Monthly Archives: February 2009

Rocky Mountain News

I didn’t read the News today. Oh, boy.

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I didn’t read the News today. Oh, boy.

Nor tomorrow and tomorrow.

What comes to mind is poetry, how absurd. Lines that were committed to memory for a college grade back when the written word had value, a B- as I recall.

Stop all the clocks, shut off the telephone…let the mourners come.

The best newspaper is dead and for no good reason save the spine to fight on, a battle lost to lessers and to a marketplace diverted by ease. The world today can be held in the palm of the hand, with all the news and sounds and motion a tap away.

These are familiar agonies that grip the newspaper industry across the land and may yet do in the survivor here, victory not a conclusion as much as an amnesty.

Sports is a small part of it all, the writing of it, the reporting of it, the celebrating of it, the censuring of it. The sports page is the proxy for harder reality, where the wars are only mock and success and failure matter only as long as it takes to turn off the scoreboard. Or turn the page.

The scores will stand, heroes will come and fools will go without this newspaper to note any of it.

It is impossible now not to think of endings, of those I witnessed and wrote, others who faced the finish, most with tears, even the hardest of men. I recall that little knuckle of a shortstop, Larry Bowa, weeping in a scruffy laundry room hastily set up for his departure from the Cubs.

They all cry at the summing up.

My most vivid memory is the last fight of Muhammad Ali, in Freeport, Bahamas, a shadow lurching and gasping in the ring, and then finally slumped in his makeshift dressing area, a cinderblock men’s room reeking of urine, facing the finish, a weeping young John Travolta at Ali’s knee.

Martina Navratilova, exiting Centre Court for the final time, stopped to pull up a piece of sod. Jack Nicklaus posing on the footbridge on the 18th hole at St. Andrews, was stubbornly dressed in a sweater vest in fashion when he was.

Joe Louis, the great Brown Bomber, became a prop to various promoters, and I cannot see old films of him in his prime without recalling the last time I saw him, poking around a post-press conference dining room looking for left over coffee in discarded cups still warm enough to drink.

Just this week I saw a picture of the last scrap of Shea Stadium, what looked like a walking ramp standing stark against the sky. An awful place, Shea, one of the most uncomfortable, inhospitable places I ever covered a game, football, baseball and even soccer.

And still the sadness came when thinking of all the memories made there. It is much too easy to walk into Invesco Field past the parking lot where Mile High used to sit. As if it was never there.

Beginnings are not as easy to know as endings nor do they stick as long. I saw it in Chris Evert, then 14 years old, knocking balls on a clay court in the town where I first worked for a newspaper.

Michael Jordan was it from the start and remained it until his final shot in Utah that won his sixth championship. The perfect finish, the most perfect ever, except Jordan could not leave it there.

I understand that. If this were a perfect column, the final and best of any I’ve ever written, I would still want to write another. And another.

If this newspaper had another day, another edition, it would want more. It most certainly deserves more.

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.