Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Sports

Classy Nantz looks the other way

What’s a nice boy like you doing in a billion-dollar dive like this?

To know CBS’ Jim Nantz is to know a right-headed sportsman and gentleman. He both knows and practices right over wrong.

That’s why he might one day declare, “To Hades with it all, even the pizza-commercial dough. I’m done with the NCAA Tournament. I can no longer be a front-and-center party to such fraud.”

Saturday, early in the Florida-Connecticut game, Nantz, calling the Final Four for CBS on TBS, said: “Kromah has checked in for the Huskies. Lasan [Kromah] is a graduate student by way of George Washington. He was a thousand-point scorer from his years at GW.”

Ya’ don’t say?

Nantz delivered this brief info casually, as if giving the time off his wristwatch. Oh, so a recent graduate of some other college just entered the game for UConn to play against Florida in the Final Four? The corner of Ho and Hum.

So with what does that leave us? Kromah, as an undergrad at GW, also found time to star for its Division I basketball team, then, having enrolled as a graduate student at UConn — with a year of eligibility left — has found the time from pursuing his master’s to play basketball?

Anything’s possible … I suppose … Nah.

Kromah wasn’t recruited by UConn to exploit his remaining season of eligibility to win ball games?

Moments later, Florida’s Will Yeguete was at the line when Nantz casually identified the 6-foot-8 forward as “the young man from France.” Yeguete was born in France, raised in the Ivory Coast.

Soon, UConn’s 6-7 Niels Giffey entered. As Nantz had previously noted during the tournament, Giffey’s from Germany.

Does either Yeguete or Giffey speak English? What difference does it make? They weren’t recruited to college to be educated in any language, but to help win ball games. And they had made good on the deal. There they were in the Final Four.

Tonight, Nantz will call the NCAA Tournament final, Kentucky versus UConn, both universities that have exhibited no shame in manufacturing big-ticket basketball programs that allow their full-scholarship recruits to front for the school as “student-athletes.”

How much more can Jim Nantz endure as a front for these fronts?

Murphy-bashers weren’t hired to respect women

Lost in the Daniel Murphy paternity-leave conflagration, as ignited by WFANers Craig Carton, “Weekday” Boomer Esiason and Mike Francesa, is that Carton and Esiason were hired to replace Don Imus. They weren’t hired to be or expected to be sensitive toward women.

Quite the contrary. Last week, in addition to bashing Murphy for taking fatherhood too seriously, they concluded, as per their obligatory “guy talk,” their latest salacious “Tournament of Babes.”

CBS Radio Network execs, as they did when they sacked Imus, can again feign disgust and surprise, as if they had no idea.

Meanwhile, we have reached the point at which an athlete catches more derision for being with his wife than if he had beaten her.


Yankees radiocasts remain the worst listen this side of a Yoko Ono solo. Saturday, after Derek Jeter walked, John Sterling said, “That was the first walk of the game,” cueing his read of an ad for a “walk-in” medical clinic.

What’s next? Sterling’s mangled calls sponsored by White-Out?


Don’t touch that dial! The best thing about Connecticut-Kentucky tonight in the NCAA Tournament final is that regardless of which scores first, it’ll still be a one-possession game.


Strangest TV sight of the weekend: Throughout the Yankees-Blue Jays series, the seats behind the backstop had people in them!


Those with 3-year-olds still eligible to enter the Kentucky Derby are Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville and Falcons offensive line coach Mike Tice, owners of Midnight Hawk, and Terry Bradshaw, who owns a piece of Constitution, winner of the Florida Derby.


Michael Kay’s assertion Friday that Ichiro Suzuki is “one of the more successful and famous players ever to come out of Japan to come to the major leagues,” brought to mind an old “Bob & Ray” radio bit, when Ray Goulding recalled George Washington as “one of our first presidents.”


Teddy Atlas, still the best reason to watch ESPN’s boxing, last week was inducted into the New York State Boxing Hall of Fame.


We’re not always dealt from a marked deck. Saturday morning, although WFAN is now the Yankees’ station, update man Mike McCann led with the Mets’ win. Friday night and Saturday morning, although SNY is a Mets’ enterprise, SNY’s studio led with the Yankees’ win. Nice!


Note to CNN: Kentucky over Wisconsin wasn’t an “upset.” The Wildcats were favored.


Gary Cohen, Friday on SNY, didn’t have to note the Bud Selig-preposterous weather: Wet, windy and cold weather. But he did: “It’s 41 degrees!” The Mets announced a crowd of 35,845. Mets Madoff Math: You count feet and arms.


More lost tapes: The two college teams Mike Francesa authoritatively — and to callers, rudely — dismissed as contenders will play tonight’s final.

Why replay? Sports isn’t life or death

The Mets’ successful, ninth-inning replay challenge that helped turn a loss into a win Saturday carried the trace evidence of what has caused the NFL’s version to still be in the shop, undergoing repairs more than 25 years after its adoption.

With the Mets down a run in the ninth, Juan Lagares was called out on a close force at second, after which the Mets went into a replay review time-stall before issuing an NFL-like nothing-to-lose challenge.

Next, with the transfer of the human condition from a field ump to a monitor of a TV monitor, it was time, a la the NFL, to remember one man’s “inconclusive evidence” is another’s “conclusive evidence.” Lagares was ruled safe.

On SNY, Gary Cohen and Ron Darling formed an amen chorus, claiming the replay application “got it right.” Maybe. It was a very close call. But from what I watched, there was no indisputable, conclusive evidence to reverse that call.

Either way, the original call didn’t meet with the intent to correct egregiously incorrect calls. Or was this the kind of call replay advocates had in mind? Put it this way: You wouldn’t want to be convicted of murder based on such evidence.

But it’s only baseball, not life and death. Exactly! That’s why replay often — most often — takes us to places we should avoid.

Again, “getting it right” becomes a matter of varying judgments that begin with an umpire’s call, then passed along to another, higher-authority human. And one man’s conclusive evidence …