Luck of the draw (or not)

 And now a sporadically recurring Blob favorite, What They Were Really Thinking, which today focuses on the NFL Draft, plus dark portents involving a certain quarterback in Green Bay, Wis.:

Zach Wilson, upon learning he'd been drafted by the Jets, as expected: "All right! I'm a Jet!"

(What he was really thinking: "Omigod! The Jets! They've ruined more careers than hotel surveillance video!")

Justin Fields, upon learning the Bears had traded up to draft him: "I can't wait to begin my new life as a CHICAGO BEAR!" 

(What he was really thinking: "Omigod! The Bears! They've ruined more careers than Craig T. Nelson in 'All The Right Moves'!")

Mac Jones, upon learning he'd dropped to the 15th pick, where the Patriots snatched him: "Gosh. I kinda dropped like a rock."

(What he was really doing/thinking: Breaking into Steve Martin's Happy Feet dance while shouting "Woo-hoo! I'm a PATRIOT!")

And finally ...

Almost every GM in the NFL, to his current QB, upon learning Aaron Rodgers is not happy in Green Bay and allegedly wants out: "Not to worry, bud.  You're still our guy. We have absolute faith in you."

(What almost every GM was really doing/thinking: Breaking into Steve Martin's Happy Feet dance while dialing Aaron Rodgers' agent and shouting "Holy s***! AARON FREAKIN' RODGERS!")

The dumbness of stereotyping

 I try to avoid giving racists and other niblet-brains sunlight. I also am not very good at doing that.

And so the other day I was riding the fence line on my social media spread when I came across a particularly vile post attributed to David Clarke, the Buford T. Justice sheriff up in Wisconsin who's the darling of the fringe righties these days because he supposedly "tells it like it is." 

This time Clarke was telling it like it is about LeBron James, who drew fire for blasting the police in Columbus, Ohio, for shooting to death a 15-year-old black girl who was wielding a knife at two other girls. Unlike so many other similar police shootings, this one actually might have been semi-defensible -- which might have been why LeBron  took down his original post, saying he didn't want to add to the prevailing hatred.

No matter. Clarke was gonna say what he was gonna say anyway. The fact he himself is black was no cover at all for the weary stereotypes about young black men he trotted out there.

"If LeBron James wasn't playing basketball he'd be on the block drinking malt liquor from a paper bag. He's the epitome of a dumb jock!" is how the quote attributed to Clarke went.

Since it's the internet, who knows if he actually said this. But if he did, it was an appallingly racist thing for anyone to say, let alone another black man; the whole "hanging out on the block drinking malt liquor from a paper bag" is an old lazy-black-man trope, the sort of thing you'd expect to grace a Klan pamphlet. And it revealed that the only dumbness here belonged to the speaker.

Of course, white persons of a partiKular Kulture no doubt ate up Clarke's alleged quote with a spoon, not being brain surgeons themselves. That is just the country we seem to be these days.

And it is endlessly exhausting to those of us who know better.

I covered sports for 40 years in Indiana, and I can't count the times I saw the "dumb jock" thing -- and specifically, the "dumb black jock" thing -- get blown to shards. I met people from all walks of life in those 40 years, see. Some of the dumbest turned out to be what we used to call captains of industry in this country; some of the smartest were those alleged "dumb jocks."

More than a few were dumb jocks of color, too.

I had the distinct pleasure, for instance, of interviewing the late Arthur Ashe once upon a time. A more perceptive, thoughtful individual I will never hope to meet again in this lifetime. No "dumb jock", he.

Ditto the late Eugene Parker, one of America's most astute and successful sports attorneys. Ditto Tiffany Gooden, now an attorney of note herself. Ditto many, many others.

And LeBron James?

Last I looked, he was not only the greatest basketball player of his generation, but a successful businessman who owns a video production company, pizza franchises and endorsement deals with Pepsi and AT&T. According to Forbes, he's the fifth richest athlete in the world, with close to $95 million in  annual earnings.

Most of that comes from sources outside of basketball.

"Yes, but basketball made it all possible," some people will say.

"Yes, but if he was really just another dumb jock, how much of that would already be gone?" is my answer.

I'll give those of you of a certain mindset time to think about that. I realize you may need it.

Not to stereotype or anything.

Gettin' drafty up in here

 By now, loyal Blobophile(s) know my position on the NFL Draft. I think it's great theater and well worth the forty-umpteen hours of primetime programming it will take up tomorrow night.

Psych! Of course I don't think that.

No, I think it's such must-avoid TV I'll watch old reruns of the Andy Griffith Show rather than tune in to see if the Lions, with the seventh pick, take an offensive lineman from Bemidji State. Give me Ernest T. Bass all day over that -- and not just because Ernest T. frequently makes more sense than Mel Kiper Jr.

That said, it's fascinating to see how the NFL Draft has evolved from Yay! We Got Tony Dorsett/John Elway/Eric Dickerson! to Oh, God, Please Don't Let Us Screw Up And Take Ryan Leaf Instead Of Peyton Manning. Which has led to the hilarious festival of second-guessing and over-analysis that the NFL Draft today has become.

And the most hilarious thing about it is the more teams learn about a prospective draft pick, the less they seem to know.

After all, 20 years after Leaf-over-Manning, the Bears took Mitch Trubisky over Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes. How did nine teams pass on Mahomes, for heaven's sake?  How did the Cleveland Browns not pass on Johnny Manziel?

Sure seemed a lot easier, and less of a gamble, back when the Cowboys took Emmitt Smith just because My God, have you seen the man PLAY? Less overthinking meant less second-guessing, it seems to me. And less second-guessing meant less talking oneself out of an Emmitt Smith.

Which brings us to your 2020 Heisman Trophy winner, wide receiver DeVonta Smith from Alabama.

By all rights he ought to be the first wideout taken, because My God, have you seen the man PLAY? But some mock drafts have him going anywhere from 10th to 16th, behind two other receivers (one of whom is Smith's Alabama teammate Jaylen Waddle). And why is that?

Because DeVonta Smith is kind of shrimpish at 6-foot and 166 pounds.

This seems to matter more than it should to some folks, and certainly more than it did when Dan Marino was throwing all those home run balls to Mark Dufer (5-9, 185) and Mark Clayton (5-9, 177). Lots of people passed over both of them; Duper went in the second round and Clayton in the eighth, which doesn't even exist anymore.  Couple years later, what do you suppose all those people were saying?

"Geez. How'd we miss those guys?"

"Wait, we coulda had Duper AND Clayton?"

"Wait, we traded up to take Trubisky instead of Deshaun Watson or Patrick Mahomes??"

Oops, sorry. That was the Bears in 2019 or so.

Or someone a couple years from now, after passing on DeVonta Smith.

Logic 101

So now we have this kerfuffle over whether or not Madison Bumgarner, who pitched a no-hitter the other night, actually pitched a no-hitter.

Major League Baseball says no, on account of it happened in a seven-inning doubleheader game.

Everyone who's not an obsessive-compulsive seamhead says yes, because seven innings in this case constituted a complete game.

And why did it constitute a complete game, you ask?

Because MLB decreed doubleheader games would now be seven innings in duration.

Ergo, Madison Bumgarner pitched an official no-hitter, because MLB in essence said so. And never mind what it's saying now.

See how easy logic is, people?

And that's even in baseball, which frequently avoids it.

Like, you know, now.

Star of the day

 Last night was Oscar night, which compels the Blob to make at least a couple obligatory (and possibly gratuitous) comments.

One, the powered-down awards show for once didn't last 47 hours. So that was good. 

Two, the late Chadwick Boseman got screwed, apparently because the Academy figured too many people of color were winning awards, so they threw a bone to the customary Old White Guy (Anthony Hopkins, 83).

Three, because people of color and previously ignored nationalities did win so many awards, the Blob fully expects a backlash from the usual quarters -- something along the lines of WHY AREN'T WHITE PEOPLE ALLOWED TO WIN OSCARS ANYMORE.

But enough about that. Let's talk about the real star of Sunday. 

You probably didn't watch the IndyCar race yesterday, because, let's face it, hardly anyone watches an IndyCar race unless it's the Indianapolis 500. Besides, the usual NASCAR wreckfest was going on at Talladega at the same time, and NASCAR still commands the fattest slice of the American auto racing market.

(This is because there aren't enough discerning motorsports viewers in America, in the Blob's opinion. But my arm's grown weary from banging that particular drum.)

In any event, for the second straight week, a young'un put on a show. This time it was 21-year-old Colton Herta, who won the pole and then led 97 of the 100 laps down there on the streets of St. Petersburg, Fla.

It was an historically dominant performance made more so by the fact Herta had to survive two restarts in the last 22 laps, both with Josef Newgarden nipping at his heels. Newgarden, seasoned veteran and two-time IndyCar champion, was even out there on reds, softer tires that presumably were a smidge quicker than the blacks upon which Herta was riding.

Yet Herta never blinked. On both restarts he simply drove away from Newgarden, eventually winning by 2.49 seconds.

This was Herta's fourth victory in just 34 starts for Andretti Autosport, and, again, he's still only 21. Which suggests we might be looking at the next great IndyCar racer -- a Scott Dixon in embryo, if you will.

That's not the Blob indulging in its usual overreaction, by the way. That's no less an authority than Mario Andretti saying that.

"Look at what he's done in the last two years," Andretti told Nathan Brown of the Indianapolis Star. "He's the most complete race driver as anyone I've ever known at this stage of his career. Every race he's won, he's won with speed, not strategy, not fuel mileage ...

"I love seeing how complete he is, and the future he has? I'll tell you what, you only find one of those every 35 years."

That's some high praise indeed. And from on high, no less.

Now all the kid's gotta do is live up to it.

Numerical advantages

Somewhere in Football Heaven last week, Old 77 surely was laughing at Tom Brady. So was Old 99. Prolly Old 00, too.

In order, those gentlemen would be Red Grange, Tom Harmon and Jim Otto, and you figure they were laughing because the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League, heretofore America's uniform Nazis, decided to loosen its Windsor knot the other day. Henceforth, uniform numbers will not be as narrowly regimented as before. If you're a defensive back and you want to wear No. 1, you can. And so forth.

This prompted a hilariously unhinged response from Brady, who ranted, sure, let's just let anyone to wear any number he wants. No rules, Red Grange! Total anarchy, Tom Harmon! Dogs and cats, living together, Jim Otto!

Brady was rightly bashed from all quarters for this, even though it fit the man's buttoned-up world view to a T. This is a man who so monitors his diet, remember, that nothing as blasphemous as strawberries will ever touch his kale-fortified lips. So it figures he'd get bent out of shape by the NFL allowing defensive backs and linebackers to wear different numbers than usual.

Apparently he  believes his offensive linemen will be confused by this or some such thing. Which of course is ridiculous, because these are the best offensive linemen on the planet. One presumes they identify linebackers from where they line up in a defensive set, not because they're all wearing 51 or 55 or 58.

And, gee, one would think the GOAT would be able to sort out man coverage from Tampa Two even if the D-backs are wearing No. 4 or 6 instead of, say, 21.

That said, I might be able to even marginally accept this if I hadn't watched Jaylon Smith play linebacker once upon a time.

Wearing No. 9, if memory serves.

In high school. 

Where, presumably, quarterbacks would be more easily confused than Tom Brady two decades deep in a legendary NFL career.

And now I'm laughing, too.

Dream sequence

 Sometimes I dwell too much on my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates, here on the Blob. That's absolutely true.

("No s***, Sherlock!" you're saying)

I do this even now, when the Cruds actually are only semi-cruddy, and in fact not nearly as cruddy right now as those pinstriped devils in New York. Which I find highly gratifying, mainly because the pinstriped devils are the sort of snotty entitled fat cats my Cruds could never hope to be unless the current owners sold the team to someone who actually was interested in fielding a major-league team.

In any event, I dwell too much. And I know this because when you start having dreams about something, you know you're over-dwelling on that something.

And so last night, I had a dream.

In my dream, I drove out to Pittsburgh to watch my Cruds play the first game of the NLCS. They'd reached the NLCS by beating the Dodgers in the opening round of the playoffs, for which the Cruds had qualified even though they were the worst team in baseball by several nautical miles.

(No, that doesn't make any sense. But that's how dreams work.)

Anyway, the Cruds were playing the Cubs, in my dream. Even the locals thought that was ridiculous. They knew the Cruds were the Cruds, and the Cubs, who in my dream had the best record in the National League, were probably gonna laminate 'em. 

Well, one thing led to another, all of them completely random because that's also how dreams work. I remember PNC Park had this weird layout in which half the crowd, including me, wound up watching the game on TV monitors on some sort of concourse outside the ballpark. And so I spent most of the game walking around stumbling into various luxury suites from which I was rather rudely evicted.

"You! Out!" some usher in a yellow Pirates blazer would shout at me. And also, "You're not allowed in here!"

Finally, the game was over. And the Cruds, absurdly enough, had won 9-0. And all of us Cruds fans were yukking it up because we could just imagine how steamed all the Cubs fans must be, losing to such a hideous baseball team by such a lopsided score.

After which I swiped some candy from one of the luxury suites and headed back to my car.

"Oh, who cares about your stupid dream," you're saying, especially if you're a Cubs fan.

Yeah, I know. I'm sure you don't.

But that candy, man. It was really good.

Athletic moment for today

 And now your Blob quiz for a Saturday morning, which consists of one question only ...

Q: When is an anchor leg more than just a leg?

A: When it's four legs.

As proof, we take you to a high school track meet in Utah, where this happened.

All together now: Run, Spot, run! 

And how about that little NASCAR move at the end, the Poochinator bangin' side panels with the lead runner? Look out, Jane, look out!

As the stock car boys like to say, rubbin's racin'. Especially when the checkered flag/finish tape is in sight.

And if you'd like to add a little musical accompaniment to this exciting feat of pure athleticism, here ya go. Can't think of anything more appropriate.

Unless it's this.

Gorging globally

 Somewhere in St. Louis right now heads are bobbing knowingly, because they've seen this movie, too. Nobody has to tell them what a grasping fluffhead Stan Kroenke is, on account of St. Louis doesn't have a football team anymore.

Kroenke took care of that, whisking the Rams off to L.A. in one of those naked cash grabs the NFL never seems to mind so long as the TV numbers in a particular market are fat enough.

Well. Now soccer fans across the pond know what that feels like.

Kroenke, see, holds the controlling interest in Arsenal, one of the Premier League's most iconic sides. Their fans are passionate, not entirely rational and loyal right down to the ground -- in other words, they're English soccer fans.

And they don't like money-grubbing slicksters gorging themselves at every trough any better than folks in St. Louis do.

Which brings to the sad saga of the abortive European Super League, a money-grubbing scheme cooked up by some of Europe's wealthiest sides. Among those were six Premier League sides; among those was Arsenal.

The idea was Europe's power elite would form its own league, thereby undercutting the established Champions League. The best American analogy I heard came from some radio talking head, who compared it to college basketball.

The Super League, he said, would be as if all the college hoops royalty -- your Dukes, your North Carolinas, your Kansases and Kentuckys et all -- played for their conference titles like usual, then conducted their own postseason tournament separate from March Madness. That way they wouldn't have to share the proceeds with Mercer and North Texas State and the rest of the riffraff.

The fans of the riffraff schools would no doubt howl. But there's howling, and then there's howling.

And Stan Kroenke and the rest of the American owners sponging off European soccer sides have never seen howling like soccer-fan howling.

And so Premier League fans rose up as one, and pretty soon all six PL sides had pulled out of the proposed Super League, which caused the proposed Super League to fall down and go boom. And now Arsenal's fan base is demanding Kroenke's family sell the team.

They say they won't, but in my notoriously over-active imagination, I can see a come-to-Jesus meeting starring the Kroenkes and a few hand-picked Arsenal supporters. It would be held in some blue-collar pub, and the conversation would go something like this:

Arsenal supporters: Sell the club, you wankers!

Stan Kroenke: I'm sorry, but that's simply out of the question.

(A tinkly smashing sound as Will'um and Georgie and Artie the Fist break their ale bottles on the bar and brandish the jagged remnants)

Arsenal supporters: Perhaps you'd like to rethink your position, guv'ner.

Of course, in real life, Kroenke merely apologized to Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta for his money grubbing, saying he understands now that "the soul of this sport belongs to the fans."

And from across the pond in St. Louis, where Kroenke trashed the fan support on his way out of town, the sound of bitter laughter.

Indy on the half-shell

Almost Indy. I suppose that's what you call this.

Lights-Turned-Low Indy. Stow-The-Sequins-And-Full-Orchestra Indy. Library-Volume Indy, the usual animal roar dialed back to more civilized levels.

Not a lot else to make of the Speedway's announcement that the Indianapolis 500 would play out on the half-shell at the end of May, or however else you characterize 135,000 or so souls. That's how many folks they'll let into the place on Memorial Day weekend, making it the largest sporting event since the pandemic netherworld descended some 14 months ago.

As with everything else in Covid America, we'll see how it goes.

Here's what I know: IMS and the Penske folks who run it wouldn't be rolling out this half-capacity plan if they hadn't well thought it through. And just because they've rolled it out doesn't mean it will happen.

Last summer, remember, they rolled out much the same plan, only to scrub the mission when it became apparent COVID-19 wasn't going to let us up easy. So the race went on in August as re-scheduled, but with nothing but echoes and humid summer breezes filling those towering cliffs of grandstand.

I suspect this time they'll pull it off, with the number of vaccinated Americans steadily climbing and the protocols that will remain in place. To be sure, 135,000 thousand people in one place sounds like a lot, but when the place covers the expanse the Speedway covers, it's not really. You can spread 135,000 bodies pretty thin when you're doing it on a site that sprawls across the Indiana flatlands like the Great Plains.

So, yeah. This year, we'll get Indy back. Or at least enough of it.

Because if you can't prepare a newbie for the sheer vastness of the place on race morning, what you really can't prepare him or her for is the sheer mass of humanity that gathers there as the place stirs to life. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the sporting universe; the mutter of all those thousands of voices carrying on thousands of conversations at once washes over you like the soft growl of thunder miles off, or maybe surf breaking on some distant strand. And when those 33 drivers fire the engines and come screaming down to the green in their rows of three ...

Well. The roar that goes up is what makes the start of the Indianapolis 500 one of the two or three most belly-quivering moments in sports.

Once upon a long ago day, those of us who'd covered a 500 or ten used to go down inside turn one for the start, on the strip of grass between the infield crowd and the mammoth cabled catch fence separating us from the track. The veterans knew that's where you went to get the most visceral feel for the start, all those rocket ships flying down into the corner in multi-hued flashes.

They were white and blue and green and red and orange and yellow, those flashes, there one second and gone the next. The sound of their passing was a sort of schoop-schoop-schoop-schoop-schoop -- the sound displaced air makes, because they were outrunning even the scream of their engines. And  we knew they were coming before we saw them, because that unearthly roar came tumbling through the grandstand ahead of them.

All of that was missing last August, and the 500 wasn't quite the 500 as a result. It won't completely be back at the end of May, either, if it happens. But you know what?

If it does happen, this will be one of those times when we'll look at half-full and not also see half-empty. And that will be way more than half-glorious.

Sticking to the bully pulpit

This is not where you come today to read that sending a psycho killer to the Graybar Hilton is some sort of corner turned. A smirking Derek Chauvin caught on video kneeling on George Floyd's neck until he died is as close to a slam dunk as there ever will be in an American courtroom, and that's the plain truth of it.

So, yes, convicting Psycho Boy on all three counts was justice, but it was also a case in which the justice system couldn't avoid justice no matter what kind of Barry Sanders spin move it threw at the Big J. The corner will be turned the day justice is done when justice is far more easy to elude.

But enough about that.

Today, this is where you come to read that the Stick To Sports crowd just took another walloping.

This is because the NFL, the NHL and Major League Baseball all issued statements on the Chauvin verdict, and so did the Minnesota Lynx, Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Timberwolves because Chauvin's murder of George Floyd was local. LeBron James weighed in with one word: "ACCOUNTABILITY." Megan Rapinoe tweeted a reaction. Magic Johnson, Victor Cruz, Donovan Mitchell, Billie Jean King, Ja Morant ...

The list goes on. And on.

This must have profoundly galled the STS brigade, who somehow feel only businesses that sell motor oil or insurance should be allowed to express/act on their political leanings. That professional sports, and those who work in them, operate like any other business never seems to occur to the STSers. Sports should be a haven from all of that unpleasantness, even if it's a product like any other product.

And let's face it, those who manufacture that product are no less qualified than, say, the My Pillow Guy to weigh in on matters outside their purview. In fact, given the idiocies spewed by My Pillow Guy and others of his ilk, they're far more qualified -- and certainly have far more standing in American society.

Stick to sports, you say? How about stick to goose down or its synthesized equivalent?

Or for that matter, how about sticking to legislation instead of performance art?

Because, listen, no matter how disingenuous some of the responses might have been from the various professional sports, they were far more eloquent than the responses from some of our elected meatheads. The endless pandering to respective political bases almost always produces a treasure trove of standup comedy, but perhaps never more so than yesterday.

The silliest of the lot?

That was delivered by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who somehow managed to frame George Floyd as some sort of  civil rights hero because he had the bad luck to cross paths with a psycho cop. He gave his life for justice, Nancy declared -- just like Martin and Medgar and JFK and Abraham Lincoln his own self, presumably.

Ay-yi-yi. And people say LeBron James isn't qualified to discuss such weighty matters?

Hell, he's Winston Churchill compared to Nancy Pelosi. Or at least he was yesterday.

Stick to gaveling, Nance. Stick to looking the other way while your wrestlers are being molested, Jim Jordan. Stick to whatever it is you do with high school girls, Matt Gaetz -- and the rest of you Q-Tips, stick to hanging out in your little White Citizens' Council treehouse, or whatever you call that Anglo-Saxon Caucus of yours.

Let the grownups handle the eloquence.

And by "grownups," I mean the ballplayers.

Draft psychosis

 The NFL Draft comes up next week, which means we'll be bombarded with hilarious over-analysis, utter speculation posing as bedrock truth and arcane terms like "burst." "waist-bender," "all the throws" and the Blob's personal favorite, "tight skin."

No one will know who's gonna be a stud and who won't be. Everyone will pretend they know who's gonna be a stud and who won't be. 

We'll also get the usual cranial fluid leakage about whether or not Player A has the appropriate level of fanaticism to make it in this man's league.

Which brings us to Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, who's all but a lock to go to Jacksonville as the top pick in the draft.

Most of the gurus regard him as the best quarterback prospect to come out of college since Andrew Luck, and maybe the best in the last 30 years or so. That would cover some impressive waterfront, if true. It would also depend on just how maniacal a competitor he is -- which, because some folks just can't help themselves, has come into question in a few scattered corners because of some stuff Lawrence told Michael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated.

It seems Lawrence uttered some remarkably sane things in Rosenberg's piece. Like, I don't know, this for instance:

"It's not like I need this for my life to be OK. I want to do it because I want to be the best I can be. I want to maximize my potential. Who wouldn't want to?"

This sounds to most normal people like a young man who has his priorities straight and his life neatly grounded. Of course, draftniks aren't normal people. So here are some imagined, and not so imagined, responses to the above quote:

He doesn't need this? Red flag, man. Where's the commitment? Where's the unhealthy obsession to the exclusion of all else? Where's the part where he says "You could break my leg and I'd still be game-prepping two days later"?

Break his leg? Hell, where's the part where he says you could tear off his arm -- both arms! -- and he'd still refuse to go on IR?

Tear off his arm? Come on, guys. I'm still waiting for him to say he could be lying in the hospital with no brainwave activity and he'd still be READY TO SUIT UP AGAINST THE 49ers NEXT SUNDAY.

That's all just exaggeration for effect, of course, but there was enough  blowback that Lawrence felt compelled to go on social media and say football was very, very important to him, that it was a massive priority, more massive than, say, an aircraft carrier or a mighty Himalayan peak or something. 

As if the fact he's been playing the game since he could walk wasn't proof enough of that.

At any rate, there are now some people out there who undoubtedly think Lawrence will be like that awful Andrew Luck, who was so uninterested in football he only played through leg injuries and torn rib cartilage and a torn labrum and a lacerated kidney, and was sacked more than 30 times four times in his first five seasons.

Finally he decided enough was enough, after 23,671 passing yards, and 171 touchdown passes, and 2,000 completions. Oh, and 174 sacks in six seasons.

Just imagine if Trevor Lawrence has that kind of career. What a terrible waste that will be.

Or so those afflicted with chronic draft psychosis would no doubt have it.

JJ all day

 Watched a little of that new hit series yesterday, and I have to say, this Jimmie Johnson Show might have legs. Among his guests were Alex Palou, the exuberant 24-year-old Spaniard who'll make a splendid sidekick for J.J., and Chip Ganassi, who'll gush in all the right places about J.J. just like Ed McMahon used to for Johnny Cars--

I'm sorry, what was that?

This wasn't the Jimmie Johnson Show I was watching?

Well, OK. If you say so.

I mean, yes, I know it was actually the season opener for IndyCar, the Grand Prix of Alabama, which heralded the arrival of a couple of fresh almost-new faces, Palou and Patricio O'Ward of Arrow McLaren. O'Ward started on the pole, got hamstrung by bad pit strategy, then came roaring back in the closing laps to finish fourth. And he was right on third-place finisher Scott Dixon's pipes when the checkers fell,

And Palou?

Went to the front in the first pit shuffle, went back in front after the last pit shuffle, and not even seasoned charger Will Power could catch him at the end. It was a sterling debut for the kid as part of Ganassi's stable; besides him, only Michael Andretti and the late Dan Wheldon won their first starts for Chip.

It capped a day in which three Ganassi drivers came home in the top eight positions. The fourth, of course, was Jimmie Johnson, who finished three laps down in 19th despite the impression left by NBC that Sunday really was the Jimmie Johnson Show.

He starred in the pre-race coverage. He starred in the commercials. Dixon, the defending IndyCar champion -- and six-time champ overall -- was compelled to talk not about himself but his new teammate. And during the race, an in-car camera tracked Johnson's  every move among the backmarkers. 

Shoot. He might have the been the first IndyCar driver ever to have an in-car camera while starting 21st on the grid.

Hard to blame either NBC or its IndyCar partner in crime for this, of course. A seven-time NASCAR champion jumping to IndyCar at the age of 45 is a huge story, not to say the sort of promotional hook a racing series starving for pub could hardly resist. So naturally they squeezed as much juice from it as they could.

For those of us who've been around IndyCar for a spell, though, there was not entirely pleasant sense of deja vu to all of it. It felt uncomfortably like Danica Mania all over again, IndyCar trying to make some hot new ticket the face of the sport before the hot new ticket had earned that distinction.

It was grossly unfair to Danica then, because she was just another young driver still learning her trade. And it's unfair to J.J. now, because, while he's not at all young, he, too, is learning this new trade.

That he'll undoubtedly handle the attention with more aplomb than Danica occasionally did is a given, of course. She was 24-years-old and green as spring grass; he's 45 and the greatest NASCAR racer of his generation. So he's got that going for him.

One would hope, however, that as the season goes along it won't be quite so all-J.J.-all-the-time. Because as Palou and O'Ward demonstrated Sunday, the kids are gonna be a hell of a show, too -- and there's a whole fistful of them waiting to bust out.

And that'll be must-see TV, too.

Delayed gratification

The best story in baseball today -- hell, in all of sports -- is not that my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates are actually better than the mighty New York Yankees right now. No, really, it's true. Cruds rule!

But enough about that ("Yes, really," you're saying). Let's talk about this guy named Sean Kazmar Jr. instead.

Sean Kazmar Jr. is an infielder in the Atlanta Braves system, which is not significant in and of itself except that the other day he was called up and activated by the big club. This in turn is not significant until you consider how long it's been since that last happened.

Thirteen years is your answer.

Yes, you heard right. Kazmar, who is 36 now, was originally drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in 2002, when he was 17. Then he was drafted by the A's and the Padres, with whom he eventually signed. In 2008, he played 19 games in the bigs. batting .205 in 39 at- bats.

He's been riding buses in the minors since.

Bryan Fonseca of Deadspin tells the tale here. And it's quite a tale.

Imagine, spending 13 summers trying to get back to the Show. Thirteen summers with kids who get younger and younger every year because you keep getting older and older; thirteen summers of day games after night games in Port Where Is This and Is This Really A City and Outskirts Of Boondocks USA.

That's some love of the game right there. Or some questionable sanity. Take your pick.

Either way, good on the guy. 'Cause that's a hell of a long stretch to wear a rally cap.

A man and his words

 Ran across a quote the other day, thanks to a post by Deadspin contributor Chuck Modiano. It's seems especially relevant in a week in which America again revealed itself  to be a violent and blood-soaked nuthouse, gripped by gun mania and awash in psychopaths and street cops who've forgotten they are first and foremost supposed to be peace officers.

It was a week when video emerged of a 13-year-old black kid getting shot to death with his hands in the air by yet another patrolman who fired first and asked questions later.

It was a week in which there was more unrest in the streets of Minneapolis after a 26-year veteran cop (a training officer, for pity's sake) somehow forgot which hip her Taser was on and shot a black motorist to death during a routine traffic stop -- a stop that never should have been made, and that certainly didn't call for her to unholster either the Taser or her service piece.

It was a week in which a 19-year-old punk allegedly took an AR-15 into a FedEx office out by the airport in Indianapolis, and shot eight people to death before shooting himself.

We are a nation, here in 2021, that loves guns too much and human beings not enough. We are a nation whose sick fascination with the former has made police officers trigger happy, because we insist on arming ourselves with military-grade weaponry and a fistful of concealed carry permits.

This is the nation we are. This is, frankly, the nation we deserve to be, because you always get the nation you deserve in a democracy.

Know who would have hated all that more than anyone, and wouldn't have kept quiet about it?

The man who uttered this quote, reprinted in Modiano's piece:

I think most white Americans have their heads in the sand when it comes to race relations. White America is saying "law and order." But in their hearts, law and order simply means holding black men down.

The man who said that was Jackie Robinson, whose breaking of the color line in major league baseball on April 15, 1947 was commemorated again this week.

t's a quote from decades ago that appears in a 2016 Ken Burns documentary, and it rings just as true today.

It tells us that, were Robinson alive today, he might well have been in the streets in Minneapolis the other night, too. Or at least been outspoken in his sympathy for those who were.

The mythology, the one white America so loves, is that he was this proud stoic man who endured all manner of indignities with dignity in the summer of 1947. The reality is he was only that stoic man until he didn't need to be anymore. Thereafter, he said what he thought -- and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and the rest of the reactionary hacks on Fox News would have turned his name into an epithet as a result.

Stick to sports, they likely would have said. Because that's the country in which we live these days. 

God help us all.

Memory's Key(es)

 So now comes word that Leroy Keyes has laid down his burden, and suddenly there is a hint of Lemon Pledge in the air. This is an odd sentence, I'll admit. But context is all.

The context is a Saturday afternoon -- a lot of Saturday afternoons, actually -- and the sun is painting the living room carpet in the burnished patterns of fall, and the radio is on at 3029 Castle Drive in Fort Wayne. My mother is cleaning the house. Everything smells of, yes, Lemon Pledge. And Leroy Keyes just ran for a first down for Jack Mollenkopf's Purdue Boilermakers.

Out of the radio he comes, with that black 23 on the side of his old gold helmet and the same number on his black jersey, and a certain 12-or-13-year-old boy with a vivid imagination can see him. Keyes is gliding away from shoals of Minnesota Golden Gophers or Wisconsin Badgers of Northwestern Wildcats, and Bob Griese and Mike Phipps are back there throwing darts to Jim Beirne and Bob Dillingham, and this will always be fall for me, this will always be my most distinct memory of that lovely haunted season.

Leroy Keyes and Purdue football and the smell of Lemon Pledge: It's a sensory thing for me, and maybe not so odd now that I've presented it as such. I grew up with all of it because Mom always cleaned house on Saturday afternoons, and she was a Purdue grad who was always faithful to her Boilers. And there was a lot to be faithful to then.

Keyes, of course, was at the center of it, the black kid from Newport News, Va., who could run and catch passes and return kicks and even, on occasion, play defensive back. That skill set helped carry Purdue to the Rose Bowl in 1967 with Bob Griese at quarterback, and then to consecutive 8-2 seasons in 1967 and '68 with Mike Phipps at quarterback. In Keyes' three seasons in Purdue's backfield, the Boilers went 25-6.

Then he went off to the Philadelphia Eagles, where, long after it was fashionable, he played both ways for awhile as a running back and safety. 

Now he's gone, at 74. And I smell Lemon Pledge again. And see the sun on the carpet and hear Leroy Keyes barging out of the radio, making some hapless Gopher or Badger or Wildcat miss in wondrous ways in the overactive mind of a boy.

Rest well, Mr. Keyes. And know we were always listening.

$100 for "Clueless"

 I don't know if being Alex Trebek is Aaron Rodgers' next career move. I mean, Alex didn't win the gig by throwing a seed down the seam into a skinny two-deep window, so that line on Rodgers' resume probably wouldn't be useful.

What I do know is he's been an exemplary guest host for "Jeopardy!" these last two weeks, and he didn't even have Davante Adams or Robert Tonyan hanging around to bail him out.  So maybe this is what life after football could look like for him.

One thing's for sure, though.

Like everyone else, he'll never match the exquisite mix of sorrow, pity and veiled disdain Alex used to achieve with two words: "Nooo, sorry."

Rodgers could have used this superpower the other day, when all three of the Jeopardy! contestants whiffed on a setup line so obvious it might as well have been prancing naked around the set. 

It was the $400 clue under the category "Title Waves," and it went like this: "In the 1960s these midwesterners earned 5 NFL championships trophies."

The collective response from the dunderheads: "Uhhhhh ..."

Like the rest of us, Rodgers was amazed he had to tell them the answer was "Who are the Green Bay Packers?"

I mean, Aaron Rodgers plays for the Green Bay Packers. Famously so. And even if they don't follow the NFL or sports in general, it's impossible to believe the contestants didn't put two and two together.

This is the part where the Blob always imagines it could kick Daily Double ass if it ever got on Jeopardy! That's not an isolated fantasy of mine, either. How many times have all of us sat at home just knowing we could send Matthew the schoolteacher from Cedar Rapids back home to Herbert Hoover Elementary?

Of course, this is nothing but hubris. Speaking for myself, I have no doubt that as soon as the cameras went on, I'd freeze like Jack Nicholson at the end of "The Shining." I'd be the one saying "Uhhhh ..." over the $400 answer, "This U.S, president is buried in Grant's Tomb."

And yet ...

The Green Bay Packers, people.

Come on.

Boom baby requiem

 The bone-deep cultures, they're never defined by one place or time or individual. So you can't say Robert "Slick" Leonard was Indiana and basketball, on the occasion of his passing yesterday at 88.

But you can't meaningfully discuss that particular bone-deep culture without him.

The man came out of a high school hoops institution, Terre Haute Gerstmeyer, and he played for Indiana University's bedecked college program, and then he wound up coaching Indiana's pro basketball team, the Pacers. He even played a major role in saving them in the late 1970s, when he and his wife Nancy organized a telethon to keep them from disappearing.

So you won't get very far with Indiana and basketball without his name coming up.

As a coach he was as wild-west as his fledgling league and his team, whose players used to actually dress up like cowboys (complete with firearms!) when the mood struck them. He was a rebel coach in a rebel league  -- A red, white and blue basketball? A "three-point basket"? What was THAT? -- and he acted the part to perfection. 

Harass officials?

He did that with the best of them.

Chase his players around the locker room when they played like goofs?

He did that, too.

And his players loved him unreservedly, because they were rebels, too. They were Mel Daniels and Roger Brown and Freddie Lewis and Billy Keller; George McGinnis and Bob Netolicky and Warren Jabali and Rick Mount. And together they took that red, white and blue basketball and shoved it down the rest of the league's throat.

Under Slick, the Pacers were the Boston Celtics of the ABA, winning three championships and appearing in five ABA finals. Their nemeses were the Utah Stars with Zelmo Beaty and Willie Wise, and the Kentucky Colonels with Artis Gilmore and Dan Issel and Louie Dampier.

And even when all that was done, it was never really done, because Slick hung around, the most loyal of the loyal. As the Pacers color man he turned "Boom, baby!" into a cultural catchphrase, making it synonymous with Reggie Miller and Miller's love affair with the three-point line -- a line Slick's ABA first made chic.

So the lineage is as multi-faceted as its roots are deep. And because it is, the most righteous way to honor that lineage should be obvious this morning to every son or daughter of Indiana.

Go grab a red, white and blue basketball.

Head to the park.

Stand behind the three-point line.

Let 'er fly.

Boom. Baby.

A fine mess, Part This Time

 We shoulda learned by now. Isn't that what folks who never seem to learn always wind up saying?

And so here came a man named Joe McClendon to town promising some sort of minor-league pro football (Indoor? Outdoor? Take your pick), and again we fell for it. Same old shuck, same old jive, and you can't fool me, mister, the pea's under that shell right there.

The National Gridiron League, McClendon called it. There would be two teams in Indiana, both called "Indiana." It was gonna start in May 2019, and it was gonna be wonderful entertainment, and, here, go on this website and order your tickets NOW.

Well. Two years down the road, and the NGL is still the No Go League. Or the Never Gonna League. Or the Nick (the) Gomers League.

If you haven't read Dylan Sinn's piece in The Journal Gazette yet, feast your eyes. It's the latest chapter in Joe McClendon's big con, and it's not only like watching the Titanic hit the iceberg in slow motion, it's like watching the Titanic hit the iceberg while a three-ring circus was happening on the promenade deck.

McClendon claimed the city of Fort Wayne was going to loan him money for deciding to play a football season in a "bubble" in the Fort. The city of Fort Wayne had no idea what the man was talking about. Folks at the prospective game venues that showed up on the league's website had no idea what he was talking about, either. And the players, the biggest victims of all, were stuck in a strange city with no way to get home and no way to pay the hotel bills the NGL said had been taken care of.

There is this, though: Two years after its launch, the NGL at last delivered something approximating football yesterday.

OK, so it wasn't football. It was a fight in a hotel conference room between McClendon and one of the players. There might have been a tackle or two involved, though, before McClendon and the player wound up rolling around on the floor, and McClendon wound up falling over a table when someone tried to pull him away.

The Thrilla in Manila it wasn't. More like the Melee Over My Hotel Fee.

Of course, this is how it goes in every professional sport, right? I mean, we've all seen  the video of Roger Goodell rolling around on the floor with Dak Prescott after the Washington game because Goodell wouldn't pony up car fare to the airport. Haven't we?

Yeesh. What craziness is this?

Unfortunately for the Fort, it's what we always seem to get every time we roll the dice on semi/quasi/kinda-sorta professional football. And there have been a few times. On at least four occasions we tried indoor football, and sometimes the folks who brought it to us were well-intentioned but under-capitalized, and at least one time we got fleeced by a con man.

You'd have thought those would been cautionary tales. You'd have thought the aforementioned con man, Jeremy Golden and his Fort Wayne Fusion, would have enabled us to see Joe McClendon coming from half a continent away.

The guy virtually screamed bad news from his first news conference, but we went along with him anyway. I have no earthly idea why. Making a big play for the Easy Mark Hall of Fame, I guess.

In any event, it wound up yesterday with the players getting flim-flammed again, and one of them rolling around on the floor with McClendon, and the coach of the theoretical Fort Wayne team calling McClendon, his theoretical boss, a "fraud" and a "scumbag." Oh, and the folks who went on the website and ordered tickets NOW?

They all got their money back.

Psych! Of course they didn't. One poor guy who's into McClendon's scheme for $700 told Sinn he still hasn't seen a refund, two years later.

Which means I guess we should leave the last word to good old Major Clipton from "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

Have at it, Major.

History, without (much) drama

 You had to give Hideki Matsuyama a pass Sunday, because he'd never been this way before. That green jacket must come with suffering, see, or it loses something in its winning. You have to let Augusta box your ears a few times, or draw a little blood, to truly appreciate that trip to the Butler Cabin and the subsequent wardrobe change.

And so Matsuyama came to Sunday at the Masters with a four-shot lead, and for a long time he acted as if it was Sunday at the Al's Body Shop Velveeta Open instead. He pushed his tee shot on the first hole into the wilderness and took bogey, but after that he just kind of cruised along as if he'd been here before, which of course neither he nor any Japanese golfer ever had been.

Finally he had a five-stroke lead and was cruising -- which is not the proper etiquette in a place where etiquette is almost comically observed. 

But give him credit, as well as a pass. He recovered nicely.

Just when it seemed this Sunday back nine at the Masters would have all the drama of a man eating a sandwich, Matsuyama dunked one in the water at 15. Then he came weaving home with a 73 to win by a much more traditional single stroke over Will Zalatoris.

That looked closer than it actually was, but, again, it was history, Matsuyama becoming not only the first Japanese winner of the Masters but also the first male golfer from his homeland ever to win a major. This is a huge deal in Japan, a golf-obsessed nation in which Matsuyama is himself a huge deal. And it opened a window on how differently certain athletes are perceived in their home countries than elsewhere.

Japan, for instance.

It's been a big year for the Japanese, and not just because of what happened Sunday. Last August, after all, Takuma Sato won the Indianapolis 500 for the second time in three years. When he won it the first time in 2017, he became the first Japanese -- first Asian -- ever to win motorsports' most iconic event.

And, like, Matsuyama, he is a much bigger deal in Japan than he is everywhere else.

Sato, in fact, is an icon himself in his native land. If he's never gotten the credit he  deserves as a racer in  America, in Japan he's gotten it in spades. There, he's treated like the two-time Indy winner he is.

Ditto Matsuyama, who's come close to winning a major before and seems to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around in the upper reaches of the leaderboard. Do that, and eventually your ship will come in.

Consider Sunday his arrival at the dock.

Baseball, a brief update

 And now a quick peek at what went on in baseball over the weekend, which will involve the Blob's cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates in a sort of bank-shot way, which means the Blobosphere commence bitching and moaning.

("Bitch!" you're saying. "Moan!")

So, OK, then.

In this quick peek we go to San Diego, where on Friday night something happened that had never happened in the history of the hometown Padres. What happened was, a pitcher named Joe Musgrove from just up the road in El Cajon threw a no-hitter, striking out 10 Texas Rangers along the win. Sort of incredibly, considering the Padres have been around for 52 years, it was the first no-hitter in club history.

Not so incredibly, guess from whom the Padres acquired Musrgrove.

Thaaat's right, boys and girls. The Cruds. 

And  just going by precedent, Pittsburgh probably dealt him to San Diego for two gently used Kurt Bevacquas, a Nate Colbert and a Steve Garvey with one corner missing. Because, you know, baseball cards make such a cool sound when you stick them in your bicycles spokes.  

Oh, the humanity.

When hurtin' ain't certain

 Once upon the Before Time, when men were men and injuries were 'tis but a scratch, a Los Angeles Ram named Jack Youngblood played the Super Bowl on a broken leg.

Years later, Tiger Woods won a major on a broken leg and an injured knee. Dale Earnhardt once finished sixth at Watkins Glen two weeks after breaking his collarbone and dislocating his sternum in a crash at Talladega. And by the time Bobby Orr was done playing hockey, he was playing on knees that had no cartilage in them.

I bring all this up because Aaron Judge sat out a game for the New York Yankees the other day.

The official reason, according to Yankees manager Aaron Boone: "General soreness in his left side."

Now, I don't know what Boone meant by "general soreness." Maybe it was a persistent ache, like when you sleep wrong or something. Maybe it was really, really bad general soreness, like when you're running and you get a stitch in your side and you suddenly find yourself in the hellscape of a Soreness Apocalypse.

Shoot. Maybe the Yankees were afraid the general soreness would become a localized soreness, and that would escalate into a strained whatchamathing. And then Judge would aggravate  the strained whatchamathing, and it would become a pulled whatchamathing.

After which he would go on the DL, and no one would see him until June.

So I can understand why the Yankees would rather be safe than sorry, and sit him out. I mean, when one of the biggest bats in your lineup has an owie, you don't mess around. Because what if it turns out to be a Super Owie, and spraying Bactine on it doesn't work anymore?

Then you might have to call Neosporin off the bench and that wouldn't be good.

So, Aaron Judge sat out the other night.

Meanwhile, a week ago, an MMA fighter named Khetag Pliev lost his finger during a bout. No, really. He literally lost his finger -- as in, it got torn off and no one could find it for several minutes until it turned up inside Pliev's glove.

Five days later Pliev was training again.

None of this is to suggest baseball players are big wusses compared to other professional athletes. Well, maybe it is. I honestly don't know. 

I have some general soreness in my left whatchamathing, see. It's kinda distracting me, so I think I'll go sit down now.

Scootch over, Aaron.

The root of madness

I don't know what it is that compels a man to pick up a gun and shoot a doctor and the doctor's wife and the doctor's two grandchildren and two other people, and finally himself. I hope I never do.

All I know is where the mind goes when you find out the man who did all that used to play professional football.

Phillip Adams was a knockabout defensive back who got shuffled around to six teams in six seasons and played a total of 78 NFL games between 2010 and 2015. He tore up his ankle as a rookie in San Francisco and later had two concussions in three games with the Raiders in 2012. 

That's about all we know about him, other than he played his college ball at South Carolina State. And that yesterday, in Rock Hill, S.C., he picked up a .45 and a 9-millimeter and killed Dr. Robert Lesslie, Lesslie's wife and their two grandchildren, ages 9 and 5.

He also killed a 38-year-old man named James Lewis, and left another 38-year-old man named Robert Shook fighting for his life in a Charlotte, N.C., hospital. Then he went to his parents house and shot himself in his bedroom.

And so another day of madness in an increasingly mad nation, and the fresh realization that there are dark corners of the human soul that bring only ruin if explored. And the sort of questions that lead only to speculation, which is unfair and ghoulish and also unavoidable.

Especially if, again, a man spent a good many of his 32 years bashing his head against other men.

No one knows if that had anything to do with Phillip Adams becoming a spree killer yesterday, but, yes, you can't avoid wondering. When the investigating authorities say "There's nothing right now that makes sense to any of us," your mind goes there. Because there was nothing that made any sense about Dave Duerson or Junior Seau or Andre Waters or Justin Strzelczyk, the former Steelers lineman who climbed in his pickup truck one day and drove 90 mph into oncoming traffic until he hit a tanker truck head-on and died.

All of the aforementioned were driven mad, a lot of smart folks now believe, by a condition called CTE. And that CTE was a product of their profession, which dictated they fling themselves into other men with foot-pounds of force unimagined by those who played their game four or five decades ago.

I don't know if that affected Phillip Adams. His father thinks so, but that doesn't mean anything. Truth is, it's impossible to know at this point. 

But the mind goes there nonetheless, and keeping it from happening is just as impossible. It's the price football pays for its years of denial about repetitive head trauma and its cumulative effect.

Now they are forever linked. And we will forever be unable not to wonder when a Phillip Adams picks up a gun.

Beauty is a beast

So I'm watching the run-up coverage to the Masters yesterday, and in the background I can see those impeccably radiant flowerbeds cupping the 13th green in the palm of their hand, and it looks like an English garden upon which no human foot ever should trod.  And it reminds me again why the Masters is about the only golf I ever watch on TV.

It's because no other major or minor or Greater Potted Meat Product Open combines its  sheer beauty with its occasionally indescribable horror.

There are the azaleas and Rae's Creek and the Cathedral of Pines and the slant of the late-afternoon sun bathing everything in gold. and there is Greg Norman. Or Rory McIlroy. Or Jordan Spieth or Francesco Molinari or any number of others for whom a Sunday afternoon in the spring of the year became the setting for a Stephen King novel.

The Masters gives you all of it all at the same time, and it is wondrous and soulful and awful and cringe-worthy. It is spring announcing that winter is finally, fully over, and Norman losing a six-stroke lead on Sunday like the drip of water torture, a hooked drive  followed by a butchered approach followed by a missed 10-footer, and then a three-foot gimme sliding past the cup on the comebacker.

It is McIlroy yanking a drive into the wilderness with the green jacket there for the taking.  It is Spieth unraveling on the back nine like a plucked stitch. It is Molinari, with the ghost of Young Tiger coming hard after him, swallowing hard and going swimming on both 12 and 15.

Against that Monet backdrop, it is a horribly fascinating thing to watch, like slowing down to rubberneck a car crash. And then you blink and there's Jack Nicklaus striding up the 18th fairway on his ancient unconquerable legs, the fabled Augusta roar going up to through the pines around him, and it is all beauty again.

It began again this morning, and, no, I  have no idea who's going to win. But it's going to be a hell of a thing to discover, in that lovely, beastly garden, who it is that loses it least.

Citius, altius, moral imperit-us

 I love the Winter Olympics.

I love the downhill and the giant slalom and Jean-Claude Killy-Klammer falling down an Alp in a giant cartoon snowball with skis and poles sticking out of it. I love short-track speedskating, aka NASCAR On Ice. I love the bobsled and luge and skeleton and curling's bizarre fascination, and that one guy who used to fall off the ski jump at the beginning of every episode of ABC's Wide World of Sports.

Shoot. I can even tolerate figure skating, despite its goofy, inexplicable scoring and sequin overload.

So it was with some dismay and a few flashbacks that I opened up ESPN's website the other day to read that President Biden is huddling with allies of the United States to figure out a game plan for the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. And by "game plan," I mean "How do we hold China's feet to the fire for its deplorable human rights record?"

Among the options: A boycott.

And here is where the flashbacks come in.

Talk of an Olympic boycott, see, always takes me back to 1980, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan and then-President Carter decided the United States would not be participating in the Summer Games in Moscow that year. Much debate ensued.

Some people wondered about the fairness of a decision that would likely not stop anything happening in Afghanistan, but deprive hundreds of Americans who'd trained for years and sacrificed both physically and financially. In a nation founded on the concept of individual liberty, should the moral imperative of the whole eclipse an individual's historic right to pursue happiness?

I concluded at the time it should not, given that any boycott would be primarily symbolic. I was younger then, of course, and so was the world. The Berlin Wall had not yet come down, the towers still stood and America had not yet elected a black president. And so the weight of symbolism was not yet as apparent.

This time around?

It's different. Unlike the old Soviet Union, China's a business partner, albeit a contentious one. It's also an adversary, and increasingly more than that. The global economy, and the global village knit together by millennial technology, has complicated the once black-and-white dynamic of Us vs. Them.

On the other hand, symbolism still has its uses. And China's human rights record, particularly in regards to Hong Kong, is not something whose whitewashing the United States nor its allies should eagerly abet.

And if our athletes march into Beijing under the Olympic rings and the Olympic torch, and ski and skate and play hockey and make nice under the American flag, that is precisely what they'd be doing. Or so the rationale goes.

On the other hand, politics and what-not.

People are all wrathy these days about politics and sports, and how they shouldn't mix and blah-blah-blah. Currently those of a certain persuasion are mad at Major League Baseball for pulling the All-Star Game out of Georgia, on account of MLB isn't down with the local voter suppression initiatives. They say sports should stay out of politics, and then inject politics into it themselves by threatening to boycott baseball over the MLB's decision.

They don't really want sports out of politics, see. They want sports out of their politics -- unless of course the sports agree with their politics.

Or maybe you think all those giant American flags and military flyovers and Salutes to the Troops at sporting events aren't political statements themselves. 

That's different, of course, because they're political statements of which those of a certain persuasion approve. And in any case, sports and politics have always been part of the same weave, from the moment William Howard Taft became the first President of the United States to toss out the first pitch on Opening Day.

That begat the National Anthem, which begat Hitler using the '36 Olympics to glorify the Third Reich, which begat John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising black-gloved fists into the Mexico City night. And the political undertones of Fischer-vs.-Spassky, U.S.-Soviet medal counts, the Miracle On Ice and the dueling boycotts of Moscow and Los Angeles in 1980 and '84.

So: Boycott or no?

I don't know. It's not 1980 anymore, and in the intervening years we invaded Afghanistan and began killing Afghans ourselves. So I sympathize with the idea of a boycott, but I also understand how moral imperatives can come back to bite you.

I wish I was as sure about it as I was when I was 25, in other words. But I'm 66 now, and surety doesn't come as readily these days.

Stupid time. 

Elusive perfection

 Ugly plaid jackets of some combustible weave are still the rage this morning, because in Indiana there is still Indiana and don't you forget it. Don't you dare.

And so 45 minutes north of where a legend with hideous fashion sense once ranted and raved and bullied his Indiana Hoosiers to 32-0, Gonzaga failed to match last night. A Baylor team with frightening stores of firepower, will and focus punished the Bulldogs from pillar to post, jumping out to a 9-0 lead and curb-stomping perfection with a wire-to-wire win.

The final was Baylor 86, Gonzaga 70, and 31 wins and one defeat for the Zags. And 45 years and counting for anyone to do what the Hoosiers and Bob Knight did in 1976.

It was a different time then, and not just because people thought plaid sports jackets were a good look. There was no three-point arc, and the game was more studied and less athletic and less freewheeling as a result. There are still offensive sets in the game today -- check out how well Gonzaga moves the basketball when it's right -- but they are different sets with different desired goals. It's no longer about merely finding the easiest shot close to the rim; now it's about doing that or finding the open look on the arc.

Baylor did both with bloodless precision last night, and Gonzaga never had a chance. The Zags looked out of rhythm from the outset, and there's probably truth that some of it was the residue of their epic overtime semifinal against UCLA. But a lot of it was Baylor brutally strangling Gonzaga's usual lovely flow at one end, and never seeming to miss an open look at the other.

In the immediate aftermath, some people picked at the bones of that and concluded The Zags were always a counterfeit unbeaten. It was an easy take and, like most easy takes, both hugely unfair and hugely witless.

Truth is, Mark Few put together an exquisite team this year, and until that semifinal against UCLA no one seriously challenged it. If you could watch the Zags play and not conclude you were watching something special ... well, maybe basketball isn't your thing.

Unfortunately for Gonzaga, Baylor was even more special. In the Final Four, the Bears blitzed their two opponents by a combined 35 points. It doesn't get more dominant than that, or more impeccable.

And because it was, plaid's still in season. Deal with it, fashionistas.

Championship nights

 They played the NCAA basketball championship game last night, and the top seed in Da Tournament hung on to win by a single point. It was an impeccably contested game, as everyone figured it would be.

The team that won hadn't won a national title in 29 years. Its coach is a college basketball coaching legend who's now won more games than any coach in history, and for whom last night's title was the third.

Her name is Tara VanDerveer.

The team she coaches is Stanford.

It beat Arizona, 54-53, when a contested 3-point attempt by Wildcats' star Aari McDonald died unblessed at the buzzer.

"But wait, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "You said this was the national championship game. Shouldn't you have said it was the women's national championship game?"

Well, yes, I suppose.

But if it's tomorrow morning and I'm writing about the men's NCAA championship game tonight between unbeaten Gonzaga and Baylor, and I call it the NCAA championship game the way a whole raft of folks tend to do, would you have asked the same question?

No you would not.

Because the men are the men, see, and the women are That Other Thing. It has always been thus in the public mind, and that's not the public's fault. That's the way the NCAA itself has always treated it. And that was made starkly evident this month when it got out just how steerage-class the NCAAs were treating the women's tournament as opposed to the men's.

Much "What the HELL?!" tumbled down on the NCAAs as a result, and also a lot of misogynist noise about how the men generate more revenue so they should be treated better. It is 2021, after all. Sticking up for the overdog is all the rage in some circles.

The good news, sort of, is that's a much more egregious insult now than it ever has been. And that's because the women put on such a fabulous show this time around.

Their tournament was as competitive as it's ever been, with 13s beating 4s and 12s beating 5s and Arizona taking down Connecticut in the kind of monumental upset that traditionally puts the Madness in March. UConn, the monolith whose dominance has made the women's tournament all but moot so many years, hasn't won a national title since 2016. 

Four different schools -- South Carolina, Notre Dame, Baylor and now Stanford -- have won the women's championship since.  Which suggests the pool of talent coming out of high school these days is as deep as it's ever been, and it's not all going one or two places.

That's a good thing.

That is, in fact, a great thing.

No qualifiers need apply.

The day the ASG went down in Georgia

 Some beer vendor is gonna be out the rent money because of  baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. I guess that's the narrative now.

Some beer vendor, some small business owner, some ballpark worker, they're gonna be hurt because Major League Baseball is pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. And maybe that's true. Maybe that has legs. 

What doesn't have legs is who's being blamed for this.

It's not MLB who'll be depriving some working folks of a payday, see. It's the Republicans in the Georgia statehouse, who put this whole thing in motion to begin with.

They're the ones you blame here, because they're the ones who passed the law that drove the All-Star game out of Atlanta. They're the ones who passed a raft of new voting regulations so blatantly targeting the voters who dared to reject Donald Trump last November you could only marvel at the gall of it.

It's not just that the new law is a solution in search of a problem, sweeping reform to ensure "free and fair elections" none of the bill's proponents thought was an issue until their guy lost. It that it's so obviously voter suppression in service to a power grab. 

If you can't beat 'em at the ballot box, move the ballot box farther away, provide fewer of them and take control of the process. That's the name of this tune.

It may not be precisely a wormhole back to Jim Crow, as the President and others have characterized it. But that's only because Georgia Repubs forgot to include poll taxes and literacy tests, no doubt an accidental oversight. Aside from that, Jim Crow's only a street or two over.

In response, Manfred decided his All-Stars didn't need to associate with these clowns. You can debate that moving the All-Star Game hurts some of the very people the new law targets, but you can't debate that MLB's heart is in the right place.

Maybe a better solution would have been to go ahead with the game and just let most of the players boycott it. Because a lot of them would. That way the beer vendors would get paid, but Atlanta wouldn't get any All-Stars to watch -- or Home-Run Derby participants, for that matter.

Then, on game night, send out a handful of select players to unfurl a banner that reads THIS "ALL-STAR GAME" BROUGHT TO YOU BY YOUR STATE LEGISLATORS. ENJOY.

Yes, sir. I think that has legs, too.

Benchmarked

The NCAA trotted out its Gilded Age philosophy for the Supreme Court the other day, and the Supremes weren't buying it any more than any other thinking person in the land. Even Justice Thomas, whose primary role is to look grave and importantly clear his throat every so often, had something to say.

Justice Thomas wanted to know, if big-deal college football and basketball really are amateur athletics, why do their coaches get paid so much. It's a damn good observation.

Also making a damn good observation was Justice Kavanaugh, who pointed out it's some fine circular thinking for the NCAA to say its "student-athletes" shouldn't be paid employees because the consumers of their product don't want them paid. In other words, you can't say you're not a business beholden to business principles (i.e., paying your employees) if you're also admitting you have consumers.

Justice Alito called BS on the NCAA's argument, too. And Justice Coney Barrett just thought the NCAA's entire position was Weird City, which makes her merely one among millions.

Fact is, the NCAA's entire position is Weird City, not to say a farce, and it has been for a long time. The universities raking in all the jack from D-I college football and basketball want you to believe this really is the Gilded Age -- all sis-boom-bah and raccoon coats and smuggled flasks on fall afternoons, cheering lustily as Our Lads crush Their Lads with that newfangled flying wedge.

'Taint so, and everyone knows it. It's a straight-up bidness proposition now, as corporate as Microsoft or Amazon, complete with major sponsorships and TV dough and even individual schools and conferences cutting their own broadcast deals. And yet the workforce that produces all that revenue stream is still being paid in services and amenities only.

Little wonder the workforce is organizing and demanding a meeting with the NCAA's de facto CEO, Mark Emmert. Little wonder even the famously reticent Justice Thomas is asking some damn good questions these days.

And as he does, you can see the whole rotten structure teetering. You can see it tremble on its foundation with every question from the highest bench in the nation, with every basketball player who's worn #NotNCAAProperty on their uniforms during March, with Emmert agreeing to meet with some of those players, even if he planned it to be away from the NCAA Tournament spotlight.

There's a wind out there, boys and girls. And it's strengthening.

Opening Day, a brief Part Deux

 Wait ... what?

My cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Cubs 5-3 on Opening Day in Wrigley Field?

All those Cubs fans froze to death AND watched their lads go down to the worst team in baseball?

And now the Cruds are undefeated on the season? And a game better than the la-di-da New York Yankees, who lost yesterday as is only right and just?

One game in, and the Cruds are already better than the pinstriped goofs. And 162-0 is STILL ATTAINABLE. 

God. I love baseball.

Opening Day

 It was 28 degrees when I took the new pup outside to do her business this morning, but that's OK. Because it's Opening Day in baseball, or just opening day.

It's also April Fool's Day, which means it is totally acceptable to believe my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates are going to experience a joyous resurrection (this being Holy Week as well) and win, I don't know, 60 games.

April Fool's! The Cruds are only going to win 50 or so, and we all know it.

As to everything else, this is the official-official first day of spring for a bunch of congregants, the average age of which creeps upward every year. This is a major concern for baseball, which long ago lost its mantle as the National Pastime to the Megalomart NFL. The former is too slow and too anticipatory and too obsessed with alphabet-soup minutiae to appeal to a generation raised on Call of Duty and instant gratification. 

WAR? WHIP? BABIP? WTHC? (Who The Hell Cares?) 

Little wonder that baseball's demographic skews heavily toward the AARP (another acronym!) these days. Little wonder, too, that Opening Day is a non-descript Thursday this year instead of, say, a Sunday or Monday -- because if Opening Day was one of those more traditional days of the week, it would get buried by Final Four coverage.

Truth is, baseball is a pastoral sport rendered more pastoral than it was ever intended to be, which means it is as out of touch with its times as it has ever been. The games, especially those interminable Red Sox-Yankees sagas, plod along for hours and hours. If a batter isn't going yard, he's going yawn by striking out. Moving a runner along with a well-placed bunt is a lost art, because bunting itself is a lost art.

And, yes, I am proving my hypothesis about baseball's demographic by sounding like the archetypal shaking-his-liver-spotted-fist geezer. .

And yet ...

And yet: Opening Day.

Which calls up all sorts of trace memories, because for all its modern-day faults baseball traffics in trace memories like no other American game. With rare exceptions, the details of Super Bowls fade from memory almost immediately,  and they are not sensory things. Baseball is.

And so for me, Opening Day will always be a raw gray day in Wrigley Field when Lake Michigan roared and the wind off it carried snow on its breath. It will be a rain-soaked day in Jacobs Field in Cleveland that stretched long into a well-lubricated night in the city's watering holes. 

It will be those yearly trips to Cincinnati, which for years traditionally christened Opening Day as the lone game on the schedule. This was 40 years ago, during my Anderson days, and I always hitched a ride with a wonderful old character named Clarence Young, who was the sports editor of the newspaper in Elwood. One year it snowed the night before the game, and a photo went out on the wires of San Diego pitcher Randy Jones building a snowman in the visiting dugout. 

Another year, the Reds hosted the Cubs on Opening Day right after the Cubs swung that deal for all those Phillies, and I got yelled at by Larry Bowa for asking a question about his leadership skills instead of his skills at shortstop. 

It wasn't as mortifying as you might think for a young sportswriter. It was more like: Wow! I got yelled at by LARRY BOWA!

I suppose today I'd only get yelled at by some ballclub flack for groaning too loudly in the pressbox as some Opening Day slogfest dragged on and on ... and on.

Sigh.