The Oops! Report

Training camps are open around the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League (phonetics by the late Howard Cosell), and you know what that means: Lots of irrelevant breathlessness about how good Player X and Player Y are looking in practice.

Also, how bad Player Z is looking. 

And so we come to the training camp Oops! Report, in which various players do some wildly unimpressive things, and (in one case, anyway) are cut almost upon arrival. 

My favorite, while not exactly an Oops!, was watching Chris Hinton of the Colts dog it during gasser drills back in the day. This entailed having the offensive unit take off from the goal line, sprint the length of the field, then sprint back. When the offense reached the 50, the defensive unit would take off. This went on until tongues were hanging out.

Well. Except for Hinton, that is.

He used to lope along so slowly the defense nearly caught up with him.

Now, understand, this was in the days before mini-camps and mini-mini-camps and Not-Really-Optional OTAs. So big guys like Hinton used training camp to slowly work themselves into shape.

Also, Hinton was an All-Pro lineman. Taking it easy in a training camp exercise was going to have zero effect on how many linebackers he road-graded once the season started.

Plus, it's not like he was Andrew Mevis or Daniel Jones.

Mevis, a rookie kicker trying to make the Jaguars' roster, didn't just not make the roster the other day, he didn't make it with bells and whistles. This is because he so badly sprayed his kicks spectators on the sideline should have been wearing body armor.

One of Mevis' kicks hit former Dallas Cowboys head coach Dave Campo in the head, to list the most prominent example.

Shortly thereafter he was told to report to the head coach and bring his playbook. Or something similar.

And Jones?

The struggling New York Giants quarterback didn't do himself any favors when one of his passes hit a spectator. And not just any spectator, but a disabled kid. Sharp-eyed reporters noted that he was not the intended receiver.

Jones is already entering a season in which he either goes big or goes bust. Now he does this? Can you imagine the heckling from fans?

Hey, Danny! (Holds up picture of a kid in a wheelchair) Hit the disabled kid and win a new car!

Hey, Danny! (Points to the construction helmet on his head) I came prepared!

Hey, Danny! Was that kid you hit running a deep sideline, or an underneath slant?

And that'll just be at the home games.

Contractual follies

 Decisions come hard sometimes in life, and I'm not talking about deciding between the cruller and the cream-filled. I'm talking about deciding between Yakety Sax and Sad Trombone as background music.

One or both would work right now for the Arizona Cardinals and quarterback Kyler Murray, who pratfalled their way into a carnival act of their own making this week.

I'm referring, of course, to the bizarre clause in Murray's new contract that stipulated he must spend a certain number of hours doing film study. Oh, and put down the phone/video games. Oh, and do your homework, young man, or there'll be no dessert for you! Those who are late do not get fruit cup!*

(* - Gratuitous Mel Brooks movie reference. See: "High Anxiety")

Hard to say what anyone was thinking here. The Cardinals, at the same time they were handing Murray a wad of cash, seemed to be saying "We'll pay you, but you don't work hard enough." Murray compounded matters by calling a bewildering impromptu presser in which he recited his athletic accomplishments. And who knows what Murray's agent was thinking?

Other than "Why won't Kyler return my phone calls anymore?", that is.

Certainly Murray should be rethinking his representation at the very least, because how could any agent looking out for the best interests of his client agree to this deal? And why would the Cardinals insert such a clause, anyway? Did they not realize it would open a can of worms that would be impossible to re-seal, and sour their relationship with the team's most valuable asset?

The clause was hurriedly removed once it blew up into a national story, but the damage is done. Being a high-profile quarterback in the NFL comes with pressure enough without every single gaffe being scrutinized to death, and that's what the Cardinals have sentenced Murray to. 

Every time he throws a pick this season, people will wonder if he slacked off on his film study that week. Every bad read, every less-than-stellar day, every underthrow to an open receiver ...

"Welp, looks like Kyler didn't do his homework again," folks will say, shaking their heads sadly.

Thing is, maybe he did. And maybe he does. Or maybe this is a matter between Murray and the coaching staff that should have been kept in-house.

What you say here, what you see here, what you do here, let it stay here when you leave here. Remember that one?

Now here comes Cardinal management itself breaking that, um, cardinal rule. And publicly embarrassing its star. 

Hmm. Maybe Yakety Sax AND Sad Trombone?

Cheater beaters

 The stock car boys come back to Indianapolis this weekend, and because it's not the Brickyard 400 anymore, there might at least be a fighting chance NASCAR fans will stay awake to the finish. That's because they'll be running on the infield road course again, having realized (years too late, in the Blob's estimation) that the hallowed oval made for hollow racing.

That's not what has the Blob intrigued, however.

What has it intrigued is whether or not anyone will try to cheat, given what happened last weekend.

What happened was, NASCAR stripped Denny Hamlin of a win, and Kyle Busch of second place, when the post-race inspection revealed Joe Gibbs Racing was up to some shenanigans involving the nosecone of the car.

To say that ruffled a feather or two is an understatement. NASCAR, after all, hadn't disqualified a race winner in 62 years. And it's not because everyone stopped trying to pull fast ones in 1960.

On the contrary, cheating, or trying to, is practically a NASCAR tradition, complete with its own unofficial slogan ("If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'.") Car builder Smokey Yunick made his bones trying to shell-game NASCAR, including once fielding a perfect 7/8-scale Cup car. Various others have tried various other dodges, some of them quite inventive.

Most times they got caught. But NASCAR, especially once it became the 800-pound gorilla of American motorsport, was loathe to strip offenders of victories. Instead it just fined/suspended them and took points away.

Until last Sunday, that is.

Lots of folks complained about it, and even Chase Elliott, who never led a lap but wound up the race winner anyway, wasn't exactly ecstatic about his good fortune. But it's notable that JGR didn't utter a peep of protest, not even bothering to file an appeal. 

So will NASCAR bringing the ultimate heat to beat the cheaters dissuade teams from further attempts to fool the inspectors?

Somewhere Smokey Yunick snickers.

Commitment confusion

 Remember a couple days ago, when the Blob Blobbed about Kirk Ferentz and Pat Fitzgerald complaining that college football had become a lunatic's romper room?

They were talking about the "rules" governing NILs, which amount to no rules at all. But that's not what sets the Blob to shaking its bony fist at clouds and what-not.

It's this business about recruits committing to schools, and then de-committing. 

Latest example is the current top recruit in the 2023 class, quarterback Malachi Nelson from Los Alamitos, Calif. Nelson originally committed to Oklahoma, then de-committed when Lincoln Riley left Norman for USC and re-committed to USC.

Know what he's doing this weekend?

He's visiting Texas A&M.

So here's a kid who was committed, and then wasn't, and then was, and now ... well, who knows? This week USC; next week, maybe, Texas A&M. By the time the wheel stops spinning, he could wind up in South Bend.

(No, not really. Calm down, Domers.)

Anyway, the Blob has a cranky old English minor's lament about this. Which is, why do we say a recruit has committed somewhere when he actually hasn't? If you de-commit, doesn't that mean you weren't "committed" in the first place?  

Maybe I'm over-thinking this, the way some English majors/minors overthink the Oxford comma (Don't get me started on that). But in the interests of accuracy, shouldn't we use different terminology these days when a kid declares his college choice early?

Something like, I don't know, "Jon Moxon has tentatively announced he will play college football for Brown University." Or, "Billy Bob is a pre-signing date Southwest Northern Texas State Tech recruit."

"Wow, you really are overthinking this," you're saying now. 

Just what I do.

Justice juked

 It seems fugitive from justice and all-around dirtbag Daniel Snyder will voluntarily testify before Congress via Zoom this morning, which sounds like a victory for justice but really isn't.

It's not justice denied, either, mind you. It's more like, I don't know, justice head-faked or something.

Snyder's little juke is that he gets to testify voluntarily, after fleeing the country for his yacht in  Italy to avoid a congressional subpoena. Thus he still gets to avoid the subpoena, which would have required  the Washington Commanders owner to testify under oath.

He doesn't have to do that now, since he's voluntarily testifying. This means he can't be compelled to answer any question put to him by the House Oversight Committee. He also can't be compelled to tell truth. Oh, the agreement reached says if Snyder doesn't honor his commitment to provide "full and complete testimony" the committee is prepared to compel his testimony on any unanswered questions when Snyder returns to the U.S., but that threat sounds a trifle hollow.

First of all, Snyder could just stay offshore until after the November elections, hoping the Republicans regain control of the House. If that happens, he's home free, because the ranking Republican, James Comer, says they'd drop the investigation.

You can read all of this here.

You can also wonder why unscrupulous fat cats always seem to avoid the consequences of their actions. But the answer to that is obvious.

Because they're fat cats. Accountability is for the little people.

Today in family feuds

 IndyCar and its now-lesser-light NASCAR come to Indianapolis this weekend for their annual doubleheader on the road course, and so I guess it's time to address the bizarre family feud that's happening right now in the former.

What's happening is, Chip Ganassi Racing is suing Alex Palou, who won the IndyCar title for CGR last season, his first with the team.

The reason CGR is suing Palou is because it really likes the guy and wants him to keep driving for it.

If this sounds weird to you, well, it isn't really. It seems Palou announced he was jumping to McLaren in 2023, and McLaren confirmed it. Except ...

Except, um, Palou apparently is still under contract to drive for Ganassi in 2023. Oops.

McLaren's people claim they knew nothing about this, and that Palou's people informed them he was a free agent. This might or might not be entirely true, but it gets McLaren off the hook for poaching another team's driver.

Ditto Palou, who apparently honestly thought he was a free agent. It's uncertain, other than the obvious (money), why he was so eager to jump to McLaren from CGR, one of the top two teams in IndyCar. But it seems that's the case.

Anyhoo ...

It's in the hands of the lawyers now. And if CGR wins, it gets a driver who thought he was leaving, and will still be there only because the court ordered him to be. This would make for some, ah, interesting team chemistry next summer, to say the least.

Hope Chip has his diplomacy skills all buffed up.

A petard, hoisted

 Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz is worried about the future of college football. So is Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald.

"The game on the field has never been better," Coach Fitz said this week at the Big Ten Football Media Days. "Once you walk off the field, it's never been more chaotic."

And Ferentz?

"I think we're in a really precarious place," he said. "There's just a lot of vagueness, a lot of uncertainty ... I mean, there are moments where it's like 'What the hell?'"

He's right. Fitzgerald is right. Neither is against the NIL (Name, image and likeness)  concept of players cashing in on the sport the way coaches and athletic departments always have. But no one seems to know where the lines are drawn, because no one in charge thought it through before rushing it into being.

The NCAA ran scared from all the potential lawsuits filed by student-athletes looking for a piece of the pie, and it's still running scared. Now no one's driving the bus -- and the bus, the way Ferentz, Fitzgerald and others see it, is heading for the cliff.

Shoot. These days, there's even a quasi-union pressing Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren for even more concessions, student-athletes acting like the university employees they've become. And don't think that doesn't send a chill up the spines of football coaches from Alabama to Whatsamatta U.

But you know what?

College football bought this. All of it.

It stopped being about "student-athletes" and degrees and academia when Iowa started paying Kirk Ferentz $7 million a year to coach its football team. Or when Alabama started paying Nick Saban $9.75 million to coach its football team. Or when Georgia started paying Kirby Smart $10.25 million to coach ITS football team. 

Those salaries reflect the value of a successful program these days, which is measured not by graduation rates but by the gargantuan revenue those programs annually bring in. And they give the lie to the notion that college football is a game at all anymore;  instead it's now a totally profit-driven enterprise as corporate as GM or Microsoft or Amazon.

As with any corporate enterprise, there are CEOs and middle managers and a labor force that does the actual work and generates the revenue. This is especially true of college football, where athletic departments sign chunky apparel deals in exchange for using their "student-athletes" as billboards for whatever apparel company is paying them.

Maybe you can tell me the last time you saw a college football player who wasn't wearing the Nike swoosh or the Adidas trefoil or the Under Armor stylized "H." I sure can't.  

All of this, of course, you've heard many times before on this platform. But it bears repeating now that college football has hoisted itself on its own petard. The coaches and administrators may be fretting about all this new chaos, but it is chaos they willingly (if perhaps unwittingly) brought into being. And they're just going to have to live with it.

 Or maybe Coach Whoever would like to go back to the true amateur days, when coaches got paid salaries commensurate with the rest of the faculty, and actually taught classes on the regular.

Yeah. Didn't think so.

Putting a roof on it

 No, no, no, NO, Lori Lightfoot. Haven't you been in Chicago long enough to, you know, understand Chicago?

Look, I get you're trying to keep the Bears from kiting off to the 'burbs, same as a whole lot of other NFL teams these days. It's the hipster thing to do.

But putting a roof on Soldier Field? 

No, no, no, NO. No.

Forget that Mayor Lightfoot's proposed stadium would carry a price tag somewhere between $900 million and $2.2 b-as-in-billion, a good chunk which would inevitably be paid for by work-a-day Chicagoans who like their collars blue and their Old Style cold. And forget that domed stadiums are the devil's work anyway, turning a game designed for the elements into a climate-controlled waltz for players who like their unis spotless and doilies with their tea-and-crumpets.

But a domed stadium in Chicago? On the lakefront?

At least half the Bears mystique, if they still have any, is tied to those days when the snow flies and the wind comes off Lake Michigan like a truckoad of chainsaws. It's called Bear Weather, and it defines Bear Football: Brutal, elemental, painful. Bear Weather hits you in the mouth, and Bear Football hits you in the mouth. It's Dick Butkus horse-collaring some poor mope in the open field; Mike Singletary hitting a running back so hard he forgets both his mother's name and what day it is.

Once, long ago, I was in Soldier Field for Bear Weather. It was late November, and the Bears, who were awful at the time, were playing the Lions, who were worse. I think it was 28 degrees at game time, and, yes, the wind was coming straight off the lake. I was wearing six layers and I've still never been colder in my life.

Build a domed stadium at Soldier Field, and I'm sitting in shirtsleeves in late November.

No. No. No, no, no, NO.

Broadcast news

 Watched the IndyCar doubleheader from Iowa this weekend, and like a lot of folks I came away wondering why IndyCar doesn't run more races on mile ovals. I also wondered why God's so hot at Josef Newgarden, considering what happened to him in Sunday's race.

Newgarden dominated the Saturday 250-miler and was dominating again in Sunday's 300-miler, when with 64 laps to run a piece of his suspension broke as he winged into turn four. Newgarden immediately became a mere passenger as the car hurtled into the wall, and his day was done.

Well, not quite. An hour or so later he collapsed and was airlifted to the hospital in Des Moines for observation. Seems the heavy G-force crash took its toll after all.

In any event, Pato O'Ward, who chased Newgarden to the checkers on Saturday, went on to win this time. Both races were sellouts, thanks mainly to primary sponsor Hy-Vee, which sandwiched the racing between four concerts featuring heavyweightsTim McGraw, Florida-Georgia Line, Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton.

So, huge weekend for IndyCar. But it wasn't until the NBC crew was signing off that the Blob realized just how huge.

As the broadcast ended, almost as an afterthought, the broadcast team informed its audience that if it wanted to watch the NASCAR race at Pocono, it could switch over to NBC's secondary platform, USA. That's where you could find it.

So IndyCar gets the network feed, and NASCAR gets the backup feed. Quite the discombobulation for those of us who've become accustomed these past 30 years to NASCAR ruling American motorsport as the 800-pound gorilla putting everything else in shadow, IndyCar especially.

And next weekend?

Next weekend, they share top billing back at Indianapolis.  

Strange times, man. And, for an unrepentant IndyCar guy, about time.

Highlight in low light

 The athletic feat of the week, probably of all the weeks so far in 2022, happened in Eugene, Ore., the other day. But if you blinked you likely missed it. 

This is because it didn't happen in baseball or pickup summer basketball (And what is The Basketball Tournament, anyway?) or Premier League soccer. . It didn't even happen in NASCAR or the WNBA or the annual NFL Reporting To Training Camp extravaganza.

It happened in track and field.

Women's track and field, which the male-centric Sportsball viewing public tends to pay even less attention to than men's track and field.

What happened was a woman named Sydney McLaughlin broke her own world record in the 400-meter hurdles at the World Track and Field Championships, becoming the first woman ever to go under 51 seconds with a time of 50.83. That time would have been good for seventh place in the 400-meter final. And she did it while clearing 10 hurdles.

Here's what her final few yards looked like. And note that the runners she's completely left behind are all elite 400-meter hurdlers themselves, no matter how much it looks as if she's running against a bunch of fifth graders.

Should have been the highlight of the week. And yet, it was a highlight in low light, sort of.

ESPN, one of the primary arbiters for such things, didn't even make it the Play of the Day. Instead it chose a bunch of minor-league baseball highlights and the like, while placing McLaughlin's feat  in the 10th and last "oh, yeah, and this" spot on its daily list.

Ridiculous. And no matter, because it says here you won't see a more astounding athletic performance this year.

You just won't.

A Buck's admission

John Jordan "Buck" O'Neil went into the baseball Hall of Fame yesterday, and what you can say about that is it's about damn time. The man was as baseball as a frozen rope to the opposite field. He was a hit-and-run, a drag bunt, a pitch-out that catches a baserunner napping.

America got to know Buck, and fall in love with him, in the Ken Burns documentary "Baseball", and if America had never heard of him it was a testament to the world African-American players were forced to inhabit for the game's first 90 years or so. Racism kept black players out of major league baseball until 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the color line. Until then, the Buck O'Neils and Satchel Paiges and Josh Gibsons -- the Cool Papa Bells and Oscar Charlestons and Judy Johnsons -- played what Burns dubbed "shadow ball" in the Negro Leagues. People who knew, knew how good the baseball was there; white America did not.

What they didn't know hurt them, because the record books would look a lot different today if Kenesaw Mountain Landis, racist and authoritarian commissioner of baseball, hadn't kept MLB lily-white for decades. It fell to O'Neil, in the Burns doc, to be their chronicler.

He was the perfect man for the job, kind and whimsical and folksy, and grandfatherly in a way grandfathers should always aspire to be. That he was also a figure of some historical note didn't hurt; after his playing days with the Kansas City Monarchs, he became a scout and, later, the first African-American coach in Major League Baseball. He also was instrumental in establishing the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in K.C.

I met Buck once, years ago, when he came to Fort Wayne for some function or other with the Fort Wayne Wizards. He was every bit as charming as you'd expect, and I was duly charmed. Told the story again about how he'd only heard a certain sound when ball met bat three times in his life;  once it was Babe Ruth, once it was Josh Gibson and the third time it was Bo Jackson.

Confirmed for me what I always thought, which is that Bo might have been the first man to wind up in both Cooperstown and Canton had he not suffered that career-ending hip injury.

Winding up in the former should have happened years ago for Buck, but to my knowledge he never openly campaigned for it. It simply wasn't in his nature to shine himself up. That the HOF frittered around until Buck was gone -- he died 16 years ago, at the full-to-the-top age of 94 -- feels like just another the slap among many for those old Negro Leagues players.

 That's probably unfair, given that there's now 36 Negro Leaguers in the Hall. But that's how it feels in these precincts.

In any event, the wrong was made right yesterday. And wherever Buck is in the Great Beyond, you can be sure he's smiling about it.

He always was, after all.

Cranky Old Man rant for today

 (In which the Blob's shakes its bony fist at wardrobe violations and the like)

Wardrobe violations? Did someone say "wardrobe violations"?

Indeed someone did.

And as heinous Exhibit A, the Blob presents the "alternate helmet" the Cincinnati Bengals will be wearing on odd occasions this season.

Here it is.

Have you ever seen anything more stupidly generic than that?

OK, well, I haven't. Don't like the Jets alternate helmets either, which will be black and will be paired with black unis.

As Lilly Von Schtupp said in Blazing Saddles: "Ooh. How ordinary."

I mean, has anyone broken the bad news to these guys, which is that black is, like, sooo 1990s? Or at least 2000s?

It's borrrring, people. It's like when you were a kid and thought Commodore 64 was the coolest gaming system ever, and nothing would ever top it. Whyncha do something creative with your actual team colors, instead?

 Listen. If NFL teams want to go alternate, that's fine. But let's see something old school, because the Blob is, well, old. Let's see the Bengals go full throwback to the plain orange helmets with "Bengals" on the side in lettering you can barely see, and black jerseys. Now that would be cool, in a totally uncool sort of way.

But that black-and-white helmet?

Yeah, that's great, and I get the whole White Bengal motif. But black-and-white TV was great, too, until color came along. Then it was just ... you know ... borrrring.

"Oh, go away, Geezer Boy," you're saying now. "Time for your meds."

Ha! Wrong again, Blobophiles.

I've still got an hour until pill time.

A whole pile of numbers

 Baseball is the old man who remembers the Great War like it happened yesterday, or maybe it was the Spanish-American War, or maybe it was the Napoleanic Wars. It is a game besotted with its own history.

And so come with us this morning to Fenway Park in Boston, itself an historic landmark. And enjoy one of those history wallows seamheads glory in like few others.

What happened in Fenway last night was the Toronto Blue Jays played nine innings of baseball against the homestanding Boston Red Sox.

The final score was Blue Jays 28, Red Sox 5.

The Blue Jays scored 27 of those runs in the first six innings, by which time they'd already eclipsed a club record that had stood for 44 years.

That was nothing, however. The Red Sox, see, had never surrendered more runs in a game.  Not in the club's entire 121-year history. The previous record was 27 runs, and that happened 99 years ago, when Cleveland laminated them 27-3 in 1923.

That was the score last night in the middle of the sixth inning. At that point the Boston faithful who hadn't already caught the T home might have been reminded of Super Bowl LI, when the Patriots famously trailed the Falcons 28-3 before the Pats staged the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history.

All heads immediately swiveled to the Sox dugout, waiting for Tom Brady to emerge.

OK. So they didn't.

What did happen, aside from a whole pile of numbers, was notable enough, at least in a Yakety Sax sort of way. Raimel Tapia of the Jays, for instance, hit an inside-the-park grand slam in the third inning. It happened because Red Sox center fielder Jarren Duran misjudged Tapia's routine fly ball, and it sailed over his head to the warning track. There it lay until left fielder Alex Verdugo swooped in to scoop it up, because a shocked Duran simply stood and stared.

Two innings later, another Blue Jays run scored when an infield popup fell harmlessly to earth while Red Sox catcher Kevin Plawecki, reliever Kaleb Ort and third baseman Rafael Devers all waited for one of the other two guys to catch it.

That made the score 16-3. The inside-the-park grand slam, meanwhile, stretched what was already a 6-0 lead to 10-0. More cruel embarrassment ensued.

And Tom Brady never showed. Now that would have been historic.

Wronged parties, and what-not

 The Blob holds no brief for radio foof Dan Dakich, basketball analyst turned wannabe Rush Limbaugh. He's just another bully with a microphone, a bag of gas that could power the Hindenburg. Lots of them out there these days. 

That said, I don't think he's entirely wrong in this tiff he's having with the Indianapolis Star.

That he said some reprehensible knee-jerk things about Scottsburg, In., two years ago is indisputable, because the Star got the tape and printed the transcript of his rant. Also, reprehensible and knee-jerk is just what Dakich does. Hypocrisy, too, when he attacks his favorite stalking horse, the media -- forgetting that he himself is "media," and guilty of many of the same sins for which lambastes others.

In any event, in March 2020 he went after the town of Scottsburg in southern Indiana for firing its winning basketball coach, calling it "hilljack world" and wondering if its citizens were "complete idiots" and "fricking stupid." He also said "take a dump in Scottsburg" should be "our new thing," and that he bet the coach was fired  because a school board member had a kid on the team.

"Let me guess, some jackass of a board member has a kid on the team at Scottsburg that didn't get to play enough," is what Dakich actually said.

If so, he went on, someone should tell that board member his kid was "a methhead" and "a pain in the (expletive)."

The Star printed all of that this week. 

In the same piece, it shared the story of Andrew Slaton, now 20, who says he's the player to whom Dakich was referring. His dad, it turns out, is not a mere school-board member, he’s the superintendent. So people in Scottsburg just assumed Andrew was the kid.

That may be. Problem is, the transcript the Star printed in the same story tends to support Dakich's version of things. 

Dakich claims he wasn't referring to a specific kid, and it's hard to objectively deduce otherwise. Read what he said again. Was he really referring to a specific kid, or simply being hypothetical ("let me guess"), which is how it sounds?   

Believing the former assumes Dakich is much more clever than he is, which is not very. It also assumes he'd done some actual homework before launching his rant, which is not his deal, either.

And so the Blob thinks  Dakich was being hypothetical, and it turned out not to be. Not a stretch at all when you consider how many times coaches, especially in small towns, get fired precisely because a school board member or official thinks little Johnny or Susie isn't getting enough playing time.

Happens more often than not, frankly. Bad luck this time for Dakich, and a lesson in why you should never flap your gums as carelessly as he does. And worse luck for Andrew Slaton, the unwitting victim of that carelessness.

So who is the wronged party here?

How about both, sort of?

A Ring to it

 Big debate out there now on the Magic Twitter Thingy about Andrew Luck, and, no, it's not because he's coming back. He's NOT. He NEVER WAS. Not EVER-EVER-EVER.

I'm sorry, what was I was saying?

Oh, yeah. Andrew Luck. Big debate.

The debate is about whether or not Luck should be enshrined on the Colts' Ring of Honor in Lucas Oil Stadium. Some people say yes. Some people say no. Some say yes, but not just yet.

The Blob chooses Door No. 3.

The Blob says of course Luck should eventually be on the Ring of Honor, but the etiquette for these things suggests a decent interval should pass before it happens. He only just retired three years ago, albeit with famous (some say notorious) abruptness. That still sticks in the craw of  the wanna-be warrior set, which is itself famous (or notorious) for questioning the gumption of those with whom they have nothing in common, gumption-wise.

"'I just can't take it anymore'," they like to say of Luck, in mocking tones.

"He quit on his team!" they also like to say.

Here's what the Blob says to all that: Oh, balls.

First off, no one who mocks him for leaving the game before he turned 30 has any clue whatsoever how unimaginably violent professional football is. None of them has a clue what that violence does to the human body over time. And none of them has a clue how that especially applied to Luck -- a generational talent who was carelessly broken by a front office that put him out there behind a cheesecloth O-line that couldn't block a random thought.

Pretty soon Luck's medical dance card was full up.

Torn rib cartilage? Check.

Torn abdomen? Check.

Concussion (likely several), lacerated kidney, torn labrum in his throwing arm, strained calf muscle?

Check, check, check aaaand check.

So he walked away. He could have not waited until the season was about to start to do it, but the body keeps to its own schedule. and pain doesn't wear a watch. After awhile the former decides enough is enough, and the latter becomes too much. And whatever decision there is to be made gets made for you. 

That Luck waited so long to listen, thus putting the Colts in scramble mode, is a testament to his stubborn toughness than anything. 

And the quitting on his team business?

Please. Sooner or later, everyone "quits on his team". Every time a guy retires, he is, in essence, walking away from his team. Enough with that noise.

So it says here, anyway. And so it always will.

It also says here that a man who left pieces of himself on so many football fields in service to a franchise deserves to be recognized by that franchise. It helps if you're also one of that franchise's top four quarterbacks of all time, which Andrew Luck is. 

So recognize him, eventually. It has a Ring to it, after all.

The Big Move, explained

 So California governor Gavin Newsom is demanding an explanation from UCLA, a public institution supported by the taxpayers,  about how moving to a conference half a country away improves the lives of student-athletes, the school in general, etc. etc.

Frankly that came off a trifle pouty and hurt-feelings-y, as if Newsom were saying "How could you not tell me you were moving to the Big Ten? I'm the governor, ya know! I'm kind of a big deal!" Which might or might not have been why UCLA, a public institution supported by the taxpayers, rather snootily told him (and the taxpayers) to go fly a kite, we don't owe nobody an explanation for nuttin'.

If the school HAD chosen to respond, however, it might have gone like this:

“Because it’s going to make us a buttload of cash, brah!  It'll pay for all those crappy women's sports we're forced to support because of that Title IX bulls***! But mainly, IT'S A BUTTLOAD OF CASH. What else matters?”

Think we all know the answer to that one.

The streets of Chicago, reimagined

 You've gotta admire Ben Kennedy, the new-generation NASCAR pasha. He does think outside the box.

His latest big idea is a street race in downtown Chicago, plans for which were unveiled this week. The 12-turn, 2.2-mile course will run along Lakeshore Drive and Michigan Avenue, through Grant Park and past Soldier Field. The start/finish line and pits will be in front of Buckingham Fountain.

It all happens next July 2, if all goes according to plan.

Me, I can't imagine what's going to be like to drive in Chicago then. It's a nightmare any time, even without half the major thoroughfares shut down for several days.

Quick story: Several years ago I went to Chicago to cover the Bears against the Bengals, because Tyler Eifert was playing for the Bengals and Eifert was a native son. Unbeknownst to me, the Chicago Marathon -- or some run or other -- was happening that same day.

I can't begin to tell you all the weird detours I had to take just to reach the vicinity of Soldier Field. All I recall is it seemed to take hours, and there were a million dead ends because half the city streets were closed. Frankly I've blocked most of it out. 

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Isn't that the deal with every street race in every city? Aren't they all inconvenient as hell for people who are just trying to get somewhere?"

Well ... yes. I suppose. But Chicago I know. 

I also know a NASCAR race there will likely be a tight, relatively slow-moving affair, given all the twists and turns. There'll be wrecks, surely. Guys will get into other guys. There might even be fisticuffs when Guy One blames Guy Two and vice-versa.

In other words, it has a chance to be entertaining. But as someone who's survived driving in Chi dozens of times, I'd like to see the stock-car boys take on a REAL Chicago challenge.

Rush hour. The Dan Ryan. We'll see who can drive and who can't, by God.

Rob Manfred's planet

(Hint: It's not this one.)

Which is to say, the planet baseball commissioner Rob Manfred lives on is a planet where you can make a pretty good living for yourself on somewhere between $4,800 and $14,700, which you earn only in the summer months. That's what your typical minor-league player makes, which Manfred insisted the other day was plenty of jack to live on.

"I reject the premise that they're not paid a living wage," is what Manfred actually said.

I don't blame Manfred for saying this. I mean, when you make $17.5 million a year, as Manfred does, you tend to lose track of the little people. And what reality is like for them.

As one of the little people (though not a baseball player in any known universe), I can tell you what it's like.

I can't remember exactly what I made in my first sportswriting gig out of college, but it was somewhere in the minor-league baseball player range. I lived in a duplex in a rundown neighborhood, and the cuisine at Chez Ben was not exactly five-star. I lived on Pete's Pride Pork Fritters, Banquet pot pies (into which I used to dump canned green beans, because, you know, veggies!) and grilled cheese on Wonder bread. 

Occasionally I would splurge and swing through Wendy's for a triple with cheese, aka "Just A Big Ol' Wad Of Meat." This explains how I put on 40 pounds in an embarrassingly short period of time.

Point is, I made a living wage, but barely. And it was 1977, almost 50 years ago. Gas was 62 cents a gallon. Now it's four bucks and up.

Which is to say, if I could barely live on what I was making then, there's no damn way a minor-league baseball player can live on it now. Especially when they're only drawing a paycheck during the baseball season.

At least I got paid year-round.

Kinda like Rob Manfred.

OK. So not really.

Fun with tiebreakers

 The American League beat the National League in the regulation nine innings last night, which deprived a nation that loves its gimmickry of its fix. This was an opportunity missed.

Because who wouldn't have wanted to see it tied after nine, in which case the All-Star Game would have been decided by a home-run derby? How awesome would that have been?

Personally I think every extra-inning baseball game should be decided by a home-run derby, or something similar. A sausage race, like they have in Milwaukee. A presidential mascot race, like they have in Washington. A putting contest. A base-running contest. A sunflower-seed spitting contest.

And, yes, I know, that WOULD NOT BE BASEBALL. No, it wouldn't. But it would be fun, and baseball could use some these days. 

A couple of weeks ago, for instance, Julie and I were in Fenway Park for a Yankees-Red Sox game, kind of a bucket-list deal for me. The Yankees beat the home team like a dozen egg whites, 12-5. Several bombs were hit. It was an entertaining game if you like short bursts of action interrupted by long minutes of, frankly, just screwing around.

(This included, but was not limited to, batters calling time between virtually every pitch to adjust various pieces of equipment. This absolutely drives me nuts. If I were the king baseball, this would be outlawed. I would mandate that once you step in the box, you're not allowed to call time and step out for any reason other than injury. If you do, it's the batter's version of a balk and, instead of taking your base, you take a seat in the dugout.)

Anyway ...

I remember thinking, as the game crept past the three-hour mark during the seventh-inning stretch, that baseball is the only sport I can think of that seems designed, at least these days, to run off the casual fan. And especially the young casual fan.

Oh, the seamheads will say "Well, that's just because they don't appreciate the rhythms and nuances of the game." They're probably right. But if you have to be a seamhead to enjoy a drag-assing four-hour baseball game, baseball is in trouble. There simply aren't enough seamheads out there to maintain it, or at least to keep it from becoming an irrelevant relic of the past.

And so: Sausage races. Mascot races.  A brisk game of tag. Something.

After all, it's not as if baseball hasn't already instituted its own gimmicks to speed things along. This season extra innings begin with a baserunner already on second base. This is not called, but should be, the "Beam Me Down To Second, Scotty" Rule. The seamheads hate it. Hell, I  hate it.

But at least I understand it.

The conscience of youth

 So it was just another American weekend down in Indianapolis, and by that I mean, another fine display of calibration. Someone took a loaded weapon into a mall and opened fire, killing three people, and then someone else with a loaded weapon shot the shooter, and what a world, what a world.

Now you can't go to the mall without wondering if the shootout at the OK Corral will break out. Whoopee.

And, yes, the first someone probably would have killed more people if the second someone hadn't shot him, so good for the second someone. Still can't help wondering what happens the next time. The unforeseen tends to happen when bullets start flying around, much of it involving blood and death and, you know, cool stuff like that.

But, hey: America, right? Land of the free, home of the packing. Why, even some of our loonier politicians have taken to waving guns around in their campaign ads, as if their ability to wield deadly force will help them represent their constituents up there in Congress.

And who knows? Enough loonies get elected the next couple years, the rule of the gun might be the only rule left in what used to be America. Could happen.

Me, I like to think there are still enough non-loonies out there to keep that from happening, and some of them are -- gasp! -- college kids. You know, the ones we're always talking about when we shake our heads sadly and say "These kids today ..."

Well, one of those kids today is named Anthony Richardson.

He's a quarterback for the Florida Gators who wears No. 15.

Which is why it was an easy play to dub himself "AR-15," because he's got an arm, apparently, and you know how often QBs with an arm are said to have a "cannon," a "rocket-launcher," a "rifle."

Well, Anthony Richardson has decided that's grossly inappropriate, according to Deadspin's Carron Phillips. So many people are being gunned down by AR-15s these days in the land of the packing that, to Richardson, it just felt dirty to make light of it with a silly nickname. So he's decided to drop the "AR-15" moniker and just brand himself as "AR."

A college kid with a conscience. Who knew?

Hail the Kiwi

 Quietly, this past weekend, a man from New Zealand achieved a career landmark. You might not have heard about it, although if sports fans were more discerning you would have. Their loss.

What happened was, Scott Dixon scored the 52nd IndyCar win of his career. 

This tied him for second alltime with Mario Andretti. 

The only guy ahead of him now is A.J. Foyt Jr., who won 67 IndyCar races on his way to becoming one of the three most iconic American racers of all time.

Those three, of course, are Foyt, Andretti, and Richard Petty. Petty is the man whose silhouette would be NASCAR's logo if NASCAR had an NBA-style logo. Foyt and Andretti are merely the greatest American racers of all time.

So this is some company the Kiwi is joining.

He's never gotten his proper due, mainly because of the aforementioned lack of discernment. IndyCar passed into the shadow of NASCAR in the 1990s, when the latter became nearly the fourth major professional sport at the same time the former decided civil wars were fun. It was not one of the alltime great decisions.

These days NASCAR's star has dimmed and IndyCar's has brightened somewhat, but the damage has been done. The sporting public in general watches the Indianapolis 500 and then IndyCar vanishes from its radar, partly because there is so much else that commands its attention in the wired-and-streamed 2020s. This despite the fact IndyCar is as competitive and stuffed with talent as it's ever been.

And that includes the good old days of Foyt and Andretti and Rick Mears and the Unsers.

And so here is where we hail the Kiwi, the greatest IndyCar driver of his era. He's smooth, he's fast, and when he makes a mistake it's big news because Scott Dixon never makes a mistake. He's as good as anyone ever was in this game, and that's why you can say the following now in one breath:

Foyt, Andretti, Dixon.

"A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Scott Dixon -- sounds kind of odd, don't you think?" Dixon said back in 2018, when he moved into third place in alltime wins.

Nope. Nope, not at all.

Home Run Dreary

 Pete Alonso of the New York Mets goes for his third straight All-Star Home Run Derby title tonight, but I only know this because I Googled "All-Star Home Run Derby" and several Alonso stories popped up. Including one containing Pete's tips for Derby success, for heaven's sake.

See, I can name every winner of the Indianapolis 500 on command, a nerdtastic feat that always provokes howls of laughter and "God, you're so weird!" pronouncements from my friends. But I couldn't have told you Pete Alonso had won the last two Derbies on a bet.

This is because the Home Run Derby is more like Home Run Dreary for me. Watching muscle-y dudes swat batting-practice pitches out of the park doesn't do it for me. It's like watching 7-footers with hops dunk; I always think, "Well, sure. Shouldn't they be able to?"

"But, Mr. Blob, it's still a great show," you're saying. "Especially when it comes down to the end and Player A needs to tag three or four in his last ups to catch Player B. Now that's exciting!"

Yeah ... I suppose. But what can I say? I am weird, plus a little ADD-ish. It just doesn't hold my interest.

Now, maybe if you replaced the batting practice pitchers in the final round with actual major league pitchers bringing 95-mph heat ...

That I'd find intriguing. Especially if Shohei Ohtani was in the finals, and you could somehow conjure up an AI Ohtani to pitch to himself.

Would that be cool, or what?

A W for history

 This was no unraveling in the shadow of the old town, and somehow that made it worse. Rory McIlroy had no one to blame but no one as the Claret Jug again slipped from his grasp, and how did that not make you ache a little?

All he did with a two-shot lead on the last nine holes of the British Open was keep making pars. He  didn't Jean van de Velde it. He didn't disappear into one of St. Andrew's famous pot bunkers, never to be seen again. Hell, he didn't even yip it up on the Old Course's continent-sized greens.

He just didn't make birdies.

Rolled his ball up to the lip of the cup, time after time. Watched it stop just short or slide just past, time after time. Pursed his lips, shook his head, went on to the next hole, the next chance.

You know that old saying about the majors? That no one really wins them, other people just lose them?

Well, forget that. Rory McIllroy didn't lose anything Sunday afternoon.

Cam Smith just won.

Dropped an 8-under 64 on everyone, and what are you gonna do when a guy does that? Birdied six of the last nine holes, Cam did, including 18. Reeled in Rory like a rainbow trout. No one's ever shot a lower final round in the 30 times The Open has been contested at St. Andrews, and that goes all the way back to 1873.

Ulysses S. Grant was president then. Custer was still three years away from the Little Bighorn. Old Tom Morris wasn't even old yet.

That was some historic stuff yesterday, in other words. And how does a guy beat history?

And so Rory shot 2-under for the day, and still lost. In the 150th Open. At the home of golf, St. Andrews. 

History?

History sucks.

Just not for Cam Smith.

O('s) my goodness

 ( No!" you're saying. "Not more cheesy whining about your stupid Pirates again!")

Well ... not entirely.

I mean, as the All-Star break comes, my Cruds are NOT as Cruddy as usual. They're not even in their ancestral home in last place in the NL Central. Heck, they're not even in NEXT to last place.

That's because the Reds and the Cubs are the real Cruds of the division, two of the worst four teams in baseball. My Cruds, on the other hand, are just serviceably Cruddy. 

But enough about that. ("Finally!" you're saying).

You know who's NOT cruddy right now, comparatively speaking?

No, not the Yankees. Shut up.

The Orioles!

The O-Nos just won ten straight games, and, no, I'm not making that up. They are not yet 100 games out of first. They're not even ten bazillion games below .500.

Why, right now -- right this very minute, at 8:08 a.m. on July 17 -- they're 46-45, which according to the Blob's math means they're actually one game ABOVE .500. And this after losing 110 games last season and finishing 48 games out of first.

Oh, they're still in last in the AL East, and they're still 17 games out of first, but that's because that Y Team From New York is 63-28 and 13 games ahead of even the second-place team in the East. But with 46 wins, they're already within six of their win total for all of last season (52). At the All-Star break.

So here's to the Birds, who for once are not for the birds. Long may their one-game-above-.500 flag wave.

As for the Cubs and the Reds, you are a civic embarrassment. An embarrassment, I say.

A little lame duck musing

 Look, I don't know if Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy was kidding or not. He said he was, kinda. Well, maybe. Except ...

Except then he said, kidding aside, that he didn't think it was a good idea to let Texas and Oklahoma sit in on any future Big 12 meetings, seeing how they're abandoning the conference to go to the SEC.

"I mean, if you're strategically in a business meeting, and it's two cellphone companies, I don't want someone in their company in my company," he said at the Big 12 football Media Days this week.

Again, he threw the word "jokingly" in there. But it seemed pretty clear he wasn't joking.

Nor should he have been. Because he's absolutely right.

It's all well and good for Texas and Oklahoma to ditch the Big 12, and for UCLA and USC to bolt the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. Raiding conferences -- even conferences with whom you allegedly have an "alliance," as the Big Ten and Pac-12 supposedly do -- is just how it works now. It's scummy and underhanded, but it's also corporate America. No one ever got to the top of that ladder by playing nice.

Which is why the Pac-12 and Big 12 shouldn't, either.

What they should say to Texas and Oklahoma, and UCLA and USC, is this: OK, so you're still nominally a conference member for a couple more years. But we reserve the right to decide what 'nominally' means. And to us, it means you're lame ducks -- oh, hell, let's call you what you are: carpetbaggers -- without a compelling interest in Big 12/Pac-12 affairs. So you'll be treated as such.

You'll still play a conference schedule. You'll still be eligible for conference titles. But you'll get no say in how we do things.

Seem fair to you?

Does to me.

A stroll for the ages

 This felt like a benediction, this walk up 18 under the lowering Scottish clouds. The  tribute rose around him, cheers and shouts and hands banging together. He raised his cap as it went on and on. Waved. Waved some more.

Not much was happening here. Just an entire era of golf taking one last stroll on the Old Course at St. Andrews, fighting hard to keep his old stoic's mask intact.

In the end, Tiger Woods failed, of course. He was only mortal after all.

Past 45 now, stumping along on a ruined leg, he proved his mortality with two days of weekend warrior golf, piling a 75 atop a 78 to miss The Open cut by roughly a bazillion strokes. And so this walk up 18 indeed felt like a benediction, or at least an acknowledgment that we were never going to see Tiger Woods again, at least the way we remember him.

He's old Arnie now, old Jack, taking his bows. The future of the game he took into the stratosphere -- the game he made appointment viewing in a way no but Arnie or Jack ever had -- belongs to someone else. All those people shouting and applauding and all but roaring knew that, and Tiger knows it, too.

It's why the stoic's mask cracked and his features quivered and the tears came, as he walked up toward the green. It's why a walk up 18 by a guy who'd missed the cut will be the signature moment of this Open, no matter who hoists the claret jug tomorrow afternoon.

It's why Tiger mused that this really might have been the last time he'd play The Open at St. Andrews, because it doesn't return here until 2027 and by then he'll be 51. It's why he reminisced about Arnie hitting his first tee shot in the second round of his last Open in 1995, and Jack playing his last Open in '05.

"Just to hear the ovations getting louder and louder and louder, I felt that as I was coming in (this year)," he said.

He says he's not retiring. He says he plans on playing more Opens. But he also says this is it for him this year, that just playing the events he played required an enormous amount of effort.

"It's hard just to walk and play 18 holes," he said.

Mortality talking again.

Vax this

 The lowly Kansas City Royals went up to Toronto yesterday and beat the Blue Jays 3-1, and if that's the high point of their season it's a pretty lofty one. 

After all, they not only conked the Jays. They conked Peawit Nation, too.

See, the Royals went to Toronto without 10 of their regulars, because 10 of their regulars decided to personally choose not to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Canada, unlike the U.S., takes that stuff seriously, on account of COVID is still out there and probably always will be, and it's still all kinds of nasty.

The Personal Choosers, however, remain undeterred. They're also peawits, because the Blob is tired of being told it has to coddle anti-vaxxers because Personal Choice is what America was founded on, apparently, and that deserves our respect even if we disagree.

Well, horse pucky to that, as Col. Potter used to say.

I'm going to continue to call them peawits, because that's what they are and the Blob is way past the point of being nice about it. The volume of misinformation and nonsense out there now about the COVID vaccine means being nice about it is no longer an option. If you haven't gotten the jab yet, you're a peawit. Also a numbskull. Also a few other words I'll refrain from using because this is a nominally family Blob.

"Oh, real nice, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Resorting to name-calling, are we? That's never won an argument, and it won't this time."

True. But I'm not trying to win an argument. You can't argue with anti-vaxxers, first of all. They know what they know, or think they do, and what they don't know they either don't want to know or dismiss as "fake news."

Fine, then. Believe what you want. Believe the vaccine is a plot by Dr. Fauci, who of course is in league with Big Pharma. Believe it's the vaccine that's killing people, not COVID. Believe it's totally ineffective because the vaccinated are still getting COVID, even though vaccines do not and never have guaranteed you won't get what you've been vaccinated for. That's not how they work.

But, hey, believe what you want. It's your Personal Choice, after all. 

Just as it's mine to call you a peawit. 'Cause you are.

Justice delayed

 You gotta love that International Olympic Committee. Even with all the grifting, bribe-taking and looking the other way taking up so much of its time, occasionally it gets around to doing the right thing.

I mean, just look what it did for Jim Thorpe.

What the  Olympic poobahs did was reinstate his gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon, and it only took them 110 years to do it. This is because Thorpe won those medals at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Subsequently, he was stripped of his medals,  and his name erased from the record books, because Thorpe also was playing professional baseball at the time.

What playing baseball -- minor-league baseball -- for money had to do with the Olympic pentathlon and decathlon remains a mystery, of course. But it didn't matter. Thorpe took money for playing a sport totally unrelated to his Olympic events, so he was out.

This is what passed for logic in 1912. And it did so right up until the Soviets started winning all those medals with what amounted to professionals, which the IOC conveniently overlooked because by that time excluding the Soviets would have been like starting the Indianapolis 500 with a field of 15. Too much would be missing, and viewership would plummet as a result.

Now, of course, virtually everyone is the Soviets, in the sense that they're all professionals. They make money directly from their status as Olympic athletes, which Thorpe never did. Even the IOC eventually recognized the absurdity of continuing to punish Thorpe for something that no longer violates the Olympic ideal, and hasn't for decades.

So, good on the IOC folks. It took them long enough, but, hey, they're the IOC. Stuff just takes longer to dawn on 'em.

 Now if only Major League Baseball would reinstate Shoeless Joe Jackson, having decided betting on baseball is OK here in the enlightened 2020s.

Baby steps.

Fight of no century

 So the interwhatsis tells me Ozzie Guillen wants to fight a sportswriter, and I mention this only because I'm a retired sportswriter and the thought of me climbing in the ring with a retired professional athlete makes me laugh from the belly. Also wince a bit.

I mean, it's not like it's news, Ozzie wanting to fight someone. Ozzie always wants to fight someone. Ozzie has spent his entire career, both the playing and managing segments, with his metaphoric fists up. 

And, yes, a lot of times that's happened with members of the fourth estate.

So no surprise he's proposing a fight for charity with New York Post columnist Jon Heyman, who wrote that Guillen's repeated bashing of White Sox manager Tony LaRussa is part of a campaign to supplant LaRussa as the Sox skipper. That infuriated Guillen, whose response was classically Guillen-esque: Let's put the gloves on and settle this like men.

"I am not perfect, but tired you hiding behind you a writer," he tweeted.

Let me be the first to say here I have never tried to hide behind me a writer. 

My writer-ness isn't good enough for me to do that, for one thing. Also, pronouns, gerunds and independent clauses are not at all effective in stopping a left hook -- or so I assume, because no one's ever thrown a left hook at me because of something I wrote.

Lots of descriptive adjectives, sure. A few appearances by "dumb bastard," as I recall. But no one's ever walked up to me on the street and decked me while screaming "How dare you not really insinuate but sort of insinuate that Lance Armstrong is a doper!"

People did scream that years ago, by the way, at least via email and letter. But that's another Blob post for another day.

In any event, me vs. anyone in the ring would be a spectacle only for the kind of people who slow down to ogle car crashes. I float like a tree stump and sting like a gnat, first of all. Also I'm as blind as a Washington politician without my glasses.

I guess I could wear them into the ring, though. And then tell my opponent, "You wouldn't hit a guy with glasses, would you?"

After which he would hit me, and that would be that.

Fight of the century?

Oh, sure. Fight of the ninth century, maybe, between the mortal remains of Norbert the Vital and Ethelwaine the Inept.

Tickets available nowhere.

Tiger lays it out

They're playing the first round of The Open this morning at the ancestral home of golf, the Old Course at St. Andrews. Which is only right because this is the 150th Open, and therefore proper genuflection at the Road Hole and the Valley of Sin and Swilcan Bridge is a liturgical matter as much as anything.

Me, I just like all the venerable-ness that attaches to The Open, being a history nerd and all. Did you know, for instance, that in 1871 they actually canceled The Open because they didn't have a proper trophy to hand the winner (the Claret Jug arrived two years later)? Is that not the most British thing ever?  

And speaking of venerable-ness ...

Yes, Tiger Woods is here. As he said he would be. 

And the other day, he had some things to say about that Saudi exhibition tour all the greedheads on the PGA Tour are defecting to.

What Tiger said is, he doesn't hold with it.

What he said, in essence, is the LIV defectors, a lot of them, have deserted the very thing that enabled them to command the gargantuan money the Saudis are throwing at them. (The word for people who do that is "ingrates," Blobophiles, though Tiger didn't use it.) And the kids who are signing up with it right from the amateur ranks?

"They've gone right from the amateur ranks right into that organization and never really got a chance to play out here and what it feels like to play a tour schedule or play in some big events," Tiger said.

This is because the LIV, as noted, is an exhibition tour, with 54-hole "tournaments" and no cut and a substantial payday even if you finish last. That's not exactly the Greater Greensboro Open, or even the Greater Velveeta On Rye Open. It's Words With Friends, only with gap wedges.

"What these players are doing for guaranteed money, what is the incentive to practice?" Tiger wondered. "What is the incentive to go out there and earn it in the dirt?"

And excellent question. And the counter to that is a lot of the defectors -- Phil Mickelson chief among them -- have gone out there and earned it in the dirt. And have been doing it for years.

Which leads one to the inescapable conclusion that they feel they're entitled now to some easy money, even if a lot of them already are wealthy beyond measure. 

Actually earning your dough out there is hard, after all. You have to work on your game. You have to compete. You have to pit your work ethic against everyone else's.

Maybe the defectors are tired of doing that. 

Maybe they just want to sail off into the sunset with a wad of cash in one hand and an umbrella drink in the other.

Maybe that's why Tiger Woods, who lives to compete, said this week he "just didn't understand it."

Because what competitor would?

From Russia with angst

 The usual suspects are all barking at LeBron James again, because he's wondering the same things they're wondering but he's LeBron, so LET'S BASH HIM FOR IT. 

If you think that sounds really stupid, and also epically hypocritical, you're not wrong. It is. But then that is the usual suspects specialty.

And so here's radio foof Clay Travis, once and future Suspect, saying LeBron sounds like an idiot when he talks about anything but basketball. His Greek chorus of followers and imitators chime in. And all because LeBron said something eminently reasonable on his show "The Shop". 

"Now, how can she feel like America has her back?" he wondered aloud  about the so-far failed attempts to free WNBA star Brittney Griner from her jail cell in Russia. "I would be feeling like 'Do I even want to go back to America?'"

This was taken by Clay and the Suspects as a shot at 'Merica, the greatest country in the entire history of the universe by far. And never mind that the Suspects have been harshly critical themselves about the American government's efforts to get Griner out of Butcher Putin's clutches.

Their usual line of attack is that Donald J. Trump ("Our boy!" you can almost hear them saying) would have freed Griner long ago. And the fact Joe Biden hasn't yet only proves what an incompetent boob he is.

So, in essence, they've been just as critical about Griner's continued detention as LeBron, just in a slightly different way. And it's warranted. 

Griner has been locked up in Russia since February, after all. And she, and her family, do feel abandoned, as LeBron suggested.  It's why Griner sent a letter to President Biden pleading with him to get her home, and her family trooped up to the White House to meet with the President's people.

The heat is on, in other words, from Griner and her family and the WNBA,  which turned its All-Star weekend into a Brittney Griner Awareness-fest. It's well past time, they're all saying, for someone to do something.

The problem, of course, is that Putin is using Griner as a political chess piece to force the Biden administration to back off its support for Ukraine in Russia's ongoing aggression against that nation. It's why the Suspects contention that Their Boy Trump would have gotten Griner home months ago is patently absurd. It's based on Trump's successful efforts to get LiAngelo Ball out of China, a completely apples-to-oranges comparison.

That said, the Blob can't help thinking this is becoming the Iran hostage crisis of Biden's presidency. That helped run Jimmy Carter out of the White House; the Griner mess could wind up doing the same to Biden if it keeps dragging on.

In any event, nothing LeBron said on his show was invalid. And it's merely an echo of what the Suspects have been saying themselves.

Must kill the latter to realize they basically agree with the former. So LET'S MAKE IT LOOK LIKE WE DON'T.

Yeesh. What a world.

Getting along, and stuff

 So, I have been to Fenway Park now.

I have sat in those ancient slatted seats beneath the overhang in right field, and thanked the good Lord I ignored my impulse to hit every Dunkin in B-town.

I have watched the sky go purple and orange as the sun went down beyond the Coca-Cola sign and the Green Monster.

I have stood sweating in a snake line of Bogaerts jerseys and Yaz jerseys and Ortiz jerseys - even a faded Garciaparra jersey or two, God love him - to pay 26 bucks for a couple of Bud Lights. And I’ve eaten freshly-shucked oysters in a place across the street from the ballpark, and watched the aforementioned jerseys bend an elbow with Jeter jerseys and Judge jerseys and even Ruth jerseys.

Remember the old line, too often repeated with a mocking lilt and a smirk? 

“Can’t we all just get along?”

Well … what I discovered in Fenway last week is we can. Sort of.

I don’t know what I expected when the Yankees and Red Sox had at it that night - knife fights, Sharks vs. Jets style? - but civility was way down the list. Maybe the latter happened because there were so many Yankees fans in attendance, and a lot of them seemed almost to be regulars. In our section, anyway, they seemed to know at least some of the Red Sox fans around them.

So, no duels of the blade. No drunken brawls, even though the well-oiled were well represented. When the Yankees fans sent up thunderous chants of “Let’s go, Yankees!” - and they were thunderous, odd as it was to hear - the Red Sox fans would respond with “Let’s go, Red Sox!”

The Yankees fans won that one this night, mainly because the Pinstripes were slapping the home team around in a 12-5 laugher. And of course they got pretty obnoxious about it, Yankees fans being the front runners they are.

OK. So that is not the tone I want to set here.

Because, see, I’m remembering the two young boys who sat in front of us, one in a Red Sox jersey and one in a Yankees jersey. And how the only adversarial incident between them was seeing who could cram the most popcorn in his mouth at one time.

I don’t know how you score such things. But I think they tied.

I’ll remember that, from our night in Fenway. And I’ll remember the family Julie and I met on the Kenmore train platform after the game, a man and his wife and two boys from Albany, N.Y.

Yankees fans, of course. But the dad said he actually enjoyed Fenway’s rust-flecked ambience more than Yankee Stadium, because when they tore down the old place and built the new Yankee Stadium, something went out of it that Fenway retained.

“It’s a very nice stadium,” Dad said of his home park. “All the amenities, every convenience. But it’s just really  … something.”

“Sterile?” I said.

He smiled.

“Sterile. Exactly.”

Fenway, on the other hand, is certainly not that, especially on a Yankees night. It looks like a place that opened 110 years ago, a handful of days after the Titanic sideswiped that iceberg. The concourses are dimly lit, the lines at the concession stands snarl foot traffic along them, and no breezes reach you under that overhang on a sultry summer night.

But then the sun goes down.

And the lights come up.

And this place you’ve seen a million times on TV glows like a green jewel.

And when Trevor Story and Bobby Dalbec go deep over the Green Monster back-to-back in the home fourth …

The roar, man. The roar.

The Gargantuan Ten

 (Well, I’m back — and no groans from you popcorn throwers  in the last row. I had a great time, and more on that later.  I also missed a lot, not much of which was good. In that vein, here’s my Official Catching Up With Stuff That Happened A Long Time Ago post. Apologies if you’ve already heard enough about this …)

And so, to summarize: The Big Ten's footprint is now a clown shoe.

Heel on one coast; toe on the other. Bells and whistles everywhere. Painted a particularly garish shade of green because, well, cash is green.

And that of course is what this all about, adding USC and UCLA to the family. The "student-athletes" (cough, cough) are gonna love those coast-to-coast flights to New Jersey and Maryland, with a red-eye home. And vice-versa, of course.

Geezers like me will mourn what is lost, with intersectional rivalries now just another Big Ten Saturday or Big Monday. In football especially, one of the things that made the Rose Bowl so intriguing was the clash of styles between the combatants. You had General Patton and his tanks against Richtofen's Flying Circus, aka Woody "Three Things Can Happen When You Pass, And Two Of 'Em Are Bad" Hayes vs. John "We'll Take The Other One, Then" McKay. And now that's gone.

College football is a homogenous creature now, and there isn't a lick of difference between the way USC plays the game and the way Ohio State plays it (except that Ohio State plays it better). And even if it's impossible for the geezer crowd to get its head around USC and UCLA, those Left Coast degenerates, playing in the freaking BIG TEN ... well, it ain't 1970 anymore. It's 2022, and the landscape of college athletics has changed in ways both literal and conceptual.

Literally, of course, there are no geographic boundaries anymore. Conceptually, that's because geography means nothing when everything is driven by TV markets.

That's why the Big Ten eagerly poached USC and UCLA from the Pac-12, thereby shredding the illusion of their alleged "alliance." No honor among thieves, and all that.

 Especially when adding USC and UCLA opens L.A. to the Big Ten Network.

The BTN now has the New York, Chicago and L.A. TV markets in its pocket, something none of its competitors can say. And that's all that matters anymore. Don't let anyone try to tell you it isn't.

All the sis-boom-bah that once characterized college athletics went the way of raccoon coats and "Fight On, Dear Old Whatsamatta U." decades ago. It's a boardroom game now, and every chess piece everywhere is in play. Even the "student-athletes' (cough-cough) have gone commercial with the advent of NILs.

Turns out Alabama or Kansas didn't win the national title, capitalism did. You can hate it as much as you want, and ADs can ever more laughably insist they're not the NFL or NBA. But reality is reality -- and the new reality is Penn State Inc.'s "student-athletes" (cough, cough) leaving campus on a Wednesday to play USC Inc. and UCLA Inc., and not coming back until the wee hours of Sunday.

Travel costs won't be an issue, because the BTN will pay the tab from its overflowing coffers. The SEC, which has already torn out the heart of the Big 12 by poaching Texas and Oklahoma, will go after, I don't know, Washington or Oregon or Stanford to secure their own west coast TV markets, if the Big Ten doesn't poach them first. 

Eventually only the Big Ten and SEC will be left among the "major" conferences, and they'll own all the markets. 

(And, yes, Domers, that means even Notre Dame football will eventually have to pick a side. There won’t be enough parking spaces left for them otherwise, because the two conferences will be so big all the spots on the schedule will be filled with conference games. Or so it looks from here.)

And everyone else?

The PAC-12 or whatever numerical that applies may be doomed, also the Big-12 or the ACC, or they may become a diminished presence with their own designation. Say, Division I while the two mega-conferences become Super Division I, which will look a lot more like the NFL than college football the way the geezers misremember it — or that the folks involved will ever be willing to admit.

I mean, the Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, Georgia Incs. et al are essentially already there, yet continue to peddle their worn fictions about “student-athletes” and academic integrity and what-not. Might as well go full legit pro so they can finally ditch a charade that surely must be getting wearisome.

Me?

I get enough of that on Sundays. I’ll watch the service academies and the Ivies instead, thanks. Geezer that I am.