Delayed action

 So, then: It's Kyrie 'n' Luka vs. Jaylen 'n' Jayson in the NBA Finals.

Also, if you prefer, the Dallas Mavericks vs. the Boston Celtics.

Also, a team with two guys playing out of their minds right now vs. the team that has been the winningest in the NBA all season.

Logic says you pick the latter. Not being remotely logical, I'm picking the former, who last night booted the Minnesota Timberwolves (who themselves had booted the reigning champion Denver Nuggets) in five games in the Western Conference finals.

Luka (Doncic, for those still require a last name) scored 36 points in last night's win, 20 of them in the first quarter. Kyrie (Irving) also scored 36. It was the fourth time in the playoffs so far both players have scored 30 or more points in the same game.

I don't know if the Celtics can put the brakes on that. I also don't know if the Celtics own dynamic duo, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, can match Luka and Kyrie bucket-for-bucket, although they probably won't have to because the Celtics also have Al Horford and Jrue Holiday and Derrick White, and the Mavs do not.

In any case, we'll have to wait six days for it all to begin, because the NBA and the teevees insist on being inflexible about this. The schedule says the Finals begin on June 6; therefore the Finals begin on June 6. It doesn't matter that both conference final series wrapped up a full week before that, or that the Celtics disposed of the Indiana Pacers on Memorial Day. The schedule is inviolable and timeless, like Stonehenge. It has withstood centuries of logic and rational thought (OK, so a week of logic and rational thought), and cannot be moved by any force known to man or nature.

Or, you know, something like that.

In any case, the Celtics will have been off nine days before they play again, the Mavericks six. By that time they may all be old enough to qualify for their pensions. Tatum and Brown may require walkers to get down the floor. Luka may have grown a long white beard and go by a new nickname: The Gandalf of Buckets.

"Now you're just being silly," you're saying now.

Yes, well. It's what I do.

I'll also wait, just like we'll all be compelled to do. At least nothing else is happening in the country now, besides the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Oh, and some guy got convicted yesterday on 34 counts of cooking the books to hide pay-offs to some porn star. I think I read something about that.

Sockless

 Checked in on the MLB standings this morning, and ye, gods, the White Sox, man. The Sox are Sockless. They are the Chicago Bare Feet. Choose your aphorism.

As of this morning, see, they are 15-42 and already 22 1/5 games out of first in the AL Central, with two days left in May. They've lost eight in a row and nine of their last 10. At their present rate of non-winning, they'll finish the season 45-117. 

Forty-five and 117. And 22 1/2 games out before June. I can't even.

I can't even imagine what it must be like in that clubhouse, realizing the season's already over and there are still four months left in it. I see depression. I see unanswered prayers to Jobu (H/T to "Major League") for a season-ending injury to end this torment. I see players desperately petitioning ownership and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to please, please, just let them go home already.

I see that exchange going like this:

Sox players: Can we go home now? 

Manfred: No.

Players: But this is a mental health issue! I thought baseball cared about mental health issues!

Manfred: Mental health? The hell is that? MLB has no position on mental health. If we did, we never would have let the Cubs win a World Series and then go back to being the Cubs. Think what that must have done to the mental health of Cubs fans! Although it is kinda fun, torturing them like that.

 Players: Ah, screw those northsiders. What about us? What about the fact you let baseball's worst ump, Angel Hernandez, retire the other day even though it's still only May? In fact you called him in and pretty much INSISTED he retire, even though it's still only May!

Manfred: Well, that was different.

Players: Different, how? He sucked at his job; we suck at ours. He was an embarrassment to baseball; we're an embarrassment to baseball. Same thing.

Manfred: No. It's not. You guys can still see, at least.

(Pause as the players absorb this obvious truth)

Players: Well ... can you at least get rid of Reinsdorf, then? That guy is the WORST. OK, so, actually we're the worst, but he's right up there in the Worst League standings. Hell, at this point, we'll even take Nutting over there in Pittsburgh instead of Rein-o. And he sucks, too.

Manfred: Yeah, he does. But no.

(Long pause)

Players: You're so mean.

Manfred: Hey, at least I ain't Landis. Remember what he did to you?

History, standing corrected

 I wish I were somewhere else this morning, and not because I'm unhappy with where I am. I wish I were somewhere else because I like to be entertained, and the somewhere else I'd like to be would be entertaining as all get out.

See, I wish I were wherever Ty Cobb is. Because, God, that would be some kind of fun.

I figure the racist old sociopath is throwing an epic poop-fit this morning, bellowing shattering oaths because a black man just supplanted him in the record books. I see him calling out to his fellow old racist, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and saying "Mountain, can you believe this? They're changin' history on us! How dare they!"

To which Landis would no doubt say: "Hey, I tried to keep 'em out. Can't lay any of this on my doorstep."

"This", of course, is Major League Baseball announcing that Negro League records for more than 2,300 players were officially incorporated into the baseball record books, forever altering some longstanding numbers.

This includes Cobb's lifetime .367 batting average, which now is second to Josh Gibson's .372. Gibson's .466 average for the 1943 season becomes the alltime single season record. Charlie "Chino" Smith's .451 average in 1929 moves into second place, supplanting the former alltime leader -- Hugh Duffy, who batted .440 for Boston way back in 1894.

This being the riven days of 2024, when straight-up crazy runs around stark naked in public, I'm waiting for some elected loon to call this "wokeness," the loon epithet of choice these days. I would hope, and frankly expect, this is one instance when the elected loons hold their tongues. But you'll never go broke these days underestimating the sheer bat-shittery of some of them.

So, someone somewhere will say something about "revisionist history." Count on it.

What they'll miss is the irony of being right for once, but not the way they think. This is revisionist history, in the sense that it's history that needed revising. It's history standing corrected, to be more precise. It's the completion of a history that for a century has been glaringly incomplete.

Adding Negro Leagues numbers into the official baseball records, after all, is adding the numbers of the only established professional entity excluded from those records. Yes, most of the records in the book are from the National and American leagues. But also included are records from the American Association (1882-1891), the Union Association (1884), the Players League (1890) and the Federal League (1914-1915). 

All of those had one thing in common: They were lily white, or virtually so.

The Negro Leagues, of course, were not. Yet they were far more legitimate, and certainly more successful, than most of the aforementioned. The only reason they were excluded from baseball's official record was ... well, we all know why they were excluded.

Now, finally, that injustice has been undone. That it should have happened long before 2024 is a shame MLB must rightfully bear, and for which Tuesday's announcement only partially absolves it.

In any event, hears to Josh and Chino and Oscar Charleston and all the rest. Welcome home, gentlemen. Welcome home at last.

The month that wasn't

 These are not the palmy days for NASCAR, which once bestrode the American motorsports scene like a Colossus and now bestrides it like a Colossus who shrunk in the dryer. And now Colossus is all faded, too.

Consider, for instance, what's happened in the last month, and especially in the last four or five days:

* Hendrick Motorsports, one of NASCAR's pillars, partnered with McLaren to give Kyle Larson, one of NASCAR's biggest stars, a shot at the Indianapolis 500.

* Because of that, when rain soaked Indy on race day and delayed the start of the Spectacle by four hours, Hendrick and Larson decided to stay and run the 500 rather than bail for Charlotte to run the Coca-Cola 600.

* Because of that, NASCAR has to decide whether or not to waive the rule for Larson that stipulates Cup regulars must run every race to qualify for the playoffs.

* Then there was the 600 itself, which NASCAR declared a race with 151 laps still to run and the track damp with rain. Like so much else in the NASCAR biosphere, this got some folks crabbing that NASCAR quit on its Memorial Day centerpiece, and that it instead should have waited out the wet and finished the race, even though it would have stretched into the wee hours of Monday morning.

* Last but hardly least, Stewart-Haas Racing, another NASCAR pillar, chose the day after Memorial Day to announce it is shuttering its NASCAR operations at the end of this season. This is not like the Bubba 'N' Them Family Of Car Washes race team pulling the plug on its deal, mind you; it removes from the series a 15-year-old entity that has won two Cup titles and 69 races since its formation.

Hell of a month. Hell of a last few days. And not in a good way.

Even before Tuesday's announcement, after all, NASCAR observers were saying allowing NASCAR teams to set up deals with outside entities to let NASCAR regulars run outside events is a slippery slope of the first magnitude. If they're gonna do it for the 500, what's next? LeMans? The Monaco Grand Prix? What?

The Blob's take on this is everyone should drop those pearls they're clutching, because the 500 is the 500 and everything else is not. It's the oldest, largest and most iconic motorsports event in the world, and not by a little. It's why F1 and NASCAR drivers have for decades been making the pilgrimage to Indianapolis in May.

Back in the 1960s, for instance, F1 stars Jim Clark and Graham Hill won the 500, and Jackie Stewart, Jochen Rindt, Denny Hulme and Jack Brabham raced in it. And between 1970 and 1973, Cale Yarborough, LeeRoy Yarbrough, Donnie Allison and Bobby Allison all ran the 500 as a side hustle from their stock-car racin'. 

The world didn't end. NASCAR didn't suffer from their brief absence. Cale and LeeRoy and the Allisons didn't suffer, either.

And, yeah, it's different now, because what was then called the World 600 didn't go head-to-head with the 500. On the other hand, Cup racing was strictly a points deal in those days; nowadays, the points accrued in any given race are only a means to an end -- the playoffs -- and Larson will have plenty of chances to make up for any points he lost by staying in Indianapolis. So there's that.

Truth is, this is NASCAR's fault, or rather the fault of NASCAR's hubris. It could easily solve the problem by moving the 600 to Memorial Day itself, or run it Saturday night instead of Sunday night. But this would be admitting the 500 is the bigger event, and too many in NASCAR are still laboring under the delusion that it's 25 or 30 years ago, when NASCAR was that aforementioned Colossus, and the 600 was bigger than the 500.

Those days, clearly, are long gone. IndyCar may still be the 500 and a largely anonymous bunch of street and road races, but NASCAR is a diminished presence itself. It's a case of aggravated living in the past to believe it can still go head-to-head with the Indianapolis 500 and win.

 Not the palmy days, no, sir. Not the palmy days at all.

Free spirit

 This one's for the granola-eaters, the tie-dye wearers, the Deadheads, and also for an appreciation for the deft pass out of the pivot. It's for everyone who grew his hair out and wore a headband when he hooped. It's for the 1970s, dammit, a wild and crazy time if ever there was one.

Speaking of which, here's some crazy for you this morning: Bill Walton is dead.

Passed to his reward yesterday at 71, and may his reward be great. Cancer got him. May it be cast into outer darkness forever for that offense, and for all others.

What it took from us Monday was maybe the greatest college basketball player of all time -- hoops analyst Jay Bilas thinks so, anyway -- and of course so much more than that. It  took a child of the counterculture '70s who protested the Vietnam War at UCLA, but who also loved and revered his coach, an old-timey disciplinarian named John Wooden.

It took a hoops genius who played with pure joy but who was undone by pure human torment, his pro career wrecked by perhaps the most fragile feet in America. And it took a confirmed Deadhead who hung with Jerry Garcia, and who decades later was still quoting the Dead as a network basketball analyst.

Some people found that weird and annoying. Others, who actually knew Bill and thought him one of the kindest souls who ever breathed air, thought it was just Bill being Bill: A free spirit no one could ever fence in.

What I know is one Monday night in 1973 I watched him play the greatest national championship game anyone ever played. Walton scored 44 points that night as the UCLA machine took down Memphis State. He grabbed 13 rebounds and blocked seven shots. And he made 21 of 22 shots, which looks like a misprint but isn't.

Twenty-two shots. One miss. In a national championship game. Perfection isn't possible in basketball, everyone knows that, but for one magic night Bill Walton made a hell of a run at it.

He went on to grow a beard and let his hair go and don a headband, and lead the Portland Trail Blazers to the 1977 NBA title in six games over Julius Erving, George McGinnis and the favored Philadelphia 76ers. They were some team, those Blazers. Played beautiful basketball, sharing the rock in Jack Ramsay's intricate motion offense, and it all started with Bill Walton, the best passer out of the post who ever lived.

Maybe someone was better, back in the day and up until this one. But I haven't seen him yet.

In any event, those Blazers seemed the perfect metaphor for Walton himself, a delightful amalgam of structure and improvisation. Wooden more than anyone else was able to balance those two with Walton; if he was so obsessively autocratic he even taught his players how to properly put on their socks to prevent blisters, he was tolerant enough to recognize his players had their own convictions as college students.

Which is why Walton was present and accounted for at those aforementioned protests. And why he always put his athletic socks on exactly as Wooden taught him, and taught his children to do the same.

Rest easy, Big Bill, man of your time.  Perhaps we'll all don a headband today, just for you.

For those who didn't come back

 Today being Memorial Day, the Blob is reposting something it posted three years ago, when the Vietnam War memorial -- a replica Wall -- was unveiled out on O'Day Road. Seems appropriate on a day when we pause to remember (as if we shouldn't remember every other day) those who didn't come back so the rest of us could live the lives we all live:

 Memorial Day weekend, and out on O'Day Road the sun is shining and the sky is blue and it's '68 again, '69, '70. Joe Walsh is singing about the glories of Rocky Mountain Way. A Huey evac chopper is beating at the air as it settles in to land, side doors open, men and women peering out.

A few feet away, men hold tight to their bush hats against the prop wash, transported God knows where in their memories. 

They are old now, these men. They are gray-haired and white-haired and the beards they sport, some of them, give them the look of haunted Santas. Because this is all just a setpiece, out here on O'Day Road. That's a cover band rocking through Joe Walsh, and the Huey is a restored 1970 model taking the old vets and their wives on peaceful rides, and it's not really '68 or '69 or '70, not at all.

Memorial Day weekend, and they are dedicating the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. And they have brought the traveling version of the Wall to commemorate, panels and panels of names stretching away, beginning ankle high and growing until the names stretch far above your head.

The names are Thomas C. Treadway and Harlin P. Treen and Vicente D. Perez. 

They are Sam Tenorio and Wilson N. Flowers and Edward O. Bilsie

They are Jimmie D. Brown and Lanny M. Hamby and Marcas J. Garcia and Vincent Saldano, all of whom died between 23 Sep 1968 and 28 Oct 1969, along with Valentine B. Suarez and David L. Sackett and dozens and dozens more.

Every one of them on this stretching-forever wall had families, and some of them had wives and some of them had children. None of them came home to them from Vietnam. Names and names and names, all of them lost in some benighted place halfway around the world, all of them remembered now on this weekend.

Memorial Day is not a happy day, nor is it supposed to be. It is not about thanking some uniform for his or her service. It is about all of those who did that service, and who didn't survive it.

It is about the dead -- the truest heroes of this filthybusiness of human beings killing other human beings, most of whom didn't ask for any of it.

It is about the men in bush hats and caps porcupined with unit pins, shuffling slowly along the panels and bending close occasionally, searching for their lost brothers.

"Find who you were looking for?" I ask one of the bush hats, whom I'd noticed peering intently at one of the panels.

"Yep," he says.

And then: "Well, four of 'em. There's 12 on there somewhere."

Twelve brothers. Twelve men -- kids, really, most of them -- he laughed and lived and ate and likely got drunk with.

Twelve who didn't make it back.

He did, and so he's here. Because it's his job to remember them, on this weekend and all weekends.

And now here comes the Huey again, beating the air. The cover band screeches away. American flags flutter in the cool breeze, and the old men search, and the panels stretch on and on, names and names and names again, sacrifice in every one.

Dat race

 Four hours times 365 days equals deja vu all over again. There's your calculus for this long strange trip.

It took 'em four hours to get the 108th Indianapolis 500 started Sunday, and then they all drove like bats out of hell for three hours as May afternoon stretched into lingering May twilight. Marcus Ericsson, your 2022 winner and 2023 runnerup, was crashed out of it by a rookie named Tom Blomqvist before he got to the first turn of the first lap. Folks were trying to go three- and four-wide through corners where you can't do that. 

A whole pile of drivers bit the wall, including Will Power and Colton Herta and Marco Andretti. Scott Dixon ran Ryan Hunter-Reay right into the grass and got away with it. Helio Castroneves was in the top ten for awhile, and then wasn't; NASCAR star Kyle Larson was in the mix for a bit, but missed a shift at one point and sped on pit road another time like any other rook, and finished 18th.

It was wild. It was nuts. And then, down there at the finish, last year happened all over again.

Last year was Josef Newgarden getting a huge run off turn two on the 200th lap, passing Ericsson and taking the checkers to put his face on the Borg-Warner. This year was Pato O'Ward -- the dazzling young Mexican who's going to win this race someday -- passing him for the lead as the white flag flew, and then Newgarden returning the favor, diving past him in turn three on the 200th lap to become the first repeat winner in 22 years.

Two years, same ending. Only this time in the Hoosier gloaming. and this time with everyone in the sprawling place hurting for O'Ward, who cried in the pits afterward and left his helmet on because, as he said later, it was "very wet in there."

"A tremendous champion," Newgarden called him.

No one disgreed.

Other stuff:

* Whether it was the protracted rain scrubbing the track clean or the long wait scrubbing nerves raw, the 500 looked more like a 50-lap sprint than a 500-mile Patience Bowl. Everyone was in a hurry to get to the front, and once there no one stayed there for long. 

Eighteen drivers led at least a lap, from Newgarden to Dixon to O'Ward to the previously unlettered Sting Ray Robb, who led 23 laps for A.J. Foyt. In the last 50 laps, seemingly everyone had a shot at the win: Newgarden and Dixon and O'Ward; Alexander Rossi and Santino Ferrucci and Rinus VeeKay and Scott McLaughlin, who led a race-high 64 laps from the pole.

The Blob's take: Maybe there should be a four-hour rain delay every year.

Nah. Just kidding.

* No, I don't know why Scott Dixon wasn't penalized for running Hunter-Reay off the road and out of the race, unless it was because he's Scott Dixon. He should have been.

On the other hand, if he had been penalized, he might not have been in the mix at the end, a circumstance owing to skilled fuel window management and the fact that he's, well, Scott Dixon. You don't run here for 20-plus years without learning a few things about how to get to the front. 

* Move of the day: O'Ward's amazing double save coming off turn two. How he didn't stuff it in the wall, not even he could explain. "I put that car in certain points where I didn't know if I was going to come out in once piece," he said.

* Line of the day: NBC race analyst Townsend Bell, who suggested drivers might have ingested a bit too much caffeine during the long wait for the start, and that was why they all seemed to be impersonating the wild and crazy Festrunk brothers out there. 

And last but not least ...

* Annoyance of the day: NBC endlessly, endlessly going to commercial, especially early on. For awhile there no one led more laps than And Now A Word From Our Sponsors.

Mighta won without that drive-through penalty for exceeding the limits of viewer patience. Just sayin'.

What th-?

 I am no young pup anymore ("No s***, Sherlock," you're saying), and so I am prone to non-young pup episodes. And by "non-young pup episodes," I mean, "Geezer/codger sitting in a rocking chair waving his cane in the air and complaining that the world's gone to blazes because you can't get a good (insert timeworn item here)."

So maybe you'll understand if I do a little cane-waving this morning.

What triggered it was an item I saw on the Magic Twitter Thingy last night, which noted that NBC has announced it will air the Indianapolis 500 on the USA Network tomorrow if the Spectacle gets washed out today.

"What th-?" I yelped.

And waved my cane. And began to rock furiously back and forth to keep time with my rant.

Went something like this: How the hell do you dump the Indianapolis 500 on the USA Network? This isn't the WWE (a USA staple). It's not Barmageddon or NCIS or the entire Law & Order family of programs (more USA staples). It's the freaking Indianapolis 500! What on God's green earth does NBC have on the front burner that could possibly be more important than the BIGGEST SINGLE-DAY SPORTING EVENT ON THE PLANET?

"Well, it's Memorial Day," you're saying now. "Maybe they'll run some sort Memorial-y special. Dig deep into the archives and present a 'Combat!' marathon. Steal 'Band of Brothers' from HBO and air that. Or how about 'Sands of Iwo Jima'? Can't go wrong there."

Ah, phooey, I say. It's the Indy 500. I know lots of people claim it's not as big as it used be (although they can never explain how it still draws 300,000-some people every year).  I know it's a cable TV/live stream world now. But simple propriety dictates certain events should still be reserved for the network feed, and, dammit, the 500 is one of them.

(Also, dammit, while we're at it, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway needs to bag its silly local TV blackout once and for all. It's as out of fashion as bobby sox and poodle skirts, for one thing, an anachronism belonging to a time when TV was in its infancy and there weren't a gazillion ways to watch the broadcast. And yet even though there are a gazillion ways to do that now, 300,000 paying customers still show up in person every year. Continuing to black it out, therefore, is nothing but aggravated money-grubbing. In the first degree.)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah. Simple propriety. What happened to it?

And where's my cane?

I want to wave it again.

And your winner is ...

 ... Jim Cantore from The Weather Channel. Maybe.

In other words, maybe they squeeze in the Indianapolis 500 between rain events today, and maybe they don't. Maybe it becomes the Indianapolis 252.5 or the Indianapolis 332 or the Indianapolis 415, with the weather turning everyone's strategy upside-down and inside-out. Maybe, because of that, some outlier wins because he hits the fuel/rain window right and happens to be in front when they flag the thing.

"And what outlier would that be, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.

Hell, I don't know. Do I look like I know?

All I know is I covered the 500 for 40 years, and I've correctly predicted the winner, um, three times. Or four. I might have picked Scott Dixon when he won in 2008, but I  have this nagging feeling there's some mis-remembering going on there.

I did, however, pick Emerson Fittipaldi to win in 1989, and Gil de Ferran in 2003, and Simon Pagenaud in 2019. So that's three for sure. In forty years. Obviously (he said sarcastically) you should come to me for all your "Who's gonna win the 500?" needs.

No, I suck at this, which means I either don't know a damn thing about the Greatest Spectacle, or I know way too much and therefore am prone to over-thinking the whole deal.  Arrogance makes me suspect the latter.

So who's gonna take the milk bath today? Or tomorrow or Tuesday?

Well, the weather situation makes it a much harder call, and it was hard enough for me anyway. What's on the radar will dictate strategy today, and if what's on the radar is an approaching green blob bigger than the one Steve McQueen fought in "The Blob", everyone will bury the throttle and make a mad dash to the front. 

I predict some running into one another back in the field, if that's the case. It's why I also predict a rain-shortened race favors those who are already up front, particularly the Penske monopoly in Row 1.

In which case, I'm picking Josef Newgarden.

He'd be the first back-to-back winner in 22 years, but all that tells me is we're overdue for another one. And the last time Roger Penske swept the front row in qualifying, in 1988, Penske won with Rick Mears. So there's precedent.

Mind you, this is not to say I'm absolutely 100 percent sold on my pick. I'm looking at Scott McLaughlin and Will Power in the front row with Newgarden, and I'm thinking A) maybe this is McLaughlin's time, or B) old heads tend to prosper when weather throws a wrench into best-laid plans, and Power's one of the best of the old heads. So there you go.

Then again ...

Then again, I'm looking at Alexander Rossi, another veteran and your 2016 500 winner, sitting inside Row 2 in one of those swift McLarens. I'm looking at the other two Row 2 starters -- NASCAR refugee Kyle Larson, who's been ridiculously smooth in his first try in an IndyCar, and Santino Ferrucci, who's finished in the top ten in all four of his 500 starts and finished third last year.

And then there's Pato O'Ward, who starts eighth, and Colton Herta and Alex Palou, who start 13th and 14th. Everyone seems to think they're all going to win the 500 sooner rather than later. Why not today?

All three, I figure, will be among those beating feet toward the front early. Deeper in the field, meanwhile, Helio Castroneves, hunting for win No. 5, and Scott Dixon, the best IndyCar pilot of his generation, start side-by-side in Row 7. Don't think they'll let any grass grow under their undercarriages, either.

Still like Newgarden, however. Call it a feeling.

Probably the wrong one, but, hey. Onward.

Welp

 For awhile -- in the dim recesses of four or five days ago, or even in the less-dim recesses of about nine hours ago -- this looked possible. Not probable, mind you. But possible.

The Indiana Pacers could play with the mighty Boston Celtics. Play with them? Hell, they had them beat, back in the ancient days of Game 1. And then they made one more turnover to complete the 22-turnover matching set, and Jaylen Brown did a Jaylen Brown thing by popping a three-ball to force overtime, and ...

And the Celtics escaped in overtime, 133-128. And then reminded everyone why they won 64 games in the regular season with a dominant Game 2 win in which the Pacers lost Tyrese Haliburton to a bum hammy. And then Indiana, even without their best guy, came out smokin' in Gainsbridge Fieldhouse and led by 12 at halftime last night in Game 3.  

And then ...

 Well, you know. The Pacers the sustain, the Celtics kept coming, and the C's wonn again -- even though Andrew Nembhard stepped up for Indiana with a career night (32 points, 4-of-7 from deep), and Pascal Siakam and Myles Turner combined for 44 points, 13 rebounds and seven assists, and T.J. McConnell put up 22 points, nine rebounds and six dimes in 29 minutes off the bench.

And, welp. 

Celtics lead the best-of-seven Eastern Conference finals 3-0. Season all but over for the Pacers.

Relevant stat, at three-games-to-none: The Pacers have turned it over 49 times in three games. The Celtics have kicked it away 31 times.

Other relevant stat: Aside from Nembhard's 4-of-7 sniping, the Pacers were 1-of-15 from the arc in Game 3. The Celtics, on the other hand, made 16 triples and have outscored the Pacers 138-96 from Threeville in the series.

To paraphrase Dean Wormer in "Animal House": Turnover-prone and outshot from deep is no way to go through an Eastern Conference final, son.

Ah, well. Always next year, right?

Rainy day tales

They say it's going to rain all over the Indianapolis 500 tomorrow, and, man, I hear that and immediately pour myself another cup of coffee. Rain and Indy and coffee, see, are wired together in my brain in some weird half-assed way. Most things in my brain are wired together in weird half-assed ways, but let's get specific here.

Let's talk about rain at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Let's tell a tale or two, while we wait to see if the AccuStormTrakFutureCast nerds get it right this time.

If you were a media grunt there, which I was for 40 years, rain at the Speedway made you crazy, or at least crazier. IMS was larger than life itself when the sun shone and the breezes were soft and the sky was a cerulean bowl ("Aaaand there you go with the fifty-buck words again," you're saying). But when it rained, through some strange wrinkle in physical law, somehow it contracted.

Got smaller than the inside of mom's old spin dryer, the place did. The sky would go black, precip would first darken that 2 1/2-mile ribbon of asphalt and then turn it into the world's largest moat, and, up in the media center, fidget mode would hit Defcon-1.

 We'd all, yes, go get more coffee. We'd stare at the Green Blob From Hell on the radar ("Look, it's engulfed Sacramento now!"). Then we'd go get coffee again.

Someone would repeat, for the 1,239th time, the same tired weather-dude line: "It's raining now, but it looks like we've got a window over Terre Haute". Someone else would pop an umbrella and venture down to Gasoline Alley, returning with the breathless news that it was even raining on good old A.J., and he was pretty damned mad about it.

After awhile, because the drivers were bored, too, IMS staff would bring a few of them into the Chris Economaki Conference Room. The Frost/Nixon interview, it was not.

"So, how about this weather?" we'd ask the drivers.

"Yeah, boy, it's somethin'," they'd reply.

And off we'd go to hammer that nugget into our rain-delay stories. And hit the coffee again.

Anyway ... on with the rainy day tales. Or tale.

The one that always leaps to mind is not 1997, when it took three days to get the race in, or 2007, when the skies opened right after Dario Franchitti took the checkers and his wife at the time, actress Ashley Judd, went splashing barefoot through the pit area on her way to Victory Lane. No, for pure memorably apocalyptic weather, I always come back to 2004.

Buddy Rice won from the pole that year for Bobby Rahal and David Letterman, and it was a mess of a day from the jump. The start was delayed two hours by rain; then there was another long rain delay 27 laps in. Finally Rice took the checkers and headed not for Victory Lane but one of the Formula One garages, because another dangerous storm was closing in.

This one was pure loveliness: Not only was there wind and rain involved, but it had an F2 funnel cloud embedded in it. And here we were, the Assembled Media, gathered in the worst possible place we could be, the IMS media center in the Tower Terrace complex just north of the pagoda.

It was on the fourth floor, first of all. And the entire front of it was glass. Windows ran the length of it in back, and overhead there were, I don't know, 120 or so TV monitors (more glass!) arrayed in neat ranks from the head of the room to the back. 

It was as if the whole joint was waving its hand and shouting "Hey, F2 funnel cloud! Over here, dude!"

Little wonder that, as the storm approached, we were instructed to move downstairs to the protected second floor. You know what happened next, right?

Heads popped up. Then, almost as quickly, they bent back over their laptops. You could almost hear the unspoken refrain: "Screw THAT. We got early holiday deadlines."

Some would call that dedication. Others would say it was more evidence that none of us was the sharpest knife in the drawer. 

In any case, the storm passed just south of the Speedway, where the funnel cloud tore up that side of the city. And I headed home that night through a violent cloudburst, lightning stitching the sky and the rain coming down so hard it took me an hour to get back to my hotel -- a trip that had been a 20-minute drive early that morning.

Here's hoping that doesn't happen tomorrow. But if it does, I know what I'll be doing up here in the Fort.

I'll be going for more coffee.

Questions, we've got questions

 OK, soooo ... now what?

Now that the NCAA and its five power conferences have at last all but admitted the obvious -- that they're a wholly for-profit corporate entity -- where does college athletics go from here?

Question No. 1.

Now that they've settled three pending antitrust suits by agreeing to cough up $2.7 billion over 10 years to the college athletes who made the power fives a wholly for-profit corporate entity to begin with, who foots the bill?

Question No. 2.

And ... now that the NCAA and its five power conferences have agreed to a revenue-sharing plan separate from the Name, Image and Likeness deals that have turned college athletics into a largely unrestricted marketplace, how will that work, exactly?

Question No. 3.

Others: How do Title IX regs fit into all this? Ditto the non-power five conferences that by necessity operate under entirely different economic strictures? How much of this $2.7 billion legal burden will they have to shoulder, and why the hell should they be asked to shoulder any of it given that it's the power conferences driving this bus?

How much revenue does, say, a Ball State-Eastern Michigan football game on a lovely fall afternoon generate? How much TV money? And if Ball State and Eastern Michigan have to dip into that assumed pittance as part of the settlement, how do Ball State and Eastern Michigan have enough left over to fund, I don't know, women's softball or men's golf?

And, OK, so maybe that's not how this will work. I'll be the first to profess to a certain cluelessness in that regard. But that's the problem here, is it not?

Everyone's pretty much clueless, at this point. No one knows exactly how the dominos will fall. It remains extremely murky how the NCAA is going to satisfy the power fives' unending lust for Everests of cash -- which got them into this mess to begin with -- and still serve the interests of the 22 or so other conferences who operate in an utterly different economic reality.

In exchange for stacks of guarantee money, after all, the Ball States and Eastern Michigans already serve up their football players as a live sacrifice to Alabama Inc. and Georgia Inc. and Michigan/Ohio State/Etc. Inc. Everyone wins in those deals, theoretically: The Inc.'s get to feed their endlessly needy alumni a few satisfying ass-whuppin's, and the ass-whupped Ball States and Eastern Michigans get to limp home with some desperately needed cash.

How does this settlement remedy that? NCAA is still laboring under the same old delusions. Public statements from officials involved made that painfully clear: NCAA capo Charlie Baker said the settlement will "provide clarity in college athletics across all divisions for years to come"; Notre Dame president John Jenkins, meanwhile, said it will provide "temporary stability," and that now it's up to Congress to pass legislation establishing that "our athletes are not employees, but students seeking college degrees."

Apparently he missed the part about the revenue-sharing, which basically establishes that those "students seeking college degrees" are, in fact, employees. Because why would you share revenue with someone unless they were the generators of that revenue, and not just divinity majors playing intercollegiate sports for funsies?

Yet another question.

Word Twister

 So it seems Jemele Hill, a black woman who says what she thinks, is in hot water again for being a black woman who says what she thinks.

Or rather, she's in hot water for saying what people who don't like what she says have decided she said. This happens a lot now in the noxious biosphere of Social Media These Days, as we shall see.

Anyway, Jemele Hill.

What she said in an L.A. Times piece the other day was this, about Caitlin Clark: "We would all be very naive if we didn't say race and her sexuality didn't play a role in her popularity."

That's it. That's the quote. And I'm trying very hard to see what is remotely controversial about it, given that it seems like a pretty "Well, duh" statement to me.

No one with a working brain cell could possible take issue with it, because it's absolutely true. Clark is a white, straight woman playing basketball in a league with a lot of non-white (and white) gay women. This is an indisputable fact. It's also a fact there are people who like that she's white, and also like that she's straight. 

Some of them are straight-up bigots. Some pretend they're not but eventually blow their cover. It takes all kinds, and all kinds are out there.

Immediately, though, Hill was getting bashed as a "racist" by what the Blob likes to call the Usual Suspects. She was accused of once again dragging race into everything, a consistent theme for her detractors ever since she got in hot water at ESPN for calling Donald Trump a racist.

Now, I don't know if Trump is a racist or not. Circumstantial evidence exists both ways. What I do know -- all I do know -- is a whole lot of folks who used to wear sheets and hoods and burn crosses on hillsides (and some who still do) think he's their guy. And I doubt that's because of where he stands on the gold standard.

Anyway ... back to Hill and social media, which took what she said and did a fine job of  distorting it. Suddenly we were told she was saying the only reason for Caitlin Clark's popularity was the fact she was white and straight, which is not what she said at all. And we were told this suggested Hill had a major problem with Clark's whiteness and straightness, which is also not what she said -- or even intimated, given that her feeds are crowded with attagirls both for Clark and for those who publicly support her.

But Word Twister is social media's favorite sport now, and it cuts across every societal strata. Politicians on both sides of the ideological divide play it all the time; Donald Trump himself, the gravitational center of the fringe entity that once was the Republican party, is especially adept at turning the game on its head in his own uniquely dishonest way. 

Hey, I didn't say that. Wait, you have video of me saying that? Well, geez, I was only joking. Can't you guys take a joke?

Maybe Jemele Hill should tear a page from that playbook next time. Just a thought.

Up against it. Or not.

 OK. So now we know what we know, I guess.

We know the Boston Celtics didn't win 64 games during the regular season through sorcery or fairy dust or some leprechaun alchemy, the still-potent essence of Bill Russell 'n' them inhabiting the bodies of Jayson Tatum 'n' them.

We know they're good, damn good, and they don't quit even when for long stretches it looks to be the other guy's night.

We know, finally, that the Indiana Pacers can hit them with everything they have, and the Celtics are still going to extract the W because everything the Pacers had wasn't quite enough this time.

What else can you say about Game 1 of the NBA Eastern Conference finals, except that the Celtics escaped with a 133-128 win in overtime?

That the Pacers shot 53 percent, made 13 threes, out-boarded Boston and still lost?

That they put seven players in double figures, and three of their five starters scored 23 (Myles Turner), 24 (Pascal Siakam) and 25 points (Tyrese Haliburton), and, yep, they still lost?

That they lost because Tatum went for 36 for Boston, and Jrue Holiday for 28, and Jaylen Brown for 26? That they lost because, as well as they played, they turned the ball over 21 times, and were especially sloppy when it mattered most?

Well ... yes. You can say all of that.

You can also say this means there's no way the Pacers can win this series -- or you can say if they play that well and don't boot the rock 21 times (which isn't likely to happen again), they're perfectly capable of taking it the distance and maybe even winning it by stealing Game 7 in Boston the way they stole Game 7 in New York. This record has two sides.

Me, I'm inclined to believe the latter, up until the "stealing Game 7" part. I don't think that will happen. I don't think it even gets to that point unless the Pacers can duplicate what they did in Game 1, minus the 21 turnovers.

That's an Everest of an order, frankly. Which is why I think, if it doesn't go seven games, the Celtics wrap it in five.

Here's to the Pacers proving me wrong. Please do, gentlemen.

The Blight of the Century

And now for something completely different, as Monty Python used to say. Or maybe just weird or stupid or some combination of both.

Which is to say, it's time to look in on the Fight of the Century coming up in July between an old man and some YouTube guy who has built a boxing career, sort of, by fighting has-beens and athletes from other sports.

Yes, it's Jake Paul against 58-year-old Mike Tyson, and, OK, so it's not the Fight of the Century. It's more like the Blight of the Century -- and if you want to call it, it's OK by me.

Tyson, however, would prefer you not. It seems he's touchy about that sort of thing.

According to Deadspin, see, last week some local radio producer in Arlington, Texas (where the fight will take place) asked Paul at a presser when he was going to fight a real fight and not "gimmick fights," and Paul said something like "Wow, did you just call Mike Tyson a gimmick?", and then Tyson got up and expressed his displeasure with Radio Dude.

"What did you call me, sir?" he said. "What did you call me?"

He called you a gimmick, Mike. And let the Blob be perfectly clear: No, you are not a gimmick. Not, you hear that? Now please don't hit me.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, this fight kinda is a gimmick.

It's kinda like the tennis Battle of the Sexes between Billie Jean King and another old man, this one a huckster named Bobby Riggs. At least, it would be kinda like that, had Billie Jean King not been the best women's tennis player in the world and instead been, say, Bobby Jo Fleenor from the Foot Fault Tennis Club in Hoboken, N.J.

Billie Jean beat Old Man Bobby in straight sets in the Battle of the Sexes, which was every bit the gilded circus the hype leading up to it ensured it would be. I have no idea what sort of circus we'll see come July, but if Bobby Jo Fleenor Paul and Iron Supplement Mike Tyson arrive in the ring via flying trapeze, I won't be the least  bit surprised.

As to the fight itself, a lot of old schoolers seem to think Tyson will grate Paul like a wedge of smoked gouda. I'm not convinced of that. Paul, after all, is 31 years younger than Iron Supplement Mike. Which means if he can stay upright through the first three rounds or so, his chances of winning will rise exponentially. 

He won't out-punch Tyson, in other words. He won't out-fight him. He'll just out-youth him. Instead of the Thrilla in Manila, it'll be Arthritis in Arlington.

Or maybe Paging Medicare Plan B.

Coming soon to a YouTube channel near you.

Pacers 1, East Coast bias 0

 I have a communique in my hot little hand this morning. It's an important communique, and it's actually several communiques, but they all say the same thing:

Dammit!

-- Stephen A. Smith

Dammit!

-- ABC and ESPN

Dammit!

\-- The NBA league office and various other moneyed interests

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. Your Indiana Pacers done did it. They defied Stephen A., the moneyed interests and the logic of this entire Eastern Conference series by marching into Madison Square Garden and laying an almighty whuppin' on the New York Knicks in Game 7, booting the New York market out of the NBA playoffs 130-109 in a contest that, shockingly, was never much of a contest.

The Pacers shot 67 percent and controlled Game 7 almost from the outset, leading by as many as 19 points in the first half, letting the Knicks get back within six and then burying them down the stretch. And now it's onto the conference finals against the fearsome Boston Celtics, leaving Stephen A., ESPN and ABC to weep into their  festive blue-and-orange Knicks pompons.

Yes, the ESPN/ABC pregame coverage was that comically boosterish, and if you're saying here "Wasn't that terribly unprofessional, Mr. Blob?", let me remind you: It's ESPN/ABC. Also Stephen A., ESPN megastar and (as he endlessly reminds us) Knicks megafan, whom his employers' cameras followed into MSG as if he were a player arriving for the big showdown.

And the team from Indiana?

Barely mentioned in all the Knicks love. A mere foil. The Washington Generals in this scenario, to the Knicks' Globies.

And then ...

And then, the game started. And suddenly it was, "Hey, no fair! Where does it say Tyrese Haliburton gets to make all these shots?"

Hard to say, but he did. Scored 26 points, Haliburton did. Dropped 10-of-17 shots, and 6-of-12 from the 3-point arc. Led six Pacers in double figures -- including three starters (Haliburton, Pascal Siakam and Andrew Nembhard) who went for 20 or more. And Aaron Nesmith nearly made it four, finishing with 19 points on perfect 8-of-8 sniping

All told, the Pacers shot the rock 79 times, and 53 of them found a proper home. And they were a ridiculous 13 of 24 from Threeville.

All of this must surely have frosted everyone's cookies in both MSG and its apparently private TV network. Everyone outside the East Coast loves to gripe about major media's East Coast bias, and mostly the East Coast crowd laughs at us like we're a bunch of clueless hayseeds with lousy dental plans. Why, goodness, there's no East Coast bias ...

Except Sunday there was, clearly.

And it lost, even more clearly.

Ah, yes. It's lovely day, here in the sticks. Lovely day.

Meanwhile, in Indy ...

 So here's what happened at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway over the weekend, aka the Brickyard, aka That Big Ol' Scary Place: 

* Scott McLaughlin won the pole with the fastest pole-position run in history, a 234.220 jaunt on a 90-degree day that cooked the track surface to 130 degrees and turned it into 2 1/2 miles of  non-stick Teflon.

(And if you're saying here, "Wait, what about Arie Luyendyk's 236-plus trip back in 1996?", that wasn't for the pole. Luyendyk missed the first day of qualifying that year, and so his record speed only got him a starting spot in the middle of Row 7.) 

* Alexander Rossi qualified inside Row 2, but not before harming some wildlife. On Saturday, he ran over a snake that had somehow slithered onto the track. Relatives of the snake immediately filed a protest, claiming the snake had a coveted Blue Lot parking pass and was therefore fully within his legal rights to be there.

(OK, so I made up that last part. But there was a snake on the track, perhaps an IMS first. Also, the Blue Lot reference is an inside joke for my fellow veteran Indy 500 scribes, who used to battle for spots there on race day.)

* McLaughlin, Will Power and reigning 500 champion Josef Newgarden gave Team Penske its first sweep of the front row since 1988. Which of course immediately got the Tinfoil Hat Brigade conspiratizing about Roger's crowd cheating again, considering it was an illegal push-to-pass boost issue that stripped Newgarden of his season-opening win at St. Pete.

"How come THEY didn't have the same issues with those Chevy engines everyone else seemed to. Hmmm?" the Tinfoils sneered.

Rossi, meanwhile, observed that Team Penske had been doing an awful lot of jaw-flappin' lately, and said it would give him extra motivation for race day.

The Blob's official position: Whatever works, dude.

* Marcus Ericsson, your 2022 winner and last year's runnerup, squeaked into the field in Last-Chance qualifying, but not before flunking basic elementary school math. On his initial run, he unaccountably lost track of the number of laps he'd completed, lifting as he got the white flag and ruining the attempt.

That got him an extra 45 minutes or so to marinate in his car while the engine cooled,  steeling himself for four more edge-of-the-envelope laps on that Teflon griddle. Fun times.

* Speaking of fun times, Graham Rahal had to literally sweat out the last fleeing seconds of the Last Chance session, same as last year. This time it worked out; 19-year-old rookie Nolan Siegel, making a last desperate attempt to knock out Rahal after Ericsson knocked him out, got over his skis a skoche on his second lap, hit the wall off turn two and ended his attempt.

That left Rahal shaken but in the field in the 33rd and last starting spot. And suggesting, or at least seeming to, that teammate Takuma Sato got the good Honda engine and he got one from out back in the spare parts lot or some such thing.

Which might or might not have led to an interesting conversation with Rahal's team owner -- his dad, 1986 Indy 500 winner Bobby Rahal.

And last but not least ...

* NASCAR star Kyle Larson, who's taken to IMS and those IndyCar rocket ships like (insert metaphor here), stuck his Arrow McLaren ride in the middle of Row 2, then went winging off to the NASCAR All-Star race in North Wilkesboro, N.C.

He finished fourth. Joey Logano won. In other news, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. scored a TKO over Kyle Busch in the garage area after the race.

Here's the video. Enjoy.

Gray (or grey) matters

 See here, now. Don't you blame me for that business at Pimlico yesterday.

I've told you a bazillion times what I know about horse racing you could fit in a jockey's silks, and we're not talking one of the more statuesque jockeys, either. So don't be getting all huffy because Seize the Grey won the Preakness Stakes yesterday, even if I have repeatedly maintained that gray (or grey) horses are frequently slower than erosion.

Well. I stand corrected.

I stand corrected, because Seize the Grey, a bonafide gray/grey horse, not only won the Preakness but led wire-to-wire, slopping through a muddy track to outlast Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan and Catching Freedom. And this after going off at 9-1, one of the longer shots in the eight-horse field.

Know what was even worse, from the Blob's point of view?

After all my jokes about mutts and Alpo, and how gray/grey horses should all be named Dobbin or Old Paint or Slow-Ass Clyde, Seize the Gray turned out to be not only fast but ... good-looking.

I'm serious. Most handsome gray/grey horse I've ever seen. And, yeah, it kills me to admit it.

"So you really don't know squadoosh about horses, do you. Fetlock Boy?" you're saying now.

Guilty as charged.

Back marker blues

 I don't know what sort of dreams crowd Graham Rahal's sleep these days, but surely they can't be pleasant ones. Surely, last night, they took the form of some ravening six-eyed monster with "2023" written in blood on its forehead, chasing him through an oddly deserted Gasoline Alley shouting "Hey, buddy! Remember ME?"

Or, you know, something like that.

("You have an exceptionally disturbed mind, you know that?" you're saying now.)

(Yeah, well. Tell me something I don't know.)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah. Graham Rahal.

Who's experiencing some serious back-marker blues this morning, because for the second year in a row he'll be scrambling to get into the Indianapolis 500 as a last-chance qualifier along with three others. Two of them are Katherine Legge and 19-year-old rookie Nolan Siegel, who went on his head in a scary crash yesterday. The fourth, shockingly, is 2022 Indianapolis 500 winner Marcus Ericsson, who finished second last May and came within half a lap of becoming the first back-to-back winner in 21 years.

Rahal, meanwhile, failed to make the field in qualifying, but caught a break when Stefan Wilson broke his back in a practice crash a few days later. Rahal took over Wilson's ride, starting dead last in the field.

Now he's in the same position again, and this is where you wonder (or at least I do) why it is Indy seems to enjoy tormenting certain drivers. There's always been cruel and occasionally bloodthirsty streak to the place, one which manifests itself most starkly in the way it dumps heapin' helpin's of misfortune on particular victims.

Lloyd Ruby comes to mind, of course. Any and all Andrettis. And now, Graham Rahal.

When he won St. Pete at 19 in his very first IndyCar Series start, it was naturally assumed that someday he'd win at Indy in May, too. But that was 16 years ago, and Rahal is 35 now, and still the big W eludes him. He's finished third twice and fifth another time, but someone has always been faster or hit the pit window right or just been plain luckier.

Now he comes to May again with another certified beater, hoping to wring enough speed out of it to finish at least third in a four-car battle for the field.

"When you've got a car like the guys in the front row do, they don't have to do much," Rahal said yesterday. "And when you don't, it's not so easy to ride."

Especially when, back in the day, it looked so much easier than it's turned out.

Jailhouse Scottie

 The coppers sprung Scottie Scheffler yesterday in time for him to lay down a splendid 66 in the second round of the PGA Championship, and, boy, what an ordeal that must have been for the poor lad. Arrested! Handcuffed! Thrown in a holding cell! Spending hours agonizing over whether or not he'd make his tee time!

Oh, the torment. Oh, the ... the ... uncertainty.

"I was just so confused at what was happening at the time," Scheffler told the assembled golf  media later. "I didn't know what time it was. I didn't know what was going on."

To which certain folks in America who aren't lucky enough to be good at golf (and, let's face it, aren't of either Scottie's pigmentation or economic class) no doubt chuckled mirthlessly and said: "Welcome to our side of the street, bud."

Truth is, the non-Scotties of America have days like Scottie's on the regular, only they don't get sprung to play a round of golf on some neatly manicured patch of exclusivity. They face the same confusion. They face the same uncertainty. And that's if they're damn lucky.

Lotta times, they never make it to a holding cell. Lotta times, if they do what Scottie did and they run up against the wrong cops with the wrong assumptions about certain types of people, they wind up holding down a slab in the morgue instead.

Here's what happened, in the predawn hours outside Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville yesterday: A vendor employee was struck and killed by a shuttle bus while crossing one of the main drags outside the club. Scheffler wheeled onto the scene of the accident a short time later, intent on driving into the club. 

Louisville police had stopped traffic at the scene. Scheffler, however, decided to drive around on the median instead. A Louisville police officer grabbed Scheffler's arm through his car window  (a perhaps unwise move). and, according to the LMPD, was dragged along the ground briefly before Scheffler finally stopped.

He was then pulled from the car, handcuffed and hauled off to the hoosegow, charged with second-degree assault of a police officer, third-degree criminal mischief, reckless driving and disregarding the instructions of an office directing traffic.

Scheffler claims the whole thing was "a big misunderstanding" and that he didn't understand what he was being asked to do. To which the Blob says what about a cop telling him to stop didn't he understand?

Or maybe he should have just stopped, rolled down his window and asked one of the police officers what was going on. Isn't that what a normal person would do?

Of course, Scottie hasn't been a normal person for quite some, which is the crux of the issue here. As someone who's good at hitting golf balls where they're supposed to go, he gets treated like royalty everywhere, and it's only human nature after a time to take such privilege for granted. So when he rolled up on the accident scene yesterday morning, why would he not assume the rules (or even a police officer's instructions) didn't apply to him, Scottie Freakin' Scheffler?

This is not to absolve him for what he did, or to maintain absolutely that was his mindset. Maybe it was; maybe it wasn't. But for once, he ran into someone who either didn't know Scottie Scheffler from a Scottish terrier, or didn't give a tinker's damn if he did know. And so Scottie got treated the way everyone else gets treated -- or perhaps  better. 

Boo-(bleepin')-hoo, is all I've got to say about that.

Except for this: If Scottie Scheffler thinks he had a bad day, he should ask how the day went for the family of the poor guy who got splattered all over the street in the shank of a rainy Kentucky morning. 

Big Mo loses again, Part Deux

 Well, of course. You knew how this would go, didn't you?

This was easier to predict than sunrise at dawn, which is the only way the Blob could once again have gotten right. Pacers win Game 4 by 32; Pacers lose Game 5 by 30. And that means ...

Yup. Pacers win Game 6 by 13. Right on absolute cue.

The same Pacers who got Windexed 53-29 on the glass in Game 5, with the Knicks collecting 20 offensive boards, Windexed the Knicks 47-35 this time around. Even outboarded them on the offensive end, 14-13.

All six Pacers starters snagged at least half-a-dozen rebounds. Pascal Siakam went for 25 and seven as the Pacers exploited one mismatch on him after another. Myles Turner scored 17 points and grabbed eight boards. Isaiah Hartenstine, the Knicks 7-footer who dominated the Pacers in the paint in Game 5 with 17 boards, got just seven this time out.

And so it's on to Game 7, back in New York. Where, of course ...

Oh, heck. You know.

Nothin's sacred

 The big story in golf this morning is not Xander Schauffle filching a majors-record 62 from Valhalla in Louisville in the first round of the PGA Championship. Although that was pretty big.

No, the big story is what happened in Chicago. In a federal courtroom, to be exact.

What happened was a 39-year-old man named Richard Globensky pled guilty to a wholly different sort of filching -- the kind where you actually steal stuff. Globensky, it turns out, stole a pile of Masters memorabilia from a warehouse at Augusta National, where Globensky was once employed as an assistant. And when we say "memorabilia," we mean memorabilia.

One of Arnold Palmer's green jackets, for instance. Yep, Globensky stole it.

Also green jackets belonging to Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen.

Also Masters tickets dating to the 1930s, chairs, and assorted commemorative T-shirts and mugs.

It was all part of a scheme that lasted more than a decade and allowed Globensky to supplement his income by, oh, about $5 million. He'd steal an item here and an item there and sell them to various oily memorabilia dealers in Florida, who'd then sell the items at a significant markup. To hide the whole disgusting enterprise, the dealers paid Globensky through a limited liability company set up in his wife's name.

And now I'm thinking about the guardians of the Sacred Kingdom of Augusta, and just how tight a twist their shorts must be in over all this.

No one wallows in self-reverence the way those folks do every April, when CBS is compelled to bend a knee to the Sacred Kingdom and its signature event, the Masters. The azaleas! Amen Corner! The Cathedral of Pines! Those world-famous pimento cheese sandwiches!

Oh, they are fierce protectors and myth-makers, the guardians. They even insist the Masters doesn't have fans. It has "patrons." "Fans", it seems, is for the little people -- or the little tournaments, which includes every tournament except the Masters.

And woe betide a broadcaster who refers to the Masters gallery as a "mob," as Jack Whitaker once did in the 1960s. That got him banished from the premises for six years.

Now to find out that the premises was regularly being robbed by a warehouse worker? And that among the victims (in absentia, anyway) were Masters icons like Palmer, Hogan and Gene Sarazen? The guy for whom Augusta named the Sarazen Bridge?

Why, Globensky might as well have unzipped and relieved himself in Rae's Creek. Or gone all Carl Spackler on the azaleas. I mean, if you can steal Mr. Sarazen Bridge's green jacket and sell it for filthy lucre, surely nothing is sacred anymore.

Not even in the Sacred Kingdom.

Today in anachronism

 Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion, man.

-- The Dude

Sometimes a guy's heart just has to go out to the Harrison Butkers of the world. Imagine waking up every day and realizing it's not the 17th century anymore.

By now you've heard, or maybe not, about Butker's commencement address at tiny Benedictine College, in which the Kansas City Chiefs placekicker unleashed the traditional lament of the man out of his time. To say he's a conservative Catholic does not lend nearly enough weight to the term "conservative", and so of course he told the women graduates how much more rewarding it would be if they'd stay home and raise babies instead of pursuing (ugh) a career. And a bunch of other stuff, besides.

He said President Biden isn't a real Catholic because he's all in favor of killing babies. Bashed gays by obliquely referring to Pride Month as a deadly sin. Inveighed against IVF, surrogacy, "dangerous gender ideologies" and the "tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion," and lamented what he perceives as the decline of masculine culture.

(The last of which, by the way, almost always makes the Blob smile. Ever notice it's always the men who trumpet their masculinity who are the first to whine about how men are disrespected these days, simply because they get pushback now when they say and do stuff for which they didn't used to get pushback? Some masculinity.)

Anyway ... none of that was particularly shocking, given Butker's particular worldview. There was a lot of vintage Thomas-More-taking-on-Henry-VIII in it, and perhaps a whiff or two of 1692 Salem. It wasn't hard to imagine Butker dressed as a disapproving Puritan of those times, complete with broad-brimmed and buckled black hat. Pass that turkey, John Alden, and let's get on with the witch-burnin'!

That's an exaggeration, of course, but the truth is Butker came off as such an anachronism it was hard for me to work up a lot of outrage at what he said. As the Dude said, that was just like his opinion, man. That it was so out of touch with the reality of 21st-century America -- that he saw such darkness in those who are simply different from him, or who support certain practices (IVF, surrogacy) out of a different sense of human charity -- made him a figure more to be pitied than scorned.

I can't speak for anyone else. But I reserve my scorn for those who reflexively jump to the defense of the Harrison Butkers, and who castigate anyone who has the temerity to call them out. I reserve my scorn for those who loudly promote freedom of speech for those with whom they agree, but try to muzzle it for those with whom they don't.

Look. I don't particularly care if Harrison Butker comes out and says Copernicus and Joe Biden should burn in hell side-by-side, or that any woman who chooses a career over staying at home and birthin' babies should be cast into outer darkness. There will always be people out there like that. And in most cases, thank God, they will be more a curiosity than a menace.

The menace comes from those who believe anyone who speaks out against the Harrison Butkers is a menace. They are not, and suggesting they are -- that they're evil simply because they disagree -- is a dangerous path to tread. History is rife with examples of what happens when that sort of mindset gains power, and those examples are always stained with the blood of innocents.

And that's MY opinion, man.

Big Mo loses again

 The Blob makes no claim that he has figured out the NBA. But it seems I have figured out the NBA.

See what happened in Indianapolis Sunday?

Yes, those were your Indiana Pacers laying an almighty tattooing on the New York Knicks, 121-89 to even their Eastern Conference semifinal series at two games apiece.

See what happened in Madison Square Garden last night?

Yes, that was those very same Pacers getting floor-waxed in Game 5 by those very same Knicks, 121-91.

If you're keeping score at home, that's a 61-point swing. And while the Blob didn't exactly predict that, it did write the following two days ago, for those who might have forgotten:

... And now the series goes back to New York all even at two games apiece, with the Pacers (what a surprise!) suddenly not uttering a peep about the officiating. Any idea what happens in Game 5, momentum being what it's not?

Sure you do: The Knicks will hit everything they put up, and win in a walk. 

Only thing I got wrong there was the walk part, because when you win by 30 you've won in a dead sprint, not just a walk. Jalen Brunson, who was 5-of-17 from the floor in Game 4 and missed all five of his attempts from the arc, scored 44 points on 18-of-35 shooting. Josh Hart added 18 and Miles McBride 17. And some guy named Alec Burks scored 18 off the bench and was 5-of-8 from Threeville.

All told Sunday, the Knicks made just seven threes, not nearly enough for a team that lives on the three-ball. Last night, they made 12, which was more like it.

And the Pacers?

They actually made a dozen threes themselves, on 44.4 percent shooting. But the Knicks forced 18 turnovers and outboarded Indiana 53-29, which hardly seems possible.  Twenty of those rebounds came on the offensive end, which seems even less possible.

Momentum is a phantom, in the NBA. It's as mythical as Paul Bunyan, as tall a tale as  Mark Twain ever spun.

And that means what, boys and girls?

Thaaat's right. Pacers win Game 6 back in Indy to force Game 7.

To repeat what the Blob said the other day: Book it.

And now, the reality

 The rook played like a rook. And not just a rook, but, you know, a rook.

As in "Welcome to the bigs, rook."

People waited 2 1/2 hours to get into the arena in Uncasville, Conn., last night for Caitlin Clark's official WNBA debut, and the Connecticut Sun handed out 170 media credentials, and what they saw was an old, old story. What they saw was a rout -- and, no, not the Sun making kindling out of the Indiana Fever, 92-71.

What they saw was reality once again smacking hype upside the head.

Folks who should know better have been saying Clark is the greatest women's player ever, and saying she will turn the woeful Fever around all by her lonesome, and saying ... oh, hell, all manner of fanciful things. It got to the point where you began to feel sorry for Clark, because there's no way she could possibly meet all the absurd expectations heaped upon her unless she actually grew wings and flew in last night's debut.

She did not. What she did, instead, is demonstrate that the WNBA is an entirely different level than women's college buckets -- as some WNBA vets have been saying, and for which they were dismissed as jealous old grumps.

Well, hello, people. With veteran WBNA guard DiJonai Carrington putting the clamps on on her for much of the night, Clark didn't score until midway through the second quarter, didn't warm up from the 3-point line until the second half, and played a horrendous floor game, turning it over 10 times. It was the most turnovers in a career debut in league history.

She did score 20 points to lead the Fever, but was 2-of-10 from the floor while Carrington was dogging her and dished just three assists. Welcome to the bigs, rook, indeed.

None of this is to suggest Clark isn't a terrific player, She is, or will be. What she's not -- yet -- is the greatest women's player ever, nor even the greatest WNBA rookie ever. The Blob can name at least half a dozen more accomplished rooks, the most recent being Breanna Stewart.

And in the meantime?

In the meantime, Clark continues to have her head screwed on far straighter than a lot of those around her.

After last night she said, look, she was disappointed, but she wasn't going to dwell on it, because that wouldn't be good for anyone. All she can do, she said, is learn from the experience and keep moving forward.

Good advice at any time, and for anyone.

On Pace(rs) again

 So remember the other day, when the Indiana Pacers were whining about the refs like a bunch of losers, and the Blob was saying whining about the refs is what losers do, and they were down 2-0 to the New York Knicks and looking like, well, losers?

Um ... forget all that.

Forget all that, because the Blob forgot one of the major tenets in NBA basketball and pro sports in general, which is there's no such thing as momentum. It's a myth, Big Mo is. It exists only in that brief window of time between the shot you just hit and the one you're about to miss. Or the one you just missed and the whole buttload you're about to hit.

Hear what happened in Indy yesterday?

Well, your Pacers hit a whole buttload of shots and buried the Knicks deeper than Pompeii with them.  Routed the New Yorkers by 32 points, 121-89, after leading at halftime by a ridiculous 28 points and at the end of three quarters by an even more ridiculous 38 points.

The Knicks, last seen shooting 57 percent from the floor and 46.7 percent from the 3-point arc, shot 33 percent and missed 30 of 37 three-ball attempts. And their vaunted starting five, which scored 118 of their 130 points in Game 2, scored just 39 in Game 4.

Oh, yeah: And now the series goes back to New York all even at two games apiece, with the Pacers (what a surprise!) suddenly not uttering a peep about the officiating. Any idea what happens in Game 5, momentum being what it's not?

Sure you do: The Knicks will hit everything they put up, and win in a walk. And the Pacers will miraculously re-discover how bad NBA officiating is, and how small-market teams never have a chance, and how it's just not fair.

Book it. Book it right now.

Premi-notions

 Alex Palou won the Grand Prix of Indianapolis for the second straight year yesterday, and he won it from the pole. And maybe that means this will be Palou's month of May the way last year was supposed to be Palou's month of May, and the year before that was supposed to be his month of May, and maybe even the year before that.

All I know is this: At some point, it is going to be Palou's month of May. We all take that as gospel, right?

Well ...

Well, here is something else I know, having spent most of my life either covering the Indianapolis 500 in May or hanging out at the Speedway in May: The Big Five is both the most venerable event in motorsports, and also the most capricious. It eats assumptions for breakfast -- even gospel assumptions -- and if there are any left over, it eats them for dinner. No place is as adept at transforming premonitions into mere premi-notions.

A.J. Foyt, Al Unser Sr., Rick Mears and Helio Castroneves have won the 500 four times. Mario Andretti, the greatest race driver in American history unless it's Foyt, won it once, in 1969. He never won it again in 24 more starts stretching from 1970 to 1994.

Scott Dixon, the most accomplished IndyCar driver of his generation, won the 500 in 2008 and hasn't won it since. Bill Vukovich could and probably should have won four times in a row from 1952 through 1955, but his car broke with nine laps to run after he dominated the '52 race, and he was killed while leading the race yet again in '55.

Not-quite-superstars like Buddy Rice, Buddy Lazier and Kenny Brack all gulped the milk in Victory Lane. Marquee names like Michael Andretti, Lloyd Ruby, Ted Horn and Rex Mays never did. You just never know with this place.

Palou, for instance?

He's one of the brightest young stars in a series crammed with more of them than IndyCar has seen in three decades. He's got the skill set and temperament that fits the place and the event, and he races for Chip Ganassi, who knows how to win at Indy on Memorial Day weekend. 

And none of it means a thing once the green drops on race day.

Last year, for instance, he won the Grand Prix, and then won the pole for the 500. And he finished fourth.

In 2022, he finished second to Marcus Ericsson.

In 2021, he finished ninth in his first season with Ganassi.

This year?

Well ... we'll see. 

ybe it'll be his month of May. Maybe it'll never be. Only Indy knows.

A mixed review

 Well, OK. So maybe the kid isn't the next Bob Gibson. Not yet, anyway.

This just in from PNC Park in Pittsburgh, where my always underwhelming Cruds lost to the Cubs yesterday in phenom Paul Skenes' major-league debut, but not because of the Phenom:

The kid can bust the fastball.

And, the bullpen is trash.

The first we kinda already knew, but yesterday pretty much confirmed it. Skenes gave up six hits and three earned runs in four innings' work in the 10-9 loss, but he also struck out seven and cracked 100 mph on the gun 17 times. So he's got that going for him.

And the bullpen?

Gloriously Cruddy.

After Skenes departed with no one out in the fifth inning, see, it took three more arms  for Pittsburgh to retire the side. Before they did, however, those three arms had issued six bases-loaded walks. Six. It was the most walked-in runs by a major-league team (or, in this case, an alleged major-league team) in 65 years.

Sixty-five years! Good lord, Ike was still president then. Sputnik was a thing. So were hula-hoops, Bill Haley and the Comets and big honkin' cars with big honkin' tailfins.

The names of the perpetrators of this historic buffoonery?

They were Kyle Nicolas, Josh Fleming and Colin Holderman. Together, in the fifth, they walked six batters -- including three on 12 straight balls by Nicolas.

(And, no, before you ask, I don't know where the Cruds found these guys. In the beer line at PNC would be a good guess. Or maybe waiting for a sandwich at Primanti's.)

In any case, the Phenom showed flashes of Phenomhood, and also flashes of being just 21 years old. And so, on balance, he's probably not going to turn out to be Kyle Nicolas, Josh Fleming or Colin Holderman.

Good enough for now.

Coachin' 'em up

 Alrighty, then. So maybe the coach of an NBA team does serve some constructive purpose, other than being a suit who calls timeouts, plots sub rotations and wrangles wayward egos. 

Maybe he can call out his players when necessary. I know, what a concept.

Hard so say if that was the case last night with Nuggets coach Michael Malone up in Minnesota, but something happened to the defending NBA champs on the flight from Denver to Minneapolis. After losing the first two games of their series with the Minnesota Timberwolves at home, the second horrendously, they put a whuppin' on the Wolves last night in front of Minnesota's home crowd, 117-90.

And maybe it was just a coincidence that the win came a day after Malone scolded his guys, telling them they were the defending champs and it was time they started acting like it. Or maybe they were actually listening and responded.

Jamal Murray, for one, responded with 24 points in front of a hostile Target Center crowd that booed him incessantly, two nights after he shot 3-for-18 and threw a heat pack and towel onto the floor during the Nuggets' 26-point loss in Game 2. The NBA lightened his wallet by $100,000 for that little tantrum.

Last night, he scored 18 of his 24 points in the first half and splashed 11-of-21 shots. League MVP Nikola Jokic added a 24-point, 14-rebound, nine-assist stat line, and all five Nuggets starters scored in double figures.

In other words, they were the defending champs again.

Reminder or no reminder.

Arms alert!

 I hesitate to bring this up, first off. Past experience may not guarantee future results, after all, but it does guarantee present howls of derision and, I don't know, maybe even showers of rotten fruit.

Know what happens tomorrow, boys and girls?

My Pittsburgh Pirates will send the Next Nuclear Arm to the mound against the Chicago Cubs.

Yes, my Cruds are calling up Paul Skenes, whom they took with the first pick in the 2023 draft and who has been mowing down batters like a zero-turn Toro goes after your grass. Skenes, a 6-foot-6, 235-pound righty, has a 102-mph heater according to the gun, and mixes in a 95-mph combo splitter/sinker, a high-80s slider and an 88-mph changeup just for funsies.

And lest you think the Cruds are acting a bit rashly, considering this is Skenes' first full pro season and he's only 21 years old ... well,  in their defense, to which I rarely feel compelled to come, the kid's wasting his time in Triple A. In 27 1/3 innings in Indianapolis, he's allowed just three earned runs with 45 strikeouts. That's a shade under two strikeouts per inning to you and me, kids.

"Greeaat," you're saying now. "Like you needed another excuse to talk about your stupid Pirates and their stupid cruddiness and, geez Louise, where's the off switch on this Blob?"

Oh, pipe down. These are the Cruds we're talking about, remember. I give Skenes two seasons max before his arm either explodes in a shower of tiny arm bits, or he asks to re-do his deal and the cheaper-than-Jim-Harbaugh's-khakis Cruds swap him for prospects the way they do all their other homegrown studs.

In which case, you won't hear another word about him from this precinct. Unless it's how dashing he looks in Dodger blue or Yankee pinstripes, that is.

So you've got that going for you.

Nah, they're good

 I wouldn't know Ethan Strauss if he went upside my head with a ball-peen hammer. But let me start out this morning by saying I do know a couple things about him:

1. He's a guy. (I'm pretty sure)

2. Like some guys, he thinks guys suggesting ways to help out wimminfolk is just what an enlightened, 21st-century, equality-huggin' fella does.

I understand that impulse, being a guy myself. But I also understand how that impulse can come off sounding not enlightened by condescending, and therefore insulting in an entirely unintended way.

I say this after Strauss, whoever he is, went on Bill Simmons' podcast recently and suggested the sudden surge in the WNBA's popularity could be helped by tying it more closely to its male counterpart (and subsidizer), the NBA. His solution, or part of it, was to have all the WNBA teams change this nicknames to their NBA counterparts -- i.e., the Indiana Fever would become the Indiana W-Pacers, the Los Angeles Sparks the W-Lakers, the New York Liberty the W-Knicks. And so on and so forth.

The Blob can't speak for the women of the WNBA, but I figure this is not the path they'd prefer to follow to raise their league's profile.

This is because the women, one would assume, don't want to be seen as just the NBA's little sister, a perception which Strauss's suggestion would inevitably create. One would assume, again, that they want to forge their own identity and their own brand, tied to the belief that the women's game is not the men's game, but its own unique entity with its own unique appeal.

In other words, the women are likely saying this right now: "Nah, we're good." And that's especially true now that Caitlin Mania has thrown an even brighter spotlight on the WNBA than ever before. 

The Fever, after all, drew 13,000 fans to Gainsbridge Fieldhouse last night for Caitlin Clark's first home game, and it wasn't even a regular home game. It was a preseason home game. No. 22 Fever jerseys are almost literally selling out as fast as they can be produced. Consequently, every semi-conscious person in America knows exactly who the Indiana Fever are.

Why would you need to rename them? Why would the WNBA need to be Lil' Sis when the Caitlin Effect has already shoved it to the front of the American sports consciousness -- to the extent that the league announced this week it will begin providing charter flights for its teams the way a big-time professional sports entity should?

Shoot. Way it's all going, maybe the Pacers should change their name to the M-Fever. Just a thought.

Just play basketball

 The Indiana Pacers are down 2-0 to the New York Knicks in the NBA conference semis after losing the first two games in Madison Square Garden, and now the Pacers are hollering "No fair!"

They're saying the officiating in New York was atrocious, and most of the atrocious landed on their doorstep.

They've submitted to the league office 78 calls against them they claim are suspicious,  and want to know what the hell's going on with that.

Pacers coach Rick Carlisle even went to the conspiracy well after Game 2, hinting the Association is agin' 'em because Indiana is just a little ol' small market team, and it would be better for the NBA if a major player like New York advanced instead of, ugh, Indianapolis.

Me?

I think Tyrese Halliburton has a better grip on reality than Coach Rick does.

Here's what he said after Game 2, for instance: "Let's not pretend like (officiating) is the only reason we lost. We just didn't play good enough. We just got to be better."

In other words: You want to take officiating out of the equation? Start guarding Jalen Brunson. Stop letting the Knicks' starting five use our starting five like Handi-Wipes. Just play some damn basketball, the way we did against the Bucks.

Look. The Blob is not going to tell you the Pacers haven't gotten hosed on some calls at crucial times. They have. But running off to the league office to whine about it isn't going to magically turn around the series. Because that's what losers do.

So what do winners do?

Well, they don't do is what they did last night, which is let the Knicks' starters combine for 118 of their 130 points. They don't let Brunson drop 29 on 11-of-18 shooting two nights after dropping 43 in Game 1. They don't let the Knicks shoot 57 percent -- 67 percent in the decisive third quarter -- and 46.7 percent from the 3-point arc. And their starters don't go a combined minus-87 on the night.

Minus-87. Man, you have to be trying to be that bad.

Oh, Halliburton bounced back after his no-show in Game 1, scoring 34 points to give with nine assists, six rebounds and three steals. But no one else in the starting five took his cue.

Myles Turner scored just six points in 31 minutes. Pascal Siakam, who's been virtually invisible so far, scored 14 in 36 minutes. Were it not for the play of Obi Toppin (20 points in 20 minutes) T.J. McConnell (10 points and a dozen dimes in 23 minutes) and the rest of the Pacers bench, this would have been a platinum-grade blowout instead of the nine-point mini-blowout it was.

But, yeah, let's make it about the officiating. As if NBA officiating is the gold standard for the craft, instead of the poop show it generally is.

Enough with that. Time for the Pacers to listen to Halliburton -- a leader who does what a leader does, which is cut through all the noise.

Just play basketball. Just play some damn basketball.

Punishment phase

 Comes now the word that Indianapolis Star columnist Gregg Doyel, who became a flash point for the Big Issue brigade when he went full creepy mode on Caitlin Clark last month, is in the midst of a two-week suspension by his newspaper.

The news was announced not by the Star, which for the usual lawyer-ly reasons tried to hide it from the public and, as night follows day, succeeded only in making themselves look like gutless connivers. Instead, it was Bob Kravitz, veteran sports scribe and Doyel's predecessor at the Star, who broke the story. According to Kravitz, the Star not only gave Doyel a two-week sitdown, but will also bar him from covering Clark and the Indiana Fever in person

Which sounds a lot more like a restraining order than it probably should.

This is because the Blob remains convinced that Doyel's skeevy exchange with Clark was not intended to come off that way, but was Doyel just looking for a column hook. I haven't talked to Gregg and I certainly don't know that for sure, but that's my educated guess. I absolutely do not think he's a dirty old man who was hitting on a woman young enough to be his daughter, simply because nothing in his professional background suggests that's the case.

This of course doesn't stop people who have an axe to grind with Doyel from painting him that way. Social media is a jungle that thrives on hyperbole, false generalization and suspect motives, after all, and certain of its species enjoys nothing better than feeding on the carcasses of the fallen.

Not to get all hyperbolic myself, of course.

No, what I think in this instance is a two-week sitdown sounds proportional, and not just because I suggested that's what should happen when this first blew up. Firing Doyel would have been rash overkill, and I suspect most of the people who endorsed that either have some personal beef with the guy or don't like the positions he takes on certain issues. Nor do I agree with the Big Issue people, who tried to turn the whole thing into some referendum on the way predominantly male sports media routinely belittles and objectifies women athletes (which it does).

Sorry. But in this case, all I see is a guy blowing his assignment. Deeper meaning than that I leave to the navel-gazers.

And the notion that he should be cast forever into outer darkness?

I leave that to social media, dark lord that it is.

The sons of the fathers

 I'll credit Dylan Sinn of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, my old newspaper home, for pointing this out. But you know what Marian University hiring Pat Knight as its new basketball coach means, among other things?

It means Pat Knight will be coaching in the Crossroads League, an NAIA powerhouse. And that means Knight's Marian teams will be playing Huntington University on the regular, because the Foresters are also in the Crossroads League.

And you know what that means?

It means Pat Knight, the son of Bob Knight, will be coaching against Huntington's Kory Alford, the son of Steve Alford.

Who of course played for Bob Knight at Indiana. And who got crosswise with him later on when Steve was coaching Iowa, and Knight supposedly snubbed him (although maybe he didn't). And it became his whole thing where Knight supposedly resented Steve because he thought Steve was angling to be his successor at IU, even though Steve was never actually doing so.

Anyway ... 

Anyway, the Blob being the oddly wired creature he is, this immediately made me proclaim the following: "It's like 'Creed II' come to life!"

"Creed II," of course (or maybe not "of course" if you're not into movies), is the film in which Adonis Creed, the son of Apollo Creed, fights Viktor Drago, the son of Ivan Drago, who killed Apollo in the ring in "Rocky IV." Creed the son gets his ass kicked by Drago the son, and then comes back to beat him in the traditional Big Climactic Fight That In Real Life Would Have Been Stopped Long Before The Hero Rallies To Win.

 "Why, that's the stupidest, most trying-too-hard analogy I've ever heard!" you're exclaiming now. 

Yeah, well. I suppose that's true if you consider Pat and Kory won't be out there at midcourt trying to cave in one another's skulls, or looking to avenge their fathers, or probably won't have any feelings about it at all other than their shared bond with IU basketball. But if you ignore all that ...

"It's still stupid!" you're saying.

Man. You guys are no fun.

Stanley rules

 I don't know what you were doing Saturday night, but here's what I was doing: Examining another piece of evidence pointing to an irrefutable fact. 

That fact being, the Stanley Cup playoffs are the best playoffs. And Stanley Cup Game 7s are the best Game 7s.

And Game 7 sudden-death overtimes?

Shoo. It's like watching a bunch of teenagers in a horror flick approaching That Door That Should Not Be Opened. Except the tension s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s out like bleeping Gumby for minutes at a time.

And then, in a flash, the door is flung open. And it's all over.

Saturday night that happened in Boston, and, damn, it was glorious. The Bruins once again were trying to eliminate the Toronto Maple Leafs -- they seem to take a perverse glee in doing that, like Sid torturing his army men in "Toy Story" -- and, sure enough, they did it again. And after cruelly giving the Leafs a brief glimmer of hope, to boot.

Game 7, see, was dominated by the Leafs early, but they couldn't get the biscuit past Jeremy Swayman in goal. Down at the other end, meanwhile, Ilya Samsonov was a wall in the Leafs net. So it was 0-0 after one and 0-0 after two, and then, midway through the third period, the Leafs went up 1-0 on a William Nylander goal.

And for just over a minute, they could see daylight. For just over a minute, they weren't the same old Leafs anymore, capable of breaking the hearts of their believers in any circumstance.

But then -- just over a minute later -- Hampus Lindholm tied it for the Bruins, and on it went. And then, a tick fewer than two minutes into overtime, Lindholm fired the puck into the zone as David Pastrnak streaked down the wing after it, and you know what happened next: The puck took a crazy bounce off the corner boards, Pastrnak played carom perfectly, and just like that, it was over.

Bruins 2, Leafs 1.

On a goal that looked like an ordinary dump-and-chase until -- wait, what?

You won't see a purer example of the suddenness of sudden death than that. Nor a better example of why Stanley's Game 7s are the best -- unless it was Game 7 last night between the Dallas Stars and Vegas Golden Knights, when Radek Faksa scored the go-ahead goal for the Stars 44 seconds into the third period and the Stars put the clamps on Vegas thereafter to eliminate the defending Stanley Cup champs 2-1.

Stanley rules. Rules, I tell you.

By a nostril

 A bob of the head. A hoof striking the turf a millisecond before some other hoof. The flare of a nostril.

Choose your standard of measurement. Choose your method of description. And bag the metaphors, because this time a horse race wasn't a congressional race or a presidential race or a race for Chief Cook And Bottle-Washer of Succotash County.

This time a horse race was actually A HORSE RACE. 

This time it was three horses coming dead abreast to the wire, and the Kentucky Derby hadn't seen the like of it since 1947, or so the record books tell us. Closest three-horse finish since Jet Pilot nosed out Phalanx and Faultless that year. Even closer, actually.

Yesterday, it was another longshot, Mystik Dan at 18-1, who brought it home, and if you ever bet anything but longshots in the Derby again, may empty pockets be forever turned out. Saturday marked the third straight year a horse that went off at least 15-1 wound up with the blanket of roses, so call it officially a trend. 

Also call it officially one hell of a, well, horse race.

How close was it, down there at the end?

It was so close that if the Derby distance were a stride longer, Mystik Dan would have been the "place" horse and not the "win" horse.

Your winning horse would have been Sierra Leone, who was coming like a freight train with Forever Young half-a-stride back. All the momentum was with those two; Mystik Dan was just trying to get to the wire in front.

And he did. By that aforementioned bob of the head, planted hoof, flare of a nostril, as people watching in bars and restaurants all over America yelped "Whoaaa!"  

I know this because that's what everyone yelped where my wife and I were.

Hell of a horse race.

Don't ask, go to hell

 Couple of questions about the now-viral video of Bucks guard Patrick Beverley telling an ESPN reporter she wasn't allowed to ask him a question because she didn't subscribe to his podcast:

1. How does Patrick Beverley's head not take up the entire locker room?

2. Will Eddie Murphy ("I am Gumby, dammit!") play him in the movie?

Ay-yi-yi. I know arrogance is a common malady in professional sports these days (always has been, really), but Beverley has introduced an entirely new strain into the national bloodstream. I mean, it's not like he's LeBron or KD or Giannis. He's an NBA journeyman who's on his seventh team and has a lifetime scoring average of 8.3 ppg. Who the hell is Patrick Beverley?

And yet, there he was the other night, pulling high-handed BS far beyond his station in NBA life. He might only be Patrick Beverley, but he is Gumby, dammit!

Know what the scary part is, though?

Even though he's likely to be fined by the Association for this and for throwing a basketball at Pacers fans the other night, he might actually be ahead of the curve in future player/media relations. 

Now, as an old newspaper grunt, I understand the day is long past when athletes needed us to buff up their images and attract endorsements. Along came the worldwide web and Mom's-basement bloggers and, yes, podcasts, and with them an acceleration in how and through what conduits information (and disinformation) flows.

It's an instant gratification world more than ever now, and also a world in which athletes can bypass the media filter completely. Newspapers have tried to keep up, but the parameters by which print media must operate work against it in the everyone's-a-journalist-now reality. 

Thus we get Patrick Beverley pimping his podcast by dissing the media -- although telling the ESPN reporter "no disrespect" was a howler, considering disrespecting her was exactly what he was doing. And thus, the continued devolution of "journalism" into something that is nothing of the kind.

Telling a reporter he or she can't even ask a question without contributing to an athlete's own online "media" is only the latest step in that process. Rest assured Beverley won't be the last person to pull the stunt he pulled the other night.

Unless.

Unless, the reporter disrespected the next time goes ahead and asks his or her question anyway. And asks again. And asks again. And asks ... again.

Look. Every person under media scrutiny has the absolute right not to answer a reporter's question. Freedom of the press does not include that stipulation. It does, however, include the stipulation that the press has every right to ask that question, and really any question.

Plus, it's not like anyone can stop it from doing so. It is, in fact, literally impossible.

Which is why the other night, when Beverley told the ESPN reporter she wasn't allowed to ask a question if she didn't subscribe to his podcast, she should have immediately responded with a question: "And why is that, Patrick?"

And then told him to go piss up a rope.

OK. So maybe not that last.