The best, sure-fire, fail-safe method of assuring that you hit the bullseye every time you fire a rifle is to shoot at a blank wall, THEN draw the target around the bullet-hole.

I think about that every time I read or hear the after-the-fact excuses that people are still making for LeBron James every time his team falls short. Sure, he took a little flak after the Cavs’ flame-out against the Celts, but that was short-lived.

At least, it was short-lived until his intemperate former team owner, Dan Gilbert, publicly claimed he “tanked” in multiple games in that series. And what’s up with THAT, anyway? Either he didn’t “tank,” but just played horribly, for reasons only he and team insiders know, in which case he’s just a “bum” – or would be a bum, if his name were Kobe Bryant. Or he actually did “tank,” in which case what the Hell was Gilbert doing offering him a max contract, and bemoaning his departure from Cleveland. Seems to me, that’s exactly the kind of player whose ass you’d like to see the door hitting on his way out. What’s wrong with this picture?

Anyhoo, the new mantra is: “Sure, he didn’t finish the job in the playoffs the last couple of seasons, but that’s because he had no supporting cast. It was King James and a bunch of useless scrubs.”

Ex-squeeze me? Maybe it looks that way now, but nobody – and I mean, nobody — was saying anything of the sort when the Cavs were winning 66 and 61 games, respectively, the past two seasons, or when the “experts” made the Cavs the favorites in EVERY SINGLE PLAYOFF SERIES in which they were involved.

To the contrary, all we heard when the Cavs acquired any player in a trade, or signed any free agent, be he Antawn Jamison, Mo Williams, Shaq, Anthony Parker, Larry Hughes, Ricky Davis, Damon Jones, Flip Murray, Drew Gooden, Joe Smith, Jamario Moon, Wally Szczerbiak or Delonte West (oops, more about him later), was that this guy was the perfect complementary player for King James, and that THIS was the piece of the puzzle that put the Cavs over the top and made them THE team to beat.

In fact, it wasn’t only sportswriters and media whores who are on record as having said that. It included alleged “expert” analysts, who’ve actually played, or coached, the game. Just go back and replay what schmucks like Tim Legler, Jon Barry, Sir Charles, Kenny Smith, and everyone else was saying before each of the past two seasons, and before each of the past two playoff seasons.

And players, too. Just go back and replay what Shaq said when he joined the Cavs.

Or what everyone was saying just a few months ago, when the Cavs “stole” Antawn Jamison without giving up anything – and, in fact, having a deal in place to get back Zydrynas Ilgauskas, who was part of the trade. The following was a typical sentiment:
“Cleveland not only landed Jamison — one of the best forwards in the L (averaging 20.5 ppg, 8.8 rpg) — but also keeps the ever improving JJ Hickson. Hats off to you, Danny Ferry.
OK, LeBron. You now have all the horses you need to win a championship. No more excuses.”

Or this gem of a headline:
“Cavs’ Danny Ferry Proves Himself As Elite GM With Antawn Jamison Trade.”
That’s FORMER Cavs’ GM Danny Ferry, if you’re keeping score at home.

So now, we’re supposed to suddenly turn a switch and pretend that all of that pre-failure hype never existed? Sure. It’s what psychologists like to call the “Hindsight Bias” — looking back on recent events and assuming or pretending, not only that they were predictable, but that we somehow predicted them. It’s part of being a human being, but that doesn’t make it right.

Since the moves the Cavs made the past few seasons didn’t result in championship parades, we NOW know, or think we know, that they were doomed to failure from the start. Maybe they were. But is that because the people the Cavs brought in were as mediocre as we now believe them to have been, or is it possible, just a teensy, weensy bit, that one of the reasons those moves didn’t work out is a flaw in the make-up of LBJ himself?

I guess not, because for a gasbag talking head even to broach that theory is to admit that, in fact, he doesn’t actually know squat about the game. The prevailing meme is and has always been that LBJ is the greatest, most versatile TEAM-oriented player. Ergo, if his TEAM failed its most important tests, it’s entirely because of his teammates, not him.

Or maybe not. He’s got lots of gaudy statistics, for sure. But statistics regularly lie. Unfortunately, they are all too often used the way a drunk man uses a lamp post – for support, rather than illumination.

Just for example, people like to cite LBJ’s laudable assists totals as conclusive “evidence” that he’s unselfish, team-oriented and just wants to win. Maybe so, maybe not. God knows, there have been a lot of NBA players who have pursued assists for their own sake, rather than as part of an overall strategy to make the team better. (Wilt Chamberlain, call for you on Line 2.)

Having a lot of assists doesn’t necessarily mean that the player is unselfish, necessarily makes a lot of good decisions, or even that he cares a lot about winning. Allen Iverson, just for example, accumulated impressive assist totals, mainly because he never made a pass to a teammate unless he was pretty sure it would turn into an assist. Those assists looked great on his stat sheet, but didn’t mean that he was running an offense well. In fact, most of the time, the opposite was true.

Here’s what Phil Jackson’s buddy Charley Rosen, never a LeBron hater the way he’s been a Kobe-hater (until the past couple of seasons, anyway) has to say about the current state of LBJ’s game:

“He is either incapable of, or resistant to, playing in a structured offensive system, one that isn’t primarily based on his having the ball on a string.

Forget about his assist totals. He accumulates dimes because he’s a very good passer and because he controls the ball. But how often does LeBron deliberately throw a pass that leads to somebody else making an assist pass? Or LeBron do anything significant without the ball except making dive cuts or (seldom) settling into the low post?

On those rare occasions when it’s somebody else’s turn to go one-on-one or use a screen, LeBron usually stands idly by somewhere on the weak side. For the most part, he’s either a spectator or makes spectators of his teammates.”

Make no mistake, I am not trashing The King’s talents or abilities. They are superb, especially in one who’s still so young. At the end of the day, though, it is about wins when it counts. Which is why Kobe was lambasted so royally when the Lakers lost to the Celtics in 2008, even though there was definitely an argument that Kobe’s “personnel” just weren’t able to match up to the Celts. But even when King James was surrounded by the best players the NBA had to offer – in the 2008 Olympics – he still had some issues when it came to what Magic Johnson called “Winnin’ Time.”

James was publicly acknowledged as the “leader” of that team, which included his new Miami teammates D Wade and Chris Bosh, plus greats like Chris Paul and Deron Williams. Yet, he might well have wound up with just a silver medal had the much-maligned Kobe Bryant not decided to take over in the final 4 minutes of the title game against Spain with both offense and defense. Don’t believe me? More hindsight bias, I suspect. Check out the film from that game. D-Wade had 27 points in that game, but he was clueless, helpless and ineffectual in the end-game until The Kobester bailed everyone out.

And just by the way – not that this matters, given how All-Star teams are selected – the Cavs roster over the past few years actually has had more players who had been selected to an All-Star game at least once in their careers, than the Lakers. True, some of those players, like Shaq and Joe Smith, were past their primes by the time they got to Cleveland; but not all of them were, by a longshot.

If you’re keeping score at home, only Kobe, Pau and Ron Artest, on the current Lakers roster, have EVER been All-Star game participants. As for Artest, he was added as an alternate ONCE, in 2004. And as for the Lakers’ # 2 All-Star, all we ever heard about Pau before he joined the Lakers and started playing with The Mamba, was that he was a soft, cowardly, underperforming piece of “Eurotrash,” whose teams couldn’t win a single playoff game. Of course, AFTER THE FACT, everyone talked about how the Lakers had “stolen” him. (And thank God they did.) But that’s not what anyone was saying while he was still with Memphis. Not even close.

Andrew Bynum, Lamar Odom, and D Fish, to say nothing of the scrubs on the Bench Brigade, have never, ever, caught a sniff of that accolade.

Yet all we hear is that Kobe had by far the better supporting cast around him. Yeah, right. More shooting at a blank wall, then drawing the target around the bullet-holes, methinks.

Forget about Kobe’s having to carry the likes of Smush Parker and Kwame Brown in the bad old days of just a few years ago. Let’s just look at what he had to work with on THIS YEAR’s championship roster:

An aging D Fish, who again proved his ability to come through in the clutch, and who’s exceptionally valuable as a facilitator in the Triangle offence and as a presence in the locker room, but who’s been maligned for years by all Lakers fans – including critic in chief The Sportsgod himself – for being too old, too slow, too lacking in pizzazz. I love Fish, but question his effectiveness in any other offensive scheme.

An enigmatic Lamar Odom, who has the skills to dominate but who seemingly comes awake once a week, whether he needs to or not. And who also, often justly, has been the target of barbs from the Lakers faithful.

Andrew Bynum, one of the biggest teases in the business, who looks awesome for stretches of games, but then either regresses or gets a debilitating injury. I’m impressed that he played with his injury in these playoffs, and give him props for that, but the Andrew Bynum who gamely played in the playoffs was worse, because of the injury, than a number of the Cavs. The games, after all, aren’t played on paper.

Ron Artest, who spent much of the season trying to figure out the Triangle and to find his role with the team; who scared his teammates and coaches every time he launched a three-ball; and who, just by the by, played some pretty soft defense against LeBron and Paul Pierce in the regular season. It wasn’t THAT many weeks ago that Lakers’ faithful were speculating that the team would have been better off just keeping Trevor Ariza.

Jordan Farmar, who has some skills, but never really established himself as a consistent shooter, passer, defender or decision-maker. A perfect fit for the Nets, with whom he’s just signed. He should have a breakout statistical season, but read the above diatribe against believing in stats.

Shannon Brown, bigger, faster and with more hops than Farmar, but just as inconsistent in all the above areas. I learned all I need to know about Brown when he entered the slam dunk contest last year, and showed he had no clue what it took to compete in it. He’s living proof that jumping ability is meaningless unless accompanied by intelligence and purpose. Or, as the late, great John Wooden often said, that we should never mistake activity for achievement.

Luke Walton: some skills applicable to the Triangle, but slow, unathletic, and, through no fault of his own, unable to play most of the season and playoffs.

Sasha Vujajcic: great pair of clutch free throws. Anything else about his contributions this season we should remember?

Josh Powell/DJ Mbenga: bodies, and fouls to give.

Adam Morrison: who?

So, feel free AFTER THE FACT to reflect on the events that unfolded and admit that maybe the Cavs’ roster wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. But let’s not rewrite history in the process, or negate the evidence of our own eyes and brains, in the process.

Although this column has turned into a LeBron dump-a-thon, and although there’s a lot negative to be said about the silly, narcissistic way in which this tarnished “king” took his leave of the good folks of Ohio, let the record show that there was and is nothing wrong, ethically, morally, practically, with LBJ shopping himself around, and making a decision other than to stay with Cleveland. That’s what free agency is all about. To get rid of it would be to go back to the days of indentured servitude that kept great players tethered to bad teams in perpetuity.

One of my pet peeves is that loyalty is never a two-way street in professional sports. Had the roles been reversed, and Dan Gilbert had dumped LeBron because he underperformed, despite his 7 years of “loyal” and “devoted” service, we’d have heard nary a peep about this good, hard-nosed business decision. LBJ owed Dan Gilbert, the Cavs and the people of Ohio nothing more than to give his all while the Cavs were paying his salary. Whether or not he fulfilled that obligation is still in question. What shouldn’t be in questions is whether, once that contract ended, he “owed” them anything else. It says her, he didn’t.

Oh, and just by the by, everyone dumps on the Cavs now for failing to surround LBJ with the right “pieces.” I guess maybe they could have done that, had they decided to do what Miami and the Knicks, to name just two teams, tried: tank whole seasons, or multiple seasons, by getting rid of players who might be able to help the team win now, to clear enough cap space to land more than one premier free agent.

The Cavs’ management may not have been geniuses, but what exactly were they supposed to do? Had they thrown away 2 or 3 of LBJ’s seasons by jettisoning productive players so that they’d have cap room for 2011, does anyone really think LBJ would have stayed around? They surmised that their best shot was to do what could be done to help James reach the promised land, and it seems to me that, with 66- and 61-win seasons, they didn’t do a half-bad job. The lesson I take from all this is that the only teams with a shot at landing a true franchise player free agent, from now on, will be those willing to endure years of mediocrity – and deliberately creating such mediocrity. Is that really a model we’re comfortable with?

Oh, yeah, almost forgot about Delonte West. As anyone who goes to websites NOT sponsored by ESPN already know, there’s a persistent rumor going around that LeBron’s teammate, the aforementioned Mr. West, was boffing LBJ’s mother – and that he wasn’t the only Cav doing that. Worse, LeBron was the last to know, and was irked beyond belief when he found out about it.

This rumor, among other things, has inspired one of the most tasteless (but kind of funny, in a twisted, misogynistic way) T-shirt slogans I can recall: “LeBron, you may be headed south, but your mother’s riding West.”

A secondary rumor, posted on sportsbybrooks.com, is that LBJ made his arrival in Miami contingent on the Heat’s getting rid of Michael Beasley, because (so Beasley’s father said) Beasley looks a lot like West, and James just didn’t want to be reminded of West every time he stepped into the Heat’s locker room. Who knows? It’s true that the Heat sent Beasley to the Bulls for, basically, nothing. On the other hand, it’s also true that Beasley, to be charitable, “underperformed” last season, and was/is a bit of a head case, besides.

I don’t know if any of that is true. But if even some of it is, how much incentive would LBJ – heck, how much incentive would any normal person — have had to stay in a locker room filled with reminders of such perfidy, no matter how much money the Cavs could offer him? And who could blame him for leaving like a thief in the night? Just saying.

Now that the World Cup has ended, I’d be remiss if I failed to tip my hat to the greatest sports prognosticator in history. You can have your Jimmy the Greek and his ilk. Just give me Paul, the Oberhausen, Germany, Aquarium’s “psychic” octopus, who predicted the outcomes of 8 matches – including the semifinal and final matches – with nary an error. Can they rent him out for the Super Bowl and the Kentucky Derby?

We sure could have used him as the “where will LeBron sign” circus played out. It could, at least, have spared us that horrid1-hour “The Decision” pseudo-reality suckfest.

.

write history and

It took the Lakers winning the NBA title to awaken me from my dogmatic slumbers. Sweet revenge, made all the more sweet by the un-Lakerlike way they had to perform to win at the end.

I’d ordinarily not care particularly who the unfortunate opponent was, but I have to admit that the Celts’ loss gave me an extra crispy helping of schadenfreude. Not because of the long, tortured history of the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, mind you, but mainly because the Celts, to a man, have shown themselves to be churlish, oafish boors, who don’t know how to win, or lose, with anything approaching grace.

There may be teams that show less class than the Celts in winning and losing. But not in recent memory. In fact, even though I remember Larry Bird as one of the all-time great trash talkers, I give that team a pass. It’s hard to remember any teams that have come close to the Celts’ crass, boorish and graceless behavior since the “Bad Boys” Pistons, who to a man vacated the floor and refused to shake hands with Jordan’s Bulls when the Bulls finally scaled and conquered Mount “Jordan Rules.”

Following the lead of the self-aggrandizing, chest-beating KG — who did nothing in this year’s Game 7 to erase his well-earned reputation as an all-time great, if only games were played for 3 quarters, and 4th Quarters never existed – the Celts, from the stars down to scrub charity-case Brian Scala“weenie,” took every opportunity to offer excuses for failures, and to give no credit to any achievement by any Laker. I can understand the joy of Paul Pierce (Inglewood boy that he is) at finally having become relevant in the twilight of his career, after years of outstanding performances for mediocre teams, having been forced to play beside clueless “chuckers” like Antoine Walker and Ricky Davis. But his relentless and incessant insistence on pumping up his belated achievements by belittling the Lakers has rubbed me the wrong way for the past 2 years. Ditto Ray Allen, whose jealous hatred of Kobe Bryant is well known and of long standing.

Of course, that’s Bahston for you. Red Sox and Celtics fans are insufferable enough when their teams are losing. But they’re worse when their teams have success. It’s a New England thing, I guess. Not that Lakers’ homers aren’t obnoxious in their own right. But Celts’ fans, players and coaches are in a (low) class by themselves when it comes to making excuses and to giving no props to any opponent.

They are followed closely, seems to me, by Suns’ players, who, despite the graciousness in defeat of their coach, Alvin Gentry, also refused to acknowledge that they’d lost to the Lakers 2-4. True, after Game 2 of that series the Suns were at a minimum competitive. But for Ron Artest’s stirring put-back of a Kobe miss at the end of Game 5 – an achievement overshadowed only by his full-game heroics in Game 7 of the league Finals – who knows what might have happened? But we know what DID happen. And for Steve Nash and Amare Stoudamire not to acknowledge that reality, and to insist despite empirical evidence that “the better team lost,” is kind of galling. Not as galling as actually losing to the Suns might have been, mind you; but galling nonetheless.

Since the punditocracy can’t take being wrong, I was prepared for an onslaught of anti-Lakers and especially anti-Kobe negativity after the Lakers won the Finals, and Kobe was awarded the Finals MVP. But I never thought the viciousness would be as pronounced and logically contorted as it’s been.

It was predictable that they’d blame the lousy refereeing, while overlooking the fact that a lot of the lousy refereeing throughout this year’s Finals actually worked in the Celts’ favor. Deadspin.com ran a live feed commentary from disgraced former NBA ref Tim Donaghy for every game of the Finals. Read it. It’s a litany of “no calls” by the refs when Celtics fouled Lakers players. True, what the heck kind of credibility does Donaghy have, these days? I can only point out that Jose Canseco had no “credibility” when he wrote about MLB steroid use – until, of course, he did.

As many free throws as the Lakers got in Game 7, they could have had double-digits more, and put the game away long before the last minute. Of course, except for Kobe, none of them could MAKE any of the FTs they were actually awarded. Including Pau Gasol, whose contribution can’t be minimized (I mean, NINE offensive rebounds), but who, in my opinion, like Shaq, regularly is less of a factor than he should be in the end-game because he can’t make his free throws. 7 for 13 in Game 7, just for example, doesn’t get the job done.

I’m not going to join in the orgy of MJ vs. Kobe comparisons – all structured to make Kobe appear to be a stumblebum. But I will say this: for whatever reason, The Mamba gets far fewer “superstar” calls than any other player of his stature, ever. Fewer by far than LeBron James or D-Wade today, and certainly, no contest, fewer than MJ, even in his rookie year. Not even close. I’m still reminded of Magic Johnson’s classic barb during a Team USA photo op at the Barcelona Olympics, when he told Larry Bird and another player not to stand too close to MJ, because “the refs will call a foul on you.” True, dat.

And anyway, the wheels of the gods grind slow, but they grind exceeding small. Maybe the Lakers (minus Andrew Bynum, as we all remember, and, oh, yeah, also with a limited Trevor Ariza, who’d been out from late January to the middle of the playoffs after suffering a broken foot) wouldn’t have beaten big, bad Boston in 2008 under any circumstances. But what I remember most from the 2008 Finals is the way the refs consistently let Boston get away with thuggery against Kobe without calling any fouls. Wouldn’t have helped in Game 6 of those Finals; but sure would have helped in, say, Game 2. So if anything, the wheel of life came around full-circle in 2010. Tough noogies, you whiners.

It was equally predictable that the talking heads would blame the loss on the absence of Kendrick Perkins – whose presence certainly would have made the game different – while ignoring the offsetting impairment of Andrew Bynum, who followed Kobe’s example and gamely played with immense pain, but was ultimately unable to be a force.

It was even more predictable that they would show their visceral dislike of Kobe by claiming that he didn’t deserve the series MVP. That may even be true, but so what? First of all, the Lakers won the series. What does it matter to a distraught Boston honk WHICH Laker won that award? And anyway, as far as I’m concerned, individual awards like that are at best meaningless “beauty contests.” Who knows who or what an “MVP” is? Heck, voters can’t even figure out what makes a person worthy of being selected for an “all-defensive” team, so what chance do they ever have of figuring out what makes one player more deserving than another of being the MVP?

It may well be that Kobe was “carried” and “bailed out” by his teammates in Game 7, although he made some important contributions himself, with 15 boards (4 offensive, by the way), and serious defense on Rondo, who, lest we forget, was touted as the best Celt and the reason for their resurgence when he ran roughshod over Cleveland and Orlando. But again, so what? One of the reasons they were mentally and emotionally able to “carry” him and “bail him out” was because he is, in a real sense, their leader, and helped make them tough enough to do that.

Mind you, he’s not the guy they go to for advice, or a sounding board, or an encouraging pat on the butt. That guy, as Kobe acknowledged in multiple post-game interviews, is D-Fish. But then again, MJ wasn’t that guy on the great Bulls teams, either. As everyone associated with that dynasty (except, maybe, Jordan) acknowledges, it was Scottie Pippen who played that role and held them together when MJ was cursing and intimidating them.

Still, Kobe has definitely emerged, post-Shaq, as a leader that his teammates will follow, because of his strong will, exceptionally hard work, and his dogged willingness to keep on playing despite injuries that would keep just about everyone else off the floor. He played the last half of the 2008 season, including all the playoffs, the 2008 Olympics and all of last season with a finger injury on his non-shooting hand severe and painful enough that everyone, including The Sportsgod, sagely pontificated that he needed to cut his season short and get surgery for the long-term good of the team. Thank God he doesn’t listen to The Sportsgod.

This season, a veritable trifecta (that we know of): a knee injury that apparently existed even in training camp, which drastically impaired his mobility and his ability to get the proper loft on his shots; a BROKEN index finger on his shooting hand, which required him to wear a cumbersome splint and to re-learn how to shoot to compensate, and which kept getting whacked on in every game; and, as an afterthought, a dicey ankle. There may be more that we don’t know about, but those will do. What other player in the NBA would have withstood the pain and played – effectively for the most part – with even one of those afflictions?

Not that he was asking for or needed sympathy. But it’s laughable that when someone like Bron Bron has a hyperextended elbow and plays, there’s talk of putting him in for a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. For Kobe, however, nada. When the team’s best player consistently showed his determination to play with those kinds of injuries and that kind of pain, is it any wonder that Andrew Bynum didn’t think twice about sitting out the playoffs, but instead showed up game after game, to give it a go with a knee injury that caused such pain and swelling that teammate DJ Mbenga admitted it make him sick to look at?

Like many in Lakerland, I gained a huge quantum of respect for Bynum because of his willingness to play with the pain just so he could give the team more size inside. But I firmly believe that without Kobe’s example, Bynum, who many of us have derided as soft, would have packed it in in May. The Lakers proved that “toughness” and “grit” aren’t the unique province of Eastern teams. And all that started with and emanated from Number 24.

The fact that one of Ron Artest’s biggest thrills about the late trey he made at a crucial juncture wasn’t just that it helped the Lakers win, but that “Mamba passed me the ball; he passed me the ball,” kind of says it all, too. If a team leader is the alpha dog from whom all the others in the pack seek validation – that’s KB on the Lakers.

And what about Pau Gasol, a great player in his own right, derided as a “soft Euro” off his 2008 performance? He doesn’t and didn’t need Bryant to “validate” him. But he also never got out of the First Round of the playoffs until he joined the Lakers. Nobody can call him “soft” again after that Game 7 performance. (Of course, no one who ever saw him play for Spain in international competition could say that, either, but who ever watches those games?) He’s a prideful man, and a star in his own right. But he defers to and takes his cue from KB, as well.

Speaking of Gasol, has anyone noticed how, despite the fact that English is, maybe, his fourth or fifth language, he speaks it better than most of his native-born teammates, and is regularly the most articulate, or one of the two or three most articulate, of the Lakers in interviews? Ah, the vaunted American education system.

Notwithstanding that this column is written mainly as a paean to the oh so satisfying Lakers victory last week, I can’t sign off without acknowledging another stirring performance – the one by the U.S. soccer team in the World Cup. They won their Group – for the first time since 1930, when pretty much nobody competed in the World Cup – and play Ghana in the “knockout” round on Saturday.

I know, soccer is at best a minor sport here, and I’m as bored by it sometimes as the rest of the Sportsgod denizens. But national pride is still national pride. Especially when it sure seemed as if the FIFA powers that be absolutely had it in for the plucky Yanks, who’ve been the victims, in this year’s tournament and in 2006, of some of the flat-out worst officiating I’ve seen. (The Aussies might make a compelling case for their own victimization, ‘cause the refs also seem to have it in for them, too; but we’re in the U.S., for Pete’s sake.)

Not exactly “Miracle on Ice 1980 redux,” maybe, but eking out that 1-0 victory against Algeria in the most dramatic possible fashion – 91st minute, when they were just a minute or 2 away from a result that would have been worse, for U.S. soccer fans, than the Lakers’ 2008 Game 6 loss to the Celts was to the local faithful – was pretty darn dramatic.

That it was Landon Donovan who scored that epochal goal made it all the sweeter. I’m one of those who’s always believed that, while he may be the best player the U.S. has to offer, he’s been either a bit of a choker or totally snake-bit in the clutch. We need look no further back than last year’s MLS Cup when, once again, he blew a penalty kick that could have helped the Galaxy win. But he’s a hard worker, has some charisma, cares deeply about the game and about his teammates. And, damn it, he deserves some luck after having received the royal shaft a lot during his career – most notably when the German Bundesliga team for which he played on loan deliberately refused to give him a chance, and really trashed his reputation and stunted his development. Maybe his electrifying stint for Everton in the English Premier League this past year helped him break through. Whatever it was, he’s been a much more masterful player and leader this time than in 2006.

USA, all the way! Well, probably not, but this is the best team this country has fielded since the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. I’m on their bandwagon, and not ashamed to be there.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.

It took the Lakers winning the NBA title to awaken me from my dogmatic slumbers. Sweet revenge, made all the more sweet by the un-Lakerlike way they had to perform to win at the end.

I’d ordinarily not care particularly who the unfortunate opponent was, but I have to admit that the Celts’ loss gave me an extra crispy helping of schadenfreude. Not because of the long, tortured history of the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, mind you, but mainly because the Celts, to a man, have shown themselves to be churlish, oafish boors, who don’t know how to win, or lose, with anything approaching grace.

There may be teams that show less class than the Celts in winning and losing. But not in recent memory. In fact, even though I remember Larry Bird as one of the all-time great trash talkers, I give that team a pass. It’s hard to remember any teams that have come close to the Celts’ crass, boorish and graceless behavior since the “Bad Boys” Pistons, who to a man vacated the floor and refused to shake hands with Jordan’s Bulls when the Bulls finally scaled and conquered Mount “Jordan Rules.”

Following the lead of the self-aggrandizing, chest-beating KG — who did nothing in this year’s Game 7 to erase his well-earned reputation as an all-time great, if only games were played for 3 quarters, and 4th Quarters never existed – the Celts, from the stars down to scrub charity-case Brian Scala“weenie,” took every opportunity to offer excuses for failures, and to give no credit to any achievement by any Laker. I can understand the joy of Paul Pierce (Inglewood boy that he is) at finally having become relevant in the twilight of his career, after years of outstanding performances for mediocre teams, having been forced to play beside clueless “chuckers” like Antoine Walker and Ricky Davis. But his relentless and incessant insistence on pumping up his belated achievements by belittling the Lakers has rubbed me the wrong way for the past 2 years. Ditto Ray Allen, whose jealous hatred of Kobe Bryant is well known and of long standing.

Of course, that’s Bahston for you. Red Sox and Celtics fans are insufferable enough when their teams are losing. But they’re worse when their teams have success. It’s a New England thing, I guess. Not that Lakers’ homers aren’t obnoxious in their own right. But Celts’ fans, players and coaches are in a (low) class by themselves when it comes to making excuses and to giving no props to any opponent.

They are followed closely, seems to me, by Suns’ players, who, despite the graciousness in defeat of their coach, Alvin Gentry, also refused to acknowledge that they’d lost to the Lakers 2-4. True, after Game 2 of that series the Suns were at a minimum competitive. But for Ron Artest’s stirring put-back of a Kobe miss at the end of Game 5 – an achievement overshadowed only by his full-game heroics in Game 7 of the league Finals – who knows what might have happened? But we know what DID happen. And for Steve Nash and Amare Stoudamire not to acknowledge that reality, and to insist despite empirical evidence that “the better team lost,” is kind of galling. Not as galling as actually losing to the Suns might have been, mind you; but galling nonetheless.

Since the punditocracy can’t take being wrong, I was prepared for an onslaught of anti-Lakers and especially anti-Kobe negativity after the Lakers won the Finals, and Kobe was awarded the Finals MVP. But I never thought the viciousness would be as pronounced and logically contorted as it’s been.

It was predictable that they’d blame the lousy refereeing, while overlooking the fact that a lot of the lousy refereeing throughout this year’s Finals actually worked in the Celts’ favor. Deadspin.com ran a live feed commentary from disgraced former NBA ref Tim Donaghy for every game of the Finals. Read it. It’s a litany of “no calls” by the refs when Celtics fouled Lakers players. True, what the heck kind of credibility does Donaghy have, these days? I can only point out that Jose Canseco had no “credibility” when he wrote about MLB steroid use – until, of course, he did.

As many free throws as the Lakers got in Game 7, they could have had double-digits more, and put the game away long before the last minute. Of course, except for Kobe, none of them could MAKE any of the FTs they were actually awarded. Including Pau Gasol, whose contribution can’t be minimized (I mean, NINE offensive rebounds), but who, in my opinion, like Shaq, regularly is less of a factor than he should be in the end-game because he can’t make his free throws. 7 for 13 in Game 7, just for example, doesn’t get the job done.

I’m not going to join in the orgy of MJ vs. Kobe comparisons – all structured to make Kobe appear to be a stumblebum. But I will say this: for whatever reason, The Mamba gets far fewer “superstar” calls than any other player of his stature, ever. Fewer by far than LeBron James or D-Wade today, and certainly, no contest, fewer than MJ, even in his rookie year. Not even close. I’m still reminded of Magic Johnson’s classic barb during a Team USA photo op at the Barcelona Olympics, when he told Larry Bird and another player not to stand too close to MJ, because “the refs will call a foul on you.” True, dat.

And anyway, the wheels of the gods grind slow, but they grind exceeding small. Maybe the Lakers (minus Andrew Bynum, as we all remember, and, oh, yeah, also with a limited Trevor Ariza, who’d been out from late January to the middle of the playoffs after suffering a broken foot) wouldn’t have beaten big, bad Boston in 2008 under any circumstances. But what I remember most from the 2008 Finals is the way the refs consistently let Boston get away with thuggery against Kobe without calling any fouls. Wouldn’t have helped in Game 6 of those Finals; but sure would have helped in, say, Game 2. So if anything, the wheel of life came around full-circle in 2010. Tough noogies, you whiners.

It was equally predictable that the talking heads would blame the loss on the absence of Kendrick Perkins – whose presence certainly would have made the game different – while ignoring the offsetting impairment of Andrew Bynum, who followed Kobe’s example and gamely played with immense pain, but was ultimately unable to be a force.

It was even more predictable that they would show their visceral dislike of Kobe by claiming that he didn’t deserve the series MVP. That may even be true, but so what? First of all, the Lakers won the series. What does it matter to a distraught Boston honk WHICH Laker won that award? And anyway, as far as I’m concerned, individual awards like that are at best meaningless “beauty contests.” Who knows who or what an “MVP” is? Heck, voters can’t even figure out what makes a person worthy of being selected for an “all-defensive” team, so what chance do they ever have of figuring out what makes one player more deserving than another of being the MVP?

It may well be that Kobe was “carried” and “bailed out” by his teammates in Game 7, although he made some important contributions himself, with 15 boards (4 offensive, by the way), and serious defense on Rondo, who, lest we forget, was touted as the best Celt and the reason for their resurgence when he ran roughshod over Cleveland and Orlando. But again, so what? One of the reasons they were mentally and emotionally able to “carry” him and “bail him out” was because he is, in a real sense, their leader, and helped make them tough enough to do that.

Mind you, he’s not the guy they go to for advice, or a sounding board, or an encouraging pat on the butt. That guy, as Kobe acknowledged in multiple post-game interviews, is D-Fish. But then again, MJ wasn’t that guy on the great Bulls teams, either. As everyone associated with that dynasty (except, maybe, Jordan) acknowledges, it was Scottie Pippen who played that role and held them together when MJ was cursing and intimidating them.

Still, Kobe has definitely emerged, post-Shaq, as a leader that his teammates will follow, because of his strong will, exceptionally hard work, and his dogged willingness to keep on playing despite injuries that would keep just about everyone else off the floor. He played the last half of the 2008 season, including all the playoffs, the 2008 Olympics and all of last season with a finger injury on his non-shooting hand severe and painful enough that everyone, including The Sportsgod, sagely pontificated that he needed to cut his season short and get surgery for the long-term good of the team. Thank God he doesn’t listen to The Sportsgod.

This season, a veritable trifecta (that we know of): a knee injury that apparently existed even in training camp, which drastically impaired his mobility and his ability to get the proper loft on his shots; a BROKEN index finger on his shooting hand, which required him to wear a cumbersome splint and to re-learn how to shoot to compensate, and which kept getting whacked on in every game; and, as an afterthought, a dicey ankle. There may be more that we don’t know about, but those will do. What other player in the NBA would have withstood the pain and played – effectively for the most part – with even one of those afflictions?

Not that he was asking for or needed sympathy. But it’s laughable that when someone like Bron Bron has a hyperextended elbow and plays, there’s talk of putting him in for a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. For Kobe, however, nada. When the team’s best player consistently showed his determination to play with those kinds of injuries and that kind of pain, is it any wonder that Andrew Bynum didn’t think twice about sitting out the playoffs, but instead showed up game after game, to give it a go with a knee injury that caused such pain and swelling that teammate DJ Mbenga admitted it make him sick to look at?

Like many in Lakerland, I gained a huge quantum of respect for Bynum because of his willingness to play with the pain just so he could give the team more size inside. But I firmly believe that without Kobe’s example, Bynum, who many of us have derided as soft, would have packed it in in May. The Lakers proved that “toughness” and “grit” aren’t the unique province of Eastern teams. And all that started with and emanated from Number 24.

The fact that one of Ron Artest’s biggest thrills about the late trey he made at a crucial juncture wasn’t just that it helped the Lakers win, but that “Mamba passed me the ball; he passed me the ball,” kind of says it all, too. If a team leader is the alpha dog from whom all the others in the pack seek validation – that’s KB on the Lakers.

And what about Pau Gasol, a great player in his own right, derided as a “soft Euro” off his 2008 performance? He doesn’t and didn’t need Bryant to “validate” him. But he also never got out of the First Round of the playoffs until he joined the Lakers. Nobody can call him “soft” again after that Game 7 performance. (Of course, no one who ever saw him play for Spain in international competition could say that, either, but who ever watches those games?) He’s a prideful man, and a star in his own right. But he defers to and takes his cue from KB, as well.

Speaking of Gasol, has anyone noticed how, despite the fact that English is, maybe, his fourth or fifth language, he speaks it better than most of his native-born teammates, and is regularly the most articulate, or one of the two or three most articulate, of the Lakers in interviews? Ah, the vaunted American education system.

Notwithstanding that this column is written mainly as a paean to the oh so satisfying Lakers victory last week, I can’t sign off without acknowledging another stirring performance – the one by the U.S. soccer team in the World Cup. They won their Group – for the first time since 1930, when pretty much nobody competed in the World Cup – and play Ghana in the “knockout” round on Saturday.

I know, soccer is at best a minor sport here, and I’m as bored by it sometimes as the rest of the Sportsgod denizens. But national pride is still national pride. Especially when it sure seemed as if the FIFA powers that be absolutely had it in for the plucky Yanks, who’ve been the victims, in this year’s tournament and in 2006, of some of the flat-out worst officiating I’ve seen. (The Aussies might make a compelling case for their own victimization, ‘cause the refs also seem to have it in for them, too; but we’re in the U.S., for Pete’s sake.)

Not exactly “Miracle on Ice 1980 redux,” maybe, but eking out that 1-0 victory against Algeria in the most dramatic possible fashion – 91st minute, when they were just a minute or 2 away from a result that would have been worse, for U.S. soccer fans, than the Lakers’ 2008 Game 6 loss to the Celts was to the local faithful – was pretty darn dramatic.

That it was Landon Donovan who scored that epochal goal made it all the sweeter. I’m one of those who’s always believed that, while he may be the best player the U.S. has to offer, he’s been either a bit of a choker or totally snake-bit in the clutch. We need look no further back than last year’s MLS Cup when, once again, he blew a penalty kick that could have helped the Galaxy win. But he’s a hard worker, has some charisma, cares deeply about the game and about his teammates. And, damn it, he deserves some luck after having received the royal shaft a lot during his career – most notably when the German Bundesliga team for which he played on loan deliberately refused to give him a chance, and really trashed his reputation and stunted his development. Maybe his electrifying stint for Everton in the English Premier League this past year helped him break through. Whatever it was, he’s been a much more masterful player and leader this time than in 2006.

USA, all the way! Well, probably not, but this is the best team this country has fielded since the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. I’m on their bandwagon, and not ashamed to be there.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.

Great hockey game to end the 2010 Winter Olympics. That Team USA was not only in it to OT, but easily could have won, proves again two of the age-old truisms about the sport: (1) a hot goalie is the great equalizer; (2) a conditioned, committed hard-working team on which everyone knows and plays his role can compete with more-talented, less-cohesive groups. Boy, can they ever.

I don’t have the stats, but I’d bet money that crimes went down exponentially during the 3 or so hours of that game. Even the crooks in Canada were glued to their TV sets – or maybe to other people’s TV sets. And, it being Canada, lots of celebration but no riots at the end!

Lucky for Canada’s self–esteem that the locals pulled it out. Even though Canada had already tied the record for Gold Medals in a single Winter Olympics before that hockey game, the gold would have seemed like lead had they not added the hockey medal. Instead of singing “Oh, Canada,” the nation would have been crying “Oh, Oh, Canada.” I love Canada, but its obsession with hockey as an expression and encapsulation of national identity kind of makes the country seem a bit, shall we say, parochial.

I also loved the post-game celebration, but not for the usual reasons, even though I am Canadian by birth. What I loved especially were the shots of the celebrants wearing Canadian flags like Superman capes. One of every 3 or 4 had substituted a marijuana leaf for the Maple Leaf in the middle of the flag. Is Vancouver a great city, or what!

I found it somewhat fitting that Sid “The Kid” Crosby scored the Gold Medal-winner. I think he’s gotten an incredibly and undeservedly bad rap, mainly for reasons having nothing to do with him. Lots of fans – including lots of fans in Canada – hate him because he was “anointed” by the media and by the NHL as “The Next One” to assume the mantle of The Great Gretzky. Not that he ever made any speeches or boasts about it – he’s typically modest and self-effacing in his public pronouncements, which is the Canadian way – but the hatred of the hype transferred to the player in a big way. That he’s for the most part lived up to the hype – Hart Trophy and Art Ross Trophy in 2007; captain of a Stanley Cup finalist in 2008 and youngest captain of a Cup winner in 2009; youngest person in any major pro sport to lead league in scoring – has only added gasoline to the fire.

A lot of fans (outside Pittsburgh) also hate the fact that he seemed to whine at the refs a lot in his first two seasons, and displayed a chippiness that sometimes translated into what opponents felt were cheap shots. Even the great Neanderthal, Don Cherry, chastised him for that behavior, and in Canada, what Cherry says, no matter how nonsensical, is tantamount to the word of God.

In Crosby’s defense, he was, especially in the early years (comparatively speaking – he’s still only 22) pretty much the only dangerous offensive player on his team, so he received a disproportionate amount of attention from opponents. A lot of that attention was borderline illegal. Unlike what some other teams have done to protect their great players – think of Gretzky being protected by Dave “Cementhead” Semenko and later by Marty McSorley – the Penguins pretty much left the kid to his own devices. Not having anyone to keep opponents in line, he took it upon himself, sometimes with ill-advised zeal. Whose fault was that, exactly?

As for the “whining” part, there’s been a lot of that going around over the decades. Crosby is hardly the first. Wayne Gretzky, the preeminent talent in the game for years, was called “Whine” Gretzky when he was younger. Mario The Magnificent, now an owner of the Penguins, did his share of kvetching. Unfortunately, we live in a far different media age, where a single incident that would have been forgotten in a day lives forever on millions of cell phones and computer hard drives.

Crosby isn’t perfect, by any means. He’s less flashy and offensively talented than Alexey Ovechkin, though he’s always up there in points, and plays a better all-around game in all 3 zones. He was kind of invisible for much of the Olympics until the OT Gold Medal winner, although Canada certainly needed his goal in the shootout win against Switzerland, which had its own super-hot goalie in the Ducks’ Jonas Hiller. And he may never reach the exalted heights of Gretzky and Lemieux. But he’s damned good, and deserves a lot more praise than condemnation. In fact, as far as I’m concerned his main negative quality is that he’s so young that he just can’t grow a decent playoff beard!

As if we didn’t already have overwhelming evidence that we in the U.S. are ethnocentric to a fault, comes the news that Tag Heuer, which dropped its Tiger Woods ads in the U.S. like a hot potato, not only hasn’t dropped Tiger as a product endorser worldwide, but has actually doubled-down and stepped up its ads showing Tiger wearing its product in other markets – most notably China. According to a Tag Heuer spokesman, not only does his serial philandering not hurt his image in China, but it may even enhance it, since traditionally having a lot of mistresses is a sign of success.

I don’t fully buy the rationale, and I’m not condoning serial or concurrent multiple marital infidelities, but I do buy that it’s short-sighted to apply our own parochial standards to the rest of the world, and expect the rest of the world slavishly to follow suit. All the predictions about the implosion of Tiger’s off-course income, based on what U.S. sponsors have done in the U.S. market, may be wildly off-base. Hey, isn’t Jerry Lewis still a hero to serious French cinephiles?

Speaking of Tiger, it may still prove to be the case that his extramarital romps will not be the most damaging revelations about him. The investigation into the practices of Canadian Dr. Anthony Galea, who allegedly gave Woods Platelet Rich Plasma (“PSP”) therapy to help him recover from his knee surgery, proceeds apace. Authorities have already interviewed Mets short stop Jose Reyes and fellow Met (and former Blue Jay) Carlos Beltran, and are seeking to interview Alex Rodriguez.

Reyes has claimed publicly that the only thing Galea did for him was (unsuccessful) PRP to help with a nagging hamstring injury. If that’s all that happened, it’s a legitimate use of the therapy, entirely legal, and not a problem. But if PRP therapy was used as a cover for something else for which Galea is somewhat notorious – namely HGH therapy – there could be serious repercussions. And those may be harder for Tiger to live down, if they’re substantiated.

I have no opinion one way or the other about whether Big Ben Roethlisberger did or didn’t assault that party girl in Vegas in 2008. Nor do I know (or particularly care) whether the more recent, breaking allegations on TMZ, that he allegedly assaulted some women early on Friday, March 5, in the ladies bathroom at Capital City, a “nightclub” in Milledgeville, GA are true.

God knows, there are plenty of golddiggers out there preying on prominent and rich athletes, hoping the athlete will impregnate them, which could lead to marriage and lots of money in the inevitable divorce (rarely if ever any prenup) or at least to years of lucrative child support payments. Some others may not want to get pregnant, but believe they can benefit financially from a hook up – look at all the debutantes in the Tiger Woods Cavalcade of Skanks making money off their “brushes” with celebrity — or, at least, cry “rape” and get a nice quick settlement, even if nothing bad actually happened.

But I’m pretty sure of this: when accusations of something happen a second time, whether they’re true or not, there’s a strong suspicion that the accused IS guilty – of bad judgment. The fact that Roethlisberger knew from the Vegas experience that he’s a target for such accusations, and STILL continues to visit places and get into situations where people who like to accuse athletes of misdeeds are likely to be found, is kind of unsettling. To Roethlisberger’s “credit,” the Capital City club appears to be more honky-tonk than titty bar. This suggests he at least learned something from his prior experience, just not enough.

If the accusation is true, by the way, pretty classy to do the deed in the ladies room. Who does he think he is, Kirby Puckett (of blessed memory)?

For some reason sports in general, and Olympic sports in particular, seem to provide a disproportionate share of “No s***, Sherlock,” moments. The latest one is the startling revelation that at least one of the Chinese women’s (well, actually, girls’, since even 18 is positively geriatric in that “sport”) gymnasts “may have been” under 16 at the Sydney Olympics. Just one? I suspect all of them were. That China lies about its athletes’ ages in sports where younger is better is a pretty open secret.

I’m starting to wonder if there’s some disturbing trend about New Mexico athletes, or BYU athletes, or both. Most recently, there’s audio of Steve Alford, coach of the New Mexico men’s basketball team, yelling something at a BYU player in the handshake line after a close, grudge-match 83-81 Lobos win, that sounds suspiciously like “I’m going to tell you real clear – you’re an a**hole.” Then, several months ago, we were treated to Internet saturation of footage of a New Mexico women’s soccer player yanking an opponent from BYU to the ground by her long braid, and committing other mayhem.

One way to look at this is that New Mexico attracts hotheads. No one sprang to the defense of the soccer player, even though the full video shows she took a few elbows and cheap shots from BYU players before she retaliated. And there’s been a fair bit of criticism of Alford because, after all, he’s the “adult” and should know better. Some might say that he’s channeling the worst characteristics of his erstwhile mentor, “Bad” Bobby Knight.

But just maybe there’s something very wrong on the BYU side, as well. Maybe BYU athletes, because of the insular nature of the population demographic of many of the (Caucasian) athletes who go there, have holier than thou sanctimonious chips on their shoulders that really rub opponents the wrong way, and that make the BYU players themselves believe – how you say? – that they don’t poop at all, and if they do, it smells like Chanel No. 5, because, after all, they are of the elect. I have no objective evidence for same. I’m just saying . . . .

Just by the by, did anyone, including his parents and his college coach, ever figure that UCLA alum Darren Collison would be THIS good in the NBA? True, one should always be suspicious of stats that cover only a short span, stats amassed for a bad or mediocre team, and stats complied when a substitute is pressed into service for a short stint to replace an injured starter. Even so, Collison’s stats in 24 games as a starter for the Hornets after All-Star CP3 went down with a knee injury, have been revelatory. 18.5, 8.6 assists, and 3.7 boards per game isn’t exactly chopped liver.

More importantly (and let’s not overlook the equally surprising contribution of his fellow rookie guard, Marcus Thornton) the team for which he’s getting those stats is playing around .500 with a roster that, outside of Collison, Thornton and, of course, David West, strikes fear into no one. Unless you count Emeka Okafor and Peja Stojakovic, which I certainly don’t.

I must confess that I’m not a big MMA fan. I don’t hate it, but it’s not “must see TV” for me, either. That may change, now that I’ve seen the tape of Chuck Liddell and his hard-bodied girlfriend, Heidi Northcott, exercising in the altogether while visiting Brad Penny’s house. I’d be more interested, of course, if it was Northcott, not Liddell, doing the MMA fighting, and I could at least hope for a “wardrobe malfunction.”

I’ve never eaten Wheaties in my life, and I’ve certainly never been motivated to eat anything, or buy anything, because some company paid some athlete to pretend he or she likes its product. But I’ve always been fascinated by the politics of the Wheaties box after every Olympics. I’ve never quite figured out how they make their decisions on whom to include, and whom to leave off.

This time around, its 3 U.S. Gold Medalists: women’s skier Lindsey Vonn, men’s halfpipe champ Shaun White, and men’s snowboardcross winner Seth Wescott, who may be the only person simultaneously to make the “Who’s Who” and the “Who’s That?” lists.

I have no quibble with the selections. They may not be no-brainers like Michael Phelps was after he won all those Gold Medals, and before he became, to quote the inimitable Mr. White, “Smoke on the Water,” but they’re all eminently justifiable on merit, to the extent that merit has anything to do with it.

Vonn is after all America’s sweetheart du jour, having graced the cover of Sports Illustrated AND survived its curse to win a gold. White is an X Games icon who regularly delivers the goods. And Wescott won gold with as dramatic a comeback as one could hope for.

But why not any of the other gold medalists? How about Shani Davis, the speedskater who’s merely won gold at two consecutive Winter Olympics, and counting? How about Bode Miller, who tanked big-time in Turin and wasn’t expected to do squat, but came away with a gold, a silver and a bronze (compared to the mere gold and bronze of the more highly touted Vonn)? How about Hannah Kearney, the women’s Moguls Gold Medalist, who may not be quite as pretty as Vonn, but is every bit as wholesome and photogenic, and had her own uplifting redemption story from failure at Turin? And how about the 4-man bobsled team, which won the U.S. its first gold in the sport in 62 stinking years?

I have my own suspicions. I guess that the ones selected have higher “Q” ratings than the ones kicked to the curb, and Wheaties is, after all, in the business of selling inedible and rather expensive processed grain products, not meting out athletic justice.

I suspect that Davis would be a hard sell because he’s a black man in a usually invisible, usually all-white sport. Miller is known as a hard partier, and if Wheaties was embarrassed by its association with Phelps after his agile demonstration of the “puff, puff, pass” technique, why go there?

But come on. There was a highly successful movie about a Jamaican bobsled team that barely managed to compete. No love for a U.S. one that actually won something? And what about Kearney? Not blonde enough? And how about Evan Lysacek? Too “flamboyant”? Since Congress doesn’t appear to be doing much else these days but flinging dung like a tribe of overstimulated monkeys, why not appoint a blue-ribbon commission to investigate these injustices, and come out with a lengthy report suitable for use as a doorstop?

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.

I make no secret of my general disdain for women’s ice hockey. No biggie, especially in this country, since most people, including sports fans and even alleged sports “experts” like The Sportsgod, don’[t even give a rat’s patootie about MEN’s hockey, but that’s a cross I have to bear.

I admit that I watch women’s hockey sometimes, but it’s not because I ever expect to see great feats of athleticism. No, I watch, sporadically, for the reason that most of the few people who watch women’s sports do. NO, not because of non-heterosexual gender preference. Get your minds out of the gutter, people. I watch when the U.S. plays Canada because one of the stars of Team USA used to play on the same Peewee and Bantam teams as one of my sons, and more than held her own in that age-group, and one of the stars of Team Canada is the kid sister of one of the same son’s teammates when he spent a year in Canada.

I like both of those girls? young women? So I have a semi-rooting interest. I’m happy they’re both doing well, and that via Title IX they were able to parlay hockey into scholarships or the equivalent at two very good, prominent U.S. universities. But please, let’s get real. Women’s hockey at its HIGHEST level is at about the level of boys’ Midget AA or AAA, or maybe Junior B. I watch Midget and Junior B when I have a personal rooting interest, like a relative or a friend’s kid participating, but I’d never watch a match at that level just for funsies. Which is how I feel about women’s hockey.

In fact, in many ways it’s worse than boys’ Midget or Junior. At least the boys are allowed to hit. Hitting is banned from women’s hockey. Heck, that’s only half the game right there. It’s the difference between, say, real football and flag football. Why even bother calling it hockey, at that point? Might as well call it Ice Dancing with props.

Second, the level of speed, skill and athleticism even at the very top of the women’s game is so palpably inferior even to the lowest levels of the adult men’s game. Remember the jokes that The Sportsgod and others have made about women’s basketball, that most decent boys high school teams would wallop the best the WNBA has to offer? Well, I can’t guarantee that he’s right about basketball (although I suspect he is), but the observation is sure true about hockey. On January 16, the U.S. women’s hockey team played the Edina Lakers of the Minnesota Junior Hockey League, and barely escaped with a 1-0 OT victory. And they only managed that because the Team USA goalie, in the parlance of the sport, “stood on her head,” stopping over 40 shots.

Of course, the score was that close in any case only because the game was played under women’s hockey rules. Had hitting been allowed, who knows how many goals the boys would have scored? And, c’mon, what level is the MJHL, anyway? Having another son who played in that league, I can tell you that it’s basically middle-of-the-road, Junior B. Few of the participants in that league can ever reasonably hope for a shot at Junior A, let alone major college hockey. So it’s no surprise that Team USA hasn’t scheduled any Men’s Junior A or college competition, because then the myth of their accomplishments would be blown.

And Team USA is one of the top two women’s teams IN THE WORLD, the other being Canada. Actually, that’s a total misnomer because in reality those are the ONLY 2 teams in the world. Yeah, a bunch of women representing other countries put on jerseys, pads and skates and masquerade as hockey players, but as a practical matter, there is no third team that’s remotely close to the big 2. True, Sweden somehow snuck in and claimed the Silver Medal at the Torino Olympics, but everyone agrees that was a fluke. And the drop-off from nos. 3 to 8 is staggering. By contrast, in the men’s game, there are 5 - 6, and sometimes more, solid teams with actual medal hopes.

Which is why I’m defending Team Canada, women’s version, for its seemingly “heartless” 18-0 demolition of Slovakia in the Games’ opener. The gulf between top and bottom is so great that these things are just bound to happen on a regular basis. After that, Team USA beat China 12-1, Team Canada beat Switzerland 12-1, and Team USA demolished Russia 13-0. Not a knuckle-biter in the bunch.

Oh, and not for nothing, Slovakia actually – and I’m not making this up – demolished Bulgaria 82-0 in pre-Olympic qualifying, leading 31-0 after the First Period. Where was the hand wringing for those valiant, undermanned (underwomanned?) Bulgarians?

So I confess that it chaps my hide a little bit that the winning women’s team will get THE SAME GOLD MEDAL that the winning men’s team will get, even though the achievements of both aren’t even close to comparable. But what would the Olympics be without monumental injustice?

I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone with gonads, testosterone or a Y chromosome could possibly stomach the NBC coverage of the Olympics. Not of the sporting events themselves, mind you. NBC does a creditable job of covering those – to the oh, so limited extent it does.

Actually, I take that back. It does a creditable job of FILMING the events, sort of. When it comes to commentary or analysis, the coverage is disgraceful to any actual sports fan. The gushing, ingenuous commentary is pretty much all fluff and nonsequitur, like a steady diet of NFL sideline reporting – pretty people mouthing clichés, with no substance. It’s like the Jason Bateman character’s commentary in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, except without the humor or off-color language.

If I have to hear one more breathless gush about “overcoming adversity” that would make The View proud, I may literally throw up. The folks at slate.com have actually created a “Sap-O-Meter” to chart just how often the following sappy, treacly words are used: adversity, battled, cancer, challenges, courage, cry, dad, daughter, death, dedication, determination, dream, emotion, father, glory, golden, heart, hero, inspiration, inspire, journey, magic, memory, mom, mother, overcome, passion, patriotic, proud, sacrifice, son, spirit, tears, tragedy, triumph. They record one “Sap Point” each time one of those magic words gets spoken during NBC’s prime-time Winter Games programming. I hope they have a calculator with a lot of memory.

But it turns out that, as far as the Olympics goes, NBC isn’t actually in the sports broadcasting business, anyway, except incidentally. Instead, it’s in the business of broadcasting for maximum sponsor dollars which, incidentally and only a bit, happens to include sports. Nothing wrong with that. Maximizing revenue is the American Way. It’s the pretense that it’s something else that irks me.

To be more precise, NBC as Olympic broadcaster is resolutely and indefatigably actually in the business of trying to sell stuff to women, who as a rule aren’t sports fans, and become casual fans – emphasis on the “casual” – only every 4 years when the Olympics comes around. This means, in turn, that it’s far less important to make sure the broadcasts are good sports-wise, and far more important to figure out what non-sports-fan women want, and give it to them in doses that induce gastrointestinal distress in any male sports fan, so that they’ll keep watching in prime time, even when Idol or Lost is on opposite NBC.

If that involves broadcasting a few minutes of actual athletic competition every now and again, so much the better: but never except in prime time; and never an entire competition or event. Instead, knowing that many women spend their days watching Oprah, Montel, and whomever, as well as soap operas, NBC spends most of its Olympic coverage air time on athletes’ back-stories, as long as they’re uplifting or sob-inducing. Oh, and make sure there’s LOTS of coverage of figure skating, because women just love the costumes and the music. So do pedophiles, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Men? Well, since they actually care about sports, they’ll proactively look for it, so why make their task easy? If they really want actual sports coverage, they’ll look hard and find it on some remote cable channel or on the Internet. Unfortunately, during the Olympics, the remote is controlled by women and children – with the nauseating results we see on TV every night for the next fortnight.

As for figure skating, it’s now half over (pairs and men’s singles completed, “Ice Dance” and women’s singles to go), so there must be a scoring controversy, no? Mais certainement!

American Evan Lysacek won the gold, edging defending champion, Russkie Yevgeny Plushenko, with a technically solid, safe but hardly spectacular long program. So, of course, says the Plush-man, it must have been the result of tainted judging, since Lysacek didn’t attempt, let alone land, any quads.

My reaction? The skating world has more bitches in it than any dog kennel.

First, assuming the judging was biased, tough noogies. After all those years when Russkie skaters got the benefit of Iron Curtain-based inflated scores, a little payback is just fine with me. And, second, if Lysacek really was as bad as Plushenko claims, then Plushenko’s routine must have been pretty pedestrian in its own right, given that Plushenko was actually leading after the short program. A really strong long program surely would have given him the gold. Whose fault is that? My heart bleeds beet borscht for you, Yevgeny, you big weenie.

Not, mind you, that I’d be shocked to learn that hanky-panky had occurred. Figure skating is notorious for biased judging, bribery, intimidation and what-not. It just wouldn’t be a Winter Olympics with at least one tainted figure skating gold medal.

The latest Roland Lazenby book, on Jerry West, contains the maybe not-so-stunning revelation that Magic Johnson was having 300-500 “sexual liaisons PER YEAR when he was a Laker, and that “The team’s locker room, and its sauna, had been a place where the star and other players had entertained women, even right after games. [Magic] Johnson would retire to the sauna after a game, have sex, then put on a robe and return to the locker room for his postgame media interviews.” I just don’t want to hear anything further about Tiger Woods and his dozens, or even hundreds, of mistresses and hook-ups. Whatever they amount to, Magic has them beat. And it doesn’t matter that Magic wasn’t married at the time. He was affianced, and that’s good (if that’s the right word) enough for me.

Speaking of Tiger, although his highly scripted, media-unfriendly, rather sanctimonious non-press conference to “apologize” to the American Public was a bit of a circle-jerk, let’s give him some credit for what he DIDN’T do. I can’t judge true sincerity, but I sure have an eagle-eye for INsincerity, which is what we routinely get from athletes, politicians, and other prominent public figures caught cheating. Tiger stayed away from the most obvious insincerity traps.

For example, he DID NOT issue the odious but all-too-common non-apology apology, of the “if anyone was offended by what I may or may not have done, I’m sorry.” He also didn’t pull the Jason Giambi “I’m not telling you what I’m apologizing for, but I’m apologizing anyway” schtick. He didn’t pull a Mark McGwire and claim that he didn’t know what he was doing, or that he did what he did for reasons other than the ones that everyone knows. He didn’t claim that anything was wholly or in part anyone else’s fault.

Nope, sincere or not — and, for what it’s worth, the claim is that Tiger wrote it himself so as to avoid the worst excesses of spin doctoring – the speech took full personal responsibility for Tiger’s own failings, and clearly and unambiguously stated that he had no one to blame but himself. That’s something that John Edwards has yet to do, to take just one of many examples. And,, after all, in the end Tiger Woods is just a golfer. A supremely successful golfer, to be sure, but not someone in an occupation “infused with the public interest,” or whose personal peccadillos really have the potential to exert a significant influence on our lives. Edwards, on the other hand, but for vote fraud in Florida and a corrupt Supreme Court, could have been Vice President of this nation, for Pete’s sake! (The same, in lesser measure could be said for the countless other scandal-ridden pols: Sen. Vitter of Louisiana; Sen. Ensign of Nevada: Gov. Sanford of South Carolina; former Gov. Eliot Spitzer . . . you get the idea.)

I also found it refreshing that Tiger DID NOT include the “woman wronged” at his side as a prop, the way everyone else – Kobe, are you listening? – has tried to do. Had Elin been there, smiling through gritted teeth, we might have been subjected to a variation of that vomitous “You are the air that I breathe, the heart that beats within me” claptrap to which Kobe subjected us. Mazel tov for sparing us that torture, Eldrick.

I may fault Tiger’s wooden delivery and workmanlike rhetoric. But I can’t fault his being pretty much the only prominent figure in my memory to say publicly and straightforwardly: “It was my fault, and I own this,” as well as “I’m sorry.” Whether he believes it or not is extrinsic. He said it.

That’s probably still not enough red meat for our ravenous tabloid media – which these days means ALL media, mainstream or otherwise – but what the hey. I do know that, whatever El Tigre did, I haven’t watched a nanosecond of golf since his accident. I suspect millions of fellow Americans have done the same. Like them, I’m a casual golf fan, and am just too busy to waste my free time watching meaningless ciphers like Ernie Els and the host of others who feel it’s now OK to take potshots at the guy they’ve always hated because he’s so consistently humiliated them. And, incidentally, made each and every one of them calculably richer than they’d have been without his influence. I WILL watch some golf after his return, if and only if he’s still in contention of a Saturday or Sunday. I suspect millions of others will do the same. And apologies or non-apologies be damned.

No one can ever tell how a midseason NBA trade will work out. What looks like dynamite on paper may be a dud on the court. The Gasol trade, which turned the Lakers into the premier team in the West, was a happy exception.

Still, it sure looks as if the Cavs, already a beast, did nothing but help themselves in the trade that brought them Antawn Jamison at a cost of nothing more than Zydrunas Ilgauskas and the Cavs’ first-round pick in the 2010 draft. Whoop de damn do. Not only did the Cavs have decreasing use for Ilgauskas and his high salary, but, because of the quirks of the trade rules, they may even have a wink and a nod for the Wizards to buy out Ziggy’s contract to get the cap relief, then cut him and let him rejoin the Cavs for pennies on the dollar! Not that Jamison is the second coming of Gasol, but let no one henceforth complain about how uniquely one-sided and unfair the Gasol trade was. (Actually, not quite as one-sided as it may have seemed at the time, given the way the younger Gasol has flourished in Memphis.)

Speaking of Pau, now that the winning streak without Kobe is over – in a game in which the Lakers scored something like 2 points in the final 5 minutes and lost by one, can we please, please lose the talk about how the Lakers are better, and will go farther in the playoffs, without The Kobester?

And, while we’re at it, maybe lose the meme that Gasol is the team’s most valuable player? He’s a great player; I love him; and the Lakers can’t win another championship without him. (Maybe not with him, either, but hope springs eternal.) But he’s not a franchise player, and he’s not a cold-blooded assassin in the clutch – except maybe when he’s playing for the Spanish National Team. He is a fantastic second-option super-role player, who regards the rock as if it’s covered in excrement when it comes to him late in the game, and tries to wash his hands of it as expeditiously as possible. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that. Let’s agree to stop trying to make of him something he’s not.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.

Here’s an interesting nugget I picked up from somewhere or other: Charlotte coach Larry “Gypsy Feet” Brown, who’s already itching to leave Charlotte for another job, and may use an impending sale of the team as an excuse to break yet another contract, is angling HARD for the team to move point guard D.J. Augustin for a veteran big man.

Nothing earth-shattering there. After all, Brown is and always has been hard on his point guards. He falls into and out of love with them like a speed-dater, and when he falls out of love, he can’t even stand to have his former inamorata in the same city. The kicker in this case, though, is that, for a change, the justly maligned Michael Jordan is the “good guy.” Apparently, he and Rod Higgins wanted to draft Brook Lopez with the 2008 9th draft pick, but Brown demanded they pass on Lopez for Augustin.

This doesn’t tell us a lot about Brown that we don’t already know. Not only is he notoriously fickle, but EVERY SINGLE TEAM that has ever accommodated him on personnel matters was in decidedly worse shape, personnel-wise, when he skedaddled. Every single one. Because he’s such a great coach when his neuroses are within limits (and make no mistake, having the Bobcats over .500 at this stage of the season is damn fine coaching) owner after owner for whom he’s coached has made the mistake of gutting a roster to accommodate Brown’s ever-changing whims regarding personnel, and rued the decision for years afterwards.

Amazingly, however, it may require some new perspective on Jordan and Higgins. Brook Lopez isn’t exactly Kwame Brown. He’s an up-and-comer who’s a legitimate presence in the low post. Admittedly, the 9th pick isn’t quite the no. 1 that MJ wasted on Brown. But it still would have been a good, solid pick, and would have helped the Bobcats a lot more than Agustin ever could. Maybe MJ isn’t a total personnel disaster and deserves a modicum of slack.

Kind of about time for Mike Dunleavy to step aside as the Clippers’ coach, wasn’t it? Not that his obviously forced resignation made any difference, as the Clips have not only continued their drain-circulation, but have been doing so with epic point-differentials. Still, it’s been obvious since his unfathomable player rotations a few years ago, when the Clippers had a golden opportunity, up 3-1, to beat the Suns and move to the Western Conference Finals, that he’s not the man for the job. Or maybe it was obvious when his Portland team collapsed in such epic fashion in Game 7 of the Western Conference Final.

But does it really matter who’s the coach? The Clippers are cursed. Just ask Blake Griffin.

I have no idea what NCAA football recruiting classes actually mean, let alone how to rank them. Everyone seems to agree that Florida and Texas had the top two classes, that USC was right up there, and that UCLA’s class was surprisingly strong. But what does any of that mean?

In the first place, none of the “great” recruits at those schools has played a down of college ball yet. Until they show that they can make the transition and continue to perform at a high level, the jury is out. It’s like pro draft “classes.” Nobody knows what a draftee is going to do unless and until he does it.

It’s like the pro draft in another way. As we see year after year at the combine, player personnel types make their decisions based on “measurable” not necessarily directly related to performance: 40-yard dash time; number of reps in the weight room; apparent arm strength; jumping ability, whatever.

What, after all, is a 5-star or a 4-star player? Mainly, someone judged on how he did in high school, plus “measurables.” No thought whether a particular player can play in a particular system. I remember passer Troy Aikman committing to Oklahoma because he bought the Kool-Aid the Bootlegger’s Son was selling about finally instituting a passing game. Had a horrible year or two at Oklahoma before transferring to UCLA. The thing is, even though he was a terrible fit at Oklahoma, I’m sure he had a multi-star rating out of high school, so his horrible signing undoubtedly enhanced the Sooners’ recruiting class standing at the time. But he didn’t really shine until he went to a school with a system suited to his talents. How many other players have been screwed by going to the wrong school?

I tend to discount all of the rumors about Tiger Woods’s “sex rehab.” There’s no hard evidence that he even went to a “sex rehab” clinic, let alone about what he may have done there. But if the latest rumor is true, my respect for him has just increased a bit. The rumor, published in the National Enquirer, which these days seems to be the last bastion of old-style, hard journalism, is that he derided sex addiction rehab as nonsense, “treated group therapy with such contempt that he caused one female patient to break down in tears,” and “ridiculed fellow patients and refused to cooperate with therapists.”

If true, good on him. Because he’s right. It’s as much BS as the “anger management” therapy that athletes with violence issues get sent to. It’s either a solution for a non-problem, or a non-solution for a real problem. In either case, it’s all for show. Of course, that makes me respect him LESS for using it to start restoring his image. Which is, in fact, the only effective “rehab” such therapy provides.
I totally agree with Colin Cowherd on this one. Derek Jeter has had just as many (and from what I can tell, much more attractive and higher-class) babes as Tiger. Maybe more. Yet he’s not a “sex addict” and Tiger is. Why? For one reason and one reason only: because Derek Jeter is single and Tiger made the mistake of saying “I do.” And that’s just not a meaningful distinction – certainly not clinically meaningful evidence of pathology.

It’s morally wrong to disgrace that vow to be sure, but simply continuing satyriacal behavior after marriage doesn’t suddenly transform a “playa” into a “sex addict.” I know many would like married men to place their gonads in a blind trust accessible only by their wives, but let’s get real.

I meant what I said, by the way, about the disreputable tabloid National Enquirer being perhaps the last bastion of old-style journalism – at least on stories like this. Let’s not forget that it was the Enquirer, not the mainstream media, that broke the John Edwards “love child” story. It took a lot of heat for it, too, until every major detail was later discovered to be accurate. At a time when the so-called “mainstream media” are acting more like stenographers than reporters, simply repeating and rehashing press releases, it’s good to know that some media outlet is actually doing investigative journalism, however tawdry.

Apparently all it takes is a single pass to remove Peyton Manning from the ranks of God’s anointed to “choking bum.” He shouldn’t have thrown that interception in the Super Bowl, and it didn’t help that it was returned for a TD, but anyone who believes that that’s why the Colts lost the game is smoking something. Heck, even on that play, the smart-guy consensus is that it was largely Reggie Wayne’s fault for running a nonchalant route and not sealing off the inside. And don’t even get me started on the dropped pass by Pierre Garcon, or the botched play on the onside kick by Kendra Wilkinson’s baby daddy.

Manning blew it? Maybe. But how about this: take away Manning all season, and the Colts are at best a 10-6 team, maybe even 9-7, and not within sniffing distance of the game with all the Roman numerals. They’re just not all that good. Kudos to Manning for getting them there, despite putrid special teams, so-so kicking, and a banged-up, undermanned defense.

Manning actually had an OK game, statistically. The problem is, Drew Brees had an even better game. Happens. What happens when – as I guarantee right now – Brees never gets back to the big game. Is he suddenly a fraud?

The real problem is that the media, so eager to anoint sports gods, is even more eager to tear them down when their performance falls short of what the same media, in their collective wisdom, predicted – nay, demanded – that they do. The problem, as always, is that games aren’t played on paper; they’re played on the field and in the arena.

It’s true that Joe Montana won 4 Super Bowls and had exceptional stats in each of the games. Of course it didn’t hurt that the Niners were demonstrably superior to their opponents in each game, Montana or no Montana.

How about the great Elway, who was, no question, one of the best ever? Forget about his truly mediocre stats in the three Super Bowl losses before his two wins. It’s reasonable to attribute that to the sorry supporting cast that he essentially carried to the games on his broad shoulders. But in the 1998 game against the Packers, when the Broncos finally broke through, he was a very ordinary 12/22 for 123 yards, with no TDs and one INT. However, the Broncos won that game, so the oh-so-pedestrian stats – consistent with his prior Super Bowl appearances – were overlooked.

Even the next year, when he won the Super Bowl MVP, he was still “only” 18/29 for 336 yards and one TD, with an INT. Just for the record, Manning was 31/45 for 333 yards, 1 TD and one INT. If the Colts won, he’d have been the MVP instead of the goat. Of course, stats are for losers and liars.

I’m not using those stats to demean Elway. He took his team to 5 Super Bowls and won 2, for Pete’s sake. But if his team hadn’t won those last two Super Bowls, what would people have been saying about his stats, which were worse than Manning’s?

Is there ANY NBA player more polarizing than Kobe Bryant? Let him hit a few last-second shots, and he’s the greatest clutch shooter since MJ. Let him miss a couple, and he’s a pathetic bum who can’t close the deal. Let him play with injuries that would bench pretty much any other player playing today, and he gets no slack for any fall-off in his stats. Let him sit out three games to get better for the stretch, and when the Lakers win all three, it’s obvious they’d be better off without him.

Let’s get real, people. The Lakers ARE NOT, in the long haul, and especially in the playoffs against elite teams, better off without Kobe. Who, exactly, would anyone trust with the ball in the game’s dying seconds? Not Shannon Brown or Jordan Farmar; not Ron Artest or Lamar Odom; not Derek Fisher, MOST of the time; and not even Pau Gasol, whom I love but who tends to vanish in the end-game.

Just for the record, Gasol is a great player. He’s one of the top post players in the league, and his intelligence makes him perfect for the triangle. He’s got all kinds of skills. In fact, as Kobe has said on several occasions, Gasol was truly the missing piece of the championship puzzle, because once he arrived, everyone else on the team could play his natural position.

But it wasn’t Kobe who lost that game in Cleveland, even though he shot 12/31. If anyone, It was the Spaniard, who missed two easily makeable close-in shots, and 2 FTs, in the waning minutes of that game. And that’s par for the Gasol course. I don’t want the ball in his hands in the end-game of any important game. He routinely misses free throws and gimme 3-footers.

Kobe does sometimes take too many shots, and miss a lot of them, especially when his finger is hurting, and that isn’t good for the team. I generally don’t like it when he takes 25-30 shots, and the player with the next-highest shot total has, like, 14. But look at the tape. He usually makes the right entry pass to initiate the triangle offense. If the ball doesn’t move right, it’s not just because he “dominates the ball,” but because his teammates are dicking around with it. And how many of his bad shots are taken because his teammates have screwed up the shot clock, and give it to him with a couple of seconds left, and no other option? If his teammates aren’t moving the ball – or, worse, not moving without the ball but instead standing around and waiting for him to create something — it’s on them, not on him. They have to take ownership of their own responsibilities.

For what it’s worth, it sure does seem as if Lamar Odom plays better as a starter than as a sixth man. PJ has acknowledged that every one of his coaches has been lobbying for him to start Odom and let Bynum come off the bench. True, Bynum’s feelings may be hurt a bit by the perceived demotion, but is the team a meritocracy or a day-care center? Let him play solid defense and get double-digit rebounds for a few games, and EARN his way back into the starting lineup.

The Winter Olympics are starting Saturday in Vancouver, where I was born. Bully for Canada. Hope the games are spectacular, though they’re not off to the most auspicious start, what with the death of a Georgian luger during a practice run.

I hope and pray even more fervently that the games don’t bankrupt Vancouver. Not an idle fear. I can think of few, if any, instances where cities and countries have actually wound up financially better, or even broke even, off AFTER hosting the games. MAYBE Los Angeles in 1984, largely because the infrastructure was already there, and there was no need for costly construction projects. But the good financial afterglows have been few and far between.

Montreal in 1976 was driven into virtual bankruptcy from all the wasteful (and, as it turned out, substandard) construction. There’s a line of thought that a major reason for Greece’s present economic death spiral was the proportionally massive public debt it incurred to bring off the 2004 Athens Olympics. The 2008 Olympics in Beijing were certainly a PR triumph for China, but they proved to be somewhat of an economic bust. Most of the buildings constructed and unveiled to great fanfare now sit empty or underutilized – “see-through” buildings, in the jargon of the distressed real estate market.

And those stories are typical. Frankly, Chicago should be overjoyed that Barack Obama wasn’t successful in winning its bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Congratulations, Rio, home of more crime than South Central, and more poverty than anyplace above Haiti. Nice that you got the bid. Please don’t come to the U.S. for a bailout after you wind up in the deep, deep red.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.

Some guy allegedly offered one of his testicles on CraigsList for Super Bowl tickets. C’mon. I know it’s a “ball” game, but this is carrying things too far. The guy is surely, dare we say, certifiably “nuts.” Or, since he’s offering only 1 of his, perhaps “a nut” would be better. And not for nothing, what person in possession of valuable Super Bowl tickets would want someone else’s testicle? I mean, I know about the practice of hanging replica bull testicles from vehicles, but really, a single human one?

I’ve often said that I have zero interest in meeting or befriending (even in my fantasies) artists whose work I admire. And that includes athletes, with a bullet. In fact, athletes are among the artists whose “art” productions I most admire and yet with whom I’d least like to become personally acquainted. Why should I? I’d only and inevitably be disappointed. The poet Christopher Isherwood put it so well: “No need to meet the duck just because you’ve enjoyed the foie gras.”

Exhibit umpteen comes from the L.A. Times obituary of J.D. Salinger, unquestionably a great writer, whose “Catcher In The Rye” was virtually a bible for generations of angst-ridden, rebellious teens. Turns out that, in addition to being obsessively reclusive and a bit of a dick in his personal life, former live-in lover Joyce Maynard revealed – and who could possibly have seen this coming? – “his absorption in homeopathy and his devotion to Reichian therapy. According to Maynard, Salinger also regularly induced himself to vomit after eating foods he deemed unhealthful and taught her to do the same.”

That doesn’t make him evil, and there are plenty of people into such things. But it does make him a crank, and I suspect that every great artist, whether a writer, painter, musician, dancer, actor, or athlete, is a crank or an eccentric – a self-centered eccentric – to a significant degree. Just speaking for myself, I’d rather enjoy the great art without ever meeting the whacko artist, and limit my involvement with cranks and eccentrics to myself, my family, and my friends.

Perhaps an even better analogy is a story that a rock groupie from the 1970’s told a writer for New York magazine decades ago. Seems she had a fixation on getting laid by Mick Jagger, and pursued that goal monomaniacally by becoming a groupie and shtupping pretty much every man involved with the rock scene. Every time she bedded a guy, she thought, “He’s good, but he’s no Mick Jagger.” After a few years, it happened. The Stones were in New York, and with her connections, she was in the entourage participating in the bacchanalian orgies at their hotel. One night, Jagger crooked his finger at her, led her to his bedroom, and the culmination of her fantasies came to fruition. So what was she thinking when Mick was playing hide the bratwurst with her? You guessed it: “He’s good, but he’s no Mick Jagger.”

And that’s the problem. NO great artist can ever be as great in person as the art he produces makes us think he should be. Why set oneself up for disappointment?

Exhibits A-Z: Terrell Owens, Esq. Trust Mr. Owens to stir the (chamber) pot yet again. He’s had his share of artistic contributions to the collective body of football art, to be sure. No surprise, that. Didn’t one of his spokeswomen once refer to him as “a man of his STATUE”? He’s apparently a living WORK of art! But what a piece of work he is.

No perceived lack of success in his career, no missed catch, no fumble, no failure to score a TD has EVER been TO’s fault. Not a single one. Every problem he’s ever had has been because he was paired with inferior QBs, who couldn’t or wouldn’t call his number, couldn’t get him the ball, etc., etc. Now he’s mouthing off about how he’d have set every single record had he just managed to be paired with Elway, Montana, Young, or [fill in the blank]. Oops, he actually DID have Young for a while at San Francisco, but hey, who’s counting?

He might even be right about that records thing, since he’s compiled some impressive stats anyway. But so what? If I had a billion dollars, I’d be a billionaire.

It’s not as if the QBs he’s been “burdened” with (until he got to BARFalo, anyway) are total chopped liver. While Jeff Garcia, Donovan McNabb and the Tony Romo of a couple of years ago might not have constituted a Hall of Fame roster, each and every one of them was significantly above the median for NFL QBs. Not that Pro Bowl selections mean a damn thing, but each of those “inferior” QBs has had at least one of those.

That’s a better group of QBs, come to think of it, than some WRs who’ve MADE the Hall of Fame can boast of. So, as Cassius said to Brutus, perhaps “the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves.” (True, Owens was venting about owning the records, not merely compiling HOF numbers, so the case isn’t quite closed; but the door’s swinging shut, anyway.)

And just maybe, even saddled with those QBs whom he holds in such contempt, he still could have padded his statistics just a bit had he actually made some effort on a regular basis to complete routes, to reach a little for balls that were overthrown, to go back into traffic to snare balls that might have been a bit underthrown, to fight defenders for balls that were in any sense up for grabs – you get the idea.

For all his physical gifts, like Randy Moss much of the time, Mr. Owens was never one to do any of the dirty work. Which then became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Heck, forget about “dirty work.” How about just hanging onto the ball, which was always a challenge for TO. Maybe that, rather than an inability to get him the ball, explains why his QBs have always had the temerity to look for other receivers who’ve been far less gifted, but far more committed to running routes, making plays, and protecting the ball. Just a thought.

Serena Williams, head case extraordinaire, known for bad sportsmanship, for beating herself at the U.S. Open and for her incredible meltdown and loss of nerve against a younger, fitter Justine Henin at the French Open a few years ago is back on top, having cleaned the comebacking Ms. Henin’s clock, or, since she’s Belgian, her “horloge.” To be fair, she’s also kind of known for having won 12 Grand Slam singles titles, tied with Billie Jean King, and countless doubles titles More power to her. When she wants to be, she’s a beast.

My main criticism of her – other than her spoiled-brat and classless way of losing AND winning – has been that she doesn’t want to be often enough. Seems kind of a silly observation, given her 12 Grand Slam titles and all, but just imagine how great she could have been had she been committed and motivated on a consistent basis.

What irks me about her now, though, is her continued insistence that she could, in any sense, and at any level of accomplishment, compete with male tennis players. Maybe she’s joking, but I don’t think so. She’s referred to the fact that she’s closing in on Roger Federer’s 16 Grand Slam titles, as if there’s something comparable just in the numbers. Annika Sorenstam, before her retirement, made a similar reference to her “competition” with her good friend, Tiger Woods, for number of majors won. Are we expected to take this nonsense seriously?

Just to set the record straight, Serena has won her Grand Slams, and Annika has won her Majors, against women. The best women players in the world, to be sure, but still women. Federer and Tiger have won their titles against men, and, not to beat a dead horse, but the very best male players in the world, to boot. That should be all that needs to be said.

After all, lest we forget, Sorenstam, at or near the top of her game, actually competed – well, maybe not the aptest term – at the Colonial Open a few years back. That tournament, of all the Men’s PGA tournaments, was maybe the best one for her, because it was played on a short and not super-challenging course. So how did she do? Missed the one-over-par cut by 4 strokes. A bunch of men missed that cut, too, but that’s hardly the point, is it? More power to her for ruling the women’s toy roost for all those years, but what’s the comparative value of her women’s majors?
The Serena story is pretty much the same. Brad Gilbert said in an interview a few years ago that she’d played against a male player ranked so low that he was pretty much reduced to playing doubles only, and lost love and love. I don’t have independent verification, but it’s credible to me.

So congratulations to her for her great success in a minor league. She’s earned her fame and large fortune. But that’s no excuse for her to start getting delusions of grandeur about her ability to succeed in the major league, or the comparable worth of her achievements and Federer’s.

When I speak of “comparable worth,” I’m not speaking about popularity, mind you. I can’t prove it, but it does seem to me that women’s tennis is at least as popular as the men’s game these days, if not more popular. But that’s not because the women’s game is better, and most assuredly not because the women are better tennis players.

The unquestionable number one factor is that most sports fans are heterosexual men, and they’d rather watch attractive women sweat and flaunt their wares in skimpy attire than watch men in shorts do the same. That’s as valid a reason as any to watch a sport, I suppose; and certainly a valid issue to consider in determining allocation of money and camera time.. But it’s no basis for promoting the ludicrous concept of ATHLETIC equality.

I see where U.S. national soccer team member DaMarcus Beasley’s BMW was firebombed FOR THE SECOND TIME. Beasley plays for Glagow Rangers, one of the Scottish Premier League’s premier teams. Rangers have a long and storied rivalry with Glasgow Celtic. The rivalry is even more heated than, say, Red Sox-Yankees, not just because Rangers and Celtic play in the same city, but because Rangers are the “Protestant” team, while Celtic are the “Roman Catholic” representatives. So there are overtones of holy war added in. And Glasgow is a toyugh town, anyway – about as tough as they come. Fans of Celtic have been known to treat Rangers fans and players even worse than Raiders’ fans treat fans of the Broncos or Chargers, and vice-versa.

So the HOPEFUL analysis is that the firebombing is “merely” an indication of how truly rabid and vile the rivalry is, or, possibly, that a diehard Rangers fan – pissed to the gills, as “lager lout” Brit soccer fans regularly seem to be – did the deed because he was fed up with Beasley’s ineffective play while recovering from injuries.

That’s the “hopeful” analysis, you say? What, pray, could be worse? Well, Mr. B is African-American, and there’s been a distressing spike in racist comments and attacks by British and European soccer fans. I’m talking monkey yells during matches, chants featuring language banned at all sports facilities in the U.S., obscenely derogatory signs, and even physical attacks. The “barbaric” U.S. would never even consider countenancing such filth, but it’s standard operating procedure in the “cultured” and “refined” Old World. Just ask French and Barcelona FC great Thierry Henry. There’s plenty wrong with U.S. attitudes to race, but we are the acme of enlightenment by comparison.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.

Who’d have thought that the ONLY stand-up guy from what co-conspirator/enabler-in-chief Bud Selig has incorrectly called the “so-called Steroids Era” would be lowlife dirtbag Jose Canseco? But that’s STILL the case even after Mark McGwire “courageously” made his scripted, mendacious “confession” to Bob Costas the other day.

To this day, Canseco is the ONLY former baseball player – and that includes the late, lamented Ken Caminiti — who not only admits to having taken ‘roids, but goes further to admit what we all know about all the other weasels who still won’t admit the full truth, namely: he not only took them, but he knew exactly WHAT he was taking — none of this “some unknown person or persons handed me some unidentified substance and told me to take it and I, naïve multimillionaire manchild that I am, took it without asking any questions”; he knew WHY he was taking them, and it was to get bigger and stronger and to hit balls farther, NOT (or not mainly) for some BS reason like “recovering from injury”; and he knew damn well that the ‘roids he was taking did the job he asked them to do, namely make warning-track flies into fence-clearers; and he knew damned well that with ‘roids, he was an All-Star, while without them, he was, well, Ozzie Canseco. (Maybe not the best analogy; apparently Ozzie took them, too, with rather glaringly worse results.)

Let’s be clear. My beef with McGwire and his ilk isn’t that he took steroids, and thus gave himself an improper advantage in both performance and, of course, earning power. That’s a given, and I’m still not happy about it, but that boat’s already sailed for me. It’s that instead of telling the truth, he STILL gives us a small dose of what Steven Colbert calls “truthiness” together with a whole mess of vile, cowardly lies. That’s called, “spin,” not ‘fessing up. McGwire’s nickname when he played was “Big Mac.” But the way he’s been pussyfooting around the truth ever since, he should now be known, officially, as “The Whopper.”

In this regard, let the record show that Canseco has challenged McGwire to a lie-detector contest. I’ve been on record for years as against the whole “lie detector” myth. Polygraph machines aren’t “lie detectors” in any meaningful sense; they are inherently unreliable; their use and interpretation is at best more art than science; and how good can they be when every single FBI or CIA agent later exposed (by accident) as a spy and traitor to the U.S. regularly underwent polygraph screening – allegedly by some of the best trained pros around – and always passed with flying colors? Nonetheless, my money’s on Canseco in any forum.

Where do we start with the McGwire smarm? How about “I wasn’t really cheating (in my own feeble mind) because I only took whatever I took (I can’t remember now what it really was, if I ever knew) because I took it to recover from injuries, not to gain a competitive advantage. Great, Mark. I’ll try running that by all the guys who DIDN’T cheat, and wound up taking longer than you to recover from injuries. What, advantage in recovering from injuries using illegal/banned substances doesn’t count as cheating?

How about “Yeah, Canseco was right ‘in general’ when he said I was using, but he lied through his teeth about us shooting up together in the toilet stalls.” Sorry, Mark. A woman can’t be just “a little bit pregnant,” and you can’t be just a little bit dirty. You’re either clean or you’re dirty, and there’s no in-between. You were as dirty (and as cowardly) as they come. Doesn’t matter if you only used “a little bit” because you didn’t want to look like Lou Ferrigno or The Terminator. You used, and you damned well knew what you were doing when you used. And don’t tell me that you didn’t really know what you were taking.

And please, Mark McLIAR, Bud Selig, Tony LaRussa (another pompous, self-righteous prevaricator if ever there was one) DO NOT try to pee on my back and tell me it’s raining. DO NOT tell me that steroids couldn’t really influence the game because no matter how many ‘roids you take, they don’t hit the curve ball or the fast ball for you.

What a fatuous load of drivel. Of course I and my ilk can’t hit major league pitching no matter how many kilos of ‘roids we take or how many hours we spend lifting weights. But what about someone who can hit the pitching, say, 20 percent of the time, but can’t hit it very far or very hard? ‘Roids will help those guys hit it farher, so that pop flies become first-row homers; they’ll help them hit balls harder, so that balls that would have been fielded cleanly become base hits; and they’ll help them have much better bat control, if they work at it, because they’re a lot stronger and can wait on pitches like they couldn’t before. Of course the juicers still have to work hard and practice. ‘Roids don’t hit homers by themselves. But only an inveterate liar like Selig or LaRussa would deny that ‘roids + hard work = a potent combination.

Here’s what we KNOW steroids did for a bunch of journeyman players: Sammy Sosa, a pedestrian, marginal major-leaguer at Texas, took ‘roids and suddenly hit 60+ homers annually; Brady Anderson (allegedly) took ‘roids and hit 50 homers and 110 RBIs in 1996 (and got a multi-million dollar contract out of it, despite never again approaching those numbers when he got smaller). We all know about Jason Giambi, of course, who parlayed ‘roids to one MVP and almost $100 Million, but what about his Yankees’ teammate, Aaron Boone (allegedly) and that 2003 season? What about Aaron’s brother, Bret (also “allegedly”)? What about poor, departed Ken Caminiti?

The issue isn’t, and has NEVER been, whether ‘roids made bad athletes suddenly able to hit major league pitching. It is, and has ALWAYS been, what it can do for marginal, or even good players. Marginal players who were contact hitters started juicing and almost overnight were able to hit balls 100 feet farther than they’d ever managed before. Chicks (and the guys who sign the players’ paychecks) dig the long ball. Guys like McGWIRE, who were already good but not quite supermen, suddenly started hitting opposite-field home runs off the handles of their bats, for Pete’s sake. And Barry Bonds, who already had a probable HOF career even before he’d ever heard of ‘roids (and still won’t admit that he juiced), became simply unbelievable.
So please don’t try to sell me the snake oil that verifiably performance enhancing substances don’t enhance performance.

Speaking of snake oil, how in heaven’s name does Lane Kiffin, of all people, wind up back at USC, this time as head coach? As an offensive play caller when Norm Chow left – and even before Chow left, apparently – he was, well, simply offensive. Perhaps no one could have won at Oakland under the (rusted) iron hand of Al Davis. But Kiffin was abysmal as the head coach there, even by Al Davis’s lackluster standards. And he hardly set the world on fire at Tennessee during his one year there – unless you count his amazing penchant for committing NCAA rules violations and making more verbal gaffes than Joe Biden.

All of which make him the perfect candidate to take over a USC program that NCAA violations problems of its own, and that hasn’t exactly been wowing the college football world with the razzle-dazzle of its offense lately. Way to go.

To be fair and balanced about it, though, who ever in his wildest dreams believed, when his name was announced, that Pete Carroll would achieve what he did at SC? But I’d still like to see what USC football’s police blotter looks like after a year or two of Kiffin. Not pretty, if what happened at Tennessee is any indication.

I was amazed to hear Norm Chow’s name mentioned as possible offensive coordinator, for two reasons. First, Kiffin’s main claim to fame is that he’s part of the Pete Carroll coaching “tree,” and it seems pretty clear that Carroll ran Chow off, perhaps because it galled Carroll that Chow was garnering praise for the offense’s ability to make adjustments, and to turn out Heisman Trophy QBs.

But, second, I had always understood that there was substantial bad blood between Kiffin and Chow, in part because Chow (rightly) felt that Kiffin had been promoted too quickly and beyond his level of competence (I mean, c’mon, letting Kiffin call plays and relegating Chow to quarterbacks coach when you’ve had Chow do the playcalling with such stunning success?), and in part because, some say. Kiffin was a punk.

Didn’t they nearly come to blows at least once? Didn’t Chow pretty much (correctly) call Kiffin and Sarkisian incompetent play-callers in praising De Wayne Walker after UCLA’s 13-9 win that kept the Trojans out of a sure-thing BCS Championship game? Didn’t Kiffin refuse to give Chow any props when UCLA beat Kiffin’s Vols, AT ROCKY TOP, this past season? And they’re now supposed to do a couple of public Hollywood-style air kisses and make like nothing ever happened?

What, exactly, has changed in the interim? It was bad enough when Carroll passively-aggressively insulted Chow by making Kiffin Chow’s equal in the offense – or maybe, as in “Animal Farm,” a bit “more equal.” Now we’re supposed to believe that Chow would be happy to report to Kiffin? Or that Kiffin would actually keep his greasy fingers out of the play-calling cookie jar?

I do think that Chow is kind of wasted at UCLA. In answer to Jon Castro’s question a couple of months ago about how brilliant Chow really was/is, given the sorry evidence of UCLA’s offensive woes this year, I kind of side with The Sportsgod on this one. Look at the material he has to work with. It’s the old chicken salad/chicken s*** conundrum. And I have no evidence whatever to back up this supposition, but I know that the UCLA head coach, whom Mr. Castro has christened “Newweasel,” has a huge ego, and believes himself even more of an offensive genius than Pete Carroll claimed to be. Not that his track record supports that assessment, but I think it’s the one he firmly believes. So who’s to say that The Weasel didn’t try to micromanage the UCLA offense, to its detriment and the detriment of Chow’s reputation?

What we DO know is that when Chow had preeminent talent to work with at USC, he did more with that level of talent than either Kiffin or Steve Sarkisian. I am not alone (in fact, I’m channeling Petros Papadakis) in believing that had Carroll left Chow the Hell alone and made him continue to feel welcome at SC, the Trojans would have won the 2005 Rose Bowl, and would have qualified for at least two more BCS Championship games, probably winning at least one. Of course, if ifs and ands were pots and pans, we’d have no need of tinkers.

Just when the Clippers were showing signs of life, we learn that the jinx is alive and well. Blake Griffin, though no fault of his own, is the new Shaun Livingston. Busted kneecap, out for season, microfracture surgery, will never regain explosiveness. Nice seeing you in Summer League.

It’s a real deflater, because the Clippers really have been playing well lately. Ironically, so has Memphis – the 19-18 Grizzlies, thank you very much — who dealt the Clips a heartbreaking loss on Tuesday. Stands to reason, though, that Zach Randolph, a pain-in-the-ass, selfish underachieving cancerous creep wherever he’s been, would suddenly blossom, sort of, once the Clippers dumped him. He may still be a creep, but he’s now a more-or-less in-shape, 20.5 ppg, 11.5 rpg creep who, as much as anyone, has been responsible for the positive record of a team that managed only 24 wins all of last season. Had to happen. It’s the Clippers after all. If it weren’t for bad luck, they’d have no luck at all.

The irony, I suppose, is that Griffin checked out as completely healthy when he was drafted. DeJuan Blair, on the other hand, fell to the Spurs because of concerns over lack of ACLs in his knees. Blair now turns out to be the healthy one. He scored 27 points and grabbed 21 boards for the Spurs in their 109-108 OT win over the Thunder on Wednesday.

It’s NFL playoff time, and therefore, as surely as night follows day, time for articles questioning why Peyton Manning keeps coming up small in the postseason. It’s an easy target. After all, Manning had a bit of a reputation as a choke artist even in college. In the pros, he’s been lights-out in the regular season but, despite QBing the winningest team of this millennium, going into Sunday’s game, he’s still under .500 all-time in the playoffs. Plus, although he was on the field throughout the Colts’ triumphant march to their one Super Bowl win, he was more of a passenger than a helmsman during most of it.

Truth to tell, I’ve felt that way about him lots of times. On the other hand, maybe the Colts had regular-season records that were better than they should have been, BECAUSE of Manning, and made people like me overrate their chances in the postseason. Maybe Tony Dungy, who did a lot of great things in football (like bring Tampa Bay back to respectability before being dumped by the Glazers) never was a very good game-planner or in-game coach. And maybe the Colts didn’t have the personnel to compete in the postseason. Like when New England got away with mugging the Colts’ smurf-like wide receivers that one year. I attributed the loss more to the failings of Marvin Harrison (obviously MUCH tougher with a gun in his hand), in particular, than to Manning. But Manning is the guy who gets paid the biggest bucks and gets the most accolades, so, tough. If he pooches again this season – despite the Colts’ well-publicized injury problems on defense and offense – he’ll officially be the A-Rod of football (without the serial adultery thing).

Brett Favre is an obvious lock for the HOF, and has had an outstanding comeback season, only a little tainted by the Vikings’ comparatively weak schedule. And, of course, his Vikes have beaten the Packers twice. For all I know, he’ll win three more games and his second Super Bowl. So it’s obvious that the Packers were wrong to let him go, right?

Not so fast. Aaron Rodgers isn’t Favre yet, and may never be, but he was pretty good himself this year. And Rodgers played behind an offensive line that did its best imitation of a sieve for much of the season. Rodgers is pretty mobile, but because of that line he got sacked more than any coastal English town during the years when the REAL Vikings were laying waste to much of Europe. Just imagine how the now-immobile Favre would have fared behind that line. He might not have lasted the season.

Rodgers played great in that wild-card game OT thriller at Arizona, his only three mistakes being the early interception, the overthrowing of Greg Jennings that would have meant an OT win, and, of course, the fumble that ensued on the next play, that gave the game to the Cards. But it’s not as if Favre never threw interceptions in big games when he was a Packer. Boy, did he ever. Including, naturally, the one he threw, into coverage, in OT in his last game for the Packers, AT LAMBEAU FIELD, that set up the Giants’ winning field goal. Maybe he would have hit Jennings in last Sunday’s game, as the Favre loyalists declaim lustily. But it’s an even-money bet that he’d have thrown a few INTs earlier that would have given the Cards a victory in regulation.

The fact that Favre has been almost MVP-good this year doesn’t mean that he’d have been nearly as good had he stayed active with the Packers. Especially with THIS YEAR’s Packers.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.

Perhaps the single stupidest comment I’ve seen on “L’Affaire Tigre,” was this one on one of the all-Tiger, all the time blog sites was this one: “HAPPY NEW YEAR TO THE MICKELSONS!! Thanks Phil for being a good Husband and a Great Golfer!!! you are the best EXAMPLE for the PGA tour, GOOD SHOW BRO!!”

Haven’t people learned ANYTHING from this fiasco? In particular, haven’t they learned that we should assume that NO ONE in the public eye is without flaws or deserving of our mindless, unconditional adoration? Resolving a disappointment at the disappointing behavior of one fallen public figure you mistakenly hero-worshipped by transferring your devotion to another one who hasn’t yet been exposed isn’t the answer. EVERY public figure has something in his or her private life that will infuriate some segment of society if exposed. The answer is to STOP HERO-WORSHIPPING people whose only claim to your allegiance and affection is that they can do something athletic that you can’t.

I’m not, by saying this, trying to throw Mickelson under the bus. I have no knowledge of his private life other than what he and his handlers have let any of us know. But he is a human being. It’s simply inconceivable that he doesn’t have flaws of character, personality or behavior that wouldn’t play well with the public in the up-close magnification of a media frenzy. Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.

Oh, and Fox News’s Brit Hume, about that “Tiger, convert to Christianity and repair your image” advice? Please can that. Nothing against Christianity, or any religion, but whatever it is, it surely must be more meaningful than a “get out of Jail free” card. “Finding Christ” may be laudable; but it doesn’t and shouldn’t wash away all sins.

One of the biggest Bible-thumpers in pro sports, Eugene Robinson of the Falcons, was arrested in a seedy section of Miami the night before the 1999 Super Bowl for soliciting an undercover police officer for oral sex. He was a real “family man,” too. In fact, a few hours before he was arrested, he was lounging by the pool at the team’s hotel with his wife and 9-year-old son, the very picture of domestic bliss.

Oh, it gets better. A mere 12 hours before his arrest, a Christian athletes’ group had selected him the winner of the Bart Starr award, an honor bestowed for “high moral character.” When he won the award, he burst into tears and profusely thanked his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He had been nicknamed “The Prophet” by his teammates because of his “deep religious beliefs.” All week before the Super Bowl, he had been professing the importance of his wife and children and was constantly preaching biblical values. Apparently, his deep Christian values didn’t make all that much of a difference where the care and well-being of his schlong were concerned.
Which comes as no surprise to the people who make parole decisions for prisoners, all of whom seemingly come to their hearings ostentatiously carrying a Bible and claim to have “found Jesus” and turned over a new leaf in the can. Maybe some have and did. Just like, maybe, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was thinking about Jesus when he was doing the horizontal lambada in Argentina with a woman other than his wife – on Father’s Day weekend, no less. Or just like the “Crystal Methodist” preacher, Ted Haggard, of “Focus on the Family,” must have been thinking of Jesus when he was paying a male “escort” to come to his Denver hotel room to give him a “massage” and sell him methamphetamine – for research purposes only, of course.

Not to say that religion is inherently bad, or that many people who are religious don’t practice its precepts in their daily lives, but lots don’t. And many of the ones who don’t are precisely the ones who make the biggest public displays and proclamations of their false piety. To paraphrase Disraeli, religion is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

One thing I haven’t seen much discussed in the whole Mike Leach – Texas Tech fooferaw, is the ridiculous notion that Tech fired him for “insubordination” – that is, for refusing to comply with “orders” from his employer – and was therefore somehow legally justified in firing him (suspiciously, just before it was due to pay him an $800,000 bonus). Stuff and nonsense. The “insubordination” may well have been one of the “real” underlying reasons for the decision. After all, bosses don’t like uppity underlings, and especially don’t like uppity underlings who’ve already publicly embarrassed them. But I strongly suspect that no court of law is going to find that Tech could get out of paying Leach if that was the supposed reason.

Texas, like California, is a “right to work” state, which means that every employee serves at the pleasure of his employer, who may terminate him for any reason or for no reason. However, one of the exceptions is where the employee has a written employment contract that gives him certain rights against arbitrary termination. Leach, like all D-1 college football coaches, did. A website called “CoachesHotSeat” has provided it. I’ve read it. The contract clearly provides that, while Tech can fire Leach any time “without cause,” if it does so, it still owes him a boatload of money. Only if it fires him “with cause” – and the “cause” holds up in court – can it get out of paying him.

Well, guess what? Tech’s termination letter handed to Leach’s lawyer just minutes before a scheduled hearing for a court order to allow him to coach in the Alamo Bowl, specifically says that Tech fired Leach “for breach of the provisions of Article IV” of his contract.

Guess what, part deux? There is NOTHING in Article IV that says Leach can be fired “with cause” for simple “insubordination.” True, he has to “follow all University policies and procedures,” as well as state and federal laws and NCAA and Big 12 guidelines, but something gerry-rigged just to address the Adam James situation AFTER it happened doesn’t qualify as a “policy or procedure.” In other words, unless a court finds that not only did Leach mistreat James, but that such mistreatment was against existing rules and regulations, I’m betting that Tech had better be prepared to pay a nice chunk of change to make this thing go away.

Not for nothing, as well, about this contrived outrage over the fact that Leach dared to sue his employer when he felt it had acted high-handedly? Get over it, people. Of COURSE employers hate being sued, because without the possibility that they can be sued and lose, employers would have no incentive to act in a reasonable and evenhanded manner. It’s the ability to go to court that keeps employers as minimally honest and fair as they are. Those of us who aren’t employers should bow down and thank whichever almighty works for them that there are legal ways to check the untrammeled power of employers to screw us over. No offense to Jon Castro, who I’m sure is an exemplary employer, or to all the other employers out there who wouldn’t take advantage even if they could. There just aren’t enough of you.

Oh, and about that video that’s just surfaced of Leach criticizing James’s non-performance in practice with “colorful” language? If that’s a basis for terminating Leach, I hope that AD Myers will be able to explain with a straight face exactly why the university allowed Bob Knight, who never met an f-bomb he didn’t like to use, to continue coaching after he unleashed those epithets, not just on his players, but on the university’s CHANCELLOR – in public, at an upscale Lubbock grocery store. (To its meager credit, the university did “reprimand” Knight for that, although it didn’t suspend him.)

By the way, the very concept that a college coach and molder of impressionable young men could POSSIBLY ever, ever resort to the use of profanity in making his point is as shocking, in its way, as the revelation in my prior post that a study has found that universities routinely relax and bend their admissions requirements so that otherwise underqualified athletes can attend (at least until their eligibility is used up). Yet another entry in my “no s***, Sherlock” files.

Good to see Andy Murray get jettisoned by the Blues for replicating his miserable performance while coaching the Kings. He wasn’t the only thing wrong with the Kings when he was coaching them, and certainly didn’t singlehandedly cause them to fail, but he most definitely wasn’t the solution to their problems, either. Of course, he’ll get at least 2-3 more coaching jobs, and fail at those, as well, before he’s finally relegated back to high school hockey, where was WAS successful, and where he probably belongs.

The “real” story on Murray may well be that he was fired during THIS miserable season, after being one of the finalists for coach of the year last season. In this, he has a lot in common with Byron Scott and a host of other NBA coaches.
For months last year I heard that the Pac-10 was the second-best league in college football, and wasn’t getting any respect because of “East Coast Bias.” I believe, mind you, that there is such a thing as “East Coast Bias,” and that it certainly applies in college football, almost always to the detriment of the west coast teams. That’s certainly one of the reasons why Mack Brown’s whining a few years ago got Texas a BCS Bowl gig in lieu of a clearly more deserving Cal team. (Of course, Cal didn’t help its cause by folding like a cheap suitcase in the lesser bowl it did get, as it so often does). And it sure looked like our whining was justified when the Pac-10, alone of all the conferences, went undefeated in the 2008-09 bowl games.

What a difference a year makes. Not only does the conference have a losing record this time around, at 2-5, but it’s looked pathetic in the process. The only two “winners” were USC and UCLA in nonentity bowls, and both of them underwhelmed. Oregon State, Cal (what else is new?) and Arizona got their butts kicked, and only Oregon and Stanford performed creditably against high-caliber completion (if 8-5 OU qualifies). I don’t know what any of that means, but it must mean something.

Inevitably, this brings us back to USC, and exactly how good (or bad) it really was this year. USC couldn’t beat Arizona at home. Nebraska was clearly capable of creaming ‘Zona in a neutral setting that was, for all practical purposes, a home game for the Wildcats. Of course this doesn’t prove anything. There’s a reduction ad absurdum feel to comparing teams by doing a ‘six degrees of separation” analysis on everyone’s schedule. After all, USC beat Ohio State AT THE HORSESHOE; Oregon pounded SC into pulp; and Ohio State beat Oregon in the Rose Bowl.

But still. The way Nebraska, a good team that gave Texas a run for its money in the Big 12 championship game, certainly cast USC’s season in an even worse light. Enjoy it while you can, Trojan haters. I don’t see SC faltering like this next year, when they’ll have veterans at a number of key positions vacated this year by injuries and by graduation/early entry into the NFL draft. But still, schadenfreude is fun, no?

Speaking of USC, smooth move to screw over the basketball program to take the heat off the moneymaking football program. Reminds me of Jerry Tarkanian’s quip about UCLA when he was coaching Long Beach State, to the effect that any time the NCAA found violations with UCLA basketball, they’d punish UCLA by taking another couple of scholarships away from Long Beach State. Gotta take one for the team, I guess.

Can the Lakers actually beat a team that’s (a) over .500 and (b) not coming into LA after a tiring road trip, to play the Lakers at Staples in the second game of a back-to-back (so much for the two home wins over the Suns, or the Sunday win over the Mavs)? I guess they have beaten a few lower-echelon “winning” teams, like the Rockets, Thunder, Jazz (at home only) and the Heat, but they sure did their best in pretty much every one of those wins to prove Tim Donaghy right. All of those wins could easily have been losses. They may be the defending champs, but if they went into the playoffs right now, it’s unlikely they’d be the favorites to come out of the West, let alone win it all.

One of the players whose play this year has been particularly disappointing (despite a very nice outing last Sunday against the Mavs) is Lamar Odom. The Sportsgod is always on about how marriage causes most athletes’ performance to decline. I don’t know how statistically valid that is, but it sure seems anecdotally valid as to Mr. Odom. Perhaps it’s not “marriage” per se, but with whom. Marrying publicity whore Khloe Kardashian and the chaos of the bogus “reality” show lifestyle she brings to the marriage, can’t possibly be conducive to better play, can it?

For those who misconstrue such things, I’m not calling Ms. K a woman of loose morals. I have no idea what her personal morals are. I do know that she and her sisters, her odious mother and her scary stepfather, whose botched serial plastic surgeries have earned him a place of honor – I’m not making this up – on www.menwholooklikeoldlesbians.blogspot.com (bottom row, next to Al Franken!) – apparently have never met a camera or an opportunity for self-promotion that they don’t like!

And let’s not even get started on Andrew Bynum, whose play has regressed to the point that he is, once again, someone with “potential” who might be OK one of these days if he ever figures things out. The team doesn’t need his offense, which is all he seems to care about. Heck, his body language pretty much shows that he’s channeling the Shaq of the “if you don’t feed the big dog, the big dog won’t work” comment.

It desperately needs his presence inside – you know, rebounding and defense – as to both of which he has nary a clue. He’s got good feet, but lousy footwork; excellent hands but can’t snare a rebound that isn’t uncontested. He’s now in his 5th year playing (or, equally often, rehabbing) for one of the top teams in the NBA. His sole job during all that time has been to get better as a basketball player, so the excuse that he didn’t play much in high school is wearing thin. And he’s been tutored one-on-one by HOFer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and by experienced big man Kurt Rambis. Say what you will about either, both are highly intelligent and know what inside play is all about. If Bynum hasn’t figured it out by now, it’s on him, and no one else.

It always hurts me to agree with The Sportsgod, but facts can’t be ignored. The stats from Bynum’s game against the Mavs last Sunday, when he allegedly “rediscovered” his mojo when Pau Gasol went down with the hamstring injury, are particularly telling. 28 minutes, perfect 8 for 8 from the floor, but only FIVE rebounds, none of which was offensive, and zero blocks. Apparently Bynum’s contract specifies that he gets paid only for balls put into the hole.

I seem to recall that in his Cincinnati Royals days, Jerry Lucas once whined to Oscar Robertson that he didn’t think he was getting the ball enough in the paint. The Big O pointedly suggested that if Lucas wanted the ball so much, maybe he should man up and GO AND GET IT. Which Lucas, to his credit, did. Sage advice. Too bad there’s no Big O here.

Man, oh man, how about Gil Arenas and former Laker J. Crittenden? Guns in locker rooms? Makes no difference to me that Arenas’s THREE pieces were (allegedly) unloaded. How many people have been shot with guns everyone thought were unloaded? How many have been shot by people packing heat, after brandishing empty guns? I know that Arenas has been accused of being a “gunner,” but who ever thought that they were talking about bullets instead of Spaldings? That old Second Amendment makes itself some STRANGE bedfellows.

I don’t believe that the NBA is a “thug” league. Or certainly not any more of one than the NFL or even MLB. But news like this sure isn’t going to induce middle Americans to fork over big bucks to fill the half-empty arenas we’re now seeing on a regular basis. Better hang onto those guns, Gil. After you’ve run through your bloated salary, you may need them to earn a living.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.

One of the hands-down dumbest sports blogs I’ve ever read is one published the other day on www.sportingnews.com and attributed to some bozo named Mike Florio, an alleged columnist at ProFootballTalk.com. Entitled “Coaching? You call that work?,” it takes snide digs and not-so-deadly aim at Urban Meyer’s revelation that he needs to take a breather because the pressures of his job are, if not killing him, then at least seriously impairing his health and the quality of his life.

According to Florio, coaching football at a major college program isn’t really “work,” because “These guys are living the dream. They get paid millions of dollars, they bask in the limelight, and they never have to lift anything heavier than a suitcase.” And, of course, he falls back on the tried and true fatuous observation that there are plenty of guys fighting in wars, digging ditches or working in steel mills – i.e., doing “real” work – who’d give their left testicles to be in Meyer’s shoes, coaching a game and getting a 7-figure salary for it..

Well, sure, who wouldn’t? The reason those ham-and-eggers AREN’T doing Meyer’s job is because they can’t. If they could, they wouldn’t be digging ditches or working at whatever thankless jobs they’re in. Heck, they’d like to be All-Star basketball players, MVP baseball players or All-Pro football players, too. What’s any of that got to do with the price of tea in China? If the queen had balls, as they say, she’d be the king.

Maybe our values are skewed, and maybe it’s an absolute sin that society monetarily values the contributions of athletes and athletic coaches more than those of teachers, firefighters, policemen or soldiers, but that’s still a fact. Everyone contributes to society in his or her way, and everyone’s contribution is important on some level. But, valuable and respected as they are and should be – I have a son who’s a firefighter, so I understand that – the fact remains that there are a lot more people qualified to be teachers, firefighters or law enforcement personnel than to be top-line coaches or athletes of major sports. Is what it is. There’s a joke that’s decades old, about a college president saying that he wants to bring in funds so he can build a college that the football team can be proud of. Still rings true.

Just because football is a “game” doesn’t mean that playing or coaching it full-time isn’t hard work. Certainly tougher than sitting in a cubicle all day, every day, week in, week out, banging away at a keyboard. Couple that with the incredible responsibility and pressure to win, when the difference between an 8-4 season and an 11-1 is tens of millions of dollars to the university’s bottom line, and it REALLY becomes work. Yeah, digging a ditch is physically tough. But the ditch-digger’s responsibility doesn’t extend past the hole he’s digging. Having primary responsibility for a $50-million-plus business, which is what a major college team is, is pretty tough, too, even if you don’t have to lift anything heavier than a megaphone.

Think stress and pressure haven’t prematurely aged lots of men who don’t do “heavy lifting,” or killed them before their time? Take a look at the “before” and “after” photos of every U.S. President of our lifetime(s). Some were, of course, old men going in, but most were middle-aged and looked pretty good for their ages (since Eisenhower, it’s been crucial for a politician with aspirations for higher office to look good.) Every single one of those men has left office looking like cartoon depictions of the outgoing year that we see annually around this time – haggard, drawn, decrepit. Even Reagan, despite his carefully and regularly dyed hair.

The tremendous pressures and responsibilities of the job age everyone who does it. And Presidents, too, “never have to lift anything heavier than a suitcase.” Heck, most of them don’t even have to lift a suitcase. Of course, they do have to bear the fate of the country and the world on their shoulders. But apparently that doesn’t qualify as “work” for Mr. Florio.

I’m not saying that a college football coach’s workload and responsibilities are equal to the President’s. But they are comparable, in context. So give it a rest, already.

Oh, and about that “You think you’ve got it tough? No, soldiers who put their lives on the line in real wars are the ones that have it tough” card, could we please just retire it permanently? Just because our soldiers face death and serious injury in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we commend and commiserate with their sacrifices, doesn’t mean that people who aren’t soldiers can’t have real problems that they need to address. Yes, even people who dig ditches, work in steel mills – or coach college football. In this regard, I defer to the person who left this online comment on that deplorable piece of thoughtless crap: “I guess, when I go home tonight and my wife complains about her day, I can just bring up the soldiers in Iraq and tell her to stfu.”

No, you can’t. Any more than it’s legitimate for a parent to dismiss his child’s real personal problems with the old “You think YOU have it tough? I had to walk ten miles to school, without shoes, in driving blizzards, after getting up at 3 a.m. to milk the cows, slop the hogs and bale the hay” card.

Was Pete Carroll serious when he said that the Emerald Bowl is an up-and-coming bowl game, and that USC was honored to be a part of it? Well, the location is pretty premier – San Francisco at Christmas is probably just a tad bit of an improvement on Detroit or El Paso – but other than that? And to have that kind of trouble with a game but pretty clearly outmanned BC team when they got there? I think this season is probably just a brief stumble in Carroll’s otherwise outstanding college coaching career, but stumble it most definitely was. And to pretend otherwise, and celebrate the Emerald Bowl win as if it were the team’s second undisputed national championship, is just plain embarrassing.
Why is Tiger Woods such a big deal? Yeah, partly it’s because he sold and made much money off a fake image of Norman Rockwell/American Gothic purity and rectitude – to which I say, shame on any of US who actually bought it. Just as you know that divorce filings are right around the corner when a film, music or TV star waxes eloquent about how wonderful the marriage is and how much in love they are, so, too, should we all expect the worst when people portray themselves as the best. Some “playas” are better than Tiger at keeping stuff on the down-low, but the “stuff” itself is almost surely there. Until proven otherwise, that is, just as with PEDs and baseball.

But mainly it’s because Tiger is such a big deal to the economy. I don’t know how they figured it out, but as reported in a blog at the Wall Street Journal, 2 economics professors at UC Davis have calculated that Tiger’s corporate sponsors have lost $12 BILLION in collective stock value since his car crash – especially Gatorade, Nike and EA Sports. In a generally rising market, to boot! Even if it’s only $6 Billion, or even just $1 Billion, that’s a lot of money. If you or I crashed an SUV and it was later revealed that we’d been serially unfaithful to our wives, I can guaran-damn-tee that the stock market wouldn’t even take notice.

And don’t even get me started on all the ways the PGA Tour is whistling in the dark when its officials say Tiger’s scandal and his enforced absence won’t have a negative impact. Like it didn’t have an impact when he was out all that time after knee surgery? The spin is that his absence will allow new charismatic stars to emerge and capture the public’s imagination. Like who? Why didn’t those “new stars” shine when he was off the Tour before? Please. Love him or hate him, El Tigre is the only player who puts butts on sofas in front of the tube on Saturdays and Sundays in non-major tournaments. THE. . . ONLY . . . PLAYER.

I, for one, am totally over news of his serial infidelities, even as new “bimbo eruptions” occur on a seemingly daily basis. Maybe I’m just numb. After the first 10, what’s the point? Cumulative evidence is almost always the most boring. Anyway, he’s admitted them, sort of. He already copped a plea on those charges, so to speak.

And it’s not as if a golfer has any special responsibility to the public. Not like, say, an elected official. Like, say, the Governor of South Carolina, who left his state as well as his family in the lurch for almost a week while he frolicked in South America with his “soul mate.” No biggie. We never even hear about him any more.

But the revelation that the Canadian doctor who’d been helping him recover from his surgery by Platelet Rich Plasma (“PRP) injections, is the target of joint FBI and RCMP investigations for possession of more than personal-use quantities of steroids, HGH, and other PEDs gives me some pause. Especially when I learn that he treated U.S. swimmer Dara Torres during her remarkable – dare one say, unnaturally remarkable – comeback at a positively geriatric age (for swimmers). She’s never been caught with the wrong substances in her system, but the Court of Public Opinion isn’t a court of law. There’s no presumption of innocence until proven guilty here – in fact, quite the opposite.

PRP therapy, though a bit “cutting edge,” is a recognized and legitimate therapy with many renowned advocates. But there are all kinds of fine doctors in the U.S. – some of whom even work in Florida and even work at recognized, legitimate hospitals – who could have done it. The perceived necessity to seek the treatment from someone so far afield with no better credentials in legitimate medicine than lots of doctors in his own back yard, raises questions. It’s kind of the way I feel about people who claim to have been abducted and rectally probed by aliens (aside from the fact that if the aliens are scientifically advanced enough to have interstellar travel, why do they even NEED rectal probing?). I’d feel a lot better about the stories if at least one of the poor unfortunate abductees had a degree from Harvard, could read without moving his lips, and held a decent, responsible job. Similarly, I’d feel a lot better about Tiger’s chances of NOT having been given some kind of PED, had he used a more reputable doctor. It’s not, after all, as if he couldn’t afford anyone he wanted.

I don’t know what kind of PED would work for a golfer, mind you. You don’t need Schwarzenegger muscles to hit the ball a ton, and anyway, as they say, you drive for show and putt for dough. Big biceps don’t put the ball in the cup. Beta blockers and things like that would probably be more effective, and they don’t make you look like a linebacker. Still, what could Tiger have been thinking?

Speaking of Tiger, wasn’t it just predictable that he’d check into a rehab clinic so that he could blame all of his problems on some kind of uncontrollable “addiction” or “dependency,” and in true American fashion achieve forgiveness because his problems weren’t “really” his fault and he’s worked so “courageously” to overcome them? Or so today’s rumor mill tells us – Tiger has checked into a high-end rehab clinic in Arizona. Heck, he can probably work on his golf game while he’s at it.

The betting is that his addiction of choice is “sex addiction,” not drugs. Please give us all a break.

Mind you, unlike Tommy Lasorda, who seemingly believes that all so-called “addictions” are simple products of weak wills and lack of discipline – I guess there’s no “food addiction” in his own life, eh? – I do believe that there are real addictions. Alcohol, tobacco, hard drugs. Those are all tough monkeys to get off your back. But “sex addiction”? I don’t buy it. Sure, sex gives pleasure, and some people want to experience that pleasure more and more frequently than others. For some people, the pursuit of constant sexual gratification becomes all-consuming. Sex, like food, booze or drugs can also be a substitute or an anodyne. But please don’t insult everyone’s intelligence by giving it a classification on par with real addictions. And while we’re at it, can all the pop psychologists also please lay off the notion that “anger management” sessions actually work?

Here’s one difference between the Mark Mangino and Mike Leach “scandals.” Pretty much no one came out publicly in support of Mangino (except, ironically, some fellow coaches, including Leach himself!). Lots of former players have come out in support of Leach. Not that that necessarily means anything. Maybe they’re all suffering from a collective “Stockholm Syndrome,” where the victim comes to identify with his victimizer. But it does suggest that Leach isn’t quite the abuser Mangino allegedly was, even though some players have privately grumbled about the “negative vibe.” I’ll tell you what a REAL “negative vibe” is: when the team’s 4-8 instead of 8-4.

Anyway, all I need to know about the issue is that that pompous, insufferably arrogant and usually wrong gasbag, Jay Mariotti, called for Leach’s ouster. The right side of any argument, usually, is the one opposite Mariotti’s!

That’s not to condone cruel and inhumane treatment of players. After all, players are kind of captives to a program. They have to put up with a lot of crap, or they have no place to go. That very vulnerability, however, makes it especially incumbent on the adults responsible for them not to abuse the position of power.

And no one can plead ignorance any more regarding the real, frightening long-term effects of concussions. A player has only a few years on the field, and it would be unconscionable for a coach, for his own selfish reasons, to put the remaining decades of the player’s life in jeopardy. That’s why I was appalled at Urban Meyer’s apparently cavalier attitude to Tim Tebow’s concussion, and at Hines Wards’s cruelly callous comments about Ben Roethlisberger.

But the so-called “evidence” of Leach’s alleged cruel and inhumane treatment of Craig James’s son sure hasn’t surfaced in any story I’ve seen – even if the James family spin on the facts is correct. Had Leach tried to force James to play, or to practice in a way that could have exacerbated the concussion, I’d say, s***-can the SOB tout-suite. But nothing of the sort has surfaced.

The way this has come down, it begins to look like Texas Tech was (a) wetting its pants about a possible lawsuit, and responding to pressure in the craven fashion of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” not the way the descendants of the heroes of the Alamo are supposed to face a crisis; and (b) they didn’t like Leach, and were happy to find some excuse to fire him, notwithstanding his on-field success which presumably translated to off-field money for the university, because he’d had the temerity to reject their lowball contract offer after an 11-2 season and “explore other opportunities.” Possibility (b) looks like a lock to me, because Leach and AD Gerald Myers have been at loggerheads almost since Leach arrived. Or has everyone forgotten that Myers had Leach investigated in 2001 regarding allegations about Leach’s off-field activities. Then, when Leach was cleared, Myers stopped Leach’s outgoing mail in a dispute over postage stamps. And let’s not forget that it was Texas Tech, not Leach, that went public about last year’s “contract impasse.”

I would REALLY hate to find out that Leach was fired because Tech didn’t want to pay him his contractual $800,000 bonus for coaching a game that would earn the school over a million dollars. We do know that the termination letter claimed Leach was fired “for cause,” meaning that Tech believes it owes Leach nothing! Harsh, that. Heck, even Mangino wound up with a multi-million dollar buyout and was allowed to resign. Tech covered its voluminous, spotty behind, sort of, by claiming cryptically that “other things” came to light during the investigation, as to which the university Chancellor courageously declined to elaborate. Way to stick in the innuendo knife, guys.

Speaking of college sports, a recent study published by the AP, shockingly, finds that in many colleges, “athletes were at least 10 times more likely to benefit from special admission programs than students in the general population.” Included in the list of schools studied are Oregon, Georgia Tech and Alabama, whose coach, Nick (rhymes with, well you know) Saban was, predictably, utterly unapologetic, philosophizing: “Some people have ability and they have work ethic and really never get an opportunity. I am really pleased and happy with the job that we do and how we manage our students here, and the responsibility and accountability they have toward academics and the success that they’ve had in academics.” Yeah, you betcha.

Reaction? No s***, Sherlock. People actually get paid real money to do studies like this? Next we’ll learn that most morbidly obese people get that way by eating too much and exercising too little; that drunk people have slower reaction times than sober people; and that men are attracted to large-chested women with loose moral and tight miniskirts. Man, I sure wouldn’t have guessed anything of the sort, had AP not done its valuable research. Maybe there’s a future for hacks like me and The Sportsgod in the service of useless studies of obvious truths.

Happy New Year, everybody. Here’s hoping that the New Year finds The Sportsgod gainfully employed where he belongs – on the airwaves.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.

Is it possible to circulate a petition to declare a moratorium on the Tiger Woods “serial infidelities” reality series playing out on TV and computer screens everywhere? I know I’d sign. The rank and blatant hypocrisy pervading media coverage is nauseating. El Tigre shouldn’t a did what-all he done did, but in the end, who gives, or should give, a rat’s ass, other than those to whom he “done wrong”? And I emphatically DO NOT mean the public.

Incidentally, Sportsgod and others of your ilk. Could you please make a decision once and for all whether golf is, or is not, a “sport,” and whether golfers are, or are not, “athletes”? If, as you continually claim, golf isn’t a sport and golfers aren’t athletes, what business do you, or any of the myriad other sports blowholes, have wasting our time talking about the extracurricular sex life of a NON-athlete playing a NON-sport? Make up your damn mind, already.

I have no problem, by the way, with coverage of the Tiger story as a salacious peep-show, or as a schadenfreude orgy by all those who’ve felt jealous of his success, or slighted by lack of access. Let’s face it, that’s REALLY why everybody outside San Francisco has piled on Barry Bonds when others (Jason Giambi, Sammy Sosa, and a host of others) did equally bad things and have largely escaped unscathed. They’re getting back at Bonds for being an arrogant ***hole, and I understand that even if I don’t respect it. But how about toning down the phony-baloney sanctimony, guys and gals?

It’s practically a cliché these days that the politicians, pundits and religious leaders whose voices are raised loudest in support of public morality and “family values” are – seemingly almost without exception – themselves some of the vilest transgressors in private of the values they so vehemently espouse in public. Yeah, that includes a whole bunch of the hosts and talking head pundits on Fox (aka “Faux”) News.

This is hardly earthshaking news. What’s always puzzled me, though, is (a) that the public that buys into this fakery CONTINUES to support the fakers even after they’re outed, as long as the fakers continue to mouth the same hypocrisies, and (b) that that public not only continues to support the fakers despite clear evidence of the fakery, but continues to support the bull**** they espouse despite incontrovertible evidence that the members of the public THEMSELVES don’t adhere to it. In other words, a significant percentage of the bloggers and callers ranting about what a vile, vomitous wretch Tiger was to philander while married, do the same things in their own private lives.

Since most people try to cover up what they do in private – or what’s left of “private” in this age of spycams, E-mail, texting, Twitter, Facebook at al. world without end amen – no one can really know with certainty how many people why rail against immorality in public figures commit the same offenses themselves, but as the saying goes, their name is legion.

Don’t take my word for it. There’s ample statistical evidence that porn downloads are more plentiful in the Bible Belt than elsewhere. There’s also a whole lot of divorce there and a whole lot of cheating on spouses. Heck, in one study, 53% of “Promise Keeper” men admitted to viewing pornography the previous week. And of the remaining 47%, I’d wager at least 53% of THEM were lying.

The, shall we say, “cognitive dissonance” there is mind-boggling. 90 percent of Americans believe adultery is morally wrong. At the same time, 50 percent of Americans polled by Time-CNN said that Slick Willie Clinton’s adultery made his moral standard “about the same as the average married man.” Try wrapping your head around THAT overlap! Seems to me a large percentage of people who believe adultery is “morally wrong” DO IT ANYWAY.

Statistics confirm that between 50 and 70 percent of married men (between 38 and 53 million men) have cheated on or are likely to cheat on their wives. Think only the 30 – 50% of those who don’t cheat are the ones writing those nasty blog posts and making those incensed calls?

And, sorry folks, that number has to be a lot higher among married men with more options. As our own Jon Castro noted, channeling Chris Rock, men, horndogs that we are, tend to be as faithful as our options. The rich and famous have way more options than thee and me. Do the math.

As for the argument that it’s incomprehensible that a guy with such a delectable crumpet at home as the pulchritudinous Elin would ever even consider straying, let alone stray with so many skanks and hos who’re rather less attractive, and whose only positive attributes are that they provide lots of work for penurious plastic surgeons who’d otherwise have to scramble to meet the payments on that second Maybach, c’mon, who is anybody kidding? I can’t remember who it was, but some wag out there said that for every beautiful woman, somewhere there’s a man who’s grown tired of her. Not a flattering description of the male sex, but an accurate one. Just ask Rebecca Romijn.

That’s not to say that there aren’t rich and prominent men who remain monogamous and faithful, or that cheating, even though prevalent, isn’t hurtful and morally reprehensible. But we’re all sinners, or potential sinners, had we but the opportunity and the means.

Most of the outrage surely has been spawned by our envy of Tiger and his wealth and fame, and our delight when icons are toppled, like Saddam Hussein’s infamous statute in, down to our level. But a lot of it seems to come from the fact that Tiger makes the bulk of his money from endorsements, and that the success of his “personal brand” depends (depended) on our continuing to perceive him as bland, monogamous, and as personally moral as we like to believe we all would be, if it weren’t for the fact that we’re not, and the public, fools that they/we are, actually bought into it. The fall is the price of the climb, so to speak.

Fine and dandy. But what does it say about us, that we still buy into the daily-refuted myths of the distorted, saccharine-sweet Frank Capra version of our culture, and are not merely sad, but outraged, when those myths inevitably prove false, or that we actually buy things because some person we know not at all but think we do, and admire for what we’re told he or she is, shills for them?

I’ve been out of circulation for a while, and so wasn’t able to chime in when the whole bogus controversy broke out about which local coach was actually “classless” at the end of this year’s Trojans-Bruins football snoozefest. Frankly, neither of them covered himself with glory there. But neither came close to approaching the “(fool’s) gold standard” of classlessness and sheer unadulterated crassness, which has for the past few years been virtually the exclusive province of Charlie Weis. His feel-good parting shot, taking unwarranted chap shots at Pete Carroll, not for anything football-related, but for allegedly., maybe, possibly “shacking up in Malibu” with a graduate student, was the classless gesture by which all classless gestures will henceforth be measured. And I think that’s something on which both Bruins and Trojans fans can agree.

Instead of getting outraged about Tiger, who has performed admirably on the golf course despite his personal – what’s the word he used, “transgressions”? – and has earned the millions he’s won on the links, how about a little outrage at Charlie “La Calabeza Gorda” and the $18 Million he’s due for failure? Has there ever in recent memory been a sports figure who talked as big, and produced as small, as Mr. “decided schematic advantage”? Maybe former Dodgers GM Kevin “There’s a New Sheriff In Town” Malone, but after that, I’m hard-pressed to find one All we need to know about Weis is that when he decided to start calling plays to “save” last year’s season, he guided his team to stunning late-game losses against the likes of Syracuse and Navy.

I don’t know what kind of recruiter or overall head coach Steve Sarkisian is. I have a feeling, based on some of his play-calling gaffes when he was Peter Carroll’s golden boy at USC, that he’s highly overrated as a strategist. But one thing of which I’m positive is that he’s benefited inordinately from having a healthy Jake Locker available to quarterback the Huskies this year. Ty Willingham had a number of shortcomings as a coach of a major NCAA program, but he’d not have gone 0-12 in 2008 with a healthy Locker. I don’t know that he’d have won enough games to save his job, but I confidently predict that Sarkisian won’t do as well (if “well” means 5-7) once Locker is playing on Sundays. That Locker guy is a better pro prospect than either of the two QBs who were in New York Saturday for the Heisman ceremony.

In fairness to Sarkisian, how good a coach would Jim Harbaugh have been this year, minus the Heisman runner-up, Toby Gerhart? That guy is a HOSS.

The Sportsgod has over the years repeatedly proved that he’s a great a judge of basketball talent as Dick Cheney was as a judge of the existence of WMD. Had he had his way, the Lakers would still have been absent from the NBA Finals every year since Shaq left. They’d certainly never have Pau Gasol, because they’d already have traded away the relevant pieces for higher-paid cripples and has-beens like Jermaine O’Neal, Jason Kidd, or, for all I know, Tracy McGrady. Marcus Banks, who’s proved at numerous stops in the NBA, that he has zero basketball IQ, an indifferent handle, and a truly atrocious shot, would have been the team’s point guard, making folks long for the halcyon days of Smush-calade Parker. And Derek Fisher, without whom the team wouldn’t be the defending NBA champs this season, would have been consigned to the trash-heap years ago.

So imagine my surprise when I read something from him about the Lakers that I agree with. Andrew Bynum has oodles of talent and potential. He’s big, has nice hands, decent vision, and pretty quick feet. So why can’t he defend, and why is he seemingly incapable of rebounding any ball that doesn’t bounce his way, uncontested? I understand that he’s infatuated by scoring, presumably because he thinks that points scored are the route to an All-Star team berth. Indeed, he seems to be channeling Shaq’s mantra that if the big dog doesn’t get fed, the big dog won’t hunt. But interior defense and rebounding are important, too – especially in the playoffs – and I’ve seen scant indication so far that Bynum is committed to those aspects of the game. Sportsgod, like a broken watch, you’re right either once or twice a day (depending on whether the watch is digital or analog)!

I know that the Lakers got one of the all-time lopsided deals when they acquired Pau Gasol for his brother, plus a lot of dead weight, the deadest and weightiest being Kwame Brown. But the Grizzlies are, shockingly, playing respectably this year. After cleaning the Heat’s clock in Miami, they’re a close-to-respectable 10-13. They’re not going to be challenging for a playoff slot any time soon, but they’re playing far better that anyone should have expected of a team conspicuously dumping salaries. And they’re doing it even with locker-room cancer and head-case Zach Randolph, some particularly bad rubbish of whim the Clippers (themselves only 9-12) were fortunate to rid themselves in the offseason.

Speaking of the Clippers, has anyone noticed that their name is an anagram for “cripples”? Maybe they need a name change before they can achieve respectability.

Don’t look now, but our L.A. Kings, perennial doormats of the league, are tied with the Sharks on top of the Pacific Division, and, with the Sharks, have the best record in the Western Conference. They’ve teased us this way before, but not this late in the season – at least, not since Gretzky left. They have a larger-than ever nucleus of good, young talent that all seems to be jelling at the same time, and are FINALlY getting adequate goaltending.

Of course, now that I’ve said it, I’ve doomed them. I’m the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island of sports fans. But it has to be said.

Mind you, it’s not as if they’ve totally escaped their old curse, that saw underachieving player after underachieving player jettisoned, only o to blossom with another team. I refer in particular to Mike Cammalleri, who’s having an excellent season with Les Canadiens, currently on pace for 42 goals and 27 assists, with a +10 +/-. That’s not entirely fair. He had an 80-point season for the Kings players 3 years ago, but never really produced before or since, until he was sent to the Flames last year, where he flourished. But why couldn’t he do for the Kings what he’s done since he left them? There’s a simple answer: BECAUSE THEY’RE THE KINGS! At least this year, the Kings have someone who’s outplaying a former King made good, namely Anze Kopitar, who if anything proves that Slovenians are better hockey players than basketball players (right, Sasha?).

Speaking of Gretzky, I find it interesting that his Phoenix Coyotes are playing better than they have in years (just a few points behind San Jose and the Kings), now that The Great One isn’t calling the shots in the front office or on the bench. Many great players prove to be absolute disasters as coaches or GMs, and Gretzky is no exception. He’s in pretty good company, right Michael Jordan? Gretzky, like Michael Jordan, has over the years proved himself to be at the Sportsgod level when it comes to judging talent. Whatever player Gretzky has a touted, has proved a bust.

And not just in Phoenix, either. I wonder how good the Kings might have been in the Gretzky years had management not acceded to his requests to bring in over-the-hill teammates from the Edmonton days, and other aging friends from around the league, instead of, I don’t know, good young talent. Jordan was the same way. He was notorious when he was a player for hating pretty much all management player personnel decisions, and demanding that the team acquire other players who, in the cold light of day, would have been disasters, and on whom he’d have soured after only a few weeks. Based on his rants a couple of years ago, Kobe may have the same anti-golden touch in such matters. Luckily for the Bulls of the ‘90’s and today’s Lakers, those teams had ownership strong enough to withstand the whims of their star players. The Kings didn’t.

It must be particularly galling to Gretzky, not just to have failed in Phoenix, but to look east and see that another financially troubled team, in a less-wealthy city, has been in the Stanley Cup Finals both of the past two years, winning the last one, and part-owned by Mario Lemieux. Gretzky and Lemieux were both all-time great players; both definitely in the top ten of all time and in the mix for mythical “greatest ever.” I’d rate Gretz a tad ahead of Mario the Magnificent on the ice, if only because Lemieux had the bad back and the Hodgkins, which cut his career short, and hurt his stats. But there’s no comparison between the two post-retirement. Mario all the way.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.