Bigotry in disguise

 So I see the Felon in Chief waved his Magic Executive Order Wand again the other day and banished transgender athletes to the nether regions, which he's not empowered to do but did anyway. Afterward, he announced the "war on women's sports" by those freaky vandals was officially over.

Well, that's a relief.

I used to lie awake at night wondering when some icky transgender was going to take Caitlin Clark's job.

I also used to wonder when I would go to a girls high school basketball game or volleyball match or swim meet and see no REAL GIRLS out there anymore, because boys posing as girls had taken all their spots.

Thank god the Felon and ideological brethren like our Bible-thumping reverend/lieutenant governor Micah Beckwith -- who the other day championed Indiana's own version of the transgender athlete ban -- were on the case.

I feel better now. Female athletes can feel better. Heck, Caitlin Clark can feel better, knowing some Stephanie Curry won't be coming for her job.

Now if only the Felon and the Rev and their ilk would do something about all the dolphins taking over Olympic swimming.

"Oh, please,"  you're saying now. "That's a ridiculous analogy. There are no dolphins in Olympic swimming -- although the jury's still out on Michael Phelps."

Yeah? Well, maybe you're just not paying attention.

Dolphins are everywhere in Olympic swimming these days, cleverly made up to look like humans. Why, the evidence is irrefutable. You think Katie Ledecky is a real human? Aw, HELL, no. The woman is Flipper.

The Blob stands foursquare against such trans-species perversion. Now it's time for America to address this serious threat to fair athletic competition, too.

He said, tongue deeply imbedded in cheek.

Because, listen, claiming dolphins pose a threat to Olympic swimming is ridiculous. Of course it is. But it's not a very long jaunt down Ridiculous Street from that to what the Felon and the Rev have been saying about transgenders taking over women's sports.

"No more robbing girls of championships, scholarships, and lifelong dreams," the Rev tweeted the other day. "This bill (HB1041) exists because we've watched biological males ... shatter girls records that took years of dedication to achieve! Dominate competitions, leaving female athletes demoralized! Snatch college scholarships that were meant to empower young women!"*

(*Exclamation points mine)

And now for the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to say.

All those icky transgender athletes shattering girls records and demoralizing female athletes and stealing scholarships?

They must really get around, because there are hardly any of 'em.

Two months ago, for instance, NCAA President Charlie Baker testified he knew of only ten or so transgender athletes among the NCAA's 510,000 student-athletes. Moreover, guidelines exist in both national and international sports -- testosterone levels and what-not -- to safeguard against exactly the sort of sky-is-falling scenarios the Felon and the Rev falsely present.

And if transgenders really are "taking over girls and women's sports", how come the research shows states permitting them to compete have more girls competing in sports than states that ban them?

So ... yeah. Hysteria, all of this. Solution in search of a problem. Bigotry dressed up as fairness, because folks like the Felon and the Rev apparently do think transgenders are icky and freaky and perverted, and want to keep them marginalized by banning them from sports under the guise of "protecting" girls from imaginary threats.

Me?

Only experience I've had with a transgender athlete was years ago, when I covered the U.S. Clay Courts in Indianapolis. One afternoon I covered a match between Chris Evert and Renee Richards, who was named Richard Raskind before he had underwent gender-affirming care.

Now, Raskind was a decent athlete who played tennis at Yale and was a good enough baseball player to bring the Yankees sniffing around. So according to the anti-transgender narrative, Renee Richards was therefore a threat to women's tennis because surely the former Richard Raskind would mop the floor with all those defenseless girls, steal their records and championships, and utterly demoralize them.

Ahem, no. Instead, Evert mopped the floor with Richards in straight sets. At the time, Richards was at the tail end of five seasons on the women's pro circuit, during which she was never ranked higher than 20th in the world and never came close to winning a major. 

So much for taking over women's sports.

Those dolphins, though, man. Now there's a real problem.

History on a loop

 The stars in their courses held true last night in the basketball universe, and that was a good thing. At least there's some status that remains quo in these mad times.

Which is to say, Purdue was its usual efficient self in handling a hot Iowa team on the road, 90-81. Same old Boilers.

Which is also to say, Indiana lost in Madison, Wis., for the 21st straight time, going down 76-64 in a game that was essentially over six minutes in.

Same old Hoosiers.

Fun fact to know and tell: The last time the Hoosiers won at Wisconsin, head coach Mike Woodson was 39 years old. He's 66 now.

Other fun fact to now and tell: The last time the Hoosiers won at Wisconsin, the oldest players on the current roster were still three years away from being born.

That's because it was 1998, right after the 27-year-old Bradley Center opened. That's so long ago, Bob Knight, who died in 2023, was still coaching Indiana. It's so long ago A.J. Guyton, who's 46 now, was playing for him.

In other words, it's been a long damn time since Indiana figured out the Badgers in Madison. And it sure didn't get any shorter last night, when history maintained its loop and the Hoosiers maintained theirs.

Once again, in other words, they couldn't throw it in the ocean from the 3-point arc, missing 20 of their 27 attempts. Couldn't defend the 3-point arc, either, where Wisconsin shot 41.4 percent (12 of 29). Got 15 points on 5-of-13 shooting from Mackenzie Mgbako; 11 on 4-of-12 shooting from Luke Goode; and 10 from Myles Rice. And not a whole lot from anyone else.

As has been noted, the evening's suspense lasted all of six minutes. By that time, Wisconsin led 24-4, the Bradley Center was howling, and for the rest of the night Indiana was essentially trying to climb Everest in board shorts and flip-flops.

Needless to say, the Hoosiers didn't make the summit. It was the sixth loss in their last seven games, they've gone from 13-3 to 14-9, and March is just a month away.

Remember last fall, when Woodson gathered his latest crop of high-end recruits and transfer portal studs, and even people who should have known better were picking the Hoosiers to contend for the Big Ten title, and maybe even win it?

Seems like a long time ago.

Seems like, I don't know, 27 years ago, maybe.

Stirrings

 It hit 56 degrees here in the Fort yesterday, and the snow is down to a few stubborn piles where the plows have run. So I guess this is as good a time as any to bring up the S-word.

That word would be "spring", of course.

Oh, it's not close to being here yet -- Elvis not only is not yet in the building, the building is not yet in the building -- but for awhile yesterday the sun on your face didn't feel quite so winter-sterile. And every so often, you caught, perhaps not a whiff, but at least the memory of a whiff of living things in the air.

The world is still deeply asleep in this precinct, and next week February will likely break our hearts again in its usual jerkwater February way. But for one day, or part of the day, there were stirrings. For one day, or part of a day, we got to pretend February wasn't the SOB it usually is.

Also, something happened over the weekend down in Winston-Salem, N.C.

What happened, at an ancient historical site known as Bowman Gray Stadium, was a bunch of muscled-up rolling billboards went rumbling and blaring around Bowman Gray's well-worn quarter-mile of asphalt.

The Clash, NASCAR's annual preseason kickoff event, happened Sunday night, which means Daytona is right around the corner, and that means -- along with pitchers and catchers reporting -- winter doesn't have much left on the clock. The Clash used to be run at Daytona, which made it even more of a kickoff event. But last year NASCAR ran it in the Coliseum in L.A., and last weekend it landed at Bowman Gray as a tip of the cap to its mostly dead past.

Bowman Gray, see, played host to a regular NASCAR soiree from 1958 to 1971, before Winston brought the big money to the series and launched it on its current trajectory. Put simply, it outgrew quaint little places like Bowman Gray. Just like the NFL outgrew, say, Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, War Memorial in Buffalo and the Pontiac Silverdome, all  merely memories now.

So this was a sweet dip into nostalgia, NASCAR returning to Bowman Gray for one night. Chase Elliott won -- which, unlike when it ran at Daytona a week before the 500, offered no hint about how he'll run on Daytona's 2.5 miles and 31-degree banking. 

No matter. The point is, if the stock cars are running again, maybe 56 degrees in early February in northeast Indiana wasn't quite the outlier it seemed. 

A body can imagine so, anyway.

Imports and exports

 Been following with some interest lately the Felon in Chief's misbegotten trade war on Canada and Mexico, and it got me to thinking about last fall. My wife and I vacationed north of the border then, see, and now I'm wondering now if we shouldn't have stayed. 

People actually were sane there. The beer was cold, the music in a certain blues club was fine, and no one was running around with his or her hair on fire ranting about the Haitians or Venezuelans or Africans.

Hell, down on Rue St. Denis in the university district of Montreal, some of 'em even had their own restaurants. And, wonder of wonders, the immigration gestapo wasn't kicking down their doors. Refreshing.

Anyway, one night we were in the aforementioned certain blues club on St. Denis and struck up a conversation with a bartender, who somewhat surprisingly didn't think the Felon was batshite crazy. He thought no one had much to fear from the Felon, that a lot of the talk that he was Training Wheels Mussolini was overblown. He sounded quite reasonable, in the reasonable Canadian way.

I wonder what he's thinking now.

Because now the Felon is trying to bully Canada because, as he always does, he thinks the Canadians are taking advantage of their vastly richer and more powerful next door neighbor. And so he's strapped an across-the-board 25% tariff on both Canadian goods and Mexican goods, and Canada's retaliated with its own 25% tariff, and now we've got a completely unnecessary trade war just like the trade war with China that backfired so badly in the Felon's first term.

Some guys never learn. No matter how much remedial help you try to give them.

At any rate, because my job was covering Sportsball World for almost 40 years, I got to thinking about all the cool sports stuff that's come down over the years from the Great White North to enrich the lives of its ungrateful neighbors. And I figure this is the perfect time to remind everyone of some of it, and what would happen if someone back in the day had gone full Felon on Canada.

We never would have gotten to mangle Yvan Cournoyer's name, for one thing.

Also, we wouldn't have gotten the full effect of Ted Lindsay's crooked smile, or learned the meaning of a "Gordie Howe Hat Trick" (a goal, an assist and a fight), or laughed with as much appreciation when Strother Martin said "Oh, f*** Eddie Shore!" in "Slapshot." Heck, "Slapshot" wouldn't have been "Slapshot" without all the Canadians in the cast. 

And that's just hockey.

For instance, where would Purdue basketball have been last season without Toronto native Zach Edey? Not in the national championship game, surely.

And speaking of basketball, know who the best player is on the team with the best record in the NBA right now?

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Oklahoma City Thunder. Canadian.

Or how about those Chicago Cubs?

Would their star-crossed history be complete without Ferguson Jenkins, the first Canadian to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame?

Shoot, the MVP of last fall's World Series was Freddie Freeman, a Canadian-American. Vlad Guerrero Jr.? Joey Votto? Justin Morneau? Jason Bay? Hall of Famer Larry Walker?

Canadian-American. Canadian-American. Canadian. Canadian. Canadian.

And speaking of Chicago ...

Let's hear it for your Chicago Bears!

Who've got your George Halas and your Walter Payton and your Gale Sayers and your Dick Butkus in their long and spangled history, among many others. And whose first superstar, arguably, was Bronko Nagurski.

Bronko Freakin' Nagurski. Canadian.

"And, hey, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Don't forget all those NFL guys who played in the Canadian Football League, like Warren Moon and Cookie Gilchrist and Joe Theismann, who started his career with the Toronto Argonauts."

Absolutely not. Although I'll never quite understand that weird deal where the CFL had two teams with the same name: The Ottawa Rough Riders, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders. 

At least the Felon hasn't slapped a Duplicate Nickname tariff on 'em yet, though. So at least there's that.

More name games

 Look, I know what I said, not quite two weeks ago. My short-term memory is not yet that wobbly, though there are times when it has balance issues putting its pants on one leg at a time.

So, yeah, I did say the Oakland A's and Oakland Raiders should always be known as the Oakland A's and the Oakland Raiders, no matter where or how often they move. I figured if the Nutty Professor in the White House thinks he can magically rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America or the Gulf of Rama Lama Ding Dong or whatever, we should be able to call the A's and Raiders whatever we want, too. And neener-neener-neener on anyone who says we can't.

Anyway.

Anyway, it seems the San Francisco Chronicle has come around to my way of thinking, although it will not continue to call the Oakland A's the "Oakland A's" like I said.

No, sir. Because the A's are making a pit stop in Sacramento this summer before presumably moving on to Las Vegas, the Chronicle has decided to call them the Sacramento A's, with "SAC" as the approved abbreviation.

The Blob heartily approves of this, no matter what I said ten days ago. And mostly it approves of this because it's a big ol' thumb in the eye of the Establishment, i.e. Major League Baseball.

MLB, see, has decreed that the A's will just be called the A's, or the Athletics. And the abbreviation will be "ATH" for standings and the like.

Well, phooey on that. As our esteemed President has demonstrated, a person can do anything he wants, no matter what the rules say. Rules are for losers, in this new America. Let freedom ring!

But I digress, somewhat snarkily.

What I mean to say is, hooray for the Chronicle. 'Tis a bold lot you are, to paraphrase Michaleen Flynn in "The Quiet Man." The rest of America might meekly follow along and call 'em the Athletics as MLB directs, but at the Chronicle (and, you bet, in Sacramento, too), they'll be the Sacramento Athletics.

And now?

Now it's on to defying the NHL over this Utah Hockey Club business.

Me, I'm gonna call 'em the Utah Overalls, or maybe the Utah Paper Straws. Just because I can.

A day for weirdness

 Woke up this morning to a brave new world, and, no, not a world in which hockey fans in Ottawa boo the American national anthem. That actually happened last night, and good for those patriotic Canadians. Polite as they are, they know bad manners when they see them, and respond in kind.

But enough about oafish American presidents who think bullying longtime good neighbors is smart foreign policy. Ignorance and stupidity will keep for another day, of which there no doubt will be plenty.

No, this strange new world comes to us out of the NBA, where this morning we awoke to Luka Doncic the Laker and Anthony Davis the Maverick. Yes, you read that right. Last night, in a three-team deal we're told shocked the two principals and even Lakers quasi-CEO LeBron James, Los Angeles shipped AD to Dallas for Luka, one of the top five players in the league.

Not even the usual insiders know exactly why this happened -- Mavs execs say only it was to bolster their defense -- and why now, when the annual NBA epoch is still two months and change away from the playoffs. Folks can speculate, and will, about whether or not the Mavs had soured on Luka, who's been on the shelf with various ailments for all but 22 games this season. And the often-injured AD, out again, hasn't exactly been needed in L.A., where the Lakers stand fifth in the West and have won eight of their last 10 games.

Whatever. In any case, Saturday's deal was seismic in a way, say, Kareem-to-the-Lakers or Gretzky-to-the-Kings was seismic. And so it's going to take awhile for the weirdness to wear off.

(Which I suppose makes it apropos so many of us learned about this on Groundhogs Day. After all, what's not weird about our annual ritual of pulling a furry rodent out of his den at the crack of dawn to predict when winter will end?)

Anyway, get ready for the Luka/LeBron show, which ought to be something.

LeBron, supposedly, has always wanted to play with Luka, who in turn has always regarded LBJ as his idol. So there's that. And, of course, there's also the notion that the Lakers are surely weary of being an afterthought every spring. With Luka and the parts already in place that have carried L.A. to a 28-19 record thus far, you have to think those days are over for now.

But the first time Luka trots out there in Lakers colors is bound to be disorienting. Remember the first time you saw Fran Tarkenton in a Giants uni, and then saw him back in Vikings purple? Or how about Johnny Unitas wearing Chargers gold-and-robin's-egg-blue? 

Joe Montana in Chiefs red. Gretzky in Kings black-and-silver. Your eyes telling your brain, "Nah, this just don't look right."

Now, you can make the argument the disorientation isn't nearly so disorienting anymore in an era of rampant free agency, and that's a fair point. Players jump teams all the time these days; hell, it even happens in college now thanks to NIL and the ungoverned transfer portal. So the days when seeing an icon wearing the wrong uniform perhaps doesn't make the vision swim the way it used to.

Still.

Still, occasionally, the vision still swims. Like, right now, for instance.

Wait ... what?

 Purdue's gonna kill 'em, I suppose.

The guy to my left, a life-long friend, says something like this while drawing on one of those long-ass Churchill cigars in a local establishment that still allows a guy to draw on long-ass cigars. It's Friday afternoon, bending toward Friday evening. The ritual sacrifice of a wayward Indiana basketball team to its archrival Purdue is less than four hours away.

"Maybe," I reply. "But I dunno. This feels like one of those situations where you think it's gonna be a blowout and then for some weird reason it goes right to the end instead."

 And, yes, I really did say this. Yes, I really did have this vague feeling Indiana, which had explored strange new worlds of losing in dropping four of its previous five games, was inexplicably going to get its back up for its ancient foe. 

But I didn't really believe it.

It wasn't really this "ah-ha" moment when the clouds parted and I was bathed in the glow of revealed wisdom.

It was just ... a feeling. And I had it because I've been around sports long enough to know that nothing can faster turn assumptions into chopped liver.

Fast forward to halftime in Mackey Arena, and, hey, look at this, Indiana is actually leading going to the locker room, 41-37. 

Fast forward to 5:55 or so to play, and Indiana leads by six, 67-61.

Fast forward to 15 or so seconds to play, and Indiana still leads by one, 76-75, and that sound you hear is the Paint Crew and every other hostile in Mackey saying, "What the FUDGE?"

Only, like Ralphie in "A Christmas Story,"  they didn't say "fudge."

And then, of course, the universe right itself.

Trey Kaufman-Renn dropped a hook shot with 11 seconds showing, and Purdue led 77-76.

Then Myles Rice scurried down the floor for Indiana, Gicarri Harris blocked his shot and Fletcher Loyer collected the remains.

Four free throws down the well iced it as Purdue survived the uprising, 81-76.

You could say it was a case of Indiana gonna Indiana, and you wouldn't be wrong. Across the aforementioned last 5:55, after all, the Hoosiers were outscored 20-9. Purdue made plays when it needed to make plays, as Purdue tends to do, and Indiana didn't, as Indiana tends to do.

The Hoosiers also turned it over 20 times against the Purdue ball pressure; Braden Smith, who seems to have more than the standard number of hands in those situations, had six of Purdue's 13 steals to go with his team-high 24 points and seven assists. Indiana counterpart Myles Rice, meanwhile, wound up on the bench for half the game and wound up with zero points, two turnovers and one assist.

However.

However, the Hoosiers did outrebound Purdue 32-26, and Mackenzie Mgbako scored a game-high 25 points on 10-of-17 shooting including 3-of-8 from that notorious forbidden zone, the 3-point arc. Luke Goode came off the bench to hit three triples and score 13 points in 34 minutes, and Trey Galloway emerged from wherever he's been hiding to score 15 points, dish five assists, take three rebounds and make a steal in 25 minutes.

Of course, he also turned it over six times. Bad with the good, as ever with these Hoosiers.

Shocking stat of the night, other than Indiana leading with the game almost done: The Hoosiers actually outshot the Boilers from the arc, dropping 7 of 19 while Purdue inexplicably clanked 11 of its 13 attempts.

Not-at-all-shocking stat of the night: In the last 11 seconds, Purdue outscored Indiana 6-0. Also, the Boilers won for the 16th time in the last 20 meetings. Also-also, Matt Painter is now 6-3 against Mike Woodson.

Same "L", different day, in other words, for Woodson and Indiana. 

If not quite the "L" everyone was expecting.