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Weekly briefing for Monday, June 30, 2008 |
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June 30, 2008 |
≡ 7 Days ≡
 Andrews: not interested in dogpiling! |
= 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 =
>> Vienna, Austria: Russia’s 3-0 demise in the 2008 European soccer championships semifinal with Spain on Thursday not only eliminated them, but the shutout meant that Pytor Listerman didn’t have to make good on his promise.
Seems Listerman, a noted “socialite” said that he would provide each Russian player who scored a goal in the semifinal with two women friends to entertain them. “This is a great incentive,” said star midfielder Andrei Arshavin, but neither he or his teammates will ever know if Listerman would make good his promise!
= The National Pastime =
>> Los Angeles, Ca.: Saturday’s interleague game between the Dodgers and Angels at Dodger Stadium was not just notable for the Dodgers’ amazing 1-0 win while being no-hit by a pair of Angels pitchers. It was also a sign that the Dodgers’ 38-year-old closer, Takashi Saito, might be getting ready for a strong performance the rest of this season.
Brought in to close out the ninth inning, Saito allowed two baserunners, but also threw fastballs of 97, 96 and 95 miles per hour during the inning! Combined with set-up man Jonathan Broxton’s 96-98 mph heaters in the 8th inning and batters are going to have to start swinging now to catch up with these two guys!
>> New York, N.Y.: The Wall Street Journal noted in a lengthy piece on June 24 that while about 60% of major-league baseball players are white, some 86% of college baseball players in the NCAA’s three divisions are white with just 11% consisting of Hispanics and African-Americans.
Comment: The story, by James Wagner, notes that while college players are overwhelmingly white, nearly half the players in the minor leagues are foreign-born with most of them of Latin background. So players of color are in baseball, but just not in college baseball.
What’s barely mentioned in this story is the impact of Title IX, the killer of men’s collegiate sports. Compared to men’s basketball, women’s basketball and men’s football, where essentially every team member has a full scholarship, the NCAA restricts Division I schools to 11.7 scholarships for a team with a limit of 35 players. Stupid? Of course, but baseball is flourishing compared to sports like men’s gymnastics, volleyball, wrestling and swimming, which are barely competed in any more.
So now the critics will say that baseball is elitist, but of all sports, this is wrong. Baseball, more than any other sport, gives children who can play the game the immediate chance to be a professional and if they are good enough, to play in the major leagues as quickly as their talent can carry them. College baseball doesn’t have any paucity of opportunities for players of color; it doesn’t have enough scholarships to give them.
>> Miami, Fl.: According to a statement that appeared in the Miami Herald, the fan who caught Ken Griffey Jr.’s 600th home run had a plan to get away unscathed. Joe Scherer said that he’d caught a batting practice home run earlier in the evening and when he caught Griffey’s homer, he kicked the batting-practice call into the row behind him so fans would scramble for that ball and let him get away without being mobbed. Smart!
Scherer says he will sell the ball at auction.
>> Detroit, Mi.: Believe it or not, Tigers third baseman Brandon Inge was placed on the disabled list after injuring himself while moving his three-year-old son’s pillow! Tigers manager Jim Leyland said that it was the first time he’s heard about an injury by pillow and it reminded some of when Chicago slugger Sammy Sosa injured himself sneezing!
>> Omaha, Nb.: Fresno State became the lowest-seeded team in NCAA history to win a national championship last week when the 89th-ranked Bulldogs beat Georgia in the final game of the College World Series. So it was no wonder that the team went wild, dogpiling in the middle of the diamond after the last out, leading ESPN on-field commentator Erin Andrews to stop trying to get interviews and say, “I’m going to get clobbered.” Counseled play-by-play man Mike Patrick, “You don’t want to get caught in there!” Did anyone ask the Fresno State guys about that?
= The NBA =
>> Miami, Fl.: Despite their woeful 15-67 record, the Heat didn’t get the first pick in the 2008 NBA Draft, but they might have done better than anyone else anyway.
Not only did they pick Michael Beasley with the second selection and Kansas hero Mario Chalmers at no. 34, but they also retained 30-year-old Shawn Marion for at least a season as he didn’t opt out of his contract.
Marion will give the Heat steady production at forward, plus as Chris Perkins of the Palm Beach Post wrote, “An Eastern Conference scout said it’s a good deal for the Heat, which will gain salary flexibility when Marion’s contract expires. The scout said Miami might want to use that cap space to sign forward Elton Brand when his Los Angeles Clippers contract ends after the upcoming season.
“‘And the other thing is they end up with Shawn Marion in his contract year,’ the scout said, ‘and players historically have great years in their contract year.’”
A better Miami team is ahead with Beasley at center, Udonis Haslem and Marion at forward and Dwyane Wade and Chalmers at guard. And the Heat still have their mid-level exception to try and sign more talent.
>> New York, N.Y.: Two other teams which came out ahead in Thursday’s night NBA Draft were Portland and Memphis:
If Portland gets Greg Oden back whole and healthy starting in October, they now have Jerryd Bayless to run the point and drive the lane and either score or dish to Oden or Travis Outlaw down low or Brandon Roy on the perimeter.
For Memphis, a team which was ridiculed for giving away Pau Gasol to the Lakers, they ended up with USC’s O.J. Mayo at shooting guard to play opposite Mike Conley and power forward Darrell Arthur to play opposite Rudy Gay at small forward, a big upgrade. Of course, to get Mayo, Memphis had to trade the rights to UCLA’s Kevin Love to Minnesota, but at least they won’t have to answer questions about their frontcourt of Gay-Love!
= College Football =
>> Tuscaloosa, Al.: Nick Saban was hired in 2007, at $4 million a year, to change the Alabama football program. He’s done that.
Former running back and current linebacker Jimmy Johns was the seventh Tide player arrested during the last year when he was charged with selling cocaine on Tuesday, June 24. Undercover police officers had reportedly purchased drugs from Johns five times in the prior 10 days.
Comment: Saban had better make the Tide better fast because at the rate this is going, he’s going to have to go back to the NFL . . . as the coach of the Bengals!
>> Eugene, Or.: As if the SEC needed more speed, it now has the two fastest players in college football.
LSU’s Trindon Holliday was the fastest with his 10.02 clocking and second-place finish in the 100 meters in the 2007 national championships. But now South Lake (Groveland, Fl.) High senior Jeff Demps ran 10.01 for second (behind Tyson Gay) in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Olympic Trials on Saturday to set a new high school record. He’s going to play football (and run track) for Florida, which will use him anywhere his speed can help: running back, receiver and kick returner.
Demps was eliminated in the semifinals, but he’ll be back to try for the 2012 Olympic Games . . . with three years of football behind him.
= The NFL =
>> St. Louis, Mo.: Relocation alert! A lengthy article in the New York Sun notes the angst growing among some NFL owners as the new stadiums in Dallas and New York provide awe-inspiring cash flows for teams other than theirs!
Reporter Evan Weiner speculates that the Rams could be on the move after the 2014 season, when an escape clause in their agreement with the city allows them to move because the club won’t be among the top 25% of the league in stadium revenues. With the passing of Madam Ram – owner Georgia Frontiere – son Chip Rosenbloom could be looking at a new home . . . perhaps Los Angeles? Are you kidding?
The story noted that developer Ed Roski is looking at building an NFL-level stadium in the City of Industry and the list of teams which have bad stadium deals include Minnesota, San Francisco, San Diego, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Buffalo and even Oakland, home of the Raiders . . . for now!
= Tennis =
>> London, England: Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova’s grunting during her loss to countrywoman Alla Kudryatseva in the second round at Wimbledon reached 103.2 decibels according to The Telegraph, louder than a motorcycle or a lawnmower! It wasn’t her best effort, however; she reached 103.7 decibels last year, equivalent to the noise of a small aircraft landing!
= Track & Field =
>> Middletown, N.Y.: “To be perfectly blunt about it, while Juan Samaranch is alive, I don’t think any action will be done. Because it all happened on his watch. The IOC is an organization in which they aren’t going to embarrass themselves.”
That’s the legendary Frank Shorter, speaking to Kevin Gleason of the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, New York, in which Shorter also said he was a candidate to be executive director of USA Track & Field, a job currently open even though this is an Olympic year.
Shorter is referring to his loss to unheralded East German Waldemar Cierpinski in the 1976 Olympic Games marathon, where Shorter was a strong favorite. A 1976 document from East Germany indicates that Cierpinski was part of the national program of performance-enhancing drug use and Shorter said that while the document itself isn’t enough to change the results, “there’s certainly enough evidence to get them to dig deeper.”
Shorter’s reference to Samaranch, the long-time IOC President from 1980-2001, indicates that the IOC won’t get into the Eastern European doping issues while the former President – now 87 – is still alive. But the IAAF, worldwide governing body of track & field, could get into the issue and isn’t interested yet, either.
At stake are a whole series of world records, world championship results and other honors besides the Olympic Games. Shorter, outspoken but also with a keen eye for politics, told Gleason that changing the 1976 results “is not a priority. The way I view it is, if as part of an overall system of deterrence, they include going back [to rule on previous Olympics] for anyone in that situation, that’s fine with me. But I don’t want any individual treatment.”
He also noted that the U.S. anti-doping efforts are getting better. “We went from the worst to the best,” he said. Shorter played a leading role in the formation of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and still works with the organization.
Comment: With the revisions in the medal standings in recent Games because of recent disqualifications of Marion Jones and other American athletes, the time will come to revisit the files of the East German and Soviet sports machines and the record books will be considerably rewritten. Shorter is right to bide his time; it’s coming.
>> New York, N.Y.: Eric Silverstadt of the New York Sun lays it on the line about the state of track & field in the U.S., in his preview of the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials in Eugene:
“Track and field in America, perhaps in a way similar to boxing, has lost much of its popularity. America’s a NASCAR nation and, sadly, most Americans prefer watching two machines flying at 200 miles per hour, in lieu of cheering two human beings leaving their blood and guts on the track surface. Some want to blame the steroid binge; America used that as an excuse when the Eastern Europeans started catching up with his in the mid-1970s. Track and field doesn’t have a casual fan base: Either you’re obsessed with the sport (and times and distances and heights), or you’ll tune in to watch the Olympics every four years. When stars such as Marion Jones are in jail, it’s easy to blame the athletes. But, in American track, it goes a bit deeper.
“We are weeks away from the Olympics, and the USATF still does not have a chief executive officer. The previous boss, Craig Masback, was a third-place miler who ran a fourth-rate organization and after New York’s failed Olympic bid, he jumped ship. Guess where? To the real power in track and field: Nike.”
= The Five-Ring Circus =
>> Beijing, China: The International Olympic Committee sent a letter this week to the organizers of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, very unhappy about comments made during the Torch Relay! While the IOC has been defending its choice of China amid the protests concerning Darfur and Tibet, the Communist Party leader in Tibet said during the closing ceremony of the torch run through Tibet, “China’s red flag with five stars will forever flutter high above this land.” He also said, “We will certainly be able to totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama clique!”
Comment: With the Games so close, perhaps the IOC is now getting a taste of what a Chinese-run Olympic Games will really be like, and are they ready to handle it? I’m afraid that’s exactly how the Chinese government may be looking at the IOC. What are they going to do, take the Games away?
>> Bejing, China: In the latest medal projections by the respected Italian sports executive Luciano Barra, the Chinese are predicted to score an all-time high of 88 medals, including 39 golds! The only bad news for the hosts is that the Russians are projected at 90 total medals and the United States at 101 total medals and 49 golds! That can’t sit well with the Communist government in Beijing!
= Potpourri =
>> Tokyo, Japan: The Wall Street Journal reports that for the second time in three years, a cheerleading squad called The Shockers has won the Japanese national cheerleading championship. The shocker is that the team is all men and competes in T-shirts and baggy shorts; they defeated14 all-female teams to win the title!
~ Rich Perelman
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