Summer's shortening arc

 The Chargers play the Lions tonight in the Hall of Fame Game, and again I think what I always think: "What, already?"

I mean, this can't be the beginning of the NFL hogging every Thursday night until literally next year, can it?

Heck, the Rockies haven't even lost 100 games yet. How can summer be on the wane?

But then I look at the calendar, and see that, yes, August begins tomorrow. Which means high school football is only three Fridays off, and kids head back to school in these parts a week from today.

A week. From. Today.

The arc of summer shortens with every year. Or so it inevitably seems when you've seen 71 of them, and remember when summer stretched all the way from Memorial Day to Labor Day and didn't cheat us out of a whole month.

Now?

Now summer is June and July, and then here comes the NFL and school starting up again, and even though the celestial calendar says there are still six weeks or so left until fall,  it feels like summer is done like dinner. The neighborhood baseball diamonds stand empty. The back-to-school sales are at flood tide. The other day I walked through some big-box store and saw candy corn for sale, and gold-and-orange wreaths decorated with pumpkins on display.

And I realized summer had slipped out the back way when I wasn't looking.

Good lord, wasn't the MLB All-Star Game -- the Mid-Summer Classic -- just a couple of weeks ago? (It was). Wasn't the Fourth of July yesterday? (Seems like it was). And when did I get so damn old I started crabbing about how BACK IN MY DAY summer lasted longer than the Punic Wars?

Because it did. No, really. 

Now, don't get me wrong. I love the fall. I love everything about it: Cool evenings and crystalline blue-sky days and football Friday nights. I love cider. I love donuts. I love the first time you step outside and there's a chill in the air, and you realize it's time to break out the Whatsamatta U. sweatshirts again.

I love fall almost as much as I loathe Dryer-Vent Season in summer -- you know, those several weeks when you step outside and it feels like you're standing in front of a dryer vent. On those days, I want fall to begin yesterday.

But last night it rained and today a front's supposed to blow Dryer-Vent Season back to hell where it belongs, and tonight the Chargers scrubs do battle with the Lions scrubs. And the other night I was sitting out on the deck, and a parade of kids on bicycles went by -- four, five, six of them riding nose-to-tail -- and it felt like a celebration of sorts, one last salute to summer before it ends.

Or maybe that was just my imagination running away from me again.

Running away like summer, you might say.

Wrasslin' with image

 It was all just a bizarre coincidence. No, really. Bring me a stack of that book the President of the United States has never read and I'll swear on it.

I will swear, so help me God, that the other day when I made an offhand reference to the WNBA getting perilously close to WWE country, I did NOT know there was someone out there who actually wants to do that. 

Well, sort of.

Here's the deal: As reported on the website Awful Announcing, last week the co-founder and owner of Women Of Wrestling, Dave McLane, said he'd love so see Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever step into the ring at one of his event. And then Jeannie Buss of the Los Angeles Lakers, the other WOW co-founder, said she'd love it, too.

Now, if you don't know who Sophie Cunningham is, you've either been living in a snowdrift in the high Andes or you're still operating on dial-up. Cunningham, see, is that tall blonde looker you see showing up for games in alarmingly short skirts, and who functions as Caitlin Clark's oncourt muscle. Think Luca Brasi, only with better legs.

Mess with Caitlin, Sophie messes with you. She can also play a little, which doesn't hurt.

The problem with that is every time Sophie messes with someone, she contributes to the widening perception that the WNBA is a goon league full of cheap-shot Betty Laimbeers. This is not to single out Cunningham, who has had lots of help in advancing that unfortunate rep. She's even been on the receiving end of the goonery on occasion.

However ...

However, when a huckster like McLane says she's "the Marty McSorley to Wayne Gretzky," that's a problem. Basketball is not supposed to be hockey, although occasionally (the 1990s NBA, ahem) it's looked as if it would like to be. And when you start comparing the WNBA's players to legendary NHL enforcers ...

Well. This is surely not the image league president Cathy Engelbert was banking on when Clark hit the WNBA like a whirlwind last summer and sent the league into the stratosphere in exposure and popularity. 

With added exposure comes added scrutiny, see, and that's veering increasingly toward a net loss for Engelbert and her league. Oh, they cashed in on the Caitlin Effect with a chunky new TV deal, but as more and more fans and media have tuned in, they've more and more not liked what they've seen.

The officiating, for one thing, is disturbingly wretched, an object of increasing ridicule and the main culprit in all the WWE stuff. Everyone's seen Clark get knocked around with impunity, in part because the camera's always on her. But she isn't the only high-end player subjected to the rough stuff, and it's become an annoying question that buzzes around Engelbert's head like a fly: Why doesn't your league better protect its stars? Is it because it can't, or it won't?

And now a couple of pro wrestling execs want to put one of your most visible players in the ring?

Sophie Cunningham in tights, bashing Hellzapoppin' Heidi or someone with a folding chair. Executing the Sophie Smash off the top rope to take out Valkyrie Val. Or how about an all-WNBA  grudge match between Sophie and the Queen of Mean, Joltin' Jacy Sheldon?

Oh, yes. That's just what the WNBA needs.

Not.

Lyin' down with dogs

 For the second time in as many weeks a Cleveland Guardians pitcher has been caught up in an online betting probe, and, like Claude Rains in "Casablanca," I am shocked, shocked. Imagine, gambling soiling our national game again. And after all that hoo-ha about the 1919 Black Sox, and also Pete Rose.

But star reliever Emmanuel Clase has been placed on leave just as starter Luis Ortiz was last week, and maybe the cases are related and maybe they aren't. All we know right now is Ortiz was flagged by "a betting integrity firm" (now there's an oxymoron for you) because of in-game prop bets on two pitches he threw back in June.

Apparently a whole pile of folks with their eyes glued to their betting apps dropped coin on those two pitches, which the Betting Integrity Firm noticed, flagged and sent on to MLB.

Me?

Right now I'm remembering an old saying: Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

By which I mean it's a lack-of-self-awareness world record for MLB to pretend to care about Betting Integrity when it's green-lighting the Oakland A's to become the Las Vegas A's a couple of years down the road. Or when it enters into a partnership with FanDuel, the official MLB online betting site.

That's a hell of a fence for baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and the gang to straddle, and perhaps only an absent self-awareness gene could make it possible. You'd think they'd want to get as far away from the gambling culture as possible, given baseball's traditionally severe stance post-Black Sox. But, nah. They're all in, as the saying goes.

There's money in them there prop bets, as the saying also kinda goes. So why not shrug at the jarring dissonance of promoting gambling while also condemning it?

And why get all righteous when you send such mixed messages to the players?

Do not bet on the game, gentlemen. That is the third rail of baseball. Betting on the game is very, very bad. Those who do it will be dealt with very, very severely.

Also, here's a sponsor patch from FanDuel. Make sure you display it prominently.

You can almost hear them saying it, can't you?

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. Oh, you, um, bet.

And here are your winnings, Mr. Manfred.

Most Valuable Human

 Cancer took Ryne Sandberg from us yesterday, and if it's a cliche to say the world is a poorer place this morning because of that, I'm going to say it anyway.  Because the world is a poorer place because of it.

Every Cubs fan I knew wanted to be Ryne Sandberg in his salad days, see, or at least that's how I remember it. He could hit, he could field, and he was the very soul of a franchise that went to the playoffs twice in the 1980s after they'd been, well, the Cubs pretty much since the end of World War II. 

Which is to say, losers. Lovable sometimes, and merely losers at others. But consistent about it.

And then came Ryne Sandberg, sort of. Allow me to explain.

Begin with the fact that, in the 1982 trade with the Phillies that turned the Bear Cubs around, Sandberg was not the headline name. He was just a struggling kid in the Phillies' organization then, having gone 1-for-6 in his 13-game debut with the big club in '81. You couldn't quite call him a throw-in on the deal, but he wasn't Larry Bowa or Bobby Dernier or even Keith Moreland, the names in the trade everyone knew.

Sandberg?

Well, the '82 season would be his first full summer in the bigs. And he'd spend it in Wrigley Field, a circumstance that might or might not have been thick with portent. Because where do you suppose he got that one hit during his cup of coffee with the Phils in '81?

Thaaat's right, boys and girls. The Friendly Confines.

Anyway, here he came  along with Bowa and Dernier and the rest, working hard to learn his craft. And before long, Ryne Sandberg became, well, Ryne Sandberg.

He broke out for good in 1984, when he batted .314 with 19 home runs, 19 triples and 32 stolen bases and was the National League MVP. Hit two late jacks that summer to win what forever after would be known as The Sandberg Game. Led the Cubs to the playoffs for the first time since Andy Pafko was patrolling center field. 

They blew a 3-1 lead and lost to the Padres, of course -- hello, Leon "Wickets" Durham -- but they were no longer losers. In '89 they reached the playoffs again, as Sandberg batted .290 with 30 homers, 76 RBI and 301 total bases. By then, of course, he was no longer Ryne Sandberg but Ryno, and Mr. Cub to the Wrigley faithful in a way no one had been since the OG Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks.

Not that Ryno would have ever cottoned to such sacrilege.

What set him apart, always, was not just that he was good at everything on a ballfield, but that he was good at life, too. He was a family man who played the game with visible joy, and he was reflexively humble about it all. That he was also a notorious clubhouse prankster no one ever got mad at because of his incorrigible good humor and that damned smile of his was a testament to (for lack of a better term) his innate goodness.

He was a Most Valuable Player, and also a Most Valuable Human. Which is why, yes, every Cubs fan wanted to be him, and  why no opponent ever had a bad word to say about him anyone remembers.

In his later years he'd become a manager and a coach and mentor to the kids coming up, and none of them had anything bad to say about him, either, because he never talked down to them and always knew how to massage the flaws in their game.

Several of them said just that in Jesse Rogers' ESPN piece on Sandberg today. A pile of Ryno's contemporaries chimed in, too -- including Bowa, who remembered the way the young Sandberg used to come in early that first summer in Chicago to hit and hit and hit under the watchful eye of Cubs manager Jim Frey.

"I think about how handled himself when he first got called up," Bowa said. "He struggled out of the gate. I watched this guy not let it affect him. It might have affected him on the inside, but the way he handled himself on the outside was great."

Reading that takes me back my own Ryne Sandberg moment, which is actually not a Ryne Sandberg moment at all. It was actually a moment involving the man being quoted, Bowa, in the first days of those new-look Cubs of '82.

They opened that season in Cincinnati, where the Reds still traditionally kicked off Opening Day for all of major-league baseball. That was a big deal in those days, and so our paper -- the late, great Anderson (In.) Daily Bulletin -- always covered it.

So there I was, venturing into the visitors clubhouse because, let's face it, the new-look Cubs were the story that day. I wormed my way into the scrum surrounding Bowa, and asked him if, in addition to his obvious skills, if perhaps the Cubs traded for him because of his leadership abilities, too.

Larry didn't like that.

"What do you mean?" he snapped. "They got me because I can play! I can play!"

Young guy that I was, I thought it was a terrible thing, getting yelled at by Larry Bowa. Later, of course, I found out Bowa yelled at a lot of people in those days, and I felt somewhat better about it.

Know what I don't feel better about, on this day when all of baseball mourns an MVH?

That somewhere in that clubhouse was Ryne Sandberg, before he was Ryne Sandberg. And that, because he wasn't yet Ryne Sandberg, I never thought to seek him out for a comment. I might not have even known his name.

Sure do now, though. Sure do now.

Bubba

 It was Brickyard 400 weekend in Indy Saturday and Sunday, and damned if I forgot about it until the weekend was upon us. This either speaks volumes about my old-man brain, or about the Brickyard's diminished status in the motorsports firmament.

A bit of both, I'm thinking.

Oh, NASCAR still hypes the Brickyard as one of its official Crown Jewels, but that feels  like hollow courtesy these days. Sunday, a half-empty IMS spoke louder. In front of all those closed-off grandstands and here-and-there clumps of breathing humans, it felt like just another stock car race.

Until Bubba Wallace happened.

The man in the livery of Michael Jordan's race team had won a handful of Cup races, but he'd never won anything like the Brickyard 400. Yet there he was at the front of the field as the laps peeled away Sunday, trying to hold off onrushing defending champion Kyle Larson and stretch his last tank of gas to the finish at the same time.

And then ...

And then it rained. With six laps to go.

The red flag came out two laps later, and there we were, four laps to run and the field sitting in line in the pits for 18 minutes that must felt to Wallace like 18 centuries. The track was dried, the field ran the remaining four laps under yellow while Wallace's gas gauge trembled, and it was on to one of those damnable green-white-checker finishes.

(Why four laps under yellow before dropping the green, you ask? I don't know. Made zero sense to me, but I wasn't trying to manufacture a green-white-checker finish like NASCAR so clearly seemed to be doing. They're big into that sort of manipulation, it seems.)

Anyway, the green dropped, Wallace sailed away and, sure, of course, two numbskulls ran into each other behind him, bringing on a second green-white-checker. By this time it felt as if the racing gods had it in for him: Think you're gonna win, Bubba? Ha! We'll make it rain, then we'll make a couple of numbskulls run into each other, and, oh, by the way, how's your fuel situation?

Which is where history itself stepped in with a reply: Just fine.

Just fine, because the green dropped again, Wallace fled again, and this time there was no catching him. A couple of laps later he was crossing the yard of brick under the checkered flag, and the Brickyard 400 had the sort of moment for which it had been starving for years.

Bubba Wallace,  Brickyard champion. Bubba Wallace, first black driver in 116 years to win a race of any kind at the most iconic site in motorsports.

It was yet another historic moment at a place that breathes history like air because it has seen so much of it, and whose sustaining cache is that almost no other motorsports venue has seen more. It's gone from Harroun and DePalma and Milton and Lockhart to Arnold and Meyer and Shaw and Rose; from Vukovich to Ward to Foyt to all those Andrettis and Unsers.

Gordon and Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson? Yep, they're in there. Schumacher and Barrichello and Hakkinen, too. Castroneves, Franchitti, Dixon, Guthrie, Patrick ... on and on it goes.

And now, Bubba Wallace. Who adds his own unique piece to a seemingly unending tapestry.

Racing gods and forgetful old men be hanged.

Happy-ness is a sequel

 Dialed up "Happy Gilmore 2" the other day in defiance of all the alarm bells clanging in my head, because the only thing in filmdom guaranteed to flop worse than a sports-movie sequel is a comedy sports-movie sequel. 

It's why you likely never saw "Major League 2" or "Major League 3," even though some lint brain in Hollywood green-lit those unfortunate projects. It's why you also likely never realized there were also three "Bad News Bears" movies in the original franchise, plus a 2005 remake of the original, plus a short-lived "Bad News Bears" TV series.

Many more sports-movie sequels never got made, on account of there was pretty much nowhere left to go at the conclusion of the original. "Rudy 2" would have been just Rudy Ruettiger making bank off what happened in the original "Rudy" for the rest of his natural life. And "Secretariat 2"? 

That might have been the first equine porn film, given it would just be endless shots of Secretariat at stud. "Seccy Does Claiborne Farm," roll tape.

However ...

However, "Happy Gilmore 2" works. And a lot of the reason it works is not because of Adam Sandler, but because Adam Sandler talked a number of golfing icons into poking fun at themselves in a frankly ridiculous (but hilarious) plot.

Is Jack Nicklaus in this thing, in other words?

You're damn right Jack Nicklaus is in this thing.

Are Rory McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Scottie Scheffler in it?

You're damn right they are.

Does Rory get hit in the 'nads in a batting cage (don't ask)? Does even the famously colorless  Brooks play along with the silliness? Does Verne Lundquist play Verne Lundquist to the hilt, and do Scottie and John Daly pretty much steal the film?

You're damn right they do.

The Blob will not be That Guy and throw out a bunch of spoilers, except to say Daly is priceless as a sort of couch-potato philosopher king and Scottie perfectly deadpans his famous brush with the law. But if Sandler gets his laughs, and Christopher MacDonald gets his flowers as Shooter McGavin, and the blatant parody of the Liv Golf Tour is fun, it's the golfers, and those in their orbit, who make "Happy Gilmore 2" worth the watch.

Heck. Even Brooks Koepka looked like he was having a blast.

Tour time!

 The Tour de France wraps up today with three short climbs up Montmarte in Paris, and what I know about that is my wife and stayed at the foot of it back in 2005 and found this humble little place halfway up the hill that became our favorite restaurant in Paris.

Other than that, I got nothin'. Or right next door to nothin'.

Truth is, I haven't paid much attention to the Tour de France since it was the Tour de Syringe and Lance Armstrong was the godfather of HGH or something close to it. Lance won the thing every year, it seemed, until it came out he was a stone psychopath bullying his teammates into injecting themselves with horse testicles or some such thing, and banishing those who refused.

All that was a long time ago, however. Now I read that today is the last stage of the 2025 Tour, and everything I know about it you could fit in the cheesy basket on the front of my old 26-inch Huffy -- the one with the cheesy white wall tires and the Chico Salmon baseball cards flapping in the spokes.

Tadej Pogacar will definitely not be riding a Huffy up Montmarte today, but he's almost certainly going to be cruising down the Champs Elysees as the king of the Tour when it's all over. He's got a comfortable lead on Jonas Vingegaard, and if he maintains it he'll be the Tour champion for the fourth time.

So who is Tadej Pogacar, you might ask?

(Or not. You may have already bailed on this post when you found out it wasn't about baseball, NFL training camps or ... NFL training camps. If so, go with God.)

Anyway, who is Tadej Pogacar?

Well, he's a 26-year-old Slovenian who's the new Lance Armstrong, presumably without the Michael Corleone gene. Last year he became only the third male bike racer in history to win the sport's Triple Crown, which means he won the Tour, the Giro d'Italia and the World Championships in the same year. He's also became the only bike racer in history to win the Triple Crown and two monuments in the same year, whatever the hell a monument is.

(Just kidding. Monuments are other notable bike races. In Pogacar's case, the Liege-Bastogne-Liege and the Giro di Lombardia, both of which he won in 2024.)

In any event, Pogacar is a heck of a bike rider. So here's to him, even if he won't be riding a 26-inch Huffy with whitewall tires.

But it would be cooler if he did, to quote Wooderson from "Dazed and Confused".

Generations

 Maybe you missed it this week with all the other news happening, but Rich Hill pitched another baseball game the other night. Went five innings for the Kansas City Royals, gave up six hits and an earned run, struck out one in a 6-0 loss to the Chicago Cubs.

Rich Hill is 45 years old.

The Royals were the 14th MLB team for which he's pitched.

The first was the Cubs, for whom he debuted 20 years ago this summer.

Tuesday night he was pitching against them, and the player he struck out was Ian Happ. Ian Happ is 30. He was 10 years old when Rich Hill first took the hill for the Cubs.

Twenty years later, he goes down swinging to the very same Rich Hill.

This is generational stuff, and there's nothing baseball loves more than generational stuff. Largely this is because it encompasses so many generations, and has been a touchstone to those generations in a uniquely American way. The first National Association game -- the predecessor to the National League -- was played in Fort Wayne five years before George Armstrong Custer rode to his doom above the Little Bighorn. America was still a spry 95 years young then.

Now?

Now here it is all these years later, and Rich Hill is still pitching at 45. He's the oldest player to take part in a major-league game since 2012, when Jamie Moyer took the mound for the Colorado Rockies seven months shy of his 50th birthday.

So what does this all mean, generation-wise?

Consider:

When Rich Hill pitched his first MLB game, Julio Franco was still playing.

Franco played his first MLB game on April 23, 1982.

Among others, Gaylord Perry was still playing then.

Perry made his MLB debut on April 14, 1962.

Among others, Satchel Paige was still playing then.

Satchel Paige played his first Negro Leagues game in 1927.

So, three degrees of separation (if I'm reading this right) between Rich Hill and Satchel Paige. Three degrees of separation between 1927 and 2025.

Generations, man. They make the baseball go 'round.

A bad week, brother

 Hulk Hogan and Chuck Mangione -- a professional wrestling icon and a jazz musician -- were both in the news yesterday because they both died, and I don't know what cosmic meaning to attach to that. Perhaps the Hulkster needed a house band to soundtrack the Sturm-und-Drang of him leaping off the top rope onto the Iron Sheik.

Whatever. In any event, it continued a bad week for entertainers, brother, as Hulk would say. Hogan and Mangione and Ozzy Osbourne and, most tragically, Malcolm Jamal Warner, aka Theo from the old Cosby show. The latter drowned in Costa Rica while on a family vacation, a perfectly awful thing. 

The Hulkster, on the other hand, died of a heart attack at 71, plunging into mourning anyone who grew up in the 1980s and remembers big hair, Pearl Jam and Molly Ringwald. Hulk Hogan was right smack in the gob of all that, arguably the biggest, most outlandish icon in a decade of big, outlandish icons. Pro wrestling went Hollywood -- lights, camera, plotlines! -- during that time, and the Hulkster was the Hollywood-iest of them all.

Who could forget him taking down the Iron Sheik to win the world championship n '84? Or his legendary ability to take a licking and keep on ticking? Or that time he squared off against Andre the Giant?

Andre of course is gone now, as are a bunch of them: The Sheik and Rowdy Roddy and Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff, and of course The Macho Man, Randy Savage. Now the brightest star in their firmament has joined them in the firmament, which can only mean a heavenly Royal Rumble is about to commence.

Or perhaps a celestial rematch, Hulk vs. Andre.

In which Rowdy Roddy hits Hulk from behind with a folding chair, the sneaky little jerk. And the Macho Man leaps into the ring to defend the honor of Miss Elizabeth. And Andre flings Macho Man over the ropes and onto a card table, and Hulk, unfazed by the folding chair, drags Rowdy Roddy into the ring and beats the mortal crap out of him. 

The good Lord would love it. You know He would, brother.

Saturday's comin'

 Last quarter of July now, and summer owns the room. Here in the Midwest it's all dryer-vent heat and rainforest humidity, lawns turning to shredded wheat beneath a merciless sun that slows the pace of life to a torpid crawl.

Except.

Except yesterday on some sports channel they were talking college football, and up in Chicago a bunch of Big Ten coaches were talking football, and Saturday Afternoon felt no more than a half-mile off, suddenly. You know what I'm talking about: That moment when it's the weekend and blowtorch July is just a sweat-blurred memory, and you turn on your TV and there is Tennessee at Auburn or Ohio State at Illinois or Michigan at Minnesota.

Here's the alma mater, dear old Ball State, taking on those misbegotten derelicts from Central Michigan. Here are Yale at Dartmouth and Princeton at Penn. Here are Oklahoma at Baylor, Cal at USC, Colgate at Lehigh.

Saturday's comin'. And by "Saturday," I mean those September/October days when the sky is so blue it hurts your eyes, and it's Arkansas vs. Texas in the noon game, and Notre Dame hosting Michigan State or Navy or North Carolina in the 3:30 game.

Saturday's comin'. The more I watched, the more July slipped away, and I realized with a jolt that even though the pool still beckons and the kids are still out of school and everyone's still up at the lake, summer is starting to edge toward the exit.

This always happens, and if I'm always surprised it surprises me, I'm also glad for it. Football media days, so soon? All this talk about how loaded Penn State is, and who's going to play quarterback at Ohio State and Oregon, and names we haven't thought about in awhile -- hello there, Dylan Raiola at Nebraska; howdy, Luke Altmyer at Illinois -- suddenly re-emerging from the shadows?

Bring it on. Bring on Dylan and Luke and that Manning kid at Texas and the Red River Shootout, Longhorns vs. Sooners. Bring on Alabama-Auburn and USC-Notre Dame and Michigan-Ohio State, all the burning rivalries. Bring on Saturday Afternoon, which of course is short for Chris Schenkel's iconic line about Saturday Afternoons In The Fall, which of course is just code for "college football."

I'm ready. Even though college football isn't really college football anymore -- it's just the pro game in drag now, and thus has forfeited romance for commerce -- its grip on me is as firm as ever. Grimly corporate now or not, I still start getting excited for it about this time every year, like a junkie who hates the fix but loves it at the same time.

Get the hell off the stage, summer. Time for fall, and a new jam.

Those damn women

There are many things you can say about the caveman demographic in America, and one of them has always been that it rarely leaps out of the bushes to blackjack the unwary. Surprise attacks are not its thing. You always see it coming, and usually from a good stretch of the legs off.

So when the WNBA All-Stars came out the other day in black warmup shirts that read Pay Us What You Owe Us ... 

Well. Here came the knuckle-draggers, the Those Damn Women crowd, the usual gaggle of Neanderthal McCalls.

Social media erupted with folks blasting the players for being ungrateful and delusional, because the WNBA has always been a money pit propped up by the NBA boys club. In fact, with injured league dynamo Caitlin Clark on the sideline in streets, the All-Star game saw a 36-percent drop in viewership.

No one wants to watch women's pro buckets, the Usual Gaggle concluded from that. The Gaggle thinks it's just a pack of mean girls, occasionally adding a bit of bigoted garnish -- i.e., that too many of them like other girls. Unless it's poor Caitlin getting knocked around, or one of her teammates knocking someone else around for knocking Caitlin around, it's as off the radar as Amelia Earhart.

Why, how dare they ask for more money? How dare they say a league that's always been a sunk cost isn't paying them what they're worth?

Because the league isn't. That's why.

Now, I don't know how you feel about media yakker Jemele Hill, who's been a lightning rod ever since she called Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump an old white racist during her ESPN days. But she had something to say the other day about the Pay Us What You Owe Us business, and it cut the legs out from under the Neanderthals as neat as you please.

What she wrote in a post on the Magic Social Media Thingy is the WNBA just added a team in the Bay Area (the Golden State Valkyries), and will be moving into the Toronto, Portland, Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia markets in the next five years. That will take the league from 12 teams to 18, a breathtaking 50 percent expansion.

Throw in the chunky new media rights deal that kicks in next year -- 11 years, $200 million a year -- and this does not sound like a league that's turning out its pockets. It sounds like a league a lot of smart people with dough are getting behind.

"The WNBA is adding multiple franchises because there are a line of investors wanting in," Hill pointed out. "You think billionaires want in on bad products?"

And as for the WNBA never turning a profit ...

"The NBA lost money for over 40 years," Hill reminded. "Do you think player salaries stayed the same for 40 years?"

Um, well, no. Which is why the WNBA Players Association is demanding more of a cut for its membership in collecting bargaining talks that may or may not wind up in a shutdown in October.

Should Caitlin Clark -- or Napheesa Collier or Breanna Stewart or Aja Wilson, for that matter -- get paid what LeBron or Luka get paid?

Of course not. No one worth listening to is saying that.

Should they get paid more than they're getting paid, given the elevated profile and consequent attractiveness of the product?

Damn skippy they should.

Oh, yeah. And about that dip in viewership for the All-Star game?

The night before, the 3-Point Contest and Skills Competition nearly doubled their viewership from a year ago -- even with Clark sitting it out.

Pay the women. Pay 'em.

Name games

With his usual free-range oafishness, the President of the United States shouldered his way into an NFL team's stadium negotiations the other day, proving once again no issue is so off-radar The Supreme Leader of Spouting Off won't spout off about it.

The Washington Commanders, see, are trying to get a new stadium in D.C., which would end their 28-year exile in Landover, Md. Thing is, the proposed site is on federal land, which means the lease would have to be approved by Congress. And that means The Supreme Leader could rally his serfs in both houses to put the kibosh on the deal.

Which he threatened the other day to do if the Commanders don't restore their old  nickname, the Redskins. 

And if you're asking here "Why would the President of the United States care about a sports team's nickname?", you've clearly been in a coma for the last decade or so. 

He cares because there's nothing he enjoys more than sticking his thumb in propriety's eye, and he deems no opportunity to do so beneath his office. Like any bully with a big hammer -- and he's got the biggest any bully ever had -- he's gonna wield it every chance he gets. He just can't help himself.

So, yeah, trying to blackmail an NFL team into bringing back an old and contentious identity sits squarely in his wheelhouse. And the more contentious the better.

Look. We could debate all day the provenance of the term "Redskins", and whether or not it demeans a people we've already demeaned enough in America's long history. Even the people in question are split on the matter.

Some would no doubt welcome The Supreme Leader's shakedown tactics to restore the old nickname; more believe it deserves its place in history's dustbin. It is, after all, 2025, not 1825. The primitive culture that gave birth to the term "Redskin" presumably is long gone, as are the brutal practices with which it unavoidably resonates.

Scalping the dead, and sometimes the living, for one. Also, in some perverse instances, skinning Native Americans to provide, um, clothing for the particularly degenerate. Yes, children, those things happened.

This is why "Redskins" is regarded as a pejorative by many Native Americans, along with the fact it often was used as such by those who subjugated them. It's why the Blob regards it as such, though as a white man my opinion counts for very little.

As does that of The Supreme Leader -- who's apparently never met an offense he wouldn't give if it involves those who aren't members of the rich white guy club.

That he's in a position to freely give that offense, and in fact enshrine it as national policy, is our misfortune. We're in the clutches of men and women who yearn for those halcyon days of the 1820s, or at least the 1890s. 

Hence the systematic removal of black history exhibits in our national museums, using the slick con that they're "divisive." And the proposed re-christening of naval vessels named for, among others, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Cesar Chavez and  Medgar Evers.    

And the attempted erasure of Native American culture enacted by the Indian schools of those aforementioned 1890s -- when children were taken from their homes, given white names and severely punished if they were caught speaking their native tongues instead of English.

And, OK, sure, we've wandered a good ways from nicknames for sports teams. But context is all, and the aforementioned forms the context here. And therefore the question asked at the top of this remains the nut of all this.

Why does the President of the United States care so much about this? Why would he care so much he'd blow up a stadium deal over it? Why is he so passionate about a word many regard as a racial slur? 

I think we know the answer to that. Don't we?

The example

 Word came down over the weekend that Hall of Fame sportswriter Bob Hammel had passed, and if you were in the profession in Indiana -- hell, if you were in the profession anywhere -- you bowed your head and lit a candle, figuratively if not literally. Sportswriters like to fancy themselves hardshell creatures, but this one hit hard.

That's because Bob Hammel was everything you aspired to be, if you were a chronicler of games. He was ... Hammel.

By that I don't just mean he was a prolific writer of surpassing gifts, a man who wrote so fast and so well you wondered how on earth he managed to knock out a gamer, two sidebars and a column in the usually limited time afforded him. I always figured there were two of him. It was a theory.

But of course there was more to Hammel than the impeccable scribe, and it was that part of him that made him such a splendid example to the rest of us. You wished you could write like him, but more than that you wished you could be more like him. With the talent came a genial and giving soul; in all the years I knew him, he never spoke an unkind word I can remember.

He was a newspaperman's newspaperman, oh, you bet. But he was also a profoundly decent human being.

He became most famous, sometimes to his chagrin, as Bob Knight's best friend -- his muse, his sounding board, even his Boswell, the 18th-century writer who became famous for chronicling the life of the eminent man of letters Samuel Johnson.  In so doing he flirted with journalism's third rail, which says you're never to cross the line between observer and active agent. 

Hardly anyone looked down on Hammel for that, however. There was simply too much to respect about the man, and there was also the understanding that a sports editor in Bloomington, In., wasn't going to last long if he focused more on Knight's wild child immaturity than his knowledge of the game and service to Indiana University. 

Plus, Hammel was no pushover. Those of us who worked the gig in Indiana understood that, too.

After a rare spat between him and Knight, for instance, Hammel briefly refused to use Knight's name in his IU basketball stories. The Hammel Ban didn't last long -- he and Knight patched things up fairly quickly, if memory serves -- but while it did, readers of the Herald-Telephone in Bloomington got used to reading quotes from "the Indiana coach."

It was this Bob Hammel, and all the rest of it, that a young John Feinstein got to know when he came to Bloomington to spend a winter with Knight's Hoosiers. It became the runaway bestseller "A Season On The Brink", and it launched Feinstein into the journalistic stratosphere. And along the way, Feinstein was as touched as everyone else by Bob Hammel, and for the same reasons.

From the book:

"The other reason few people disparaged Hammel was Hammel. Not only was his basketball knowledge respected, but he was generally considered a true gentleman in a business often sorely lacking in them. Some hometown writers let their prejudices affect what they write about other teams. Hammel never did that. He wasn't about to attack Knight, but he didn't run around attacking other people unfairly either."

And now he is gone, after a life well and beautifully lived. But the splendid example?

That survives, of course. Always will.

Marketing tools

 (In which the Blob once again ... well, you know. Standard procedure.)

So I see by the intertoobz that Indiana could be getting its very own immigrant gulag down at Camp Atterbury, and even though Secretary of Defense Pete "90 Proof" Hegseth says it would only be a temporary gulag, I can hardly contain my excitement.

Atterbury, after all, is one of only two such military sites in the country chosen for this honor. And the other is in New Jersey, so who cares, right? 

At any rate, there are no doubt already corporate jugheads considering the marketing possibilities, just as they have for that concentration camp down in the Florida swamps. They call that one Alligator Alcatraz -- which President Trump, Homeland Security chief Armband Barbie Noem and Florida governor Ron DeSantis thought was HI-larious when they were down there for the ribbon cutting.

It was such a hit, in fact, that apparently you can get "Alligator Alcatraz" printed on caps and T-shirts and, I don't know, maybe even keychains. Get yours today, America!

Now, obviously, "Alligator Alcatraz" won't work here in Indiana, on account of we tend to be a trifle light on the critters in these parts. Besides, it's probably already been trademarked. So we've gotta come up with some other brand for those unburdened by a conscience to sell to America.

Me, I vote for "Corn Sweat Sobibor." Or perhaps "Tenderloin Treblinka." 

Gotta be something America associates with Indiana, I figure, although probably not basketball or the Indianapolis 500. Those things are sacred here, and should never be subjected to such tawdry doings. Especially when the tawdriness involves locking people in cages who threaten America by speaking with an accent in public.

Or who, you know, happen to be named Valdez or Garcia.

No, it  would be the height (or depth) of crassness to name our little home-away-from-home "Logo Three Leavenworth" or something, and then sell Logo Three Leavenworth hats and shirts featuring the silhouette of Jimmy Chitwood rising up to take that last shot. And you wouldn't dare use the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's winged wheel logo on a hat or shirt, no sirree.

People might look at the wings, see, and think it's a subliminal message in support of all those dangerous gardeners and Home Depot workers and Purple Heart winners we've got penned up. Couldn't have that.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, if you're going to market concentration camps with hats and shirts (and keychains, don't forget the keychains!), you've pretty much slipped the surly bonds of crassness anyway. Using human misery as a marketing tool just makes you a tool. And you should be cast into outer darkness for it.

After all, there's a reason no corporate giant sells Buchenwald hats and shirts, and it's called "basic human decency." Same goes for Black Hole of Calcutta novelty items.

Although if someone christened our gulag the Black Hole of Cargill ...

Seed caps, baby. What's more Hoosier than that?

That man again

 That was a hell of a thing Rory McIlroy did Saturday, in case you missed it. Not only did the native son cup all of Northern Ireland in the palm of his hand on a sun-washed day at the British Open, he also won the coveted (or not) Word Of The Day championship.

Rory's winning word was "inevitable."

Which was what he thought after trudging up and down through a sea of chanting humanity (Rory! Rory! Rory!) to put up a 5-under 66 -- and then stealing a glance at the leaderboard.

There at the top of it was -- surprise! -- Scottie Scheffler. Despite Rory's 66, he was still six strokes ahead of McIlroy with one round to play in The Open, and four strokes to the good on the field.

"Inevitable," McIlroy said of that a little later.

Sure seems so.

Sure seems as if Scheffler has gone all Tiger Woods on the game of golf, and if that sounds sacrilegious it's a burden we'll have to bear. This will happen when you scorch the Royal Portrush track with a 64 to steal the halftime lead from a bunch of Nicolai Hojgaards and Tyrrell Hattons, then pile on a third-round 67 to create his four-stroke separation coming to Sunday.

On Saturday, Scheffler played bogey-free golf, continuing a week in which he's made bogey just three times in 54 holes. He's also turned the long par-3 16th the locals call Calamity Corner into Scottie's Corner; while virtually everyone else has struggled there, he's made birdie all three days. 

And, sure, that doesn't mean it's actually inevitable he'll be hoisting the claret jug at the end of today. But, again, it sure seems so.

Scheffler has never held a larger 54-hole lead before, and, like Tiger, he's a stone killer on Sundays. The last nine times he's led after three rounds, he's won the tournament.

To re-work the old motorsports line: Lead on Saturday, win on Sunday.

"He's just so solid," McIlroy said. "He doesn't make mistakes ... There doesn't seem to be any weakness there. Whenever you're trying to chase down a guy like that, it's hard to do."

And if no one chases him down today, Scheffler will have captured the third leg of a career Grand Slam. At 29, he'll have won the Masters, the PGA and The Open.

The last guy to do that before the age of 30?

Come on. Do I really have to tell you?

Summer of discontent

 The WNBA's All-Star weekend has arrived, but the Star who moves its needle will not be on the floor. Caitlin Clark is hurt again, and as goes Caitlin, so goes the WNBA.

The summer of her discontent, in other words, has become the summer of the WNBA's.  And through not much more than bad luck on Clark's part, and a bit more than bad luck on that of the league.

Let's start with Clark, as of course we must.

This was supposed to be a dream season for her and the Indiana Fever, but it instead become a season of endless frustration for both. With a new coach (Stephanie White) and an infusion of new, proven talent (Sophie Cunningham, Natasha Howard, DeWanna Bonner), Clark's Fever were regarded as legit contenders for the league title. But it's all gone south faster than a snowbird in January.

Instead of emerging as one of the league's best teams, the Fever are instead 12-10 and treading water in sixth place. Cunningham and Howard have lived up to their hype, but a disgruntled Bonner left the club last month, ostensibly because she was unhappy coming off the bench. And as for Clark ...

As they say, it's been one damn thing after another.

First she strained her left quad and missed five games; then she suffered a groin injury and missed five more. Then, late in Tuesday's win over the Connecticut Sun, she came up hobbling after a dish to Kelsey Mitchell, walked the length of the floor to bang her head against the stanchion, and then retreated to the bench, where she covered her head in a towel and briefly wept.

She knew before anyone else, see, that she'd tweaked the groin again. 

So she'll miss the All-Star Game and the 3-point contest, even as she sits on the bench as her team's captain. It will be the 13th game she'll sit out, counting a preseason game and the 11 regular-season games she's missed -- exactly half the campaign. And even when she's played, she's not been the Caitlin Clark who filled arenas last season; although she's averaging 16.5 points and is second in the league in assists per game with 8.8, her shooting eye has deserted her. 

In 11 games, she's shooting just 36.7 percent -- including an abysmal 27.9 percent from behind the arc, where her patented logo 3s have been mostly logo misses. Of her 104 3-point attempts, 75 have failed to bed down.

And as goes Caitlin ...

Well. Her struggles have become the league's struggles, at least to an extent.

The spotlight she's brought to the WNBA has boosted its national profile, but it's also boosted its national profile. Which is to say, it's brought increased scrutiny to the league's shoddy officiating and it's propensity for oncourt goon-ery -- at least some of which is media whipped cream, as it almost always is.

Clark, of course, has been at the center of much of the latter; as opponents continue to get physical with her for the same reason they get physical with any linchpin star -- if you can knock her off her rhythm, you can knock her team off its rhythm -- the media has transformed her into some sort of dime-dishing Joan of Arc. It's as if no WNBA star ever got bumped and banged around until Caitlin came along.

Not there isn't a pinch of truth to that.

There does, after all, seem to be a particular egregious-ness (targeting?) on occasion to the bumping and banging Clark receives. But the league's flagrant foul numbers suggest she's no more a candidate for martyrdom than, say, Sabrina Ionescu, Chelsea Gray or any other backcourt star. And if you're prepared to say, as some are, that her recent spate of injuries are proof opponents are deliberately trying to hurt her because they're jealous of her, you must also consider other possibilities.

The one the Blob embraces, albeit without any proof: It's common knowledge Clark spent a lot of time in the weight room in the offseason bulking up and reshaping her body. The results are visually obvious. Makes you wonder (or at least it does me) if that's part of why she's suddenly plagued by muscle strains when she was never bothered by them either at Iowa or in her rookie WNBA season.

More muscle mass, more muscle to strain or pull or tweak. Hey, it's a theory.

At any rate, Clark's injury woes fit neatly into the narrative that the WNBA is full of out-of-control brutes, and that ham-fisted officiating is largely to blame for that. Undoubtedly there's a pinch of truth in that, too -- and surely more than a pinch where the officiating is concerned.

But the rest of it?

Sorry, drama fans. Bad luck, mostly. As ordinary as that sounds.

An Open question

They're off and running in the British Open at Royal Portrush as I write this, and I'm wondering where Scottie Scheffler's head is right now. I'm wondering if he has his mind right. I'm wondering ...

Ah, hell. I'm wondering if he'll actually get some lasting joy out of the experience if he gets to lay his hands on the Claret Jug come Sunday afternoon.

That's my open question for The Open this week. And it's one I find more than a little sad.

I find it sad because, this week, the best golfer in the world said golf doesn't really do it for him. He's devoted most of his 29 years to it, spent hours upon hours learning to make wedges nestle and drives sail plumb-bob straight, and yet ...

And yet, he says it's not "a fulfilling life." Says he hungers to win as much as anyone, and when he does the moment will fill him to the top. But then it's gone, and it's on to the next wedge, the next drive, the next tournament, the next challenge.

As an example, he offered the Byron Nelson Classic in Fort Worth, which is Scheffler's hometown tournament and the one he wanted to win perhaps more than any other. And then he did, and the joy lasted about as long as the flavor in a stick of Fruit Stripe gum.

"You win it, you celebrate, get to hug the family, my sister's there, it's such an amazing moment," he said this week. "Then it's like 'OK, what are we going to eat for dinner?' Life goes on. It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes."

And, sure, if that's a measure of the guy's competitive drive to win -- a drive that has won him three majors before the age of 30 -- there's also an unavoidable regret that comes with it. That aforementioned drive is utterly remorseless, and it turns life into an endless treadmill for the man or woman who possesses it. Winning just means there's more winning to be done.

Or at least I think that's what Scheffler was trying to say.

The sad part is he seems self-aware enough to understand that, and to understand he's helpless against it. It is, after all, not just the way he's made but the way the world is made these days -- which is why, a nanosecond after the Oklahoma City Thunder won the NBA championship last month, the sporting media was already speculating whether or not they could repeat.

I hope we don't hear that two seconds after Scheffler's last putt circles the jar and drops, and he wins The Open, if he wins The Open. 

I hope he savors not just the moment he hoists the Claret Jug for the cameras, but for other moments several months hence.

I hope he takes the time to look at it in the year it will be in his possession, run his fingers over it, remember everything about that momentous weekend at Royal Portrush. I hope there will be a little twinge in his gut when he has to bring it back, unlike this year's defending champion Xander Schauffle.

Who took the Claret Jug to a home devoid of  memorabilia; the only golf photo of himself is one his wife hung high enough that he couldn't reach it, and all his trophies are at his parents' house. He doesn't know exactly where ("Probably in a bank vault," he said this week), and he has no clue where his Olympic gold medal is. And doesn't seem particularly perturbed by that.

"What am I going to do with it?" he said this week about the Claret Jug. "I don't really invite people over to my house. Am I just going to look at it myself?"

Well ... yes. Because isn't that the point of all this?

A W for gimmickry

 The Blob is usually death on goofy made-up junk that defiles our games -- don't even get me started on that dropping-a-baserunner-out-of-the-sky-in-extras business -- but I've gotta say, I didn't mind the gimmickry in baseball's All-Star Game last night. Perhaps my ancient hardening arteries have made me soft in the head.

Or perhaps it was because the gimmickry happened in an All-Star game, which of course is gimmickry itself if you think about it.

So, yeah, I'll forgive the guardians of what was once our national game for deciding the Midsummer Classic with a hockey shootout. In the baseball version, they went to Home Run Derby swing-off after the game was tied 6-6 at the end of nine innings. Kyle Schwarber of the Phillies parked three in the seats to win it for the National League, which blew a 6-0 lead after six innings and thus hardly deserved such a kindly fate.

Schwarber's three bombs gave the NL a 4-3 edge in the swing-off, and won him the game's MVP award. It was only the senior circuit's second All-Star Game win in the last 12 years. 

And, again, I was OK with that. And not just because, as a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, I'm an NL guy.

I was OK with it because baseball's All-Star Game achieves what none of the others manage these days, which is mix actual competition with straight-up joyous fun. And it's the fun part that makes baseball, baseball. It's why, for 100 years or more, kids have slung their mitts over the handlebars of their bikes every summer and headed off to the nearest scruffy dirt-and-grass patch of ground.

And even when they grow up to become, say, Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, part of that kid stays with them.

So when you go to a Home Run Derby to decide things, it's only the lineal descendant of declaring any hit to right field an out when you can't scare up nine players a side. And, chatter being an integral part of the game when you're a kid, the best part of last night's festivities by the Blob's lights was another gimmick: Miking up selected players so the broadcast crew could talk to them while they were playing the game.

And so we got 37-year-old Dodgers legend Clayton Kershaw calling out his pitches during his auld-lang-syne star turn in the second inning, and the Cubs' Pete Crow-Armstrong yakking away while he played center field. And then there was A's rookie Jacob Wilson, somehow playing shortstop for the Americans while simultaneously engaging in a three-way gab with John Smoltz in the booth and Wilson's dad, Jack, who played shortstop in the All-Star Game as a Pirate 21 years ago.

Weird stuff, all of that. But also awesome stuff.

And perfect for baseball's All-Star Game -- which, after all, is supposed to be a celebration of both the game and the generational ties that make it what it is.

Well done, baseball. Well done indeed.

Too much ado

 In the end, I may do what I do sometimes, on the occasion of what we used to call the Mid-Summer Classic.

I will wander out to my back deck, where the combustible July heat is beginning to ease its grip in deference to approaching evening.

I will take a radio and a frosty beverage with me.

I will tune in for an inning or two or three, and sip my beverage, and listen to the night sounds of summer begin to come up. And go back in time, a little, to a day when people used to do such things in the lollygagging twilight of July and August.

Then I will go inside, back to the air-conditioned bubble of 2025, and turn on the TV, and watch a bit more of the game.

And not waste a moment's thought on who should be playing and who shouldn't.

Because 2025 is what it is -- a time whose sustenance is manufactured contention and all its consequent silliness -- a controversy of sorts bubbled up this week surrounding tonight's All-Star game. Like most controversies these days, it's ... well, stupid. The fact it's infested even such a blameless nostalgia hit as an All-Star game confirms as much.

See, Jacob Misiorowski is on the National League roster.

He's a rookie pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers.

He's got a photon torpedo for a right arm, which has enabled him to hit 103 mph on the gun.

He's also pitched in only five major-league games so far, a record low for an All-Star.

Hence the controversy.

The yapping poodles of radio and TV sportstalk have debated whether he should be playing tonight. Several major-league players have said he hasn't done enough to deserve the honor. Among them, Trea Turner of the Phillies has been the most succinct.

"What a joke," Turner was quoted by ESPN as telling reporters.

Me?

I think Trea Turner needs to calm his hindparts down.

I think everyone needs to remember this is an All-Star game, not a merit badge. The fans vote for who they want to see, which makes it a popularity contest. And apparently they want to see a rangy kid who can throw a baseball 103 mph, because, really, who wouldn't?

So there he'll be in Atlanta tonight. Whether he deserves to be there -- or whether someone else deserves to be there in his place -- is immaterial.

Thing is, it's not like he's some rag-arm with a 6.25 ERA who got voted in because he's been playing for 15 years and everybody likes him. So far, in five starts, Misiorowski is 4-1 with a 2.81 ERA. He's struck out 33 batters and allowed just 12 hits in 25 2/3 innings. That means he gives up a knock just once every two-plus innings.

But as the ESPN piece notes, he's not Christopher Sanchez of the Phillies, who's 8-2 with a 2.50 ERA. And he's not teammate  Ranger Suarez, with his 7-3 record and 1.94 ERA.

Neither is in Atlanta. Which likely accounts for Turner's blunt assessment of Misiorowski's inclusion. 

Just standing up for his guys, Turner was. And that's as fine as pie.

Still ...

Still, he and everyone else needs to realize this is way too much ado about very little. They need to listen to Atlanta manager Brian Snitker, is what they need to do.

"You know what?" Snitker said this week. "It's an exhibition game."

Exactly.

And now, the All-Star break

 So we've officially reached the All-Star break in our baseball spring/summer, and that means the All-Star Home Run Derby and the All-Star Game from Atlanta, and that also means the one thing baseball can still lord over the NFL and the NBA in 2025 America.

Baseball has the best All-Star Game. And it's not even close.

It's still a baseball game, see, and it's still the National League vs. the American League, and you can still sit out on your deck in the slow-cooling July twilight and listen to it on your radio, and pretend it's 1936. That was the year of the first baseball All-Star game, and the format hasn't changed a whole lot.

The NFL?

It doesn't even have an All-Star Game anymore, unless you count that backyard cookout it tries to pass off as one. 

The NBA?

Yeah, it still has an All-Star Game, if you can call it that. The Association went back to he East vs. the West in 2024, but before that it was Team LeBron vs. Team Giannis, or maybe Team Drake vs. Team Shakira. Also they don't really play basketball. In 2024, for instance, the final score was 211-186. It looked like that time Vladimir Putin scored eight goals in a hockey game because no one dared touch him.

Ah, but the baseball All-Star Game is still baseball. Pitchers pitch. Batters stand in. Players in the field actually try to make put-outs.

The only fly in the ointment is AL vs. NL doesn't have the cache it used to on account of all the wildly out-of-control interleague play. No one has to guess anymore how Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani will fare against, say, Paul Skenes or Tarik Skubal, because we've already seen it. Usually more than once.

At any rate, it's All-Star week, which traditionally has been viewed as the halfway point of the season. It's not, really -- game-and-calendar-wise, we're well past halfway -- but let's check out some highlights anyway, shall we?

* The cool-running Detroit Tigers (59-38) have the best record in baseball. They're the only team in the bigs playing .600 ball (.608), although the Los Angeles Dodgers, the best team in the National League, are at .598 and just one game behind the Olde English "D."

* The indescribably horrific Colorado Rockheads have the worst record in baseball. They're now 52 games under .500, 35 1/2 games out of first in the NL West, and a staggering 24 1/2 out of next to last.

* The Chicago Cubs still lead the NL Central, but Milwaukee has won seven straight and folks on the north side are starting to develop a nervous twitch. This will happen when you see your lead shrink to one game, and also when you're a Cubs fan and are thus conditioned to expect the worst.

* Best race in baseball right now? The Blob votes for the AL East. The Blue Jays, the Yankees and the Red Sox (who've won 10 straight) are all within three games of one another. I'm still betting the Yankees, but only if the Red Sox don't run the table the second half of the season. That would be a 74-0 finish for the Scarlet Hose -- which of course is impossible, but we all know how unrealistic hopes hrive in the Fens.

"Hey, what about your Cruds, Mr. Blob?" you're asking now.

Well, they're still the Cruds, naturally. Nineteen games under water, 18 1/2 out of first, 11 out of next-to-last. But a bright side beckons.

Thanks to the Rockheads and the Washington Nah-tionals, they're not the worst team in the league. They're not even the second worst team in the league.

Oh, the glory.

American resurgence, Part Oopsie

 Well, that didn't line up with the narrative.

Remember the other day, when the Blob was carrying on about how Amanda Anisimova reaching the Wimbledon singles final was yet another sign that was American women's tennis was back, baby? About how it was the fourth straight Grand Slam women's final which would feature an American? And about how, if Anisimova managed to beat former world No. 1 Iga Swiatek at Wimby, it would make American women 3-0 in Grand Slam finals this year?.

Yeaaaahh ...

Fast forward to yesterday, when Anisimova was force-fed bagels on Centre Court.

A "bagel", in tennis parlance, is when someone wins a set 6-0. When someone does it twice, that's called a "double bagel."

Which is what Iga Swiatek did to the American. Double-bageled her red-white-and-blue ass.

In a match that took less than an hour, Swiatek dispatched a virtually helpless Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 to win her first Wimbledon title. It was just the third time in history a Grand Slam women's final went 6-0, 6-0, and only the second time it had happened at Wimby.  You have to go all the way back to 1911 to find the other instance.

In that one, Dorothea Lambert Chambers double-bageled Dora Boothby in the final. I think the women were still playing in ball gowns then, on account of they hadn't yet won the right to vote. 

At any rate, here's to Swiatek, who's always kind of struggled on grass. And better luck next time to Anisimova or the next American to reach a Grand Slam final -- because yesterday notwithstanding, it's bound to happen again, and soon.

One oopsie can't stop a resurgence. Says me, anyway.

Timeout for 'rasslin

 Went to dinner last night with my wife at a nice place, and then stopped at another nice place for a nightcap, and on the TV over the bar there wasn't the usual golf or baseball or  other summer pursuits. There was professional wrestling.

NBC was airing a primetime WWE show because it was some character named Goldberg's retirement bout, and all sorts of weirdness was commencing. While we were watching there was a bout between Randy Orton and some other guy, and Orton pinned him, and then one of the Paul brothers jumped in the ring and started raining blows on Orton's bald head, and then Jelly Roll -- say what? -- jumped in the ring and decked the Paul brother with one punch ...

Ah, hell. I couldn't keep up. All I know is, at some point Jelly Roll got knocked colder than a polar vortex, and a bunch of  'roided-up dudes started yelling and pointing fingers at a bunch of other 'roided-up dudes. And then two other 'roided-up dudes got in the ring and started jawing, and those two 'roided-up dudes wound up throwing each other out of the ring and onto the broadcast table.

It was about that time I turned to Julie and said, "Who watches this stuff?'

The answer, of course, is a lot of people watch this stuff, because if it's not exactly legit sport, it's a damned entertaining un-reality show. In fact I've always thought they should do an entire season of "Survivor" (another long-running phenomenon I don't get) where they strand a bunch of pro wrestlers on Tom Hanks's desert island. Last one to get eaten by the others wins.

Look. I'm not trying to disparage pro wrestling and its enthusiasts here. It has its place in the entertainment sphere, and it's made Vince McMahon and a bunch of other guys some serious jack. Vince's wife Linda is even our education czar now, though God knows why.

At any rate, it is what it is, pro wrestling. I guess I find it weird because at some point I outgrew it, and it's not the pro wrestling I used to watch back in the day anyway (the eternal rant of the elderly, natch). In my day, pro wrestling was Dick the Bruiser and Yukon Moose Cholak and Baron Von Ratschke. It was Sailor Art Thomas taking on Mitsu Arikawa in the prelim, or maybe Wilbur Snyder vs. Pepper Gomez.

These guys were not 'roided up, unless you count Budweiser. They looked like normal human beings. Some of them had the muscle tone of beanbag chairs.

I don't know if that made them more real to us, but it sure made pro wrestling more fun. Who could forget Bruiser's legendary powers of recuperation? He'd spend 20 minutes getting knocked around the ring by the Baron or Black Jack Lanza, and then he'd shake his head ... shake it again ... and JUST START WAILING on the Baron or Black Jack.

Awesome stuff. And it's not as if it distracted us from more bonafide athletic events, like roller derby.

Big Joanie Weston! Charlie O'Connell! The San Francisco Bay Area Bombers!

Now that was entertainment, ladies and gents.

American resurgence

 Donald Trump and his Knothead Gang should forget trying to convince us shipping brown people to concentration camps is what makes America great. They should be paying attention to women's tennis instead.

See what happened at Wimbledon yesterday?

Miami native Amanda Anisimova, seeded 13th in the Big Show, sent top-seeded Arya Sabalenka packing in the semifinals, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4. That puts her on Centre Court tomorrow to play for the title against 8-seed (and former world No. 1) Iga Swiatek.

If Anisimova wins, the U.S. will be 3-0 against the world in Grand Slams this year and Anisimova will be the third different American woman to claim one. Madison Keys beat Sabalenka to win the Australian Open in January, and last month Coco Gauff beat Sabalenka to win the French Open. With Jessica Pegula reaching the U.S. Open final last fall, an American woman has played in the last four Grand Slam finals -- and not just an American woman, but four different American women.

So if you were waiting for someone to turn the lights back on after Serena Williams retired, you need wait no longer. In fact you have to go back to the Serena-and-Venus days to find a time when American women had as robust a presence on the world stage as they do now.

Or perhaps you have to go back even farther than that.

Anisimova's victory over Sabalenka, see, marked the first time three different women had beaten a world No. 1 since 1982. You know, back when Chrissie and Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger and Pam Shriver 'n' them were knocking it around.

Make America great again?

Only a punchline until Anisimova, Gauff, Keys and Pegula showed up. So raise a glass.

Ode to a rant

 Lee Elia shuffled off this mortal coil yesterday, which will mean nothing to those of you who don't live and die with the northsiders in Chicago, and even less to those who have the standard American memory span here in 2025.

Which is to say, if it didn't happen before noon today, it didn't happen.

Well, Lee Elia's moment in the (bleepin') sun didn't happen today. It happened in (bleepin') 1983. Which is a (bleepin') long time as America measures these (bleepin') things.

And if you're wondering here "Why all the bleepin's, Mr. Blob?", well, gather around children. It's time you heard the tale of the most famous rant in the history of rants.

It happened one April afternoon in the Friendly Confines, aka Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Bear Cubs were having a tough start to the season. So tough, in fact, that boos were heard in the Confines that day.

This got Lee Elia, the Bear Cubs' manager, a trifle exercised.

The official transcript of his postgame soliloquy went like this:

I'll tell you one f—— thing. I hope we get f—— hotter than s— just to stuff it up them 3,000 f—— people that show up every f—— day. Because if they're the real Chicago f—— fans they can kiss my f—— a– right downtown and PRINT IT! They’re really, really behind you around here. My f—— a–.

What the f— am I supposed to do? Go out there and let my f—— players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the f—— nickel-dime people that show up? The m———— don’t even work! That’s why they’re out at the f—— game. They ought to go out and get a f—— job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a f—— living.

Eighty-five percent of the f—— world’s working — the other 15 come out here. A f—— playground for the c———-. Rip them m————, rip them c———- like the f—— players. Got guys busting their f—— a– and now f—— people boo and that’s the Cubs? My f—— a– ...

And so on, and so forth. 

Elia went on for three minutes, and it was pure (bleepin') stream of consciousness. Almost poetic, in a way, with "My (bleepin') ass" as its rhythmic anchor. It became so legendary someone recorded a Wrigley Field jingle punctuated with audio from Elia's rant.

What not even some of the oldtimers remember is Elia sort of halfway apologized the next day, and life went on until later in the season, when the Cubs let him go. It remains the wonder of this age how the Cubs didn't immediately fire him the day after The Rant, but it was a different time then. After all, in those days Mel Brooks could make a film like "Blazing Saddles" without every knucklehead who doesn't understand satire get all wound up about it.

In any event, The Rant followed Elia the rest of his days, which is kind of a shame. He went on to manage the Phillies for a brief spell, then wound up in Seattle as a revered coach. So here's to his (bleepin') ass.

I mean, here's to him.

White Housed

 Been thinking a bit the last few days about The Supreme Leader's latest harebrained idea, and I say, why not? It beats the dog out of some of his other harebrained ideas, like putting cities he doesn't like under quasi-military occupation, and letting dopey billionaires vandalize federal agencies.

No, this latest has legs, and also arms, and also beaucoup tattoos. I'm speaking, of course, of Supreme Leader's idea to celebrate the nation's 250th birthday next year with an MMA fight on the grounds of the White House.

The President ran that one up the flagpole last week, and he's been unjustly pilloried since (full disclosure: yes, even on the Blob). Upon further review, I think it's a splendid idea. Sure, it's crass as all hell, but then so is the President. Remember those cheesy gold sneakers?

Anyway, I think turning the White House into a sporting venue has definite possibilities,  and could be a whole new tax base besides. The President has always regarded his office as just another personal revenue stream, after all. So imagine how much jack he could rake in on Housed At The White House, even after Dana White and MMA take their cut.

And, listen, it's not as if the White House has been all that sacred an icon in the past. Woodrow Wilson used to let sheep graze on the South Lawn, and Teddy Roosevelt staged boxing and wrestling and judo matches on the grounds -- albeit boxing and wrestling and judo matches involving himself. So in a way, an MMA match would be something of an homage to TR.

(Also, I think Teddy would love the idea. Or maybe not. He never sold tickets to his sporting exertions, after all. I imagine he would consider that beneath the dignity of his office.)

(Of course, as has been demonstrated many times before, very little is beneath The Supreme Leader..)

In any event, the Blob's famously cockeyed world view can conjure up all manner of, well, events to follow the MMA lead. Why, just imagine ...

* The Take It To The House 150.

In which they plow up the South Lawn, put in a dirt track and stage a NASCAR Cup race. Maybe knock down a fence or two and extend the course onto Pennsylvania Avenue. Let the President bring the field to the green like he did at Daytona, and then watch with baited breath as Ross Chastain tries to knock Joey Logano or whoever onto the South Portico. Hijinks ensue!

* The Field of Schemes Classic.

Hey, if Roy Kinsella can plow up half a cornfield to build a baseball diamond, why not the White House grounds? Probably wouldn't be big enough for a real MLB game, but the Dodgers and Yankees could put on a dandy Wiffle ball show. Watch Aaron Judge swat one onto the Truman Balcony!

* The Knute Rockne Would Have Loved This S*** Bowl.

Imagine Notre Dame, USC and a rousing game of touch football on the South Lawn. Let the President play tailback so he can prove he's as virile as any damn Kennedy. Game ball goes to the Secret Service agent who takes down the first poor slob to try to tag the Prez, who rushes for 462 yards on 12 carries and scores six touchdowns.

And last but not least ...

* The Big Mac And Fries McDonald's/President's Cup Open.

 Eighteen holes of mini-golf on a course that begins in the East Room, winds through the West Wing and finishes up in the Oval Office with the dreaded G. Gordon Liddy Windmill hole. 

The President, of course, would be one of the participants. He wins with a score of 17.

And promptly issues an executive order designating the Big Mac And Fries McDonald's/President's Cup Open as the fifth major.

The plague on our house

(In which the Blob ... well, you know. Standard procedure in play.)

The long Fourth of July weekend is behind us now, and here in my town we celebrated America in an unfortunately American way. Which is to say, a bunch of teenagers staged a shootout in the heart of downtown, just like the Old West or at least how we imagine it.

Four kids between the ages of 15 and 18 ate lead, as we say here in the US of A. One of them, a 16-year-old, died.

That's another young person who didn't live through the summer, and who won't show up at school in the fall. Another young person who found out too late that when you play with guns, it ain't like the movies. People die for real, and there are no sequels.

And if you're asking now how the hell juveniles get their hands on so many guns so often, perhaps you have forgotten where you live, all the Fabulous Fourth hoo-ha notwithstanding. This is America, where we regard firearms with the sort of idolatry other nations reserve for religious icons. And where it's ridiculously easy to obtain them, despite the gun owners who claim it's not all that easy if the sellers are following the law and have a healthy respect for the lethality of what they're selling.

But if there are legal hoops through which to jump in those instances, they're comparatively roomy hoops. And the jump isn't much of one if you've got a clean rap sheet and are responsible and mature enough to understand, again, exactly what it is you're buying.

The problem, of course, is there are all kinds of other ways in America to get your hands on a gun, or guns. And those other ways don't care if you're responsible and mature, or just a teenager who wants to play gangsta.

This country is awash in guns, frankly, despite all the alarmist claptrap about Barack or Hillary or Joe Biden comin' to take them away. That is and always has been nothing more than the fever dream of wannabe patriots who seem to feel they're missing out on the total American package if they can't take up arms against tyranny, imagined or otherwise. Those guys who fought the Revolution had all the fun, dammit, and the wannabes want theirs, too.

In any case, another teenager is dead and three more are wounded here in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and downstate in Indy another wee-hours OK Corral extinguished two young lives and damaged another five over the weekend. It's the plague on our American house, bewitched as we are by calibration and the sort of feel-good payback Hollywood feeds us in regular doses.

Faced with that, public officials grasp at straws. In Indianapolis, chief of police Chris Bailey was reduced to impotent rage over the latest  spasm of violence, saying "I'm tired of it" and imploring parents to do some damn parenting.

"This kind of violence downtown or in any of our neighborhoods is completely unacceptable and unnecessary," Bailey said. "Hundreds of unsupervised kids down here ... I don't know how many times I have to say it -- we are not your children's keepers! You are!"

Here in the Fort, meanwhile, Mayor Sharon Tucker, in a more restrained manner, echoed Bailey's sentiments. Said parents and caregivers needed to know where their children were. Said young people needed to be "respectful" of each other. Said "the type of behavior by a few in our community will not be tolerated."

And yet it continues to happen, tolerated or not.

And yet kids keep shooting kids, here and in Indianapolis and pretty much everywhere else.

And this is our nation in 2025, where the gun is king and pretty words, even angry words, seemingly are no match for it.

Forget God bless America, boys and girls. God save America.

From itself.

Fans Are Jerks: The new chapter

 Saw a Deadspin piece the other day by Adam Zielonka, which landed on my radar because it was about the Blob's new favorite golfer, Max Homa. He became the Blob's new favorite golfer last month, when he actually carried his own sticks in a U.S. Open qualifier because he'd parted company with his caddy and couldn't find a last-minute replacement.

A PGA regular pack mule-ing his own bag like Bogey Joe from St. Looie Mo? Now that's a damn golfer, by God.

Which gets us back to Zielonka's piece.

It wasn't about Homa as Everyman, but Homa as a target for fan asshat-tery. Last weekend, see, Homa shot an opening-round 63 in the John Deere Classic and briefly led on Sunday, finally winding up fifth. In what has been his worst season in eight years, it was far and away his best weekend.

Only some folks on social media didn't think so.

"I hope you (expletive) kill yourself, dude," one of them posted.

Another requested Homa put $1,900 in his Venmo account because he'd bet Max to win.

Zielonka's response to that was pretty much any sane person's: You bet $1,900 on Max Homa to win? A guy who hasn't won in two years and is 99th in the PGA rankings right now? Are you a complete imbecile?

(And, OK, so Zielonka didn't write the last. That's my own contribution.)

Anyway, this points up a new component in what was already a virulent affliction: The role online betting plays in the aforementioned asshat-tery. 

You can lay down cash on almost anything from almost anywhere now, and rather than be appalled by that, major sporting entities are leaning into it. Even Major League Baseball, scarred by the Black Sox scandal and death on gambling since, is getting in on the online betting craze. They're even moving the A's to Vegas, where they'll rejoin the Raiders of the NFL.

The result is there are more deranged fans than ever out there now. And there were plenty before.

Most recently, of course, there was the dipshite White Sox fan who reduced Diamondbacks' star Ketel Marte to tears by taunting him about his mother, who died several years ago in a traffic accident. And there was the lovely group of Betsy Bigots who followed a transgender high school track star around all season just to heckle her.

Standing up for girls sports, this group claimed. Buncha lowlifes yelling at a high school kid according to anyone with a sense of decency.

At least, though, the Betsy Bigots were motivated only by their bigotry, and not by a hit to the wallet. That introduces an entirely new level of vitriol to the mix, and a potentially lethal one. As Zielonka points out, just recently the Houston Astros assigned security to pitcher Lance McCuller's family because an angry gambler threatened McCuller's children. I'm guessing it won't be the last time that happens.

I'm also guessing that, one of these days, one of those angry gamblers is going to do more than threaten. A tad melodramatic, perhaps, but not outside the realm.

You'd hope MLB or the NFL or any other sporting monolith would take this sort of potentially dangerous harassment more seriously, in the interest of protecting the players who are their product. But when you're in bed with the gamblers yourselves, and making beaucoup dollars off the arrangement, you're pretty much in reap-what-you-sow country. Occasional death threats?

Just part of the deal.

And, OK, so perhaps that's a bit harsh.  But even the site for which Zielonka wrote the Homa piece is all-in on the gambling culture. An entire swath of Deadspin is devoted to betting, and you can't scroll very far without seeing multiple ads for FanDuel and BetMGM and other online betting sites. It has become pervasive.

And a new chapter, if you will, of that long-running favorite, Fans Are Jerks. Plus the reason Homa and others are more and more eschewing social media these days.

"If you wouldn't choose to, like, sit around a table with somebody who's being that mean, I don't know, you would always get up," Homa said before the John Deere Classic last week, as reported by Zielonka. "You would always get up. If you were right there and someone was being rude to you, you would either ask them to leave or you would leave."

Although maybe you dump a drink on Betsy Bigot's head first, or pick up a bat and go all Ty Cobb on that jackwagon in Chicago. But that's just me.

A very Kiwi Sunday

 America celebrated itself over the long Fourth of July weekend, but you've gotta hand it to those plucky folks from New Zealand. Apparently they never met a private party they wouldn't brazenly crash.

See what happened yesterday, for instance?

In Chicago, a 36-year-old street-course savant from Auckland once again showed the NASCAR boys how it's done, winning the Streets of Chicago Cup race from the pole a day after winning the Infiniti series race.

Just outside Lexington, Ohio, meanwhile, a 44-year-old IndyCar immortal from Auckland won that series' race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, his 59th career victory and seventh at Mid-Ohio. It was his first victory of the 2025 season, and extended his streak of consecutive IndyCar seasons with at least one W to a mind-boggling 21.

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello again to Scott Dixon, the greatest IndyCar driver of his generation.

And say hello (again) to Shane Van Gisbergen, who drops into Cup racing every so often to teach a lesson in how you negotiate a street course in a stock car.

SVG's win at Chicago was his fourth win in five starts there, counting Infiniti events. It was his second victory in three Streets of Chicago races, and he'd likely have been 3-for-3 (and 5-for-5 all told) had he not gotten caught up in a crash last year.

His win Sunday was his second street-course win this season. He also dropped in for the inaugural Mexico City street race and scooped that one.

The man's just good on common thoroughfares. And that's especially true on the tight, tricky Chicago layout, where a pileup three laps in Sunday stopped the race for a time and looked like nothing so much as your typical rush hour on Lakeshore Drive -- which, of course, is part of the Chicago circuit.

Dixon, meanwhile, played a two pit-stop strategy to perfection to get up front, then stalked Alex Palou until IndyCar's most dominant made a rare mistake -- he entered a corner too hot and too wide and went off-roading for a few yards, which allowed Dixon to snatch the lead.

After that it was just Dixie employing all his veteran tricks to move dirty air around in his wake and keep the onrushing Palou at bay. Another lesson from the master for his Chip Ganassi Racing teammate to file away for future reference.

A very Kiwi Sunday, all-in-all. And so, on a weekend where we asked God to bless America, God bless New Zealand, too.  

Or whatever they say down there.

Cruds alert!*

 (*Special edition)

Special edition, because, no, it's not about my Pittsburgh Cruds, or the Chicago What Sox, or the Colorado Rockheads. It's about the most regally full-of-itself, look-we-got-monuments-and-you-don't franchise in baseball.

Come on down, you New York Yankees!

Who used to give us the Babe and the Iron Horse and DiMag and the Mick, all the icons, and now give us Jazz Chisholm Jr., an out-of-his-depth third baseman. OK, and also Aaron Judge, the big slugger who is the Babe's spiritual descendent. And, OK, also Anthony Volpe, who accidentally hit Judge in the face with a throw yesterday during the Bronx Bummers' 12-6 loss to the Mets.

What happened was, Volpe tossed the ball to Judge as the Yankees' right fielder trotted toward the infield at the end of the fourth inning. Apparently this is standard routine for most teams in MLB. But of course nothing is routine for the Bummers these days, so Judge wasn't paying attention and the ball hit him, knocking his sunglasses off and leaving a small cut next to his eye.

Cue up this scene from "A Christmas Story," slightly amended:

Santa: And what do YOU want for Christmas, little boy?

Ralphie: I want to be like Aaron Judge and play for the Yankees!

Santa: You'll put your eye out, kid.

And, OK, so nobody lost an eye, but Judge getting a faceful of horsehide was pretty much emblematic of the Bummers' woes right now. The loss to the Mets was their sixth straight, they're 3-7 in their last 10 games, and since June 13 they're 6-16 and have gone from first place in the AL East to tied for second with Tampa Bay, three games adrift of the Toronto Blue Jays.

The culprit, apparently, is a lot of Bad News Bears hijinks in the field and a depleted pitching staff that can't get anyone out. In other words, very un-Yankees stuff. Somewhere in the Great Beyond, presumably, George Steinbrenner is hurling pink slips like lightning bolts, and it's been reported in some precincts even the Yankee Stadium monuments are getting restless.

Elsewhere, of course, the Rockheads continue to be the gold standard for Crud-ishness. And not just because they're 20-69, 35 1/2 games out of first in the NL West and 24 games out of next to last, and there are still 73 games left in their season.

It's because nowhere in those 73 games do they get to play the Yankees.

Some guys have all the (bad) luck.

Chowin' down

Joey Chestnut won the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest again yesterday, and if there's a more purely American narrative than that I've yet to see it. A humble lad from Westfield, In., gaining fame and fortune for stuffing his face?

Why, it's the stars-and-stripes, the rocket's red glare and Lee Greenwood singing, "And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm full."

(Or maybe it's "free." I  forget.)

Either way, the point pertains: Nothin' says "America" like gluttony, excess and crass spectacle. And Joey Chestnut inhaling 70.5 dogs and buns in 10 minutes is all three wrapped up with a red-white-and-blue bow. 

That's what he did to win his 17th Mustard Belt (yes, there's actually a title belt, as if Joey were Sugar Ray Leonard or Muhammad Ali re-imagined), and it was something to see, if not entirely describable. I mean, have you ever watched a guy eat 70.5 hot dogs in 10 minutes? It's kinda gross, actually.

Every time I see clips of it, I'm reminded of one of Carla's wisecracks from "Cheers", where she's describing something disgusting. "It was like watchin' old people eat," Carla opines.

Or watchin' Joey Chestnut eat, had Carla and "Cheers" come along 30 or so years later.

And, look, this is not to disparage Joey and his mandibles o' death. More likely, it's the Blob's tendency to look at the world sideways and backward, and to find weirdness in virtually everything. And seeing how fast you can wolf down hot dogs or shrimp or, I don't know, Twinkies or Ho-Hos, is weirder than whatever odd notion poor addled Uncle Donny is floating from the White House today.

(His latest: To commemorate the nation's 250th birthday next summer, he wants to stage an MMA fight on the White House lawn. And, no, I'm not making that up, to issue the standard disclaimer. As crass spectacles go, it might challenge cramming hot dogs down one's gullet for the world championship, if not for the suspicion that Teddy Roosevelt would be all in on the idea.)

Anyway ... chowin' down as a sport is not much of a sport by the Blob's lights, although it might be more of a sport than, say, juggling hand grenades. The mortality rate is much lower, for one thing. Plus no one wants flying body parts in their spectacles.

Still, that wouldn't be as brashly in-your-face as people eating at warp speed while half the world goes hungry. That, too, seems to be as American as America gets these days, regrettably.

Which is why my favorite eating contest is not the Fourth of July hot dog contest. It's one that actually doesn't exist.

It's the pie-eating contest Gordy dreams up in "Stand By Me", in which a fat kid his town calls Lard-Ass gets his revenge by chugging castor oil before taking his place at the Big Table. He proceeds to buzzsaw his way through five blueberry pies before the inevitable happens: It all comes rumbling back up the other way.

Which of course sets off a chain reaction of symbiotic upchucking -- or, as Gordy puts it, a "complete and total Barf-O-Rama."

Now that's a Fourth of July extravaganza, by golly.

The fragile Fourth

 Today we celebrate our nation's 249th birthday, and there will be flags and speeches and burgers and 'dogs on the grill, and somewhere your drunk Uncle Carl, all jazzed up on Busch Light and patriotic fervor, will come thisclose to blowing off four or five fingers or toes.

The American Experiment meets "ER." Happens every July 4.

What doesn't always happen is the American Experiment meeting madmen who would undo it in the name of saving it.

It has become almost cliche in these bizarre times to say America has become a dark place hijacked by the aforementioned madmen, but as with most cliches much truth attends it. This is not, demonstrably and fundamentally, the America envisioned by our founders. Whatever truths they held as self-evident have become Fake News under our current regime, which traffics in the paranoia, fear-mongering and false grievance that always fuel autocratic governments.

Everyone's out to get us, according to the Regime. And so it's America's duty -- its patriotic duty -- to get them before they get us. America First, right?

This is how gardeners and laborers and people just living their lives become enemies of the state. It's how winners of the Purple Heart are forced to self-deport. It's how others -- so many others -- get snatched off the street and disappeared because they had the bad luck to be born with an Hispanic surname, or committed the misdemeanor of crossing the border without the proper papers five or 10 or 20 years ago. 

It's how we get to a place where the President of the United States, the governor of Florida and the Armband Barbie running Homeland Security pose in front of cages in a concentration camp, and yuk it up at the thought of some poor migrant who's never harmed a soul being eaten by alligators.

This is not America, friends and neighbors. This is, rather, America turned upside-down, a mean, alien land where cruelty is seen as strength and the most despicable elements rule. Where we afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable, short-sheeting the most vulnerable in our society in order to shove more wealth into the hands of those already sitting on an Everest of wealth.

Where we allocate more money than some nations spend on their armies to paramilitary street punks cosplaying as law enforcement.

America as police state? Seems we're right around the corner from that now.  

And, sure, maybe that's me plunging off the deep end like the rest of the country, but maybe it's also me seeing things through history's lens. Truth is, none of what's happening in America now is new, and there are numerous examples of where it leads. And if we're going to be honest about it, America has at times been one of those examples.

We are a nation of lofty ideals, but we're also a nation that has occasionally strayed from those ideals. Lady Liberty may hold her lamp high, but the anti-immigrant mania we're seeing now is merely the latest thread in a long and ugly tapestry of bigotry. Hispanics, primarily, are its targets this time around; at other times, it's been the Germans or the Irish or the Asians or the Eastern Europeans -- and that doesn't even get into the  holocaust of slavery and Jim Crow that kept the Africans who built America in chains both literal and symbolic.

Land of the free and home of the brave? Pretty words, but not always true.

And yet ...

And yet, for all of that, I will wave my flag today. I will do it for the founders and for their vision, no matter how many times it's been vandalized. I will do it for those Americans who understand that vision, and who do what they can for the marginalized and disadvantaged left eating the Regime's dust. 

I will do it for the America that stood up to Hitler and Tojo, and went to the moon, and  spearheaded the Berlin Airlift. I will do it for the America that once reached out to alleviate suffering around the world without asking what was in it for us.

That's the America I still believe in, not this one. Not this I-got-mine Regime that decided money spent to tend to the world's sick, hungry and impoverished was a giant scam because the Regime wasn't getting a proper cut.  

Those people I won't think about today.  Instead, on this most fragile of Fourths, I'll do what I always do: Cue up the Declaration of Independence episode of the HBO series "John Adams." Only this time I'll come at it from a different angle.

This time, I'll watch it not as an affirmation of America, and what makes it America.

This time, I'll watch it wondering how we get back to that.

Speed on screen

 Went to see "F1: The Movie" the other day, and you know what it got me wondering?

It got me wondering why there aren't more racing movies like "Ford vs. Ferrari." 

It got me thinking the best movies in an admittedly tiny genre tend to be the ones ripped from the pages of history -- like, well, "Ford vs. Ferrari," or maybe Ron Howard's "Rush." Real life, or a reasonable facsimile, tends to be yea more compelling and yea less formulaic on most occasions, it seems to me. And its surface in this area has barely been smudged.

For instance: Re-reading "Driving With The Devil," Neal Thompson's chronicle of the woolly early days of stock-car racing in the American south, made me wonder why no filmmaker has ever told the story of Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall. It's a hell of a tale: Two wild boys from rural Georgia wheeling Ford V8s loaded with 'shine on the twisty moonlit road from Dawsonville to Atlanta, in the meantime becoming the infant stock-car racing circuit's first glittering stars.

What Seay didn't win, Hall usually did.  Together with former bootlegger/huckster/semi-legit businessman Raymond Parks, they formed the first kinda-sorta team in what was then, in the late 1930s and early '40s, barely a kinda-sorta sport.

They were two entirely different men, Seay and Hall, the former quiet and calculating and the latter flamboyant and reckless to the point of madness. The story of both, however, is the story of two men who could never quite move on from the hills and stills that formed them, and who were ultimately ruined by it.

Seay was just 23 and at his peak as a racer when he was shot dead by a deranged cousin in a moonshine deal gone sideways. Hall spent most of his racing days on the run from the law, until finally his seeming compulsion to self-destruct landed him in prison for a six-year stretch.

When he got out, he tried to go back to racing, but Bill France had squeezed stock-car racing in his iron fist by then, and the lawless days in which Hall had flourished were past. One last crash left Rapid Roy with severe head injuries from which he would never quite recover.

So, drama, conflict, tragedy and car crashes, all wrapped up in one neat package. Pretty much your recipe for box-office gold.

If only the box-office gold didn't have to be vetted by Hollywood first, that is.

Studio heads are as skittish as kittens in a roomful of rockers when it comes to getting behind projects it considers iffy, and "Lloyd and Roy" would have iffy crawling all over it. Any racing movie is a gamble -- the appeal is hardly as broad as a movie about pirates or mobsters or former Navy SEALs out to avenge some horrific wrong -- so if you're going to drop significant coinage on one, it better have Brad Pitt or Matt Damon or Tom Cruise in it. 

And if it's Based On A True Story, as they say, it better be a True Story with which the general public is at least semi-familiar. And outside the Deep South, who except incorrigible gearheads has ever heard of Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall?

Better to put Brad Pitt in a racing movie, and go with the standard formula: Struggling  team owner brings back an old racing buddy who washed out of Formula One years before. Pairs him with a brash young rookie who's not about to take advice from a relic. Conflict ensues ... the old racing buddy does some crazy cowboy stuff that intensifies the conflict ... eventually everyone learns to work together. 

Oh, yeah: And somewhere in there, the old racing buddy beds the attractive female chief engineer despite her hard-and-fast rule about mixing business with pleasure. Because of course he does.

It's all as predictable as sunrise, which is why none of the above violates the Spoiler Rule. Heck, you see it all coming from a mile away, especially the bedding-the-female-chief-engineer part. You know what's going to happen there the first time she appears on the screen.

None of this, mind you, means "F1" doesn't work. It does. It's all enormously entertaining: The racing scenes are state-of-the-art, Brad Pitt is Brad Pitt, and, as in John Frankenheimer's groundbreaking "Grand Prix," actual F1 drivers and team principals make cameo appearances.

Hell of a ride, all-in-all. Best fictional racing film since "Grand Prix," in the Blob's humble opinion. Not to mention a neat two-and-a-half-hour infomercial for F1.

Still like to see Ron Howard or someone tackle Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall, though. Still like to see that.