King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Cricket makes the papers in the U.S. Plus: Ron Jaworski to join "Monday Night Football" booth. And: NCAA Tourney TV ratings flat. So?
Read more: Sports, Internet, TV, Basketball, College Basketball, NCAA Tournament, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
March 27, 2007 | On Friday I found out that the cricket World Cup was taking place in Jamaica. On Saturday I read a piece in the New York Times by Indian author and diplomat Shashi Tharoor lamenting the fact that cricket doesn't suit the "homogenized McWorld" of America.
Tharoor's a big-time writer who was in the running for a while to become secretary-general of the United Nations, so his piece was a high-class version of the old "you don't like my favorite sport, so you must be stoopid" argument. It was "Soccer sucks!" for the NPR crowd.
Cricket is neither here nor there for me, which does not, in my mind, speak to the content of my character, just as Tharoor's distaste for what he thinks of as the simple-minded sport of baseball doesn't prove that he's a fool.
His scribbling in the Great Gray Lady does that.
But my point is the only reason I heard about the cricket World Cup is because the coach of the Pakistani team, Bob Woolmer, had been murdered in his hotel room after a shocking loss to Ireland, according to Jamaican police. That's the sort of thing that can get a sport some column inches in countries where it's underappreciated, and I applaud the efficiency of cricket in this matter.
This one time? Soccer started a whole war.
It's all horrible, of course. There's been speculation about match-fixing, gambling debts, disgruntled fans. No theory has taken precedence and no arrests have been made.
But the whole thing reminded me of something the great playwright and drama critic George S. Kaufman, who I like to think of as an ancestor even though he wasn't, once said. Or was supposed to have said. He was typing for the very same New York Times in those days, and a press agent asked him, "How do I get my leading lady's name into your newspaper?"
The reply: "Shoot her."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Jaworski for Theismann: Good trade [PERMALINK]
The best NFL news of the offseason wasn't when your favorite team snagged that free agent or made that great trade -- your team, not mine -- it was ESPN's announcement that Ron Jaworski would be replacing Joe Theismann in the Monday night booth.
Nothing particularly against Theismann, who was better last year than he'd been in the final, unlistenable years of the Sunday night team with Mike Patrick and Paul McGuire. It's just that Jaworski is about the best football analyst in the business.