CHARITY, we’re occasion ally reminded, is its own re ward. To give anony mously, no press releases attached, is the purest act of kindness.
There’s a 12-year-old boy from New Jersey who has to beat big odds to make it to 14. His name and affliction are not relevant to the larger point, but put it this way: The Make A Wish Foundation last week ran the ball for him. Capeesh?
The kid’s a born-and-raised Giants fan. And, more than anything else, he wanted to attend this Super Bowl. So Make A Wish put the word out.
When that word reached ESPN, someone took it from there. In short time, or so I was told, two tickets were pulled from the network’s allotment, tickets that otherwise would have been put to corporate use.
ESPN, while confirming the story – and while employing a phalanx of publicists – provided no further information, no identity of the ESPN angel or angels. All I can report is all that’s really worth reporting: The kid and one of his parents will be at the game and will be seated among ESPN’s biggest shots and most important customers. Solid.
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If FOX’s Joe Buck tonight even goes near quarterback ratings stats – he often cites such stats, though if he ever applied them to game realities he would stop – he should note that Eli Manning finished the season as the league’s 25th-rated passer, just behind the Ravens’ Kyle Boller and 10 spots behind Chad Pennington.
Manning finished 18 places behind Jeff Garcia, 19 places behind Bret Favre and 20 places behind Tony Romo – the quarterbacks for the teams the Giants beat in the playoffs.
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Sign of the Times: George Forstner, a reader from Brooklyn, was watching the Giants-Packers playoff game while his wife “was upstairs, watching anything other than football.” When Lawrence Tynes‘ ended the game with a field goal, Forstner bolted up the steps to share the news with his wife.
“But before I made it to the top step, she yells down, ‘The Giants won!’ ”
When he asked how she knew, “She told me that the Home Shopping Network, just that second, started hawking Giants’ NFC Championship T-shirts for $39.95.”
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In September 2005, the NFL turned the scheduled Giants at Saints game into a Saints at Giants Hurricane Katrina fundraiser.
Though the disaster relief and economic redevelopment of New Orleans is incomplete, the NFL recently announced that the Saints, this October, will have its home game against the Chargers pulled – outsourced – and played in London. That will cost a whole lot of needy people in New Orleans a payday or two.
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Coincidence? You make the call.
Wednesday morning on ESPN2/ESPN Radio’s national simulcast of the “Mike & Mike Show,” Barry Sanders said the hardest he was ever hit, believe it or not, wasn’t as a ball-carrier, but while a blocking back in a “blitz pick-up.”
Wednesday afternoon, while Sanders was on WFAN, Mike Francesa suggested to him that the hardest he ever got hit was probably “in a blitz pick-up.”
If it was just a remarkable coincidence, no one plays the second party in them more than Francesa.
Speaking of WFAN, “The Boomer & Carton Show” – Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton in morning drive – continues to creep lower, last week even featuring a forced-laugh scatological bit that sounded as if it had been lifted from a grammar school recess. It’s beginning to sound more like the “The Poo-Poo and Pee-Pee Show.”
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Simple and clear realities continue to be lost on professionals. Down five with 3.8 seconds left, Sunday night at Golden State, the Knicks called time, which gave them the ball at half-court.
On MSG, Gus Johnson seemed mystified as to why Isiah Thomas would bother to call time. Analyst Kenny Smith explained that Thomas is “building for tomorrow.”
Huh? Tiny as it was, the Knicks still had a shot, and when Nate Robinson hit a 3 with 1.5 seconds left, Johnson and Smith quickly slipped into their game’s-not-over-yet! mode.
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Dick Vitale, a bit raspy but eager to return to ESPN to call Wednesday’s Duke-UNC game – he has been out since December after throat surgery that was followed by serious bladder infections – says, “I was feeling my age, 68, for a while, but now I feel like 12, again.” Oh, good.
Vitale’s recovery included a 25-day stretch when he was not allowed to utter a sound. That’s like 25 years for normal people. Watch Duke-UNC go to double overtime.
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What are the chances that someone, despite the fact that they’re playing in the Super Bowl, will draw a 15-yarder for excessive self-enthusiasm or machismo, a dead-ball personal foul? Pretty good, right? How sick is that?