Lakers losing doesn't fit surefire Hollywood script

First appeared on April 13th, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

The other day while waterskiing I asked myself a question. Besides the obvious, “what kind of an idiot waterskis in April?” the question that really had my mind swimming was, “could the Thunder actually beat the Lakers in the first round of the NBA playoffs?” Then I wiped out.


This is Los Angeles were talking about. You know the town where people are accustomed to everything running according to a script? Yet surely the Thunder evening this best-of-seven series at 2 games each wasn’t in the script David Stern handed Head Coaches Phil Jackson and Scott Brooks. These are the Lakers after all. You know, the Lakers of “15 time World Champion” fame and holders of the number one seed in the West after posting that conference’s best record.

The first round of the playoffs are a lot like campaign promises, nobody really pays attention to them because they realize ahead of time they’re worthless and not supposed to mean anything. While the Lakers playing an upstart franchise loaded with young talent is definitely an appetizing scenario, we’ve reached the point where the Thunder are just supposed to roll over and play dead. Trouble is they’re not.

Laker coach Phil Jackson would likely refer to his teams precarious situation as a “bump in the road”, only he would wrap it in a web of veiled analogies littered with much larger words those of us not attending Harvard would never use. While “bumps in the road” are nothing new to those residing in Laker land, Kobe Bryant’s inability to push his team forward is. Fans of the purple and gold have grown accustomed to Bryant jumping in the phone booth whenever Phil’s triangle gets bent out of shape, but this year, this series, Kobe Bryant looks especially disinterested. As for Jackson’s triangle, it definitely appears acute, or obtuse, whichever one means out of sorts.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. So much was made of Ron Artest’s off season signing and all eyes, from those in the Midwest who still hang the death of the Pacers on Ron-Ron to the ones Jack keeps hidden behind the Wayfarers, were peeled to see how this grand experiment would turn out. And now when the Lakers need him most, how has Artest responded?

While some (and by some I mean myself) thought Artest’s signing was simply meant to pique Phil Jackson’s interest as he flirted with retirement; it turns out there was some actual strategy behind it. Artest was brought in as a defensive stopper. Somebody who could keep LeBron out of the lane and off the line come the Finals.

Well so much for defense. The Thunder’s two top guns, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, are averaging a combined 48 points per game in this series. Over the weekend Oklahoma City tore the Lakers up like a tornado making LA look older, less energetic and frankly less interested in competing.

To give the Lakers some credit this is the Western Conference and there were only 7 games separating the two teams during the regular season. Still this is the time of the year championship teams are supposed to “flip the switch”.

Just like my own wipe out, which served as a reminder that Michigan’s water in April is still colder than a beachside resort in Antarctica, the Lakers appear primed for their own nationally televised wipe out. The big difference being I didn’t spend millions of dollars for the chance to wipe out and Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss did. So get the popcorn and botox injector ready kids, game 5 between Los Angeles and OKC is tonight.

Pacer blues has Indianapolis seeing red

First appeared on April 21st, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

So the Pacers need money. So do I. Who doesn’t it for that matter? The difference evidently is I’m too proud to beg for it and the Pacers are not. What a mess. Talk about your showdown at high noon. Indianapolis mayor Greg Ballard ran on a refusal to raise taxes and the Pacers were quick to play the “If worse comes to worse we may have to leave town” card. So where do we go from here?


Forget the fundamental fact that we live in a capitalistic society for a moment and ask yourself this question: Could there be a worse time to go fishing for money? Given today’s economy it’s a remarkably bold move for a professional sports franchise to be asking for taxpayer help; never mind the fact you finished 20 games under .500.

It’s literally the equivalent of a father on the deck of the Titanic asking a passerby to stop and snap a photo of his family as people are busy rushing for the lifeboats. The timing is just wrong. It’s like someone waiting until a microphone is nearby to whisper to the President that signing his new health care bill is a “big %$#*! deal”.

Now I’m no financial expert and I can’t break down all the ramifications the NBA salary cap has on a team’s bottom line. Most days I can’t keep my checkbook balanced. But I can say there are other NBA teams in cities similar to Indianapolis playing in buildings newer than Conseco that are not asking for money right now.

Beyond that, knowing the Pacers have lost money in far more years than they have made it has to be a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with the franchise. I guess I could point the finger at somebody if that’s what Herb Simon needs but that’s unlikely given I wouldn’t do it for free.

Here comes the part where I pretend to know what the Pacers should do. For starters stop giving away free stuff at games. Especially when it’s junk nobody wants anyway like a Josh McRoberts trading card, or a chance to have Josh McRoberts sign your trading card. Have the guys at the end of the bench, you know the ones who never get in yet somehow still wind up averaging 5 points a game, do double duty by delivering hot dogs and popcorn.

Turn the lights out between quarters. Pull a George Costanza and forget to sign the checks on all your bills to buy yourself some time. Or, perhaps best of all, put some guys in uniform who will play together and actually care about winning and losing. I know the last one sounds like a long shot, but it has worked in the past.

In 10 years the Pacers have gone from a stable franchise that had made their first NBA Finals appearance to a floundering near-disaster so bad they couldn’t even lose as many games as fans hoped they would.

So, if anything, it’s clear the Blue and Gold are in dire straits. Apparently things are so bad Boomer has taken a part time job detailing all three of Danny Granger’s Bentleys. So what can we expect? Don’t be surprised to see the Pacers go all “PBS” on fans and hold a telethon. The franchise has already done this once to save themselves. This move along with a massive garage sale and any of an array of hare-brained money making schemes ripped from the pages of the screenplay for “Semi-Pro” may be the best hope the Pacers have.

The Misperceived and often Overlooked Folly of Sport

First appeared on April 14th, 2009
in The Lebanon Reporter

Good, bad or indifferent, we are all riders on the information superhighway. Ours is an age when co-workers can have video of you backstabbing your boss at the office get together posted online before you have even finished your profanity laced rant. It is this ability to document every second of our lives so easily that is creating so many potholes along the road for stars of the sports world.


To be honest I view sports as entertainment; or folly for our friends across the pond. That being said somewhere ours went from a culture that found moral direction from parents and authority figures to one that looks for guidance from complete strangers who hit, kick and shoot balls for a living.

In its infancy Sports, like all of us, may have wet its diaper and eaten Kibbles n’ Bits out of Fido’s bowl when the parents were distracted. But Sports went on to bigger and better things by somehow outgrowing its original intention. Blame it on Vegas or performance enhancing drugs or perhaps the downfall of the Gong Show, whatever it may be, today many fans take their sports, and their athletes, far too seriously.

Perhaps it’s all a product of living in today’s “make me feel better about my life now” world. But if you combine the level of instant information that exists at our fingertips with the ubiquitous hero worship of sports stars you have a recipe so unhealthy even Jamie Oliver can’t save us.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to athletes being heroes. There is the “Athletes are performers only and not meant to be role models” argument and then there’s the “I could dunk on all the guys who made the junior high team I got cut from if only Mom would buy me that $100 pair of Air Jordans” argument.

Charles Barkley may have said it best when he quipped, “I am not a role model”. Which is especially true for students of the English language and 6’1 guys who think they can play power forward in the NBA. Besides role models, just like the movie “The Blindside”, are vastly overrated anyway. Reggie Miller and Larry Bird were both role models of mine growing up and Spike Lee never taunted me, nor did I grow to be 6’10.

So it is when our heroes fall on hard times many of us become totally captivated. Perhaps the saddest thing in all of this is Phil Mickelson could have won this year’s Masters with only a sawed off three iron in his bag and charged off the Eighteenth green into a flaming Butler Cabin to rescue a boy with leukemia and most would still remember this as the year Tiger returned from his scandal.

It’s just too easy for us to both find out about as well as become wrapped up in the off-field misadventures of our sporting heroes. Is it really fair however? Is it fair to drag them around like a goat during a heated game of Buzkashi simply because they have personal shortcomings or demonstrate poor choices? This does not excuse their behavior, it simply means who are they to be judged so harshly and not us?

Far be it for me to speak for professional athletes, I don’t know any. But can we really expect them all to approach their lives as standard bearers for American culture? This would be like expecting William Hung to perform Rawhide at Bob’s Country Bunker and not have beer bottles tossed at him too. Worth the price of admission? Yes. Realistic? No.

Coming up 47 feet short of National Championship nothing to sneeze at

First appeared on April 7th, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

Somebody get Blue II some aspirin. Apparently in an effort to forget Butler’s loss Monday night he lapped up a bit too much of Duke’s celebratory champagne from the floor of Lucas Oil Stadium. So much so they found him passed out Tuesday morning on the front lawn of the Governor’s mansion.


So the Butler Bulldogs are not National Champions. Despite their heartbreaking loss to Duke, there are still so many feel good stories when it comes to Butler that you can’t fit them all into one column. I had decided, in the classic style of the part-time pretend sports columnist who takes himself too seriously, to take the easy way out and write the all-encompassing “Despite the loss, let not this Butler team be forgotten” piece. You know, the one peppered with words like “epic” and “improbable” all the while waxing poetic about Butler being a team of destiny. But that seems like a fairly obvious thing to do now.

I can’t begin to tell you how epic this column was going to be had Butler won however. Here’s a sampling of the flowery prose you could have expected: “Fifty years from now, when the Final Four returns to Indianapolis, officials will once again trot out basketball legends from bygone eras. Small children will look on with wonderment as an aged Gordon Heyward fondly recalls the soft-spoken, baby-faced coach who proved to his players that dreams can come true. The adults will whisper and scoff as if there were no way Butler could have really won it all.”

But alas even Heyward, with as great as he was during the Tournament, couldn’t get a half-court shot that would have won it all in front of 70,000 to fall. And so now I have nothing to write about. Lack of respect from those at the “Four Letter” (yes I mean you Digger) was one possible angle, but even that is somewhat understandable considering Butler’s advancing this far was never in the plans. Surely even Bulldog Head Coach Brad Stevens would admit it was really never in his plans either.

Sure Butler was given some recognition during the season with rankings in the Top 15. And, yes the Selection Committee likely felt charitable handing a 5 seed to a Mid Major. But once the ball was tossed up in the Tournament, the experts forewarned of the smothering 2-3 zone of Syracuse, K-State’s size and Michigan State’s experience, yet all the while Butler simply played harder, smarter and better than all those teams.

There are just so many things this team did to win that stat sheets don’t chart. But they belong to history now and history will remember them as an unselfish team with relentless desire and an uncommon understanding of basketball’s fundamentals. Despite the loss, history should define these players as champions and their rare attributes as the “Butler way”.

But alas, in the face of such an incredible run and heartbreaking loss, this column does not belong to Butler. This is more about one of the greatest NCAA Tournaments I’ve ever seen (and this is saying a lot considering Indiana wasn’t playing). More to the point this is about the NCAA proposing changes to their tournament in the face of one of the most dramatic on record.

Is it simply human nature that man feels compelled to change things when they appear to be at their best? Color Television to HD. The two-slot toaster to four, then six. Bigger is not always better (see Indiana Class Basketball for proof). So while you are firing off that health care letter to your local senator, throw in something about keeping the NCAA Tournament field at 64. Maybe then we’ll all get something worthwhile.

Beware Used Car Salesmen bearing gifts

First appeared on March 31st, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

This week I thought we’d look at the impact Used Car salesmen have had on the NCAA Tournament. I chose this topic because I thought it would be interesting and also because my wife and I are currently car shopping and it’s the perfect opportunity to humiliate one salesman we dealt with who has really earned it.


His humiliation is the product of his trying to take advantage of me because he assumed I knew nothing about cars. Good judge of people? Maybe, considering the only thing I really know about cars is that red ones look much cooler. Bad decision? Definitely, considering not only will we not be buying a car from him, but he is also the impetus behind this diatribe against men of his ilk.

There are many NCAA coaches who remind me of used car salesmen. Forget their slicked back hair and $300 suits ($75 windbreaker if you’re Bob Huggins), the fact they have to sell their program to recruits makes them all salesmen to some extent. But that’s halfway intelligent and, unfortunately, not why I’m using the analogy.

I use the term “used car salesmen” to describe some college basketball coaches because many feel, myself included, that they can’t be trusted. Now before you go all “I can’t believe he just slammed used car salesmen!” on me, I’m only talking about the guy who tried to get the wife and I to trade our three year old car for a used set of golf clubs, a block of frozen cheese he claimed was once owned by Brett Favre and a sickly looking goat named Clooney he had staked to the pavement behind his dealership.

College coaches today face such intense pressure to win that many succumb to the near constant temptation to bend rules, or simply ignore them if you are a former Indiana University coach whose first name happens to rhyme with Melvin. Do I have specific rules violations to mention now? No, that would be the sign of a well researched column. I do however think there should be a rule in place that says coaches have to graduate a minimum percentage of their players to be eligible for NCAA Tournament play. The fact that I’m not sure if such a rule exists is likely what separates real sports columnists from those of us who pretend to be sports columnists once a week.

Now I would agree that Brad Stevens isn’t the pushy used car type. He’d be more like the guy running the government program that gives cars to underprivileged youth and the homeless (if such a program existed of course; perhaps this is the fate of Obama’s mountain of clunkers).

So whether it’s Bruce Pearl rolling an odometer back or John Calipari putting chewing gum over the hole in a radiator, the fact that we have graduated from the preacher-like John Wooden to the modern day used car salesmen coaching today’s game says more about the culture of college basketball than it does about the evolution of the game. College basketball is no longer about helping talented athletes get an education. Today everything, even the loveable Dick Vitale, is about money, so…what do I have to do to get you to watch college basketball today?

On an interesting side note, the Final Four is in our backyard this weekend and with Butler playing we as Hoosiers have the recipe for an unforgettable experience. So get out and brave the crowds, pay the inflated prices and do your best to be hospitable to the masses of drunk and overbearing Duke fans.