That song again

 Gabe Kapler did the proper thing yesterday. It was Memorial Day, our day to honor the dead of America's wars, and so the Giants manager came out of the clubhouse and climbed the dugout steps and stood on the dirt for the national anthem, because he said honoring the fallen was as important on this day as honoring America's other fallen.

That would be the 21 fourth graders and teachers who were murdered in our latest skirmish between civilization and semi-auto weaponry.

Not surprisingly, civilization lost again. It's got a hell of a losing streak going these days, here in America the Locked And Loaded. 

Which is why Kapler decided last week he could no longer come out and stand for a national anthem whose words no longer seem to fit our current reality. So Kapler figured he'd discreetly stay in the clubhouse during the anthem, until America decided it wanted again to be what that anthem celebrates.

And that was the proper thing to do, too.

Of course, it set off the usual suspects again, who worship the anthem almost as zealously as they worship shootin' irons. Somehow that song has gotten conflated with the flag and the troops and, you know THE TROOPS!, and is all about location and posture. Stand and you're being respectful; kneel with your head bowed or stay in the locker room, and you're being disrespectful.

I don't know why those usual suspects think they get to decide all that.  I don't recall any of them being appointed Official Poobahs of Anthem Etiquette or anything. But they sure seem to think they were.

Of course, it's pretty hard for them to say, this time, that Kapler was disrespecting THE TROOPS!, given that he came out for the anthem on Memorial Day expressly to honor the troops who died defending our nation. I'm sure they'll find a way, though.

In the meantime, Colin Kaepernick  just signed a deal with the Raiders, whose history of taking in iconoclasts and various other NFL orphans is long and distinguished. Kaepernick, of course, got run out of the NFL for his own anthem protest. Now he's back.

Bad week for the anthem worshippers, it seems.

Fantasy foof-ball

Full disclosure, to get this off the line today: I am a retired fantasy football player.

I played in a league with a bunch of friends and former colleagues, and it was great fun. We were print newsies who worked together at the Fort Wayne (In.) Journal Gazette back in the 1990s, and, the nature of print journalism being what it is, we'd all scattered to the winds since. Fantasy was a way to reconnect, revive all the inside jokes and have a few laughs.

I don't recall any of the guys ever threatening to slap me. Perhaps we weren't hardcore enough.

Or, you know,  major league enough.

Not so Tommy Pham and Joc Pederson, who play baseball for the Cincinnati Reds and San Francisco Giants, respectively, and who last year played in the same fantasy football league. 

Apparently, they weren't doing it for the inside jokes and to have a few laughs. Apparently, they saw it as bloodsport -- which is why Pham accused Pederson of cheating by stockpiling players on his bench, and Pederson responded by saying, well, neener-neener-neener, dude, you just don't know the rules.

Fast forward to last Friday, when the Reds were playing the Giants and Pham sauntered over to Pederson and ... slapped him.

"He called me a big dumb poopyhead!" Pham explained.

Well, not really. What Pham really said was Pederson was so cheating (the additional "was-so, was-so" here is implied), and compounded it by saying "disrepectful s***."

"I didn't like the sketchy s*** going on in fantasy," Pham said later. "We had too much money on the line, so I look at it like there's a code. You're f****** with my money, then you're going to say some disrespectful s***, there's a code to this."

A code! Hey, guys, did you know about this? Because no told me about any code. Not that I'm accusing you of keeping it from me or anything. That would be some disrespectful s***.

(BTW, I'm betting right now someone in your league renames his team "The Disrespectful S***s" this fall. My money's on Jim.)

In any event, Pham got a three-day sitdown for slapping Pederson, and the rest of us got yet another reminder that baseball is a game for little boys who never grow up. It's the game of eternal youth, which is why it became America's Pastime for awhile, and then just something to fill the time between NFL minicamps and training camps and Your Team's Fantasy Draft.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, a fantasy football beef might be the best thing that ever happened to the former Pastime. I mean, what could better restore baseball's relevance?

Photo(genic) finish

 Look, don't come at me with tradition, this fine May morning. I'm all about tradition, at least as it applies to that auto race they put on in Indianapolis every Memorial Day weekend.

I would, for instance, be the first to boo lustily if they decided all that spilled milk in Victory Lane was wasteful ("Starving children in China would be glad to have this!" I hear Ralphie's mom scolding in "A Christmas Story"), and offensive to the lactose intolerant, besides.

I'd yelp "The hell is THIS??" if they decided, ah, 30 cars are enough for one race.

And I'd lead the march on Doug Boles's office if they decided to pave over the yard of brick because, you know, it just doesn't work esthetically surrounded by all that asphalt.

That said ...

That said, I had zero problem with the way the 106th Indianapolis 500 finished up yesterday.

How it finished up was, they let 'em race to the checkers, which is the way something called a "race" should finish up. When the wall off Turn 2 bit Jimmie Johnson with four laps to run, it didn't bring out the yellow. It brought out the red -- as in, "Everyone back to the pits until we can clean up the mess and finish the 500 the way the 500 should finish."

And, no, that's not in the IndyCar rulebook, officially. And it's not consistent, seeing how they wouldn't do that in the same situation anywhere else on the IndyCar circuit. And, yeah, it wiped out Marcus Ericsson's three-second lead, and that seemed a trifle unfair.

But you know what?

A finish under caution would have been a trifle unfair, too. And mainly that's because the mass of humanity who turned the Indianapolis Motor Speedway into an insta-city of 300,000 weren't anywhere else on the IndyCar circuit.

They were at Indy -- full name, the Indianapolis 500, which means it deserved to be the Indianapolis 500 and not the Indianapolis-490-And-Then-Grandma-Drives-Her-Buick-To-The-Grocery-Store-10. 

So they parked 'em, and cleaned off the track, and raced to the end. Ericsson staved off a charging Pato O'Ward by snake-dancing around the place to keep Pato off his air, and outdragged him to turn one when Pato took his shot with a lap to run. 

The result: The 500 got the photo(genic) finish it deserved. As did Ericsson, for that matter.

He hung around in the top five all day and hit the pit window just right, and avoided the mistakes and bad luck that took out the frontrunners, Scott Dixon and Alex Palou. It was an impeccable performance, and A Grandma-Drives-Her-Buick finish would have dimmed its luster a tad. 

Says here, anyway.

The quiet and the loss

 GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- The Run wears its Sunday best now, here in these last bursting days of May. Down the way, a few steps from this footbridge, a mop of lilypads sprawls across the narrow reach from bank to bank; bushes and trees crowd close; tiny marsh flowers so cover the dark water that, even swollen with recent rains, you can hardly see its modest trickle.

Late spring at Gettysburg National Military Park, and there is new life everywhere. Everything is one shade of green or another, and the air is soft, and the only sound is the sound of birdsong.

I hear it now, standing on this footbridge watching the Run lollygag beneath my feet. That's shorthand for Plum Run, and along its banks, years and years ago, human beings shot and stabbed and murdered one another. 

Men bled and fell and gasped away their lives. Their bodies swelled and stiffened in grotesque postures in the July heat, And this lovely trickle became an obscene thing, its very name a synonym for the worst we can do to each other.

A few insignificant yards behind me, I know, a squad of desperate soldiers drew a bead in the fading light on a man with flowing white hair on horseback. This was Confederate general William Barksdale, and he died later that night with five bullets in him, and the Mississippians he led ran out of steam right about where he fell. 

They fled back through the fields they'd come howling across an hour or so before, the air thick with dusk and smoke now.  And their bodies would carpet the ground they crossed to mark the way.

Somewhere in front of me and to my left, meanwhile, a man named Freeman McGilvery would place a line of cannon and blast away at other advancing Mississippians, and more men and pieces of men would fall. And way down there to the south and east, where Plum Run meanders sluggishly at the foot of a pile of rock the locals called Devil's Den, yet more lives would violently end.

Later a lot of the mortal remains would be collected and buried atop Cemetery Hill, and today that is a green place, too, and quiet. White headstones spread out in a neat geometry that belies the chaos that placed them here, and tourists walk among them with a reverence generally reserved for cathedrals and holy shrines.

That's because everything that happened along Plum Run, and in places with names like Belleau Wood and Iwo Jima and the Ia Drang Valley, is about both madness and sacrifice, and this weekend we honor the latter. It's Memorial Day, and it's reserved for all those headstones, all the men and women who came to places of which most had never heard, and who never left -- men and women who, yes, died to preserve what we have and often take for granted, but who mostly died for the human beings to the right or left of them.

Me?

I prefer to think about that footbridge across Plum Run, and the life and peace there now, and the death that paid for it. Those three days in July all those years ago preserved the Union,  ultimately. And if it remains a sometimes tragically imperfect union, it's up to us to make it less so -- if not for our sakes, then for the sake of  Bayard Wilkeson and Samuel Zook and Edward Cross and Strong Vincent, and all the others who died here. 

Died so I could find it almost impossible to imagine that, on the late afternoon of July 2, 1863, I would have had a life expectancy of about two minutes standing where I stand on this day. 

Died, so everything around me is now one shade of green or another, and the air is soft, and the only sound is the sound of birdsong.

A man and his brain

 Look, I don't care if Herschel Walker -- former football star; current candidate for  the Republican Congressional Crazy Train -- thinks Samuel J. Tilden* stole the 2020 election from his boy Donald Trump. Or if it was, I don't know, space aliens or AOC or Snidely Whiplash. 

(*If you don't know who Samuel J. Tilden is, look up the election of 1876. As Dwayne Pride says on "NCIS: New Orleans", learn things)

Now where was I?

Oh, yeah. Herschel Walker.

Who's been even more incoherent than his Fearless Leader during this campaign, which of course doesn't hurt him a bit with the Republican electorate. The other day, like a lot of politicians who believe we care what they think, he weighed in on the massacre in Uvalde, and he Herscheled the bejeezus out of it.

Here's what he said: Cain killed Abel and that's a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop these things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation -- what about getting a department that can look at young men that's looking at women that's looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that and we can stop that that way. But yet they just want to continue to talk about taking away your constitutional rights ...

OK. That's enough to give you the general idea.

Which is, what the hell is this man talking about?

Cain and Abel? Sexual predators cruising online for victims? This has what to do with 19 dead kids and a dead teacher in a Texas elementary school?

And, no, Herschel, no one's trying to take away your constitutional rights. Give it a rest.

What I conclude from all this incoherency, and various other examples Herschel's given us on the campaign trail, is maybe not what everyone concludes. What I see, and hear, is another former football player who might well be suffering from CTE.

It's impossible to prove, of course, and I suppose there are other completely viable explanations for Herschel's inability to form and enunciate clear thoughts. But I can't help where my mind goes, and the more I hear him speak, the more my mind goes to his days as a football player and how much head trauma he incurred.

Maybe that's unfair. But it's not unreasonable given what so often happens to a man and his brain if he's spent as many years on a football field as Herschel has.

I think I'm seeing that every time candidate Herschel opens his mouth.  And it makes me sad.

A few I-don't-knows for today

And now it's time for a humble bit the Blob calls Things I Don't Know, which could be the longest Blob post in recorded history except the editors (me) have promised to be ruthlessly edit-y.

Things I Don't Know:

* I don't know what the Cleveland Browns were thinking when they handed Deshaun Watson $238 million in guaranteed money, now that two of the 2,237 (OK, so only 22) massage therapists suing him have come forward with tales of his sick penis hijinks. 

Of course, I frequently don't know what the Cleveland Browns are thinking. So there's that.

* Tangentially, I don't know what sort of book the NFL is going to throw at Thomas if it ever wraps up its investigation of said penis hijinks. But it better have some Tolstoy heft.

* I don't know how many people will tell Steve Kerr to shut up and coach after his entirely appropriate meltdown the other day in the wake of America's latest sacrifice to its gun fetish. But I'm guessing it will be the usual suspects on the usual platforms uttering the usual incoherencies.

* I don't know if the Warriors or the Celtics close out their respective conference championship series in Game 6. But I bet if they don't, they lose to the Mavs and the Heat by eleventy-hundred points because that's just the way the NBA playoffs roll this year.

* I don't know who's going to win the Indianapolis 500 this weekend, so quit asking. Also I'm going to devote an entire Blob post about it later this week, and why I will be wrong, again, as usual.

* I don't know if Josh Donaldson of the Yankees was just, well, joshing when he kept calling Tim Anderson of the White Sox "Jackie" awhile back, which got him suspended for one puny game by the splendidly lily-livered MLB commish, Rob Manfred. But I can't see how referencing Jackie Robinson's name to a black player could be construed as anything but a mocking slur.

I mean, it wasn't like he was saying "Gosh, Tim Anderson, when you said, off-handedly, that you felt like Jackie Robinson sometimes, I thought 'You know, he's right. He's as brave and filled with character as No. 42. So I'm gonna honor him by calling him 'Jackie.'"

Yeaaah, those groceries won't sell.

And lastly ...

* I don't know who are bigger piles of dog-doo, Yankees fans or Louis Blues fans. But I bet it' goes down to the wire after the former booed Anderson for objecting to Donaldson's mockery, and the latter hurled racist slurs and death threats across social media at Colorado's Nazem Kadri. 

Oh, hell. Let's just call it a tie and be done with it, and them.

Just another day in America

I wrote the following eight days ago. Eight ... days ... ago.

Let that sink in while you read:

Me, I just wonder when these moments of silence will become as much a pregame standard at our sporting events as the national anthem. "And now tonight's moment of silence for the victims in Waxahachie ... Hog Waller ... Ferndale ..."

That sort of thing.

Might as well start doing it now and beat the rush, I figure.

I say this because the country we were over the weekend is apparently the country we want to be, where a constitutional amendment gets warped beyond recognition and people die damn near every day because of it. What happened over the weekend in Milwaukee and Buffalo was only marginally abnormal, after all. Mostly it was just Tuesday.

"Mostly it was just Tuesday ..."

Well, yesterday was a Tuesday.

And now we can add "Uvalde, Texas" to Waxahachie and Hog Waller and Ferndale and whatever town is next to our moment of silence.

And there will be a next town. You can count on that as surely as you can count on the stars coming out on a clear spring night, because this is America, where the price of freedom is sending your kid to school not knowing if he or she will ever come home. 

The price yesterday was 19 children and two teachers on a clear spring day in Uvalde, a town of 15,214 that sits 80 miles west of San Antonio. Some sick twist -- 18 years old, a kid himself -- walked into a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School and opened fire with some damn shootin' iron or another, and when he was done Uvalde's population had shrunk by 21 souls.

The police finally took him out, thank God.

Sometime in the future they'll have to do it again, because this is America, and a shooting gallery is apparently what we want America to be. Otherwise we wouldn't keep electing people who treat the Second Amendment like it's a religious tract, and only ever quote the back half of it anyway because it best fits their campaign platform of God, Guns and Freedom.

Well, good on you, folks. You can have your land of the free and home of the trigger-happy. You can water the tree of liberty with the blood of more innocents. You can free up more concealed carry permits that make law enforcement's job a nightmare and makes for jumpy cops who shoot first and ask questions later.

Which means more death by the gun, more dead cops/innocent civilians, more blood for that insatiable ol' liberty tree.

Somewhere today, the usual thoughts and prayers will be sent out by the usual suspects. And somewhere else (in Texas, maybe), some politician (Gov. Greg Abbott, maybe) will use the slaughter in Uvalde to push for arming teachers like an infantry battalion. 

Because that would be completely normal, and not, you know, evidence of what a completely insane place this country has become.

I used to love America because I know its history, good and bad, and in spite of that recognize it as an ultimately hopeful place. 

I still love America. But now I think America belongs in a straitjacket.

God help me. God help us all.

Southern H(e)lls

 We've all stood where young Mito Pereira of Chile stood late yesterday afternoon. OK, so we haven't.

None of us ever stood on the 72nd tee with a one-shot lead in our very first major and tried not to think about it, which of course means it's all Pereira was thinking about. He couldn't help it, surely, because all he had to do was get up and down on the par-4 18th at Southern Hills and the PGA Championship was his.

He'd just missed going to 18 with a two-shot lead after missing a 12 1/2-foot putt on 17. Now, at 18, he took the same cut at the ball he'd taken 24 hours earlier, one which landed him safely in the fairway.

OK. So it wasn't the same cut.

This was more a weird swipe we all have seen before, because it looked like the sort of swipe every weekend hack at Hit-A-Tree Golf Course has taken a zillion times. And the ball did what it always does when that happens, which is stick out its tongue at the fairway and slice right and sail into a creek without regard for your feelings.

From there, Pereira took a drop and then skimmed his ball across the green and off the other side, and then two-putted for a double bogey. And suddenly he finished tied for third while Justin Thomas and Will Zalatoris went off to a three-hole playoff Thomas ultimately won.

They say majors are lost as much as won, but this was the rare occasion when it was both lost and won. Pereira lost it in the most excruciating manner possible, of course. But Thomas won it in the most miraculous manner possible, considering he was seven strokes behind with six players in front of him when the day began.

But he birdied 11 and birdied 12 and birdied 17, and finished with a 67. Pereira staggered home with a 4-over 75; the two players in his immediate wake at the start of the day, Zalatoris and Cameron Young, both shot even-par 71s.

So, yeah, it was Southern Hells and Southern Heaven, both at once. Let the theologians sort that one out.

A Kiwi blur

 The guy was from Arkansas and freely admitted he didn't know downforce from the Force Be With You, but he knew which way to look. And so there we stood in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway media center, looking down on the pits and the main straightaway through the big windows, and here came this other media creature, 

"Where's Jimmy Vasser?" he asked excitedly of no one in particular. "I don't see him out there. Where's Jimmy Vasser?"

The guy from Arkansas, a fellow sportswriter and friend who was new to both Indiana and the Indy 500, simply pointed toward turn one.

"He went that way."

Still one of the funniest lines ever uttered in the Speedway media center.

And something that bubbled up from my memory yesterday, seeing Scott Dixon go where no man had gone in 26 years. The greatest IndyCar driver of his generation put his familiar No. 9 on the pole for the 106th running of the Indianapolis at a shudder over 234 mph, the fastest pole speed since 1996 and the second-fastest official run ever after Arie Luyendyk's 236-plus trip on the second day of qualifying the same year.

So the New Zealander was a Kiwi blur -- and even if, like my friend, you knew he was going That Way, you had to look quick. And he needed to be quick, because the two men sharing the front row with him, Alex Palou and Rinus VeeKay, both qualified at well over 233 mph. 

All told, 17 drivers -- more than half the field -- qualified faster than 231 mph. The first eight qualifiers all topped 232. The field average of 231.023 is the fastest in 500 history.

And because my mind works a certain way, that makes me nervous.

It makes me nervous because 26 years ago the driver whose pole record Dixon exceeded yesterday was a joyous man from Coldwater, Mich., named Scott Brayton, and maybe you've forgotten what happened to him six days after he set the record. 

What happened was, he died.

Swapped ends coming to turn two while working on race setup. Hit the Speedway's infamously solid concrete wall. Was killed when his head made contact with the wall on impact.

Concrete vs. head rarely ends well. And it didn't this time. 

And I remember now a certain day that next week, the flowers wilting in the May sun outside Brayton's garage, and his car owner, John Menard, still struggling to find words. And I think about the Kiwi blur and all the others chasing him, and at the same time I marvel at it a piece of me wonders if maybe they're once again going too fast. 

I suppose this makes me Durwood Downer. And, admittedly, a lot has changed for the better in 26 years, from the SAFER barrier to better-engineered cars to the aero screens that protect drivers' heads.

But I can't think of 1996 without thinking of Scott Brayton. And so I pray everyone stays safe next Sunday when the green drops on the fastest 33 drivers in the history of this ancient place.

I also can't wait for it. Because, damn, it's gonna be something.

Mortality reality

 He looks old now, suddenly. There are bags under the eyes that weren't there yesterday, or so an observer could swear. The features are both puffy and drawn at once. You can see  pain his face that was never before evident.

Or so an observer could swear.

Tiger Woods limped around Southern Hills this weekend like a 46-year-old going on 66, mortal in a way we're not used to seeing in our athletic gods. The leg he shredded in a reckless car accident 15 months ago was clearly hurting him. The awe we once reserved for the way he could turn a golf course inside-out and send opponents into cringe mode with one icy stare became something else entirely.

Now everyone was just awed he could make the cut in the PGA Championship.

"He's the ultimate pro," said Rory McIlroy, his first-round playing partner, on Friday. "Looking at him yesterday, if that would have been me I would have been considering pulling out and just going home, but Tiger is different and he's proved he's different. It was just a monumental effort."

And, ultimately, one not one even an immortal could sustain. Saturday came, and with it wind and temperatures in the 50s, and it all became too much. Tiger labored through 18 holes that were excruciating simply to watch, and when he signed his card for a 9-over 79, his tournament was over. 

As McIlroy put it 24 hours earlier, he pulled out and went home.

And so everybody's human after all, and surprise, surprise. And now you wonder if that human part of Tiger Woods lured him into playing the PGA after he went the distance at the Masters last month. You do something a lot of people thought was impossible -- especially if you've done the impossible so many times across the years -- you start thinking you can do it every time out.

But no one can. Not even Tiger Woods.

And so now he's apparently reconsidering playing the U.S. Open, which would not seem prudent at this point. He's said all along he's definitely going to play the British Open in July, and if he's going to do that he'd be wise to skip the U.S. Open. 

Even immortals must concede to mortality in the end. The latter is undefeated in these matters, after all.

But watching it  win again is a hard thing. We want to see Tiger Woods astonish us again with his shotmaking; now we'll just settle for watching him swing a golf club, and occasionally give us flashes of what he once was.

Old, suddenly. Damn. How did that happen?

The correct path

 So apparently Trayce Jackson-Davis is not just a basketball player with superb close-out skills around the rim. He's got his head screwed on straight, too.

This upon the news TJD has decided to return to Bloomington for another winter in Indiana red, a decision anyone with an ounce of sense knew was the right one. He tested the NBA waters, and got the right advice from the right people. So good on him and good on IU, which immediately becomes a co-favorite to win the Big Ten next season.

Truth is TJD was likely looking at going in the second round of the NBA Draft, or late in the first round best-case. What that would have meant, probably, would be some heavy G-League minutes, interspersed with a lot of spectator time on an NBA bench. The former would have at least given him a chance to develop the parts of his game that still need developing; the latter would have benefited him not a whit.

But now?

Now he gets to be the go-to guy, or one of them, every night for 30-some nights. And Mike Woodson gets another season to help him develop an outside shot +-- which is not yet in his toolkit, and something the 6-9 TJD needs to be an effective every-night player in the NBA.

In today's NBA, 6-9 is a tweener, which means you're gonna spend a lot more time out on the floor than in the paint. It also means you need to be able to stick the 3-pointer when you're on the receiving end of a drive-and-kick. Shoot, even a reliable mid-range jumper will help you stand out, seeing as how it's all but extinct in pro buckets anymore.

Look for TJD to take a lot more 15 to 20-footers in the coming season, in other words. And look for him out at the 3-point line occasionally, too. 

Woodson's major selling point to recruits is his NBA experience, and how it can help a kid get to the League if that's where he wants to go. TJD will give him his first real chance to prove that. So there's a lot more at stake here next winter than just a Big Ten title and a deep NCAA Tournament run.

If Woodson can turn TJD into an effective NBA player along the way, you figure, there'll be a lot more top-five recruiting classes in his future. And more conference titles, and even deeper runs in March.

Onward.

Reaping the whirlwind

 There's something deeply comical about college football coaches squabbling over what they have wrought. You don't know whether to laugh or feel pity when a Nick Saban accuses a Jimbo Fisher of buying players, and Fisher gets all outraged and fires back.

Neither, apparently, seems to get that thus has it ever been. The difference now is the NCAA can no longer punish poor Whatsammata U. because Texas landed some blue-chip stud with a 280Z and a no-show job.

These sorts of shenanigans have been going on forever, and because of that the NCAA became hoist by its own petard. For decades it punished the little guy to make it look as if it were Enforcing The Rules, while looking the other way when the big-ticket programs did what they did. TV dough made college athletics a business driven by shaky ethics, and finally it collapsed from the weight of its own contradictions.

You can't pay a football coach $10 million a year, after all, and claim it's all about education. You can't call 'em "student-athletes" to get around the sticky wicket of compensation, and then turn the "student-athletes" into billboards for their university's multi-million dollar apparel deals.

The second you do that, they become employees of the university. Period, end of sentence.

And so now we have Name, Image and Likeness deals for those "student-athletes," and because the NCAA rushed the whole thing willy-nilly into being, boosters are using it the way they used to use cars and $1,000 handshakes. And Nick Saban is whining that it 'taint fair.

He's right that the NIL thing is out of control, but Saban's the last person who should be complaining about its unfairness. The idea that he's a straight shooter who never bought any of his incoming recruits, while Fisher is a sleaze who bought his whole No. 1 recruiting class at Texas A&M, is not an idea with much traction. 

Especially when you offer not a scrap of evidence to support your accusations. Which Saban didn't.

But he played the white knight here because, well, he can get away with it. He's at Alabama, after all. That gives him a leg up on outbidding everyone for talent, even if he doesn't call it that.  

And when you don't outbid everyone?

Well, then you crybaby about it because you don't like seeing a playing field that for once isn't radically tilted in your favor. And you say dumb stuff like accusing Fisher at Texas A&M and Deion Sanders at Jackson State of buying players, while soft-soaping the fact your incoming class brings with it $3 million in NIL deals itself. 

Saban got around that by saying 'Bama did it the "right way", whatever that means. After all, that $3 million surely was enhanced by the fact it was Alabama -- and don't think that wasn't a selling point when Saban or one of his assistants sat down in some kid's living room.

So what's the difference between Alabama and  those "cheaters" at A&M, Jackson State and Whatsamatta U.?

You tell me.

Balanced scales at last

Grasping such a simple concept shouldn't have taken this long, you figure. But as women everywhere will tell you, we are talking about men here.

Men don't need directions. Men can fix that hyperdrive thingy with a socket wrench and a little WD-40. And what do you mean women soccer players should be paid the same as the men?

The hell year do you think this is, 2022?

But God bless 'em, the men finally came around, and yesterday both the men's and women's national team unions ratified an historic new collective bargaining agreement with the U.S. Soccer Federation. And by "historic," we mean both national teams will get an even cut of any World Cup bonus money, and will receive identical per-game bonuses as well.

This has only seemed fair since, I don't know, 1850 or something, which is approximately the time the American women became world beaters while the men trudged along in their traditional role as world-beaten. The women have been one of the top two or three sides on the planet for the last 25 years; the men have, well, not. 

But the men always got more dough, because, you know, they were men. That this was inherently unfair is the simple concept referred to above -- and it was made even simpler by the disparate expectations on either side of the gender line. 

The men were paid more even though it was considered a Great Stride Forward if they reached the knockout round of the World Cup. The women were paid less even though it was considered a down year if they didn't WIN the World Cup.

See? Unfair. An amoeba could see it.

Amoebas, however, are not the USSF, which has spent years denying it was doing the women dirty by using cooked books to "prove" they weren't. No one with an ounce of third-grade math bought it, of course; the USSF's case was that glaringly bogus. And to compound this bumbling, the USSF chose to present it right after the U.S. women had won another World Cup.

Even amoebas would have been smarter.

Because the upshot was that the Federation came off looking small, petty and, oh, yeah,  profoundly ungrateful for the prestige its crown jewel had brought it. And it got properly roasted for it.

But you know what?

Three years later, the Federation finally came around. And you have to wonder if  the public ridicule it got for the way it reacted to the USWNT's World Cup win wasn't the first step down that road.

Sometimes nothing motivates a change of heart like being laughed at. Says here, anyway.

A J.J. sighting

 So they turned 'em loose on the big track yesterday in Indianapolis, and guess who was quickest on the first day of practice for the Indianapolis 500?

No, not Scott Dixon, you fool!

He was second.

First was two-time 500 winner Takuma Sato, who ran a twitch under 229 with a tow late in the day to knock Dixon off the top of the pylon. But you know who was third-fastest on the day?

Jimmie Johnson.

And now this gets interesting, because Johnson knows this ancient pile like the back of his hand, having won four times at Indy while becoming one of the two or three greatest drivers in NASCAR history. Indy cars, of course, are yea different, and J.J. has struggled with that difference so far on the road courses.

But ovals?

Ovals he knows.

And so when he finally decided to dip his toe in those waters at Texas a couple of months ago, he became, well, Jimmie Johnson again. He finished sixth, by far his best IndyCar finish so far, and now you've got to figure he's in the mix for the Big 500, along with ... oh, hell, half the field probably in IndyCar's hyper-competitive new reality.

Josef Newgarden comes to the Speedway as a well-duh favorite, having won twice already this season and who seems a lock to wind up on the Borg-Warner Trophy eventually. He's 32, he's Penske's top guy, he's won two IndyCar titles. Of course he'll add the 500 to his haul, and probably sooner than later.

But look who's right there with him: Sato, Dixon, Pato O'Ward, Alex Palou, Rinus VeeKay, Colton Herta, Simon Pagenaud, Will Power. Marcus Ericsson ...

Jimmie Johnson. Apparently.

"We have a really good race car," he told Paul Kelly from IndyCar. "It's just trying to work through extremes for me. What is a low trim setting? What's a high trim setting? What's mechanically tight? What's mechanically free?"

So much learning curve, so little time. But at least J.J.'s familiar with the schoolhouse.

Gonna be a hell of a two weeks.

Self-canceling, a primer

 Webb Simpson is a PGA golfer and FOP (Friend of Phil), and he's just as cute as all get out. The Blob was cruising its usual Sportsball sites the other day, and up popped a piece on ESPN by Mark Schlabach and Keith Van Valkenburg, in which good ol' Webb took his hacks at our so-called "cancel culture."

"If you say one thing, or somebody digs up something from your past, they cancel you," Simpson said, referring to Phil Mickelson's continued absence from the PGA Tour. "... Yeah, there should be consequences for when we screw up, but I don't think it should be as much as we've seen where it's like 'Hey, you're out. You're gone.'"

OK, first off: Ol' Webb, like so many who like to invoke the term "cancel culture" these days, tends to exaggerate for effect. Because it sure seems like an awful lot of the so-called canceled are still out there in the public sphere, if only to complain about being canceled.

Second off: But he's not entirely wrong. The pendulum has swung from no consequences for saying and doing vile things to people losing their jobs for making off-color jokes in mixed company. And that's just silly.

But ... but ...

But Phil Mickelson is not a victim of cancel culture.

That's because no one has canceled Lefty but Lefty.

He skipped the Masters on his own hook, and now he's skipping the PGA this week, even though he's the defending champion. No one told him he had to. No one told him he wasn't welcome. In fact, everyone's bummed he's not going to defend his title this week.

This is not cancel culture. This is just Phil being gutless.

According to those close to him, he doesn't want to face the jackal media, which will surely ask him uncomfortable questions about his comments regarding the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour. Yeah, the Saudis are butchering scum, he acknowledged. But, sure, he'll take their money, on account of  he's mad at the PGA.

As moral bankruptcy goes, that's about as bankrupt as it gets.

Better to have followed the example of Jack Nicklaus, who says he was offered $100 million to be the face of the LIV tour. The Golden Bear told the sheikhs to take a hike.

Phil could have taken a lesson. Greg "Mistakes Were Made" Norman, too.

Now Norman's having to defend doing business with the Saudis at every turn, as well he should. And Phil's canceling himself until further notice.

Neither are victims of anything. Except themselves.

Leaf season

 Sympathy cards are again in season for fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who every spring see their Leafs fall in the most excruciating ways. The yearly anguish must weigh on them terribly, unless by now they're numb to it. 

You get punched in the face often enough, it's just part of your routine, I suppose. Get up,  make coffee, watch the Leafs choke again. That sort of thing.

This time  it was two-time champion Tampa Bay who punched out the Leafs, winning Game 7 in Toronto. The Leafs had a 3-games-to-2 lead in the series, because of course they did. They blew a 3-2 lead in Game 6 and lost in overtime, because of course they did. Then they lost 2-1 in Game 7 thanks to two goals by Tampa's Nick Paul, who had never before scored a playoff goal.

Because of course they did.

The Leafs are now 0-for-5 in close-out games across the last two seasons. Last year they blew a 3-games-to-1 lead to the Montreal Canadiens, who won in seven games.

I'm not a betting man, but I bet by this time every Leafs fan k-new in his or her heart that their boys were going to blow it again when they won Game 5 to go up 3-2 in the series. Only the details remained unwritten.

But, hey. Last I looked, the Blue Jays were a game over .500. So folks in Toronto have that going for 'em.

And now ... NBA randomness!

 They got their dates mixed up. That had to be it, right?

Scene: Home locker room, Phoenix.

Time: Fifteen minutes before the tip of Game 7 between the host Suns and underdog Dallas Mavericks.

Chris Paul: "Game 7, guys! Let's GOOO!"

All the other Suns: "Wait ... you mean that's TONIGHT??"

Something like that surely must have occurred, because then the Suns -- top seed in the West, at home, Game 7 -- went out and folded like a bath towel against Luka Doncic and the Mavs. The game was over by halftime, when the Mavs led by 30. Doncic scored 35 points in just 30 minutes, sitting out the entire fourth quarter. He had 27 at the half -- same as the entire Suns team.

The final was 123-90, as spectacular a Game 7 

laydown as you'll ever see from a team that won 64 games during the regular season.

And, once again, we were reminded that momentum is a myth, especially in the NBA. Win by 30 one night; lose by 30 the next. It's been the only consistent theme in these playoffs so far.

Take the Memphis-Golden State series, for instance.

The Warriors were up 3-1 in the series, the Grizzlies had lost star guard Ja Morant to an injury, and the table was set for Golden State to finish off the series in Game 5. 

So what happened?

Why, the Grizzlies won Game 5 by 39 points, of course.

And what happened next?

The Warriors won Game 6 by 14 to close out the series.

That's a 53-point swing, boys and girls. NBA randomness, it's FAN-tastic!

It's also why you should never, ever, ever bet the NBA. Not unless you're fond of your money running away to join the circus.

Just another weekend in America

 There was a moment of silence before the Celtics put the Bucks on a shelf in Boston yesterday, because once more a bunch of people got shot by fools and lunatics over the weekend. 

Twenty-one took a bullet, although no one died, Friday night outside the arena Milwaukee where the Celtics were winning Game 6 against the Bucks. The next day, 13 more were shot, and 10 were killed, when a white supremacy terrorist drove 3 1/2 hours to shoot black people in a Buffalo supermarket.

Hell of a weekend in this shooting gallery we call America. Price we pay for freedom, and all that.

Me, I just wonder when these moments of silence will become as much a pregame standard at our sporting events as the national anthem. And now tonight's moment of silence for the victims in Waxahachie ... Hog Waller ... Ferndale ...

That sort of thing.

Might as well start doing it now and beat the rush, I figure.

I say this because the country we were over the weekend is apparently the country we want to be, where a constitutional amendment gets warped beyond recognition and people die damn near every day because of it. What happened over the weekend in Milwaukee and Buffalo was only marginally abnormal, after all. Mostly it was just Tuesday.

In Milwaukee, there were three separate shootings/gun battles, and two of them were the shootout at the OK Corral. Lots of firearms spraying lots of bullets everywhere, mere blocks from Fiserv Forum. How nice.

And Buffalo?

That was the handiwork of a twisted white boy, all jacked up on the paranoia so eagerly stoked by fear-mongering knobs on TV and politicians who openly traffic in white supremacist themes. All that "replacement theory" nonsense, for instance? 

Why, that's just traditional Klan doctrine dressed up in its Sunday best. Defending the white race from being overwhelmed by some great "invading" Other? Hell, the Klan's been playing variations on that since Nathan Bedford Forrest first got 'em together. It's one of their central tenets.

And over the weekend, it got 10 people shot to death.

Because words matter, see, especially if you're a public figure with a pubic platform. And when you use that platform as recklessly as some politicians or talking heads do -- especially in a country where lethal weapons are as available as candy bars -- people die. Screech about phantom threats loudly enough, after all, and someone somewhere is going to take you seriously. 

In any event, here we are again, with our moments of silence and our pro forma thoughts and prayers. And I can't help thinking about one item in the news stories about the Milwaukee shootings, mentioned merely in passing.

It was a note about how none of the shootings happened in the Deer District, an outdoor area of bars and restaurants adjacent to the arena where fans traditionally gather for watch parties. And where they have to pass through metal detectors to gain entrance.

Metal detectors for a watch party.

America, man. America.

Selective outrage

 Hypocrisy is the food of the gods in American politics, or some similar tortured metaphor. You can't throw a congress critter's inconsistent stance in Washington without hitting a congresscritter who's throwing your inconsistent stance back at you.

Some people are just more inconsistent than others.

Which brings us, obliquely, to what the Blob wrote about yesterday regarding Greg Norman and his blind eye. 

The Blob took to task Norman and his blood-money association with journalist-dismembering Saudis. Norman made the task-taking easy by dismissing that little Jamal Khashoggi deal by basically saying "mistakes were made." And haven't we all made mistakes?

Lots of media folk jumped all over that, as well they should have. Except, of course, for the media folk who reside in what the Blob likes to call FOX Land. 

Those folk said, essentially, "Yeah, well, where is the lamestream media's criticism of the NBA for crawling in bed with the United Arab Emirates, which hates gay people?"

The Blob has two responses to that:

1. I didn't know about the UAE thing until certain Republican congress critters, and their mouthpieces in the media, started caterwauling about it.

2. But I've already bashed the NBA for abandoning principle for profit. See: Here, and here.

OK, I lied. I have a third response:

3. You mean certain Republicans suddenly care about gay people? When did this happen?

And by "certain Republicans," I mean specifically Sen. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, one of our less distinguished public servants. She had nothing to say about Norman and those PGA golfers who are looking to get all pal-sy with Saudi butchers. Instead she bashed the NBA for scheduling games in the UAE, because it's just awful the way they treat gay people, isn't it?

Obligatory response: Seriously? I mean ... seriously??

Because this is the same Marsha Blackburn who scorched Disney for opposing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis "Don't Say Gay" law, which marginalizes gay people (and their kids) by forbidding schoolteachers from even breathing the word "gay." DeSantis has since gone on to try to jackboot Disney for daring to criticize Fearless Leader and his pet measure.

Now, it takes a special kind of stupid to make Disney your enemy in Florida. But that's another rant for another day.

Point is, Sen. Blackburn seems to have no issue getting behind anti-gay laws in her own country. It's only when other countries do it that she gets her outrage up -- and, of course, when it involves the NBA, a favored target of Republican ire. 

You can't do hypocrisy better than that. Seems the good Senator has absorbed the culture of her habitat well.

Tampa Tom, the Talking Head

 They're going to pay Tom Brady enough to choke two Derby fields next season, but not to throw footballs. FOX reportedly is throwing $375 million at him over the next decade to put on a tie and talk about football, which he probably knows a bit about.

("See, here's where you get the maintenance gnomes to deflate the football juuuust enough to give it the right feel in your hand," we can imagine Tom saying.)

("Wow, that had to hurt, getting sacked like that. Not that I would know. The zebras dropped laundry every time anyone breathed on me," we can also imagine him saying.)

Seriously, though, a few folks out there think he'll be lousy at talking about football, based on the way he presented himself to the media/public as a player. Bland would be one word you could use. Colorless would be another, although occasionally Brady would shock us with a burst of riotous beige.

Part of that was because he spent most of his career behind the Kremlin wall with the Patriots, the most anal organization in sports. And part of it was because he very carefully crafted an image that could best be described as Tom Brady, Action Figure. When he wasn't being guarded, he was being really guarded.

The Blob suspects that will not be a hindrance to him in the broadcast booth.

First of all, if FOX is going to pony up that sort of jing, it will go to any lengths to fit Brady with a personality. They'll feed him lines. They'll coach him like Lombardi coached Starr. They won't let him fail because they can't afford to have him fail.

And so he won't. One thing Brady isn't is dumb, and every so often he even flashes a sly, wicked sense of humor. I suspect that's the Brady that will emerge on the teevees. He'll never be Madden going all Picasso on the Telestrator, but he won't be some poor mope like Joe Montana, either.

Heck. He might even break out the beige on occasion.

The wrong crowd

 Justin Thomas is as right as ham on rye. And Greg Norman is ... well, I don't know what Greg Norman is, aside from not very good at choosing his words.

Thomas, see, says the PGA is absolutely within its rights to deny releases to Tour players for conflicting events such as the LIV Golf Invitational Series event in London next month. You gotta protect your turf, after all.

And Norman, who's the CEO for the LIV, which is bankrolled by Saudi oil money?

Well, ol' Greg said the other day that everybody makes mistakes. Like, you know, murdering a pesky journalist and cutting him apart with bonesaws.

That's what Saudi operatives did to Jamal Khashogghi of the Washington Post in 2018. Which Norman seemingly dismissed as, well, just one of those things. 

"Everyone has owned up to it, right?" he said in the Times of London. "Look, we've all made mistakes and you just want to learn from those mistakes and how you can correct them going forward."

Benefit of the doubt demands that maybe what Norman was talking about was not the Saudis butchering a human being like a hog, but his failing to acknowledge it when he decided to climb in bed with the butchers. Maybe that was the "mistake" he was referencing. 

Doesn't seem likely, frankly. But if not, how callous would a man have to be if he was dismissing an act of such brutality -- one that evidence suggests was green-lit by the Saudi prince himself?

"We've all made mistakes"?

Hey, Greg, we're not talking here about forgetting to pick up milk at the grocery store. Just a heads up.

Of course, these are the sorts of corners into which a man paints himself when he decides to run with the wrong crowd. The blood on their hands becomes the blood on his hands. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

Or in this case: Lie down with Saudi dough, get up having to explain yourself, however badly.

Any golfer who breaks ranks with the PGA Tour to play in London should have to do the same thing, and here's hoping they squirm mightily in doing so. As Thomas said the other day, that's their choice. If you want to go, go, he said. Just don't expect the PGA Tour to be very forgiving when you inevitably come crawling back.

The Blob's guess is the Tour's hard line will dissuade most of its golfers from going anywhere. The game's brightest young stars, like Thomas, will stay put because they have more future than past. Those who choose to bolt because they're ticked off at the PGA for one reason or another likely will be grumpy veterans who've already made their pile.

In any event, have at it, gentlemen. Enjoy your blood money. It won't buy you any respect, self or otherwise, but I doubt you'll miss that. If you were going to, you wouldn't have signed on to begin with.

Just don't forget what Greg Norman said: We've all made mistakes.

Good luck with yours.

The vanishing, NBA division

 So the interwhatsis tells me this morning that Bob Lanier has died, and right away it's the shoes I see. Because, you know, Lanier.

 The shoes were brown oxfords, if memory serves, or maybe burgundy. You could see yourself in their shine. And of course they were freaking cruise ships, the SS Minnow and the SS Three-Hour Tour.

"These?" Lanier said, looking down at his 18 1/2s. "I buy these any time I can kill a cow."

And then he smiled, and you knew the joke was standard issue, older than laces on a basketball. He'd probably repeated it a million times for a million audiences, not just for a kid sportswriter in Anderson, Indiana.

This was, lord, 37 or 38 years ago at least, and I have only vague memories of why Lanier was in Anderson. But I only had to walk a few meager yards to interview him, because the dear departed Anderson Daily Bulletin newsroom was right across Jackson Street from the YMCA, where Lanier was appearing.

By then he was in his mid-30s and had either just retired or was about to, and eight years later he'd go into Hall of Fame, where he surely belonged. The NBA doesn't do back-to-the-basket big men so much anymore, but Lanier was one of the best: A 6-10, 250-pound load who would wind up with 19,248 career points, 9,698 career rebounds and more than 1,000 career blocked shots.

An All-American who led tiny St. Bonaventure to the Final Four in 1970, his No. 31 is retired there. Not one but two NBA teams, the Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks, followed suit by hoisting his No. 16 to the rafters.

And, yes, he had legendarily huge feet -- so much so, a pair of his bronzed basketball shoes went on display in Springfield before the man himself even got there.

But of course it wasn't the shoes that made Lanier who he was.

When he died after a short illness yesterday, he was surviving as a "global ambassador" for the NBA, and commissioner Adam Silver acknowledged as much, calling him "one of the kindest and most genuine people I have ever been around."

What the Blob has to say about that is, he ain't the only one.

A couple of days before Lanier passed, see, another of the league's public faces did the ambassador thing. But not the way Lanier did it.  

No, sir. Chris Paul did it by not wading into the stands and beating the mortal goo out of a couple of idiot Dallas Mavericks fans.

L'Idiots, it seems, were harassing Paul's family. One of them put his hands on Paul's mother (on Mother's Day, no less). They also apparently pushed his wife, Jada.

That would have been go time right there for a person of less restraint. And the NBA would have had another Malice in the Palace black eye to nurse.

But Paul, bless him, let security handle it. And they did, blessedly. Duckwalked L'Idiots right off the premises.

Paul did have something to say about it, of course. He pointed out it was ridiculous for the league to fine players for jawing at fans, but where was their protection from the fans.

"F*** that!" Paul tweeted.

The Blob wholeheartedly agrees with that sentiment. Fans, it has noted many times before, are frequently brain-cell deficient. Maybe the NBA should acknowledge that, too.

And maybe, before he passed, sent Bob Lanier in to do a little global ambassadoring.

With his size 18 1/2s. Straight up some L'Idiot's hindparts.

A champion departs

 They always frame it as an "L", when it's cancer vs. human. So-and-so lost his battle with cancer yesterday, the news stories will say. Sometimes it's a short battle and sometimes it's a long battle, but it's always a "battle," and someone always has to lose a battle.

Far too often, it's the human.

This time, it was Marc Davidson.

Davidson passed Monday, 19 months after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer,  a few months less than that after he learned it was terminal. I saw some photos his wife, Lisa, posted over the weekend, and I knew it wouldn't be long. The cancer had whittled him down to the most slender of reeds, and it seemed clear his life was in its end stages.

You can call that an "L", if you want.

I'll never call it that, because Marc Davidson didn't lose anything to his filthy disease, and in fact turned it from an adversary to an affirmation. 

If you don't know Davidson's story, here's the shorthand: A former college basketball player, he came to Blackhawk as boys basketball coach in 2014. By 2019, he'd turned the Braves into a small-school power, winning the 1A state title. Two years later, with 2021 Indiana Mr. Basketball Caleb Furst as the centerpiece, Blackhawk won the 2A title.

By that time, the cancer was eating away at Davidson, although you'd never have known it if you didn't know it. He kept coaching last winter, long after he knew he was terminal. By February, he was so physically depleted he sometimes had to lie down on the floor of the bus when Blackhawk went on the road.

But somehow, he always said, God gave him the strength at gametime to walk out to the bench and coach his team. And when the game was over, he began asking the opposing coach if he could address coach's team.

Coach always said yes. And Davidson would tell them about his cancer, and how he was, well, dying, and how it wasn't really a battle but a way for faith to turn it into a triumph.

In other words: Appearances deceive. Especially in his case.

I met Marc Davidson almost a decade ago, when he was just starting out at Blackhawk. He kinda scared me, frankly. From basketball he'd transitioned into Strongman competitions, and now he was this 6-foot-6 behemoth with a fierce crewcut and a rumbly voice and muscles on his muscles.

But again: Appearances deceive.

Before the cancer came for him, they deceived because, for all his imposing physicality, he was the most congenial of men, quick with a smile and more than accommodating. And after the cancer, they deceived because he exuded a strength that had nothing whatever to do with muscles -- unless the muscle in question was his heart.

So, yes. Let us mourn Marc Davidson, because he was the example we always hope grownups are, but very often are not. He leaves a legacy that will live on long after him.  And that legacy extends from his family to his Blackhawk family to the community to the community of high school basketball in Indiana, and perhaps beyond.

He won, in other words. He flat-out won.

Crud on Crud

 So remember the other day, when the Blob talked about the hideous Cincinnati Reds, and how they were baseball's new Cruds, supplanting my very own Pittsburgh Cruds?

I think my Cruds heard about that somehow. And said, "Oh, yeah? Watch this."

My Cruds, see, were in Cincy over the weekend, which meant it was Crud-on-Crud. And my guys showed 'em how veterans do it, Crud-wise.

The Reds came into the weekend a catatonic 3-22. They left, thanks to my Cruds, 5-23. Which still is a disfigurement of baseball, but when was the last time the Reds took two-of-three from someone?

Well, they did. And, amazingly, outscored they Pittsburgh 16-5 in the two wins, after having been outscored 44-16 in their previous four games.

But leave it to the Pirates to turn that frown upside down, and deliver hope to the hopeless.

They did it first by letting the Reds walk all over them, 9-2, and behaving in quite the Reds-like manner themselves. In a spectacle you would more expect from the Cincinnatis, Pittsburgh had to employ Norwell grad Josh VanMeter at catcher after their starting catcher got hurt and their backup catcher was thrown out by a rabbit-eared ump for a little everyday jawing from the dugout.

This might have worked if VanMeter weren't the Bucs, um, second baseman. And if he'd played catcher at all since he was, oh, 14 or so, and still grabbing a donut from Heyerley's in Ossian on his way to school.

Needless to say, it did not go well. For either the Bucs or VanMeter.

On the other hand, the Bucs are still in third place in the NL Central, two games ahead of the floundering Cubs. And the Reds are still firmly settled in the cellar, 13 1/2 games out of first already even though it's only May 9.

But, still. Cruds be Cruds always, I guess.

Deja Derby, sort of

 Of course I thought of Indy, watching it for the fourth or fifth time. It's May. I'm an Indy guy. It's how my mind works.

And so here came Rich Strike out of the ether to bogart the Kentucky Derby yesterday, and I thought, "Wow. He just pulled a Sam Hornish Jr." Even had red-and-white silks, like Hornish drove a red-and-white racecar that day in 2006 when he bogarted the Indianapolis 500 in the final strides, er, yards.

They both came out of the ether, Sam and Rich Strike. There was this sense of unreality to both, watching the replays over and over. You kept thinking it was a trick of the light, a magic act, because no way could it happen, no wa- WAIT WHAT DID I JUST SEE??

Hornish was done like dinner with two turns left in 2006. Then he wasn't. 

Rich Strike was done like dinner at the head of the stretch yesterday, a back marker with all the other mutts. Then he wasn't.

The 500 was Marco Andretti barreling to the checkers with a couple of football fields to go. Then it wasn't.

The Derby was Epicenter and Zandon battling it out with a handful of strides to go. Then it wasn't.

Here came Hornish out of the ether. And here came Rich Strike. 

Of the two, it's Rich Strike you most can't get your head around. Hornish was royalty, a Penske guy. Rich Strike was a Not Even In The Field guy. He was the underdog of all underdogs, an 80-1 shot, an alternate who only got in the Derby because of a late scratch.

A literal outsider, Rich Strike broke from the 21 hole, which meant he was basically across the river in Jeffersonville. His jockey, Sonny Leon, races out of Mahoning Valley Racetrack in Youngstown, Ohio, which is not exactly Saratoga. Needless to say, he'd never had a Derby ride before.

But from the head of the stretch to the wire, he was freaking Eddie Arcaro.

Deep in the muck, he picked his way to front, squeezing through holes that weren't there until he squeezed through them, splitting a final two horses to claim the rail. By that time, Zandon and Epicenter had collected Messier and down the stretch they came. 

And then it was Hornish time.

Then, amazingly, Rich Strike was moving like a freight train. The rest of the field were monuments at Gettysburg -- even Epicenter and Zandon, caught so suddenly at the wire it surprised even the guy making the call.

And now, once more, I'm watching the replay.

I still don't believe what I'm seeing.

I won't believe it no matter how many times I watch it.

Sam Hornish Jr. in 2006. Yeah. That's what this was.

The new Cruds

 The original Cincinnati Red Stockings once went unbeaten for an entire baseball season, back in the days when men were men and those who weren't -- those who, for instance, wore gloves to protect their bare hands -- were dubbed "nancy boys."

That was way back in 1869, just four years after Appomattox. The Red Stockings, baseball's first true professional team, went 57-0 that summer.

I say this to provide context. I say it because, 153 years later, the Red Stockings descendants are now 3-22.

They're 3-22, they've lost nine straight games, and they've lost those games by scores like 10-5 and 18-4 and 10-1. Only one team since 1901 (the 1988 Baltimore Orioles) has had a worse 25-game stretch to start the season. 

So the Reds are not just bad; they are epically bad. They are historically bad -- so bad you can get away with saying they're not really a major league club at all, but some odd species of minor leaguers.

Which is what I frequently accuse my Pittsburgh Cruds of being, or at least of being run that way by owner, Robert Nutting. By contrast to the Reds, the Cruds are off to a fine start. They're 10-14 here on the morning of May 7, which places them in third place in the NL Central. They're even a game in front of the Cubs -- and when's the last time you could say that?

I suspect the rarified air of third will soon make them dizzy, and down they will plummet. But if not, it will be because several of the Cruds will have had excellent seasons -- which means they'll be able to lobby for real money, and off they'll go to the Yankees or Red Sox or Dodgers for more prospects. 

I don't know if that's what the Reds are up to. But I do  know they sold off the stars from a pretty decent team last year, and now they're the Dayton Dragons.

Scratch that. The Dayton Dragons are probably better.

The Reds, on the other hand, are an embarrassment to baseball, so much so that even this Pittsburgh fan feels sorry for them. They are, after all, an organization whose history goes back further than anyone's in a sport that worships its history. For them merely to be  impersonating a major-league team is not just a giant eff-you to their loyal fan base, but to the game itself.

And the worst part is Reds ownership actually said the eff-you out loud.

Remember back on the day of the Reds' home opener, a longtime unofficial holiday in Cincinnati?

The Reds team president, Phil Castellini, picked that day to tell Reds fans unhappy with the way management dismantled the team in the offseason that they can sit on it and rotate. Hey, you want us to spend more money on players? Fine, we can always move the team to a market where we can! How ya like THEM apples?

That's not a direct quote, of course. But it is a fairly accurate paraphrasing.

It's also something you never, ever say to your fans -- especially in Cincinnati, and especially right before you go tearing off on a 3-22 start.

Not even Robert Nutting has ever done anything that stupid. He just keeps quiet and adds to his pile while developing players for other ballclubs.

I guess that means the Reds are the new Cruds. And not only the new Cruds, but the new and improved Cruds, a significant upgrade from my posers in Pittsburgh.

So, you know, they got that goin' for 'em. At least.

Derby time!

 And now it's time for a Blob tradition, Twin Spires Over My Friend Flicka, also known as our Official Guide To The Kentucky Derby From A Guy Who Doesn't Know A Wither From Bill Withers.

Strike up that song by Dan Fogelberg, maestro!

We're here to tell you about women in hats designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Kentucky colonels, and beer-swilling infield creatures, and Robitussin juleps, the official adult beverage of Derby day. But we're also here to tell you who the gray horses are, and who's the bay somebody bet on, and which of them are cans of Alpo.

 Also, who's got the coolest jockey name, and the coolest trainer name, and why you shouldn't put any folding green on that guy with the white hair.*

(*It's because the guy with the white hair, Bob Baffle or Buffer or, oh, yeah, Baffert, that's it, doesn't have a dog in the hunt this year. Or a horse. This is because he was banned from the Derby this year for injecting last year's winner with illegal go-juice.)

Anyway ... let's get on with it, shall we?

Gray Horse Alert

Which this year includes White Abarrio, who's as gray as a November sky. Yeah, White Abarrio won the Florida Derby, and right now he's at 10-1, which aren't bad odds, and his trainer is the way-cool Saffie Joseph Jr.

But you know the Blob's rule: Never bet gray horses. They're frequently mutts.

OK, so not always. But mostly.

Coolest jockey

Lots of contenders here, but the Blob's going with Zandon's jockey, Flavien Prat. Because, you know, Flavien. It sounds imperial. It sounds like a Roman senator will be giving Zandon his head down the stretch. Et tu, Flavien!

(Actually, Flavien Prat is French. He's 29 years old and was born in Melun, Seine-et-Marne, France. But he's a pretty handsome devil, and he's driving the Derby favorite, who's 3-1 as of this morning. So he's got that going for him.)

Coolest trainer

No, not Todd Pletcher, who has eleventy-hundred horses in this year's field.

(OK. So only three. But, still)

Also, there's Tim Yakteen, who's standing in for the white-haired guy with Taiba and Messier; or Way-Cool Saffie (because a guy named "Saffie" MUST be way cool); or Steve Asmussen, who's Epicenter's trainer and still looking for his first Derby win after 23 tries.

But, nah. The Blob's going with Crown Pride's trainer, Koichi Shintani, because it isn't every Derby day you see a Japanese trainer turn up at Churchill Downs.

Shintani, in fact, has never shown up here. This is his first Derby horse, although he trains 40 other horses. He's also a quirkily secretive guy. No one seems to know where he was born or how old he is.

An international man of mystery! Perfect.

And your Derby winner is ...

You know the deal here. The Blob never picks one of the faves. It's no fun, it's unimaginative, and it's, well, boring. Only wusses bet the faves.

So this year, the Blob thought about going with Mo Donegal, who isn't an Irish horse but has an Irish name, and the Blob has always had a weakness for Irish horses. But Mo Donegal goes off from the dreaded 1-hole, and, besides, there's a better pick.

Bring on the hockey guy!

That would be Messier, a Canadian horse named for (of  course) hockey Hall of Famer Mark Messier. How awesome is that? 

Plus, he goes from the No. 6 post position, which is pretty decent. Also he's one of the white-haired guy's horses who's being trained by Yakteen since the white-haired guy is in horsey jail. And at 8-1, the bettors seem to think Messier isn't, you know, a poodle.

Besides, if they get to bumping around coming down the stretch, how do you not like a horse named for a hockey player? Try to interfere with Messier, he'll drop the gloves, pull the offender's silks over his head and start poundin'. Go time, baby!

So there you go. Put your chips on Messier.

Me, I'm going all in.

After all, two bucks wins me $16 right now if my pony wins. Clover.

A not-so-modest proposal

Someone had to say it. I mean, it's not like a whole lot of folks weren't thinking it, and have been for awhile.

Remember yesterday, when the Blob weighed in on the whole transfer portal/NIL situation? Remember how it suggested it's just the kids doing what the grownups have been doing for a long time in a thoroughly corporate college athletics culture?

Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith finally acknowledged as much this week, in so many words. Said maybe FBS college football should just say to hell with it, get a divorce from the NCAA and run its own show with its own set of rules. 

To which I say: Damn straight. And it's about time.

I mean, big-ticket college football (and college basketball) have been a charade for long enough. It's time to end the play-acting. Acknowledge the financial imperatives that drive both, make them professional in fact as well as function, and carry on.

It's not as if much will change if that happens. Conferences (and Notre Dame) already cut their own TV deals. Athletic departments are already clients of the apparel companies. Corporate sponsorships are a revenue stream for everything from bowl games to campus athletic -- and now are available to the "student-athletes" themselves.

What's left to do, aside from admitting the obvious?

Now Gene Smith has done that, too. And so why not make it official?

Treat your "student-athletes" like what they are, university employees. Provide schollys for those who wish to pursue an education while they're making money for the corporation, but don't require it. Provide health care, which they're already sort of doing anyway.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Won't this take all the romance out of college football and basketball? Won't this just be a semipro version of the NFL and NBA? Where's the sis-boom-bah in that?"

Oh, it'll still be there.

Online. For $29.99, plus tax.

($19.99  for season-ticket holders.)

Apocalypse or example?

 Maybe they shoulda had a plan. Who knows, mighta worked.

But, nah, the lords of corporate college athletics don't roll that way. They swing from the gut, even when the gut takes them to scary places they never imagined. Another way of saying that is they make it up as they go along.

So when they got lawyered into finally letting the kids who are the engine of their mighty capitalist machine become capitalists, too, they didn't have a plan. Plans are for wimps. The lords trusted their gut, same as ever.

And so here came the transfer portal and the NILs that enabled college athletes greater freedom and a piece of the economic pie, and now it's, Oh, God, college football and basketball are RUINED, I tell you, ruined. Just look at what's happening!

Well, yes, let's. Guys (and women) ARE transferring willy-nilly now. One of them, basketball player Parker Stewart, transferred from Tennessee-Martin to Indiana and now is transferring back to Tennessee-Martin. And now there's this basketball player at the U, Isaiah Wong, who's saying he'll transfer if he doesn't get a better NIL deal  -- even though the school has nothing to do with his NIL deal.

The whole thing's completely out of control. And of course it's all the fault of the kids,  because when has a 19 or 20 or 21-year-old ever consistently made rational decisions?

They see more money or what looks like a better situation, they're gonna jump at it. It's what kids do.

Then again, it's also what their coaches do. 

In the days since Wong announced he wanted a juicier NIL deal or he was off to the transfer portal, he's been made the poster child for everything that's wrong with the whole business, and why it's going to destroy college athletics. But where did a kid like Wong learn to be so nakedly mercenary?

Young people learn from their elders, and when their elders continually bolt for presumed greener pastures, the young people are going to follow that example. When Brian Kelly leaves Notre Dame after 12 years for LSU, the players he abandoned -- and players elsewhere -- take note. Same goes for Lincoln Riley abandoning Oklahoma for USC, and Jimbo Fisher ditching Florida State for Texas A&M, and so on and so forth.

In every case, Coach leaves for more money, a chunkier budget and a presumed better shot at the Big Ring. In every case, he breaks his word to the players he recruited for the school he's leaving. And in every case, he breaks a contract he signed in good faith.

Loyalty?

Shoot. Loyalty's for suckers. It's as over as eight-tracks.

So why wouldn't the kids think so, too?

What's happening might be seen as a looming apocalypse, but it's an apocalypse of college athletics' own doing. You change the landscape without a road map, that's what happens. You set the example your coaches set, you can't pretend to be surprised when the athletes follow that example.

College football and basketball have drunk deep from the free market well for decades. Now the athletes are drinking from it, too. And, gee, you mean how the free market operates didn't magically change because of that?

What a shock.

Consequences

 So, maybe you read this in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette yesterday. If you didn't, you ought to.

Read it slowly. Read it carefully. Then read it again.

This especially applies to those of you who are parents, and who think your little Johnny is the next LeBron or Patrick Mahomes or Mike Trout.

See, little Johnny just turned 5. He plays tee ball/biddy basketball/peewee football. He's batting .500 this year on running to first instead of third when he hits the ball. His last jump shot, from two feet away, came thisclose to brushing the bottom of the net. And the last time they let him carry the football, oversized helmet wobbling atop his head like a bowling ball on a pencil, he fell down as soon as he bumped into one of his linemen.

But, you know, he's gonna be a star.

The Blob has a message for you: No, he's not. He's just a kid. So sit down, shut up and quit screaming at the poor guy calling the game. Not waiting for him in the parking lot so you can punch him would be nice, too.

Because, see, if you read the aforementioned JG story, you know what all that has wrought. You know your actions have consequences.

More and more, as the story makes clear, you're driving officials out of high school and youth sports -- so much so, that games are being cancelled because sometimes there are no officials available to officiate them. And the biggest reason officials who no longer officiate give for quitting is the abuse they get from parents and coaches.

So if little Johnny shows up for his next game, and it's canceled because there are no officials, you know who to blame. He/she is in your mirror.

It's gotten so bad these days that last year, in Kentucky, the police had to be called because parents got into a brawl over an umpire's call. In a freaking tee-ball game. Hell, the ump was probably a kid himself.

Don't know what happened to the ump in question. But if he said "That's it, I'm done" and hung up his blues, who could blame him?

It doesn't seem like a big ask to expect alleged grownups to behave like grownups at their kids' games, but apparently it's a bridge too far these days. Delusion and invented grievance being what they are in 2022 -- damn near a national epidemic in certain notorious precincts -- they've filtered down to youth sports, apparently. And thus a few reminders are called for.

Coaches, this ain't the World Series/Super Bowl/NBA Finals, and you ain't Joe Torre/Andy Reid/Gregg Popovich. It's a bunch of little kids running around thinking about ice cream later, and you're just a guy whose day job is cranking out radials at the local Goodyear plant. Calm your ass down.

And parents?

Little Johnny's standing on second right now, staring out toward center field and daydreaming about who knows what. The ump doesn't have it in for him. The ump's just trying to make a few bucks at his summer job. So calm your asses down, too.

Shake your head and laugh at your goofy kid. Cheer when appropriate. Hell, think about ice cream. 

Either that, or live with the consequences. And you know what those are now.

Free speech, or something

ESPN personage Sage Steele is suing the company for violating her constitutional right to free speech, something that's all the rage these days among folks of a certain political bent. Whether her suit has legs, or is just another case of those folks playing the pretend persecution card, remains to be seen.

OK, first off: The Blob agrees with nothing Steele said on Jay Cutler's podcast last fall, which she claims led to retaliation by ESPN.

But, second off, it also hopes Steele shakes down the company for every penny she can get if ESPN indeed did what she claims it did. 

This is not to say Steele's comments weren't ridiculous. They were. For instance: She said, in the middle of a pandemic that has killed a million Americans so far, that ESPN's requirement she be vaccinated was "scary" and "sick." She also wondered why Barack Obama identified as black when he was raised by his white mother and her parents. And women who didn't want to be subjected to inappropriate comments in the workplace should, you know, dress differently.

Silly, all of it. A private company has every right to protect its employees any way it sees fit during a public health crisis; it's not some some Boston Tea Party liberty deal. And Obama identifies as black because, duh, white America identifies him as black, in sometimes disgusting ways. And is Steele really going to go there with the whole she-shouldn't-have-dressed-that-way absolution of oinker men who weren't raised right?

Steele claims, because of all that, she was suspended by ESPN, denied plum assignments and subjected to ridicule and shunning by her fellow employees. But the picture is much fuzzier than it appears.

ESPN claims, first of all, she was never suspended, but was sidelined for awhile when she contracted Covid and was quarantined. And she did, in fact, continue to get assignments when she returned, though how choice they were remains open to interpretation. And the criticism from colleagues could be seen as merely them exercising their right to free speech.

Which is where those folks of a certain political bent get a little fuzzy on the concept themselves. More and more they seem to think free speech means being able to say any outrageous thing that comes into their heads without debate. Anyone who disputes them -- Hey, that's nuts, and here's why -- is framed as an enemy of free speech who's trying to "silence" them.

Of course, by saying that, they're trying to silence their critics.  Which the Blob suspects is what oligarchs like Elon Musk are after when they buy social media platforms like Twitter -- despite (in Musk's case at least), all their blather about "free speech."

You should be able to say anything you want in this country without fear of retribution. Sage Steele is right about that.

But without fear of someone else saying you're full of it?

Sorry. Those groceries ain't for sale.