Gee, I’m gonna miss this Super Bowl, good ol’ number XLVIII, give or take a few Roman Gabriels.
This one has been loaded with fascinating commentary, especially from the tough-talking TV and radio guys who insist playing in frigid weather is “the way football is supposed to be played! Man-up!”
Big talkin’ man! If that’s their case, they’d follow such muscle-bound rhetoric by advocating the NFL season begin in December. Ya wanna get that full measure of real football weather, right, tough-talkers?
OK, maybe that would greatly diminish ticket sales, but …
Anyway, reader Dan Shipman of Carteret, N.J., asks the best kind of question — a good, sarcastic one: If the Super Bowl doesn’t sell out, will it be blacked out in New Jersey and New York?
And if Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson is exceptionally good at “extending the play” — once plainly called “scrambling” — who on the Seattle offense is not particularly interested in “extending the play”?
Pre-Supe advertising has featured some odd marriages. For example, while Fox’s Tony Siragusa during the regular season bravely starred in TV commercials for male “Depends” — adult disposable diapers — his Super Bowl advertising contribution has been a commercial for Heluva Good dips.
You don’t suppose there’s a connection, do you?
Then, there are the crashing disappointments. Wednesday afternoon ESPN Radio-NY hosts “Keepin’ It Real” Stephen A. Smith and Ryan Ruocco interviewed ESPN’s Ray “Cold Case” Lewis.
I hung in there, hoping they’d ask Lewis why he’d pay a financial settlement to the families of the victims of an unsolved double-homicide at the 2000 Super Bowl if he had nothing to do with it. But I guess they ran out of time.
Or was that a different Ray Lewis?
After all, in ESPN Land, fantastic things occur! That “Bobby Knight Goes Nuts Action Reel,” once shown as often as possible, suddenly vanished — right after ESPN hired Knight. Or is that a different Bobby Knight?
Carton’s bogus viewpoint
Bogus sports memorabilia? No way! That business is built on the Big Four: love of sports, trust, integrity and forgery! That, and enough “certificates of authenticity” to stuff one of Babe Ruth’s polyester game-worn uniforms!
Thursday morning on WFAN and the CBS Sports Network, Craig Carton, who has made it clear he finds WFAN colleague Mike Francesa’s act loathsome, imitated it.
At the top, he addressed the Eli Manning bogus memorabilia lawsuit story as a legitimate one, a serious matter. He even asked Giants co-owner Jonathan Tisch about it. Tisch declined comment. Carton called it a “scandal” that everyone allegedly involved should have to answer to.
He then added he’d bring it up to Archie Manning, Eli’s dad and a scheduled guest, later in the show.
Ah, but when Archie came on, Carton’s obsequious, Eddie Haskell side kicked in. He immediately told Archie the fake Eli memorabilia story is “nonsense.”
How was Carton able to know this, so much so that he reported it on the air to a national audience and directly to Eli’s father? He didn’t say. How did his take on the story, in the course of one show, do a 180? He didn’t say.
I know I’m starting to obsess over the Phoenix Suns, a superstar-less 27-18 team and consensus pick to be the worst in the NBA’s Western Conference, but Monday in Philadelphia, they beat the 76ers, 124-113, producing a box score that should be the envy of every team whose goal is to play like one.
Guard Goran Dragic scored 24 points and went 9-for-13 from the field. As the late Billy Mays would holler, “But wait, there’s more!” Dragic also had four rebounds and seven assists. How’s that for a night’s (team) work?
Itinerant swingman Gerald Green — he has played, mostly fecklessly, with the Celtics, Rockets, Mavericks, Nets and Pacers — scored 30. Nine Suns had at least two rebounds; nine had at least one assist. In 14:45, backup guard Ish Smith had five assists.
All under the continuing instructions of first-year coach Jeff Hornacek.
But the best team story the NBA can offer this season still makes little news and noise.
C’mon ESPN, take a bow for this one
Funny — or pathetic — that for all the bogus credit ESPN regularly gives itself for breaking or “confirming” stories, this week it had every good reason to boast about a story for which it was largely responsible, but failed to do so.
Major League Baseball’s approval of padded safety hats for pitchers — not particularly attractive to anyone who would put fashion ahead of having his head smashed by a line drive — came after a year’s worth of strong, pestering and reporting on the subject by ESPN’s “Outside The Lines.”
Minimally, OTL’s work on this provides pitchers an opportunity to preemptively try to avoid serious head injuries. Obviously, ducking doesn’t always work. Credit producer and investigator Willie Weinbaum, correspondent Steve Delsohn and host Bob Ley.
In its devoted pursuit of tethering pop culture to sports, ESPN’s annual music issue celebrates athletes who admire Eminem, Kendrick Lamar and Drake — all of whom rely on hateful, vulgar, violent, bigoted, women-denigrating and just plain as-low-as-they-can-go lyrics.
My guess is that ESPN boss John Skipper would not publicly recite such lyrics unless at gunpoint.
Furthermore, in Bristol, Conn., where antisocial on-the-job conduct is a firing offense, if most employees walked down the hall rapping, singing or speaking such lyrics — even featured them on a screen-saver — they would be summarily canned.
Otherwise, ESPN has no problem pushing such acts as good for ESPN’s image and, of course, its sports business.
Nice catch by ESPN, Monday, focusing on Pittsburgh’s 83-year-old radio analyst Dick Groat, during the Duke-Pitt game. Before starring for the Pittsburgh Pirates — he was 1960’s NL MVP and a five-time All-Star — Groat was an All-American basketball player at Duke.
If the media had collective guts, they would have walked out, as one, the moment Marshawn Lynch began to speak. Why sit and listen to a guy who doesn’t want to talk to you?
I blew it here, Sunday (or was it Monday?). The date of the Rider-Fairfield Bob Heussler Bobblehead Day game/nursing school fundraiser is Feb. 15. Details here, I think.
During the Rangers-Islanders game from Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, Peter Regin of the Isles had a shot deflect over the glass.
From NBC’s Doc Emrick: “It was high, it was long … well, never mind.”