These Next 12 Months Are My Favorite Time of Year

As a pretty avid watcher of all sports, this time of year is pretty fantastic for me.  Starting with the run up to the NCAA tournament, then you have baseball Spring training, the Tourney, baseball's opening day, the start* of the NBA season and then postseason, NHL playoffs, the Grand Slams and golf's Majors, Tour de France, this year we had the Winter Olympics and we'll have the World Cup, then the baseball postseason pushes, NFL starts, October, "BCS is unfair" month, the bowls, and then the NFL playoffs and Super Bowl and then the NCAA bubble talk starts up again, and you sprinkle in various drafts, trades, free agency, scandals, other tournaments and events throughout this time.

OK, so as it turns out, it's pretty much the whole year.  But still, February/March always seems to be the start of it all somehow.  Maybe I am just a baseball/college basketball fan first and everything else follows? 

*in my world, the first 50ish games of the NBA are preseason and don't matter.  Then somewhere between the Super Bowl and the Final Four, the NBA gets going.  Ironically, most NBA players and management seem to feel the same way.

Sadly for me, this most magical time of year is overlapping a time when I simply cannot follow any of it very closely.  I've just moved to San Francisco (fun fact: everyone here hates the Lakers and Dodgers, just like me!) and didn't have TV for a couple of weeks (staying with non-sports people - did you know people really watch Jersey Shore?).  We finally got TV in our room, but now that I am moving out of my friends' basement into my new place, I will be without TV or the internet again for a few days...during this weekend of all weekends (though I would probably be this mortified pretty much every weekend). 

All that said, it has made it hard for me to write anything about sports, even though there have been so many things I wanted so badly to write about.  So here's a capsule of what I have watched over the past month or so:

-Canada's hockey fans inspire me to be a better sports fan in general - they collectively know the game at such a detailed level, they applaud the other team, they chanted "USA" at our women as they collected their silver medals.  Very impressive.  That said, I wish we'd broken every single one of their hearts.

-When someone says, "Oh, don't tell me what's happening in the Gold Medal Hockey game.  I am taping it and left it when we were down 2-1 with 9:00 to go."  Your response cannot be, "Oh, well it's in overtime now, so you will love it."  Dammit!

-Derek Anderson said after he was released that Browns fans are "ruthless."  "I will never forget getting cheered when I was injured. ... I know at times I wasn’t great. I hope and pray I’m playing when my team comes to town and (we) roll them."  People are very upset about this and he issued an apology.  What should he have said?  "I will miss the loyal and wonderful Browns fans, especially the ones who cheered when I got injured.  I look forward to coming back here with a new team and I hope the Browns crush us."  Kudos to him for saying what he really meant and really not being all that offensive anyway.  Derek, you can keep the balls dry for Eli Manning anyday...just stay off the field. 

-Mike Dunleavy got canned as Clippers GM and found out about the move because a reported from ESPN asked him what he thought of it.  The Clips then went out and lost by 30 that night.  That pretty much sums up everything you need to know about them.

-The Jets, who have the best corner in football, just got one of the best corners in football to play on the other side.  That pretty much sums up the opposite of everything you thought you knew about them.

-The NFL Combine happened.  People ran and jumped.  Al Davis decided to draft the fastest person there with the Raiders' first pick.

-Speaking of the fastest person there, my mom (Hall of Famer, Kathy Bergen) set two World Records and an American Record at a Masters track meet a few weeks ago.  Incidentally, I really feel that she should now sign her name, "Kathy Bergen, Legend" as though it is a masters degree or a doctorate or something.

-Some race car driver got angry and ran down and crashed into another race car driver repeatedly until he wrecked because he was mad at him.  NASCAR gave the guy a three week probation, so apparently the penalty for attempted murder in the South is no longer jail.  NASCAR has seen it's popularity wane in the last few years, so they decided to allow drivers to police themselves more and let these types of things be handled on the track.  In other words, they feel that having people run into one another at 150 miles an hour will draw in more fans.  This seems a little far-fetched to me because I didn't think demolition derbies were that popular.  Maybe they just haven't been going fast enough.  This will probably be less fun when people start dying.

-The Winter Olympics presented a whole slew of events that made me look again at the Definition of Sport.  The Sport vs. Non-Sport lists grew as well.  Stay tuned.

-A women's college basketball player socked another one.  Also Connecticut's women have just set the record for longest winning streak.  Some folks say these things should make me want to take interest in women's college basketball.  Somehow women fighting means they've reached a certain level of legitimacy and passion.  And UConn's excellence supposedly shows that women can play on a really high level.  Frankly, all this makes me think is that some girl is a thug and the sport is more of a joke than ever since one team can win their games by an average of 30 points all season.  I've said it before, but I don't watch women's basketball because they are not as fast or athletic as men's basketball players.  That's not sexist, it's science (thanks Ron Burgundy).  I don't watch minor league baseball either, because it is not as good a game as major league baseball.  I also don't watch the Raiders for the same reason, and even if Tom Cable punched an assistant coach, I still wouldn't.  Oh, that happened?  Ok, I'll YouTube it.

-Milton Bradley, who signed with the Mariners this offseason, said it wasn't his fault that he kept getting into trouble when he was on the _______ (insert team here).

There are many, many more, but I need to find a job and there's only so much time I can spend on this crap.

Brand Losing The Blame-Game

Remember in "Jerry Maguire" when Cush (the star football player) and his father met with Jerry (the agent) in their living room and Cush's dad said that he doesn't sign contracts, but he shook hands with Jerry and said, "what you have is my word, and it's stronger than oak"? And just as the two shook hands, they flashed to a closeup of the hands coming together and you got the feeling that everything was going to be ok - or it was going to go horribly wrong - but there was no in between.

And then later, Cush's dad signed a contract with Jerry's arch-enemy Bob Sugar the night before the NFL draft. And Cush said that he was suffering from Cush-lash because he had been seeing his own picture everywhere he went. Right now Clipper fans are suffering from Cush-lash.

In the he-said-they-said battle of what really happened the week before Elton Brand signed with the 76ers, we may never know what really happened, but we can't stop hearing about it. When Brand signed, he was a little vague about what had happened but it seemed to be that he had wanted to stay a Clipper, but that he didn't hear from them, and that there had been no verbal deal made.

Clipper head coach Mike Dunleavy was adamant Thursday that the Clippers had gone out of their way to contact Brand, that they offered more money than Philly, that they were willing to offer one more year to the deal, they did not offer a take-it-or-leave-it deal, that they had upheld their end of the handshake deal they'd made and went out and gotten Baron Davis, and most importantly he was adamant that there had been a handshake deal...and Brand and his agent wouldn't return their calls. He went so far as to show that he had text messages on his phone from Brand confirming how excited his was for next year and said that other players had similar texts.

How can these sides, which had been so close and friendly only days earlier, be so far apart on what happened? The common thought right now is that just like Cush would probably never have turned his back on Jerry if not for his dad's interference, Brand would likely not have turned his back on the Clipper without his agent's interference.

The problem with this theory is that Brand wound up signing the cheapest deal offered to him. Sure agents want to get their names out there and Brand's agent did that by making this story blow up as big as it did. But they also want to get their names out there showing athletes that they will make a lot of money if they sign with him. And since the agent gets a percentage of the deal, they will go for the biggest deal possible. Why would the agent have hurt his own rep and taken a smaller cut?

I am ok with a guy deciding to go to a team closer to his home to raise his family. I am ok with a guy going to a team on which he feels he has a better chance to win, despite that his new team is worse than the one he left. Those are the two big reasons that Brand supposedly left. The problem I have is that Brand never gave those reasons, reporters suggested them.

Baron Davis was charming and laughing and said a few times in his Clipper press conference that he never thought of backing out on the Clippers because he had given his word. He even looked directly into the camera and said it with a wink. Davis got where he wanted and made the money he wanted, so he can't be too upset, but at the same time, he got screwed by his friend just like the rest of us did.

Sports is business and Elton Brand did not owe anybody anything. He can move his family any place in the world that he wants. People change their minds. But for him to say that there was no verbal deal and that it isn't his fault is insulting to Davis, to the Clippers and to the fans. He's always been a good buy and now it is backfiring because he doesn't have the a-hole in him to just come out and say, "I did tell them I was going to come back, but I decided that I didn't want to be there anymore and changed my mind."

Davis spoke his mind and explained his story. Dunleavy emotionally spoke his mind and explained the Clippers' story. Brand hasn't said a word besides almost blaming the Clippers for not bowing down far enough in reverence to him. They let their leading scorer go without a goodbye and signed the one free agent Brand had said he wanted, then offered him a more lucrative and longer deal than the team he went to did. How much more respect could they have shown?