As a general rule, if you don't work for the Onion, it's best to stay away from parodies. Sports parodies, especially, can be treacherous. But as a colleague who sent me a link to one story from eTrueSports.com observed, the site's article about Lou Dobbs, the border fence and the NBA is actually pretty funny.
From the story:
The news that the NBA’s percentage of Mexican-born players plunged from 2% in 2008 to 1% in 2009, was hailed by CNN television personality Lou Dobbs as proof of the efficacy of tall border fences.
“Mexicans can’t jump,” said Dobbs, a longtime anti-immigration activist, who attributed the new, higher fences along the Mexican border for the reduction of Mexican players in the NBA.
I'll leave a few jokes to the parody itself -- just know that President Obama makes an appearance, too, and it's pretty great. But I did have to share my favorite part of the story, which I like because, based on my experience, it rings very true:
An emotional CNN spokesman, when Dobbs' statement was read to him by a reporter, said, "Oh no, not again," before abruptly ending the telephone interview. CNN is currently last in cable network news ratings.
3:05 p.m. PDT Ah, well, it didn't work out for East Tennessee State. The Panthers had just enough No. 1 mojo to take control of the game down the stretch and win 72-62. It was the closest 1-vs.-16 game since 1997, the last time a 1-seed failed to beat a 16 by double digits.
The good news around here is that I actually picked the upset that did happen in the second batch of games, No. 11 Dayton over No. 6 West Virginia in the Midwest. The Flyers took that one 68-60. In the other two games, No. 3 Missouri fought off a first-half challenge by No. 14 Cornell for an easy 78-59 win in the West and Arizona State overcame an off day by its best player, James Harden, to beat the one-man team Dionte Christmas -- who plays under the name Temple -- 66-57.
A pretty swingin' day of basketball so far. No upsets for the ages, but almost-upsets are almost as good. Upsets for the ages wouldn't be for the ages without the almosts. And it's nice when those middle of the bracket games, the ones between teams that don't have much better odds of winning the Tournament than North Dakota State or Stephen F. Austin, turn out to be good ones, as today's Tennessee-Oklahoma State and Utah State-Marquette games were.
Breaktime now. Two more sets of games in prime time. Morehead State will meet Louisville and try to keep the losing streak of 16-seeds from reaching 100. And don't miss Cleveland State, the 13-seed in the Midwest, against No. 4 Wake Forest. The Vikings' wins over Indiana and St. Joe's, bringing them to the Sweet 16 as a 14-seed in 1986, helped put the NCAA Tournament Cinderella run on our cultural map.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend's games.
1:35 p.m. PDT East Tennessee State -- famous in my house as the team my son Buster picked to go all the way a few years ago -- is giving Pittsburgh all it can handle. The Buccaneers are the latest 16th seed trying to win a game for the first time ever.
From here, and I'm doing that same thing of trying to watch four games at once and not really getting the whole story of any of them, it looks like the Panthers are vastly superior, as you might expect, but they just aren't working that hard.
Pitt's Jermaine Dixon had a runout a few moments ago. He was all alone downcourt with one defender. He missed the layup, and all the other players on the floor were so slow getting there that Dixon was able to get his own rebound on a bounce. A few seconds later the other four East Tennessee State players arrived, and there were still no white uniforms in sight.
After that, Levance Fields of Pittsburgh had an easy layup, but he went up soft and a streaking Greg Hamlin swooped in from behind and swatted the ball away.
It's a story as old as sports. The heavy favorites think they have an easy win. They figure they throw their jocks out on the floor and there shouldn't be a problem. The big underdogs play their hearts out, hang close, start to believe, and next thing you know it's a real fight. Most of the time, the favored team is able to wake up, go on a run -- it's often late in the first half, as noted earlier -- and take care of business. But once in a while, the underdog can keep the magic going for 40 minutes.
It's never happened for a 16-seed in 98 tries since the Tournament went to a 64-team format, including the two games yesterday.
Funny thing about things that have never happened, though. Once they happen, it's not true anymore.
Thirteen and a half to go. Pitt by one.
12 noon PDT That was fantastic. The kind of moment I think about when I think about watching the NCAA Tournament.
North Dakota State gave a valiant effort but didn't force Kansas to the wire, finally falling by 10. Still, I don't know what else is going on in Fargo tonight, but those guys ought to get a hell of a welcome home.
The other two, though, roaring to the final buzzer a few minutes apart, were thrillers. This column was frantically clicking between the games, and so was CBS. It was a game of hide and seek there for a minute.
Byron Eaton of Oklahoma State decided the game against Tennessee with a great drive and score, and one, with 6.7 seconds to go to give the Cowboys a 77-75 lead. Tennessee had a look at a 3-pointer in the final seconds, but it didn't go.
I think those 8-vs.-9 games, which the TV guys always say are great matchups because, hey look, they're so evenly matched, are mostly dogs. They tend to match mediocre also-rans from big conferences, teams that would be seeded well into the double digits if they had the exact same talent and results but played in smaller leagues.
Oklahoma State-Tennessee fit that description. Neither is in the top 25. The Cowboys finished in a four-way tie for fourth in the Big 12. The Volunteers tied South Carolina for the lead in the SEC East, but overall their 10-6 record was in a three-way tie for second best in a very down league. The SEC's best team, LSU, is also only an 8-seed, and is ranked 21st in the nation.
But mediocre also-rans from big conferences can stage a humdinger every now and again too, and these two did.
Utah State rallied, took the lead, fell behind, then fell just short in another late rally, losing by one to Marquette thanks to a get-'em-close 3-pointer at the buzzer. A 3-pointer by Pooh Williams of Utah State with 23 seconds to go brought the Aggies to within two, and it would have been one of those indelible Tournament moments if Utah State had found a way to win. He picked up a loose ball, turned and fired. It banked in.
One more thing I liked in the last hour. Late in the North Dakota-Kansas game, Jayhawks guard Sherron Collins was walking the ball upcourt slowly, burning some clock, and CBS's Gus Johnson said, "Collins taxis into the front court."
11:25 a.m. I am loving this! A classic Tournament hour. Kansas has pulled away a bit from North Dakota State, but it's still a single-digit game. Meanwhile Utah State and Marquette have been nip and tuck, with the Aggies just now going on a run to take the lead, 49-46 at this writing.
For most of their second halves, those two games and Oklahoma State-Tennessee have been within five points, and within two minutes of each other. I wish I could tell you exactly what's been happening in each of these games but I've been flipping back and forth and forth and back among them and I have only an impressionistic view of all three.
I hadn't noticed this until Utah State started burying 3-pointers and the crowd in Boise went bananas, but the Aggies, an 11-seed, have gotten a geographical break similar to North Dakota State's. From Logan, Utah, to Boise is only 300 miles.
Hang on, triple fantastic finish could be coming. At least a double. Tennessee and Oklahoma State are tied.
10:45 a.m. PDT Forget everything I just said! The Aggies and the -- looks it up again -- Bison! Go Bison! have both come out strong in the second half. For the moment, three close games!
Wait, that's too many. I can't keep up with three games at the same time, can you?
10:25 a.m. PDT Tennessee and Oklahoma State are playing a pretty good, if entirely too orange, game in Dayton. At the half it's 38-34 Oklahoma State. There's a decent chance that as the four second halves of this first set of games progress, the Vols and Cowboys will be the only close game.
Syracuse is beating up on Stephen F. Austin, 38-22 at the half. North Dakota State -- Go Bison! -- is hanging around with Kansas, though the Bison are living by the three -- they're 7-for-13 so far -- which tends not to last for 40 minutes, though you never know because sometimes it does. North Dakota State also has one player Kansas can't stop, which is even less sustainable. But in the meantime, Ben Woodside has been fun to watch.
Kansas went on a little run at the end of the first half, which overdogs tend to do. The underdog will hang around for most of a first half, and then, bing-bang, the favorite will put together a quick little run and that close game will all of a sudden be a 10-point margin at the break, and it takes the wind out of the underdog's sails. The Jayhawks' lead is 43-34. Let's see how NDSU responds in the second half.
Marquette, the 6-seed in the West, was expected to struggle without injured point guard Dominic James. The Golden Eagles are a dismal 1-5 since James broke his foot, including the game in which he got hurt in the opening minutes. But Marquette's held on to a solid lead over No. 11 Utah State for the entire first half. It's 26-18 at the half.
I know I said Oklahoma State-Tennessee has a decent chance to be the only close game over the next hour, but I wouldn't stray too far from Utah State-Marquette.
9:40 a.m. PDT A pair of 14-seeds are up in the early set of games as the NCAA Tournament's second day begins.
Stephen F. Austin -- that's a whole team, not just one guy -- is up first, and the Lumberjacks have quickly fallen behind No. 3 Syracuse in a South region game in Miami. A 3-vs.-14 game in the Midwest has the North Dakota State Bison -- had to look it up -- challenging Kansas in Minneapolis.
The Bison get a break here, and of course they need it. The NCAA's pod system puts high seeds close to home whenever possible, and while actual home games aren't allowed, there are a lot of quasi-home games in the first two rounds. Villanova playing in Philadelphia, for example. North Carolina and Duke in Greensboro. Even Washington in Portland.
There are first-round games being played in Kansas City, which is reachable from the KU campus on a county bus, but the Jayhawks have had to travel to Minneapolis, a day-long drive from Lawrence but only four hours from North Dakota State's campus. That's in Fargo. Had to look that up.
Jayhawks travel for basketball, so Kansas figures to have its share of support, but a game-opening 3-pointer by Mike Nelson revealed the Bison have a solid contingent in the Metrodome. That figures. Not only is it a fairly short drive, but, as CBS's Len Elmore points out, a lot of NDSU grads llive in the Twin Cities.
Kansas' first bucket, a jumper by Cole Aldrich, drew only a tepid cheer. Of course all the neutrals in the building are rooting for the underdog, but it's sounding like North Dakota State is benefiting from its first-ever Tournament game being so close to home.
Approaching the first media timeout, the Bison are hitting their threes and they're up 11-10. Not so good for Stephen F. Austin. they trail Syracuse 18-4.
4:10 p.m. PDT Not much to recommend that Washington-Mississippi State game that just ended except a 10-point, 15-rebound, one-spectacular fall performance by Jon Brockman. The Huskies won by 13, which is about how much they led by for the entire second half.
Not much in the way of upsets so far. I refuse to consider a 9-over-8 an upset, so Texas A&M over BYU doesn't count. Tenth-seed Maryland beat No. 7 Cal, which is officially an upset but didn't much look like one, and 10-over-7 usually isn't really one anyway.
I can drag out my well-worn theory here that a difference of three or four seeds in the middle of the bracket, a 7 vs. a 10 or an 8 vs. a 12, that sort of thing, is nothing. It has more to do with the biases of the Selection Committee and the small sample size of a season than the actual quality of the teams.
But I'm not going to do that.
The evening games offer some upset chances. A lot of people have Western Kentucky over Illinois in the South as their token 12-over-5 upset, and a few have No. 13 Akron, also in the South, over No. 4 Gonzaga.
While you're waiting for the third set of games to get going, read this terrific post by my friend Jonah Keri, "The Legacy of Gonzaga, Adam Morrison, and Gus Johnson." By way of reviewing Gonzaga's decade-long run as a major Tournament player, he pays cockeyed tribute to my favorite announcer. With clips. Oh, baby!
I'll take my leave of you for now. We'll talk about the evening games later.
3:10 p.m. PDT I asked if it's my imagination or if 1-vs.-16 games have become less competitive in recent years. After a quick look at the last 10 Tournaments, I have to say it's not my imagination. In the last three years, those 1-16 games have been a lot more lopsided than they had been.
But they only had been less lopsided for two years, 2005 and 2006. What was a figment of my imagination was that the top seeds' opening games had been fairly competitive for most of this decade. Not true. It's been blowout city all along, except in '05 and '06.
Today's 1-16 games had victory margins of 43 and 56 points. North Carolina's 103-47 win over Chattanooga, by the way, was the first 50-point win by a No. 1 seed over a 16 since 1998, when Kansas beat Prairie View 110-52.
That means this will be the third straight year in which at least two of the 1-16 games had margins of 20 or more points, and it still could be the third straight year with 20-point margins in all four games. In both 2005 and '06, only one of the four 1-16 games had a 20-point margin. Those were the only years since 1999 when fewer than two of these games were decided by 20 or more, and there was only one other year, 2002, when as few as two games were so lopsided.
The average margin of victory in 1-vs.-16 games from 1999 to 2003 was at least 24.25 points every year, and twice it was more than 30 points. In 2004 it fell to 22.5 points, then to 15.5 in 2005 and 16.5 in 2006. But it was back up to 31.25 in 2007 and 32 points last year. This year, it'll be at least 30 points unless the total margin of victory in the remaining two games is fewer than 21 points. There have been 42 1-vs.-16 games played since 1999, and no two of them have a combined margin of victory fewer than 21 points.
The last time a No. 1 failed to win its opening game by at double figures was in 1997, when North Carolina beat Fairfield 82-74.
So what does all that mean?
It means that Mike Montgomery is part of a devious Stanford conspiracy against my Golden Bears.
In the only game going right now, Washington is pulling away from Mississippi State early in the second half. Washington's a good team.
2:10 p.m. PDT So I've been off playing fanboy, watching my sturdy Golden Bears play the Terps, and it's been a pretty dismal affair. That's partly because Maryland just closed out a solid win and mostly because it was kind of a dreary ballgame.
Now here's another way the NCAA Tournament is just like America: I'm looking around for someone to blame. Give me a few minutes here and I'll have a conspiracy theory worked up that has to do with Cal's coach, Mike Montgomery, still being loyal to his old employer, Stanford.
Chattanooga's early surge against UConn didn't exactly sustain itself. At this writing, the Huskies lead by 54. North Carolina struggled to a 101-58 win over Radford. That game was over so quickly I didn't even have time to look up where Radford is. Virginia, is what I would have found.
Is it my imagination, or are 1-vs.-16 games becoming less competitive in recent years? I don't remember so many 40- and 50-point games in the late '90s and early '00s, but lately they've become common.
Maybe I'll do a little research on that question while I watch this West region game between No. 4 Washington, champs of my home conference, the Pac 10, and No. 13 Mississippi State.
See? We work even while we're watching basketball, we Americans. That's productivity.
12:15 p.m. PDT Thanks mostly to Roburt Sallie's 35 points, Memphis held off Northridge State 81-70, so the big upset didn't materialize in the first flight of games.
Butler over LSU in a 9-over-8 in the South wouldn't have been an upset, but it always feels like one when a smaller conference team beats a BCS school, even when they're evenly matched. That didn't happen either, the Tigers hanging on for the 75-71 win. BYU never got its act together against Texas A&M and lost 79-66. That one was a BCS 9 over a smaller conference 8, but it felt a little more like an upset because who expected BYU to look so overmatched in that game?
So we soldier on to the next run of games, in search of our first upset. This is what we do during the first two days of the Tournament. We watch for upsets and any other close, exciting games. Upsets are almost always close and exciting.
We also watch our own team play, if we're lucky, and this column's lucky this year. The real alma mater, California, seeded seventh in the West, goes up against No. 10 Maryland in this set of games. The others are 5 Purdue vs. 12 Northern Iowa in the West, an upset pick for me but going the Boilermakers' way early; and the first two 1-vs.-16 games of the Tourney, North Carolina-Radford in the South and UConn-Chattanooga in the West.
The Huskies announced shortly before game time that coach Jim Calhoun would miss this game because of a health issue. He's reportedly at the team hotel, but the school isn't saying exactly what's wrong. He's had some gastric issues for several years and sometimes misses games.
In 1954 an academic named Jacques Barzun famously wrote, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball," and we baseball fans love to quote that, even though for all we know Barzun was a complete idiot and while this country's heart and soul might or might not be a constant since 1954 its leisure interests have most certainly changed, and if baseball knowledge were necessary to know the heart and soul of America in 1954 -- a dubious idea -- it's almost certainly not necessary today.
"American Idol" maybe. The NFL perhaps. But not baseball.
And maybe you can see where I'm going with this. Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better pay attention to the NCAA Tournament.
Which is nonsense, of course. Complete doo-doo, as a favorite history professor of mine at Cal -- there's the tip! Go Bears! -- used to say abouut some theory or other. But I wonder if there's something to the idea that you can learn a little something, or a lot something, about our heart and soul, maybe even our liver, by cozying up to the NCAA Tournament, especially the first round.
We love our underdogs, of course. Have I mentioned Andrew Leonard's great "National underdog days" in Salon in 2001? We love our underdogs, but we mostly bet on the favorites. And we don't really squawk much when the deck is stacked in their favor, which the NCAA Tournament does by letting high seeds play early-round games close to home.
We bet a lot.
We become absolutely fascinated by something because it's right in front of us. All of a sudden, we're huge fans of ... Cal State Northridge! We don't know where it is! We mix it up with Fullerton, or is it San Luis Obispo! But we're living and -- oh! He fouled him! The refs are in the bag! -- these guys for an hour or so if they get up in the grill of some high seed. We become experts on them. That No. 3 guy. He's got to stop going to his left like that. He can't go left! Why doesn't he know that?
Of course we've never seen No. 3 before in our lives and for all we know his friends call him "Lefty" because he goes to his left so well. But we saw him go to his left twice and not score, and we know. He should listen to us.
And we're going to forget No. 3's name 10 minutes after this game's over and never give him another thought. We don't much care what you used to do. We care about what you're doing right now.
We use the Tournament as an excuse to get together, to party, to sluff off at work. But we also work really hard. We work extra hours to make up for our -- ahem -- lost productivity. Maybe we check in on a few basketball games we shouldn't on Thursday and Friday, but how many of us are trying to catch up on Saturday and Sunday, doing a little work on the side when, goshdarnit, we should be concentrating on basketball.?
Our hearts and our souls are a little too complicated to be boiled down to how you'd best get to know this or that game to understand them. But maybe you don't get the full picture without knowing a little bit about baseball, about "American Idol" and the NFL, and certainly about the NCAA Tournament.
I could go further with this theory, but Cal has rallied from a bad start, Radford is hanging in against Carolina, and -- Chattanooga! The Mocs! I didn't even have to look that up! They've got the lead! It's 6-4!
10:55 a.m. PDT Matadors! Northridge -- my alma mater! OK, shut up -- have pulled ahead of Memphis in the middle of the second half. Mark Hill's 3-pointer put the Matadors on top 44-43. Following a Memphis timeout, a Hill assist led to a bucket that gave Northridge a 46-43 lead.
What would it do to your bracket if we got the first 15 over 2 since Hampton beat Iowa State in 2001?
10:30 a.m. Halftime times three. Why don't they stagger those starts by more than five minutes? There are 16 games going on today. Why should there ever be down time?
Northridge is hanging in there against Memphis, though I'm not confident for my alma mater. They trail by three. BYU, outside my vision because I got tired of shielding my eyes, has semi-rallied to pull within 12 of Texas A&M. LSU leads Butler by six.
I should mention that I'm not going to try to fool you into thinking I have any expertise on the 2008-09 college basketball season. This season has largely passed me by. I was shocked to find out that UNLV didn't make the Tournament. Don't they win the championship every year?
Just kidding. But I'm approaching the Tournament the same way most people do -- as a person suddenly paying a radical amount of attention to college basketball after having been no more than a casual fan all year.
This moment of full disclosure dispensed with, can we start those second halves please?
10 a.m. PDT Cal-State Northridge is giving Memphis hell in Kansas City. The No. 15 Matadors jumped off to a big lead but the No. 2 Tigers pulled even before I could even do any crowing: My alma mater!
That was a little personal in-joke anyway. I'm not a Northridge alum. I just like to say that because I went to a weekend journalism seminar there when I was in high school. But the joke's on me: That seminar was at Cal State-Fullerton, not Northridge. Who can tell the difference?
Memphis has a 26-22 lead with about eight minutes to go after a big dunk by Matador Kenny Daniels -- from St. Louis. Hey, he's my homeboy, sort of. I'm just looking for connections wherever I can find them.
Butler has righted the ship somewhat but still trails LSU 22-18. BYU is getting blown out by Texas A&M, and it's not looking flukey. The Cougars are playing terrible ball.
9:25 a.m. PDT Sweet Bud Light commercial there with the skier crashing down the slope, thanks to the tree that the Bud Light guy drew onto the mountainside with his finger.
It's not like one of the biggest news stories in the country today is a famous actress having died after a ski accident or anything.
So one of my few "upset" picks -- not that a 9 over an 8 is an upset -- is off to a great start. LSU 9, Butler 0.
9:10 a.m. PDT This column is ready for duty, primed to watch Day 1 of the NCAA Tournament so you don't have to, though let's face it: You're going to.
So let's get a few things taken care of right off the bat. The most true thing ever written by anybody about anything, and yes I'm including all those old Greek dudes and Thomas Jefferson and whoever came up with that thing about beans being the magical fruit, was Andrew Leonard's 2001 piece in Salon headlined "National underdog days," in which Leonard argued that the first two days of the Tournament should be holidays in the United States. I link to it every year, so there you go.
"It's an insult to working men and women to have one of the most exciting 48-hour stretches of sports off-limits to us poor sods who have to pay fealty to evil capitalist overlords," Leonard wrote.
Put that man in charge of the Fed. Or at least make him president.
Another thing I like to do is point out the absurdity of the annual publicity-stunt claim by a Chicago consulting firm that the NCAA Tournament costs American business some tremendous and entirely fictional amount of money. Challenger Gray & Christmas gets its name in the paper -- sorry, its name in the blogosphere nowdays -- with this stuff every year, and good for Challenger Gray. I admire the ability to get mentioned and am happy to support it.
The main thing this publicity does for Challenger Gray is let potential clients know that the firm is comfortable with shoddy analysis based on faulty assumptions, and that's giving the company the benefit of the doubt that it doesn't just invent facts to lead to the conclusions it thinks will best benefit Challenger Gray.
Hire away, American corporations! These guys can really help.
The short version of what Challenger Gray does: It uses some old survey to guess at how many college basketball fans there are and how much time per Tournament day basketball fans say they devote to the Tournament. Then it multiplies that number by the number of days men's and women's Tournament games are played on, even though there are only two days in the whole thing when games are played during normal business hours. And then it multiplies that absurdly inflated number by the average hourly wage and, presto, a figure for the amount of money lost by American business.
Oh, by the way, this calculation assumes that no American worker ever wastes a single minute, all year, except on the NCAA Tournament.
OK, that wasn't short. Challenger Gray's lost productivity figure swung from $889.6 million to $3.8 billion and back down to $1.2 billion in the space of three consecutive years from 2005 to 2007. Just to give you an idea of the rigor here.
But never mind that. We're ready for basketball. I've decided to go with a boring bracket this season. My son Buster, the coin-flippinest 6-year-old who ever thought he was a rock star, has a much more interesting bracket than mine, though we both come to the same conclusion: Pittsburgh over Louisville in the Championship Game.
Here's what I have. In the Midwest, my only first-round upset is 11 Dayton over 6 West Virginia. In the second round I have all favorites except 7 Boston College over 2 Michigan State. Louisville over Kansas in the regional final.
In the West I have my token 12-5 upset, Northern Iowa over Purdue. I also have 11 Utah State over 6 Marquette, but then the bracket resolves to the top four teams making the Sweet 16. How could I resist the Huskies vs. the Huskies and the Tigers vs. the Tigers in the regional semis? I've got No. 2 Memphis beating the top seed, UConn, in the final.
In the East I'm taking 11 Virginia Commonwealth over 6 UCLA, only because I always pick against UCLA if a Bruins loss is plausible. I was born there. Paging Dr. Freud. I have 10 Minnesota beating 7 Texas. A minor upset in the second round, 5 Florida State over 4 Xavier, and then 3 Villanova over 2 Duke in the regional semi before Pitt takes the region.
In the South I've got 9 Butler over 8 LSU and 10 Michigan over 7 Clemson. I'm going with a 6-3 upset in the second round, Arizona State over Syracuse. And then North Carolina over Oklahoma in the final.
So my Final Four is Louisville over Memphis and Pitt over UNC, with Pitt winning the title. If I'm not entered in your pool, just send me the money.
Buster has Missouri, his home-state team, making a Final Four run out of the West, where he had them beating Cal in the Sweet 16. Dad has his own alma mater losing in the second round. Even better than that, though, he has Clemson making a shocker of a run out of the South, knocking off Gonzaga in the regional final.
Butler-LSU, Cal State Northridge-Memphis and Texas A&M-BYU are all bouncing balls around, about to tip off. Let's go.
We seem to have a little trend going in the field of sports history. For all I know it reflects a broader movement in letters, but I don't get out much so I don't know. But it's clearly in vogue to identify a single ballgame and claim that the rush of history pivoted upon it. Or at least that the game in question was, without question, the greatest game ever.
Until it's time to write the next book, I guess.
So just in the last week or so the mail has brought "When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball," Seth Davis' book about the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird NCAA title matchup in 1979, and "The Best Game Ever: Pirates 10, Yankees 9: October 13, 1960," Jim Reisler's tome about the World Series Game 7 that ended on Bill Mazeroski's home run.
Those have been tossed on the pile with "The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78" by Richard Bradley and my DVD copy of ESPN's recent "Greatest Game Ever Played," about the 1958 NFL Championship Game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants.
I want to make it clear I'm not commenting on the quality of any of these things. I haven't read any of the books and haven't seen the movie.
But as a historian -- at least that's what professor Hitchcock used to call us sophomores during his lectures -- I'm not pleased by this apparent embrace of a kind of Great Man Theory, the idea that history is made not by an incredibly complex interaction of trends, events and circumstances but by the dynamic actions of one great man. Or in this case, one great game.
It's the idea that NFL football didn't become our biggest sport in the last quarter of the 20th century because it played beautifully on the emerging medium of television, was marketed and organized brilliantly starting in the early '60s, jibed better with Americans' postwar tastes and internal rhythms than the more languorous, formerly ascendant baseball, had a vibrant minor league system with a passionate fan base feeding it already famous talent at no cost and a host of other reasons.
No, the NFL conquered the American sports scene because the Colts and Giants played an overtime humdinger at Yankee Stadium in December of '58. If they'd played a 9-3 dog we'd all be watching badminton or something on winter Sundays.
And good thing Joe Namath and the New York Jets beat the Colts in the Super Bowl 10 years later. The NFL might not have kept growing without that. Without Magic and Larry, the NCAA Tournament would be on C-Span today.
Now I realize titles are more likely to come from marketing departments than from authors. These people are trying to sell books and "The Greatest Game Ever" or "The Game That Changed Everything" has a better chance of catching the public's attention than "A Really Interesting Game That Happened One Day."
I must not be the only one who's not comfortable with all the superlatives. The only cover blurb the publisher, Da Capo Press, chose for the front of the paperback edition of "The Best Game Ever" is by Bob Costas. Here it is:
"One of the most memorable games in World Series history."
Well, either that or it was the best game ever.
Last week's bad economic news included fresh evidence that the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) is taking on water. The league's mandate that teams cut their rosters from 13 to 11 players follows the demise of the four-time championship Houston Comets, once the WNBA's most dominant team, this past December. "The way I figure it, the overall reductions -- the 13 spots lost when Houston folded, plus two more cuts from each of the 13 remaining teams -- means that there are 39 less spots in the league," says one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history, Sylvia Hatchell of the University of North Carolina.
It's terrible news whenever any organization eliminates 20 percent of its workforce and people suddenly find themselves unemployed in a weak economy. But as the WNBA struggles, and if it folds, it's taking along something else with it: the hopes of the first generation of Title IX-era female athletes who went through high school and college thinking they might someday actually be able to make a living playing a professional team sport.
The WNBA currently represents the only significant women's professional team sports franchise in the U.S. (The Women's United Soccer Association failed after only three seasons, in 2003, and women's football and softball have never taken off, despite several attempts.) And its inception in 1996 changed the scene for aspiring women athletes.
"For me personally, knowing that the WNBA was there as a possibility made a difference in my goal setting as a high school student, my work ethic as a college athlete and my fulfillment as a professional athlete," says Kara Lawson, 26, who chose to pursue basketball over soccer after the WNBA's inception during her sophomore year of high school. Lawson was one of coach Pat Summitt's stars at the University of Tennessee prior to being picked fifth in the 2003 WNBA draft, and is now a point guard for the 2005 WNBA championship Sacramento Monarchs, as well as an analyst for ESPN. (Lawson also won a gold medal in the most recent Olympics as part of Team USA.) While grimly noting that the roster cuts mean that one in five WNBA players will lose their jobs, Lawson also spoke about its negative effect on the developmental side of the league. "A lot of your 12th and 13th players are young players who have the potential but need a couple of years to learn the professional game. Now you don't have the luxury of seeing if someone can get in shape or work on their jump shot or get used to the speed of the game."
Of course the flip side of that equation is the pressure the roster cuts put on older and better paid players. "Our players get the message that making a roster won't be easy and they'll likely have to beat out a veteran player to do so," says coach Brenda Frese of the University of Maryland Lady Terrapins, the 2006 NCAA champions.
It seems quaint to point out that competing for so few spots at one another's expense isn't necessarily a boon for sisterhood. But even the biggest cynic should consider what the need to stand out from the pack will do to a game that's currently distinguished by qualities that are too often missing from the NBA as athletes vie for the biggest contracts and sponsorship deals: teamwork, passing, strategy and defense.
None of the people I spoke with thought the game was over yet for the WNBA. I wish I could share their optimism.
What I think about a lot these days are the high hopes that attended the kickoff of the WNBA's first season in the summer of 1997 at the peak of the Internet bubble. There was a big marketing campaign and clever prime-time TV spot commercials that introduced Lisa Leslie of the L.A. Sparks, Rebecca Lobo of the N.Y. Liberty, and Sheryl Swoopes of the Houston Comets as the league's marquee players. Swoopes, often referred to as "the female Michael Jordan" (she wore his number, 22), even became the first woman basketball player to have Nike name a shoe after her. Talk about high achievers. Swoopes helped lead the Comets to their four consecutive championships from 1997-2000, was voted the league's most valuable player in 2000, 2002 and 2005, and is a three-time Olympic gold medalist. She's widely considered one of the great athletes of her time.
But because of WNBA salary caps -- $772,000 for an entire team in 2008 -- Swoopes never earned more than $97,500 for an entire four-month season. (By contrast, the NBA 2008-09 salary cap has been set at $58.68 million per team; the rookie picked 30th in the NBA is paid $797,600 for his season.) Just this past Saturday, two days after the WNBA announced the roster cutbacks, Swoopes, now nearing 38, was waived from her most recent team (the Seattle Storm), likely signaling the end of her professional basketball career.
And possibly the end of an era for the rest of us as well.
Years from now, 2008 will probably be remembered as the year of an economic collapse so severe that even the usually recession-proof world of North American sports felt it. The NFL laid people off. That doesn't happen most years.
But for most of 2008, living through it, even as housing prices fell and the recession gathered, the sports year didn't feel like the Year of the Crash. Most of 2008 seemed to be about big sports stories actually living up to their hype.
It started with the New England Patriots chasing an undefeated season. They'd ended 2007 by winning an epic regular-season finale over the New York Giants, and a month later lined up as heavy favorites in the Super Bowl against the same team. Giants quarterback Eli Manning engineered a late touchdown drive that gave New York a stunning victory.
The highlight, Manning spinning away from the grasp of the Patriots pass rush, sprinting to the sideline and heaving the ball downfield, where David Tyree trapped the ball against his helmet and hung on while the great safety Rodney Harrison wrestled with him, was the signature football moment of the year and, so far, of the century. It might have been the single greatest play in Super Bowl history.
Like that, is how 2008 was. A series of breathtaking did you see thats destined to become do you remembers.
Swimmer Michael Phelps set out to win eight gold medals in the Beijing Olympics and succeeded. His seventh gold, tying Mark Spitz's record for one Games, was in the 100-meter butterfly. Trailing badly at the turn and still behind Serbian Milorad Cavic one body length from the wall, he somehow made up the distance on the last stroke, touching one-hundredth of a second before Cavic.
And that wasn't even the most electrifying moment of the Games. That honor belonged, pun and all, to Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who didn't just win the men's 100- and 200-meter gold medals, the first to do so since Carl Lewis in 1984, he did it in cartoonish, world-record-setting fashion and with a sparkling personality -- which drew fire from the International Olympic Committee's idiotic chieftain, Jacques Rogge.
Bolt was so rattled by Rogge's inanity that he went out and helped Jamaica win the four-by-100 gold, also in world-record time.
American Dara Torres became the first woman over 40 to swim in the Olympics and the first to swim in five of them, all the more remarkable because the five, dating to 1984, weren't consecutive. She won two silver medals in relays and another in the 50-meter freestyle, losing to gold medal-winner Britta Steffen by a Phelpsian hundredth of a second. "I'm thinking," she said afterward, "I shouldn't have filed my nails last night."
Overall the Olympics failed to live up to the hype in one good way. After a few American athletes were censured for arriving with masks on to filter out the pollution, fears of athletes being overcome by Beijing's horrible air quality were not realized. American television viewers, however, were nearly suffocated by NBC's ceaseless broadcasting of synchronized diving and beach volleyball.
In between, glimpses were caught of the U.S. men and women winning basketball gold, and the usual drama in the gymnastics arena. China dominated the men's competition and won the women's team all-around, but Americans Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson went gold-silver in the individual all-around, and Johnson, a darling of the pre-Games buildup, won gold on the balance beam.
The Euro 2008 soccer tournament lived up to its billing thanks in large part to a thrilling underdog run by Turkey, which staged dramatic comebacks against Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Croatia before falling to Germany in the semifinals. Spain, an exciting, attacking team -- two concepts often lacking in international soccer -- beat Germany for the cup.
Kansas guard Mario Chalmers hit a 3-pointer in the final seconds to cap a Jayhawks comeback against Memphis in the NCAA men's basketball Tournament Championship Game, forcing an overtime, which Kansas dominated for the title.
That finished off a Tournament that was outstanding even by its own high standards, with just enough upsets to make it interesting and a deep run by an exciting -- and underseeded -- No. 10, Davidson, but the best teams were left standing at the end. The Final Four was the first ever to feature all four top seeds.
In the women's Tournament, the sport's colossus, Tennessee, won yet another title, led by Candace Parker, the game's best player. Parker was taken first in the WNBA draft by the Los Angeles Sparks, scored 34 points in her first game, and went on to be named Rookie of the Year. Now that's living up to the hype.
The Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers spent the 2007-08 season threatening to renew their old NBA Finals rivalry, and sure enough, this being the year that anticipation paid off, they did. The offseason acquisition of Kevin Garnett was the centerpiece of the Celtics' return to prominence. Boston started strong and never let up.
The Lakers had been fringe contenders for a while but became championship caliber when they made a one-sided trade for Memphis Grizzlies star Pao Gasol. Even without talented young center Andrew Bynum, who was injured during the season, the Lakers won the Western Conference behind Gasol and Kobe Bryant. But they proved too soft to be a match for the Celtics, who took the Finals in six games and won the title for the first time since 1986.
The Gasol trade sparked two answer trades in the West, longtime contenders trying to reload for another run by bringing in aging superstars. Shaquille O'Neal went to the Phoenix Suns, and Jason Kidd to the Dallas Mavericks. It didn't work out in either place. Not everything in 2008 lived up to the hype.
It just felt like it. Baseball's trading deadline, July 31, is usually a time of a million blockbuster rumors and a handful of minor deals. Oh, but this was 2008. In early July, C.C. Sabathia, the defending Cy Young Award winner, was dealt from the Cleveland Indians to the Milwaukee Brewers, and Rich Harden, who might have the best stuff in baseball when he's healthy, which isn't often, was sent from the Oakland A's to the Chicago Cubs.
And then, supposedly within seconds of the deadline, colorful slugger Manny Ramirez went from the Boston Red Sox to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Harden pitched brilliantly as the Cubs, already in first place when the deal was made, reached the postseason. But it was Sabathia and Ramirez who led their new teams to the playoffs by playing so spectacularly well that they got serious consideration for postseason awards in the National League for two months' work.
A few weeks before those trades, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer met in the Wimbledon men's final for the third year in a row. That one lived up to its billing and how. In an epic, see-saw, rain-delayed match that people who are paid to know about such things have called the greatest ever played, Nadal ended Federer's five-year run as Wimbledon champ.
The women's final took a far backseat, but it was as glamorous a matchup as women's tennis is capable of serving up: Venus Williams beat her younger sister Serena for her second straight Wimbledon title, her fifth overall.
The National Hockey League even lived up to its hype, kicking off the year with an outdoor game that easily overshadowed the now-meaningless New Year's Day college football bowl games.
The game, between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Buffalo Sabres in front of 71,000 people in Buffalo, was the first outdoor contest in the league in four years, and it was a humdinger, the Penguins winning 2-1 on a shootout, though that result, and the sloppy, snowy hockey that led to it, was secondary to the spectacle, which was magnificent.
In a show of brainpower that's often missing in the NHL, including five years ago, when the league failed to follow up on a similarly successful outdoor game in Edmonton, plans were made to do it again on New Year's Day 2009. The Chicago Blackhawks were to host the Detroit Red Wings at Wrigley Field, though unseasonably warm weather was threatening to delay the game.
The Red Wings won their fourth Stanley Cup in 11 years in 2008, beating the Penguins and the league's transcendent rising star, Sidney Crosby, in the Finals.
And then there was Tiger Woods. His legend would have been secure even if he'd bowed out of this year's U.S. Open with what he later revealed was a torn ligament in his knee and a broken tibia. Instead, he played on that bum leg and beat game journeyman Rocco Mediate in 19-hole playoff. It was a moment so grand, Woods would have been a legend if he'd done that and nothing else in his career. As it is, that win was just one more case of Tiger being Tiger, just one in a series of the hype coming true in 2008.
Of course it wasn't all greatness and wonder. It never is. While 2008 wasn't weighed down with scandal, tragedy and misbehavior like most recent years, it didn't escape those things either.
The year began in the shadow of the Mitchell Report, baseball's December 2007 accounting of the steroid era, which by January had become the story of the fall of Roger Clemens. The great pitcher decided against the "disappear and hope it blows over" strategy of Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro and fought back hard against accusations that he'd used steroids.
Clemens traded barbs and lawsuits with his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, and eagerly faced a congressional subcommittee. But the more he spoke, the less believable he sounded. Then a small-time country singer went public with her story that she'd carried on a long affair with the married Clemens. His pal and teammate Andy Pettitte admitted that the parts of McNamee's story that concerned Pettitte were true, which badly damaged Clemens' credibility. When the dust settled, Clemens' reputation was in ruins.
A lot of the year's most depressing stories were like that, holdovers from previous years.
The New England Patriots "Spygate" game-taping scandal oozed into the new year before fizzling out in the spring when former Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh admitted to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell that an alleged tape of the St. Louis Rams' pre-Super Bowl walkthrough from January 2002 did not exist.
Marion Jones was released from prison and went on Oprah Winfrey's TV show to apologize for her "mistake," the slight boo-boo of lying about her illegal activities to an admiring world for years. Indiana basketball coach Kelvin Sampson took a $750,000 buyout -- a year and a half's salary -- as punishment for his illegal calling of recruits.
The year's biggest controversy in sports wasn't directly about sports. It was the worldwide protests over human rights violations in China in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. The traditional celebratory globe-trot of the torch became a tense security gantlet as grim-faced Chinese military security forces squared off against protesters.
At times it became comical as officials head-faked demonstrators and sneaked the torch through streets filled not with cheering fans but with bemused commuters. Is a parade still a parade if no one knows it's going on?
Once the Games began, a controversy broke out about Chinese officials lying about the age of some allegedly underaged female gymnasts. If it can be called a controversy when almost no one believed what China was saying.
As is usual with malfeasance and misbehavior committed not by relatively powerless individuals but by formidable entities, nothing came of it. That's the way to bet on the shenanigans surrounding the new Yankee Stadium in New York.
The Yankees shut down their historic 85-year-old ballpark in the Bronx this season amid much hullabaloo and prepared to move next door to a new park, one with a reported price tag of nearly $2 billion, including more than a half-billion in taxpayer subsidies, according to various outlets, including the Village Voice.
The Yankees allegedly pulled a fast one on the real estate assessment, telling the IRS the parkland under the new stadium was worth more than $200 million in order to qualify for a massive tax break, and telling the state of New York the land was worth only $21 million in order to keep from having to replace it with more parkland.
The press and public are not nearly as outraged about this as they are about the Yankees working within the rules of baseball to improve the team on the field. So far, all of the big free-agent prizes of the offseason -- Sabathia, pitcher A.J. Burnett and first baseman Mark Teixeira -- have signed with the Yanks, who have literally outspent the other 29 major league teams combined. The remaining marquee name, Ramirez, who grew up in New York City, has been the subject of a few rumors involving the Yankees, which have been denied by all sides.
The New York Mets are also moving into new digs in 2009, and while they made the big splash of the 2007-08 offseason, trading for pitcher Johan Santana, their results were the same: They collapsed down the stretch and missed the playoffs.
The Yankees are hoping to spend their way back into the postseason, which they missed for the first time since 1993. This turned out to be a season of the underdog as the Tampa Bay Rays, a doormat of a franchise for a decade, went from their habitual last-place finish in 2007 to the World Series in '08, where they lost to the Philadelphia Phillies, a doormat of much longer standing, having now won two championships in the last 29 seasons, and also two in the last 126.
The World Series ended with the completion of a suspended game, the first ever in Series history. Following two days of rain, the teams finally got together to play the last three innings of Game 5. It wasn't a classic of a Series but it ended up as a heck of a way to decide a championship.
Almost any way of deciding a championship would beat college football's Bowl Championship Series, which lunged through another year. LSU won the 2007 title in January by destroying Ohio State, and in the year between that game and the upcoming Florida-Oklahoma tilt for the '08 championship, the president of the University of Georgia and the president-elect of the United States both joined the chorus calling for a playoff or tournament to decide the victor.
Fat chance. ESPN signed a deal to televise the BCS bowl games through 2015, making any revisions before then unlikely. And with the juggernaut of the sports industry having a vested interest in the status quo, expect calls for change to become fewer and farther between in the media.
2008 had its share of departures. Some major figures died, among them Sammy Baugh, Pete Newell, Gene Upshaw and Buzzie Bavasi. Sports lost several great chroniclers this year, most prominently W.C. Heinz, Jim McKay, Skip Caray and a pair of good players who became much-loved broadcasters, Herb Score and Bobby Murcer.
One of the year's most poignant moments came at the end of the Kentucky Derby, when the filly Eight Belles collapsed with two broken ankles just after finishing second to Big Brown. The horse had to be euthanized. It was the second year in a row sports fans had to watch a popular American racehorse die. Barbaro, the 2006 Derby winner who was injured at the Preakness, died in January 2007.
There were calls for reform in the breeding and training of thoroughbreds in the wake of the Eight Belles incident, with industry critics saying the inbreeding of horses has led to equine physiology like that of Eight Belles, who, Sally Jenkins wrote in the Washington Post, "ran with the heart of a locomotive, on champagne-glass ankles for the pleasure of the crowd."
There were other kinds of departures as well, many caused by the economic upheaval that climaxed late in the year. The Arena Football League, hailed just a few years ago as the next big thing on the North American sporting scene, shut down.
So did EliteXC, a mixed martial arts circuit that was second tier but notable because an EliteXC event was the first MMA card broadcast on U.S. prime time network television. CBS showed a lackluster EliteXC card in May, lying to viewers that what they were seeing was the sport's big leagues.
Instead they were watching YouTube sensation Kimbo Slice, a Florida bouncer and street fighter, who beat a tomato can on cuts in the third round. A few months later, Slice was TKO'd in 14 seconds by a last-minute replacement fighter named Seth Petruzelli. EliteXC folded shortly after.
Not exactly dead but far more lamented are the Seattle SuperSonics, an NBA team that abandoned its home of 40 years for the -- greener? -- pastures of Oklahoma City, where the team now plays as the Thunder. Clay Bennett, an Oklahoma City businessman, and his partners bought the team in 2006 and immediately began lying about their intentions to move the team south.
Bennett and Co. dropped that charade fairly quickly, and it took them two years to escape their lease. The loss of the Sonics was the lowlight of a lousy year in the Emerald City. The baseball Mariners had their worst season in 25 years, finishing last in the American League. The football Seahawks had their worst season in 16 years, going 4-12 after a five-year run as NFC West champions.
And the Washington Huskies football team managed to do something that no other team in the NCAA's Bowl Subdivision -- formerly Division I-A -- did: They went 0-12.
Women's basketball fans in Houston lost their team and couldn't even hate on the city that took it. The Houston Comets, the team that won the first four WNBA championships and was home for Sheryl Swoopes and Cynthia Cooper, among other stars, folded. The Comets were disbanded by the league when owner Hilton Koch couldn't find a buyer.
That was the last in a series of blows for women's sports this year, the most notable of which was the twin retirements, one day apart, of golfer Annika Sorenstam and tennis player Justine Henin, arguably the best in the world at their respective sports.
Sorenstam, 37 when she announced that she would quit the LPGA tour at the end of the year, had slipped some from her peak, when she was the best female golfer of her generation, the rare woman who transcended her sport, famous for owning the women's tour and sometimes playing with the men. Back and neck problems had slowed her down, and she admitted to having lost some of the burning desire that had helped make her great. She has various business interests and has talked of starting a family.
In her last tournament, two weeks ago in Dubai, she led after two rounds before fading. She ended her career with a birdie, though she has said that might not be the end. She might return to competitive golf someday.
Henin's withdrawal, a day later, was far more shocking. She was two weeks shy of her 26th birthday and a few days from opening her defense of three straight French Open titles when she announced the immediate end of her career. She asked the WTA to remove her name from the rankings, making her the first woman ever to quit while ranked No. 1 in the world.
Though she'd reportedly spoken excitedly about the French Open and other upcoming major events mere weeks before, she said she had had enough of tennis. This month she was named a goodwill ambassador for the joint bid of the Netherlands and her native Belgium to host the 2018 soccer World Cup.
Henin acknowledged that it's hard to believe a 25-year-old superstar athlete at the top of her game would simply walk away, and she dropped the name of a 38-year-old superstar quarterback who then, and for months before, and for months after, was waffling about his own retirement.
Brett Favre, who had for years made an annoying habit of playing out the offseason will he or won't he retire drama to the hilt, made a veritable career of it in 2008.
After his usual couple of months of indecision, he announced in early March that he would retire from the Green Bay Packers. There were rumors throughout the spring that he might return, and in early July he asked the Packers to release him so he could sign with another team. The Packers refused, leading to a standoff of sorts.
There was talk of a trade to the rival Minnesota Vikings, and then charges by the Packers that the Vikings had tampered with Favre. Eventually, Favre petitioned for and was granted reinstatement to the league and actually reported to the Packers training camp, though he never suited up and the team sent him home.
A weary nation begged for release from the long nightmare of wall-to-wall Favre coverage -- one of the key moments in the summertime melodrama was an interview Favre gave to, of all people, Greta Van Susteren of Fox News -- and at long last, in early August, he was traded to the New York Jets for a bag of kicking tees and two tickets to "South Pacific."
It started well, with Favre showing flashes of his old self as the Jets won five straight at midseason to improve to 8-3. But since that eighth win, a thrashing of the then-undefeated Tennessee Titans, things have gone sour. The Jets lost four of their last five and missed the playoffs. Favre, complaining of a bum throwing shoulder, threw two touchdowns and nine interceptions down the stretch.
Thus as the NFL playoffs and a new calendar year begin, so begins another edition of will he or won't he, starring Brett Favre. Favre was to undergo an MRI on Monday, and if the news was bad from that, the drama this time might be a short one. If not, stay tuned.
One small consolation: Anything that looks like 2008 can't be all bad. It was a year that really lived up to the billing.
