Aa Howard Cosell solemnly said upon the passing of George Halas, age 89, “It was inevitable.” Good call; the inevitable is always bound to happen.
The inevitable occurred this week, too, and sooner rather than later. For the first time in our sports history, the total of mixed messages surpassed the regular ones, those that became messages because they made sense.
Monday, Alabama’s Nick Saban became the first recipient of the new Bobby Bowden National Collegiate Coach of the Year Award. The day before, Florida State’s football program, coached by Bowden, was forced to vacate 12 wins. For cheating. Congratulations to Coach Saban!
This past Sunday, NFL Network, controlled by the NFL, removed analyst Warren Sapp from that morning’s Super Bowl pregame show because he had been arrested for domestic battery. Given that Sapp, as an NFL player, was among the all-time leaders in conduct violations, he seemed a play-with-fire choice to represent the NFL on its TV network.
Regardless, NFLN brought in as its guest/fill-in analyst current NFL player Joey Porter. Good pick. Three years ago, Porter was one of six arrested (he pleaded no contest) for beating another NFL player in a Las Vegas casino. In 2003, Porter was shot outside a Denver nightclub. Last season, he was suspended for a game by his coach. And, as Sapp did before him, Porter once ignited a pregame brawl.
Porter doesn’t even have to be around to make trouble. In 2006, his pit bull and a mastiff killed a neighbor’s pony.
So, on Super Bowl Sunday on NFL Network — run by the image-conscious, sick-of-all-the-lawless-players NFL — it was out with the bad, in with the bad.
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In 2006, HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” closed with a mocking condemnation of the Winter Olympics and its competitors, saying they don’t deserve to be taken seriously as world-class sports because they don’t include enough black participants, making the Winter Games, Gumbel concluded, “look like a GOP convention.”
This week’s edition of HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” devoted all four segments to the Winter Olympics.
On the subject of the Olympics, its drug inspectors and doctors are now the most aggressive and vocal in sports in the quest to rid the Games of drug cheats who feed the public’s belief that to those cheats go the Olympic victories and the spoils.
Last week, however, the IOC announced that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose fame and fortune is rooted in steroid use as a competitive body builder, has been selected to carry the Olympic torch during today’s opening of the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
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It didn’t much matter that Jimmy Johnson, as both a college and NFL coach, built winning teams through the abandonment of both rules and minimally acceptable social conduct. FOX hired him. Twice.
Then it didn’t matter that Johnson exploited his sustained national presence on FOX by starring in a highly dubious, get-rich-quick (in the stock market!) infomercial.
This week, it was revealed Johnson will become a TV spokesman for a magical “male enhancement” pill. Clearly, the point has not been reached at which FOX tells Johnson, “That’s enough.”
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The NBA, like the NFL, is worried sick about its image as a league that can’t generate even minimal civility from far too many of its players
This week, however, the NBA announced it will partner with (somewhat) musical Fuse TV to promote the NBA All-Star Game. Ever watch (Cablevision-owned) Fuse? It makes what MTV has become look like “Little House on the Prairie.”
Fuse is aimed at two things: 12-22-year-olds, and the crotch. I’d love to see the relentlessly smug David Stern spend an hour or two watching Fuse at random, then declare that Fuse and the NBA make a nice fit.
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This fresh, record-breaking batch of mixed messages brings to mind W.C. Fields, who called his coffee mug, which was filled with booze, his “pineapple juice.” The assistants on movie sets were compelled to deliver and replenish his “pineapple juice.”
One day, he took a swig from the cup to find that his mug had been filled not with liquor but with pineapple juice. Fields spit it out. “Who,” he demanded, “put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice?”
What’s up with Tiger?
The latest issue of Sports Illustrated’s golf magazine carried this quote from an “anonymous pro” about Tiger Woods: “I think something happened to him where he doesn’t want to be seen publicly, whether it’s due to surgery or missing some teeth. There was a reason beyond simple embarrassment why he disappeared.”
What’s worse, WFAN’s Craig Carton‘s cruel references to that young, unhinged ESPN go-fer who was played by Steve Phillips — Carton repeatedly called her “a pig” — or Boomer Esiason‘s indulgence of it? By the way, at 48, isn’t it time Esiason went with something a tad more adult than Boomer — maybe Corky or Biff?
From Israel, reader David Schor e-mailed this dreadful story: The international TV feed of the Super Bowl included the non-stop nonsense of Joe Theismann. “Why, oh why?” Schor lamented.
After suggesting that Mike Emrick lately seems to call as many Penguins games as Devils games, Marc DiBernardo of Kewaskum, Wis., wonders if NBC stands for Nothing But Crosby.
Wonderful are those times when ESPN uses its Classic network as more than a garbage dump. Tuesday it ran Kansas-North Carolina, from Nov. 28, 1981 — UNC freshman Michael Jordan‘s first start.
Howie Rose apparently is among those who dislike the NHL’s shootout thingy. Tuesday on MSG-Plus, at the end of overtime in Predators-Islanders, Rose said, “So ends the hockey portion of this game.”
It doesn’t matter that New Orleans-Indianapolis made for a record Super Bowl audience, or that Kansas City-Philadelphia, in 1978, is still tied for the highest-rated World Series. Know-it-alls will still insist that only “big-market teams” can attract such TV audiences.
