Winners And Losers In Sports Last Week

Stanley Cup Finals: Detroit Leads 2-0
Winners: Red Wings, my friend Googs, the downtrodden people of Detroit that we were all supposed to support during the NCAA tourney but apparently don't need to worry about anymore since we remembered that Detroit wins the Cup every other year and they don't care about any other sport anyway.
Losers: NBC (Did you know this series is on NBC? No one else does either.), the NHL (the Golden Boy is getting crushed by a faceless red blob)

Rafael Nadal Loses At French Open
Winners: Roger Federer, Captain Fist Pump (aka Andy Murray)
Losers: Fans of Federer-Nadal epics,

Rachel Alexandra Will Not Race In The Belmont Stakes
Winners: People who don't like horse racing and want it to go away
Losers: the Sport of Kings (not only is there no Triple Crown chase, but now there is no Derby/Preakness winner rivalry), whoever is airing the Belmont this weekend

Manny Ramirez Will Be Voted Into All-Star Game (thanks to all this press)
Winners: Manny Ramirez, wig makers, hypodermic needle makers
Losers: Baseball ("we kinda have rules in place to condemn steroid use, but not really"), Raul Ibanez (by far the best overall outfielder in baseball right now, won't be voted in for sure...but will be there).

NBA Finals: Lakers vs. Magic
Winners: Basketball fans (Kobe-LeBron would have been cool, but could you really have watched five or six more games of the Cavs lining up all 11 other players on the bench and watching LeBron hold the ball till there were 5-seconds on the shot clock before making a move?), Adidas (they need to make a commercial where Dwight Howard is the the person holding the strings on those Kobe and LeBron puppets)
Losers: The NBA, Nike, the Lakers (home court: yes, but it is a worse matchup), Cavs fans (sure, he'll still stay in Cleveland with all the help they've managed to get for him over the years...of course!)

Charles Barkley Swearing On The Air
Winners: Fans of the English language because maybe he'll finally be fired
Losers: TNT (the fine can be as high as $500,000 thanks to Janet Jackson's boob)

The Yankees Are Back On Top Of The AL East For The First Time In Two Years
Winners: The Yankees, fans
Losers: Society

College World Series Freakish Box Scores
Winners: Florida State, Texas, fans of amazing hitting, fans of amazing pitching
Losers: Ohio State (lost 37-6...in baseball), BC (lost 3-2 in a 25 inning game that featured 28 consecutive batters being retired)

Soccer Team Beats Other Soccer Team
Winners: Fans of whichever team won that big game last week
Losers: Bar-hopping fans of the team that won who were subsequently crashed into by a bus driver who was angry with them because he is a fan of the other team

Some Kid Won A Spelling Bee
Winners: No one
Losers: Everyone who watches this every year and is subjected to not only a freaking spelling bee, but also the desperate, clumsy, and obnoxious phony mannerisms and attention grabs by these painfully socially awkward young people

Simona Halep Is Getting A Breast Reduction To Help Her Tennis Career
Winners: No one
Losers: Society

Donald Sterling To Be Honored By NAACP For Longtime Help Of Minority Youth
Winners: Donald Sterling, minority youth
Losers: Elgin Baylor (who is suing Sterling for wrongful termination in part because he claims Sterling is a racist), socially conscious people who try to avoid using archaic and offensive racial epithets by accident but still have to say "colored people" because of the NAACP

Clippers Win NBA Draft Lottery
Winners: The Clippers, fans (all 4 of us)
Losers: Blake Griffin

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.

Hard To Keep My Eyes Open For The French Open

I have been working for the Tennis Channel on their coverage of the French Open, so I have seen a lot of tennis. During this time, I have not really been all that entertained...of course our live coverage starts at 2 a.m. because France is stupid and doesn't go by Pacific Standard Time, so that may be contributing to my sleepiness.

Maybe it is the same old generational bias thing (even though these players are my generation), but only one of the matches has been very interesting. Granted, we are not even to the quarterfinals yet, but there are no players who are really all that captivating. There is no must-see player. Roger Federer is great, but he is like a surgeon - it is a science out there and he just methodically puts his opponents to bed. Rafa Nadal is much more fiery, but I can't watch him and his clothes for two hours. He also plays at a slower pace than John Kruk working his way through a buffet line. Nikolay Davydenko is pretty fun to watch, and Novak Djokovic is very entertaining, but then there is no one else really.

The Americans are just depressing. Andy Roddick is unwatchable. James Blake, Robby Ginepri and Mardy Fish are just never going to get over the hump. Watching them play and thinking about how 10 years ago we had Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi makes it even sadder.

And the women are just as bad. This is supposedly a great time for women's tennis and while I could have watched Sunday's Ana Ivanovic-Petra Cetkovska match all day long, it isn't necessarily for the tennis. Justin Henin, one of the more graceful athletes and champions you will ever see retired at the ripe old age of 26 last month. Maria Sharapova is a fantastic player but listening to her is like hearing a puppy rolled down a hill in a bag. To say the least, I was not sad to see her lose today, and actually you can say the same of most players on tour (men and women). The Williams sisters are just as implosive as always, but they are not as good as they used to be. Venus is whithering away and will soon look more like Pluto (get it? Cuz Pluto is small?) and Serena looks like she is on the same diet as Andruw Jones. I cannot distinguish (or easily pronounce) all of the -Ovas and while there is some good talent spread around, the fact that the average fan can't remember who any of them are is telling. None of them is all that interesting (the exception being Ivanovic or course). After all, the biggest news in tennis this week was that American Ashley Harkleroad is posing for Playboy, not anything that happened on the clay.

That said, there is nothing better than the meltdowns that occur regularly on tennis courts. Tennis, like most sports, is very mental. But unlike many sports, the players are completely on their own and there is no helmet to hide behind. There is a lot of dead time and there are a lot of cameras. Dinara Safina almost went supernova this morning in her match against Sharapova when she lost four straight games after they returned to the court after an hour-and-a-half rain delay. Safina (famed for her emotions being very clear, to say the least) had already taken a warning for "racket abuse" because she had slammed her racket to ground, breaking it during the first set tie-breaker.

In a stunning turn of events, Safina composed herself, stormed back into the match, defended a match point in the second set to come back and win a tiebreaker, and then bull-rushed Sharapova in the third set to win 6-3. If Safina can keep from erupting and turn it all that emotion into whatever she turned it into today, she is a sure-fire Grand Slam champion.

All that said, tennis still makes for spectacular drama and wonderful television. It is easy to choose sides because you always wind up not liking one of the players even if you'd never heard of them before. For instance, the French men with their mediocre play but constant fist pumps make them eminently hate-able, to say nothing of their whining or frequent surrenders.