty of candidates, given the Cubs' long, colorful and mostly heartbreaking history, for statuary.

What was unreasonable, not to say entirely inappropriate, was the statue Sosa was pounding the drum for was of himself.

Bad form to flog your own posterity, and for that Sosa deserved the raking he got in Chicago and elsewhere. But that doesn't mean he didn't have a point.

After all, he pretty much was the Cubs back in the late '90s and early Aughts.  Between 1998 and 2001, the man hit 60 or more home runs in a season three times, and he hit 50 the other time. He drove in 100 or more runs nine straight years, and drove in 138 or more four straight years. He led the perennially playoff-anemic Cubs to the NL playoffs in '98, and for a period of five or six seasons he was a Chicago sports icon, and maybe the Chicago sports icon.

This certainly sounds statuary worthy to me.

Unfortunately, Sosa did all that in the shadow of the Steroids Era in baseball, and almost alone among the prime suspects of that era he remains a pariah among pariahs. Alex Rodriguez, an admitted serial PED user (Sosa never admitted nor was ever proven to be one) is now a national broadcaster, one of the public faces of Major League Baseball. People have largely forgiven Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the latter two of whom continue to creep closer to Hall of Fame eligibility every year. And outside ballparks all over the country, there are statues of icons who, if not products of the Steroids Era, were at least guilty of popping amphetamines to get through day games after night games.

That, too, was better baseball through chemistry. And yet no taint attaches to them.

And they certainly don't have the untouchable-ness of Sosa, who has been thoroughly shunned by the franchise and city he once all but owned.

Maybe he doesn't deserve a statue. But to somehow acknowledge what he once meant?

That doesn't seem unreasonable, either.

The Battle, an update

And, please, no caterwauling.

The Blob knows you don't care about the Battle for the Cellar. It knows you don't care about its crappy baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. It doesn't care that you don't care. So there.

Thing is, this is the perfect time for a Battle update, given that we're a week away from the All-Star break and neither the Pirates nor the Reds, the hard-fightin' Battle participants, are going to have much of a presence there for the excellent reason that they both stink.

The All-Star rosters were released yesterday, and the Pirates have exactly one player (pitcher Felipe Vazquez) on the National League's. The Reds have three, none of them starters and none of them pitchers. And one of them is Joey Votto, who shouldn't really count because Votto's really, really good and pretty much an automatic All-Star every year.

This brings us back to the Battle, which has tightened again since we last checked in. The Reds have now closed to within 2 1/2 games of the Buccos, mainly because they've been playing some decent baseball while the Pirates have doggedly pursued their customary craptitude. In fact, their lead over the Reds was as low as a game-and-a-half until the Reds dropped two in a row to the Cubs over the weekend.

Can't wait to see what the rest of the season will bring.

Yeah, I know. I'm the only one.

That bicycle race

And now we check in on the Tour de France, which the Blob once christened the Tour de Syringe on account of cycling's hydra-headed drug scandals, and which once brought the cycling community's wrath down on my head for suggesting it wasn't unreasonable to wonder how Lance Armstrong was winning it so often and so easily.

Ah, those were the days.

And now?

Now we're two stages into this year's Tour de Syringe, and, be honest, I bet most of you weren't even aware it had begun. Lance is long gone, having been revealed not only to be a drug cheat, but something of a mafiaso among drug cheats for using intimidation and threats to strong-arm his team members into using, too. Chris Froome, the sport's new dominant figure, fell in the first stage after spending most of the run-up fighting his own drugging allegations (he was cleared).

Some guy named Peter Sagan is leading after two stages, and the big story yesterday was the leader of Team Sky, Froome's team, attacking the new president of cycling's ruling body, David Lappartient, for being biased against Team Sky and Froome in particular.

In other words, cycling is still cycling.

To the peloton, mon ami!

That's racin'

And now a brief moment to check in with NASCAR, which is still racing all these months after Daytona, and this weekend went back to Daytona for what used to be called the Firecracker 400, but now is called the Coke Zero Sugar 400 or the Coke Lite 400 or the Coke That Won't Make You Fat 400 or some such thing.

Anyway, they had a big ol' crash Saturday night in the Won't Make You Fat 400, same as ever at NASCAR's two restrictor plate tracks. Later, Brad Keselowski, who triggered it by lifting in the middle of the customary freight train, complained afterward it was because the kid who was leading, William Byron, moved over to block Keselowski in an inappropriate way.

Apparently there are appropriate ways and inappropriate ways to keep a guy from trying to pass you for the lead, which most normal people would regard as the whole point of auto racing. Byron, according to Keselowski, blocked him the wrong way. Or waited too late. Or ... something.

In any case, it set off that big ol' crash. Which, again, always happens at Daytona and Talladega no matter what, so why it was a bigger deal this time than any other time is beyond the Blob's comprehension.

Best guess from trying to decipher Keselowski's complaint is that Byron should have moved over and let Keselowski go by. Maybe thrown in a friendly wave, just for etiquette's sake.

After all, that's racin'.

Requiem for the New World

We like to think we're better, over here in the Western Hemisphere. We're newer, for one thing. We've got wide open spaces where we can swing our mighty elbows to our hearts' content. And we believe we brought the best of the Old World with us while jettisoning the worst of it, although that's not nearly as true as we assume it is.

And you know what else?

Most years, we can play soccer with the best of them.

Most years.

This year, however ... well let's just yesterday was a crummy day for the New World, which got old-schooled right out of the World Cup. France beat Uruguay and Belgium knocked out Brazil, a nominal favorite, and that's it for the Western Hemisphere. We're not even out of the quarterfinals and the Americas are out of it.

It's an all-Europe show now from here on out, and I don't know what there is to say about that except the Europes just play better soccer these days. The United States didn't even get into the World Cup. Mexico had the big day against Germany but that was pretty much it. Panama played the role of Automatic W for everyone it played. And Brazil and Argentina, the royal couple of South American soccer, never approached the level of play which was expected of them.

Uruguay, it turns out, was likely the best South American side. And it couldn't even get out of the quarters.

So now the New World has to watch the Old World divvy up the spoils, which is kind of where we came into all this, if you think about it.  The Old World came here in the first place, after all, to divvy up our spoils. History, the great circle.

So who do you root for now?

Well, the logical choice here in the U.S. would be the mother country, England, because we're still kinda-sorta relatives. But the Blob is putting its chips on Belgium, and not only because they play a lovely brand of soccer. The Blob is putting its chips on Belgium because it's historically one of the most put-upon nations in Europe, and so deserves a moment in the sun. You get run over by the Germans twice in one century, the gods surely owe you something.

Germany, of course, is already out of it. Karma.

And as for England ...

I'm sure a lot of Americans are pulling for them. But I'm also sure a nation with as significant a population of Irish descendants in it means it's in no way an automatic thing. The Irish, after all, have no reason to love the British, for the very good reason that the British once upon a time tried to exterminate them. And I guess my opinion in this area is colored by an encounter I had in Florence, Italy, one night in 2012, when the Brits were playing the home country of Italy in the Euro Cup quarters.

Sitting next to me at the outdoor café where we were watching, it turned out, was a guy from Ireland. And at one point I leaned over and asked him if he were rooting for England. The Commonwealth, and all that.

He looked at me like I had two heads.

"Oh, hell, no!" he said.

I suppose he's rooting for Belgium now, too. All the best people do, I'm told.

Free market blues

Lots of pearl-clutching from the usual suspects these days about the Imbalance of Power in the NBA, and how it's ruining pro buckets because if the Golden State Warriors can add Wilt Chamberlain to what is already an All-Star team, then all his lost.

Oops. Sorry. That wasn't Wilt they signed.

It was Boogie Cousins.

Easy to get confused, though, for all the caterwauling that's been going on. Yes, Boogie Cousins is probably the best low-post player in the league right now -- he averaged 25 and 10 last season -- but to hear all the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, you'd have thought it was Wilt the Warriors had signed, notwithstanding the fact that he's dead and all.

Look. I get it. We all do. The Warriors signing Boogie, absent a rash of catastrophic injuries, makes next season irrelevant. There will be no reason to watch, other than to see how he fits in. It's going to be the Warriors against three or four other superteams in the West for the NBA title, and then an exhibition series against whatever sorry humps come out of the Eastern Conference.

This is not a good situation if you want to maintain the fiction that what you're giving the public is actual competition and not something perilously close to scripted. It is concerning. And it makes the Blob think the NBA should institute a best-interests-of-the-game clause that would empower commissioner Adam Silver to nix any trade he deems not good for the league as a whole.

Bowie Kuhn invoked such a clause in the mid-1970s, when Charlie Finley tried to sell his World Series champion Oakland As virtually wholesale. (David Stern did much the same thing when he nixed New Orleans trading Chris Paul to the Lakers, but the NBA held an ownership stake in the New Orleans franchise at the time, and so that was a bit different). The present-day NBA would likely have a much tougher time getting a best-interests clause past the players' union, but it seems worth the effort.

Absent that ... well, what do the pearl-clutchers suggest be done?

The hard truth is this is nothing more nor less than the free market at work, basketball players doing what doctors and lawyers and accountants and, yes, journalists have done forever. The most amusing aspect of all the pearl-clutching has been listening to sportswriters and commentators bash players for doing exactly what they've done themselves: Seek out their best employment situation. No one sneers "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" at them, after all, when they leave some lesser place to join ESPN.

That's just moving up the ladder, in their case. But when Kevin Durant or Boogie Cousins do it?

Why, how dare they! The NBA should ...

Should what?

Abolish free agency? Severely restrict player movement? Follow the mood of our current national leadership and try to turn back the clock to, oh, say the 1950s or so?

Good luck with that. Truth is, there's simply certain toothpaste you can't put back in the tube (though God knows Our Only Available President and his gang of vandals get an A for effort). If what we're seeing now is the consequence of greater control of their situation by the players ... well, it just makes up for the decades upon decades when they had no such control.

Maybe if the owners had been farsighted enough to cede some of that control when they had the power to do so, they'd never have had to cede so much of it now. Unchecked pendulums do tend to swing from one extreme to the other, after all.

As the NBA is discovering now, to its dismay. As the country is.

A brief musical interlude

Happy Independence Day from the Blob, which is taking the day off, as is every right-thinking American who's still fortunate enough to do so in our corporate oligarchy.

May the beer be cold, the briquettes hot and the mortar rounds from your neighbor's professional-grade fireworks show at least mildly tolerable.

Have a great day, and try not to blow off any appendages.

And now, a little something appropriate to the occasion.

Oh, no, not another Civil War

The Blob usually refrains from posts that don't incorporate something from Sportsball World, or whatever mixed martial arts is. But this is too good to pass up.

We're havin' us a second Civil War, boys and girls!

Or so says Alex Jones, gibbering lunatic of the right, a sad creature whose ravings put you in mind of someone sitting in a corner fending off imaginary intergalactic spiders with an imaginary ray gun. Alex's latest hallucination involves the most evil people who ever strode the Earth (i.e., the Democrats), who he says are going to launch a Civil War on Independence Day.

Faithful Blobophiles know this is irresistible fodder for the Blob, a Civil War nerd from way back. I even dress up like an imaginary Union officer on occasion. (See photo at bottom*)

Anyway ... Alex says the imaginary intergalactic spiders tell him the Civil War is coming. Which of course has prompted the Blob to come up with the Complete Imaginary Historical Facts Of The Second Civil War, Even Though It's Not History Yet.

Some excerpts:

* The first shots were fired from the backyard of the guy who lives next to the White House, when one of his Silver Salutes went off course and set fire to a 12-foot tall, spot-lit portrait of Our Only Available President, Donald J. "Donny" Trump, recently installed by Trump himself on the White House lawn.

* The greatest MAGA defeat came on the Fourth, when the Democrats infiltrated turkey dogs into the traditional Fourth of July weenie roast. They also failed to burn any American flags like the spiders told Alex Jones they would, and the President once again forgot the words to God Bless America, proving himself once more to be a big jaw-flapping phony.

* The greatest rebel defeat came when Gen. George "Half-Caf" Pickett's credit card was refused at Starbucks as he tried to send the President 500 caramel macchiatos. Pickett's Charge had failed!

* Hispanic immigrants did not take part in the fighting, on account of they had families to feed and bills to pay and so they had to go to work like everyone else. This was another grievous defeat for the MAGA forces, who had been led to believe by the President that the Hispanic immigrants were all murderers, drug dealers and freeloaders who were coming here to destroy America.

* The war finally ended in a truce, when the Democrat rebels agreed to stop yelling and hollering and raising cane if the President would give them a reason to do so, like stop yelling and hollering and raising cane himself.

Also they would stop pointing out that the President had no clothes, policy-wise, if the President would agree to start wearing some.

*Imaginary Civil War officer Lt.
 Benjamin "Flight Risk" Smith 



The NBA is hereby banned

Well, OK. So it's banned from this post on this Blob.

This is because it's the day before the Fourth of July, and sports-blab radio is still talking about the NBA to the virtual exclusion of all else. This is because sports-blab radio is BS. It's also because the NBA is a property of the No. 1 sports-blab outlet, ESPN, whose sports blabbers are apparently  contractually obligated to talk about the NBA 95 percent of the time.

No truth to the rumor that you can win valuable cash prizes if you're lucky enough to tune in at the precise nanosecond to hear this:

 "Hey, look it's baseball!"

"Wimbledon ... Roger Federer ... Serena ..."

"Tiger!"

"That soccer tournament!"

And then: "But back to that one basketball player, and that other basketball player."

If you tune in to hear the last, darn, you juuust missed out.

Better you should visit the Blob, which today is a defiantly NBA-Free Zone. We will discuss more important questions, like the proper way to garnish a Fourth of July hotdog (mustard, definitely; onions, OK; chili, sure; melted cheese. acceptable; and I don't care what you say, if you want to add some ketchup, the Blob will not cast you into outer darkness). We will launch our latest contest, When Will Triple Crown Winner Justify Start Making Babies. We will talk about how the one thing the Blob didn't get to cover in 38 years as a sportswriter, but always wanted to, was Wimbledon.

World Cup?

Sure, since outside the ESPN bubble, it's the biggest sporting event going right now. Yesterday indicated Brazil might not be a total fraud.  And how about Belgium? No one in World Cup soccer ever erases a 2-nil deficit in 20 minutes, but the Belgians did it against Japan. Which of course provoked the exact same reaction in both Brussels and Tokyo.

In Brussels: "What the hell!"

In Tokyo: "What the hell?"

What else?

Oh, yeah, baseball is still a bunch of guys swinging and missing and a bunch of guys hitting home runs. Other than that, it's become even more a lot of standing around than usual, which is not going to capture the imagination of the Instagram generation.

Other than that, today is given over to the hotdog debate, and whether or not your neighbor who insists on artillery-barrage-at-midnight fireworks should get 25 to life, and why they still can't call the traditional Fourth of July NASCAR race the Firecracker 400 instead of the numbingly corporate Coke Zero Sugar 400, which is what they're actually calling it now if you can believe that.

That is all. Now back to the NBA.

Sorry. That was cruel.

LeBron saves America

Well. At least now Magic Johnson won't have to quit.

And so here's a decorative fruit basket for you, LeBron James, from Earvin Johnson himself. He said he'd step down if he didn't land a splashy free agent, and you were the splashiest there was. I know this because I'm still soaking wet from all the splashing that went on over the weekend from every 24/7 sports outlet in America, which insisted on repeating the same speculation over and over and over ... and over.

The story hadn't advanced, but that didn't stop the yapping poodles on ESPN and everywhere else. It was all LeBron, all the damn time.

In which case, here's another decorative fruit basket from America, LeBron, for being so considerate as to take just two days to decide you were hitching your wagon to the Lakers. You could have dragged this out and compelled us to insert knitting needles in our eyeballs. But you made Decision II (III?) in a most timely fashion, sparing us that unhappy occurrence.

You also proved, by signing with the Lakers, that what you'd been saying about your decision wasn't just the usual flapping of the gums.

When asked, after all, LeBron said this wouldn't entirely be a basketball decision, and clearly it wasn't. This is no juggernaut he's joining. It's a young team with some nice pieces, but it won only 35 games last year, and even with LeBron -- and absent the Lakers reeling in Kawhi Leonard, too -- it figures to be no better than third in the West right now. And maybe not even that.

And so no real uproar about betrayal (please) and lack of loyalty (double "please") and ring-chasing this time around, from Cleveland or anywhere else. LeBron, after all, did what no one does -- come back to Cleveland -- and did what he pledged to do, which is bring a title to his quasi-hometown. He took the Cavaliers to four NBA Finals in four years and, this last time, did it largely on his own. Not much was going to change about that -- except with his kids, who were getting older, and in particular his son, a rising basketball star in his own right who was going to be entering high school.

If you're going to make a move, and it's not just about basketball, that's when you make a move. And so he did.

Simple as that. And blessedly quick.

The Cup runneth over

The truth is out there, and sometimes it's uncomfortable. Fair warning from the Blob, which is about to say something a certain segment of the American sportsball audience is never going to accept.

Soccer is never going to be one of our major sports. It just isn't.

Oh, lots of people love it, lots and lots, but it is never going to be the blood-and-bone thing it is everywhere else in the world. Football is. Basketball is. Baseball still is, kinda, at least if you're old enough to draw Social Security.

But soccer is not. We've been hearing since the days of Pele and the New York Cosmos that it was going to be the next major sport in America, and periodically someone will say it again. But we're still waiting. And we're pretty much always going to.

And that's too bad. Because if you watched the two World Cup games yesterday, and were not absolutely riveted, you are never going to be.

Both round of 16 matches went to PKs. Russia knocked out Spain -- a monumental upset -- when this guy did this on Spain's last attempt.  Croatia knocked out Denmark, also on PKs, because Croatia's keeper was just slightly more amazing than Denmark's keeper, who not only stopped two of five PKs but had to stop another in extra time just to get it to the PK stage.

You don't often see goalkeeping like that in World Cup soccer. OK, so you never see it.

A lot of us here in the USA did, yesterday. But a lot more did not, preferring to watch Tiger Woods again play well but not nearly well enough, or stock cars drive in circles, or the Greatest Spectacle In Drying Paint, aka another interminable Yankees-Red Sox game.

It's a safe bet no one in Zagreb or Copenhagen was watching any of that. Advantage, them.

PG, LBJ and the rest

And now, our latest episode of Magic Shouldn'ta Oughta Said That, in which Paul George kicks all the wise guys in their revealed knowledge by signing a four-year deal to stay in Oklahoma City.

PG, remember, was supposed to go to the Lakers. Everyone said so. Everyone said so a year ago, when he signed with the Thunder for what looked like a one-season rest stop on his journey to L.A.

Well ... guess not, wise guys. And here Magic had the pullout couch ready for him and everything.

Now he has go to looking for another big-name free agent, because he said that thing he said, which is that he'd step down if he didn't sign a big-name free agent this summer. And there's still a pile of them out there, led of course by the Notorious LBJ, aka, LeBron James, who the Blob has it on good authority was in Minnesota yesterday, talking to the Timberwolves.

OK, so he wasn't. He was actually in Boston, talking to the Celtics.

OK, OK! So he wasn't there, either! But you see how easy this is, messing with people's heads?

I could tell you I have a friend of a friend of the cousin of a friend who says LeBron is staying in Cleveland, because the cousin knows one of LeBron's second cousins twice removed and that's what he said. I could tell you he's going to Philly because he used the words "cheese" and "steak" in a sentence one too many times. I could tell you he's a lock for the Lakers, because why else would Magic say what he said --- crawling out on a limb with a handsaw, in essence -- unless he knew he had LeBron locked up, and so the chances of Magic having to actually step down were nil?

All we really know at this point is more and more Americans wish he'd hurry up and make a decision, because they're sick of hearing about LeBron and they just want to watch the World Cup in peace (Uruguay! You go!). Which seems reasonable to me.

Not that reason, in a 24/7 news cycle on networks already married to All LeBron All The Time, has very much to do with much. Or anything.