I worked in the main sports media world for 16 years, where I’m delighted to report that opposite day is every day.
(ESPN’s Emperor, regrettably, has no clothes)
It’s a world where networks like ESPN, which is joined at the hip financially with all the major sports leagues, pretends to cover those leagues objectively.
It’s a world where sportscasters like Jim Gray and Chris Berman get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but Angelina Jolie doesn’t.
(Sports media opposite day even somehow infects Hollywood!)
It’s a world where Bud Selig, perhaps the most dishonest and disingenuous commissioner in the history of pro sports, is never confronted with his lies and mismanagement of MLB by on-air employees of bought-off outlets.
It’s a world where ESPN refuses to extensively cover perhaps the highest profile case of cheating in NCAA football history - Reggie Bush’s family being paid off while he was at USC - because a competitor, YAHOO SPORTS, broke the story first. (And what’s bad for USC football is bad for ESPN’s revenues.)
(Off limits: Athlete making a$$ of himself with famewhore)
Like many control freaks who are in the public eye, Mark Cuban often gets frustrated with bloggers. What’s he supposed to do when they put out scurrilous rumors about the Mavericks, or post unflattering images of him alongside discredited 1950s politicians? Mr. Cuban figures, as one would probably guess, that a blacklist would be a good thing.
And who to administer this list? Why ESPN of course. Cuban’s modest proposal is that the WWL should present a page of blogs and websites which they won’t use in their reporting. But wouldn’t such a list just give these sites the publicity that Cuban says they don’t deserve? He has an answer for that, too. Read more…
The contentious playoff series between the Mavericks and Nuggets may have ended on Wednesday, but the off-court drama surrounding it continues. Yesterday, Nuggets coach George Karlstoked the flames surrounding Carmelo Anthony’s fiancee’s fight club video, keeping that brouhaha brewing long past its expiration date. Today, the original Nugs-Mavs offcourt drama, the feud between Mark Cuban and Kenyon Martin’s mom got another jolt, keeping it out ahead of the pack.
Cuban may have thought that a crummy blogpology (buzzword!) would be enough to end the tiff between himself and Kenyon Martin’s mom, but almighty NBA commish David Sternhas decreed otherwise.
It was billed as the hockey playoff series everyone wanted to see, and for six games it was. With three overtimes in that spell — and two other games that easily could have been pushed into extra frames, too — the Capitals-Penguins second rounder felt like an instant classic heading into Game 7. All it needed was a respectable finale.
It didn’t get one.
Instead, Pittsburgh’s experienced markmen carved up Washington’s rookie goalie, Simeon Varlamov, jumping out to a 5-0 lead before finishing with a 6-2 victory in D.C., which spent much of the third period reminiscing about a strong season and wondering what might havce been.
That made for a deflating end to Alex Ovechkin’s second playoff campaign, with Washington’s transcendent star thoroughly outshone by Pittsburgh star Sidney Crosby, whose two goals and an assist paced Pittsburgh’s stunning Game 7 rout.
In fact, while conventional wisdom holds there’s nothing like a Game 7 in hockey, this graph from the WASHINGTON POST’s writeup of the game tells you all you need to know about what got the Caps into trouble:
Varlamov wasn’t totally to blame; he didn’t get much help from his teammates, who were outplayed in almost every sense of the word. They took bad penalties. They were beaten to loose pucks. They made mental miscues when the team could least afford one.
The game began with Ovechkin being stopped by Marc-André Fleury on a breakaway after 3 minutes 1 second with a brilliant glove save. It was all downhill from there for the Capitals.
There you go, and there go the Caps in a game which could have cemented Washington’s status as a burgeoning hockey town. Instead, it’ll just be a quiet one until training camp starts this summer.
If it helps cushion the blow, the Caps didn’t go quietly into the night alone. The Mavericks are headed to the golf course, too, thanks to a dominant performance by, who else, Chauncey Billups and Carmelo Anthony, in a 124-110 victory.
Only Dirk Nowitzki really showed up for Dallas, which is nice considering the fact that his pregnant fiancee most definitely couldn’t be there. And while the final scoreline shows a 14-point victory for Denver, it felt bigger than that, since the Nuggets opened up an equal 14-point lead by halftime and never really looked back.
Not to be overshadowed by the exploits of his own team on the court, Dallas owner Mark Cubanhad his apology to the mother of Kenyon Martin labeled as insincere by none other than K-Mart himself. And he had company, with Carmelo also questioning whether Cuban could possibly be sincere with an apology posted in the middle of the night on his personal blog. In fact, while we’re at it, I’d like to apologize to my second grade art teacher. I really didn’t mean to spill all the macaroni for those zebra designs on the floor, and I really shouldn’t have laughed so loud when they flew all over the floor and you had to throw them out. If I knew how little money you made, I never would have laughed.
Case in point: Last fall, former Gators quarterback Shane Matthews, a proud, former greasy-haired Florida alum, offered up one of the stronger rebukes of Meyer’s game strategy after UF’s lone loss, to Ole Miss.
At the time, Matthews called the Rebels’ man-to-man defense on Florida’s wide receivers an outright affront to the team’s passing game, questioning why Meyer wouldn’t take advantage of what seemed like mismatches.
That led to a stern speech at a Gator Club (read: really rich alumni) rally where Meyer said former players who criticized any part of the program could buy a ticket to a game, not hob nob in the team’s athletic offices.
Needless to say, that’s made plenty of headlines because it was uttered by Urban Meyer, since anything he says at this point ends up on a front page in any state with an SEC school.
For his part, Matthews is just amazed that the entire episode has become such a media flashpoint.
“I’m as Gator as there is and very supportive of the program,” he said on ESPN Wednesday. “You can be critical of a coaching decision here and there, but that’s just being a Monday morning quarterback, everyone does that.”
He’s that, and a well-known radio host, so it is kind of his job to critique coaches’ decisions. It’s not like he’s some Florida high school football coach. Maybe Meyer can consider that the next time he launches a diatribe, or maybe not. After all, Urban Meyer does what Urban Meyer thinks he should, when he thinks he should.
• Just when you thought things might finally be looking promising for the Eagles, one of Andy Reid’s sons goes and gets himself sent back to the slammer. Nice work Garrett Reid. Donovan McNabb doesn’t send his condolences.
• Wait, so just because Al Davis hated Tim Brown, that means he hates all black players from Notre Dame? Is there a significant difference between those two classifications? How many other black Notre Dame alums have played in Oakland?
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is used to having his mouth get him in trouble since he entered the NBA. He’s repeatedly been fined by David Stern for complaints about the officials, other teams, and life in the NBA in general. On Saturday night he may have taken things just a bit too far when he apparently told Lydia Moore, the mother of Denver Nuggets forward Kenyon Martin, that her son was a thug and a punk.
(”They’ll never recognize me in this brilliant disguise!”)
Not surprisingly, Martin was a bit upset about this. You don’t treat somebody’s mother that way, let alone the night before Mother’s Day. Mark responded by telling the media he was “going to take care of it“, and that he was more of a “face-to-face dude.” Well it seems that Cuban wasn’t really all that excited about a face-to-face conversation with Kenyon because he posted an apology on his blog yesterday.
