Category Archives: Professional

Baseball, Biography, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

Rodriguez is not giving back any of the money

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The money made him do it.
Money is the second oldest motive in the world, after all. Willie Sutton famously said he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. The Menendez brothers. The Lindberg baby kidnapping. Bonnie and Clyde. Wall Street.

All about money.

We understand. People do awful things for money. Heroic things. Careless things.

Except, of course, Alex Rodriquez already had the money. More money than any baseball player ever. More money than Madonna, just to make a nice, neat circle.
Rodriguez already had the talent, too. That’s why he got the money. More talent than, well, certainly Madonna, and anyone else in baseball, including Mr. Clear and Mr. Cream himself, Barry Bonds.

How awful it would have been if A-Rod had been judged to be worth only, oh, $20 million, or even $15 million. What a shame. What a sham.

A man has to protect his over-inflated worth, or what’s a CEO bonus for?

Rodriguez is not giving back any of the money. Not for the years 2001 or 2002 or 2003, nor is he returning the MVP award he won in Texas. He is not refuting his distinction as the youngest player to ever do just about everything.

Sorry, Ernie Banks, you kind old gentleman. A-Rod is still the sluggingest shortstop of all time.

Rodriguez is not saying, please, don’t count any of the 156 homers hit during that time, nor please ignore any of the phony deeds that got him to the Yankees, to New York, where even Rodriquez’ money is more than anyone needs for doing nothing very vital.

Are you worth that much money, Alex? I will be as soon as I take this shot.

What’s in the shot? Dunno. This is a loosey-goosey time. Everyone’s doing it.
The President of the United States finds the news depressing. He said so at a press conference that somehow, after the economy and war and terrorism had been dealt with, just naturally got around to Rodriquez, A-Fraud as is his new alias.

And the President is especially depressed about the message sent to the kids out there.
Don’t do this, kids. Don’t do it if you want to make $27 million a year, hang out with celebrities, challenge the greatest records in the greatest game, be considered the best there ever was.

Deny everything until you can’t and when you no longer can, be ready to say you are sorry, really sorry. Sorry for being foolish, sorry for being naïve, sorry for being part of a loosey-goosey time in baseball, sorry for…well, you know. All of it.

Don’t accuse the reporter who got the story of stalking you because that just seems petty, but do make sure to confess to a friendly baseball eminence, someone who will treat you with deference and never make you say out loud the actual word, “steroids.”

You may come away leaving the impression that you had done nothing more serious than put cinnamon on your sunflower seeds.

There are many good lessons here for kids. No reason to be depressed about that.

Spread the blame around. Give a share to Tom Hicks, the Texas owner who paid him all that money, and to Seattle, too, I suppose, for not being a grand enough stage for a 25-year-old with great hand-eye-coordination. And his agent Scott Boras for concocting the contract in the first place.
Blame everyone before Rodriguez.

If there was “enormous pressure” to perform on a last place team, why should Rodriquez feel any less pressure playing for just as much money in the House that Ruth Built? Maybe, as his postseason failures grow, what Yankee fans resent is that he does not think enough of them to do what he did for Texas.

In the five years since Rodriquez confesses he did what others did, what he felt necessary to justify the wealth he accepted, he has been a terrific player, if not Derek Jeter in the New York heart. In the same way that Bonds was great before the pharmaceutical deceit that will define him forever, so does Rodriguez repel sympathy. Maybe more so.

Rodriguez was the anti-Bonds—and I suppose that title now falls to Ken Griffey, Jr.—the natural specimen of power and skill, unpolluted by either chemistry or conceit, and surely that perception made it difficult for Rodriquez to confess before now.

It’s that image thing again. In Texas he had to be better to justify the money. In New York he had to lie to protect the original lie. Lie. Lie. Lie.

The so-called Steroid Generation of Baseball is defined by lies, finger-wagging, stone-walling, Congress defying lies, and now that Rodriguez has told some of the truth he seems more forgivable than Bonds. Or Roger Clemens. Or Miguel Tejada.

Bonds may go to jail for lying. That’s the difference between lying to a grand jury and lying to Katie Couric.

Football, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

Changes and Broncos

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Encouragement is where you find it, and in the case of the top-lopped Broncos so far it is that no one wants out.

No one wants to play for a contender, as in Kansas City, an insult from inside by both Larry Johnson and Tony Gonzalez. No one wants a different defense, as Julius Peppers in Carolina, is just generally unhappy as Anquan Boldin in Arizona, or is still thinking it over, as LaDanian Tomlinson in San Diego.

Coaching changes inevitably cause this sort of thing, and old sores seem always to need fresh picking.

It would appear that the Broncos are willing to buy into whatever it is that fresh coach Josh McDaniels will have on offer, most importantly, the quarterback.

Clearly, at this point, McDaniels needs a happy Jay Cutler, more so than Cutler needs a new coach. And the Broncos generally must accept the notion that all of this upheaveal was necessary.

Cutler has come around to that conclusion, no longer as bitter a view as that of Jake Plummer, who is now in the duck blind and able to shoot without being shot at.

This attitude change must be taken as wisdom from Cutler, and a sign of maturity as well. It is not wise to stick your tongue out at the new boss.

When last Mike Shanahan spoke to his team there could not have been much satisfaction with a season so ragged at the end. The Broncos had to assume that many changes would be coming, just not the one that did.

Rather than the usual good-byes by this time—Mike Shanahan would have shown half the defense the door by now and started replacing them with others, not necessarily betters—the Broncos remain, and much can be said for it, employed. To still have a job is to still have hope.

Not that it will last long. Except for Champ Bailey, Elvis Dumervil and D.J. Williams, the defense could be put in a sack and dropped off a bridge. No, that’s cruel. Cut a hole in the sack.

Who replaces them? An ideal list of free agents would start with any or all of the Baltimore linebackers, including Ray Lewis, linebacker Mike Peterson of Jacksonville or James Farrior of the Steelers, the aforementioned Peppers, Albert Haynesworth, safety Brian Dawkins of the Eagles, not to overlook running back Darren Sproles of the Chargers or the once-upon-a-Bronco, Bertrand Berry

All are just names now and if one of them is more worthwhile to the Broncos than the rest, it is Haynesworth, the Tennessee defensive tackle. It must be assumed that some of these will end up in Denver.

Another assumption is that by rushing to the head of the line first, the Broncos got the best of the bunch of new coaches. Of the 11 changes in the NFL, two were pre-chosen—in Indianapolis and Seattle—and Tom Cable in Oakland and Mike Singletary in San Francisco were merely kept on.

Eric Mangini shifted shirts from the Jets to the Browns, the Chiefs just picked Todd Haley, leaving McDaniels among a half dozen who have not head coached before, no reason to be pessimistic there.

It is discouraging to assume that McDaniels’ chief credential is that he will mind his owner and not, for a while at least, act like he is the franchise.

One might wonder if a late casualty like Jon Gruden would not be a more useful choice all around, but that assumes that McDaniels is not the next Gruden.

Ideally, what will happen is that Cutler, still too young to have grown stale, will respond to the new challenge and the new crew, when it would be natural for him to resent the changes. Cutler is where Ben Roethlisberger was when Bill Cowher left the Steelers.

And it isn’t as if McDaniels is not thoroughly schooled in offense, as was the case with Cowher’s replacement, Mike Tomlin. Cutler is replacing one expert offensive mind with another, except the new one is more likely to seem a partner than a critic.

More enthusiastic is Brandon Marshall, less vital but nonetheless essential. The Super Bowl is evidence of what a Larry Fitzgerald or a Santonio Holmes can mean, and those moments yet await Marshall.

Just as Cutler can imagine himself to be Tom Brady so can Marshall see the success that came to a settled Randy Moss in New England with McDaniels’ offense.

With, then, the two most notable Broncos on board, McDaniels is free to sort out the rest, and much sorting is needed.

Linebackers. Defensive linemen. Safeties. Running back. Not necessarily in that order. But in some order.

Baseball, Crime, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

The mugbook is running out of pages for athletes

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The mugbook is running out of pages for athletes who are less than they seemed, when great physical achievements are diminished by human weakness. The fault is theirs, of course, but ours, too, and maybe the cereal maker who puts them on the side of the box.

We perpetually wish that the breakfast of champions is not what it often turns out to be.

Those eight gold medals were carefully arranged for the photo of Michael Phelps. Nice picture. As we were reminded by Donald Rumsfeld, it is not the action but the pictures that matter.

And now the other one, the one where it looks like Phelps is swallowing a telescope, rather a device for inhaling marijuana, will not last as long, but it is more recent.

Barry Bonds faces trial soon and Michael Vick is about to be sprung, proving only that the door swings both ways. The brother, yes, the younger brother of Mark McGwire shops the story that McGwire himself won’t tell, about all of it. Roger Clemens? The muck hardens.
So why do we keep this up, those of us who still have the means to do it, glorifying strength and speed and hand-eye coordination? Caution always come later, and as in the case of the Steroid Decade in baseball, without enthusiasm.

We have let Kobe Bryant back in from his brief exile, a prize for being the best player in basketball, just as Michael Jordan was passed without real scrutiny into his gambling associations.
So, too, will this pass with Phelps, a young hero much over-prized and guilty of little more than having similar appetites of the young. There is no designated punishment for being a disappointment.
The list of Olympic champions is rife with vacated victories, some still fresh from Beijing, those who tested positive for performance enhancers, which, by the way, Phelps has not. There must be examples of swimming after pot but more likely nachos after pot.
It is not that Phelps’ indiscretion is a small corner of the very big picture, it is simply that he is not as represented, and that will be something his marketing folks will have to sort out.

As for Bonds, what has seemed endless almost to the point of piling on is about to reach a resolution. Bonds will be officially condemned or officially forgiven, though in the minds of the world there will always remain only the first one.

Bonds cannot get off any more than Tiger Woods can make us forget how brave and foolish competition can make a man. If Woods never plays golf again or can’t play it as Woods again, there will always be that Sunday in San Diego.
The moments that last, that seem pure and clean, are too few to lose, and so we guard them and scrapbook them and are all the more disappointed when they are soiled. We just never seem to learn to separate the feat from the character, or lack of it.

Bonds must now face an accounting, evidence being notes and recordings and whatever was gleaned from the raid of Bonds’ mother-in-law’s house, all to prove that Bonds lied, not exactly the central concern of the sport that passively allowed him to become the greatest home run hitter of all time.
What baseball wants, and what we want, too, what all sports want, is the promise of innocence, never more represented than in the sleek, shaved body of Phelps, in a sport that washes its heroes as it glorifies them, a sport watched once every four years, and only when a Phelps or a Mark Spitz is doing it.

I have passed through the home town of Super Bowl MVP Santonio Holmes, not the hell hole he described, Belle Glade, Florida. Just another collection of souls and strip malls, supporting agriculture, but no Walmart as he said.

I did not see a single dope seller on any corner, though I may not have passed the right corners, including the one on which Holmes himself confessed to selling drugs. Had it been the reverse, MVP first, drug dealing second, we would be as unforgiving as we are with Phelps.
Timing does matter, then, and the fall is always down, never up.
When Red Smith, then in his 70’s, was asked why he kept writing sports, he answered, “In case I meet another Joe DiMaggio.”

We must keep looking.

Football, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

This one was all thumb screws and root canals

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TAMPA, Fl — Nevertheless, the Steelers of Pittsburgh will keep this Super Bowl trophy. They can put it with the other five, and tell lies later about how this one was a cinch.

It was not. This one was all thumb screws and root canals, shock and awesome, slap and smack, a duel in the cool tropical night.

“This is for you Pittsburgh!” shouted game MVP Santonio Holmes, raising the Lombardi Trophy over his head as if it were the first one instead of the sixth, as if the town had never seen the others.

This may be the least of all the Super Bowl winning Steeler teams, though the trophy is exactly the same size as all the rest.

They passed the shiny symbol around, from owner to coach to players, toted to the ceremony for some undeclared reason by Joe Namath, the trophy a hard earned souvenir, harder than the Steelers thought. Winners get to leave fingerprints.

Losers—in this case the Cardinals are not losers as much as companions in as gutsy, gut-wrenching, a melodrama as any since…well, since last year when the wrong team won with a helmet catch—are left with highlights.

And the Cardinals had highlights, the highest and lightest a catch and run of 64 yards by Roy Fitzgerald that would have, should have stunned the Steelers into an admission that fate or chance was wearing a Cardinal on its hat.

“The Steelers are a 60 minute team,” said their coach, Mike Tomlin.

This one was won with a classic, almost cliché catch, the kind that is staged in movies or dramatized in sports books, impossible and indelible, the football equivalent of the buzzer beater or the walk off homer. It had everything but slow motion, and it even had that later as it was studied for validity and, probably, for artistry.

“Great players step up in big-time games to make plays,” said Holmes. “I knew that was my play. Ben stuck with me, put it up where it was supposed to be and I made the play.”

Whether Holmes is a great player, certainly he had the greatest game of his life and one of the greatest of any receiver in a Super Bowl, for effectiveness and drama, not that the same wouldn’t have been said of Fitzgerald had Holmes not made The Catch.

Unlike the stadium witnesses, who may have chewed their fingernails down, Holmes had just enough left on his hands to stretch, hold the football, “come down on his toes”, as the referee finally and officially confirmed, and lock down a victory nearly blown from 13 points in front.

And, just like that, David Tyree’s helmet catch for the Giants against the Pats last year was bumped from the top of Great Super Bowl Moments.

“We embrace those moments,” said Tomlin. “We are built for those moments.”

The game did not match the boasts nor beat the spread, and the Steelers’ special torment for the Cardinals was to allow them to think they belonged.

“Nobody expected us to be here,” said Cardinal quarterback Kurt Warner, as if he needed to remind anyone of that. “We exceeded expectations and came close to being world champions only to lose it.”

Fewer penalties and just anyone, Warner having the best chance, tripping up Steeler linebacker James Harrison on the last play of the first half as he was galumphing a record 100 yards with an interception for the longest play in Super Bowl history, and the Cardinals would have had the whip in their hands.

This was a memorable Super Bowl because the Cardinals flirted with the improbable, and the Steelers—except for the plays by Harrison and Holmes—were not good enough to do anything about it.

Arizona could allow itself to believe in destiny even with a half minute to play, until the last five seconds, until Arizona quarterback Warner lost the football, breaking the heart of a perfectly nice place like Arizona.

The Steelers were not going to be lucked out of their birthright, and they weren’t going to be passed or punched or tackled out of it either.

“We back up talk with action,” said Tomlin.

“Backyard ball,” said Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, describing his cobbling together the final, winning drive, and at the same time coining a T-shirt slogan if ever there was one.

“It’s never going to be pretty or perfect,” said Tomlin. “There are no style points out there. But this is a team with great resolve.”

Winners can, and will, say all these things, of course, as Arizona would have said and even more loudly, because the Cardinals would have been the most astonishing winners ever of the Super Bowl, at least since the Jets beat the Colts in the third one.

Maybe that was why Namath was here, to represent audacity and surprise, and it was all there for the Cardinals.

So close. So long.

Football, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

The NFL encourages this annual folly

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TAMPA, Fl — It matters not who wins Media Day, even to the media, but of all the Super Bowl hoo-haw only two of the days really matter, this one and Sunday.

In a close call, Arizona wins this one, complete with voting paddles, as on “Dancing With the Stars.”

That silliness was under the direction of Warren Sapp, the once and no longer defensive lump who always nattered at least as well as he played. He had persuaded two Cardinals of his own ilk, 330-pound defensive tackles Alan Branch and Gabe Watson, to show their dance steps with a spangled beauty.

To music barely audible over the din of the day, the stars danced as stars do. Branch bit his lip and concentrated on his feet. Watson whirled and tried not to hurt his tiny partner.

At the end the paddles declared that Branch had won narrowly over Watson, though the pair of them were about as agile as a couple of front loaders. Handed his prize, a mirrored ball on a mirrored pedestal, Branch raised it over his head and bellowed—“Yessss!”—as if it were the Lombardi Trophy itself.
Sapp put his hands over is ears, slunk away, rolling his eyes back in his head. “Whoa. This is too nutty even for me,” Sapp said, leaving the poor young woman to fend for herself.
Not nutty at all, actually This is relatively mild for Media Day, no costumed brides looking for grooms, for example, as was one asking Pats quarterback Tom Brady for his hand. No costumed gorillas or bottles of Gatorade with feet.
The nonsense was down a bit, which had to disappoint the girl reporter from Austria.

“I ask you a question,” she said, not asked. And I nodded. “Vere ist Kort Vorner?”
I pointed in the direction of the Arizona quarterback, assuming that anyone named Kurt would be a big hit back in Salzburg. She did not say thanks.

The NFL encourages this annual folly, or at least does not discourage it, especially now with its own network to service. To find wisdom is futile, but one has to try.
“Right here is the epicenter of the NFL,” said Arizona coach Ken Whisenhunt, surprising for throwing the word “epicenter” into any football discussion and, at the same time, diminishing the occasion since the grandest game of the greatest sport of the greatest nation surely makes this the epicenter of the world.

Fred Dryer of the then Los Angeles Rams parlayed one Super Bowl experience into a career. Dryer gave the answer to my favorite Media Day question. Is the Super Bowl bigger than death? “No,” Dryer said, “but it comes in a bigger box.”

And now I have to give some consideration to this response to the question of what this all means.

“People are going through hard times,” said the Steelers Hines Ward, he not being one of them. “But in Pittsburgh if you’ve lost a job or your house you’ve still got the Steelers and you don’t worry about that, the light bill, the rent, stuff like that. When the Steelers play you’re hugging each other without regrets at the bar.”

Now, that’s the epicenter of something. Inflated self-importance for certain.

One shudders to think should the Steelers somehow lose to the upstarts from Arizona, what those bar hugs might turn into.

“There’s an old saying in football,” said Betrand Berry, now a Cardinal once a Bronco. “If you bite when young, you’ll bite when old.”
This is just the kind of gibberish that flows easily from the mouths of football players who are given podiums and microphones for a while. Philosophers, like dancing stars, are not born but made.
“You have to pass failure on the way to success,” said Cardinal punter Ben Graham, the notion sounding more profound because it came with an Australian accent. Austria and Australia in the same day. What a sport.
The NFL itself has operated all season under the slogan, “Believe in Now,” which was, I believe, the same position taken by bankers and brokers.

“I’ll carry this team on my back if I have to,” said Steeler Santonio Holmes.

The Chicago Bears were probably the best example of collective look-at-me-ism at a Super Bowl, but the thing has always had its share of outrageous individuals. The very first one had Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, who was, for his cheek, hammered by Green Bay. Still, The Hammer got the movie contract and his fame subsists.
Todd Christiansen of the Raiders showed up for Media Day with copies of his poetry, which he passed out as press releases. Dexter Manley tried a similar thing by pre-answering questions with a printout, the first public indication that he was functionally illiterate.

This is the one day of the football season when the anxious gives way to the excessive.

“When I retire, I’ll write a book,” said Arizona linebacker Chike Okeafor.

We all say that.

Golf, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

Tiger Woods XIV

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Working just from memory, this must be at least the fourth edition of Tiger Woods, the consistent theme being that in each he has been terrific. The young Tiger, the revamped Tiger, the Tiger Slam Tiger, the married Tiger, the post funeral Tiger, the new father Tiger, the limping Tiger. So many Tigers.

A pride of Tigers, or is that lions? Well, there have always been enough to go around.

All these Tigers ought to come with Roman numerals the way Super Bowls do, so that it may not be exactly clear which is which and which is when but the pretension assures significance. In fact, we should catalog his major victories the same way, so that Jack Nicklaus’ 18 would be just everyday.

Once Woods gets to his final total, say XXIV or something, we would know how much more it weighs.
This one—let’s call it Tiger IV—is certainly the most unsure of them all, even if Woods himself proved that golf can be played on one leg.

Still, that guilty left knee has been repaired four times now and this last one sounds like something earned on a football field, not on a mown fairway. Torn ACL. Those two words are as scary as any to an athlete. Double stress facture. A single would have been enough.

To have had all that and still have played 91 holes at Torrey Pines at last summer’s U.S. Open begs both admiration and dismay. Nothing Woods does ever again will surpass that. How odd to know at 33, with presumably more greatness still ahead, no greater reward awaits.
One must assume, then, having set so high a mark, that Woods is ready to resume what he left, that he is not just bored or misguided or anything less than what he always was.

The risk is not ours but his, and it is easy to imagine impatience disturbing him long before it does us. And if even if Woods is less, or is just rusty, any inspection is secondary to appreciation for his being back.
The return of a single athlete to his sport has never been as pregnant as this one, not Ben Hogan coming back from his car accident, not John McEnroe returning from adulthood nor Joe DiMaggo back from the war, not Muhammad Ali from political exile.
I do not remember any of them receiving, to quote the PGA tour site, “comprehensive on-line hole-by-hole video, audio, scoring and editorial coverage.” Douglas McArthur didn’t get that on his return to the Philippines.

The time that Woods has been gone has its own identity, the Tour Without Tiger, even though it was only eight months and that every tournament won by anyone else still counts.
When Phil Mickelson won at Riviera last week, coinciding with Woods’ announcement of his return, the significance of Mickelson’s victory was widely portrayed as the last one without Woods.

Look at it this way. You’re doing well at a singles mixer, and then suddenly George Clooney shows up.
It is possible to believe that somehow Woods is just what we all need, a symbol of resilience, an envoy of expectations, a courier of hope. Well, sure, that would be nice, and nicer if your 401K cared.

How helpful it would be to the general economy if there were a Woods to ride to the rescue, ( and while he is at it maybe salvage a discarded newspaper). So it was thought that Barak Obama was such a one and so it has turned out not to be so.

But all Woods has to do is restore golf to its place on the sports shelf, where it has been lately missing. Never a game of the masses in any case, golf faints easily from small concerns. While golf has continued after a Palmer or a Nicklaus, and so it will after Woods, it has done so quietly enough to hear a tee drop.
Strangely, Woods plays so few actual tournaments that his absence affects a small number of real locations. Yet does his shadow fall so far and linger so late that places he ignores leave a light in the window (not counting our late, lamented gathering at Castle Pines.)
Not in just these times but at any time, it is not easy to adopt as your proxy anyone who is playing a game for $8 million of someone else’s money.

That’s kind of how we got to where we are.

Football, Professional, Rocky Mountain News

Giants spoil the perfect matchup

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The New England Immortals v. the New Jersey Scarecrows.

Or some such.

Well, there have been worse Super Bowls going in, I suppose, not that it mattered who the Patriots got to confirm their greatness against.

Only coronation is left, the anointing of the New England Patriots as the greatest team in the history of football and of Tom Brady as the greatest quarterback, mere trifles what with only those improbable New York Giants in the way.

The least the Patriots should have had to do was to beat the better Manning, and yet they get Eli the Lesser. They could have had Cowboys, if just for the quarterback girlfriend matchup, or best of all and what ended in overtime in subzero Green Bay, the last patrol of Brett Favre.

But, no, the Giants survived on the road again, under the weather again, ruining a perfectly good narrative and allowing the world to wallow in Patriot glory for the next two weeks, as if there are enough superlatives to last that long.
Again and again is proved the old reflection of F. Scott Fitzgerald that there are no second acts in American lives.
That’s what we might have gotten with Favre, if his own and old nemesis, the refusal to believe that he can not throw a football through the eye of a needle, had not gotten him in overtime.

Against the Broncos, we recall, he threw a touchdown pass in overtime. Against the Giants, a careless interception.

Where we are now in the acts of Brett Favre’s life is surely somewhere beyond two, or even three, while Tom Brady is still in a very long first act, greater than Favre already, with the same dignity and appeal at the end yet to be managed.
And of all the possible finishes for a season kissing up to history, when someone had to take the last licks from New England, none could have been more intriguing that Favre and Brady at the end.
Not to take the clunky, ugly, freezer football of Sunday in both Green Bay and New England as an indication of anything other than survival of the thermally fitted, the NFL is the one sport that inevitably comes in from the cold, this time in suburban Arizona for Super Bowl XLII.

Things would have turned out as they did in the tropics or indoors, the Patriots outlasting an injured San Diego team and the Giants riding some kind of serendipitous joy wagon, clearly the least likely Super Bowl finalist since the Chris Chandler Flacons, whipping the Packers in their own ice box.

This was going to be Favre’s Super Bowl, not necessarily in victory but in tribute, the clear, dominating story line until Brady and the Patriots confirm the first 19-0 season.

We were ready to admire a career of courage and distinction and presence, and then when it came to a final defeat, a warm round of applause for the perfect warrior.

When all that history is made by New England, when the greatest single season standard in sports is set, there will be only a sense of conclusion rather than great achievement, a begrudging acceptance that Bill Belichick is every bit as great a coach as his more likeable predecessors.

Yet, the sentiment that would so naturally have flowed to Favre does not drift automatically to Brady, and certainly it will not be wasted on Manning either.

This will be a Super Bowl not of uncertainty nor disbelief but of filling in the blanks, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s as the Patriots confirm the obvious.

What risk there is for New England is that, though they are already the only team to go 18-0, if they do not go 19-0 they will be immortal frauds, the greatest case of false advertising since the free lunch.
Not often does the Super Bowl match quarterbacks who are in the discussion of greatest ever, and that was what was lost when the Giants refused to do the right thing.
Favre against Brady would have been the best matchup since Elway against Joe Montana, at least the equal of Bart Starr and Len Dawson who were in the very first one or when Roger Staubach met Terry Bradshaw.

In fact, Favre lost to Elway when the sympathies were the opposite, Elway then as the well used Favre and Favre as the in-his-prime Brady.

The usual Super Bowl quarterback intrigue is wrung out of a Brad Johnson against a Rich Gannon or a Trent Dilfer against a Kerry Collins.
Brady has matched his Super Bowls against Kurt Warner, Jake Delhomme and Donovan McNabb, and for his most significant one he deserved better than the little brother of the other Manning.

Favre won his Super Bowl over Drew Bledsoe, the predecessor of Brady, and how moving that might have been if Favre could have bookended a career over man and boy.

We sigh for what might have been.

Baseball, Biography, Chicago Tribune, Professional

SUTTER’S FINGERS HIS SAVING GRACE

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WEST PALM BEACH, FLA. – Except for enough hair on his face and head to stuff a small mattress, Bruce Sutter is as ordinary as any of us who makes $1.7 million a year working roughly seven or eight minutes a week.

Sutter likes hunting and fishing, ignores exercise and avoids lifting anything heavier than a 5-ounce baseball or a 12-ounce can.

“I get my exercise on the mound,” Sutter said, swabbing off the sweat he had gathered by watching his new Atlanta pitching mates try to advance imaginary baserunners on a remote field at the Braves’ spring-training complex.

When Sutter left St. Louis to gain greater wealth as the most significant free agent of the winter (“What it boiled down to was they didn’t want me anymore,” he said), Cardinals’ manager Whitey Herzog moaned, “I am now 45 games dumber.”

What makes Sutter different from the rest of us, as well as from the 100 or so members of his own fraternity of late-inning game-savers, is the way he holds the baseball.

The first two fingers of Sutter’s right hand look long enough to scratch both ears at the same time. That is a good trick at parties but not something anyone would give him $48 million to do, which the Braves have agreed is fair over the life of Sutter’s new contract–a life that will most likely last longer than his own.

Sutter’s right wrist is long enough to keep him from buying his shirts off the rack. He wraps his fingers around each side of a baseball, snaps his wrist and tickles the underside of the ball with his thumb as he releases it. His thumb ends up between his fingers, just like yours does when you pretend to steal a baby’s nose.

And that, pretty much, is how the forkball is thrown.

“I know the mechanics of the pitch,” said Johnny Sain, the Braves’ pitching coach who has been around Sutter for less than a week, “and I surely know what it does when he throws it. But why it works so well I’m kindly hoping to learn from him myself.”

Good luck. Sutter can show it and will explain it if he’s in the mood, but he is as mystified as the next guy as to what makes the forkball–or the split-fingered fastball–the deadliest pitch since the Sirens sang to Ulysses. “All I know is that it is easy for me to throw,” Sutter said. “I don’t think a lot about it, where my head is or my shoulders are. I wouldn’t make a very good pitching coach.”

Other pitchers have tried it, or so they claim, most notably the staff of the champion Detroit Tigers. But Sutter holds the patent.

“It looks like a fastball, but it’s not,” said Braves’ center-fielder Dale Murphy, who has had as much success hitting it as anybody. “It looks like an off-speed pitch, but it’s not. Usually when you swing at it, it’s not a strike.”

Sutter learned the pitch when he was in the Cubs’ farm system, in Quincy, from the late Fred Martin. Sutter was a 20-year-old prospect who had signed for $500, in contrast to the $500,000 signing bonus the Braves gave him 12 years later.

Sutter remembers Martin showing a group of young pitchers how to throw what he called an off-speed curve. Because of his long fingers and his wrist snap, Sutter realized that he could throw the ball harder than it was meant to be.

What a batter sees when Sutter’s ball comes at him is a fastball that suddenly disappears below his knees.

“When Sutter is pitching well,” said Atlanta’s Bob Horner, “the ball jumps under your bat.”

“It’s kind of like a dry spitter,” Sutter said.

And the beauty of all of this is that Sutter only has to show off when his team is ahead, and for not very long.

“I’ve never pitched for more than five innings in one game in the major leagues,” Sutter said.

Most batters see so little of him, their knowledge of how to hit his pitch relies largely on rumor.

“I have more trouble with slap hitters,” Sutter said. “But they usually bring me in to pitch to the stars in the big situation.

“I only face a hitter maybe three-four times a season, so none of them can really get familiar with the pitch. And I throw it 95 percent of the time. “I’m not an intimidator like a Rich Gossage, where if he has one slip, he could end a guy’s career. Mine is a freak pitch. It goes spiraling in like a football, but I can’t explain it any better than that. I know that when it’s working best, I can’t see it break. And if I’m in the game for more than two innings, we’ve lost.”

Sutter’s value, as with most things in baseball, must be put into numbers. He saved 45 of St. Louis’ 84 victories last season and won 5. No Atlanta relief pitcher had more than 16 saves.

Atlanta lost nine games after leading in the ninth inning; St. Louis lost only two. Had those numbers been reversed, the Braves might or might not have caught San Diego, to whom they finished second, but Ted Turner’s money is saying that they would have.

“I can’t really help a fourth- or fifth-place team,” Sutter said. “I can’t make a team a winner by myself. The team has to be good enough to give me a lead to protect. I think the Braves are that good.”

“The worst feeling you could have,” said Murphy, “was to see Sutter get up in the bullpen. You’d tense up just knowing you had to get some runs before he got into the game.

“Now it’s somebody else’s turn to sweat.”

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

FLUTIE COMES UP SHORT USFL DEBUT IS LESS THAN A BIG SUCCESS

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Dateline: BIRMINGHAM, ALA. – What might have been, for Doug Flutie, could be reduced to simple mathematics.

“What did we score in the fourth quarter, 21 points?” Flutie asked. “Over a whole game, that’s 84.”

And that would have been ample to overcome the 38 points scored by the Heismanless Birmingham Stallions here Sunday. That many points, or even half as many, may have justified Flutie as an adult quarterback for the New Jersey Generals, if not the most recent savior of the United States Football League.

Alas for Flutie, they still count the actual points scored in each quarter before adding them up, even in the USFL, and he thus will forever have to live with the indelible fact that he was a loser, 38-28, the first time he had a chance to show anyone why he is worth $7 million.

“I made no promises when I came into this league,” Flutie said. “I don’t owe anything to anybody.”

Well, that is not exactly true. He owes a small debt to whoever taught him his times tables, if no one else.

Flutie might just as easily have multiplied his first-half completions by two, which would still have been zero. In fact, he could have gone all the way until two minutes were left in the third quarter and not have projected a completion for himself, unless you count the two he threw to Birmingham.

By the end of the game, Flutie was 12 of 27 for two touchdowns and three interceptions, but until his last futile flurry, he played like a baby with his thumbs on backwards.

“I just wasn’t on the money,” Flutie said, intending no pun.

Other great athletes have had ineffective starts. Someone was mentioning that Willie Mays went 0-for-50 or something when he broke in, but of course, someone was throwing the ball at Mays, not just handing it to him.

“No one said it was going to be easy,” Flutie said.

Of course they did. Everybody said so. Anyone who saw him whip Miami with his miracle pass or applauded him for taking the Heisman without blushing thought so. Certainly Donald Trump, Flutie’s new landlord, who paid him all that money and traded veteran Brian Sipe to unclutter the backfield for him, thought so.

Watching Flutie flail away at his own myth for most of his first game was like watching a shiny new Ferrari turn into just another used car.

The first four passes he threw did not touch another human being. His fifth pass bounced off Herschel Walker, who has a Heisman of his own, and his sixth pass was swatted down by 300-pound tackle Doug Smith, who is big enough to be sliced into several Fluties and frozen.

Flutie’s seventh pass finally found a companion, though it happened to be David Dumars of the other team. No. 8 was a time zone too long and No. 9 came down in the arms of Birmingham’s Chuck Clinton.

Cynics as well as realists were trying to get up a pool in the press box on when Flutie would complete his first pass. I took August.

It wasn’t until Flutie introduced the ball to teammate Clarence Collins that the game ball had anyone’s fingerprints on it but Flutie’s and his enemies’.

Once he completed his first pass, with the score 31-7, Flutie outscored Birmingham by 21-7, but it was still another interception, by Dennis Woodberry of the Stallions with seven minutes to play, that stopped whatever chance Flutie had of working his magic.

On this day, there was nothing up his sleeve, except a rather ordinary arm, shorter than most.

“It was frustrating and irritating,” Flutie said. “I was angry at myself for not getting off to a better start. I just . . . shoot, I just wish I could have done it the whole game.”

Flutie was asked, quite properly, if he possibly had any trouble seeing over the Birmingham linemen.

“No comment,” said Flutie, who was game to talk about everything but why he has never grown bigger than your average placekicker.

He did not alibi on his lack of preparation, a mere two weeks of training with the Generals.

“If I had only one day of practice, I still would have felt I should start,” Flutie said.

And yet . . .

“What I need,” Flutie said, “is more game experience. Week after week, game after game, I will get better.”

The pressure of his debut, he said, was no bother.

“I was relaxed and I was calm,” Flutie said. “I knew what I was doing.”

And yet . . .

“I know what people will say,” Flutie said. ” ‘Flutie didn’t win his first game. When’s he going to win one?’ There will be more pressure.”

But what happened against Birmingham?

“We didn’t have the ball,” Flutie said, which was true. In all, New Jersey had the ball for only 18 minutes, just two minutes in the second quarter and three in the third. “When you make a mistake, you like to get out there and fix it. I didn’t work up a sweat until the third quarter.”

And when Flutie did, a few of the things for which he became notable began to happen.

“We’re a running team,” Flutie said, “but I feel more comfortable when things are helter-skelter. When I have to think on my feet, I react better. I don’t feel like a robot, just handing the ball off.”

That is a matter for his coach, Walt Michaels, to solve. The fourth- quarter Flutie was much preferable to the first-, second- and third-quarter Flutie, and if he is to be anything close to what the USFL imagines him to be, Flutie may have to play the game on the edge, as he did in college.

“I don’t give a damn about stats,” Flutie said. “If I was 0-for-30 and we won the game 6-0, I would be happy.”

That would make one. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Doug Flutie, New Jersey’s $7-million man. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Doug Flutie passes under pressure Sunday during his first regular-season game with the New Jersey Generals. He completed 12 of 27 for 189 yards and had 3 interceptions.

Boxing, Chicago Tribune, Professional

MANCINI FALLS AGAIN WHILE CREDITS ROLL

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Dateline: RENO – When art imitates life, especially if it is made-for-television art, happy endings can be scripted, which for Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini is that proud moment three years ago when he won the lightweight boxing championship of the known world.

That is when a just-completed TV movie ends Mancini’s life, when he is on top, not when he is fighting back or just fighting on.

What we have here is a clear case of premature biography.

Real life has a way of continuing after the last commercial, often not for the better, and a champion at 21 can be a relic at 23 if he is not careful whose fists he meets face first.

Such as those of Livingstone Bramble, who relieved Mancini of his championship eight months ago and kept Mancini from reclaiming it Saturday night.

The decision was unanimous but astonishingly close, with each judge giving Bramble the margin by only one point. Had the vote gone to Mancini, it would have been like the steer getting the decision over the butcher.

“Ray fought a great fight,” said Bramble. “I didn’t think anybody could give me a fight like that.”

Great, maybe. Courageous, certainly. Mancini fought with one eye closed and blood streaming down his face for the last eight rounds.

Mancini swung and missed. Bramble swung and hit. The actual count, which tells more about the fight than the judges’ numbers, were 1,349 punches thrown by Mancini, only 381 landing for a hitting average of .280. Bramble threw 1,220 punches and connected with 674, for .550, a mean batting average, as Mancini’s face could testify.

Mancini was cut over the left eye in the first round and on the right eye in the third. The chief question for the last half of the fight was not if Mancini would finish but if he would bleed to death first.

Mancini’s corner worked on both eyes with sponges big enough to wash a truck and still couldn’t soak up all the blood.

“No way did I want the fight stopped,” Mancini said. “The cuts did hinder my fighting. I couldn’t see all the punches coming, and I had to keep wiping the blood out of my eyes.

“It seems like the last half of my career, cuts have been a problem. After a while, you can’t kid yourself.”

Does that mean, as he had hinted before the fight, that Mancini will now retire?

“I know I look like I just went through a meatgrinder,” Mancini said, “and if I made the decison right this moment, I would probably call it a career.

“What I want to do is take a nice long rest, pray a lot, get some tender loving from my family and then decide.”

Mancini’s manager, David Wolf, had no hesitation in casting his vote for retirement.

“My own feelings are that this should be the end,” said Wolf. “There was just so much dignity in the way he fought this fight, it seems like the right way to call a halt.”

Mancini’s father, Lenny, concurred. “If it was up to me,” the elder Mancini said, “I would tell him to forget about it.”

“You’ve got to remember I’m his baby,” Mancini said.

Bramble doesn’t think Mancini should quit. “I don’t see another lightweight out there who can beat him,” Bramble said.

This was the same Bramble who had said before the fight:

“I want to cut him up, flatten him and forget him,” said Bramble before the fight. “If he gets too close, I will bite his ears off.”

Now, that is a serious threat considering Bramble is a vegetarian. Of course, he did not say anything about swallowing.

Mancini made no threats, only a promise.

“The difference between this fight and the first is that I will be victorious,” Mancini said.

In their first fight, eight months ago in Buffalo, Mancini was leading on two of the three judges’ cards when the referee stopped the fight in the 14th round with Mancini bleeding like dressed pork, though not even Mancini disputed Bramble’s victory.

“I love being the underdog,” Mancini said. “It’s the American way.”

Mancini did not join in the prefight hype with the same energy as did Bramble. Mancini also reacted to Bramble’s antics much more passively than before the first fight, when Bramble employed a bogus witch doctor to put a curse on Mancini.

Not even a voodoo doll, into whose eyes Bramble stuck pins, or a human skull Bramble gave Mancini as a gift appeared to bother Mancini. Mancini merely turned the skull over to find it was made in China.

“All I can think about is getting my title back,” Mancini said.

Before he lost that title, Mancini was in a position to be the next superstar of boxing, the natural heir to Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.

He had a natural appeal. He had guts and grit and enough talent to get by. He was unpretentious and hard working, and he was white. That didn’t hurt at the gate.

“Mr. All-American boy,” Bramble said with scorn.

Mancini was a growth industry. There were Boom Boom dolls and Boom Boom athletic gear and Boom Boom posters.

Mancini had everything, including the right motives for being in the seamiest sport of them all.

And that brings us back to the movie, which is titled “Walk in Your Shadow,” the name coming from a poem that young Mancini wrote in devotion to his father.

In its eagerness to give us Mancini’s brief life, TV may have forgotten that Mancini himself is not quite through with it yet, but for the purposes of prime-time melodrama, all the good stuff is already over.

Nothing that Mancini can possibly do from here will improve upon what so far has had the scent of bad fiction.

“It’s a real-life ‘Rocky’ story,” said Dan Duva, promoter of the rematch with Bramble.

As a child, Mancini heard the stories of how his blue-collar father, Lenny, the original “Boom Boom,” could have been the champ if he hadn’t had to go to war for his country.

His little fingers could touch the scars left by enemy shrapnel and his heart could feel the wounds that ended his old man’s dreams.

He swore that when he grew up, he would be the champ his dad never was but could have been, would have been, if only . . .

Check your TV listings later this fall and stock up on Kleenex.

Mancini wanted to play himself in the film and was briefly considered before the part was given to Doug McKeon, whom you may remember as the kid who liked to “suck face” in “On Golden Pond.”

In any case, the thing was being shot at the same time Mancini was otherwise preoccupied with trying to win back the title that climaxes the movie.

That is where the TV movie of Mancini’s life wraps things up, with tidy sentiment, the night little Ray wins the title, the night a loving son gives to his father the gift of immortality.

All in all, not a bad present.

Most of us only get neckties. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Livingstone Bramble measures Ray Mancini. Keywords: BOXING