Moving to a New Location

The Steele Drum, and all the blogging members of the World Sports Blog Network, can now be found at Real Clear Sports. Here's the link.

Not only will you find everything I've written so far for WSB, you'll also find my first post as a Real Clear Sports network member, on the cosmic justice being visited upon Notre Dame in the fifth year since they kneecapped Tyrone Willingham.

Look in the archives, meanwhile, and you'll find the story of how I became a blogger, and how I left newspapers last spring, somewhat against my will.

See you over there, and thanks for making the trip.

- David Steele

The Revolution’s Homemade Signs Will Not Be Televised

The Washington Redskins - who now have stooped to making up rules as they go along, like the ones stopping fans from bringing signs into FedEx Field - are doing the entire sports-loving world a favor. They’re teaching a long-overdue lesson about what it means to be a good “fan’’ (which is derived from “fanatic’’) and to be a good “customer’’ (derived from “gimme what I’m paying for, dammit’’).

Think about all the times organizations have put lousy products on the field, all the times fans have gotten fed up and stopped showing up – and all the times that someone has chided them for being “bad fans.’’ The times they’ve been called a “bad sports town.’’ The times they’ve been told they don’t “support their team,’’ and that heck, why not, just move them to another city that’ll appreciate that lousy product on the field.

That’s the message: yeah, we don’t have to be any good, but you’d better keep paying for us, because you’re required to be loyal to us, your home team. Or else.

Go ahead, find me one other business with the gall to operate like that – better yet, one that doesn’t need gall because so many buy into it. If you had a supermarket in your neighborhood that constantly sold you overpriced, outdated food that gave you salmonella, would you keep shopping there because it’s your neighborhood store? If the mechanic down the street charged you $1000 for yanking out your carburetor and putting in a new one he made out of Legos, would you keep going to you because his shop is located in the same city you live in?

Can you imagine how you’d react if these crooks told you that yes, you’re obligated to keep dropping off your Lego-filled car and keep projectile-vomiting on the way back to the supermarket, because that’s what real, true, loyal customers do? That if you go to get legitimate engine parts at another garage, or drive five miles further down the road for bacteria-free bacon (or, start biking to work and growing your own food), you’re really a "fair-weather'' shopper?

So, you probably get the point that you don’t have to let anybody shame you into continually cheering for a team that not only stinks (and actually causes vomiting on occasion), but also insults and patronizes you. This is how D.C. football fans are acting. Having already locked themselves into ticket commitments (and also seen what the team does when you aren’t able to meet those commitments), they’ve fought back in the only ways left to them. Plenty stay home, keeping parking and concession money out of the hands of ownership. Those who do go, pledge not to buy the beer and hot dogs or caps and jerseys, again asserting their consumer’s rights.

And they’ve brought signs and banners to show their anger. Oh, it’s beyond frustration; it’s a palpable sense of rage, the kind anyone can relate to if they’ve been sold a lemon of a car or spot a rat in the restaurant kitchen.

Now, as the whole country knows, Redskins officials have banned all signs brought from the outside. You can find the list of irrational reasons, scattershot enforcement, underhanded informing and explanation and hypocritical exceptions at this Washington Post blog. Understand, as well, that company-ordered extinction of angry-fan stadium signs is pretty much the universal symbol of a franchise gone totally off the rails.

The bottom line is that the Redskins are acting like some crazed mutation of the emperor with no clothes and the Wizard of Oz. You’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing, they seem to be telling us, and if you think you are seeing it, it’s because you’re a bad fan, a threat to the franchise and your fellow rooters, and you must be controlled.

The Redskins believe, somehow, that in doing this, they are winning. It’s incomprehensible what they believe they’re winning, though.

The truth is that they’re losing. Beneath that, they’d long ago lost sight of a business basic – the customer is entitled to take his business elsewhere if he’s not getting what he paid for. They’ve instead become convinced that the customer is entitled to sit down, shut up and don’t move until we tell you to.

When they’re begging for fans to come back and forgive them, maybe they’ll learn all the lessons mentioned above. Until then, at least one message might sink in to the people – don’t be afraid to stop being “fans’’ and start being “customers.’’

(Photo: The Washington Post)

The NBA is Back - All is Right with the World

There’s so much negativity out there that can feed a column topic today. After all, we’re less than 12 hours removed from the Redskins’ nationally-televised spanking by the Eagles, in front of a stadium where many of the seats not left empty by boycotting fans were filled by either Philly supporters or protesters against ownership.

As usual, the intersection between sports and society is the scene of a gruesome pile-up. Mark McGwire is being waved back into baseball by his ex-manager and his big heart and huge blinders. Officials in virtually every sport are being raked over the coals, deservedly so, especially in SEC football (again). Bob Griese is being suspended for a mid-game “joke’’ that turns the clock on the so-called conversation on race back another 50 years. Larry Johnson did the same, maybe double, with the conversation on sexual orientation. Steve Phillips has joined the non-exclusive club of successful middle-aged men tossing their careers and families into turmoil for a pointless “indiscretion’’ (to use Rick Pitino’s term). There’s much, much more.

But why dwell on any of that. The NBA tips off tonight! All is well. The sun is out, the shoes are squeaking on the hardwood, and to borrow another phrase from another season, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

The return of pro basketball is a joy. Even more joyous is the fact that for the first time in a long, long time, we believers aren’t in a tiny, bitter, contentious minority. The hatred and nastiness harbored against the NBA by too many people with too many laptops and microphones within reach, seems to have finally receded like the tide going out. The NBA might not be as cool as it was in the glory days of the 1980s and ‘90s – and I’m feeling so chipper, I won’t even get into the scabs being peeled off of that era by the likes of Michael, Magic and Isiah lately – but its dig-ability is at its highest rate in at least a decade. The number of people openly comparing the league to a collection of street gangs, basically, has been reduced to roughly the size of Rush Limbaugh’s listener core, and that bunch is growing out of fashion anyway.

Those of us who never abandoned it, never chugged the hater-ade, never bought the tilted coverage and blighted perception and kept loving the game long after others thought the old NBA slogan had become a joke … we kept appreciating what we saw, and we’re being rewarded now with what might be another golden era.

Yet even if this was just on the level of what we’ve been seeing since Michael Jordan left the Bulls (retirement No. 2 of 3), this is a special day. The offseason gets shorter every year, but this year it felt like forever, because there was so much to look forward to after the Lakers finally wrestled the Magic to the ground to claim the title, and after the top contenders jumped into the arms race to try to pin the Lakers this time around.

True lovers of the game at this rarefied level know two things. First: football is cool, baseball is worth it at this time of year, college hoops has its pluses, but nothing gets the juices flowing like the start of the NBA season. The inevitable lull between the trade deadline and the start of the playoffs – late February to late April – is endurable because of what comes before and after it.

Second: college hoops has its pluses, but anyone who swears it’s better than the NBA has an agenda to sell or an axe to grind. Not the colleges, not international ball, not the Olympics – this is the best basketball on the planet, period, end of story, close the book, proceed to checkout, we will be closing in five minutes, thank you for coming.

At this point, the names, teams and plotlines for this season should be laid out, to make a case for why we’re bouncing up and down in anticipation. But if you know them, you know them; if you don’t, c’mon, just watch, because nothing I can say will sell it better than seeing it yourself. Gorge yourself on TNT and ESPN and your local sports-cable station, and inhale the sweet aroma of NBA League Pass while they’re giving it away for the first week – then see if your budget can stand buying the full package. The bleary eyes every morning for the next nine months are a small price to pay.

(On the other hand, this isn't complete without predictions. San Antonio over Boston in the Finals. The Spurs are being overlooked, as is my pick for his third MVP - not that that makes any sense, being overlooked with two MVPs and four rings - Tim Duncan.)

But, Drum, you’re saying, you know good and well that everything’s not perfect in that league. Don’t be a Pollyanna. Take off the rose-colored shades and quit blowing sunshine up people’s nether regions about the beauty of the game and the promise of new beginnings and new life the season brings.

Oh, I can’t do that on behalf of the NBA, but you’ll swallow that from baseball every February? And earlier, because we’re days away from the first recitation of “xx days until pitchers and catchers report.’’ No sport has more sores and pock-marks on it than the national pastime, starting with the fact that the world championship will be decided in two Northeast cities in November, but it will all be brushed away when spring beckons and the emerald chessboard is laid out and the lovely melody of horsehide and wood and … oops, I threw up in my mouth a little.

Tsar Justice, I’m genuinely sorry. I know that is your sport. But this is mine.

As much of a shill as I’m sure I sound like … I love this game.
(Photo: Washington Post)

Disconnect the Cable, Please

It’s late Friday morning in late October, and Tom Cable is still the head coach of the Oakland Raiders. Somebody please explain why.

Never mind, for the moment, that in an investigation that somehow stretched out for nearly three months, Cable was spared of assault charges by police in Napa, Calif., where the Raiders’ UFC camp … er, training camp hosted some sort of incident in August that left assistant coach Randy Hanson with a broken jaw.

Also, never mind that the Raiders’ rock-solid grip on laughingstock-of-professional-sports honors is being loosened this week only because of the slapstick routine that the Redskins franchise has become – and because the Raiders managed to win a game last week.

Just chew on this: something that began with Cable and ended with one of his assistants going to the ER, took place back in August, was unveiled in grisly detail soon afterward, and has since made Cable, the Raiders organization and the entire NFL the butt of constant jokes all across football-loving America. And despite the decision not to press charges – and when you see why, you’ll wonder if the mob was ever this efficient at altering the memories of witnesses – the Raiders and Cable are going to get clowned over this not just the rest of the season, but whenever the low points of the late stages of the Al Davis regime are discussed.

Yet for embarrassing the legendary Raider logo and smearing mud on the NFL’s so-called shield – the one everyone always talks about protecting – neither the Raiders nor the NFL have seen fit so far to even scold him or wag an accusatory finger in his face, much less slap him down with a severe punishment of any kind.

Like firing him. Or suspending him. Or fining him. Or dressing him down in public and making him look and feel as small as his actions are making the Raiders and the NFL look.

Because you don’t have to be Johnnie Cochran to grasp that, despite the lack of charges being filed, Cable caused Hanson’s injury. The police’s final report may not have put Cable before a judge, but the picture it painted was pretty damning: a raging coach out of control, having to be separated from the target of his wrath, causing the comically-implausible series of events that landed Hanson on the ground in pain, then grabbing and screaming at the injured man on the floor beneath him.

Yes, the final report is a first cousin to the classic I-didn’t-punch-my-wife-she-walked-into-a-door acquittal. Believe if it you want, don’t if you don’t, but that’s what the cops say and they’re sticking to it. And they based their report on the witnesses on hand, and since this took place in a Raiders’ coaches meeting, you can decide for yourself who figured out where their proverbial bread was buttered.

This all makes Cable look like a lunatic, his assistants look like toadies and the Raiders look like bullies. The fact that the Raiders continue to employ him furthers the perception that the only thing that puts head coaches’ jobs in jeopardy out there is standing up to the owner (where have you gone, Jon Gruden and Lane Kiffin?).

And the NFL, which is still “monitoring’’ the situation? Every minute that goes by without Cable being suspended screams “double standard.’’ The idea that Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the leg sullies the image of the league more than one of its 32 head coaches starting a near-melee in a coaches meeting and leaving one assistant’s jaws and teeth cracked – exactly what “image’’ is it trying to project, much less protect?

If you’re trying to erase the perception of a league supposedly full of thugs, criminals and street punks, and you let Cable stay around, get paid and control the livelihoods of 50-odd players, a dozen or so assistants and all the others under his watch, then what perception are you really trying to control?

To the average fan, does being left alone in a room with, and saying the wrong thing to, Burress or Michael Vick or Adam Jones or Tank Johnson or Chris Henry terrify you more than if it was Tom Cable?

Which brings us back to the original question. If the answer is “yes’’ … somebody please explain why.

(Photos: Oakland Raiders, via AP)

Chalk Up Another Win For The 'Dumb Jocks'

It ended with a statement from the leader of the ownership group, Dave Checketts, Wednesday afternoon. It was pushed along by the NFL commissioner, the head of the players’ association, no less than two team owners, the head of the NAACP and (as always) the Rev. Al Sharpton.

But the very first pushback against Rush Limbaugh’s bid to own part of the St. Louis Rams came from a couple of dumb ballplayers.

Well, it’s obvious now, not so dumb.

Mathias Kiwanuka of the New York Giants and Bart Scott of the New York Jets spoke out, without hesitation or reservation, without prodding or calculating from their agents or their team P.R. personnel and without fear of backlash or retaliation or condemnation from anybody. They made it so clear it had no chance of misinterpretation, manipulation or pulling out of context. No way, they said, would I ever play for a team owned by that guy.

Without Kiwanuka and Scott, maybe this remains in the realm of talk-show banter and comment-section ranting, and Limbaugh stays in the group, untroubled by any of his past words or deeds, probably boasting to his “Dittoheads’’ about how he’d now be getting even richer off the very people he’d mocked and belittled for two decades.

But those two players decided not to stay quiet, and then a few more spoke up or spelled it out, and then Dee Smith, the head of the NFLPA, took their collective refusal to Roger Goodell. Next thing you knew, nobody in authority in the NFL could avoid taking a stand on it. And that groundswell washed Limbaugh overboard, where he’s now bobbing in the waves trying to convince everybody that he swam out there on purpose.

To repeat: it was the players who got that wave rolling.

Yet to hear some, this was impossible. Because athletes are selfish. Greedy. Stupid. They’d play for whoever waves the biggest check in front of them. They zip their lips and would never threaten their livelihoods by taking a stand on anything controversial. They’ve tuned out the outside world, never engage in society at large, and don’t have anything close to the guts the Alis, the Smiths and Carloses, the Jim Browns and Bill Russells had in the ‘60s.

It’s a lovely myth, and it has incredible staying power. It gets repeated in every corner of the sports world as if it was taught and memorized in first grade, and now it’s taken as scripture. It’s comforting, it’s self-assuring, it’s never going to get much of an argument, because, c’mon, look at the facts.

It is worth noting, by the way, that on CNN Wednesday night, when time came to discuss the Limbaugh ownership flop, it was not one of the outspoken active players answering questions. It was Sharpton. Maybe none of the NFL’s 2,500 or so players was available that night, or maybe on issues like this, the contact lists of the major “news’’ networks have only one name in them.

The player revolt against Limbaugh, of course, should never have happened.

Except that it happened a few months ago, when NFL players – mostly in a flurry of tweets – objected to the possibility that Goodell would not re-admit Michael Vick, or slap an additional suspension on him. But that was an exception to the rule, one shot in a million.

Except that it happened a year ago, when athletes from all sports spoke up in support of Barack Obama’s presidential quest, campaigned for him, attended his appearances and debated their teammates and reporters over him, then expressed their joy and pride about his victory and the fact that they could now tell their children that anything truly is possible.

But that was a special case, an anomaly. Except that it happened three years before that, when the government’s (in)actions during Hurricane Katrina left them and other wealthy celebrities as the chief benefactors, in money, contributions and hands-on assistance, of the victims – and prompted them to say exactly how hurt and angry they were to see their homes and their people left to suffer and die.

But that was way out of the ordinary for your average ballplayer. Except that it happened two years before that, when college and professional players answered honestly that they did not like the United States invading Iraq.

Still, you should never let facts get in the way of a good story. Of course, one fact did, in hindsight, doom athletes for the rest of eternity: Michael Jordan uttering the words he later admitted he regretted – “Republicans buy sneakers, too.’’ We’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of that quote. Proof that ballplayers speak and act fairly often is spilling out of every corner of the sports universe since then; again, the above examples are just from this decade.

Yet the assumption that every jock mindlessly follows that one example of the world’s biggest athletic star recusing himself two decades ago, will live forever. Google “Michael Jordan Republicans Buy Sneakers Too’’ and you come up with 61,400,000 hits. Not all the stories are about Michael Jordan.

Just as Sharpton is the go-to spokesman for the lazy interviewer (and it’s high time everybody stopped blaming Sharpton for that), Michael Jordan is the go-to reference for the lazy analyst. Michael never did this, Tiger never does that, and all athletes are just like them.

Mathias Kiwanuka, Bart Scott and more than a few of their colleagues made liars out of those who themselves mindlessly follow that theory. And when the next group of athletes defies the conventional wisdom, the conventional wisdom will shout them down again, and it will be as if Kiwanuka and Scott had never done a thing.

(Photos: nj.com, baltimoresun.com)

Rush Isn't The Only Problem

There is absolutely no way the NFL can allow Dave Checketts to own a team.

No, you read that right. True enough, there’s no way it can allow Rush Limbaugh to own a team, and that cannot be emphasized enough nor played down in any way. Actually, I don’t even believe that Limbaugh will ever get close to it. Just as I don’t believe Limbaugh represents as large a percentage of America’s views on anything as he and his proponents want us to think, I don’t believe three-fourths of the other NFL owners will be swayed by whatever money Limbaugh brings into the bid for the St. Louis Rams’ ownership, into overlooking the damage this resolutely dangerous man will do to their select group, their league, their sport and its reputation.

You think the resistance to Michael Vick’s return was noisy? Just wait and see what happens if Limbaugh ever gets that far with the NFL. It's even got players, normally content to speak only when trash-talked to first, prepared to revolt. (UPDATE: ESPN reported Sunday that the NFL Players Association has notified the league of its opposition.)

Limbaugh’s an enormous problem, pun not intended at all (hopefully we’re all beyond the obvious, cheap weight jokes, with someone this frightening in the discussion). But once he’s disposed of, the only proper move for the NFL – or, if they get there first, the current owners of the Rams – is to summarily reject any subsequent bids by Checketts or anyone else left in his investment group.

Which is hard for me to say. In his years running the New York Knicks and Madison Square Garden when I covered the team many years ago, and the years before that when he ran the Utah Jazz, I grew to respect Dave Checketts as a basketball executive and a person with character and integrity. He’s always come off as a good man, extremely sharp, very calculating and ruthless in his own way, which isn’t a crime. He might have political views I disagree with, but if I ever knew what they were, I don’t remember them now.

Yet you’re known by the company you keep. And anyone who would even invite as vile an example of humanity as Rush Limbaugh into a business proposition gets red flags planted all over him for the rest of eternity.

This isn’t even about being friends with someone like that; this is about associating with someone so closely that you’ll accept his money in order to achieve your personal goal. If reaching that goal requires a partnership with Rush Limbaugh, then your priorities, as well as everything about yourself, are rightly called into question.

You should never want anything so badly – whether it’s strictly money or the civic pride from keeping a struggling NFL team in town – that you would even invite his assistance in any way, much less give him a financial slice of it.

It doesn’t matter if, as many have suggested in response to this Limbaugh gambit, every sports league is run by people who look and sound a lot like Limbaugh. Of course racism and racist ideas infest America’s owners’ boxes, or else the NFL wouldn’t have needed a Rooney Rule to get black men hired as head coaches, and ballparks wouldn’t have the number 42 painted on their outfield walls. Plenty have been caught in the act, by their words (Marge Schott) or deeds (Donald Sterling).

Yet to even mention them in the same sentence as Limbaugh, in light of all that he has done and said to not only offend, but openly endanger, the black populace in this country, including the family living in the White House, is to minimize the deeply, pathologically incendiary nature of what he does. And how he has used that to become rich enough to buy into the NFL, all while avoiding any responsibility for the worst manifestations of the tales he spins three hours a day.

Whatever sins the NFL hierarchy has committed individually and collectively against blacks recently and over the years, they have at least done the right thing when either forced to or when their consciences mesh with their wallets. There is now a Rooney Rule, and it did once pull the Super Bowl out of Arizona while the state was patting itself on the back for rejecting a Martin Luther King holiday. Openly embracing a man who has built a career out of making black people the enemy (including, infamously, athletes), who repeatedly proclaims that he wants the black president to fail and who laughs at his setbacks and denigrates his successes – the NFL would be begging for a backlash that would scar it for years to come.

Bypassing that is easy enough. The tougher move would follow: to shun Checketts. To send a message that the days of owners being accountable only to themselves and each other are over, and that they are subject to a code of conduct, to the scrutiny of their associates, and to the image police, the same way the players are. If Vick needs to watch who he hangs around, then so does a prospective owner like Checketts. Limbaugh is far more of a threat to decent society than any of the knuckleheads Vick let get too close to him.

Tough break for Checketts, who otherwise seems like a decent person. But if he's palling around (to borrow an old campaign line) with Rush Limbaugh, maybe he's not what he seems.

(Photo: The Charlie Rose Show)

How Curt Flood "Ruined'' Sports

Today is the 40th anniversary of what seemed like a fairly big, but hardly earthshaking, baseball trade: Curt Flood, Tim McCarver and two others to the Philadelphia Phillies; Dick Allen and two others to the St. Louis Cardinals. Pretty cut-and-dried. Until Flood refused to report and then asked the commissioner to make him … a free agent.

We all know what happened after that, and if you don’t, check out a series of stories on Fanhouse, including a pair that I wrote.

And then check out some of the comments on those stories, then decide whether you agree with them. Flood is, in fact, the Father of Free Agency … and four full decades later (technically, three and a half, because it wasn’t fully granted for baseball players until 1975), it’s still held as gospel by a stunning percentage of fans that free agency “ruined baseball.’’ Or, more comprehensively, “ruined sports.’’

You know the arguments; you may have made them, and might be making them at this moment. Players are getting paid millions to play a kids’ game that most of us would play for free. Teachers and firefighters are struggling to survive, yet A-Rod and Kobe and T.O. make more for each game than any of them will ever be paid in their lifetimes. Heck, Joe DiMaggio and Bronko Nagurski never got paid like that, and they were real stars, not like these stiffs today. If some .220-hitting shortstop can make millions, what would Mantle be worth – forget it, he’d own a piece of the team!

And loyalty? Forget it, these punks chase the dollars and that’s it. Nobody cares about winning or keeping a team together or staying faithful to the fans of a city that adores them, the way they did in the old days, when a star would play for the same team his whole career. Agents now come in and drive up salaries and blackmail teams and bleed them dry; they have more power than anybody, and things were way better when the Vince Lombardis of the world would just throw them out of his office and trade any player who tried to use one. Then these greedy, jealous bums have the nerve to go on strike, as if they’re not the luckiest people walking the earth to be making that kind of money without having to have real jobs.

Meanwhile, we keep getting charged more for tickets and paying $8 for a beer at the ballpark, and $30 to park, and now the games aren’t even on TV for free anymore, all because of these damn high salaries. Did ya know you used to be able to sit in the bleachers for 50 cents?

Blah blah blah freaking blah.

Fans this blissfully ignorant and willfully uninformed are like gold to owners, and have been for more than a century. The truth is summed up in something Jim Bouton, the author of the legendary Ball Four, said years ago: players don’t deserve all that money, but owners don’t deserve it more.

The idea that sports, leagues, franchises and owners wouldn’t have soaked the public if players didn’t start demanding a fair share of the money they generated is beyond preposterous – it’s a flat-out lie. So is the idea that pro sports is in some sort of terrible condition today because players now have a piece of the pie they had been denied for, again, more than 100 years, before Flood finally called baseball out on it.

Meanwhile, the very same people who would never accept the kind of limits on where they could work, for how much and for how long, that athletes did before Flood, except under the most desperate and poverty-stricken conditions, are the ones who complain longest and loudest about players picking where they want to play and how much they’ll accept to do it. Folks are doing that right now, in fact, being laid off by companies for no other reason than it helps out the board members’ stock value or the CEO’s profit margins – and simultaneously enraged at CC Sabathia getting to go play for the Yankees because Cleveland and Milwaukee didn’t want to pay him as much.

There is simply no way to watch, say, Tuesday’s Twins-Tigers playoff game, as transcendent a moment as sports on any level has ever produced, and whine about how everything was so much better 50 years ago before free agency. Baseball is better now. Every sport is better now. It’s just as exciting as it ever has been, and everybody’s being treated better in it. And everybody got to see it, as more people have gotten to see more games more often than ever before.

You just wonder why fans are so compelled to continually parrot the same arguments made since the 1870s by owners working solely for their own self-interest. Why players getting rich offends them so much more than, for example, Jerry Jones or George Steinbrenner getting rich. Why pure selfishness (you don’t want your favorite player to ever leave town) can be such a dominant motivation for your feelings about the games. Why you would never swear off watching movies because of what Jim Carrey earns per picture, but curse the entire landscape of professional sports because of what Manny Ramirez makes. Why, in fact, it means so much to your personal happiness how much any player makes, and whether the envy and bitterness cultivated toward them is really worth it.

Seriously, what’s it all about? Curt Flood liked St. Louis and didn’t want to go to Philadelphia just because August Busch ordered him to. For that, he and every player since have your everlasting disgust?

Flood died young, in 1997, but he took sports into the 21st century. It's time for fans to join it there.

(Photo of Curt Flood and Marvin Miller: The New York Times)

And He's ... Safe

For nine baseball teams (soon to be eight), it’s the start of the postseason. For a bunch of others, it’s the start of the firing season. As usual, it’s the managers who are on the hottest seats, largely because fans, for reasons directly related to the root of the term “fan,’’ tend to lose all sense of perspective and rationale when their teams circle the drain. Lose enough, and no matter the circumstances, the manager gets all the rifles pointing his way.

When this happens, you end up with – just to pull a random example out of thin air, that has nothing to do with the author’s location or the team he once regularly followed – the Baltimore Orioles catching 11 different brands of hell for retaining Dave Trembley after a 98-loss season.

Now, this is far from a singular phenomenon, even in the Baltimore-Washington area, in which Eddie Jordan was fired early last season by the Wizards because he was failing to win without Gilbert Arenas, and where Jim Zorn is being dragged over the coals for having been unprepared for and undeserving of the job capriciously handed him by Dan Snyder.

But it has reached new levels of insane and illogical behavior in and around Camden Yards. On a team that proclaimed – a day or so before Trembley was promoted to the position in June 2007 – that it was time to clean house, get rid of the old ways of doing things, tear it down and build it up from the bottom, Trembley is now being blamed for the team having an awful record three seasons later.

A 98-loss season was unavoidable. It was unavoidable for a reason. The man put in charge to do the cleaning, getting rid of, tearing down and building up decided that there was simply no other choice. The long-suffering Orioles fan base – witnesses to the decimation of the glory years of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s and the early Camden Yards years in the ‘90s – practically danced in the streets when that man, Andy MacPhail, was handed the reins.

Even more revelry ensued when the man handing them over, owner Peter Angelos, kept his words and completely removed his own hands from them. No more baseball decisions being controlled by the man who had proven over and over again how uniquely unqualified he was to do it.

A real baseball man, storied and successful and with an unimpeachable lineage, was finally being allowed to do what he did best, and MacPhail decided that what was best for this team was to re-build the crippled farm system, re-stock the arsenal of pitching arms, quit the ridiculous habit of overpaying for a player on his last legs to either nudge an overestimated team into contention or to build a bridge from one wrongheaded rebuilding plan to another.

Good plan.

Good manager to handle it, too, because Trembley had been a career minor-league manager and coach, and there was no need to find a big name to steer a shop that wasn’t ready to really sail yet. Besides, going marquee on the manager was as ineffectual and pointless as the marquee player-signings had been over the years.

The Orioles were going to stink for a while, and stink bad. Trying to stink only a little had gotten them to this place. Stripping everything bare – including all pretensions that what took a couple of decades to destroy could take only a couple of seasons to restore – was the only path.

Great! Orioles fans exclaimed.

Until they actually started to stink as bad as MacPhail had said.

From then on, it was completely forgotten that Trembley’s first pledge was to raise these new Orioles up to be professionals, to make them grow up with the right priorities, and to hold all players, no matter at what stage they were, accountable – not to mention holding himself accountable as well.

Trembley did all of that for 2 ½ seasons. Before that first half-season was over, though, the screams to get rid of him had begun. It might have been half in jest when, in September of ’07, the Orioles rewarded the signing of a contract for the following season by losing that 30-3 abomination to Texas at home.

From then on, though, not a soul in the organization caught more blame from fans than Trembley. The players were, from time to time, old, hardheaded, selfish, inattentive, dense, raw, unpolished, callow and brittle mentally and physically. They lost often enough to blot out the occasional triumphs and to distract from the real growth of players being groomed as the core of the finished product – outfielders Adam Jones, Nolan Reimold and Nick Markakis, catcher Matt Wieters and pitchers Brad Bergesen, Chris Tillman, Brian Matusz and Jim Johnson.

Trembley got none of the credit for any victory and all the abuse for every loss. Every syllable he spoke and the tone in which he spoke it was parsed for proof that he didn’t belong. There was no double-standard to which the fans couldn’t figure out how to hold him. It was almost awe-inspiring to see the volume of the rage, and how misdirected it was.

Here’s one theory for it all: Orioles fans, after a dozen losing seasons (and broken promises) in a row, started running out of people to blame. Putting it on Angelos didn’t work anymore; he was staying out of it and leaving it to MacPhail. MacPhail didn’t deserve it; he was doing exactly, almost verbatim, what he had promised. The players could only be pointed to so often, as the roster changed until few recognizable faces were left from the past bad years.

No one was willing to truly live up to their own promise – to buy into the MacPhail/Trembley plan to finally, without delusion or self-deception, fall down so far that there was nowhere to go but up. As badly as everyone wanted the 12 years of losing to end, no one could accept suffering a 13th or 14th to get to the ultimate goal.

Thus, the wailing and teeth-gnashing over the news at the end of last week – as the Orioles barely dodged a 100th loss – that Trembley was coming back.

He, MacPhail and the O’s have a job to finish. Apparently, so do the fans: to hound Trembley until the very end of time itself.

(Photo: Baltimore Sun)

You Can't Fire The Owner

For a sports fan, nothing is more agonizing than wanting to fire not the coach, not the GM, not the quarterback or cleanup hitter or point guard … but the owner.

Nothing makes you feel more powerless, more impotent, more feeble in your rage.

Consider Sunday’s Lions-Redskins game in Detroit. In the wake of the worst loss in most ‘Skins fans’ lifetime, there’s the usual venting about firing novice head coach Jim Zorn and former first-round quarterback Jason Campbell and the defensive coordinator and the overpaid defensive tackle and all the usual suspects. But the common theme aims blame straight at the top, at owner Dan Snyder, who has done a masterful job of alienating one of pro sports’ most rabid supporters within just a decade.

Detroit fans know their pain, times four, because under William Clay Ford their dreams have been crushed for more than 40 years. They’ve tried everything, from staying home to staging protest marches to registering every possible domain-name combination of “fire,’’ “Matt’’ and “Millen.’’ But the true target of their ire, Ford, remains solidly in place, and was spotted celebrating the end of a losing streak that had spanned three seasons as if the Lions had won its first-ever Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, back in D.C., ‘Skins fan took an immediate beating from gloating fans of the Ravens, going to 3-0 just up the road in Baltimore at the same time the ‘Skins were being humiliated. Lost in the mocking was the fact that Baltimore fans had to have known exactly what their suffering neighbors were feeling. Even if they were too young to remember Bob Irsay (as if anyone in town would ever let them forget), they were living amidst the nightmare of the Peter Angelos regime with the Orioles.

Not only are ‘Skins and Orioles fan bases practically separated at birth – the demolition of decades of success for a storied franchise – they are largely the exact same people. Thank another despised owner, Bob Short, for abandoned D.C. baseball fans adopting the Orioles for three decades.

The list is endless, even if circumstances are so dissimilar. The Yankees and Clippers are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of success, tradition and cache, but their owners (George Steinbrenner, Donald Sterling) tend to send their respective fans into vein-throbbing tirades. The Bidwill family has managed to become the bane of the existence of Cardinals football fans in three cities over the decades: Chicago, St. Louis and Phoenix.

Any fans who have been through this, even if it was long ago, likely still feel the sting. The A’s (Charlie Finley). The Reds (Marge Schott). The Bengals (Mike Brown). The Oakland-L.A.-Oakland Raiders (Al Davis). The corporations make the feeling even worse (the Cubs and Tribune, the Knicks and Cablevision), and the coincidental collaborations worse still (the group that ran the New Jersey Nets for a while, dubbed “The Secaucus Seven’’).

What they all had in common was the feeling of helplessness they inspired in their fan bases. The only thing more pointless to yell than “Fire the owner!’’ is “Sell the team!’’

They’re untouchable. They’re made men (and women). They answer to no one. On the rarest of occasions, they answer to their commissioners – who, of course, are employees of those same owners. If they ever sell the team, they sell it when they’re good and ready, and they’re never good and ready when their paying customers are clamoring for it.

Eventually, the cry goes up, “Stop giving him your money! Hit him where it hurts!’’ Detroit fans, however, stopped giving Ford their money years ago; Sunday’s game was the lowest-attended Lions game in 20 years, and it was blacked out locally. Yet Ford still runs things, because owning an NFL team works well for him. The same goes for Angelos with the gem that is Camden Yards, to no effect on his ultimate power. Raiders games are televised slightly less than Carrot Top film festivals. As for Sterling, life is never sweeter than when he hosts the Lakers in the building they share, because it’s a guaranteed purple-and-gold sellout.

Don’t expect Snyder to be eating government cheese any time soon, either, because the groundswell of anger doesn’t guarantee that Redskins games will stop selling out before the end of the next decade, much less this season.

With Snyder and his (mostly) brethren, his team can lose. His fans can lose. His image can lose. But he’ll still win.

(FOX Network screen shot from washingtonpost.com)

Here's the Bill, Belichick

The football gods really have long memories. Either that, or they took extra-long notes on the 2007 NFL season.

How else to explain what happened to the New England Patriots on Sunday at the Meadowlands? Better yet, how it happened?

Think about this: in Week 2 of 2009, the New York Jets talked junk about the Patriots and threw it all into the streets about what they wanted to do to them, and how they weren’t about to bow down to them, and all the things that should have had them eating about 10 flavors of crow by game’s end. And not only did the Jets back it up, they actually did make the Patriots look bad, even keeping them out of the end zone.

Not a huge deal, you might say, since this clearly is less of what we’re used to seeing of the Patriots, less of what we expected of them, and more of the injured Tom Brady than the rehabbed Tom Brady. But those who believe in karma have no doubts about what went on Sunday.

Payback.

For all of 2007. And apparently, the balance has yet to be paid.

You remember, of course, the Perfect Season, the one that would have been one of the most admirable seasons ever, turned in by one of the game’s most beloved teams, had the Patriots not killed the mood and turned their admirers into bitter antagonists, first with Spygate, then with Rub-It-In-Gate.

Week after aggravating week, the Patriots, without admitting it but without even a hint of subtlety, endeavored to run up the score as high as possible, leaving in starters, throwing deep late, risking injury (particularly of the vengeful sort) to their stars. It was a middle finger flashed to the rest of the sport the likes of which had never been seen at the NFL level. And though, again, it never came out publicly, it was generally accepted that Bill Belichick was orchestrating it all to stick it to the league for investigating him for illicit taping of opponents, which plenty to this day are convinced the NFL never pursued as hard as it could have.

Despite a surprising number of defenders who loved seeing the Patriots never take their foot off the gas, the entire ploy made them look ugly and cheap.

The bottom line: the Patriots were really asking for it.

They got it in the Super Bowl, in a multitude of ways. They lost to the Giants, of course, ruining the quest for perfection. They lost to another Manning brother. The record-shattering offense never got going, and then when they finally had to come from behind and did, gave that lead right back up. They allowed a miracle play by a complete unknown who will now be as much of an immortal as any of their own players. Finally, the winning points were scored by a player who, within two years, would be sentenced to prison.

Even in the face of that, though, Belichick dared the gods, by leaving the field before the final gun, proving that you can’t flip a switch on that kind of mindset.

Then, at the start of the next season, Brady got it. His season-ending knee injury really made lots of people wonder about the limits of karma. That cost the Patriots the playoffs.

Then they lost, through various means, huge chunks of the defense that had been a bedrock of their dominance, back before they became infatuated with scoring points: Rodney Harrison, Mike Vrabel, Tedy Bruschi, Richard Seymour.

That was a temptation of fate. They dodged the consequences in the season opener, when they were all but gift-wrapped a win they barely deserved, to Buffalo.

And then … last Sunday.

The gods clearly intervened on this. The Jets came in advertising their arrogance. Lots of people dismissed their chances and their tactics, still believing that the Patriots’ humble, blue-collar nature would offset them easily.

Those Patriots, though, went away two years ago. The obnoxious, gloating, shameless point-padders took their place. And the universe proved that it was not done collecting the bill for it all yet.

These Patriots got out-talked, out-egoed, and then outplayed by, of all teams, the New York Jets.

The franchise that literally and figuratively trash-talked the entire sport for one full season, got another taste of its own medicine.

But it’s into its second year now. You have to wonder how many more doses the Patriots have coming to them.

(Photo: Associated Press)

The Customer Is Always ...

While the American public wrung their hands and wailed to the heavens about the breakdown of civility and politeness among elected officials and celebrities, they forgot once again that they have no room to talk.

In fact, just in the past three weeks, sports fans proved that they can match the very stars they blast for their anti-social behavior, outburst for outburst. It didn’t seem that way for a while, but a pair of Buffalo Bills fans closed the gap earlier this week.

These two couldn’t even wait for the rage at Serena Williams to cool down. Two days into the nationwide flogging of the 11-time Grand Slam winner for unleashing her tirade against a line judge at the U.S. Open, the “fans’’ staged an early-morning vandalism run on the home of the Bills’ Leodis McKelvin, whose late-game fumble had opened the door for New England’s comeback victory over Buffalo in Foxboro a few hours earlier.

McKelvin’s lawn was spray-painted with the score of the game and a graphic obscenity – a different one from the one that turned Williams into a pariah and put her in the crosshairs of everybody within reach of a microphone or keyboard, but a pretty vile one anyway.

Don’t ever bother wondering whether these two delinquents have since absorbed the same level of abuse Williams did. It’s been mentioned in passing in the two days since it became known, when it gets mentioned at all. There are a lot of NFL injury updates and pennant “races’’ to follow now. Not to mention replays of the fumble itself.

Can’t imagine that the paying customers want to hear much about their own lawless indiscretions, anyway. That’s not good business. Just like it wasn’t good business to pursue the mayhem in the stands in Boise two weeks ago following the punch LeGarrette Blount threw at the end of his Oregon team’s loss – not when a lot more hay could be made of running endless loops of the punch itself, and dissecting the various violations of the rules of decent society that represented. So what if, minutes later, fans were caught on camera screaming curses, physically striking Blount and waving a chair in his direction?

In terms of threats to society, a metal stadium chair is child’s play compared to a tennis ball. Depending on who is threatening whom with which.

The good news is that local police are handling the thugs responsible for taking their anger out on the home, property and family of an NFL player. Much like police in Michigan took the time and effort to bring to justice the boneheads who started and escalated the Palace Brawl in Auburn Hills five years ago, the one that tarred (deservedly) the reputations of Ron Artest and his cohorts for life. The Pistons didn’t completely uphold their own responsibility for trying to shift blame from themselves in the aftermath, but they did yank a number of season tickets and ban the ticketholders.

There is actual proof that in the real world, everybody is held accountable for their actions.

It all makes you wonder, though, in what world do a lot of people exist – the people who sit silently as their fellow fans assume some crazed, delusional sense of entitlement, conclude that the law applies to someone besides them and act as if the sports universe revolves around them and is subject to their own fears, jealousies and inadequacies.

The same people who suddenly find their voices when an athlete or celebrity acts out, who believe they can act as judge and jury on those stars – when they don’t have a moral leg to stand on.

The people who live in glass houses – or who drive to others’ houses in glass cars, armed with spray cans and filthy minds.

(Photos: wkbw.com)

Let It Go

You saw and heard what Serena Williams did at the U.S. Open last week, and you’re shocked and angry. Fair enough. But it’s not just that.

You think she’s a disgrace to her sport. You think she’s tarnished her reputation and her legacy. You think that she really did “threaten’’ the line judge, came at her with the intention of taking her life in front of a packed stadium and a national television audience. You think that if she’s said and done that “on the street,’’ she’d surely be arrested and thrown in jail.

You demand an apology, then another one, then another one, then berate her for offering it too late, or for the first being too weak. You think her fine should have been a whole lot bigger, like her entire winnings from the Open. You think she should be suspended, too.

Congratulations. You’re now officially guilty of exactly what you’re accusing Serena Williams of doing.

As chronicled by the Washington Post’s Michael Wilbon, Williams was scolded at courtside in mid-tirade by none other than her father, Richard, who saw her completely overreacting to a bad call. “Let it go, Serena! Let it go!’’ he shouted.

If only we all could heed his words. She did something terribly wrong. She took too long to acknowledge it. She cleared her head, apologized, paid her fine and absorbed the public embarrassment the act deserved.

Let it go.

But why, in this day and age, should any of us not only weigh in, but take it to the exact same ridiculous extremes that she did? That’s what passes for sports talk now, not to mention pretty much every other kind of talk, every other type of communication, ever since so many more paths have opened up. Everybody has a voice, and everybody’s gonna damn well use it now.

If the target, the situation and the timing is right, any action is open to be punished with a life sentence, which is exactly what an alarmingly large portion of not only the teeming masses, but the supposedly more-responsible professional commentators, is proposing for Serena Williams. They want to hang this around her neck forever, and move it to the top of any list of her career accomplishments. One outrageous outburst that was fairly quickly dealt with by the sport, and the world is striving desperately to have it define her whole life.

Is that an exaggeration? Not when people parse the words she spoke and wonder aloud whether the line judge she berated should have pressed charges.

Some merely want her $10,500 fine multiplied about a hundred fold. Or maybe just take away her prize money. Or remove her from play.

No mention of exactly how any of that would serve the sport or the player. Irrelevant. As long as it satisfies the public blood lust.

It’s ironic that Serena Williams has done a better job in her career avoiding extreme overreaction than the public has. It was a rare blow-up for her, which is one reason it stood out so much – not just among other tennis players, male or female, or other athletes in general, as we’ve learned from the increase in “miking up’’ everybody involved in the action at any event. (Not that even that is a new thing, unless you’ve never heard the classic bleep-filled NFL Films selections from decades back.)

No, we’re the overreactors.

It’s curious, for instance, to see whether the same people condemning Williams for going way overboard against the line judge, who take the “threat’’ aspect of it way too literally, are the same ones who said or wrote that Michael Vick should be given the same treatment he gave his dogs. Since he tortured and killed those dogs, we’re looking at probably thousands of counts of publicly threatening the life of an American citizen. Each defendant, of course, likely would immediately start screaming, “It’s just a figure of speech! You wanna arrest me for that?’’

Sure. Because if you said that “on the street’’ …

It’s almost a sure thing that this same crowd pushed for Oregon’s LeGarrette Blount of Oregon to be suspended for the season after punching the opposing player who had shoved and taunted him after a game. Some also wanted him kicked out of school. And yes, many wanted him in jail, too. To the average rage-fueled fan (or, again, writer or commentator), prison is too quick an answer.

Well, it’s not so quick when it’s a bench-clearing base-brawl, hockey melee, or Cy Young award-winner flinging a bat barrel at a baserunner during the World Series. Or, for that matter, calling a tennis official “the pits of the world,’’ or blurting out a profanity after a long mid-match argument less than 48 hours after Williams’s meltdown. But those cases are different, right?

She has been punished. Let it go.

Meanwhile, on Monday night, the Oakland Raiders played on national TV, coached by one Tom Cable. Early in training camp, Cable reportedly punched out an assistant coach. Police are, in fact, still investigating, and might still file charges.

In the six weeks since, Cable has not received a fraction of the outward public outrage for possibly assaulting a fellow coach and seriously injuring him, that Serena Williams has since Saturday night for cursing and shaking her racket at a line judge.

And on the three-and-a-half-hour broadcast, Cable’s act was never mentioned once.

Looks like in some cases, it is possible to let it go.

(Photos: federal-prison.org; The Guardian)

The Greatest Generation

With no disrespect intended to the two tremendous coaches being enshrined in Springfield, Mass., today – Jerry Sloan of the NBA’s Utah Jazz and C. Vivian Stringer of three Final Four teams – the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame class of 2009 will be identified by the three Dream Teamers inducted: Michael Jordan, David Robinson and John Stockton.

And even while Jordan is eclipsing the other two more-than-worthy inductees, the everlasting impact of all three can never be overshadowed. They were key figures on that groundbreaking, never-to-be-duplicated 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team. And they, in turn, are icons of the greatest era in the history of the sport.

They are part of the NBA’s Greatest Generation.

That has turned out to be a curse as much as a blessing for the game, on nearly every level, unfortunately. Every generation of player – every player, in fact – has been diminished, put down, denigrated in comparison not just to the players from this class, and to the players from that Olympic team, but to every player from that era. Depending on whether you shave a year off on either end or squeeze a player in on either side, the era basically is defined as 1979 – the year Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the NBA together – through 1998 – Michael Jordan’s last season as a Chicago Bull and the year before the NBA’s disastrous labor stoppage.

Just about two full decades of a mind-blowing stream of players in their prime, playing the game not only the way it should always be played, but the way the founders (including Dr. Naismith himself) could only see it being played in their dreams. That group stretched the limits of the imagination, of the physical, the mental and the psychological, yet kept the game itself grounded in its fundamentals and its essence.

Skeptical? Misty-eyed with nostalgia about the Celtics dynasty, of the days of Russell and Chamberlain and Cousy and Robertson and West and Baylor and the other players who were the building blocks of the pro game – not to mention the legends of the college game who set the stage for the greatness of the pros?

Don’t be. The Greatest Generation couldn’t have existed without having climbed on their shoulders. But they clearly took what the previous generations have created and created something even more radiant.

Think of that nearly 20-year run. Think, for starters, about the Dream Team. Magic. Bird. Jordan. The Admiral. Stockton. Karl Malone. Patrick Ewing. Charles Barkley. Chris Mullin, Clyde Drexler. Scottie Pippen. (And Christian Laettner, who should give his gold medal back, or to Isiah Thomas.)

Of those 11 players, 10 (all but Mullin) were named in 1996 to the NBA’s list of its 50 Greatest Players. This year’s three-man induction brings the number in Springfield to eight, and Malone and Pippen are on deck. Mullin, again, may have to wait, although that should hardly diminish his career accomplishments.

That’s just the Dream Team. They mixed it up in their careers, in their primes, with these future enshrinees … (take a deep breath …) Thomas, Joe Dumars, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Moses Malone, Dominique Wilkins, Hakeem Olajuwon, James Worthy, Alex English and Adrian Dantley. Their finest days were slightly past, but also sharing the court were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving and George Gervin when they still had plenty left.

That’s just the Hall of Famers. These guys were merely excellent: Byron Scott. Mo Cheeks. Michael Cooper. Mark Aguirre. Tim Hardaway. Mitch Richmond. Buck Williams. Dennis Johnson. Derek Harper. Andrew Toney. Kevin Johnson. Bernard King. Dennis Rodman. Reggie Miller. Mark Price. Gary Payton. There’s probably a list of players left off who deserve apologies.

Plus, these players were coming in at the end of that blessed stretch, and in some cases had established themselves already: Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Alonzo Mourning, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen. Again, surely some worthwhile names are left off.

There simply has been no comparable stretch in NBA history; that wave of players had a hand in some of the most memorable moments ever, and in every championship team, and their names litter the record books. No Olympic team since has been able to match it – including 2008, and that’s right, I said it – which has been a problem for the U.S. team, particularly in 2004 when it got “only’’ a bronze. The NBA players and teams since have suffered in comparison, worst of all the players stuck with the label, from wherever such labels come, of being “the next Michael.’’ Currently strangling on it: LeBron James.

It isn’t their fault. The bar was set too high.

In the next several years, these players will all have moved into their rightful places in immortality in Springfield. Future stars and fans will absorb their accomplishments and wonder if any wave of players will ever match The Greatest Generation.

May we all live long enough to see that.

(Photos: nba.com)

Boise Will Be Boys

The new college football rankings will be out sometime Tuesday, but no doubt Boise State will have moved up the polls from its preseason No. 14 spot. Good, because if nothing else was proven in its opener against Oregon on Thursday night (besides what a sharp right jab LeGarrette Blount possesses), these Broncos proved that they’re nobody’s tiny, mid-major, Cinderella outsider anymore.

No, their program can be as bloated, over-entitled, overbearing and devoid of all perspective as any member of the exclusive BCS club it’s trying to crack. Oh, yes, they’re big-time over at Boise State now.

They showed it before the national TV cameras that night, starting from the moment – just before Blount threw the infamous punch – that they threw down the first no-class card.

Just go down the list. Player (defensive end Byron Hout) singles out opponent who is walking away, shoves him, taunts him and flips the switch – check. Stadium operators replay retaliatory punch over and over again, inflaming an otherwise celebratory sellout crowd – check. Stadium security and police surround Blount and give him the “mad brute’’ treatment, as if he’s the threat to the 34,000-plus on hand instead of the other way around – check. Unruly crowd surges forward, spewing profanity and striking Blount, enraging him further – check. The obligatory chair is raised by the obligatory lout in the stands – check.

The coach (Chris Peterson) sounds notes of stern discipline toward his own player, but decides on the meekest, punishment possible – check. Player never gives his side, tells what he said to start it all, or utters a word in public about it – check. No further probing into crowd’s antics emerges – check. Program reaps benefits of landmark victory, but remains unaccountable for its part in a postgame melee that normally would tarnish that victory – check. Rising public outcry against program blissfully tuned out as team moves forward – check.

If that’s not a blueprint for a BCS program, then nothing is.

You really don’t get authentically irresponsible, bullying behavior like that from the lower divisions, that’s for sure. That’s what Boise State was that night, for sure: the bullies, the jerks, the playground punks, the folks who chewed up and spat out a pseudo-rival, then flexed and pounded their chests and dared someone to make them stop.

The last few years, to hear it told, you turned to the Boise States of the world for the antidote to that. Not any more.

And they are led by a coach who went Tom Osborne-Bobby Bowden on us: the bonehead who carelessly flouted the rules and standards of his team, his school, the sport and common sense, gets the “internal’’ punishment from Peterson. Meaning that he doesn’t even get the traditional wrist-slap of being benched for the first quarter, or first possession. He gets a firm talking-to. Ooooh, that’ll show him. Blount loses his entire senior season, and Hout gets to the training table late one day. Sounds about right.

Blount has been spraying apologies all around, and started doing so in the locker room after the punch, not sounding at all like the out-of-control lunatic he was portrayed to be in the immediate aftermath. Oregon’s first-year coach, Chris Kelly, has heard criticism of not only his coaching in that game, but in his teaching of self-control and sportsmanship beforehand. They both have paid prices in some way.

At the other program, though, no prices appear to be paid nor lessons learned. Nope, Boise State’s exercise in boorishness will actually be rewarded at some point, if they run the table and sway enough voters to their cause of kicking the BCS door open to them.

But why wait until then. On opening night, the program proved that it can bring a stank attitude, make preening fools of themselves, incite a mob and let the perpetrators walk, just like the big boys do.

Welcome to the club, Boise State.

(Photo: Associated Press)

A Collect Call from 'Skins Fans to Roger Goodell

We’ll be hearing from Roger Goodell again very soon, I’m sure.

If he’s serious about the league’s public image being at stake, if the concept of a code of conduct he has enforced the last few years has any meaning, if “protecting the shield’’ is more than the cliché it has become lately, then the commissioner of the NFL will be calling Redskins owner Dan Snyder into his office and demanding that he explain himself – and then slapping him with a fine, or suspension, or both, that will be heard and felt from his FedEx Field luxury box to wherever in the world any casual fan has tugged on a cap with an NFL team logo.

Because if Goodell thinks his sheriffing job stops at the wallets and livelihoods of the players, he’d better think again. For every way in which the actions of the Michael Vicks, Plaxico Burresses and Pacman Joneses reflect poorly on the NFL, multiply it by a thousand – and that’s what Snyder and his partners in crime in the Redskins’ front office are doing to their own fans, right down to their own decades-long season-ticket holders.

The stories that ran over two days in the Washington Post this week, about the depths to which the Redskins will stoop to extract and extort money from anyone with pockets, had better be flat-out wrong. Better yet, Snyder’s group of gangsters had better step up soon and respond, some way, any way. If neither happens, then the Redskins stand accused, and pretty much convicted, of being the biggest bunch of lowlifes ever to disgrace professional sports, and would be marching steadily into territory now occupied by the subprime mortgage lenders, health-care looters and Ponzi-scheme perpetrators. All eager to use anybody and everybody as their personal ATM, beholden only to themselves and accountable to nobody.

Seriously, Vick has to grovel and beg for his career in front of Goodell, but Snyder gets another slap on the back at the next owners’ meeting?

Go ahead, say it. Killing dogs is worse than scamming your own customers, even worse than suing them for pleading for relief from your obscenely-exorbitant ticket packages when the worldwide economy hits home for them. It’s a strong argument, and you don’t have to belong to PETA to buy it.

You can make that case – as long as you’re not one of the Redskins ticket-holders driven into bankruptcy and near destitution by one of the team’s breach-of-contract suits, while the team repossessed their tickets and re-sells them, often with the same brokers used by the team to re-sell other tickets at scalpers’ prices to opposing team’s fans while their own fans wonder why they can never get their hands on the seats they want.

If you were the fan (there was more than one) in the Post story who the team counsel called a liar … or the fan who was ridiculed because he was a mortgage broker who dared ask for a break on his tickets … or the fan who holds evidence that the team altered his ticket application to tie him into a long-term deal … or any of the fans who sat home on the Monday before Election Day last year and watched Steelers fans take over FedEx Field … even if all you did was read that the team’s various spokesmen (because Snyder couldn’t be bothered to comment on any of it) shrugged off all the accusations and complaints and sorrowful tales because they represented such a small fraction of the ticket-buying public … are you really more angry at Plaxico Burress?

Do Chris Henry’s bouts with the law enrage you more than the debt collectors who ring your phone off the hook because you lost a $66,000 judgment over tickets for the team you rooted for since before the previous stadium was named after RFK?

There’s criminal conduct, and Vick and Co. are surely guilty and are certainly serving their punishment, whether they’ve actually finished their jail terms or not. Then there are criminal-level breaches of trust against the people on whom your business relies, who literally make you rich and pay your bills and swallow your pitches about how they’re not just buying a superior product, but the integrity and credibility that hold it together.

Unless and until the Redskins offer proof to the contrary, they’re worse than the lenders who suckered eager homebuyers into houses they couldn’t afford. Even at their lowest, they never followed up on evicting the owners by suing them for their mortgage balances. When you fall behind payments for your car, or furniture, or wedding ring or plasma TV, do you get hauled into court after you get your stuff repossessed?

Hardly, if ever. Many teams the Post reached, in the NFL and other sports, claimed they don’t pull that on their struggling ticketholders, either. This is neither the NFL’s rule, nor policy, nor general practice. If you’re broke and can't pay any more, these team’s reasoning goes, it takes your tickets away. It doesn’t try to then drain you dry until you can’t buy so much as a movie ticket afterward.

The Redskins are different.

But even the Redskins wouldn’t try that if the commissioner of the sport truly was interested in safeguarding the good of the game for all the participants, not just the 32 billionaire entities who pay his salary.

So if Goodell doesn’t temporarily put aside his crusade against players who accidentally shoot themselves and step in on this, on behalf of Washington’s fans, and the fans of the entire NFL, then he isn’t worth the paper his contract is printed on.

He might as well join his partner atop the hierarchy of his league, the nouveau-riche owner of one of the most storied, legendary and profitable franchises in the sport’s history – and spit on the customers below.

(Photos: Goodell, Boston Herald; Snyder, slate.com)

As the Donovan Turns

Upon further review, the Donovan McNabb-Michael Vick marriage isn’t headed for an early annulment after all. Not even a counseling session. That’s not to say you can afford to let your attention drift away from it, though.

For a couple of days, it seemed as if the biggest obstacle to Vick’s return would not be Roger Goodell, or PETA, or the vast reaches of the BWG (Bitter White Guy) Radio Network – but the very quarterback who supposedly had lobbied to bring Vick into the Philadelphia Eagles’ fold. McNabb clearly was not overjoyed with exactly how Vick was used in his comeback game against Jacksonville last week. However, he insisted Tuesday as he tried to “re-calibrate’’ his post-game comments, there was no rift between him and Vick and no objection to having him there.

Yes, McNabb said Tuesday, he did think the Eagles were “forcing’’ Vick in early in a preseason game he’d rather have spent getting the first-team offense in a rhythm. On the other hand, he added, he did know that this situation was a little out of the ordinary: normally, he “isn’t going to be coming in every second down.’’ As for the Wildcat – at least the version where McNabb is somewhere besides under center – “A lot of good things can happen in this.’’

This time, no mention of “gimmicks,’’ nothing further on the “throat-slash,’’ no elaboration on what the Eagles should and shouldn’t have done. Nothing to indicate that McNabb was any less secure than usual about his standing as the Eagles’ starting quarterback.

All it did, then, was add another chapter to the ongoing drama that has been McNabb’s career, which on odd days has you wondering why Eagles fans never cut him any slack whatsoever, and on even days wishing McNabb would stop doing things to stir those feelings up.

This mini-conflict was completely avoidable; McNabb only had to keep his sideline gestures a little more discreet, and taken a bigger-picture view of the Vick experiment afterward. At no time in his career has McNabb been less effective than when he has to explain something he’d said or done earlier, yet he puts himself in those situations time and time again.

This might not have risen to the level of explaining the final-drive heaving in the Super Bowl, or his bafflement with the overtime rules last season, or anything related to Terrell Owens. But it was typical McNabb, confusing rather than defusing. For a guy whose playing record and general handling of himself is a hair away from impeccable and unassailable, he ends up in these short-term-dustups way too often.

In reality, McNabb is probably no more threatened by Vick’s presence than any other future Hall of Fame quarterback on a usually-undeserved hot seat would be.

But if that little flicker of insecurity didn’t turn into a five-alarm blaze every once in a while, it just wouldn’t be McNabb, would it? Without it, Vick’s last preseason game Thursday against the Jets wouldn’t have that added voyeuristic element – all the eyes veering to McNabb on the sidelines every time Vick does anything spectacular.

Purely for the entertainment potential, Vick couldn’t have landed in a better place. He hasn’t been around three weeks, but from that aspect he’s already paid off.

(Photo: Associated Press)

B-Marsh: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?

Hope I'm not taking everybody too local here. But this is worth it. From the moment Brandon Marshall was suspended by the Denver Broncos Friday morning, for "conduct detrimental to the team,'' he has been the No. 1 topic of conversation among Baltimore Ravens fans - where he was the No. 1 topic of conversation all training camp long, since so many want him on the Ravens to fix their perceived problem at wide receiver.

One of the places this debate has taken place is on The Rob Long Show, airing weekday mornings on Baltimore's Fox Sports 1370 radio, whose website is on "The Drumline'' to the right, and where I appear Thursday mornings. Rob put together an online roundtable discussion about Marshall this weekend and posted it Sunday afternoon.

Here's what his panel said. Mine is the last opinion listed. (Hint: I voted "hell no.'') Rob will be discussing it further Monday morning, I'm guessing. Discuss here as well if you wish.
(Photo: foxsports.com)

Public Enemy No. 4

The biggest of the Michael Vick plotlines have now played out, with his return to live action Thursday night with the Philadelphia Eagles. But the Brett Favre storylines are just getting started.

And none is bigger than this one: How did this man, this icon, this exemplar of modern NFL manhood next to whom everybody else seemed puny and weak – how could Brett Favre turn America against him so swiftly and so completely?

Because he has lost more cache in a shorter time than almost any superstar you can think of. At this time last year, people were screaming from the rooftops that anybody who didn’t open their arms to Brett’s return from his tragically-forced retirement from Green Bay was a fool, a hater, a bitter, jealous hack.

Now? Many of the same folk would rather drive red-hot pokers through their eardrums than hear his name again. One summer of being fully embedded with the Favre saga was one thing. Another summer of it? All right, Princess, you’re just milking it now. Either make up your mind in a reasonable time frame like everybody else, or get over yourself and drive your tractor back home.

He did neither. Thus, his once-sterling name is now a four-letter word among an alarming number of fans, NFL and elsewhere.

Oh, what an exaggeration, you say. But you might not have seen the commercials running on ESPN the last couple of weeks. They were the Worldwide Leader in breathlessly urgent alerts on every minute detail of Favre’s maneuvers to end his retirement a year ago, the very embodiment of Favre-mania.

Now? A spot that mocks him as mercilessly as any personality they ever have mocked, with the UMass Minuteman mascot playing Paul Revere with the lanterns in the window, one if Favre’s staying retired, two if he’s not, or vice versa.

That’s just ESPN’s irreverent style, you say. Well, Sports Illustrated long shared the reins with ESPN on the Favre bandwagon, and often drove it solo, thanks to an allegiance to him from senior writer Peter King that even King couldn’t help but laugh at himself about in recent years.

Now? Check out the upcoming issue, the upper-left corner of the cover. The “4’’ with a slash through it. The proclamation that this is a “100% Favre-Free Issue.’’ Zing! And … Cha-Ching! For all the years SI has cashed in on the legend that is No. 4, it is now banking on its readership’s rejection of him. At least for one week.

As for King, he kicked the Favre habit the week the career leader in waffling, fudging and chain-yanking finally committed to the Vikings. King, in his online column: “Favre’s the wishy-washiest player in memory – and the Vikings are his enablers. It’s ridiculous.’’

Yikes. Next thing you know, John Madden is going to come out of retirement just to tell us, “Don’t believe the hype.’’

You still might not be buying it, though. So ponder this: on Thursday a report surfaced that Favre’s presence in Minnesota has created a “schism’’ in the locker room. It was shot down pretty quickly, with some lame jokes about what “schism’’ meant, including one from Favre that he probably thought sounded charming and home-spun.

But you didn’t exactly rule it out right away, did you? Part of you, maybe small, maybe huge, told yourself, “If that locker room isn’t split, I don’t know why not.’’

Yes, you’re accepting the concept of Brett Favre, Locker Room Cancer. Brett Favre. Whose every ordinary act for a decade and a half was elevated to heroism, whose every flaw was explained away and every slip-up euphemized out of existence (“He’s a gunslinger!’’), now representing all that’s wrong in America’s favorite sport.

Favre probably can’t believe it. He might want to think about why so many others do. And how, exactly, he brought it on himself.

(Photo: flickr.com)

The Man, the Myths and the Beas

The tale of Michael Beasley’s recent entrance into a rehab facility, a little over a month before the start of training camp for his second NBA season, has turned out to be both far less and far more than what was originally assumed and reported.

Much has happened to clear the picture up, so we likely can stop blaming Twitter, and stop praising Twitter. We can shut up about this being proof that ballplayers need to go to college, and about spoiled millionaires not appreciating how lucky they are. We should give up on the insta-cyber-polls about what the Miami Heat “should do about him,’’ and on the debate over whether he is a future All-Star or current bust.

In short, time to stop turning 20-year-old Michael Beasley, of Seat Pleasant, Md., into a cautionary tale, and to turn him back into a flesh-and-blood person.

Unfortunately, we probably can’t put that genie back into the bottle. Too many people have already decided what Beasley represents, what he symbolizes, what he means to whatever picture those people happen to be painting. It takes a lot more effort and empathy to see Beasley as a kid who has been troubled for a long time, and is still troubled (specifically, based on the most recent reports, with a substance-abuse problem), and whose instant riches, with the accompanying increased attention and responsibility, haven’t erased those troubles.

It’s an occupational hazard for young men in Beasley’s demographic – not to mention many other demographics – and how he comes out of it will depend largely on who is willing to do what needs to be done for him. For certain, it will take more than a nation of cynics shouting, “You’re a pro, grow up!’’ If it can grant multiple drug-flameout Josh Hamilton extra-large doses of humanity and redemption (as recently as a few weeks ago, in fact, after a spectacularly-decadent relapse was made public), it can spare Michael Beasley one dropperful.

The NBA and the Heat appear to be up to the task – and they’d better be, because if a multi-billion-dollar corporation and one of its sturdier franchises don’t have the resources to truly care for someone in which they have invested so much, then they’re not worth the ink used to sign these kids to their contracts. Contrary to the accepted mythology, the pros are exponentially more equipped to help out a Michael Beasley than almost any college program you can think of.

If your average big-time program even wanted to try, that is. Beasley spent his year of higher education at Kansas State, where Bob Huggins (!) recruited him right before bolting to a better job for himself at West Virginia. Talk amongst yourselves about that for a minute.

Still, Beasley himself can’t afford to be caught up in that argument; his life, literally, is at stake, even though it eventually was determined that the Twitter message that seemed so dire (“Feelin like it’s not worth livin!!!!!! I'm done.’’) was not the trigger that sent him to the Houston-based facility. Neither was the now-infamous photo of him, his tatts and the unidentified baggie.

This all had been building since a year ago, when he got in trouble at the league’s annual rookie symposium, which does try to head off such problems but which realistically can only present its case and hope the target audience takes it to heart.

Also, because of confidentiality provisions, the Heat could not take a direct hand in getting Beasley this help. From then on, though, it’s a collaborative effort – with, of course, Beasley doing his part.

He might, and he might not. But to say he cannot reveals a complete lack of faith in the idea that 20-year-old human beings can and do change. Which says less about Michael Beasley than about you.

(Photo: espn.com)

A Delayed Bolt of Lightning

All the praise, adulation, historical perspective – even reasoned skepticism – should have come to Usain Bolt a year ago.

A year ago, Bolt was doing almost exactly what he just finished doing in Berlin at the World Track and Field Championships, except he was doing in Beijing at the Olympics, on an immeasurably larger stage. That should have been his moment, his time, his chance to savor the global spotlight.

Problem is, the spotlight ran away from him, as fast as he ran away from his competitors. The only time it turned toward him was to rain dirt, disrespect and insult on him. What Bolt is getting – for taking three gold medals, for setting world records, for reveling in his own excellence and inviting the world to revel in it with him – is nothing more than a late payment on what was due him when he originally earned it.

Instead, Usain Bolt got buried in the stampede to award the Beijing Games to Michael Phelps, and him alone. Granted, it wasn’t the entire sporting planet doing the stampeding. Sadly, it was only the largest, richest, most powerful, most influential part of it – the network broadcasting the Olympics to the United States, the American media meekly following its lead and the viewing audience slurping it all up as if it were gospel, the lone definitive picture of the Games worth seeing.

It was they, mostly figuratively but often literally, who declared the 29th Olympiad over the moment Phelps touched the wall in his eighth and final gold-medal winning swimming event.

Never mind that the night before Phelps’ final race, Bolt knocked off gold medal and world record No. 1, in the 100 meters. Literally, never mind – the race was not aired live in the U.S. by NBC (which showed a preliminary “Redeem Team’’ basketball game instead), and the replay was shown as a lead-in for the action in the pool that night.

Track and field? Nah, full of cheaters. World records? Tainted, without a doubt. The traditional sport readily associated with the Olympic fortnight? Off the radar for the audience that counts, American TV viewers, who were still stinging from BALCO.

And Usain Bolt, the Jamaican guy track aficionados seem excited by? The best of an asterisk-laden sport, not so much heir to Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis, but Ben Johnson. Probably. As far as we know, or would know if we bothered to look closely enough.

The unfortunate result: Bolt’s feats were called into doubt immediately, with several commentators unashamedly linking his records to the ones Barry Bonds had set in baseball. (Somehow, swimming this time was spared the skepticism virtually every other Olympic sport regularly and justifiably endures these days – never within serious earshot were Phelps’ seven world records or the 18 others set in the “Water Cube’’ even suggested to be questionable.)

Dismissing Bolt’s performance, at least on these shores, was too easy.

And for those who were willing to risk enjoying, and trusting, Bolt’s exploits, the prime-time voice of NBC for these Games was on hand to diminish them from the start.

Bob Costas still owes Bolt, his fans, the Olympics and the sport of track and field an apology for his withering, patronizing on-air dressing-down of Bolt after the 100-meter final. The act that in Costas’s eyes devalued the achievement and forced Costas to adopt his role as morality judge? Bolt held his arms out and thumped his chest before crossing the finish line, preventing him from lowering the new world record even further. It was “showboating,’’ Costas preached. “Disrespectful.’’ “Unsportsmanlike.’’ All delivered with the same level of whiny, condescending, tone-deaf outrage usually reserved for football players who score touchdowns and dare express pleasure in it, rather than acting “like they’ve been there before.’’

With that, the narrative of the rest of Bolt’s record- and perception-shattering competition was whether he would be properly deferential (and run hard enough, which thankfully has hardly any racial undertones at all). As a bonus, the strategy by NBC, as well as the lazy coverage provided by other outlets, in making the Games a one-man show was justified and rewarded.

Bolt was in position to steal the show and be the final, lingering image of Beijing 2008, or at worst share the glory. Until it was decided that he wouldn’t.

In the process, by the way, Phelps was done a terrible disservice as well. The unapologetic manipulation detracted from the honest brilliance of his performance – it wasn’t allowed to stand on its own, but instead was bloated beyond recognition. Both men were turned into cartoon characters, Aquaman and Ego-Man (or Needle-Man).

Last week, though, there was no Phelps around to absorb the entire glare. A lot of pre-pennant-race baseball, exhibition football and late-season NASCAR, true, and Bolt still had to fight them all for attention.

But he won that fight, just not as overwhelmingly as he won his races. Now, the space exists to ponder if what we’re witnessing is real – for better or worse – and if we’ve ever seen anything like it or will ever see it again.

It all should have happened a year ago, though. What we’re granting Usain Bolt now is what we’ve owed him since Beijing.

(Photo: The Wall Street Journal)