|
|
|
The Daily Digest for Thursday, April 10, 2008 |
|
April 10, 2008 |
≡ The Daily Digest ≡
 Nat'l Tennis Center: will it be this empty for Liberty-Fever? |
= To Our Readers =
In addition to posting our regular daily column of news, observations and commentary, we now distribute The Sports Examiner DAILY, a .pdf-format newsletter – with bonus features – with the daily Tip Sheet that can be printed out to take with you or forwarded to your laptop to read later.
We’re delighted to welcome Al Brooks Tickets as our initial sponsor; their support and that of others will help keep this site alive. Thanks again for your continued support; please ask your friends to sign up for the Tip Sheet and the free newsletter.
= Tonight’s Menu =
>> Los Angeles, Ca.: The 53-25 Lakers and the 23-55 Clippers have their last meeting of the season tonight at Staples Center, with the Clippers serving as the “home team.” Corey Maggette is listed as “day to day” for the Clippers and there’s still no word on the return date of Andrew Bynum for the Lakers. The Purple and Gold have won all three of this season’s match-ups easily, by 21, 18 and 31 points and averaged 115 points per game, so they’re favored tonight by 16. The Lakers have won four of five and the Clippers have lost three in a row, so with the over-under at 208, the oddsmakers project the final as Lakers 112, Clippers 96.
>> Los Angeles, Ca.: The 4-5 Dodgers, fresh off being swept in Arizona, will open their home schedule tomorrow night with San Diego and have the Padres for three games and Pittsburgh for three games before heading back on the road to Atlanta and Cincinnati.
>> Anaheim, Ca.: The 6-4 Angels, despite their bullpen problems, are in first place in the American League West and will head to Seattle for three games over the weekend and then to Texas for two games before returning home.
= L.A. Stories =
Lion’s Roar:
>> Los Angeles, Ca.: Bill Bayno was introduced as the new Loyola Marymount coach yesterday on campus, armed with a five-year contract to return the school to the basketball heights it knew with Hank Gaithers and Bo Kimble in 1990. Newspaper reports indicated that his five-contract will pay him about $2 million in total.
It also will be an opportunity for Bayno to showcase his coaching ability and clear the confusion over his recruitment of Lamar Odom in 1996 and 1997. He was alleged to have broken NCAA rules, but the association cleared him of wrongdoing and he reportedly received a settlement from UNLV after filing a wrongful termination suit after he was fired during the 2000-01 season.
He had a 94-64 record, won four conference titles, had three 20-wins seasons and two NCAA tournament appearances (1998, 2000) during his tenure at UNLV from 1995-2000, quite a contrast to LMU’s 5-26 record this past season. He had been working as an assistant coach for the Portland Trailblazers prior to being hired.
Halo Talk:
>> San Jose, Ca: A federal indictment delivered against a Dr. Ramon Scruggs and two others alleged to be involved in providing performance-enhancing drugs to former Angels slugger Troy Glaus and pitcher Scott Schoeneweis (when he was with the White Sox) indicated that unidentified player agents “steered” Glaus and Schoeneweis to the Costa Mesa-based New Hope Health Center to obtain prescriptions for testosterone, stanozolol and nandrolone in 2003 and 2004.
The indictment concerns, according to the Associated Press, the distribution of steroids, conspiracy, misbranding drugs, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The agents were not identified and Scott Boras, agent for Schoeneweis, said he knew nothing of the center or Dr. Scruggs and the agent for Glaus, Mike Nicotera, did not respond to the AP.
= Panorama =
The National Pastime:
>> New York, NY: Sage advice from Garret Anderson in a story by Mychael Urban for MLB.com about baseball players living in the digital age:
[B]aseball players seem particularly susceptible given the amount of time many of them spend signing autographs and/or out on the town.
“You can be in a club, and a woman comes up and says she wants to have her picture taken with you,” said Angels outfielder Garret Anderson. “Twenty minutes later, it's on the Internet somewhere, and you might have a lot of explaining to do.”
Remember when getting your favorite player to pose for a picture wasn't a problem? Those days appear to be all but gone. Common is the refusal of many players to pose with anyone who doesn't still have a bedtime.
“Little Leaguers, that kind of thing, that's safe -- we all want to do what we can for kids,” said A's closer Huston Street. “Adults, though, you have to be careful.”
If players aren't careful, their picture could very well end up appearing somewhere unauthorized -- digitally edited and taken out of context to seem otherwise incriminating. “We're all kind of learning how different things are now, with MySpace and Facebook,” Indians first baseman Ryan Garko said.
Urban notes that the result “is why big leaguers who wet their whistles at the popular watering hole, commonplace back in the analog days, are nearing extinction. These days, more players are staying in when their team is at home, and on the road only the lobby bar at the team hotel serves as sanctuary.” Better safe than sorry.
NFL Extra Points:
>> New York., NY: With so many rumors about what Miami will do with the no. 1 pick in the NFL Draft, the best view might have been voiced by SI.com’s Don Banks. “Football czar Bill Parcells has four players he's considering at No. 1 – Chris Long, Jake Long, Vernon Gholston and Glenn Dorsey – and whichever one of them seems willing to negotiate the fairest deal prior to draft day winds up getting the nod.”
Banks has still thinks it will be Chris Long going first, and has linebacker Keith Rivers of USC seventh to the Patriots, defensive tackle Sedrick Ellis ninth to the Bengals and defensive end Lawrence Jackson 26th to the Jaguars.
College Hoopla:
>> Lawrence, Ks.: Kansas won a thrilling national championship on Monday, and the school’s boosters aren’t going to let coach Bill Self go without a fight.
The Jayhawks lost Larry Brown to the NBA after Danny and the Miracles won the 1988 title and Roy Williams left for North Carolina after Syracuse edged Kansas for the 2003 national championship. After winning its first title in 20 years, Kansas wants to keep Self, no matter how much money he is offered at Oklahoma State.
The Associated Press noted that athletic director Lew Perkins has faced this kind of dilemma before, when he was at Connecticut and was faced with challenges in keeping women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, who is still there.
One positive for Kansas: without even counting on outside help, the Jayhawks can afford to keep Self. He was paid $1.375 million in base salary last season, but the school grossed $13.22 million on men’s basketball for the 2006-07 season (17% more than football!) and netted $7.05 million . . . for that one season!
WNBA Hoopla:
>> New York, NY: First hockey, now basketball?!?
The New York Liberty and the Indiana Fever will play what is reported to be the first regular-season professional basketball game held outdoors on July 19 at the National Tennis Center in Flushing, New York. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
How many people will show up is a different matter. The Liberty – who averaged a startling 15,660 in 2001 – had an average attendance of 8,698 per game last season in 19,673-seat Madison Square Garden. The National Tennis Center seats 23,737.
The NBA is jumping on this bandwagon, too. Phoenix and Denver will play an outdoor pre-season game at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden (capacity: 16,100) in Indian Wells, California on October 11.
All of this follows up on the NHL's New Year's Day game at Buffalo's Ralph Wilson Stadium opened a lot of eyes when a hockey record 77,554 braved the cold to watch the Buffalo Bills and Pittsburgh Penguins play.
Fore!
>> Augusta, Ga.: Sports Illustrated senior writer Gary van Sickle wrote a glowing report on the pre-Masters news conference held by Augusta National chairman Billy Payne, who was, once upon a time, the President of the organizing committee for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. From the story:
Payne, who helped make the Atlanta Olympics a success, is one part skilled diplomat and two parts polite host. Reporters didn't pry any information out of him that Payne didn't want to give, but his non-answers were of the kinder-and-gentler variety. One secret to success is to kill 'em with kindness. That is one Payne's strengths. Another is to build business partnerships with everyone, hence ESPN's new television deal with the Masters. The rationale? If someone's your partner, he's less likely to report harshly about you.
Among the major innovations this year were plusher, more cushiony seats in the pressroom for the nation's media, and a fully stocked, cafeteria-style lunchroom whose fare is a major upgrade from the previous selection of assorted pimento cheese and turkey sandwiches. The changes pleased the media but probably achieved a more important goal: cutting down on the number of writers who'd been migrating to the clubhouse (the members' domain) for breakfast and lunch.
Media who covered the 1996 Games in Atlanta will either be laughing or shrieking upon reading van Sickle’s coverage, remembering that the Atlanta Games had some of the biggest problems in press operations in modern Olympic history. Happily, Payne inherited from his predecessors an infrastructure that compiles the results correctly, understands the transportation needs of the event and actually tries to make those who come to Augusta enjoy the experience. That was not the case in 1996, regardless if van Sickle has forgotten . . . or doesn’t know enough to ask.
Rings & Things:
>> San Francisco, Ca.: While protesters who preferred a riot were disappointed, both public safety and the dignity of the Olympic Torch Relay were preserved in San Francisco yesterday as local police moved the run from the original route along the city’s waterfront to a major thoroughfare, Van Ness Avenue and canceled the closing ceremonies.
“If we had started down that (original) route, I guarantee you would have seen helmet-clad officers with batons pushing back protesters,” said San Francisco police chief Heather Fong. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that “The whole torch run, once the runners began their radically altered route at about 2 p.m., took less than two hours. Rather than furious clashes between protesters, there were mostly screams of support and delight at seeing the torch go by.”
That’s going to be a plus for American athletes competing in Beijing, as pictures of rioting from London and Paris will be the ones shown and not the minimal scuffles in San Francisco yesterday. Police officials said there were only three arrests on the day.
The International Olympic Committee will consider tomorrow whether to allow the running of the torch in countries other than the host, after the initial ceremony in Olympia. Although the idea of running through countries around the world started only with the 2004 Games in Athens, running in neighboring countries goes back to the first torch run in 1936, when the Germans ran the torch from Greece through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia before hitting the host country. In fact, of the 17 torch runs (including 2008), only six – Melbourne ‘56, Rome ‘60, Montreal ‘76, Los Angeles ‘84, Seoul ‘88, Barcelona ‘92 and Atlanta in 1996 – ran the torch solely in the host countries. The other 11 all touched other nations along the way and Sydney relayed the torch through 12 tiny Oceanic states and New Zealand before it hit Australia.
>> Beijing, China: “The international federations are not satisfied and they will continue demanding a reopening of the debate. We figured the whole of the Olympic family needed to be informed of this position.
“Some people may dislike the procedure we adopted for this. I apologize for this. There was no intention to insult or hurt anyone. We simply wished to make our position known.”
The issue, of course, is money. The speaker is Switzerland’s Denis Oswald, as calm and deliberative as anyone in the Olympic Movement and the long-time leader of the international federation for rowing. He’s one of the least likely people in the world to be in the middle of a high-decibel fight, but he is.
At issue is the 13% share of U.S. television rights fees and a 20% share of the IOC’s sponsorship revenues, which the U.S. Olympic Committee has received as part of an agreement signed more than 20 years ago when the International Olympic Committee began marketing worldwide rights after being schooled by Peter Ueberroth and the organizing committee for the Los Angeles Games in 1984. Ironically, Ueberroth is now the head of the USOC.
At the usually sober meeting of the IOC’s Executive Board with the 205 National Olympic Committees in Beijing, Oswald told delegates that the situation in 1988 – where American television and sponsors provided a vast majority of the money to the Olympic Movement – has changed. He sent a letter to all of the NOCs on March 7 saying, in fact, that the share paid to the USOC is “no longer morally acceptable.”
Ueberroth, who was in Beijing before returning home to be in San Francisco for yesterday’s Olympic Torch run, has been working with the IOC for more than a year on the issue, but based on a correct assessment of the situation – voiced last year – that no one wants to hear:
“We've said we will share more if we agree to grow the pie,” Ueberroth told the Associated Press. “If we hold the pie steady and shrink it, and you want to fight for little percentages here and there, that's not going to do anybody any good. We need to work together. There's a chance to double the pie.”
~ Rich Perelman
>> Have an opinion? You can send it using the “Comment” button below!
|
|
