White Collar Sports Take Center Stage

[I wrote the following post on Thursday, expecting to post it on Friday before the events that I wrote about. However, this page got screwed up and I was unable to until Sunday. Thus, I added *’s in a few places with updated news on various things.]

With the NBA Finals in the midst of its second sabbatical (only having played one game, which is amazing!), and the Stanley Cup Finals over, and baseball being 100 games from the postseason, and my school knocked out of the College World Series, the only things to watch this weekend will be the French Open finals and the Belmont Stakes.

The French Open will pit Ana Ivanovic and Dinara Safina in the women’s and Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal in the men’s. Both should be great matches (Ivanovic* and Nadal** will win), but both will air live very early in the morning and there is a really good chance I will miss both. After all, I have an ultimate game and my parents’ Senior Olympic*** meet to go to on Saturday.

But the Belmont Stakes sits right in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday and that is most definitely the big sports story of the day. Big Brown will attempt to do what blah blah blah. It's on tv for like 12 hours on Saturday. Just wait till they start and watch the race for two-and-a-half minutes. Also note that there are only two ways this event can be worth watching: Big Brown wins, or someone goes under 2:24. Otherwise, it is barely worth the 2:28 that it will take (except the overhead-blimp replay which is always awesome).****

Horse racing is a sport, if you call it a sport, designed entirely for betting. Sure, there are the people who enjoy it because the horsies are pretty – the kind of people who donate to racehorse retirement charities. To me giving money to ensure the happiness and comfort of retired racehorses is absolutely insane, but this became big news when Barbaro was injured and on Death Row.

It is not as though after their careers are over, they are forced to go back to the ghetto with their fortunes and entourages lost, and they have to take crappy jobs because they never went finished college because the Game came first. These are animals bought and raised by millionaires, pampered for the first few years of their lives, who are then retired and sent to farms where they spend their lives eating and having sex with the finest physical specimens in their species.

So realistically, the sport is truly a business, even more so than baseball and the rest because the players don’t even know they are playing. The only purpose of the races is for owners to win prize money, and bettors can try and get rich while the tracks take all of their money. There is no personal drive in the horses, or pride or glory. They just know want to get dinner and to stop getting whipped and kicked. With that in mind, Big Brown will go for history this weekend on three good hooves and I see only three possible outcomes to this race.

1) Big Brown does not win. Horse racing will slip further down the totem pole of the collective sports fan’s consciousness and legislation to protect the horses from cruelty (no more steroids and no more whips) will make it far more humane, but far less impressive in the future.*****

2) Big Brown wins. Horse racing leaps into public consciousness in a big way, like it has not seen in decades and then quickly fades away sine there is no other event worth watching for 47 weeks and none of the players we’ve come to know will be around then anyway. The same legislation is enacted and the sport is never the same.

3) Big Brown reinjures his hoof and is euthanized on the track (win or lose). Horse racing’s public image devolves further as the second high profile horse is put down in about a month, the third in as many years. People learn more and more about the treatment of the horses and how many actually are euthanized week in and week out. PETA grows even more self-righteous than ever before. If trainers and owners are lucky, the sport is eventually seen the way we look at dog racing; if they are not lucky history views it the way it sees bear bating, dog fighting and cock fighting.

Frankly, I think that the first option is the most likely. If the trainers think he can run, his hoof is clearly in decent shape because he is worth too much in the baby-making business to run him on a cracked hoof that will wind up forcing him to be put down on the track. Then again, is he worth anything if he has the stigma of weak genes and couldn’t even run the Belmont?

Notes:
* and ** - Ivanovic and Nadal did win.
*** - Mom and dad took home four medals though neither was thrilled with their performances. Such prima donnas.
**** - The winning time was a somewhat slow 2:29.65 and there was no blimp cam, which is a total disaster as far as I am concerned.
***** - He didn’t win and wasn’t euthanized. The trainer is throwing the jockey under the bus blaming the last place finish on him. Who’s really at fault? Who cares. See you next May, Horse Racing.

Promises Are Like Babies: Easy To Make, Hard To Deliver

Predictions get tossed around in the sports world all the time. Guys guarantee their teams will win a game or a series. They guarantee that they will not be back with a certain team. They guarantee postseason appearances. The say that their team is the team to beat before the season starts.

You always hear announcers talk about how that makes great "bulletin board" material and occassionally a player will say that it was a motivating factor, but it seems like all the guarantees are so run-of-the-mill these days that few bat an eye at them.

When Jim Fassel angrily declared to the New York media that the 7-4 Giants were going to playoffs, it wasn't so much that it was a groundbreaking prediction; coaches and players say this type of thing all the time. What makes this moment memorable was that the normally mild-mannered Fassel blew up and essentially told the world famous New York sports media to sit down and shut up for the rest of the season...and then he backed it up.

Before this last Super Bowl, had Plaxico Burress given a run-of-the-mill "we're gonna win" prediction, no one would have cared...likely any player would have said the same thing. But Burress gave the score as 23-17, which was so far below the Patriots' average that it raised some eyebrows, but was still mostly laughed off as harmless fun. When the Giants wound up winning, holding the Pats to a lower score than Burress had predicted, and Burress himself scored the winning touchdown, that became an all-time great prediction.

Perhaps the three most famous sports predictions are Babe Ruth famously calling a home run by pointing to the bleachers right where he hit the ball on the next pitch (or maybe he just stretched his arm, no one is sure). Joe Namath called the Super Bowl upset in 1967. And of course Kramer's two-home run prediction on behalf of Paul O'Neil to a sick boy.

But every year some guy you haven't really heard of says his crappy NBA East team will beat some other crappy NBA East team and no one cares. So what makes a great prediction? What makes it memorable? Why was Joe Namath's Super Bowl III prediction a seminal moment in sports history but so many other guys have done the exact same thing and been forgotten?

First: the stage has to be big. Boldly declaring that your 7-year-old son will score in a YMCA league basketball game is not exactly the stuff of legends.

Second: the odds have to be against you. If a first place team's manager declares his team will make the postseason when they have a 10 game lead with 11 to go, no one will really take notice.

Third: you get points for originality. Hundreds of coaches have probably told writers at some point that their struggling teams would put it all together and make the playoffs, but Fassel did it with fire, with (apparently real) anger, and most importantly with style.

Fourth: the predictor needs to have first-hand impact on the game. No one cares what the owner's dog walker says will happen. But if the shortstop guarantees a World Series sweep, that's getting in the papers. Abe Lincoln once said, "We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot."

Fifth: it has to come true. If you make a bold enough prediction and use bold enough words and fail, you will perhaps be remembered, but not how you want to be. Had the Patriots beaten the Giants 41-17, do you think there would be any stories on Super Bowl Monday about how Burress' relatively mundane prediction had been wrong, or would the press have written about the 19-0 story?

Sixth: there has to be an intangible endearing quality to it. If Roger Clemens came back and predicted that he would lead the Mariners to the World Series this year, it would come off as arrogance from a world-class jerk - not a prediction. If he pulled it off, history would find a way to cheapen it (steroids, etc.) so we wouldn't have to appreciate it like we do the Jets in Super Bowl III or Base Ruth's possible shot-calling.

Recently Big Brown's trainer, Rick Dutrow, Jr., has been proclaiming that his horse winning the Belmont Stakes is a "foregone conclusion." He boldly stated, "Forget about it. There's no way in the world there's any horse that's doing any better than Big Brown. It's impossible...I don't even care about the post position...We don't need to worry. He will handle things."

So how will this prediction be remembered? This passes the first three tests with flying colors: it is the biggest stage in his sport, and one of the biggest in all of Sport. While his horse will be the odds-on favorite, the odds are against him that he'll win - no one has done it in 30 years and there have been odds-on favorites many, many times. Originality! Even Bob Baffert never mouthed off like this.

Where Dutrow's prediction gets hurt starts with #4- he doesn't have enough to do with the prediction coming true. Sure, he knows better than anyone what his horse can do. He knows better than anyone how much steroids have been pumped in him. But he won't be the one running, nor the one riding. If the jockey made this kind of prediction, that would be interesting. If the horse did, it would be astounding! If he doesn't win, Dutrow will likely be a laughing stock (for a day or two until we all forget about him) for being too bold. And if Big Brown does win, because the prediction is just so sleazy and self-righteous, and the guy keeps yelling it into any microphone he can find, we won't remember this fondly. We will blame it on a weak field and overt steroid use, and we will likely remember this more clearly as the last of the old-fashioned, inhumane Triple Crown seasons.

Now Petr Sykora's prediction in Monday's Stanley Cup Finals should be remembered as one of the all-time greats, and may be the best ever depending on the series plays out. Sykora played his shot-calling down later, saying he was just trying to loosen up his teammates, but regardless this is a classic:

The Red Wings were 35 seconds away from a Stanley Cup win. The Cup was polished and in the tunnel leading to the ice. The champagne was chilled in the home locker room. But the Penguins spoiled the party by pulling their goalie and scoring to tie it up with the extra attacker. Midway through the first overtime period, NBC's sideline reporter Pierre McGuire announced that Sykora had told him that he was going to "get the next one." Two overtimes later, he did and the Penguins won, sending the series back to Pittsburgh for Game 6.

Now this is a fantastic story, but if the Penguins go on to come back and win at home and then go back to Detroit and steal the Cup, it will be immortalized in sports legend. Stay tuned.

Baseball Celebrates Interleague, And No One Notices

Major League Baseball's first interleague series blew by without really making any particularly interesting news. I think the honeymoon is over for Interleague and the fans. I am sure ticket sales were solid in most series (LA vs. LA, NY vs. NY for instance), but in general, did anyone really care?

When the Mets and Yankees used to play and ESPN would cover it, leading up to the game we were seemingly bombarded with commercials, animations during other games, etc. for weeks. I didn't see any ads for Sunday night's game besides their normal Sunday Night Baseball teasers.

When the Mets and Yankees used to play, the games carried all kinds of weight with them. The teams seemed to hate one another. Roger Clemens used to throw things at people all the time. It was big news!

Last night we went to a sports bar-ish restaurant and where there is one giant tv screen (that can be split into four different channels) with two large TVs on either side and then a few more big TVs scattered around the walls. The big screen was split up and the Mets-Yankees game was on one small portion of it. The other three were NASCAR, ESPN News, and the NFL network and the other two large TVs had ESPN News and the NASCAR.

That's right, the Steelers-Browns game from Week 10 got as much attention at a sports bar as the live Mets-Yankees game. This brought me to three conclusions:

1- Interleague is no longer any different for the casual fan than any other baseball game is. And for the devoted fan, is it really any different either? Was I more interested in this game than a Mets-Braves or Mets-Phillies game? Perhaps a bit, but it is just not as timeless and interesting as it once seemed.

2- The ratings of the 2000 World Series were some of the lowest for a World Series of all time. No one cared about New York playing New York despite that it was one of the more intrigue-filled Series in a long time. If that was the case, then the ratings were last night for a regular season game featuring two teams that were a combined 1-game under .500 must have been horrible.

3- The NFL Network is totally and completely wrong in their argument with the cable companies. NFL Network wants to be given a spot in the basic cable line-ups so they get wider distribution (thus they can sell commercials for much more money). Cable companies say it is a specialty-channel and won't get the wide-spread audience that basic cable channels typically get, so they want to add it to their sports packages (thus shrinking distribution and making commercials less valuable). I am a huge sports fan. I love the NFL. I would basically watch any team play any team on Sundays in the fall and winter. However, besides the eight live NFL games that the network carries, there is absolutely nothing that that channel airs that even I want to watch. They want NFL Network to go on basic cable, which would raise cable rates by the price of a cup of coffee (as the NFL network likes to say). If I don't think it is worth it to pay more for "24 hours per year of live NFL football and about 8,736 hours of filler," then do you think a non-sports/NFL fan would be willing to pay?

The Mets vs. Yankees and the NFL were not the only sporting events this weekend that no one cares about until they mean something.

-The NBA has finally gotten to the Conference Finals (once the Spurs finish off the Hornets tonight) so NBA games will be interesting even in the first quarter now. Isn't it funny that after all the BS of the last seven months, we ended up with the four teams that it was always going to be? This is further proof that the NBA season should be two months long, with only four teams from each Conference making the playoffs.

-The NHL has reached the Stanley Cup...well almost. Detroit roared out to a 3-0 lead but Dallas is now scaring the hell out of them. Dallas now plays at home in game six with a chance to tie it up. Note: when looking for NHL coverage on ESPN.com, even though they are in the most important two weeks of the season, the NHL is listed 10th behind women's basketball, NASCAR, racing (not sure what the different is there), college football (which will start in six months) and general college sports. Ouch.

- Big Brown won the Preakness and made NBC very, very happy because now someone will watch the Belmont in two weeks. No Triple Crown winner since 1978 and now horse racing (in perhaps its darkest hour) may Crown a champion. Never mind that Big Brown is widely considered one of the worst champs racing against easily the worst field in history.

Finally, can we all agree that baseball needs instant replay in the instances of home runs and foul balls? It is a good thing that the Yankees bullpen sucks as bad as it does or I would likely have strangled someone if that Delgado home run-blown call had come back to hurt the Mets.