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Weekly briefing for Monday, June 16, 2008 |
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June 16, 2008 |
≡ 7 Days ≡
 Johnson: no soup for guests in Beijing! |
= To Our Readers =
You can now find us in two different places on the Web: in addition to The Sports Examiner, we now write three times a week on Olympic sports for the World Championship Sports Network site, WCSN.com in a column called “Inside the Rings.”
Here at The Sports Examiner, we have changed our format to include a weekly intelligence briefing, with commentary, for the astute sports fan called “7 Days” on Mondays and a bonus posting called “Fun & Games” during the week.. Thanks again for your continued support; please ask your friends to sign up for the Tip Sheet and the free newsletter.
= The Top Story =
>> London, England: What a difference a mayor makes.
Boris Johnson defeated Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral race in May and is decidedly more practical about the 2012 Olympic Games than his predecessor, who helped the city win the bid to host the Games.
After blasting the London organizing committee about the lack of a legacy plan for the 2012 Games – he said “there’s absolutely no sign of what you would call a legacy masterplan” – Johnson just cut the equivalent of $2.4 million from the city’s hospitality project for Beijing.
The city will have a “London House” where it will entertain visitors in Beijing and the plan was to have 18 star chefs from Britain work in the facility under the supervision of well-known television chef Gordon Ramsay. In fact, Johnson looked at scrapping the entire London House project.
According to Reuters, Johnson said in a statement, “We looked at whether it would have been viable to abandon plans for London House, but found that many of the costs have been committed already.
“There were some pretty unrealistic things planned, which would have cost a lot of taxpayer money, but which would have had marginal value to Londoners.” Johnson will attend the Games in Beijing, flying in coach and is reducing both the number of City staff who will attend the Games and the number of days they will spend there.
Comment: Johnson gets it perfectly. The amount of wasted money by future organizing committees on hospitality is always a surprise. It buys little, but costs a lot . . . and in four years, when London will host the 2012 Games, no one will have even the slightest idea of what London got for any money it spent in Beijing.
Good for Johnson, but Sebastian Coe and the organizing committee must resist any thought of getting into a argument over this or similar items. A close working relationship between the organizers and the host city government is crucial, especially in London, where the government does so much. Otherwise, the outcome looks like Atlanta in 1996, where the organizing committee and the city have different agendas and distrust each other so much that they don’t even talk enough to know that problems await them both.
= The National Pastime =
>> Grand Prairie, Tx.: In one of the greatest minor-league promotions ever, Elaine Fulps won her own funeral last week!
The $10,000 funeral was sponsored – of course – by a cemetery, the Oak Grove Memorial Gardens near Dallas and the Chapel of Roses Funeral Home in Irving. Fulps was picked in a random drawing during a Grand Prairie AirHogs game, beating out some contestants who came dressed in black. Sidelights to the game included a pallbearer’s race, a mummy wrap and the delivery of eulogies.
Fulps told the Dallas Morning News, “I’m going to pick a spot under a tree out of the Texas heat. And let’s hope it’s a pet-free cemetery.”
>> Chicago, Il.: Broadcaster Steve “Psycho” Lyons still hasn’t gotten over his firing by Fox Sports in 2006 after he made what were termed “racially insensitive” comments to then-fellow broadcaster (and now Cubs manager) Lou Piniella during the third game of the American League Championship Series between Detroit and Oakland.
For his part, Piniella said the matter was “way overblown.” He, Lyons and some others from the tech crew were eating dinner in downtown Detroit after the game when Lyons got the news he had been fired. “I still don’t think I did anything wrong,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “I think it was a knee-jerk reaction.”
Lyons noted that in his 11 years as an analyst, he’d won three Emmys, but the firing relieved him of 80% of his salary at the time. He’s now on the Fox regional sports network in Los Angeles, helping with Dodger pre-game and post-game shows and filling in in the booth during road games when Vin Scully doesn’t travel with the Dodgers.
= The NBA =
>> Boston, Ma.: What’s it like to be a rookie bench-warmer during the NBA Finals?
Reserve guard Coby Karl of the Lakers found out that riding rookies doesn’t stop because The Finals are on. During a team dinner in an upstairs private room at a Boston restaurant, Karl was ordered to go downstairs and sing – a capella – his own version of Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again.”
According to the Boston Herald, Karl had to read the words off his Palm Pilot since he didn’t know them by heart. He did, however, get a warm round of applause from the surprised, but supportive diners on the main floor.
>> Beijing, China: Although a lot of NBA players are going to be playing basketball in Beijing, there will be some noteworthy absences. Lithuanian center Zydrunas Ilgauskas of the Cleveland Cavaliers will not participate with the national team because the Cavaliers and the Lithuanian Federation couldn’t work out insurance arrangements to cover Ilgauskas’s contract if he gets hurt. Cleveland forward Anderson Varejao has decided to sit out the Games if Brazil qualifies this week because he wants to concentrate on the rehab of his left ankle.
And Lakers coach Phil Jackson told ESPN.com over the weekend that he was absolutely not interested in coaching a future U.S. Olympic basketball team.
= On Campus =
>> Omaha, Ne.: The most national championships won in a single academic year by a single conference is 14 by the Pac-10 Conference in the 1996-97 season. With Stanford still alive in the College World Series, the Pac-10 could equal that mark if the Cardinal win the title.
No other conference has ever won more than nine titles in a single academic year. And the top three in overall team championships are all Pac-10 schools: UCLA with 103, Stanford with 95 and USC with 86. The next closest is Oklahoma State, way back with 48.
>> Los Angeles, Ca.: The hits just keep on coming for USC. Not only has a myriad of federal and state agencies – including the always-popular Internal Revenue Service – jump into the investigation of whether basketball star O.J. Mayo received cash and other benefits from a front-man for a sport agency, but the team’s grade-point average plummeted compared to last season. According to the Los Angeles Daily News, the Trojan basketball team’s average G.P.A. fell to 2.23 from 2.61 in 2006-07 and only one player had a G.P.A. of 3.0 or better. The result was a two-scholarship reduction for the coming season.
Outraged Trojan haters want to know if Hollywood icon Mr. Magoo has been retained to mount USC’s internal investigation of the Mayo and Reggie Bush affairs. Ouch!
= Soccer =
>> Cyberspace: A poll released at the start of the Euro 2008 soccer tournament showed that half of those queried would prefer to match important matches in the tournament than have sex!
The biggest fans of football were the Spanish, with 72% preferring to watch the games than to play some! Of the roughly 2,000 people polled, 60% said that soccer was more like a religion to them than simply a game.
>> Vienna, Austria: Don’t think Euro 2008 is that big a deal? Consider this: total revenue from the tournament is expected to reach about $2 billion U.S. (1.3 billion Euro) and every single available ticket to all 31 matches in the tournament was pre-sold.
= Boxing =
>> Washington, D.C.: Dan Daly of the Washington Times asks, if people are willing to pay $60 or more to see two ex-athletes duke it out in the ring as in Jose Canseco and Vai Sikahema on July 12 in Atlantic City, what other matches should be lined up? His suggestions included:
Rasheed Wallace (Detroit Pistons) vs. any NBA referee!
Chad Johnson (Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver) vs. Mike Brown (Cincinnati Bengals owner), with special stakes. If Johnson wins, he gets to be traded; if Brown wins, Johnson has to sign an extension and play with the Bengals in perpetuity, but only on special teams!
C. Vivian Stringer (Rutgers women’s basketball coach) vs. Don Imus; the broadcast rights for this should be strong from the Oxygen Channel!
= Track & Field =
>> Des Moines, Ia.: Drake University did a wonderful job in hosting the 2008 NCAA Track & Field Championships in cozy Drake Stadium. Despite the horrific flooding that closed most of downtown Des Moines during the week, the area in and around Drake suffered only a two-hour rain delay on Wednesday and there was perfect, sunny weather for Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Attendance suffered, of course, as a significant number of ticket buyers were expected from the heavily-damaged eastern part of the state. Given that and the excellent facilities, the NCAA is more than likely to come back to Drake in the future and much sooner than the 38-year gap between the 1970 meet and 2008.
>> Des Moines, Ia.: It’s a good thing there aren’t union rules in track & field. LSU had to finish ahead of Arizona State in the final event of the women’s meet, the 4x400-meter relay, to win the team title. So, of course, Tiger sprint star Kelly-Ann Baptiste was asked to – and did – run a strong leg in her ninth race of the championships after three rounds of the 100 m, three rounds of the 200 m and two rounds of the 4x100-meter relay.
Now all she has to do is turn right around and head south to her native Trinidad for her chance to go to Beijing and the Olympic Games: the Trinidadian national championships are being held this coming weekend!
>> Des Moines, Ia.: One of the more touching stories of the meet came on Saturday morning, when athletes from Florida State, South Carolina and other schools who had already finished competing in the meet showed up about a mile north of the track stadium to help fill sandbags to reinforce the levees holding back the Des Moines River.
= The Five-Ring Circus =
>> Athens, Greece: The national disgrace of having 11 of the 14-member Greek national weightlifting team test positive for performance-enhancing drugs has resulted in misdemeanor charges being filed against 25 people last week.
Christos Iakovou, the former head coach – up until this incident a national sporting hero – was charged with five counts and if convicted on all five, could receive as much as 10 years in prison. The importer who brought the “diet supplements” ordered from a Chinese supplier was also charged.
Because of the scandal, the Greeks are unlikely to send a weightlifting team to Beijing in August.
>> Beijing, China: When will people learn?
With less than two months remaining prior to the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games, perhaps only half of Beijing’s hotel rooms have been booked during the period. Zhang Huiguang, the director of the Beijing Tourism Bureau, reported that a modest 77% of the rooms in five-star properties have been filled, but the booking at four-star hotels are at only 44% of capacity during the Games period and the rate is even lower for three-stars and two-stars.
As usual, this is a function of prices which are way out of whack for what most people can afford, Olympic Games or not. Nightly room price averages for five-star hotels are 260% of their 2007 levels and cost from $553-1,139 per night for the Ganes period. Four-star price averages during the Olympic period are up 360% with prices averaging $320 per night.
Who can pay these prices? In addition, it is quite difficult to get a visa to go and see the Games as the Chinese government is worried about protestors.
Comment: “Sudden” last-minute hotel-room availability seems to happen at almost every Games. Prices are set way to high by greedy hoteliers, who are then startled to see that people won’t pay a king’s ransom to stay there.
Don’t be surprised when you see pop-up ads on major sports sites and in sports sections of newspapers around the world, packaging rooms and event tickets at discounted rates. But since you won’t be able to get a visa in time to go, the effort will be wasted.
~ Rich Perelman
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