Gettin' vaxxy

 Sometimes I actually agree with Colin Cowherd, pre-eminent FoxSports fluff brain. It happens about as often as it hits 116 in Portland, Ore.

Which, coincidentally happened on Monday, prompting this reaction from climate change Flat Earthers: "Well, these things will happen." Across the ideological aisle, meanwhile, the reaction was this: "OMIGOD THE EARTH IS GOING TO TURN INTO A CINDER ON THE FOURTH OF JULY."

In any event, Portland hitting 116 and Cowherd and I agreeing on something happened the same day, which suggests a certain cosmic balance of the rare. What we agreed on was that women are smarter than men, and as proof Cowherd noted that of all the major professional sports leagues, the WNBA by far leads the way in the number of athletes who've been vaccinated against the Bastard Plague.

Ninety-nine percent of WNBA players have gotten their shots. That means all 12 teams are now considered fully vaccinated.

Meanwhile, the dopey men are still dragging ass on the vaccination front, some of them for the usual dopey anti-vaxxers reasons. Cole Beasley of the Buffalo Bills, for instance, recently said he didn't need to get vaccinated because he trusted in God to protect him, and didn't understand why more people didn't just trust in God.

Which immediately produced this thought bubble over the Almighty's head: "WHY DO YOU THINK I GAVE SCIENTISTS THE WISDOM TO COME UP WITH A VACCINE, YOU MORON?"

Look. I get it. There are crazy people everywhere in America, because in America you're allowed to be as crazy as you want, even if you're a certain ex-president or a congress critter with the initials "Marjorie Taylor Greene." And so President Biden's goal to get everyone vaccinated is likely doomed. There are simply too many crazies out there who believe the vaccine causes autism or athlete's foot or is Antifa's secret plan to control our minds and make us learn socialism (spelled, "Socialism! Aiee!") and Critical Race Theory.

Many of these crazies are men, and some are athletes of the man persuasion. And so even though the numbers tell us virtually everyone still winding up in the hospital with the Bastard Plague are the unvaccinated, there will still be a fair number of Cole Beasleys in the Man Sports.

Not in the WNBA, though. In the WNBA, the women figured it out a long time ago: The quicker you get the stupid shot, the quicker we'll put the Bastard Plague down for good. And the quicker we'll all get the freedom the anti-vaxxers are always caterwauling about -- and which certain lawmakers have fed into by passing laws prohibiting businesses from keeping diseased people out of their establishments.

Listen to the women of the WNBA, people. Get the shot.

Bracket busters 2.0

 I don't know when the Euro Cup soccer tournament turned into the first two days of the NCAA Tournament. But I do know some brackets are already cinders.

(This, of course, assumes there is such a thing as Euro Cup brackets. I suspect there aren't. That seems like an American thing. And besides, who gets to be Loyola?)

(Oh, right. That would be Switzerland.)

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. Switzerland, the land of picturesque mountains, numbered bank accounts and two official languages, just pulled a Loyola on one of the tournament favorites. The Swiss knocked out France yesterday on penalty kicks, a huge, Sister Jean-like upset. This came a day after the Netherlands got Clockwork Orange-d by the Czech Republic -- perhaps an even bigger upset because the Czechs won 2-0, which is like 28-0 on the Adjusted American Football Scale

So, two days, two 12-over-5s or some other equivalent. They must have been hootin' and hollerin' in the Czech Republic and Switzerland -- the latter, of course, in a restrained, orderly Swiss fashion, in French in Lausanne and Geneva and Swiss German (which sounds only vaguely like German German) in Lucerne and Zurich.

This no doubt caused great consternation among the Dutch and French, who are probably even now burning their respective team managers in effigy. Or at least demanding they be fired after an appropriate display of abject shame and remorse.

Old-school fans in Amsterdam and Paris, meanwhile, are no doubt wagging their heads in the outdoor cafes over how little respect These Kids Today have for the old traditions, and how little pride in country.

"If only we still had Van Persie and Robben!" Crabby Netherlands Guy laments.

"If only we still had Zidane and Henry!" Crabby French Guy echoes. 

And in America, meanwhile?

Some crabby Illinois basketball fan, still smarting over the March Madness loss to Loyola, is shaking his head knowingly.

"Welcome to my world," he's saying.

And then: "That damn nun."

Adulting, the fail edition

 The Blob has always maintained that youth sports would be a lot better, and more wholesome, maybe, if only the youth were allowed to participate.

Adults only muck things up, frequently. Especially the adults sitting in the bleachers, who labor under the delusion that little Jimmy could be the next Michael Jordan/Pele/Walter Payton/Willie Mays if the idiot refs would stop picking on him and that idiot coach would just let him play and keep all the other loser kids on the bench.

Also ... hey, let's throw tortillas at the Latino kids!

Which actually happened at a recent basketball game in San Diego, where players from Orange Glen, a predominantly Latino high school, were showered with tortillas by the opposing players after losing in a regional championship game. Here's the story, courtesy of Carron Phillips of Deadspin.

And who supplied the offenders with the tortillas?

Why, an alleged adult, of course!

No wonder kids don't know how to act these days.

And speaking of acting, how about this splendid example of adulting?

Seriously? Brawling at a bleeping tee ball game?

I mean, OK, it was Kentucky, but still. Why is the "coach" even disputing a call? Does he not realize he's not managing the Cubs or Yankees, but a bunch of 5-to-7-year-olds who (if my experience watching tee ball is any guide) are probably playing in the dirt at third base or sitting on first counting their toes? 

Yo, chief. You're not Sparky Anderson or Tommy Lasorda. You're just some neighborhood guy trying to keep a bunch of little kids from wandering off between innings. And "parents"?

The last I saw your little Jimmy, he was manning second base by staring out toward the outfield. And now he's probably in tears, thanks to you, because a lot of the kids in Kentucky were after the alleged grownups started throwing down and the cops showed up.

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. The police were called to break up a fight at a tee-ball game. I can only imagine what the officers who responded were thinking.

I'm guessing something along the lines of, "What the f***?"

And the Blob's reaction?

I say ban the alleged grownups. And no organized sports until a kid is, I don't know, 11 or 12. The gifted kids will still rise to the top -- and without all that AAU/travel ball noise, they'll probably be a hell of a lot more well-adjusted.

Works for me.

Tour de L0OK OUT!

 This morning the Blob checks in on the Tour de France, aka, That Bicycle Thingy, aka, That Bicycle Thingy No One In America Has Cared Much About Since Lance "The Mob Boss of Juicing" Armstrong Got Busted.

We're checking in on it because the other day a new stupid spectator champion was crowned.

That's because some doofus decided to hold out a "Hi Grandma" sign as the peloton swept down on him, causing a cyclist to hit the sign and fall, which in turn caused nearly the entire peloton to crash in a gigantic dogpile of expensive bicycling equipment. 

Here's the video. Impressive, no?

The Blob has searched the dim recesses of its mind (which would be pretty much all the recesses these days), and it can't think of another stupid spectator episode in which an entire sporting event came to such a catastrophic halt because of said stupid spectator.

I mean, fans have gotten onto various fields before and run around like idiots, and just a week or so ago a naked spectator burst onto the course at the U.S. Open, pulled out a club and a couple of balls and hit them, then frolicked around until corralled by course officials.

But none of the golfers ran into each other and wound up in a pile of logo caps and alpaca because of him. And all the idiots who've ever gotten onto various fields didn't bring any games to a screeching halt or cause possible injury to any of the competitors.

Although Mike "Mad Dog" Curtis did knock the crap out of one of the idiots once upon a time.

No, whoever this particular idiot was set a new standard for stupid spectator behavior. So here's to him.

Or, you know, not.

Crotchety old guy rant. The Stanley Cup edition.

A guy named Yanni Gourde scored a goal last night and another guy named Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped every shot the New York Islanders threw at him, so there will be no nostalgia walk for the Blob today.

No Mike Bossy references. No wondering what Billy Smith or Bryan Trottier or Clark Gillies or Denis Potvin are thinking. No Blobbish fake quotes from Bobby Nystrom or Butch Goring.

OK. Maybe a couple.

"Dammit!" (Butch Goring)

"Crap!" (Bobby Nystrom)

Guessing those are reasonably accurate because, as we've already observed, the Islanders lost to the Tampa Bay Lightning 1-0 in Game 7 of the conference finals. Which means the Lightning will face the Montreal Canadiens, a proper NHL hockey team, in the Stanley Cup Final.

If the Lighting win, and they probably will, they'll repeat as Cup champions. And that means Lord Stanley's chalice will stay in Florida.

All together now: Crap! 

Also, Dammit!

This is because I'm a crotchety old man who hates change and kids on his lawn and stupid clouds, and it's his considered opinion that a bunch of imposters from Florida winning Stanley is wrong, wrong, wrong. In my crotchety view, Stanley should never be allowed anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line that isn't St. Louis. 

That's because there are no real hockey towns down there. They're all posers.

I mean, come on. Last year Tampa Bay and Dallas played in the Stanley Cup Final, which was ridiculous. It was like turning on the Masters and hearing Jim Nantz say "A tradition unlike any other," except he's not at Augusta but Frozen Moose Country Club in FlinFlon. 

Wrong. So, so wrong.

And, yes, I know Florida's full of Canadian snowbirds and they got a big charge out of Tampa winning the Cup last year. But then they all slipped on their sunglasses and shower slippers, slathered on some SP 300 and headed to the beach. Maybe they even took Stanley parasailing instead of, you know, throwing him in a frozen canal the way tradition demands.

Stanley, parasailing. Or tarpon fishing. Or reeling around in his cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt with a mojito in his hand.

Yeesh. Some images should not be allowed.

Forward to the past

 So the reviews are in as the Indiana Pacers announce they're going forward into the past, dusting off Rick Carlisle and naming him their new/old head coach.

In no particular order, here they are:

1. "Finally, an established coach!"

2. "Finally, a coach who's, like, 100 years old!"

And last but not least ...

3. "Rick Carlisle? Didn't he coach the Pacers when Freddie Lewis was playing for them?"

Please. Let's not exaggerate.

Carlisle's not 100 years old. He's only 61.

And he didn't coach Freddie Lewis, who's 77 now. He coached Reggie Miller and Dale Davis, who are only 55 and 52, respectively.

He went on from the Pacers to coach the Dallas Mavericks, who won the NBA title in 2011 with Carlisle on the bench. He coached the Mavs for 13 years, leaving at the end of this season amid reports that he and the Mavs' 22-year-old star Luka Doncic didn't see eye-to-eye.

This is not unusual for Carlisle, it seems. He's an old-school Oscar the Grouch type, and while he's an excellent coach -- in addition to the 2011 title, he coached the Pacers to 61 wins and the conference finals in 2003-04 -- he also has a history of wearing out his welcome. The knock on Carlisle is he's not a players coach nor a great communicator, which is why his returns tend to diminish over time.

That happened with the Pacers. It apparently happened in Dallas. And now he comes to a team whose players have basically run off the last two coaches because they couldn't get along with them.

The Pacers' solution: "Let's bring back a guy who's even harder to get along with than the last two guys!"

Which suggests the franchise is about to embark on a major roster turnover to accommodate its new coach, or the current roster is going to be tasked with a major attitude adjustment.

I'm leaning toward the latter, because, frankly, this is a roster that seems to need an attitude adjustment. They grumbled Nate Bjorken out of town; he was gone after one injury-plagued and underwhelming season. This was after they'd grumbled Nate McMillan out of town, too.

All he's done is go to Atlanta and coach the Hawks to the Eastern Conference finals. A big part of that, reportedly, is the bond he's formed with the team's young star, Trae Young.

Which indicates Nate McMillan wasn't the problem in Indianapolis.

It also indicates if there's a problem in Indianapolis again, it won't just be Rick Carlisle's famous inability to relate to his players. It'll be the players' famous inability to relate to their coaches.

Strap in, boys and girls. Gonna be a hell of a ride.

Les Habitants!

 You gotta love the Stanley Cup playoffs. They're the best of all playoffs because stuff happens there that rarely happens in any other playoffs.

Like the Montreal Canadiens, for instance.

Who, OK, have happened all the time in the Stanley Cup playoffs, but not recently. And by "recently" we mean "not since Tone Loc was a thing."

That would be 1993, which is the last time the Canadiens reached the Stanley Cup Final. That's 28 years to you and me, boys and girls, and that's a good stretch of time for a franchise that won the Cup every other year or so back when Rocket Richard and Guy Lafleur and Yvan Cournoyer (the most mispronounced name in hockey history) were doing their thing.

Now they're back in the Final again, thanks to a 3-2 overtime victory that rubbed out the Las Vegas Golden Knights in six games. This means hockey royalty has returned to its anointed place, sort of. And by "sort of," we mean "not really, because these Les Habitants are not the Richard/Lafeur/Cournoyer Les Habitants.

These Habs are as un-Habby as un-Habby gets.

They are, you see, the doggiest of underdogs, because they had the worst won-lost record of any team to make the playoffs this year. Their archrival, the Toronto Maple Leafs, were supposed to take them out in the first round.

Unfortunately for Leafs fans, the Leafs did their usual Leaf things, mainly choke big-time after forging a three-games-to-one lead. So on the Habs went and on they kept going against the form sheet, and now they're in the Final.

Which is great, understand, even if Carey Price is their goalie these days instead of Ken Dryden or Jacques Plante. And even if someone named Arrturi Lehkonen scored the clinching OT goal last night, and not, say, Serge Savard. 

It's great because it means an actual iconic hockey city has a shot at hoisting the Cup instead of, you know, some city in Florida or southern California or even Texas, for God's sake. And it's the underdog this time, which only makes rooting for them sweeter.

Thanks, hockey.

Gettin' religion

 And now the latest from Cringe Mode Central, aka the NCAA. aka #ohmigodtheextinctioneventisuponus:

The overseers of "amateur" collegiate athletics have gotten religion.

Which is another way of saying they've gotten their tails kicked in court so many times -- the latest a 9-0 get-that-weak-s***-outta-here rejection by the Supremes -- they've decided to come out with their hands up.

In the wake of all the legal smackdowns, the Division I board of governors has been scrambling to put together a waiver to extend student-athletes name, image and likeness (NIL) rights. This is happening in advance of July 1, when at least six states will have NIL laws going into effect.

The lesson here?

That you can only maintain a BS construct until someone with some clout -- state leges, the courts, etc. -- calls you on your BS. Then you have to say, "Yeah, OK, everything we've been doing/saying/legislating is complete hogwash. It was all just a scam to make a pile of money on the backs of a labor force we maintained to the world wasn't a labor force."

And now?

Well, gee, now it turns out the NCAA member schools didn't need to do that at all, despite all their sky-is-falling chatter about the evils of student-athletes accepting an occasional free Happy Meal or some such thing. Turns out they only said that stuff because, well, they wanted to keep the pile  all to themselves.

Funny how quickly that tune changes when a bunch of folks in black robes say "Nah, sorry. Try again." Funny how magnanimous they get all of a sudden.

Charity doesn't begin at home, see. It begins when someone puts a big-ass legal gun to your head.

A trip to the bushes

 I learned to ice skate at McMillen Park Indoor Ice Arena. Sort of.

I was a south side boy and McMillen was south side, too, and so that's where I learned to skate, or at least to wobble around the ice like a newborn calf. I was never what you could call physically gifted, see. Athletically, I came in somewhere between Tree Stump and Driveway Gravel on the speed/agility/hand-eye coordination scale.

So I wobbled around the ice at McMillen, which was perfect for such purposes. It played host to youth hockey and figure-skating classes and wobblers like me, and never aspired to anything greater, because greater was not why it was built.

For instance, the Komets never played the Turner Cup finals there.

They will, however, play the first two games of their first Kelly Cup finals here, which looks a lot like old McMillen to me. Hat tip to my old friend and local sportscaster Brett Rump for the pics. 

Anyway, this is the Carolina Ice Palace, and there's a few bleachers on one side and not a whole lot else in terms of amenities, same as McMillen. It's also nowhere the ECHL should be playing its premier event unless it wants to announce to the world it's a bush league and always will be a bush league.

See, the Komets are playing the South Carolina Stingrays in the Kelly Cup finals, and South Carolina's legit arena, the 14,000-seat North Charleston Coliseum & Performing Arts Center, is unfortunately already booked. So McMillen Squared it is.

And an embarrassment for the ECHL it is.

Look. I'm an outsider looking in, so I don't know what sort of calendar gymnastics the league would have to perform to re-jigger the finals sked. But surely, something, anything, would be better than this. 

Now, understand, I do sympathize, at least some. These are not normal times. If they were normal times, the playoffs would be best-of-seven, not best-of-five. And the Kelly Cup finals, if they go the distance, wouldn't be winding up the day before the Fourth of July.

But this is still a joke. This is like playing the first two games of the World Series in a vacant lot because the Rolling Stones Oxygen Tanks 'N' Walkers Tour is booked into Fenway. Something, anything would be better than this.

Yes, I know I already said that.

Bears repeating.

Coming out: A primer

 I don't know where Dave Kopay is these days, so I don't know how he took the news. Maybe with a smile and a sigh. Maybe with an extremely heartfelt, "Finally." Maybe neither of the above.

What I do know is Kopay is 78 years old now, and he was only 35 when his biography, "The Dave Kopay Story," came out. That was in 1977, five years after he retired from the Green Bay Packers as a journeyman running back. In nine NFL seasons, he played for five teams. His career numbers were unremarkable: 876 yards and three touchdowns.

What was remarkable is what he revealed in his biography. Namely, that he was gay.

This was a hell of a thing in 1977, and it was even more a hell of a thing because Kopay was perhaps the first gay professional athlete to openly come out. That he'd been a gay professional athlete in perhaps the most testosterone-saturated of American sports was yet more a hell of a thing.

I know this because it took 44 more years for a gay professional football player to come out while he was actually playing.

That player is Carl Nassib, 28, a defensive end for the Las Vegas Raiders. He told the world yesterday. And if I don't know how Dave Kopay reacted, I do know he understands better than anyone what it took for Nassib to do what he did. 

Kopay couldn't, not in the 1960s and early '70s; that he did so in 1977, after he quit, still demands our admiration for the courage it took.  As does what Nassib did yesterday, because even if 44 years is a long time, it's still not long enough for some folks.

Which is to say there was likely the inevitable backlash from the usual suspects, many of whom no doubt had the standard reaction to these things: "I don't care if he's gay. Why does he have make a big deal out of it? Why do 'they' have to shove it down our throats?"

First off, we all know who "they" are, and what that last question implies about those asking it.

Secondly, the answer to Why does he have to make a big deal out of it? is a simple one.

Because it's not about you, chief.

A Carl Nassib comes out publicly because it's a big deal to him, and it's for his own well-being, and it's also for the well-being of those like him he knows are out there. He's not trying to shove anything down our throats or indulge himself at our expense. Again, it's not about us.

So enough with our own self-indulgence, and just say, "Good on you, Carl Nassib."

And then remember Dave Kopay, and say, "Forty-four years was too damn long." 

Posterized

 Somewhere out there worlds just collided, and the universe has come undone. Quint and the Shark from "Jaws" are drinking buddies. Lions have laid down with lambs. Donald John Trump and his Q-Aninny fan club have stopped spinning fanciful tales.

All this because the Supremes heard the NCAA's rationale for using its "student-athletes" as a de facto workforce, and posterized it 9-0.

Also, Brett Kavanaugh -- yes, that Brett Kavanaugh -- summed it up in a way that had even  broken-down old lefties like me cheering.

The universe undone, indeed.

"Nowhere else in America can you get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate," Justice Brett wrote in a concurring opinion to Neil Gorsuch's majority ruling.

In other words: You can't say your workforce isn't a workforce just so you can get away with paying it only in goods and services.

This essentially is what the NCAA has been doing for years and years, and yesterday even hard constructionist righties like Kavanaugh called 'em on their bushwah. In NCAA vs. Alston, SCOTUS ruled unanimously in favor of Alston, saying the NCAA can't limit compensation when it comes to education-related benefits.

This doesn't exactly mandate that the NCAA has to start compensating its workforce the way any other workforce gets compensated. But that's where we're headed now, and the NCAA knows it.

And it's brought it on itself, by turning college athletics into a cash-flow industry that for years has been wholly separate from the academic mission of the universities it's used as the mechanism to generate that cash. Maintaining an illusion of amateurism was just a way to justify punishing kids for taking a cheeseburger from a booster or wanting to transfer without penalty to whatever school he or she wanted.

The foundation for this construct has always been the concept of "impermissible benefits," which the NCAA defines as benefits not available to the average Joe or Jill College. The problem with that is a lot of those "impermissible benefits" -- being able to work during the school year, or being able to use one's talents to trade on one's name or image -- were available to Joe or Jill College.

A kinda-sorta for-instance: During the Blob's dimly remembered college days as a journalism major at Ball State, it earned beer money by stringing high school basketball games for the Muncie Star. My byline appeared atop my game stories. For that use of my name as a sportswriter in training, I was paid the princely sum of 25 bucks a game.

Yet the basketball player who lived down the hall in my dorm couldn't trade on his name as a basketball player. After all, he was already getting an allegedly free education.

I wasn't, although I knew other Joe or Jill Colleges who earned scholarships for their talents the same as the basketball or football players. Which means the basketball or football players weren't being treated like college students at all. They were being treated like, yes, a workforce.

As the Supremes pointed out yesterday. Resoundingly.

Charity of the gods

 Those golf gods. They are a fickle lot.

They giveth, they taketh away, they giveth again, and the only explanation for any of it is that they must spend an inordinate amount of time at the 19th hole, gettin' communal with the sippin' whiskey. 

"I know!" one of them says, looking down on the mortals. "Let's make Bryson DeChambeau shoot a 77!"

And then they all giggle.

"Hey!" another one says. "Why don't we screw Louis Oosthuizen AGAIN!"

And they practically fall on the floor laughing.

Finally, after they've settled down, yet another golf god takes a sip and says this: "What do say, guys? Have we tortured Jon Rahm enough?"

Because two weeks ago, the golf gods kicked poor Rahm right in the man place. Had him six strokes clear heading into the last round of the Memorial over in Ohio, then yanked the rug out from under him when a positive Bastard Plague test forced him from the tournament and robbed him of an almost certain win.

Fast forward to yesterday, and finally the gods acknowledged what so many had taken as an article of faith: That the question was not if Jon Rahm would ever win a major, but when.

And so there was the Spaniard who played his collegiate golf at Arizona State and lives now in Scottsdale, standing at the 17th tee a stroke behind Oosthuizen with two holes to play. And there was his golf ball, bending gently into the jar from 25 feet away for one birdie.

And there it was again, lying in a greenside bunker on 18 before Rahm blasted it out and then curled in another sidewinding Rand McNally putt for a second birdie, unleashing a fusillade of fist pumps as the gallery thundered around him.

The second birdie gave him a one-stroke lead, and it held up after Oosthuizen bogied 17 and birdied 18 to again come up just short in a major.

Rahm, on the other hand, became the first man ever to birdie the last two holes of a U.S. Open to win by one shot. On Father's Day. With his father, his wife and their10-week-old baby on hand to see it. And with an acknowledgment, after it was done, that he'd done it for Seve -- i.e., Seve Ballesteros, spirit father of every Spanish golfer everywhere.

And somewhere the golf gods raised their glasses, toasted their work and agreed they'd done a good thing this day.

History's eddies

 You'll find Josh Gibson's name on Baseball Reference's major league record lists now, and Oscar Charleston's, too. Satchel Paige is all over the strikeout category. Many others.

This is because Baseball Reference added the stats of Negro League stars to its exhaustive compilation of numbers this week, a clear admission of an obvious truth: That the Negro Leagues, born of racist exclusion, were just as major as the major leagues, and therefore deserve the same consideration. So Josh and Oscar and Satchel 'n' them are right there alongside the Babe and Ty Cobb and Lou Gehrig and Walter Johnson, and in some cases ahead of them.

The less charitable would call that political correctness or revisionist history or (the new bogeyman of the right) Critical Race Theory, fetish terms the less charitable use to defend the illusion that history is an exclusive club with a single inviolable storyline. Historical narratives that run counter to that storyline need not apply.

In which case this was a bad week for those folks.

Baseball Reference's inclusion of Negro League records, after all, happened the same week America finally recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday, something it should have been all along. It is not just a black holiday, commemorating the day in 1865 when African-American slaves in Texas -- the last to get the word -- were finally informed they were free. It is as American a holiday as July 4, when we celebrate an independence for which black Americans had to wait another 87 years.

Their Independence Day is June 19, 1865. The U.S. Constitution, crafted by white Americans for white Americans, made that a done deal by declaring Americans of African descent only 3/5 of their white counterparts.

And so what Juneteenth teaches us, what Baseball Reference's long overdue inclusion of the Negro Leagues teaches us, is that there is no such thing as American history. It is, rather, many histories, all of them existing side-by-side and in conjunction with one another. It is not a single stream but a series of eddies and oxbows and riptides, all with their own influence on the course of that stream.

That's why, when those of a certain political bent say it's revisionist history to teach our children anything but one American narrative, they are being truer than they know. By its very nature, all history is revisionist. What Bruce Catton wrote about the Civil War is not what a Jay Winik or Jon Meacham or S.C. Gwynne would write today, because 70 years have passed since Catton and new source material and perspectives have since come to light. That's simply the way these things work.

A classic example of this phenomenon, and the way it gets some folks riled up, is the subject matter of "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of An American Myth," currently occupying the pole position on my nightstand. Co-authored by a non-fiction author, a Texas journalist and the former communications director for the mayor of Austin, it traces the historical roots of Texas' birth and how the accepted Alamo narrative came to be.

Needless to say, the accepted narrative is exclusionary, viciously racist in some aspects and pure hooey in many others -- the classic example of the victors getting to write the history. The hysterical pushback against any alteration, or the inclusion of other valid perspectives (particularly those of Mexican-Americans), is a testament to just how entrenched that narrative has become. 

Even if those other perspectives would provide a truer, more complete picture.

"Revisionist history," see, is not the cuss word some make it, but simply history better and more fully illuminated. The great irony here is at the same time Juneteenth finally was given full recognition as an American holiday, state legislatures, fleeing from the Critical Race Theory bogeyman, are passing laws that would continue to whitewash the narrative Juneteenth represents.

And who benefits from that?

Not our children, certainly. And not our history.

A big bowl of Jimmy

 Exciting news from the steadily expanding world of college bowl games, formerly the exclusive province of auto parts, chicken sandwiches, lending institutions and lawn implements:

Actual live humans can now get their names on a bowl game!

Yes, boys and girls, this is absolutely true. As announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live the other night, the star of Jimmy Kimmel Live, Jimmy Kimmel, will have a bowl game named after himself. On Dec. 18 of this year, the Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl will be unveiled in SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif.

Western Northern Whatsamatta U. and Eastern Bangalore State Tech U. will be the participants.

OK, so that's a lie. But not the Jimmy Kimmel part!

The Blob, which loves obscure nobody-cares bowl games with bizarre names more then anyone, thinks this is the best news since the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl. In fact, we're already hard at work here in the Blobosphere coming up with myriad possibilities to continue what Jimmy Kimmel has started ...

* The Donald J. Trump Do-Over Bowl

In which the competing teams, 5-7 Directional A&M and 0-12 Trump University, keep playing over and over until the damn thing comes out the way Donald J. Trump wants. (Hint: Until Trump University wins).

* The Vladimir Putin Here Just Drink This Bowl

In which the winner, every year, is Vladimir Putin, who plays every position (including all-time center) and somehow beats Alabama 77-3 anyway. Well, except for that one year, when 'Bama won and Nick Saban mysteriously succumbed to radiation poisoning shortly thereafter.

* The Rupert Murdoch Pravda State Media Bowl

In which the Donald J. Trump Do-Over Bowl is declared the greatest bowl game in American history, and if you don't believe it you're a socialist commie who sells children into slavery for Hillary Clinton from the back of a pizza parlor.

* The Matt Gaetz Girls! Girls! Girls! Bowl

In which two teams of scantily-clad underage girls battle it out for an audience limited to coked-up pervo men two or three times their age. An exciting display of bowl-game magic that isn't sick at all!

* The Bryson DeChambeau Troll Bowl

In which DeChambeau videobombs the notoriously wound-so-tight-he-squeaks Brooks Koepka until Koepka's head explodes. Greatest halftime show ever!

* The Aaron Rodgers Cavalcade Of Minicamps Bowl

In which 11-1 Great Big Corporate U., though contractually obligated, fails to show because the bowl committee is making it play in a cow pasture tilted so Great Big Corporate U. always has to trudge up a 30-degree grade to reach the end zone. 

And last but not least ...

* The Jeff Bezos I Own Everything Bowl

In which Jeff Bezos gets to pick the teams, venue and outcome; buys the Rose Bowl so he can call his bowl game the Jeff Bezos I Own Everything Rose Bowl; moves the San Gabriel Mountains to his bowl site so he also can have the Rose Bowl's backdrop; and makes a bazillion-gazillion on the broadcast rights without paying a dime for them because he's FREAKING JEFF BEZOS AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT, LOSERS. 

Then he buys the IRS so he can continue to pay no taxes, and also so he can call his bowl game the Jeff Bezos I Own Everything Rose Bowl Presented By Jeff Bezos' Internal Revenue Service.

Capacity limited to whoever Jeff Bezos decides to let in.

Hurtin' for certain

So I guess by the time this is all over, the NBA Finals will be decided by a Chuck Nevitt double-double. Or maybe by DNP - Coach's Decision putting up 45 and 15 for the Nets in Game 7 of the Finals against  the Yogi Ferrell/Daniel Oturu Clippers.

Hard telling how the NBA's bold experiment in attrition will wind up, now that Kawhi Leonard is out with a bum knee and Chris Paul is in the Covid protocol and Kyrie Irving has an ankle that bent in a particularly alarming manner the other night. 

(Pro tip: Do not watch the replay of Kyrie's injury. When a guy comes down in such a way that you can see the bottom of his shoe, it's not a good thing. And liable to make you lose your lunch.)

Oh, and don't forget James Harden, who played the other night but remains no more mobile than a tree stump thanks to a nagging hamstring injury (as if there's any other kind of hammy injury). And Joel Embiid, whose playing on despite a slight meniscus tear in his right knee. 

So in these NBA playoffs, the stars are definitely out -- and we do mean out. And LeBron James is bashing the League for essentially trying to cram two seasons into a year-and-a-half, saying he tried to warn the poobahs this would happen if they tried.

Now, I don't know if he's right about that or not. But his essential point pertains.

The Blob never did understand the Weird Summer Thing coda the League foisted on everyone in 2020. It never felt right, and not just because the whole thing was played in a Bastard Plague bubble in Orlando and the NBA Finals wrapped in mid-October. It never felt right because, as LeBron points out, it meant there was never really an offseason between last season and this.

The Plague shut down the League in March, and, instead of scrubbing the mission like people with half a brain would have, the Weird Summer Thing coda started up again in August. LeBron's Lakers ended up winning a title that never felt like a real title, closing out the Heat in six games in the Finals on October 11.

Training camps for the 2020-21 season opened less than two months later, on December 1. The season began three days before Christmas.

That's not nearly enough recovery time for basketball at this level, the season being the wearing physical and mental grind that it is. Eighty-two games has always been about 20 too many, in the Blob's estimation; trying to cram in a 72-game season on the very heels of the season before was absurd on its face.

And now it's getting on toward late June, and pieces are falling off the remaining playoff teams like a '72 Pinto. Again, maybe it would have happened even if the NBA had been smarter (and less greedy).  And, yes, if the players, who signed onto the deal, had been less greedy, too.

In any case, welcome to the NBA playoffs, aka This Way To The Training Room.

Your Finals MVP: Dr. Arthro "Granny Knot" Scoppy, the winning team's physician.

Lookit what them rules done

 I don't know Tampa Bay pitcher Tyler Glasnow from glasnost, but the man gets major points for gall on the Blob's scale of stuff for which it awards points. He's come up with a novel justification for cheating his tush off.

Cheating kept him healthy.

Getting to glop up the baseball with a foreign substance -- for Glasnow, it was sunscreen -- gave him better grip, and never mind that it also made batters frequently swing and miss. Following the rules, on the other hand, just got him hurt.

That's his story and he's sticking to it, in the wake of MLB finally getting around to banning pitchers from doctoring baseballs, which it has only been banning for a century or so. Problem is, baseball has never been very good at the banning part. And so pitchers have gone right on doctoring baseballs with everything from spit to tobacco juice to, I don't know, Dippity-Doo, maybe. 

None of them, when caught, ever were as creative as Glasnow, though.

In advance of MLB's latest crackdown on foreign substances, Glasnow ditched the sunscreen, and now he says that's why he now has a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament and a flexor tendon strain. He said without the sunscreen, he had to change all his grips, and that's what tore and strained his shoulder after just two starts.

"I had to put my fastball deeper in my hand and grip it way harder," he said in a video news conference. "Instead of holding my curveball at the tip of my fingers, I had to dig it deeper in my hand."

Didn't seem to affect his performance any. In his first start without mother's little helper, he struck out 11 Nationals in seven innings' work. This he used to bolster his argument that, nah, he wasn't glopping up the ball to get people out, he was doing it solely to improve his grip.

Of course, artificially improving one's grip itself  helps pitchers get people out, a little detail Glasnow conveniently decided to ignore. And if the practice is as widespread as it seems, that would help explain why no-hitters are suddenly popping up all over -- in some cases in the most unlikely of precincts.

As to Glasnow's contention that cheating kept him healthy ... well, maybe. But generations of pitchers have managed to properly grip their curveballs and sliders without resorting to Super Glue, and have somehow managed not to tear up their arms in two measly starts in spite of that. So why can't Glasnow and his crowd?

The Blob has some theories about that, and about the general fragility of pitchers in this particular era. But that's another Blob for another day.

For now, there is only the subverting of conventional wisdom by a clever young man from Tampa Bay.

Cheaters do prosper, it seems. And fall victim to calamity otherwise.

A whiff of the normal

 The girl at the plate this morning is no bigger than a minute, and she's fanning the breeze pretty good with that Fred Flintstone club of hers. She's wearing a purple-and-white batting helmet, which perches on her head like a hollowed-out bowling ball. Behind her, beyond the backstop, the moms sit in their collapsible camp chairs, watching with one eye and keeping the other trained on rambunctious siblings.

Out on the mound (or rather several feet in front of it), Coach lifts the baseball and lobs it overhand.

Swing and a miss.

He lobs it again.

Swing and a miss.

He lobs it two, three, four more times, and finally the girl gets the tiniest piece of it and the ball squirts toward second, where the second baseman and the shortstop have a brief territorial dispute before one picks it up and throws it.

Too late. Safe!

And here we are on a perfect June morning, golden sun in a blue-as-blue sky, lace doily clouds riding all tattery and frail on the cool breeze. And the kids and moms and siblings huddled around and on the beige dirt of a baseball diamond -- the kids all wearing that familiar white T-shirt with the navy collar and the snarling blue wildcat on the front, and the equally familiar red-and-blue cap.

I don't know what normal is anymore, not after four years living under a mad king and a year-plus living in the United States of Pandemica. But this looks and feels and sounds as close to it as we've come in awhile.

It's Wildcat League baseball in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the last glorious days of spring, and it looks and feels and sounds no different than it did 10 or 20 or even 57 years ago, when yours truly was wearing that shirt and cap. It's a lifeline from that day to this, a firm morsel of continuity in a time that feels all unstitched half the time.

It's the return of summer after a year when summer, like everything else, was weird and half-assed and profoundly solitary. 

"You know, I played Wildcat myself way back when," I say now to the one of the moms.

"And look at you now, you survived," she laughs.

"Worst baseball player ever," I say, and she laughs again.

And now we both look out towards the diamond, where Wildcat-y stuff is happening.  The kid at the plate has hit the round ball square and sent a sharp grounder between second and third, which handcuffs first the third baseman and then the shortstop. The batter goes tearing off around the bases, looking to stretch a single into ... well, something.

One problem, though: The baserunner in front of him has stopped on second. 

The coach waves him on. He starts toward third, then stops, then starts again. Meanwhile, the tearing-around-the-bases batter has caught up with him.

They arrive at third side-by-side. Then the batter passes him -- think Helio Castroneves passing Alex Palou on lap 199 of the Indianapolis 500 -- and sets sail for home, followed belatedly by the baserunner who'd been ahead of him. 

In Wildcat, this means only one thing: Two runs. Scored out of order, but what the hey.

"I love Wildcat," I say to Mom in her camp chair, after all this has happened.

This time we both laugh.

Five rings of "meh"

 This past weekend the peerless Novak Djokovic was sublime on the Roland Garros clay, young Pato O'Ward went from fourth to the winner's circle in eight sublime laps on the streets of Belle Isle, and Chris Paul and the Phoenix Suns, suddenly sublime themselves, swept the Denver Nuggets from the playoffs on the NBA hardwood.

Also, there were people falling with style off diving platforms.

This happened in Indianapolis in the Olympic Diving Trials, which I blipped past a few times as I surfed Sportsball World on the tube. The Olympic qualifiers sounded totally jacked about it, egged on by the network mic jockeys whose job it is to get everyone jacked about the Games. 

I'd like to say I shared their giddiness, as someone who's always looked forward to the Games. But that was not my reaction this time.

This time, all I thought was, "Oh, yeah. They're still doing that."

Mainly that's because the organizers have been so bullheaded about shoving the Tokyo Games down our throats, and when I say "our" I mean the vast majority of the host country's citizens, health professionals and, well, pretty much everyone except the organizers. The Bastard Plague is still a major presence in Japan, the nation remains largely un-vaccinated, but, what the hell, let's bring a whole pile of folks together from all over the world to breathe on one another for two weeks.

It's the OLYMPICS, ya'll. It'll be FUN.

I suppose so. But it just doesn't feel right to me. It just doesn't feel, I don't know, Olympic-y.

Maybe it will once they march everyone in and light the flame, but I can't imagine anyone but the athletes will be excited about any of it. With so much of the host nation so profoundly unenthusiastic about the whole business -- even vehemently opposed to it -- I have to think the usual edge will be missing. I have to think it'll be five rings of "meh" instead of five rings of magnificence. 

It's possible, of course, that only I feel this way. Maybe the rest of you will tune in just as eagerly to see bulimic pixies tumble and Michael Katie Spitz-Schollander break eleventy-hundred swimming  records while winning eleventy-hundred gold medals, and one of the usual Kenyans or Ethiopians win the 10,000 meters in track. 

Maybe the Russians will cheat again. Maybe the U.S, will lose in basketball again. Maybe the Americans will sweep the podium in the 100 meters again, unless some rando Jamaican shows up to shock the world.

I'll probably watch some of all that. Millions of others will, too.

Maybe it won't feel weird and a little deflating to them. But it will for me.

A dose of the real

 For ten minutes Saturday on a soccer pitch in Copenhagen, our games were just games again. This will happen when something as real as the end of a man's life intrudes on the festivities.

No, Christian Eriksen of Denmark didn't die after collapsing in the 43rd minute of a Euro Cup match between the Danes and Finland, but for ten minutes everyone in the stadium thought that's what they were watching. That's how long medical personnel performed CPR on Eriksen, while his teammates and their Finnish opponents milled about, transformed instantly from world-class adult athletes to anxious wet-eyed children.

Eventually Eriksen was revived and wheeled off the pitch to a local hospital, awake, alert and blessedly alive. The match initially would be suspended, but after a 90-minute delay the players returned to the field to a huge ovation.

It was likely as much an ovation for what their reappearance signaled, which is that they hadn't watched a man die right in front of them after all. He was alive and responding to treatment. The match, and the inherent make-believe construct of all our matches/games/tournaments/races, could continue.

Finland went on to win, 1-0. Eriksen was named the man of the match.

Not for anything he did on the pitch, of course. For living.

And for reminding us, for ten anxious and interminable minutes, that there is Game Life and there is Real Life. And that the former is not the latter, no matter how much it sometimes feels that way.

A sticky wicket

 Gaylord Perry is rolling his eyes right now, wherever that crafty old bird is perching these days. Could be he's throwing in a chuckle and a wag of the head, too.

See, Major League Baseball has another substance abuse issue on its hands. And Gaylord Perry knows all about it.

This is because the man rode to the Hall of Fame on the abuse of substances, though not the substances you likely think. His substance of choice was petroleum jelly. Or plain old spit. Or whatever else he could find to make the baseball do funny things on its way to the plate.

Perry was the master of the spitter, see, and he used to hide his illicit substances under the brim of his cap or on his belt buckle or on the front of his uniform or even on the back of his glove. Everyone knew he was throwing wet. He did it anyway. 

Even wrote a book about it after he retired.

So MLB's latest issue with pitchers doctoring baseballs must cause him some amusement, because, hell, it's as old as the game itself. Back in the game's infancy, the spitter was even legal. Then it wasn't, but pitchers kept throwing wet anyway.

Those who did were not so much regarded as hardened criminals but rascally schoolboys passing notes when the teacher's back was turned. Catching 'em at it became one of those game-within-a-game deals that made baseball charming before it became the strategy-deprived bore it is today.

In that regard, maybe pitchers such as Trevor Bauer and Gerrit Cole coating the baseball with sticky stuff like Spider Tack is merely an attempt to enliven the game. It's not like the Bauers and Coles are trying t hide it, after all. It's that MLB has been foot-draggy about cracking down on it -- perhaps because all these no-hitter suddenly sprouting like velvet leaf were tempering the other extreme that is baseball in 2021.

Which is to say, all the Home Run Derby business we've been seeing the last few years. Pitchers gotta do something to balance the scales, right, Gaylord?

The problem for MLB is this all comes on the heels of the Houston Cheatstros sign-stealing scandal, and so it's a PR issue more than anything. No one in the MLB boardroom wants the public to regard the product as a rigged game, so the powers-that-be have rolled out a crackdown on Spider Tack and whatever else pitchers are using to make the baseball perform unnatural acts.

Even if, as ol' Gaylord could tell 'em, it's as time-honored a baseball thing as a dog, a beer and a box of Cracker Jacks.

In absentia

 Bo Schembechler died on the morning of the Michigan-Ohio State game 15 years ago, so it is only his good name that can stand trial now. Robert Anderson is dead, too, so he is also beyond the reach of earthly judgment.

I say this because that was a hell of an indictment that got dropped on them in Ann Arbor yesterday, in absentia though it may have been.

Two of Bo's former players at Michigan, and his son Matt, told the media they had been molested by Anderson, the team "doctor," and that they told Bo about it, and that Bo refused to believe them. Matt Schembechler 10 years old at the time, alleges Bo actually shoved him when he tried to tell him about the alleged abuse in 1969, shortly after Bo's decorated reign began.

And if you're wondering now why he and the former players waited so long to go public with all this, you're just one more person who doesn't understand how sexual abuse -- and football -- work.

Victims of sexual predators sometimes hide what happened to them for decades, if not forever, because they're either trying to forget or are so mortified by it (and the misplaced guilt that often consumes them) they can't bring themselves to admit it. Better to convince yourself it didn't happen, or that you simply misconstrued a predator's depravity. 

Now imagine you're also a football player in the program of a legendary coach whose statue stands outside the stadium.

 No person on earth more approximates a Roman emperor than a football coach at a football holy land like Michigan, and Bo wasn't just any football coach. He was the football coach. The kids who played for him both feared and were awed by him; the natural inclination toward blind obedience football demands was only magnified by his stature.

He didn't just coach Michigan football, after all. He was Michigan football.

And so of course it took nearly 40 years for the two players at yesterday's news conference to go public with narratives in which Bo appears less god-like than fallibly human.

Look. I don't know what Bo Schembechler knew and when he knew it about his team "doctor," but according to the two players at yesterday's presser, Anderson's alleged proclivities were common knowledge among both players and staff. One player said assistant coaches used to threaten them with a visit to the good "doctor" if they didn't work harder.

If so, it's impossible to believe a man with such an iron grip on every facet of his program as Bo Schembechler would not have been aware of those proclivities, too. And if he did, it seems he clearly sided with Anderson.

And if he did that, he was complicit in whatever twisted acts Anderson allegedly was committing.

So this is Joe Paterno all over again, a football icon being accused of turning a blind eye to sexual predation. As with Schembechler, some of the worst allegations about Paterno came out after his death. And as with Schembechler, there were plenty of folks willing to defend him even if he couldn't.

Already, it seems, some of the Bo Boys have rallied around. Bo's younger son Glenn says Matt is lying through this teeth, and that he's been estranged from the family for awhile now. Both Glenn, and current Michigan coach and former Schembechler quarterback Jim Harbaugh, say they can't imagine Bo not taking immediate action if a player came to him with allegations about the team doctor. 

Which means this is the same old he said/he said dynamic that always emerges with these issues. What remains unclear is why two of Bo's former players would make it all up -- and why they would wait to do so until the man had been in the ground for 15 years.

The Blob has no answer for that.

Unfortunately for Emperor Bo, why they would not make it up does have answers.

The Old Guys Club

 I don't know what else 2021 will be, five months in. But so far it's the Year of Tapioca.

The Year of Metamucil. The Year of Dammit The Battery's Dead In My Hearing Aid Again. The Year of  You Kids Better Get Off My Lawn, Because I Can Still Out-Putt You, Out-Drive You and Take You To The Hole.

In short, it's the springtime of old-guy revival out there, and thank God for it. Not all old people are as decrepit and crazy Nutbar Louie Gohmert, the geriartric Texas congress critter who wondered this week it we could shift the moon's orbit and see if that will solve the climate change problem.

Of course, someone already thought of that. It didn't solve the climate change problem, but it did keep Martin Landau's career alive.

In any case, thank God for Sportsball World, which has done its bit to give old people a good name in a year when there's a 78-year-old grownup in the White House. 

Tom Brady won the Super Bowl at 59 (OK, so 43, then). Phil Mickelson won the PGA Championship at almost-51. Helio Castroneves beat the kids at Indy to become a four-time 500 winner at 46. And now?

Well, anyone see what Chris Paul is doing these days?

He's 36 years old, long in the tooth for an NBA point guard, but you'd never know it. The man hauled the sadsack Phoenix Suns out of the the NBA's remainder bin this season, providing a wise old head and some oncourt direction that earned him a couple of league MVP votes. 

Now the Suns are two games deep in the Western Conference semifinals, and they're up 2-0 already on the Denver Nuggets. Last night they floor-waxed the Nuggies 123-98, and ancient Chris Paul did his bit with 17 points and 15 assists.

He and Suns' star Devin Booker, the best backcourt in these playoffs not named Kyrie Irving and James Harden, combined for 35 points, 17 assists and 15 rebounds. Not a bad night's work.

Now, it'll be interesting to see if the Suns can sustain that heading to Denver, because this is the NBA, where momentum is a unicorn. Five'll get you 10 the Nuggies follow up their 25-point pasting by laminating the Suns in Game 3. It's just what they do in the League.

In any case, those of old enough to misremember a whole pile of stuff have a reason to  lord it over Generation X, Y, Z or whatever letter we're on now. "OK, boomer"? 

Don't look now, punk-os, but Helio just passed you on the outside.

And Phil just jarred another birdie.

And CP-3 just crossed you over, scooted into the paint and made you look silly with the dish.

OK, children.

Crudball, Part Deux*

(*Suggested accompaniment: Sad Trombone)

It seems like only a dozen days ago that the Blob was risking the grim remnants of its dwindling Blobophile base by once again bringing up his cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates, which prompted the usual howls of outrage and disgust, and perhaps the occasional pitchfork and torch.

Couldn't help it, though. The Cruds had just submitted a strong candidate for Dumbest Play In Baseball History, and the Blob felt duty-bound to pass it along with a few appropriate comments/choice insults.

Well ... if that seems like only a dozen days ago, it's because it was.

And now the Cruds have done it again.

The latest episode of Stupid Stupid Dumb Stupidness involves a rookie third baseman named Ke'Bryan Hayes, who took Dodgers' pitcher Walker Buehler deep to right yesterday in P-Town and took his home-run trot, tipping his batting helmet to acknowledge the hometown che--

Oops.

Turns out while he was trotting, he forgot to trod on first. Thereby breaking the First Rule of Baseball -- touch 'em all -- and wiping his home run off the books.

I suppose here is where I'm supposed to say something witty and cutting about the nuclear blockheadedness of my Cruds. But I used up my supply of witty and cutting some time ago. 

All I got left is this. 

Apparel fail

 Some days you'd like to be a fly on the wall, or maybe just a guy skinny enough to hide behind the curtains. Then you'd get the straight dope on how dumb stuff happens.

Like, you know, that new Detroit Lions cap, which says far more than was obviously intended.

Here it is. And, yes, it's for real, and not a meme.

Although I'm sure those are coming straightaway.

Seriously, how is this not a giant "Kick me" sign? Surely the last thing the Lions want to do is remind people of how pathetic they've been for the last, what, 64 years. That was 1957, the last time the Lions won a title. In all the Bill Munsons and Karl Sweetans and Jeff Komlos since, they've accomplished, well, pretty much nothing.

They haven't won a division title in 28 years.

They haven't won a playoff game in 30 years.

Since the turn of the century, they've had five winning seasons, interspersed with some truly spectacular futility. Like that 0-16 gem in 2008, and a 2-14 masterpiece in 2009, and a 3-12 (2019) and a couple of 3-13s (2002, 2006.)

So now you unveil a cap to commemorate that -- a cap that literally says "Losers," emblazoned with an "L" on the crown?

Can't wait for the sales pitch.

Arm getting tired from holding that "L" against your forehead, Lions fan? Well, no more! Now there's a cap that will do it for you! Available today at all fine apparel stores!

Yeesh.

Blight of the century, Part Deux

 You knew it was coming. You knew it as surely as you know the local hayseed is going to get fleeced by the midway slick with the pea and the three shells.

And so a day after YouTube Boy went the distance with a senior citizen just looking for another payday, here was some sports talk foof saying YouTube Boy -- aka, Logan Paul -- proved he was "legit." The guy driving my car when he said that (Aka: me) just shook his head and laughed.

Damn, but the con is so easy sometimes. Even when the conned are national sports media guys who ought to know better.

Listen, boys and girls: Logan Paul is no more legit than he was before Sunday night, when he fought 44-year-old Floyd Mayweather in an exhibition and stayed upright throughout. He never landed anything, but he took a few Geritol shots from Floyd and shook them off, so suddenly he wasn't a joke anymore.

Ummm ... no.

Yes, YouTube Boy went the distance, but it was an exhibition. Which means it was supposed to go the distance, because you gotta give the rubes their PPV money's worth or they won't come back. 

Plus, Mayweather was never a knockout guy even in his prime, back there in 1897 or whenever.

So I'm thinking if you put YouTube Boy in a real fight with a real contender the same size who's hungry to climb the ladder, he gets his ass handed to him. He gets exposed for what he is, a pugilistic version of the cat that plays the piano on the internet. 

In other words: Click bait.

A sporting chance

 I saw Richard Raskind play tennis once.

It was at the U.S. Clay Courts in Indy and the sun was baking everything as it tends to do in an Indiana summer, and across the net from Raskind was Chris Evert. Evert ate Raskind's lunch and half his dinner that day. And later Raskind, in his husky voice, said what a lot of people used to say about Evert, which is that she was one of the greatest women's tennis players ever and you couldn't out-rally her with a howitzer when she was on her game.

One thing, though: Richard Raskind wasn't Richard Raskind by that time. He was Renee Richards, and he was now a she.

Richards was my first exposure, and lot of people's first exposure, to a transgender athlete, and it left me with a couple of impressions. One, she wasn't at all creepy, which is what we were led to believe transgenders were at the time, and which an unfortunate number of people still believe. And, two, she wasn't all that great a  tennis player.

The latter comes back to me now that certain state lawmakers of the Republican variety are hard at work protecting us from their newest boogeyman, transgender kids. Eight states have now passed statutes that forbid transgenders from participating in girls high school sports, on the theory that they'd have some sort of unfair advantage and would ruin girls sports.

That's their story, at least.

Me?

I remember Renee Richards, who as Richard Raskind was a better-than-fair male athlete. As Raskind, Richards was a good enough baseball player to draw the interest of the New York Yankees; as a male college tennis player at Yale, Richards was regarded as one of the best college players in the country.

According to Republican orthodoxy, then, she should have had an unfair advantage as a women's player and thus been dominant. But she didn't, and wasn't.

This is why I'm completely on board with U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona -- who, unlike his predecessor, has some actual credentials for his position, and for whom naked self-interest does not drive policy. 

What Cardona told ESPN the other day is transgender girls have a "right to compete," and he's hoping the Biden administration will step in to protect their civil rights in the states where they've been banned from girls and women's sports.

Now, I'm no legal scholar, so I can't tell you if someone's civil rights include the right to play tennis or basketball or soccer for good old Millard Fillmore High. But I can tell you singling out transgender girls for exclusion is damned mean-spirited, and disingenuous besides. Based as it is on such rickety assumptions, it amounts to picking on transgender kids just because, well, we think they're creepy and we don't like them.

The rest is whole lot of stuff and feathers. No matter what they say.

Tee boxing

 I love professional golfer feuds.

I love two guys in stylish pastels (In this corner ... wearing the Sea-Foam Green Walter Hagen polo and Desert Khaki Lululemon slacks ...) swaggering around like tough guys, talking out of the side of their mouths and trying to be all gangsta. Like any minute they're gonna start throwing hands like Ali and Frazier, or maybe just Mike and Sully after 16 beers at the neighborhood Grub 'N Pub.

Golfers don't do that. Throw a left hook, and you might break your hand and have to change your swing.

And so here are Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, engaging in your typical golfer feud. Which is to say, lots of jawing back and forth and the sort of hijinks you see between rival college fraternities.

Like, DeChambeau clattering behind Koepka in his golf spikes a few weeks back, right in the middle of a TV interview Koepka was doing. And Koepka rolling his eyes and swearing in response, thereby handing DeChambeau exactly the response he wanted.

"I'm living rent-free inside his head," DeChambeau cackled later.

Fast forward to the Memorial this weekend, where Koepka kinda-sorta got him back.

Mind you, he wasn't on the premises, but his minions in the gallery came through for him, serenading DeChambeau with a stream of "Brooks!" and "Brooksie!" catcalls. When some of them got a little too rude about it, they were ejected from the premises.

After which Koepka, looking on from afar, offered to buy them beer.

DeChambeau, for his part, didn't make the mistake Koepka made. Rather than rolling his eyes and swearing, he pronounced it all "great banter" and "fun." He even deemed it great publicity for himself.

And so DeChambeau 1, Koekpa 0 in this particular feud.

This should not surprise anyone, DeChambeau being DeChambeau and Koepka being Koepka. Which is to say, the latter is not a particularly pleasant individual. He's got more than a little OCD going for him, so it's not hard to get under his skin. Indeed, the genesis of his feud with DeChambeau involved Koepka griping about Bryson's slow play a couple of years back.

Which raises all sorts of delicious possibilities the next time the two are paired together.

"You wanna see slow? I'll show you slow," said DeChambeau, lining up his inside-the-leather putt for the 47th time ...

Shoot. We might actually get a left hook sighting if that happens.

 

Blight of the century

Once upon a time a Fight of the Century was Muhammad Ali in one corner and Joe Frazier in the other, wrecking one another for 15 rounds. It was Jack Dempsey vs. Gene Tunney. It was Tony Zale vs. Rocky Graziano, Sugar Ray Robinson vs. Jake LaMotta, Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Roberto Duran or Marvin Hagler or the Hitman, Thomas Hearns.

Now it's a woman-beating punk named Floyd Mayweather vs. some guy from the internet.

OK, so Internet Guy is actually named Logan Paul, and he's famous for being YouTube star. This is no mean accomplishment, because not just anyone can be a YouTube star. That's because pretty much everyone can be.

So tonight it's Mayweather, once the greatest pound-for-pound boxer in the world when he wasn't beating up women, against YouTube Dude. It's a guy who long ago gave up professional boxing to do vaudeville acts with over-hyped MMA guys (Conor McGregor), taking on whatever the hell a Logan Paul is.

Remember that one time when Danny Bonaduce from "The Patridge Family" fought Donny Osmond?

That was less a Blight of the Century than this likely will be.

Vegas being Vegas, the odds prohibitively favoring Mayweather have undergone an "adjustment," which means enough people have now bet on Paul that more suckers, er, bettors will be induced to drop some coin on this farce. Or at least that's the theory.

Me?

I say if you want to throw your money away that badly, hell, just give it to me. I'll make sure you'll get a chunky return on your investment.

OK. So you won't.

But I'll enjoy the pizza and beer.

Wordplay

The word out of Canton, O,, this week is that certain high school football coaches aren't conversant with either the English language or the workings of the Constitution. Or perhaps both.

This is not really surprising, especially the latter. Coaches, almost exclusively the lousy ones, have been confusing abuse with discipline since Coach Slobberknocker first beat his wayward lads with rubber hoses back in the days of the flying wedge and Amos Alonzo Stagg.

What happened, or might have, at Canton McKinley High School back on May 24 wasn't that. But it happened, or didn't, because Coach and his staff didn't get the word.

That word is "voluntary." Apparently its meaning escaped them.

Because it did, in one version of the story, a Jewish player was forced to eat an entire pepperoni pizza, despite his religious beliefs forbidding the eating of pork or its residue. He was told he had to do this or the entire team would be punished with extra work.

The head coach, Marcus Wattley, two of his assistants and a baseball coach present in the weight room at the time were subsequently fired. Their version of the story, backed by several players, is that the kid was offered chicken nuggets instead of the pizza when he told the coaches he couldn't eat pork. They also said he was free to go at any time.

So it's your classic he-said, they-said. What's not in dispute is the definition of "voluntary."

See, the kid was being punished for skipping a voluntary team workout. Well, if it was truly voluntary, then why did this happen?

That's the real crux of this, and I'd love to hear Coach and his assistants try to explain it. You're strong-arming this kid -- and if you're pitting him against his teammates, that's exactly what you're doing -- because he skipped a team function where his presence wasn't required? How the hell does that happen?

Look. I get it. From the NFL on down, they play games with words in this man's game. OTAs on the pro level are allegedly voluntary, too, but woe betide if you miss one. Same on the quasi-pro college level, and (apparently) same on the high school level.

And so the coaches' contention that the kid could have left any time he wanted is a knee-slapping joke. Yeah, he was "free" to leave. But he was supposedly free not to show up for that workout, too, and look what happened.

What would the price have been for him leaving?

As for the kids who've backed their coaches' play ... well let's be honest. What young football player angling for playing time at McKinley, a longtime Ohio powerhouse, is going to do otherwise?

Here's what I think: As in most he-said/they-said dynamics, the truth probably lies somewhere between the competing narratives. Which still justifies showing these clowns the road.

Perhaps with a dictionary for the journey.

Look what's back

 No, not the Battle of the Network Stars, although that would be fun. Especially if the participants all had to wear high-water shorts and knee-length tube socks like they did in the original.

Sorry, but no. The correct answer is the USFL, baby!

A Battle of the Network Stars contemporary, sort of, and something America has been clamoring for almost as much. Which is to say, not at all.

No matter. Fox is bringing it back next spring, and it won't even be the 2.0 version. It will be The USFL, Baby! with all the same teams and logos and uni designs.

This means you can haul out that Houston Gamblers jersey you've been keeping for 35 years for just this occasion, and you'll be as with-it as ever. The Gamblers! The Chicago Blitz! The Washington Federals! The New Jersey Generals!

Ah, these are the days, one more time. And the best part, speaking of the Generals, is Donald Trump won't be around to blow up the league like he did the first time, having descended into madness and obsession that reportedly grows madder and more obsessed every day.

It is a mind-shredding thing, after all, when a delusional megalomaniac is so utterly rejected by a nation that refused to recognize his greatness. One must devote all of one's energies to believing what happened didn't happen, in such a case.

This means he won't be around to bully the owners of the new USFL into a bidding war with the NFL, which destroyed the former in less than 18 months. So pudding-headed was the Donald, and so insufferably arrogant about it, that Tampa Bay Bandits owner John Bassett once sent him a letter offering to knock Donny-boo's teeth down his throat if he didn't shut the hell up.

Well, those days are done. Donny-boo is rattling around Mar-a-Lago like Napoleon at Elba, talking to the ghosts of fictitious ballots. And Bassett, one of the USFL's best men, sadly died of brain cancer years ago.

But their teams are going to live again next spring, at least for awhile. It's inevitable the USFL will succumb to cash-flow starvation again, just like every pro football entity not named the National Football League has for 50 years. But in the meantime, whoever lands the apparel deal for the new/old USFL will make a pile selling new Gamblers and Blitz and  Generals jerseys.

Order yours today!

Family matters

In Boston, they're kicking Brad Stevens upstairs to the front office, so there go the final shreds of a particularly stubborn hallucination. Repeat after me, boys and girls: HE'S NOT COMING BACK TO COLLEGE. NOT, NOT, NOT.

So forget about him eventually winding up as Mike Krzyzewski's successor at Duke after he turned down bags of cash to be Archie Miller's successor at IU. And how do we know that?

Because, again, HE'S TAKING OVER DANNY AINGE'S CHAIR.

Also, Coach K took the "eventually" out of the occasion by announcing yesterday that 2021-22 would be his last season. And while Duke was announcing that, it also announced assistant coach and former Duke star Jon Scheyer would be the next head coach.

Scheyer has no experience as a college head coach, but his elevation should surprise no one who understands how things work at places such as Duke. After almost 40 seasons and five national titles, Krzyzewski has established a culture at Duke that is as permanent and sustainable as any ivy-covered edifice on the grounds. And so there was zero chance Duke would go outside the family for K's successor, just as there was zero chance North Carolina, eight miles down the road, would go outside the family to succeed Roy Williams, who's also stepping down.

The Tar Heels tabbed former Carolina star and now top assistant Hubert Davis to fill Williams' seat. Because at both Duke and Carolina, the culture is everything.

Whether that's the correct way to look at things is immaterial, because at both schools the powers-that-be could hardly have looked at it any other way. There are simply certain prerogatives at certain institutions, and to expect those who make decisions at those institutions to stray from those prerogatives would be like expecting them to stop breathing.

And so culture trumps experience and coaching resume, at places such as Duke and North Carolina. At places such as Indiana, too, where the culture withered on the vine years ago while the decision-makers futzed around with outsiders.

Kelvin Sampson, Tom Crean and even Archie Miller brought heftier college resumes to the table than Mike Woodson, a pro guy who's never coached college kids. But what he does have is a link to a basketball tradition Bob Knight built upon and took to new heights, and which Woodson will now try to restore as a Knight acolyte.

It's what a particular strain of IU fan has been baying for, lost in the past though he/she may be. And it remains to be seen if it's in fact recoverable, this no longer being 1976 or '81 or '87.

Best available evidence so far is that Woodson is already hard at work re-knitting the IU hoops fabric, and he's gotten Miller's holdovers to buy in. Now all he has to do is turn that into Ws.

And Scheyer and Davis?

Same deal.

Culture may be the coin of the realm in those places, see. But you gotta keep it fed.

Speak up and educate

 Russell Westbrook did what he could, on the night of Memorial Day. Went for another consciousness-altering triple double, this time a 19-point, 21-rebound, 14-assist stat line that  would leave veteran Russ watchers slack-jawed if they hadn't seen him do it so often before.

Oh, yeah: This one also helped the Washington Wizards avoid a sweep against the 76ers with a 122-114 win.

And 24 hours or so before that?

Well. He was altering consciousness in another way.

As an executive producer, he had a hand in a May 30 documentary that aired on the History Channel, which took a night off from ice-road truckers, crab fishermen and weird guys who live alone in the mountains to commit some actual history for a change. 

The documentary was titled "Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre," of which Westbrook had never heard before he landed down the road in Oklahoma City as a star with the Thunder. A man with a questing and insatiably curious mind, Westbrook was fascinated and horrified by this awful piece of American history -- one so awful that those who by and large write our history chose to bury it in an unmarked grave.

Monday was its 100th anniversary. And thanks in part to Westbrook and LeBron James and a lot of other fully formed humans a certain segment of America sees as nothing but vaudeville entertainers, what happened in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood on May 31, 1921, is finally getting its proper light.

What happened on that day is a mob of whites -- vigilantes, terrorists, either term works -- stormed Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa that was so prosperous people who'd seen it and moved through it dubbed it "Black Wall Street." The whites, using as an excuse outrage over a fictitious assault on a white woman by a black man, burned it to the ground, slaughtering anywhere from 100 to 300 of its residents and compelling thousands more to flee for their lives.

So intent on destroying what blacks in Tulsa had built, they even bombed it from the air.

It was not the first murderous eradication of a black community in America, nor would it be the last. Those who know can find not just Tulsa on a sociological map, but also other places: Colfax, La., and Rosewood, Fla., and East St. Louis, Ill., and a dozen or so others.

Lost to memory, most of them. Never mentioned in the sanitized American history texts most of us grew up reading in school. Lied about, denied, not to be spoken of.

Except ...

Except now some folks are insisting on speaking of it. And some of them are basketball players, dammit, who are paid outrageous sums of money to shut up and play, not to speak up and educate.

Why, how dare they!

Look. Here's what I know, as someone with a modest grasp of history myself: If all you teach or learn about history is what makes you feel inspired or uplifted, you're not teaching or learning history. You're teaching or learning propaganda.

History is messy, being the product of human beings with all their virtues and flaws. It is not always pretty and wave-the-flag and glory-be. And most times, it is the un-pretty, un-glorious part that is of most value to those who study it.

For instance: You can't properly understand the way race colors so much in America by pretending it doesn't. And you can't pretend it doesn't by pretending 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow and state-sponsored segregation in America were just some blip on the radar. And you can't understand that if you don't understand how the Founding Fathers, great men that they were, set all of it in  motion by kicking the slavery can down the road.

It was simple expedience: In order to form a more perfect union, they'd have to arrive at some imperfect solutions. They'd have to let some things slide. So they did.

That certain segment of America doesn't want to hear that. They don't want their kids to hear it, making Critical Race Theory their current boogeyman without really knowing what it is and isn't. They shout "Cancel culture!", another of their boogeymen, while busily going about trying to Cancel Culture themselves.

They have it all backwards, as usual. Cancel culture is what our sanitized American history gave us. What's dubbed "cancel culture" now is merely a long overdue correction of the record.

And so, yes, let's talk about what happened in Tulsa on May 31, 1921. Let's talk about the thread that runs from that day to this, because history is all about the threads that run from that day to this. 

"The Tulsa Race Massacre was not something I was taught about in school or in any of my history books," Westbrook said in a statement in February when the documentary plans were unveiled. "This is one of many overlooked stories of African Americans in this country that deserves to be told. These are the stories we must honor and amplify so we can learn from the past and create a better future."

Indeed.

Withdrawal symptoms

 I'm only here so I don't get fined.

Kyle Busch said that, once upon a time. Marshawn Lynch, too, once upon a Super Bowl. And Bob Knight was probably thinking it all those times he lumbered into the postgame presser like an angry bear, punishing us for this distasteful duty by snarling at student reporters and sneering as only he could when our questions didn't pass his muster.

Every once in awhile, he'd play games with us. Talked about fishing for ten minutes, on one famous occasion. Occasionally would send in three guys who hadn't gotten off the bench during that part of our media "availability."

This Naomi Osaka deal, though ...

Well. That's a new one.

One of the world's top two women's tennis players, she's actually decided to withdraw from the French Open rather than present herself for mandatory media duty. It stresses her out, she says. It affects her mental health, because she's an introvert and having to sit up there in front of all those inquiring minds and TV cameras is something she dreads the way other people dread snakes or spiders or a root canal.

I am not trying to make light here. Far from it.

What I'm thinking instead is if Osaka is really this uncomfortable facing the media scrum, then she's not exaggerating the mental health issues she's indicated she has. Because, honestly, speaking as member of the sports media for four decades, we're not that scary. 

In any event, Osaka is taking some time off. She says she's been battling depression and anxiety for three years now, so here's hoping she finds a way to get on top of it. 

This is not just because she's a dazzling talent, and tennis is diminished without her. It's because, as a dazzling talent, she cannot live in a vacuum. There are going to be crowds and fans clamoring for autographs, and, yes, media obligations. It's part of the deal when you ascend the sort of heights Osaka has ascended. It's the price that comes with excellence.

This isn't meant to sound harsh or cruel, understand. It's simply an acknowledgment of the way things work when you are as gifted as Osaka at what you do.

Osaka, an intelligent and classy young woman, understands this. And if she's in a place where she's unable to cope with it, that's fine. Despite what you may have heard from people who think they know how journalists are wired but actually don't have a clue, no journalist I know would begrudge her for it. 

I can't say the same for the confederacy of foofs who run professional tennis these days.

First they fined her. Then they threatened to suspend her. Finally, whoever's in charge of the French Open these days sent out a catty tweet for which the individual responsible should have been headslapped.

The tweet praised players for attending media pressers with these words: "They understood the assignment."  It was a clear shot at Osaka, and was quickly deleted.

Shame on whoever sent that out. Shame on anyone who'd exhibit the same attitude. Every one of them should be shown the road.

Media or otherwise.