AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > May
May 2007
Braves must fix flaws without big checkbook
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The Braves awoke Thursday as close to fourth place as to first. A bright April has been shaded by a .500 May. Worst of all, they’re losing manpower.
At such a time, a big-spending organization would be tempted to spend bigger. We shouldn’t expect the Braves, who have just been bought by Liberty Media, to try the checkbook fix. So proclaims Terry McGuirk, still the team’s president after the transfer of ownership.
“Everyone feels like we’re going to be a playoff team,” McGuirk says. But here’s a discouraging word: If the postseason commenced today, the Braves wouldn’t qualify.
The doings of May had an ominous feel: The holes in the rotation grew deeper, and the bullpen lost a key man. The trading deadline is two months away, but if the Braves keep treading water it to matter. The question, then: Is Liberty Media ready to step up to the figurative plate?
McGuirk believes that’s the wrong question to ask. He says the deadline dealing hasn’t gotten going: “If somebody handed us a lot of money, there’s nothing we could do right now.” Besides, he sees nothing unduly ominous about the doings of May: “If not for two injuries [Mike Hampton and Lance Cormier], we’d probably be in first place by a couple of games.”
Hampton won’t be back this season. Cormier should be soon. But is a pitcher who has won 12 big-league games apt to make a difference in a difficult division? Will the absence of Mike Gonzalez erode the Braves’ capacity to close out games? Is another position player — Ryan Langerhans and Craig Wilson have flunked out, and Willy Aybar is indisposed — required immediately?
Says McGuirk: “Our first inclination is to fix [a problem] internally. Look at the Yankees. They’ve got more money than anybody, but there’s no fixing that unless they play better. … If it takes dollars to get a deal done that we think might be for a missing piece, we can do it. But more times than not it’s not dollars [involved in a midseason trade] — it’s giving up young talent.”
The Braves used to dangle young talent as deadline bait. (Think Melvin Nieves, Donnie Elliott and Vince Moore for Fred McGriff. Think Jason Schmidt for Denny Neagle.) That’s no longer standard procedure. Says McGuirk: “Four or five years ago we changed our approach to go with youth and hustle. … We’re very loath to give up the kids who are the whole future of the franchise.”
So don’t expect Jarrod Saltalamacchia to be sent to Chicago for Carlos Zambrano (who, coincidentally, will start against the Braves today). Zambrano is scheduled to be a free agent, and the Braves’ new world doesn’t have space for pricey imports.
“Free agency is so inefficient,” McGuirk says. “It’s the easiest way to waste a franchise’s money. … Anything that’s happened from 2000 on is tough to justify, and we learned that ourselves. Our payroll was going up like a rocket ship, and the fans stopped coming. That seemed a major statement as to what this franchise should be about.”
Where once the Braves would sign a Greg Maddux or a Gary Sheffield over the winter, they now prefer to see what a Chuck James or a Jeff Francoeur can do. That said, the biggest test of this new stance will come five months hence, when a homegrown All-Star (Andruw Jones) files for free agency.
“We want to keep him,” McGuirk says. “But he’s got a very strong agent [Scott Boras]. So we’ll see.”
And we will. We’ll see if the Braves under Liberty Media are any different from the Braves under Time Warner. The guess is that they won’t be. They might spend a little more, but only a little. If you liked that cost-efficient mind-set then, you’ll like it now. If you, on the other hand, had a yearning burning to see Zambrano in the same rotation as Smoltz and Hudson … well, you’ll be disappointed.
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LeBron would make finals worth watching
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
That sound you hear is the NBA brass offering up prayers for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Another championship series between Detroit, a team with no real stars, and San Antonio, a team with a star who doesn’t act like one, would tax the league’s vaunted powers of promotion to the max. But if LeBron James should enter the mix, it’d be …
Michael Jordan all over again.
Or at least that’s how the NBA would sell it.
And the NBA, as we know, can sell its stars. The NBA, in point of fact, taught every other league how to do it. It was easy when those stars were bona fide — Michael and Magic and Bird — but in the gap following their departure the promotion became almost comical. Remember how Vince Carter was briefly the next Jordan? Remember Paul Hewitt’s famous dismissal of this ceaseless tub-thumping? “Shaq versus Yao — what’s that?” he said at the 2004 Final Four. “That’s not basketball. It’s tennis.”
But now there’s a chance the finals could be LeBron against the Spurs, and LeBron is one of only two players to enter the NBA in the new century — Dwyane Wade is the other — who possesses the combination of skill and style that defines a superstar. LeBron would be worth watching against anybody, and he now has a fighting chance to reach the finals. (Heck, if he’d gotten a foul call at the end of Game 2 the Cavs might be going for the clincher at Detroit tonight.)
Hey, I admit it. I’ve long since wearied of the NBA’s hard sell, but I’m pulling for LeBron. I guess I’m just like everybody else — I like stars, too.
Permalink | Comments (22) | Post your comment | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Kobe a Hawk? Don’t think about it
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Don’t even think about it.
If Kobe Bryant isn’t the best player in the NBA, it’s a very short argument. But better to look at others in the argument.
If Kobe Bryant played 41 home games in Philips Arena, the Atlanta Hawks could proudly give honest turnstile counts, instead of trebled ones. But better to find other ways to sell tickets.
If Kobe Bryant were a Hawk, there would be an immediate sense of, “We’re a contender!” Better to get a grip on reality.
Not going to happen. Shouldn’t happen.
Please. Don’t happen.
In the culmination of a three-year franchise meltdown since Shaquille O’Neal was drop-kicked to Miami, the Los Angeles Lakers heard Bryant demand a trade on a radio talkshow.
On. A radio. Talkshow.
Now that’s class.
What, he didn’t have a blog? Well, actually yes. He has his own website (www.KB24.com). If you missed any of Bryant’s recent radio interviews, they’re all linked there.
How convenient.
And you wonder why this guy is perceived as one of the most selfish, petulant and self-absorbed athletes in professional sports.
Bryant recently told ESPN, which I’m starting to think has office space in a spare bedroom, that he’s fed up with the way the Lakers have played and may just want out, unless the team brings back Jerry West as general manager. Then he backtracked and said he wasn’t REALLY demanding a trade. But, yes, he is frustrated and would like Jerry West back as general manager. Or else.
Then Bryant blew up about a Los Angeles Times story Tuesday that referenced a team “insider,” who rehashed that the Lakers are only in this predicament because Bryant wanted O’Neal gone. So he threw another rant on another ESPN radio show and vented on his website.
Then came Wednesday, when he told a third ESPN show, “I would like to be traded, yeah.”
In case you missed it, he did a fourth ESPN show later in the day, during which he backtracked (duh).
I think he just broke Terrell Owens’ record.
This isn’t about what kind of athlete Bryant is or what he could bring to a basketball team. It’s about what he has become. After three championships with the Lakers, he wanted to be The Show. Now he’s Sideshow Kobe.
OK, players don’t trade players. Kobe didn’t trade Shaq. There is little question, as Bryant maintains, that owner Jerry Buss balked at giving the overweight O’Neal $80 million in 2004, precipitating the trade.
But there is also little question that the Bryant-O’Neal feud significantly played into the situation. Their relationship drove a wedge into a team that could’ve won more championships. It drove Phil Jackson to grab a candle and a harp and run for the hills. Bryant’s actions set the stage for O’Neal’s departure.
If you still don’t believe that, consider Jackson’s book, “The Last Season: A Team in Search of Its Soul.” He referred to his relationship with Bryant as “psychological war.”
Jackson also wrote that he became so frustrated with his star that he approached general manager Mitch Kupchak in January about trading him. The key passage: “I won’t coach this team next year if he is still here. He won’t listen to anyone. I’ve had it with this kid.”
Turns out even yoga masters have their price. Jackson came back last year for more money and a smile from Jeanie Buss. But it’s clear Jackson fought harder to make the Kobe-Shaq relationship work than Kobe did. He knew what Kobe is only now finding out: Bryant can’t do it alone.
In Miami, O’Neal went to the Eastern Conference finals the first season, won the NBA title last year and was bounced in the first round this season. The Lakers minus Shaq haven’t won a playoff series.
It’s not all Bryant’s fault. But remember how this started.
Now Bryant wants out.
“At this point I’ll go play on Pluto,” he said.
So the Hawks qualify? Not really. If he thinks the Lakers are too far away, where does that put the Hawks?
You think: “Bryant and Joe Johnson. Wow!” But any Lakers trade demands probably would start with Johnson and the third overall pick.
Don’t. Even. Think about it.
The Hawks have a chance to do something right (draft Mike Conley Jr.) and go up.
Kobe Bryant is going down.
It hasn’t turned into the show he expected.
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Richt’s hard not to like
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
You know what? It is impossible to dislike Mark Richt.
OK, OK. Maybe you might have a problem with the guy if you can’t stand Santa Claus, or if you’re sort of into Buzz more than UGA IV.
It’s just that, whenever the Georgia football coach talks about anything, you get the feeling that he actually believes what he says, and that he really is telling the truth.
Sounds simple enough, but such isn’t necessarily the case for many of Richt’s coaching peers. You know, on the other side of the equally straightforward Chan Gailey at Georgia Tech.
All of this came to mind again as I was reading Richt’s responses to questions from the AJC at the annual SEC spring meetings this week in Destin, Fla.
For example:
On the departure of defensive back Paul Oliver for academic reasons: “I knew going into the (spring) semester that it might be a tough one for Paul … but we’ve got some pretty talented young players back there.”
On Matthew Stafford’s infamous Internet photos: “If nothing else, it was helpful for him to understand, even more than us telling him, that he is not a normal guy. He has no privacy, and he has to understand that. That is just part of the responsibility of being the starting quarterback at Georgia.”
On the off-the-field screw ups of linebacker Akeem Hebron: “I believe he can learn a valuable lesson from it. I think he can grow into more of a man for it … What happens between now and the end of his career will measure him more than what just happened.”
Very nice.
And Richt can coach, too.
Permalink | Comments (45) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Cox learned to manage from shadows
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
So what if Bobby Cox is only a game or so away from getting tossed more times than anybody in baseball history? It is worthy of maybe a yawn while sifting through the record books. The Braves still function in the aftermath of those ejections as if their manager’s fingerprints are over more than just the lineup card.
That’s because they are.
“Yeah. Absolutely,” said Ralph Houk, 87, referring to how Cox and his peers usually operate in the shadows after their early departure from the dugouts.
Houk knows of what he speaks for so many reasons. He is Cox’s role model, and there rarely is a Braves game that he doesn’t catch in his Winter Haven, Fla., home between fishing, golfing and caring for his wife. He also built his fame with the New York Yankees of the 1960s before completing his 20 seasons as a manager with the Detroit Tigers and the Boston Red Sox. In the Bronx, he had Cox for two seasons, and the hitting-challenged infielder spent the time studying each breath of his legendary manager.
Many of those breaths featured sizzling words from Houk to umpires. Although Houk isn’t among the all-time elite for ejections as a player and manager, he ranks with the best ever for throwing a fit whenever he thought an umpire had temporary blindness.
If nothing else, Houk is the undisputed king of cap-kicking.
“Well, I know I must have kicked more than Bobby, because my knees have gone bad on me,” said Houk, the former World War II major, chuckling over the phone. “If you talk to Bobby, you tell him not to kick too much or else he’ll have the same kind of knees that I’ve got.”
Too late. Years ago, Cox had his knees surgically repaired, but not because of his antics before umpires. Earl Weaver was so into his confrontations that he spun his cap around backward to get closer to an umpire’s face. Billy Martin was a kicking and spitting fool. While Lou Piniella and Lloyd McClendon threw bases wildly enough to make the sports bloopers Hall of Fame, Leo Durocher and John McGraw just lost their minds. Cox sort of bounces from the dugout, says his little piece while looking as if he just swallowed a resin bag and leaves with his latest ejection in about the time it takes to find the prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. As a result, not only do Braves players respect Cox (especially since he mostly argues to keep them from getting tossed), but so do umpires. They know he isn’t pulling an Al McGuire, the old Marquette basketball coach who occasionally urged referees to give him a technical to motivate his players.
What about Houk? With Cox watching or otherwise, did Houk ever plan any of his ejections to help Mickey Mantle hit another blast or Mel Stottlemyre throw more strikes? “Not really, no,” said Houk, which means Cox also hasn’t done so.
Just like Houk, Cox was born in the Midwest (Tulsa, Oklahoma for Cox and Lawrence, Kansas for Houk). Just like Houk, Cox was a field manager and then became a general manager and then fired his field manager to become a field manager again. Just like Houk, Cox is considered the ultimate “players” manager. Just like Houk, Cox doesn’t mind doing whatever it takes to save a player from ejection, but he prefers to see his guys in person during games instead of through the alternatives.
“I didn’t like to manage too much from the runways,” Houk said, chuckling. “I’m sure Bobby doesn’t either, although we’d usually have a guy standing there at the head of the runway, and you’d tell him what to do. As long as you’re out of sight, and they can’t see you, you can have a coach or somebody you trust up there, and you can just yell at him. ‘Take him out,’ or ‘Put him in,’ or ‘Go check on him.’ You can run the whole thing.”
Which is what Cox does, no matter where he’s hiding for the moment.
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Writer had ringside seat for Hogan
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Most Americans who can read know Dan Jenkins as a writer. Mainly a writer of golf and football. Of books with such titles as “Semi-Tough” and “Dead Solid Perfect” among others. Those two were made into movies with blushing dialogue. By that time he had surfaced in New York City, after his growing years in Fort Worth and Dallas, and weathered 30 years with Sports Illustrated. After all he could stomach there, he headed south and since has relocated in the old hometown, not too far from the campus of Texas Christian. He still contributes — that’s hardly the word — a regular column to Golf Digest, but on the side has become a football nut and official historian for the National College Football Foundation.
Enough of that. The past weekend Jenkins spent at Biltmore Forest, N.C., indulging in one of the choice missions of his life. The subject: Ben Hogan.
Biltmore Forest Country Club selects somebody of some degree of golfing notoriety to celebrate each Memorial Day weekend and holds a tournament named for Jess Sweetser, a great amateur contemporary of Bobby Jones. In 1940, still in search of winning an individual tournament, Hogan arrived at Pinehurst and won the North and South Open, then on to Greensboro, where he won, then to Biltmore Forest, where he won the Land o’ Sky Open. In three weeks, he swept the Tar Heel tour. Since Hogan is no longer available, Biltmore Forest chose to invite Jenkins to share memories of Hogan, and who better, as you shall see.
Jenkins was a pretty good player in his day. Captain of the Texas Christian golf team, whose home course was Colonial Country Club, also home to Hogan. It fell Jenkins’ good fortune to catch Hogan’s eye and to be invited to play with him several times. Many times, perhaps as many as 50. Jenkins had a smooth swing, and you can tell it to this day. If a fellow has a good golf swing, traces of its stays with him until his hair turns grey or gone.
“Sometimes we never played a full round, maybe just five or six holes,” Jenkins told members and guests at the Sweetser Memorial. “He never really coached me when we played, but you knew he was paying attention.”
Most of this time Jenkins was in school at TCU, but he also had a job at the afternoon newspaper. He was still a collegian when he was dispatched to cover the Masters in 1951. He was well grounded in the Hogan story, and spoke of the rivalry that festered between him and Byron Nelson when the two caddied at a club in Fort Worth.
“The members held an annual caddie tournament, usually played over nine holes. After nine, Hogan had the lead and thought he had won,” Jenkins said. “Then some of the members decided it should go 18 holes, and after the extra nine, Nelson had the lead and was presented the trophy. Ben resented it, and it stuck with him for years. People talk about what close friends they were, but Ben was closer to Sam Snead than he was to Nelson. He and Byron never were really close. It was a long-standing rivalry.”
You read of Nelson’s retirement from the tour because of a stomach condition. “Not so,” Jenkins said. “He quit because his wife didn’t like the tour life and made no bones about it. So he hung it up.”
Now, to the hour of decision for Jenkins. “Ben told me one day that if I’d give him four months, he could make me a tour golfer. I told him, ‘I appreciate that, but I want to be a sports writer.’ ”
Well, that life turned out pretty nicely for Jenkins, but, foolish lad, turning down a chance to become Hogan’s protege? “Don’t regret a day of it,” he said. “I’ve seen more golf than I ever would have seen playing, and I was sure of a check at the end of each week.”
No writer was ever closer to Hogan than Jenkins. He had a ringside seat to Hogan’s life in Fort Worth. “Ben was a very generous man. He made contributions of all sorts, but did it quietly. He and Valerie became prominent in everything from debutante balls to the symphony.”
That is not the picture one got of the Hogans at the time, but it came through clearly at Biltmore Forest from the writer who knew them best.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Golf
Could Petrino have second thoughts?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN…
10: The problem with trying to celebrate Bobby Cox’s record-breaking ejection is that the umpires are going to make him leave the field - and when he gets to the clubhouse, he’s going to be the only one there. Maybe they should leave an ice-cream cake in the fridge?
9: Yankees fans can’t wait for Roger Clemens to start - because then maybe they can catch the Devil Rays.
8: I realize one reason that Bobby Petrino took the Falcons job was because he wanted to see what he could do with Michael Vick for one season. But at what point does he think, “Is this worth it?”
7: No, we don’t know where the DogGate is going. But we know that the Falcons’ entire off-season has been - and will continue to be - disrupted by the investigation. That’s mini-camps, OTAs and meetings when Petrino is trying to implement a new scheme.
6: You, the optimistic Falcon fan, might think: “Training camp isn’t until July. The season isn’t until September.” But this case doesn’t seem close to resolution. Watch how quickly July and September get here.
5: The Evander Holyfield-Lou Savarese fight has been billed, “The Road to the Heavyweight Championship.” I guess, “The Road to Nowhere” would have made the banner too short.
4: Evidence of how far off the radar the Anaheim-Ottawa Stanley Cup final is: NHL officials phoned newspaper beat writers who aren’t traveling to cover the series in hopes of drumming up interest so they would write stories.
3: By the way, for those who poo-poo ESPN’s interview with the dog-fighting insider, saying he’s a bottom feeder and lacks credibility: People - he’s in dog-fighting. Did you think the “insider” would be a nuclear physicist or brain surgeon?
2: But if you really want a reason to turn down the sound on ESPN, here’s one: Keyshawn Johnson.
1: Kobe Bryant is upset that there aren’t any good players around him and the Lakers have a lousy general manager. Gee. Maybe he shouldn’t have chased everybody away.
Permalink | Comments (148) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
NFL must act on dogfighting; but how?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
According to a study by the Humane Society, dogfighting is a crime in all 50 states, a felony in 48 of them, unlawful even to watch in all but two (Hawaii and, oops, Georgia) - but completely legal in American Samoa.
Unfortunately for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, Pago Pago doesn’t significantly factor into the league’s image or merchandising sales. So we have a problem.
If you missed it this past weekend, ESPN, whose reporting on the Michael Vick/dogfighting investigation had been relatively tame to this point, took the story to a level that made Goodell’s head hurt.
They showed footage of actual dogfights. They juxtaposed it with words and images of Vick. They played an interview with a confidential informant, who pointed the finger at Vick as an active and eager participant who raised fighting dogs, fought dogs and gambled on dogs.
Nothing is more important to the NFL than its image because that’s what allows for everything else: obscene television rights, jersey sales and power. It’s the most successful sports league in the world because of what people perceive about the product, the structure, and, yes, even the league’s morals.
Dogfighting is not steroids.
Dogfighting is not drugs.
Dogfighting is not bar fights, or spousal abuse, or sexual assault.
In at least one way, dogfighting is worse than any of those things. Why? Because you’re not going to find people - particularly NFL players - who publicly defend any of those other things.
Understand this: Dogfighting is generally run and supported by the lowest common denominator of society. But some clearly believe there is nothing wrong with it. Some include Clinton Portis, the Washington running back who defended the indefensible, saying people should leave Vick alone even if allegations are true, and added: “It can’t be too bad of a crime.”
No. Just a felony. Dolt.
Do you think Portis is alone? Former NFL running back LeShon Johnson twice was arrested for dogfighting. Was he alone?
Rape is a felony. But nobody needs to declare, “I don’t believe in rape.”
The ESPN story prompted the league to release a statement. It read, in part: “Dogfighting is cruel, degrading and illegal. … Any NFL employee proved to be involved in this type of activity will be subject to prompt and significant discipline under our personal conduct policy.”
Question: Before Goodell suspended Adam “Pacman” Jones for the season, was the league moved to announce, “The NFL is against any player, coach or official who might incite a riot by ‘making it rain’?”
Goodell is worried about this story and where it’s going. That’s illustrated in how league officials are scrambling to jump in front of this train. On Monday, NFL.com, the league’s house Web site, carried a rewritten version of the ESPN story - a story that tarnishes its own product.
Imagine WorldCom posting a story on its Web site: “The Securities and Exchange Commission tells us that Bernard Ebbers is a cheating weasel who committed fraud,” without rebutting it.
The league has even offered NFL Security - which ranks significantly closer to the CIA than mall security - to assist the beleaguered Surry County (Va.) prosecutor.
Dogfights on SportsCenter. A confidential informant, identity hidden, his voice digitally disguised, implicating Vick. Bad images.
The NFL doesn’t want this story covered up - it wants resolution, and quick. There’s a big difference. The league can protect its image with the best of them. It strong-armed ESPN into taking the weekly sex-drugs-lies-and-football serial, “Playmakers,” off the air. That doesn’t mean the themes in “Playmakers” don’t exist in the NFL. Of course they do. But those ills also are a significant part of society.
But dogfighting? No. There is no rationalizing that. Goodell needs anybody associated with that sick pastime out of the league.
The problem is, this isn’t just a drug problem, or a crime problem, or an ethics problem. There’s no book on how to deal with this. We don’t know how extensive dogfighting is. We only know there are several backwoods yahoos - some of whom wear nice suits and drive nice cars - who don’t know how to define the words “felony” or “decency.” And outside of American Samoa, that matters to the NFL.
Permalink | Comments (468) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
Contract year turning sour for Andruw
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The way Andruw Jones is going, he might not be beyond the Braves’ price range this winter. Then again …
The way he’s going, the Braves might not consider him indispensable anymore.
Since nobody has ever known what Andruw Rudolph Jones is apt to do at any given moment, it’s risky to look five minutes ahead, let alone five months. But April and May haven’t gone the way any player in a contract year would script, and June will see publication of a book by the justifiably esteemed Jayson Stark that identifies Jones as “the most overrated center fielder of all time.”
The demon agent Scott Boras will still demand massive money for a 30-year-old who has won nine Gold Gloves and who hit a franchise-record 51 homers two years ago. Figure $18 million per season as a baseline. (Asked if Boras ever asks for less than you’d think, John Schuerholz almost laughed before saying, “Oh, no.”)
But here’s the bigger question, bigger even than Boras and his reputation: Is Jones still the player he was in 2005, or is he, as Stark uses diminishing defensive data to suggest, an athlete on the clear decline?
It was only two summers ago we were toasting Andruw’s breakthrough season. We’d waited for nearly a decade, and finally it arrived — a league-leading 51 homers and 128 RBIs. Last year brought more of the same, albeit with 10 fewer home runs, and seemed to furnish further evidence Jones had ascended to a higher level. But now, sad to say, the old puzzling Andruw is back with a vengeance.
In 48 games Jones is hitting .215 with 17 more strikeouts than hits. He struck out five times against Boston last Sunday. He has one home run in May.
Is this just another of Andruw’s infamous downturns, or is it something worse? Said Bobby Cox, ever chipper: “I’ve seen him in slumps before, and he’s always come out of them and will be carrying the team on his shoulders.”
Might the weight of impending free agency be pressing down? Terry Pendleton, the hitting coach who was once a free agent himself, said he didn’t think it was “until last week in Boston, when I thought, ‘Maybe it is bugging him.’ At times it seems he does try to do more. He does have pride: In this business we all do — that’s how we got where we are. And you do tend to hear negative things.”
True to his famously serene self, Jones doesn’t see these latest flailings as anything significant. “I’m seeing the ball pretty good,” he said Friday night. “I had one bad game in Boston and people made a big deal about it.”
Does he worry about where he might next year? “I don’t think about that. I’m playing baseball right now. I’m doing whatever I can to help the team however I can.”
Jones stroked a double off Jamie Moyer in the second inning Friday, one of his two extra-base hits in the last dozen games. He has struck out 18 times in those last 12 games. Cox has dropped Jones in the order, a major concession for the patron saint of loyalty. Still, it’s important to note that this is Andruw Jones, which means things are seldom as they seem for very long.
He had an 0-for-28 stretch in April 2005 and was hitting .239 at month’s end. He wound up second to Albert Pujols in the MVP voting. It might well be that, as Stark suggests, he’s coasting on his reputation as a defender. (Frankly, the Braves’ Andruw-saves-a-run-a-game claims were always fanciful.) But to dismiss him altogether would be wildly premature.
He has looked bad before and will look bad again. That’s just Andruw being Andruw. Boras is going to find some team willing to meet his price — that’s why Boras is Boras — and that price will surely be too high for the Braves. And then they’ll find another center fielder, and he won’t be as good as this one.
Permalink | Comments (56) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Moylan delivers the tonic to pick up bullpen
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Don’t let the word get around, but the Braves have a drug dealer in their bullpen. I mean the real stuff, cough syrup, aspirin, vitamins, muscle rub and such, but not a lot that would get Bud Selig’s attention. Remember when Rafael Palmeiro was the poster boy for Viagara, another drug store product?
Actually, Peter Moylan was a pharmaceuticals salesman for about three years, mainly to support his baseball habit in Australia. Baseball in Australia? The Melbourne Roos? The Brisbane Bombers? A lot of us had no idea the Aussies had taken up our national pastime. Just as likely to find baseball on Mars.
Well, let me tell you, they’ve been playing baseball in Australia since 1879, some form of it. They have their own version of the World Series, called the Claxton Shield. It was a long time developing. It had a lot of competition, and still has — Australian football, cricket, rugby, tennis, even our own U.S. golf champion is an Aussie. Baseball plodded along, but a few of their prize exports began dropping in on us in 1986, when Craig Shipley came up with the Padres after schooling at Alabama. A few others came along in driblets. The Brewers brought in a battery, Dave Nilsson, the catcher, in 1992, and Graeme Lloyd, the pitcher, the next year. Of the Aussies, only Nilsson finally made headlines back Down Under when he played for the American side in the All-Star Game in 1999.
But today we deal with the dealer. He isn’t the Braves’ first Australian pitcher. Damian Moss came before, won 12 games one season, then was traded to the Giants in the Russ Ortiz deal and has drifted out of sight. You need an atlas to track Moylan’s route to the Braves. If it had not been for that so-called World Baseball Classic two springs ago, we probably would never have heard of him. But this is not his first trip to the United States.
He was offered a full scholarship to Georgia Southern in his youth. You see, the Braves chief scout, on what is known as the Eastern Rim, is Phil Dale, who schooled at GSU. Instead, Moylan signed with Minnesota and spent two seasons in Fort Myers, a rookie league farm. That was in the mid-90s. He never surfaced again in this country until 2006, pitching, playing anywhere for Team Australia. In fact, Peter was an infielder first, then began moving all about. Down Under, you play anywhere they decide they need you. He did pitch one inning in the WBC against Venezuela, and struck out three major leaguers, including Bobby Abreu.
“Phil Dale had seen me pitch before, but he hadn’t seen me pitch against guys who could really hit,” Moylan said.
By this time, he had completely reconstructed his delivery, dropped his arm and developed a natural sinker. “I throw it 95 percent of the time. I had shoulder surgery that made it natural for me.”
It was in between seasons that he became a pharmaceuticals salesman. “Three years I did it, while I was playing club ball. Club baseball is what we play in Australia,” he said. “Our team was the Blackburn Orioles, and our colors were almost the same as Baltimore’s.”
He is a quite sociable sort who turns the Braves clubhouse into a personal refuge. It isn’t an easy life, with a wife and a 6-year-old daughter — and another offspring on the way — on the other side of the world. When the Braves offered him a shot at Richmond after the WBC, he jumped at it. The Australia National roster listed him as a first baseman, pitcher second. But he was a different pitcher now than the one who toiled in Fort Myers, with his readjusted sidearm delivery.
“I’m a pretty good hitter,” he said, quite modestly. He can put his bat away here. He has had one time at bat as a Brave. He struck out.
Coming out of the bullpen, though, he has given the Braves what they were looking for. “We were a little worried about his delivery against left-handed batters,” manager Bobby Cox said, but his concern has abated. “He throws that sinkerball, and it sinks just as much to left-handers as to right-handers.”
It got a few laughs when the word got around that the Braves had signed a drug salesman out of Australia. Well, the snickers have stopped. A shrinking earned run average will do that for a fellow. He’s 28 years old and the Braves seem to have discovered a worthy property. After all, you’re talking about an Aussie who has known what it’s like to play in the Claxton Shield.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
Feds must expand their presence in Vick case
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
One moment, prosecutor Gerald Poindexter is saying there is evidence of dogfighting in the two-story house formerly owned by Falcons quarterback Michael Vick along the backroads of Virginia. The next, Poindexter is saying there might not be enough to file charges.
Now Poindexter is getting amnesia by saying he’s moving forward in the investigation.
Huh? The law folks in Surry County are doing their imitation of Mayberry R.F.D. regarding Vick’s possible role in illegal dogfighting. That’s why three things must happen for the sake of everybody, including Vick, who likely wants all of this to end sooner than later.
Come to think of it, one of those three things just happened: NFL commissioner Roger Goodell got heavily, but quietly, involved with the investigation this week, and he is no Barney Fife.
Here are the other two things that must happen: (1) More participation by the feds, and (2) those law folks around Surry County sending this dogfighting case to the state’s attorney office in Richmond. Sort of like Sheriff Andy Taylor deferring something larger than moonshining to the bigwigs in Raleigh.
Anyway, Goodell wants a conclusion to Vick’s latest controversy. Like now. The longer this goes unresolved, the more chances you have for an ugly trial that could expose a slew of NFL types under rocks with the lowlives of dogfighting. In recent years, Nate Newton was arrested for dogfighting, and LeShon Johnson was convicted. You also had Clinton Portis and Chris Samuels of the Washington Redskins giggling before cameras over Vick’s possible role in dogfighting, with Portis saying, “I don’t know if he was fighting dogs or not, but it’s his property, it’s his dog. If that’s what he wants to do, do it.”
The commissioner was not amused. Despite just months on the job, he banished Pacman Jones for a season after his various antics. When it comes to protecting the league’s image, Goodell means business. So he spent this week dispatching some of his former FBI agents, who serve as NFL security, to Surry County. Not only that, Goodell did so without waiting for an invitation, especially after the league made a couple of calls to local authorities that weren’t returned.
This is just a start. Now the feds must expand their presence in the case. Well, if they haven’t already.
Somebody from the U.S. Department of Agriculture met for two hours on Monday with those law folks around Surry County to review the evidence. Whether the feds just came to assist the local prosecutor, investigators and policemen isn’t known. The feds won’t say, which means there still is hope they’ll take over a case that is too much for Poindexter, a Commonwealth attorney who only works part time as prosecutor in a county of 7,000.
The crime is low around Poindexter’s portion of Hampton Roads, but the celebrity worshipping is high. In addition to Vick, other high-profile people from the area include Alonzo Mourning, Pernell Whitaker, Bruce Smith, Allen Iverson and D’Angelo Hall. So it’s enough to make the overwhelmed Poindexter a little cautious (as in too cautious) with an explosive case that could involve Vick and dogfighting, especially with Poindexter up for re-election at the end of the year.
Did Poindexter once say there might not be enough evidence in this case? Even Gomer and Goober would disagree with that. Along with damaged pit bulls among the 66 dogs found at Vick’s old home, there was a slew of dogfighting paraphernalia and blood splatters on the floor of a room above the garage. The AJC also has quoted dogfighting experts as saying others have been indicted, convicted and sentenced for much less. There is the case of Richmond’s Stacey A. Miller, for instance. He currently is facing up to four years in prison for dogfighting, and this is with 50 fewer dogs than the Vick case and without blood found on his property.
Authorities did discover a dead dog, which probably didn’t help Miller’s case, but you get the point. Those law folks around Surry County need help.
They’ve got the NFL, whether they like it or not, and they already may have the feds, and they should take our Richmond suggestion, just to make sure.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
No way Smoltz was losing this game
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
No way he lost this game. Not with Victory No. 200 awaiting him. Not with a 295-game winner opposing him. Not with the first-place Mets staring out at him. Put it this way: If each of his starts had carried these dynamics, he’d have won so many Cy Youngs that the pitcher’s prize would have been renamed the John Smoltz Award.
John Smoltz is among the handful of best big-game pitchers ever — Allie Reynolds, Whitey Ford, Bob Gibson and Curt Schilling would figure in the discussion — and it’s significant that the biggest game of his life was a duel against the great Jack Morris that wasn’t decided until the Braves’ bullpen took over. The man has been money for a long, long time.
And now, 16 years after that historic Game 7, Smoltz has worked against Hall of Fame-bound ex-teammates four times in two months and hasn’t lost. He’s 2-0 against Tom Glavine, who beats everybody but the Braves, and 1-0 against Greg Maddux, who once beat everybody. Glavine and Maddux have been better over the courses of their careers than Smoltz, but no active pitcher save Schilling compares when it comes to seizing a moment. Not Clemens. Not the Big Unit. Not even Pedro.
It would be a stretch to call Smoltz the Michael Jordan or the Tiger Woods of baseball. It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest Smoltz has a bit of Jordan/Tiger about him. Give Jordan the last shot and he’d make it. Give Tiger the lead on Sunday and he’ll hold it. Give Smoltz the ball and a point to prove and he’ll prove it. He competes harder and focuses more precisely when matched against the Mets or the Red Sox than when the Nats are on the docket.
He clinched the NL West on the penultimate day of the 1991 season, touching off the run of 14 division titles. He has been the winning pitcher in the deciding game of three playoff series, and he was the reason the Braves still had a prayer against Doug Drabek in Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS. As deft as the artists Glavine and Maddux were, they were never quite the first choice on the most pressurized nights. That was always the more passionate Smoltz, was and still is.
Thursday night had an October feel to it, and October is Smoltz’s playground. He struck out the first two Mets, serving notice yet again. He escaped the third inning with help from first-base umpire Larry Young — David Wright was called out on the tiniest of swings — and there and then you knew: No way Smoltz was losing this game.
On cue, the Braves made every sort of play behind him. Kelly Johnson snatched back a run on a diving stop in the fourth — emotions running hot, Smoltz pumped his fist in salute — and Edgar Renteria ranged into the hole twice in the sixth. And then in the seventh, two on and one out, Smoltz induced forceouts from David Newhan and Jose Reyes. His part of the deed was done.
And this time, unlike in the Metrodome all those years ago, his bullpen held. The money pitcher won yet another money game, won No. 200 (to go with those 154 saves!), won again against his old teammate Glavine, won to bring the Braves within 1-1/2 games of first place.
The best big-game pitcher ever? “I’ll go with my guy,” Chipper Jones said. “He has a will to succeed in these situations that’s second to no one’s.”
As Jones spoke, the 200-game winner was screaming and gesticulating in the Braves’ clubhouse. Not even an hour after yet another milestone, his beloved Detroit Pistons were pulling out Game 2 against Cleveland. Said publicist Adam Liberman: “This has been a big night for you, John Smoltz.”
A big game. A big night. No way John Smoltz didn’t make it his.
Permalink | Comments (87) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Here’s what I don’t think…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
In honor of Tom Glavine, who’s in town and who pitches tonight, I’m throwing a changeup. Instead of telling you what I think, here’s what I don’t think.
I don’t think Michael Vick will be indicted.
I don’t think the Hawks will spend the draft’s No. 3 pick on a point guard.
Neither, however, do I think they’ll come out of the draft without landing a point guard — though it might be a veteran acquired via trade for the No. 11 pick.
I don’t think the Braves will win their division.
Neither, however, do I think the Braves will miss the playoffs.
Should I be wrong about Vick and an indictment, I don’t think Roger Goodell will hesitate to suspend him for four games.
Given the speed with which baseball swooped down on Jason Giambi, I don’t think we’ll see anybody else admit he used steroids.
I don’t think it gets much sweeter for Tech people than winning the school’s first NCAA title on Georgia’s campus.
I don’t think Mark Redman was the answer.
I don’t think Mark Redman even understood the question.
I don’t think Joe Torre will last the season.
I don’t think Javaris Crittenton will be back.
I don’t think there has ever been a great team in any sport that has excited the masses less than the San Antonio Spurs.
If Mike Gonzalez can get an MRI every week, I don’t think he has the same health plan I do.
Permalink | Comments (105) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Tomahawks still in Mets’ minds
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Nobody in baseball hits, scores or runs better than the New York Mets, owners of a Big Blue Machine.
As for the National League, only the San Diego Padres pitch better and only the Colorado Rockies field better.
If that isn’t impressive enough, the Mets currently have the league’s best record after winning the NL East last season by 12 games. They even watched their eternal nemesis from Atlanta go from reaching the playoffs 14 straight times to finishing 18 games behind themselves in third.
Still, you wonder. You wonder if visions of tomahawks continue to rattle around the heads of the Mets. You wonder as much, because the slumping Braves are just a victory away tonight at Turner Field from snatching a third series this season against their supposedly big and bad foes.
Mostly, you wonder if the Mets are still chasing the Braves. Not in the standings but in their minds.
“When we came down here and had that good series against them last year, I think we kind of felt like we put all of that to bed,” said Tom Glavine, the former Braves turned Met, referring on Wednesday night to a stretch from late July to early September that saw the Braves dropping five of six games to the Mets.
Even so, the Braves are the only team this season with a winning record against the Mets. What’s up with that?
“I don’t know,” said Glavine, pausing, in the visiting clubhouse before the Mets’ 3-0 victory in this one. Then he mentioned that most of the games have been close. “In the other two series we played against them, we were leading late in the rubber matches. We just let them get away, and that hasn’t been typical of what we’ve done all year.”
Which is my point. You wonder if the Mets are still intimidated by the Braves or something. Such also was the case for the Phillies, the Reds, the Giants and everybody else in whatever division featured the Braves for more than a decade.
Listen to Glavine, the eternally wise soul who spent 15 of his 20 years in the majors with the Braves before joining the Mets five seasons ago. While helping the Braves win five pennants and a world championship during that stretch, he had the sense that opponents were shivering even before he cranked up his Hall of Fame arm.
“You know, I always felt like that was the case a lot, but you don’t ever know, because you’re not on the other side,” said Glavine, who definitely will be on the other side tonight. He’ll take the mound searching for career victory No. 296, while his old buddy, John Smoltz, goes for career victory No.200 despite nearly four years as a closer.
Neither Glavine nor Smoltz is the fearful type. It’s just that neither can pitch and play the other eight positions around them at the same time.
The point is, Glavine wasn’t in the majority with the Mets when he first arrived and shrugged at the thought of choppers and chanters.
“Once I got on the other side of it, I think it becomes a little bit more apparent that you’re always aware of the Braves,” Glavine said. “In the back of your mind, you have that feeling that, regardless of what they’re doing or where they’re at in the standings, that they’re going to make some kind of run or have some kind of great stretch that’s going to separate them from everybody else.”
None of that happened last season for the Braves. Even when they extended their string of division titles through 2005, they hadn’t won a pennant in six seasons.
Said Smoltz, another among the eternally wise, “We’ve changed so many components, and so many of those great players, we lost — like Glavine, Greg Maddux, the great sluggers — and with that goes a little bit of that aura. The Mets have it. Boston has it, and it’s amazing how quickly Detroit got it.”
The Braves haven’t lost it.
Not against the Mets.
Permalink | Comments (45) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
Conley’s the Hawks’ only choice
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Mike Conley, Jr.
Period.
Any questions?
Well, there won’t be next month if the Hawks do the right thing in the NBA draft for the first time since just shy of forever by taking Conley at No. 3.
When it comes to such a lofty pick, Hawks officials should forget about Brandan Wright, Yi Jianlian, Al Horford, Joakim Noah or whatever mystery guy is rattling around in their heads. They need several things to become consistently effective and interesting for a change, but they mostly need a point guard.
Guess what? Conley is a point guard, and despite only a season at Ohio State, he flashed signs of becoming a splendid point guard in the NBA.
Maybe you’ve heard: Hawks officials already had a chance to draft a splendid point guard. Twice. They passed on Chris Paul, a future NBA Rookie of the Year, and they ignored Deron Williams, now leading the Utah Jazz on their best run during the postseason since the days of John Stockton and Karl Malone.
As a result, the Hawks had three backup point guards on their roster this season while missing the playoffs for an NBA-high eighth consecutive time.
So it has to be Conley. This is a no-brainer, which bodes well for a franchise that has operated without one for years.
Permalink | Comments (241) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Terence Moore
Hawks have overwhelming possibilities
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
There is probably something wrong with a league’s draft system when the fortunes of a franchise can turn on a bunch of pingpong balls.
Then again, if you’re the Hawks, maybe you prefer luck to the science of player selection because, as we have seen, this franchise’s science has blown up way too many laboratories.
In theory, through sheer luck, the NBA’s punch-line franchise took a step toward respectability Tuesday night. The Hawks fell into the third pick in the draft lottery. It means they get to keep a selection that had been gift-wrapped for the Phoenix Suns in the Joe Johnson trade (which suddenly looks pretty good). They also will get, as anticipated, the 11th overall pick from Indiana.
Two of the top 11 picks.
Celebrate the potential.
Or cover your eyes.
The first pick would have been a slam dunk: Greg Oden.
The second pick would have been even easier: Kevin Durant.
The third pick is a decision.
Do you want a decision?
These are the Hawks. This is Billy Knight. Visionaries, they haven’t been.
Two of the top 11 picks.
Great. I think.
This is like giving a mechanic $50,000 to build a car. Either you end up with a really nice car, or the engine stalls when you turn on the wiper blades. Kind of depends on the mechanic, and the blueprint, and the vision.
The Hawks can take Brandan Wright. Love the talent but disappeared in the tournament for North Carolina. They can take Al Horford. Really good player, but so good that he’s the third overall pick? They can take Mike Conley: Unbelievably quick, and a point guard, but was that overachievement in the tournament or actual career foreshadowing?
Two of the top 11 picks.
Two more decisions.
Pepto, anyone?
Why couldn’t it have been easy? Orlando fell into Shaquille O’Neal. San Antonio fell into David Robinson and Tim Duncan. Cleveland fell into LeBron James.
The Hawks just fall.
Portland won the lottery. The Trail Blazers were represented Tuesday by Brandon Roy. Hawks fans couldn’t miss the irony. Last year, Knight selected Shelden Williams with the fifth overall selection. Roy went to the Blazers with the next pick. He just won Rookie of the Year.
Williams was below average. He just got engaged to Candace Parker. Soon, he may not even be the best player in his house.
We all believed Knight was wrong when he drafted Boris Diaw in 2003. Turns out he was right about the player but wrong about the uniform. Diaw has been a jewel for Phoenix. Knight also drafted Josh Childress over Luol Deng in 2004, and Marvin Williams over two impact point guards, Deron Williams and Chris Paul, in 2005.
There was only a 38 percent chance of the Hawks landing in the top three, a 13 percent chance of picking third. So something broke right. Just not right enough.
As he was about to board a flight for New Jersey on Tuesday, Dominique Wilkins said he was wearing his lucky tie and commented: “The lottery can change the course of a franchise. We’re overdue for some luck.”
No. What they’re overdue for is some intelligence.
This hasn’t been a run of brilliance. The Hawks have gone eight seasons without making the playoffs. They are 97-231 over the past four years, which means Knight needs a 134-game winning streak to pull even for his tenure. (Yes, that would be record.)
In fairness to Knight (why not?), he merely is upholding a franchise standard. Drafts usually blow up with this team. In 1975, the Hawks had the first and third overall selections. They took David Thompson and Marvin Webster. Both opted for the ABA.
In 14 drafts from 1985 to 1998 — between Kevin Willis and Jason Terry — the Hawks’ first round went like this: Jon Koncak, Billy Thompson (traded for Ken Barlow), Dallas Comegys, no pick, Roy Marble, Rumeal Robinson, Stacey Augmon, Adam Keefe, Doug Edwards, no pick, Alan Henderson, Priest Lauderdale, Ed Gray and Roshown McLeod.
I realize it’s a lot easier to draft in hindsight. But should two “no picks” look so good over that span?
And now this: two of the top 11 picks.
Think of the possibilities.
Maybe not.
Permalink | Comments (117) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Jeff Schultz
The constant variety of blunders
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN
10: So what were the odds that drugs, steroids and bar fights would become relatively minor problems for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, relative to … dog fighting?
9: This must occupy a greater part of the landscape that any of us realized, given Clinton Portis’ reaction to the Michael Vick situation. Said Portis: “I know a lot of back roads that got a dog fight if you want to go see it. …. I’m sure there’s some police got some dogs that are fighting them, some judges got dogs and everything else.”
8: And, I mean, what’s the big deal, right? Because as Portis said, even if Vick is tried and convicted, it would be “putting him behind bars for no reason. … I don’t know if he was fighting dogs or not. But it’s his property; it’s his dogs. If that’s what he wants to do, do it.”
7: For more on this subject, Portis can be reached at his corner booth at the Club Neanderthal.
6: Solid organizations don’t need to depend on a ping-pong ball for success. And then, there are the Hawks.
5: So tonight, we watch the lottery. They end up with two of the top first 15 picks, or one, or none. But I guess it’s good news that it’s all luck and not a front office decision.
4: When Andruw Jones bats .212 and strikes out five times in one game in a free agency year, he has to answer to somebody worse than Bobby Cox, his manager: Scott Boras, his agent.
3: The Cincinnati Bengals have waived A.J. Nicholson. The Raiders and Leavenworth put in claims.
2: Thirty-three years later, George Foreman says he was drugged when he lost to Muhammad Ali in Zaire. He makes these claims in a new book. Something tells me sales of the George Foreman Grill have fallen off.
1: Portis just issued a statement through the Redskins saying he doesn’t endorse dog fighting. I think I liked him better when he was scum, but honest.
Permalink | Comments (94) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Hewitt’s forced to wait and see
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Either or both of Georgia Tech’s two best players may or may not play for the Jackets next season. Paul Hewitt, who coaches Tech, is like everyone else: He won’t know anything for a while. In the interim, doesn’t he formulate all manner of plans for 2007-2008?
One with Javaris Crittenton and Thaddeus Young.
Another without either.
A third with Crittenton but without Young.
A fourth with Young but without Crittenton.
Actually, Hewitt chooses still another option: None of the above. “I wait until August,” he says, “and I see who’s there.”
Crittenton and Young have entered their names in the NBA draft but have until June 18 to withdraw them and return to Tech. What happens in tonight’s lottery might have a swaying effect on either or both. Then again, it might not.
A coach can go crazy if he sweats every permutation. Hewitt tries not to sweat any of them. Toward that end, he falls back on his own object lesson:
“We’d beaten Iowa in the [2003] NIT, and we had to fly back to Atlanta before we flew back out to play Texas Tech. I sat in the front of the plane with [his assistants] and we looked at the roster we had coming back and how much depth we’d have. And then, the day after we got back from Lubbock, Chris Bosh walked into my office and said he was putting his name in the draft.
“Now maybe I could have seen that one coming, even though Bosh had been telling people he wasn’t leaving. But I didn’t think for one second that Ed Nelson would be transferring, and he came in the day after Bosh and said he was going to Connecticut.”
So much for returning depth. (Two ACC rookies of the year gone in 24 hours!) So much for looking ahead. Says Hewitt: “Ever since then, I never anticipate. I literally just wait until August.”
What’s the alternative? Hewitt couldn’t go recruit seniors of similar stature because most McDonald’s All-Americans commit in November, and the late signing period ended last week. He couldn’t do the quick fix because Tech almost never takes a JUCO transfer. He can’t, in good conscience, try to re-recruit Crittenton and/or Young because they’d see it as disingenuous. (“Of course he wants me to stay. It’ll help him win more games.”)
So Hewitt does nothing. He tries not to handicap the draft because it defies handicapping. (For what it’s worth, Young has inched up NBAdraft.net’s mock matrix from No. 17 to No. 14, and Crittenton, who wasn’t even listed when he declared, is now No. 20, two spots ahead of where Jarrett Jack was taken in 2005.) Hewitt thinks there’s a chance both could be back; if they aren’t, he says, “I hope we put them in position to have long careers.”
If he never coaches either again, he won’t regret their season together. Even though Tech won only one road game and lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament, Hewitt says his rookies “did great. Javaris had a great freshman year, and Thaddeus was outstanding. … I’m not sure how much better they could have been.”
Maybe they’ll become sophomores. If not, Hewitt says, “We have to make the most of the team we have. That’s one of the reasons we work so hard on individual instruction, to be able to absorb [personnel] losses.”
Should Crittenton and Young leave, the temptation will be great to bemoan this early manpower drain as another missed Tech opportunity. Before the hand-wringing begins, here’s another object lesson: Bosh and Nelson exited in the spring of 2003. Less than a year later, the Jackets played for the national championship. Some absorption rate, huh?
Permalink | Comments (39) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
Imada misses, but ‘second is second’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Look at it this way. It was like a College Bowl. Drake took on Georgia and Georgia Tech, and Drake handled them both, even though it did run into overtime. Thus, Zach Johnson, representing Drake, began the fourth round of the AT&T Classic three strokes behind Ryuji Imada of Georgia and Troy Matteson of Georgia Tech. In the end it boiled down to a playoff between Johnson and Imada; it was made easy for Johnson when Imada’s second shot found water on the exciting, exhilarating 18th hole.
Zach Johnson was like the “home” team. He had won this telephone classic when it was BellSouth, on this same course, three years ago. Now, it was the AT&T Classic, but it still rang the same, and from the tenor of the cheers and hurrahs, this was his gallery.
Last year, he was second to Phil Mickelson, but Lefty was almost out of sight. He won here with a 13-stroke lead, 28 under par, but second place is still second. Then came Augusta, Johnson boldly faced off against Tiger Woods, and Johnson now owns a green jacket. Three times a winner on the PGA Tour, three times in Georgia, and with any luck at all, he’ll get his chance at another when the Tour Championship is played at East Lake in September.
So there you have the winner. It was a day for scoring. There were 20 rounds in the 60s, and that didn’t include three of the leaders, Matt Kuchar, Matteson and Camilo Villegas, all of whom hung close, but couldn’t break 70. The course was playing like a kitten. If you didn’t score early, you got passed like a buggy on the freeway.
Zach Johnson victory conferences are old shoe in Georgia now. The fascination factor rides with Imada, the Japanese who played two years at Georgia, honing his game with a career in mind. Think of leaving home at the age of 14, traveling halfway around the world to go to golf school. Knowing at that tender age that you were pledging your life to golf. If homesickness beset him, he never admitted it.
“I grew up watching the Masters and the U.S. Opens and all those tournaments on television in Japan, and coming to America was my dream. I knew what I wanted to do, play golf, learn English and one day, play on the PGA Tour,” he said, and here he was. “After high school, I took two years off, not sure which way to go. I played all right in amateur tournaments, then I decided what I wanted to do. I had met Chris Haack [the Georgia golf coach], and I called him, so I came to Georgia.”
And there he finished second to Luke Donald of Northwestern when Georgia won its first NCAA Championship. His Bulldog loyalty was represented in the red shirt he wore on the course Sunday, and he met the situation with remarkable cool. The kid is loaded with savvy, and I use the term “kid” rather loosely. In terms of tour golf, he is a kid, but the “kid” is 30 years old, and this was his closest brush with winning. It all came down to the tee shot on the long and winding 18th hole in the playoff. His drive came to rest in thick grass on the edge of the fairway. Johnson lay clear in the fairway. “Good enough for me to take the chance,” he said.
Imada dwelt quite a time considering the second shot, and eventually settled on the club, then gave it as full a swing as his 5-foot, 8-inch body could put into it. “I’m not going to second guess it. I knew I had to get across the water because Zach was going to make better than par. I should have won it on 17. I had a six-foot [birdie] putt and missed it.”
One disturbing message reached him by television, blaring out of a residence near the 17th green. “I heard somebody yell, ‘Zach, Zach.’ I knew he had made birdie on 18,” and he knew he was in Johnson country.
“I missed the putt, and that’s that. Let’s not talk about all that. Second is second.”
And the thought is registered here that Ryuji Imada will be a winner down the road. The story is the early maturity of a mere boy who knows at the age of 14 what career he will pursue, and brings it off. We shall hear more of Imada, and surely more of Zach Johnson, who has now virtually turned the state of Georgia into his lucrative personal investment.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Golf
Tubby casts off Big Blue shadow
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
You’ve often seen the following in this space during the past 10 years: Tubby Smith shouldn’t have left Georgia.
Well, turns out, just before one of the most deceptively great coaches of our time headed to Kentucky, he had visions of coaching the Bulldogs long enough to become the Vince Dooley of UGA basketball. “Oh, God, yes,” said Smith over the phone from the site of his new employers in Minneapolis.
It’s not like returning to Athens, but two months ago, Smith did what he should have done long ago. He knocked the bluegrass from the bottom of his shoes, and he escaped the suffocating world of the Wildcat Wackos while he still had his dignity and limbs intact. Now Smith works for the University of Minnesota. “You look back, and you’re amazed at how many blue ties and shirts you’ve collected over the years,” said Smith, sounding giddy in maroon and gold these days.
All Smith did for Big Blue was win 76 percent of the time, with NCAA tournament bids every year that produced a national championship, six trips to the Sweet 16, four to the Elite Eight and five SEC regular-season titles. Even so, it was whine, whine, whine by those Wildcat Wackos, still worshiping Adolph Rupp’s ghost and Rick Pitino’s shadow.
Tubby won it all, but it was with Pitino’s players. Tubby can’t recruit. Tubby has a boring offense.
Tubby has to go.
One Web site for Kentucky fans called firetubbysmith.com had a dapper Smith squatting in the midst of flames. To which the Wildcats’ first African-American coach sighed, saying, “There were [racial] things we dealt with, but they were early on, and they were over and done with. There’s always going to be bigotry manifesting itself in some ways with people, but I don’t think it was something I felt was going to be threatening or stop me from doing my job. If somebody makes a comment, it’s probably because of the basketball end of it. I never look at it because of my color.”
Speaking of color, we’re back to maroon and gold. These are the bad old days for Minnesota basketball. Courtesy of last season’s 9-22 record, the Gophers finished ninth or worse in the Big Ten for the third time in the past four years.
Smith is an accomplished miracle worker, though, so maybe Minnesota fans will appreciate Smith as much as did many around the Bulldog Nation during Smith’s two seasons at Georgia.
The feeling was mutual. Soon after Smith walked into Dooley’s office in May 1997 with news that Kentucky was calling, Smith revealed for the first time that he planned to tell the Georgia athletics director that he decided to spend more than a few seasons with the Bulldogs.
“You know, pretty much most places that you go to, you go there thinking you’re going to be there forever, whether it was Tulsa [Smith’s first head coaching job] or Georgia,” Smith said. “I thoroughly enjoyed Georgia. I was coaching my son, G.G., and we had back-to-back 20-win seasons. In fact, it was the first time [the Bulldogs] had ever done that, and when Ron Jirsa took over for me, they won 20 the next year. So it was a great run there.
“I also was going to have my second son [Saul] come play with me, but we took him to Kentucky. Then, working with Coach Dooley, one of the best athletics directors I’d ever been with, makes it a good situation. You just love the place. It had everything you needed.”
This doesn’t make sense. Actually, it does, when you consider this: Dooley has said that he wanted Smith to stay, but Smith remembered that Dooley also wanted what he thought was best for Smith. After all, here was a gifted basketball coach with a chance to leave Georgia, a football school, for Kentucky, a basketball school. “So you go in [Dooley’s office] hoping. I mean, you’re kind of struggling there,” said Smith, who went 45-19 with the Bulldogs, including a trip to the Sweet 16 despite losing eight seniors and five starters.
“You’ve got fans and family and players,” Smith continued. “That’s the most important thing that you just get close to, and it’s a tough decision. But Coach Dooley understood that Kentucky is Kentucky, as far as basketball was concerned, and I think he wanted what was best for me, and that’s hard to separate. And I appreciate that. He gave me a lot of guidance along the way and a lot of support.”
Which brings us to this: Dooley saw that Smith’s eyes were blinded by the word, KENTUCKY. “You’ve been there before [Smith was an assistant coach for two years under Pitino], and Rick and [former UK athletics director] C.M. Newton are very good people and good friends,” Smith said. “You also understand the magnitude and the legacy of Kentucky basketball, and sometimes your ego says, ‘I want to be a part of that.’?”
Sometimes common sense says, you shouldn’t be a part of that.
Thus Tubby’s new wardrobe.
Permalink | Comments (75) | Categories: Terence Moore, UGA / SEC
Vick issues a nightmare for Blank
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
In a recent Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, Arthur Blank ranked 297th with a net worth of $1.3 billion. The assumption here is that even if 297th out of 400 doesn’t get you to the gold card playoffs, $1.3 billion keeps the image fairly well intact.
At the end of the 2004 season, Michael Vick was the centerpiece of this city. He was 23-12-1 as a starter, had just led the Falcons to within a win of the Super Bowl and radiated like a 100-watt bulb. Since then, he is 15-16 as a starter and the bulb has been crushed.
If image if everything, Vick is on the way to bankruptcy.
The herpes case, which led to lampooning (Ron Mexico) and an out-of-court settlement.
The picture of Vick possible holding a “blunt” on his girlfriend’s MySpace page.
Flipping off home fans.
The fake water bottle with alleged marijuana particulates (later cleared) at the Miami airport, a situation Joe Montana and most leaders have managed to avoid in their career.
Subsequent suggestions he might’ve been “framed” by Miami police and claims of his explanation for the water bottle, which were disputed.
Blowing off Congress, then giving an alibi that even his own endorsement partner (AirTran) stomped on.
Now comes possibly the worst of all: Allegations of a connection to dogfighting. It’s not merely a felony, it’s a pastime for the bottom-feeders of society.
If anything that has been alleged in this case is true, there’s one thing I never want to hear about Michael Vick again: “He’s a good kid, he just hangs around bad people.”
That Vick may not be a very good quarterback is suddenly the least of his problems. It’s certainly the least of Arthur Blank’s problems.
The Falcons’ owner longs for the days when his biggest concerns were fitting Vick with the right offense. Now he finds himself trying to pitch a headache to the masses. He is all about team and presenting a unified front. But if you believe that everybody in the Falcons’ organization is universal in their belief in Vick, you’re deluded.
Blank knows all about image. He must know that Vick’s has been damaged beyond repair, regardless of whether the quarterback gets charged or suspended in the dog case. The Humane Society, PETA, a California congressman — who hasn’t weighed in? Blank can read. He can hear. He can sense. The man made his fortune reading the retail tea leaves better than anybody.
There was a time when Vick pulled this city’s fans together. Now, he divides them.
Welcome to Blank’s nightmare. The Falcons are married to a quarterback with a 10-year, $130 million contract. Dumping Vick at some point projects salary cap hell. But the Falcons’ fan base is divided: half angry, half defensive. There’s no middle. Another concern is that much of the split may be along racial lines.
It’s one thing to lose a game. It’s another to have your team’s identity hinged to an image wrecking ball. Repeated incidents diminish Vick’s already in-question ability to lead and Blank’s ability to sell.
“There’s no doubt Vick’s image has taken a huge hit,” said Frank Mahar of Genesco Sports Enterprises, a sports marketing firm in New York. “It’s been one incident on top of another. For some people now, the question isn’t, ‘When is it going to stop?’ but ‘What’s next?’
“When Vick came into the league, he had multiple TV spots — Nike, a video game, Powerade. I would guess we’re not going to see him on much this year.”
The national and local perception of an athlete often differ. Barry Bonds is vilified in every stadium but one — his home park in San Francisco. But Vick is no longer universally embraced here. Boos and no-shows at home games provided sufficient evidence last season. So do sports talk shows today.
“Blank’s in a hard place,” Mahar said. “If the town is really that split, it almost like no matter what he does he’s going to upset somebody. He wants to sell tickets but he doesn’t want to upset people in the process. It almost comes down to, ‘What’s the lesser of two evils?’ “
Nobody could have predicted that a case involving fighting pitbulls may provide that answer.
That alone should tell you that Blank has a problem.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
May dates hurt tournament
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Say what you will, you can’t beat the weather. Dazzling sunshine, cloudless sky, soothing warmth. No sweat. Hard, firm fairways, and what adorable grass.
Take a couple of years ago. Heavy rains. Severe thunderstorms. Frozen precipitation (translated: snow). Wind chill low 30s. They finally played the third (and last) round on Monday. That delayed Phil Mickelson’s arrival at the Masters by a day, but it didn’t put any dents in his game.
They gave it a new name, taking the vows with AT&T, new dates, sort of between the thunderstorm seasons. Build some good weather and they would come. Great idea, but what has happened is that the New AT&T has been caught in a vacuum. Once, it was the entree to the Masters. Last stop, the launching point, which meant even more back when PGA Tour winners won a pass to Augusta. Now, rejoice, that rule has been restored and Sugarloaf has been squeezed in between The Players and, first, the Colonial, to be followed by Nicklaus’ Memorial, and the road to the Masters now looks like a long, dark tunnel with a flickering light at the end.
It also has served to take the AT&T Classic out of international scrutiny. The press room once was peopled by overseas dialects, English, Irish, French, and a mixture of American. They came because they got three for the price of one expense account. First, The Players Championship. Then on to Gwinnett County for the exciting climax at Sugarloaf, and at the end of the ritual, the Masters.
Sugarloaf was the perfect prelude. Its place in the mix was dramatic, no matter what the weather; the Masters was always the pot at the end of the rainbow.
This tournament lost something. So did The Players, once Tim Finchem finally got it out of the shadow of the Masters. Now, nobody could sneer that the guys came to Sawgrass to freshen their game for Augusta.
So, the double switch was made. The Players moved to May, the AT&T followed, and you could feel the warm, cooing breath of the tournament sponsors in the air. But where were the stars?
Well, there were several in the field. Four U.S. Open champions, Lee Janzen, Raymond Floyd, Larry Nelson and Steve Jones. This was their kind of tournament, they were invited, and they came. Only Janzen made the cut and made like a threat.
Then there was a handful of PGA Championship winners on hand, Steve Elkington, Shaun Micheel, Bob Tway, David Toms, Floyd and Nelson again, and Paul Azinger, doubling as the Ryder Cup captain.
Looking good on paper. Nice for the prestige. Sorry, but they don’t sell tickets. Oh, to have had Mickelson back again, defending his title. This place was his feasting ground. Lefty has played here nine times and won three, the least spectacular of which was the year of his one-hole playoff against Gary Nicklaus.
This may not sit well with the homefolks, but you can’t get away from harsh fact. You have your choice: Lovely weather and a modest field, or chancy weather and setting the stage for the Masters. They went together like Smith and Wesson, Crosby and Hope. Not that the tournament sponsors didn’t have a choice. It may have been May or forget it. On the other hand, as Dave Kaplan said, “We were happy to get any date that could bring us weather like this.”
OK, OK, but looking around the press room, not only is the international corps depleted, even the national press has been watered down to the representation of one: Sports Illustrated.
I will check out with this upbeat note, that there is no more exciting finishing hole on the tour than Sugarloaf’s 18th, a long, sweeping downhill plunge 576 yards to a green guarded by a lake given to gobbling up golf balls.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Braves need an owner that cares
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Bud Selig, who never met a situation he couldn’t misread, believes the Braves will benefit from being owned by Liberty Media for the next 4 1/2 years at minimum. Bud is, as ever, wrong.
The Braves would benefit from Liberty Media, a Colorado conglomerate that by its own admission has no interest in baseball save as a tax dodge, selling as soon as possible to someone who does care about Atlanta, baseball and the Braves. Someone like Arthur Blank, who tried to buy the team but was given unaccountably short shrift by Time Warner, which shouldn’t expect Blank to renew subscriptions to any of its magazines anytime soon.
The hope here was that Liberty Media would bank its write-offs and, quick like a bunny, pass the Braves along to someone who was going to do more than count snowflakes in the Rockies. Bud and his MLB cohorts have dashed that hope by getting Liberty to agree to hold the team through 2011.
Stability is nice in theory, but sometimes reality warrants change. The Braves have spent too long trying to limbo under Time Warner’s budget ceiling. Although Liberty Media says it will allow management to be more flexible with spending, will such flexibility extend to keeping Andruw Jones and still being able to buy a big-ticket pitcher like Mark Buehrle?
Liberty Media isn’t in this to win pennants. It might not know what a pennant is. As odious as it is for the Yankees to burn $18 million on the part-timer Roger Clemens, it isn’t odious to Yankee fans. See, they want to win. Their owner wants to win. Ergo, they like their owner even though he’s a raging jerk.
For a fan, raw commitment matters every bit as nuanced expertise. The Braves have gotten pretty good at maximizing value, but they haven’t played in a World Series since 1999 and haven’t lasted beyond the division series since 2001. No, payroll doesn’t necessarily equal championships — if it did, the Yankees would win the Series every time — but it always plays well with the constituency. And the Braves’ 2007 payroll ranks 15th among 30 teams.
The Mets are outspending the Braves by roughly $30 million. Is it reasonable to think the cheaper team will be able to keep up over 162 games? Is it reasonable to expect Liberty Media to pour fix-it money into its tax write-off? And what about next year and beyond? What happens when Jeff Francoeur becomes a free agent? Will Liberty Media pony up to buy new stars when John Smoltz and Chipper Jones step aside, or must the Braves pin all long-term hopes on Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Anthony Lerew?
Arthur Blank, it can be safely assumed, would have spent more than Liberty Media will. (Not at much as Steinbrenner: Blank is competitive but not crazy.) He’s constrained by a salary cap with the Falcons, but baseball doesn’t have one. He wouldn’t buy a second team just for the sake of owning it. He wanted to do big things with the Braves but didn’t get the chance this time. He won’t get another until at least 2011.
In 2011, Blank will turn 69. Will he still feel the same about Atlanta, baseball and the Braves? Will the travails of his quarterback have soured him on sports altogether? Will he wait in line as Terry McGuirk tries to put together a group and exercise his Liberty-given right of first negotiation? And, after the failure of Atlanta Spirit LLC, do we want the Braves to be owned by a similar cobbled-together entity?
Liberty Media, sad to say, will never be much more than a continuation of Time Warner. The Braves didn’t need 4 1/2 more years of status quo. They needed a new and aggressive owner. They’ll have to wait until 2011 for that.
Thanks, Bud.
Permalink | Comments (41) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Johnson adjusts to altered course
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
In fairness to Zach Johnson, it takes something to become a big story in Sugarloaf. The bar has been set too high.
A porn star runs a brothel off the ninth fairway. (Lisa Ann Taylor. She got all of that one.)
A quarterback keeps a few of his clubhouse-broken pit bulls in the yard. (Do marshals raise “Hush, y’all” signs before a dogfight?)
But Zach Johnson — Masters champion?
Pffttt.
So maybe it wasn’t a surprise Thursday when Johnson — less than six weeks removed from dumping Tiger Woods, being splashed on magazine covers and visiting Oprah — finished his opening round of the AT&T Classic at 1 under par to polite applause from a modest gallery.
This tournament, moved from its prior on-deck spot before the Masters, lost a bit of its zing. Only one of the world’s top 10 players is here. As it turns out, Henrik Stenson can’t even draw Swedes to Duluth.
Zach Johnson is the second-highest ranked player here (15th). The last time he shot a round of golf in the state, he won the globe’s biggest tournament in Augusta. It was a life-changing moment for a relative obscurity from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It led to talk shows, name recognition and “job security” (his wife’s words).
But his following for Thursday’s first round (maybe a few dozen fans) remained a distant second to the freak show that is John Daly (a couple of hundred).
Just as well. This celebrity stuff can wear a guy.
“Honestly, the biggest change is that it just hasn’t stopped,” Johnson said. “It’s still kind of overwhelming, and very surreal. About the only time I’m really comfortable is either when I’m with my family, and only my family, or inside the ropes. That’s my comfort zone. At the same time, whatever issues or problems or decisions or requests we’ve had have been good ones, and we’ll take anything on. It’s been awesome.”
Those first days after winning the Masters by two strokes were a talk show blur. Letterman. Regis and Kelly. Oprah. All of the ESPNs. (Alas, he couldn’t save “Cold Pizza.”)
Barack Obama introduced himself to Johnson and said, “I’m a big fan.”
The Iowa House and Senate honored him. The governor phoned him. The Des Moines Register still offers a poster to download on its Web site. You would have thought Joe Jackson just walked out of a cornfield.
“That first week, we just kept looking at each other, saying, ‘What just happened?’?” said Johnson’s wife, Kim, as she lugged a baby carrier from the car. (Their 4-month-old son, Will, also made the trip.)
“Even now, it’s hard to believe what happened. I mean, I never doubted he had the ability to win the Masters. But the fact it actually happened was a surprise.”
But the demands — from media, sponsors, family and friends — have been sudden and intense. Johnson says the attention hasn’t changed him but it forced him into an unforeseen position.
“I’ve learned to say no,” he said. “I don’t like to do that, but it’s not humanly possible for me to say yes to everything.”
The welcomed tradeoff for all of this is obvious: money. His earnings for his first six tournaments this year was $194,901. His earnings for the past five: $1.8 million.
“The best thing about this is the job security, because we know he has a place to play for the next five years,” said Kim Johnson, alluding to the exemption for winning a major. “That’s what people don’t realize about golf. Just because you’re on the Ryder Cup team and you’ve won a golf tournament, it doesn’t mean you’re set.”
Had this not worked out, she said, “I guess it would’ve been back to the Nationwide Tour.” Or she could’ve gone back to her social-services job in Orlando.
But that’s not happening. Not now. Even if Johnson isn’t yet among the tour’s elite, it said something when he followed up a potentially draining Masters experience with a sixth-place finish in the Verizon Heritage in Hilton Head.
His putting will need to improve from Thursday to climb the leaderboard. But there’s no reason to think he can’t win here. His only two victories have come in Georgia: the Masters and the 2004 BellSouth.
Another win, and he might even raise an eyebrow at Sugarloaf.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Golf, Jeff Schultz
Braves need more pitching
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The baseball axiom: You can never have enough pitching.
The Bobby Cox axiom: “When you think you’ve got enough pitching, better get some more.”
The Braves convened for spring training thinking/hoping they had just enough pitching. Their bullpen looked great with the three closers, and their rotation seemed to have just enough arms — in theory. Reality, alas, has been rather different.
Mike Hampton didn’t make it out of camp. Lance Cormier hasn’t yet gotten healthy.
Mark Redman has already proved why he wasn’t on anyone’s roster in February. Kyle Davies wouldn’t still be working in a good rotation. Chuck James hasn’t been bad, but neither has he been as good as he was last year.
And now the bullpen: Bob Wickman has been on the DL. Mike Gonzalez just went on the DL.
The Braves have been very good these first seven weeks. They’ve run neck-and-neck with the Mets, which is hugely impressive. To still be running neck-and-neck (or even, dare we say, ahead) in August, they’ll have to find another arm, probably more than one.
The rotation as constituted cannot carry a team over 162 games. The bullpen is deep enough to get by so long as two of the three closers are available, but the biggest reason the Braves won 24 of their first 36 was their capacity to close down games from the seventh inning on. If you shorten the bullpen, you lengthen the game. If you lengthen enough games, you’ll start losing some.
The Braves have positioned themselves to have a truly memorable season, but adjustments are needed going forward. They won’t be simple adjustments. The first name on every team’s list when the Braves call to inquire about pitching will be Jarrod Saltalamacchia. And there’s the tangle: How do you get a good enough arm to make a difference while holding on to your best prospect?
Perhaps John Malone has some ideas.
Permalink | Comments (60) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
After 755, standard bearer’s still same
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Pardon me for taking so long before coming to this realization about Barry Bonds, but you know what? He’s actually going to do it.
This stinks.
Every eighth at-bat now, the ancient but efficient slugger for the San Francisco Giants zips closer to becoming better in the record books than Hank Aaron.
Just the thought of Bonds trotting around the bases toward 755 and beyond is enough to make you wish to take a Louisville Slugger to your head.
According to a recent poll by ABC News and ESPN, I’m not alone in cringing over Bonds reigning sooner than later as the home run king. The poll determined that the majority of fans are pulling against Bonds breaking the record. For some, it’s racial, because that factors into all aspects of society. For others, it’s personality, because Bonds isn’t exactly warm and cuddly. For most, it’s Aaron, the eternal icon as a player and as a person.
All of that’s fine, but we’re still missing something here.
What?
“The thing that really is gnawing at people is that, for the first time, unlike when Babe Ruth held the all-time home run mark, the standard bearer and the record holder are being separated,” said Dr. Harry Edwards, 65, the famed sports psychologist and sociologist, over the phone from northern California. In addition to his celebrated work through the decades with the San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors, Edwards is a consultant to baseball commissioner Bud Selig.
Added Edwards, “With Barry Bonds admitting that he may have unknowingly taken [steroids], you have the record going into the hands of somebody who has tainted that record. It doesn’t matter whether it was knowingly or unknowingly. At the end of the day, it just leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. Fans of all colors haven’t been able to conceptualize it or sort of wrap their minds around it. So they just blurt out, ‘It’s because Barry’s black. It’s because of his personality.’ No, no. This is about something that is sacred in baseball, which is the record book.
“You’ll have the standard and the standard bearer. Then you’ll have the record and the record holder. For the first time ever, they broadly will be acknowledged to be totally different people.”
Well, make that for the second time ever, because there also was 1998. That’s when Mark (“I’m not here to talk about the past”) McGwire was juiced with androstenedione and whatever else he was using to blow away Roger Maris’ record 61 home runs for a season. Three years later, the artificially inflated Bonds topped the mark of the artificially inflated McGwire. So, if you go by Edwards’ theory, our subconscious has ignored Bonds’ No. 73 and McGwire’s No. 70 and declared Maris’ No. 61 as the true magic number for most home runs in a single season.
Which means Aaron’s No. 755 will live forever — no matter what happens with Bonds, Alex Rodriguez or anybody else from baseball’s steroids era that began during the early 1990s.
“People always are going to say that the standard bearers are Roger Maris and Hank Aaron, and that the record holder is Barry Bonds,” Edwards said. “I just think that Barry, in a very significant way, is going to join the world of O.J. Simpson. It’s like, he’s out there, and he’s running around, but he’s not free. Although Barry will hold the record, he won’t get any applause, and he shouldn’t look for many citations, honorary degrees or endorsements.”
Thus the final thing, and it’s a splendid thing: The standard bearer will become even more popular than the record holder after Bonds goes deep for No. 756.
“Oh, that’s going to be a huge day for Hank Aaron,” Edwards said. “Watch how they respond to Hank after that. They’ll spend more time praising the standard bearer than the record holder, and it’ll be that way into the future.”
I’m feeling better.
Permalink | | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
Liberty Media is clueless
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Individuals, not “Things,” should run professional sports teams. “Things” can’t attend games, which is a significant problem. After all, fans of professional sports teams want to see their owners cheering or cringing in the stands.
Now the Braves are on the verge today of going from one “Thing” to another “Thing”, but in this case, the good overwhelms the bad by the collective distance of Hank Aaron’s 755 home runs.
Here’s the bad: Liberty Media isn’t shy about saying it only will purchase the Braves from Time Warner for tax purposes. So I’m guessing that many among the hierarchy of Liberty Media don’t know Chipper Jones from Starr Jones.
Good.
Actually, great.
That means the Liberty Media know-nothings will leave Terry McGuirk, John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox alone.
The primary reason baseball commissioner Bud Selig is pushing the owners to approve this deal is because Liberty Media agreed to keep the Braves’ local management team intact. Since 1991, that management team has produced 14 division titles, five National League pennants and a world championship. The Braves also have a decent chance of reaching the playoffs this year for a 15th time in 16 seasons, but their latest “Thing” couldn’t care less.
And you know what?
The choppers and the chanters should care less that the Braves’ latest “Thing” couldn’t care less.
Permalink | Comments (43) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Move over Harrick, you’ve been ‘McCorkled’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Jim Harrick Jr. is off the hook. Just when you thought it was impossible for the Georgia Bulldogs to employ a sillier coach than the man who posed the stumper about the worth of a 3-point shot, Todd McCorkle rides to the, er, rescue.
And now this stumper: Why is Todd McCorkle still employed?
McCorkle resigned from coaching women’s golf, but not from the athletics department itself, for a series of suggestive comments he’s said to have made to his players. McCorkle is 44 and should know better, but age is never an inoculation against stupidity. And McCorkle, who’s married to one of his former Arizona players, sounds really, really stupid.
Relationships on a college campus — between teacher and student, man and woman — can sometimes appear to be governed by a hazy set of rules. If even half the allegations levied against McCorkle are true (and the school itself seems to believe they are), there’s no haze here, no gray area. On the contrary, right and wrong are as vivid as purple (the color of the undergarment worn by one of his players, on which the coach is said to have remarked) and blue (don’t even ask).
The university mounted an investigation into McCorkle’s (mis)conduct and found, to quote from legal-affairs director Steve Shewmaker’s May 4 letter, “there is evidence you did engage in inappropriate behavior in violation of the university’s [non-discrimination, anti-harassment] policy.” Shewmaker noted the coach had even admitted to instances of imprudent repartee. And what was the legal department’s recommendation? Immediate termination? The bum’s rush through UGA’s famous Arch?
Nope. One month’s suspension without pay and sensitivity training.
McCorkle subsequently quit as coach but, being luckier than any man deserves, remains on the payroll through next summer. He will, according to AD Damon Evans, “be assigned other duties.” (Social chairman, perhaps?)
Asked Tuesday just what, in such a case, it would take to get fired, Evans thought for a moment and said: “That’s a heck of a question.”
The athletics department’s overriding interest, Evans said, “was the environment in which our student-athletes are involved. Our coach resigned when he met with us [on May 7], and that part of the issue was addressed. … I was satisfied with the resignation of the head coach.”
But why is he still around? Why was Marilou Braswell fired as cheerleading coach in 2004 for being too upfront about her religious beliefs and McCorkle only gets reassigned for being too upfront with his crudity? (Technically, Braswell was sacked for “retaliating against students who report what they believe to be discrimination.” Actually, she read a letter to the squad explaining her position and was dismissed.)
Evans again: “Each issue has its own little intricacies. Our main concern [with McCorkle] was to make sure we do have an appropriate environment for our student-athletes.”
And that’s fine. But why did Georgia allow McCorkle to step down as coach three days before his team was to play in an NCAA regional and say, in an official release, what’s now patently laughable? (McCorkle then: “This will allow me more flexibility in assisting my wife with her LPGA career.”) Why not fire the guy and let him sue for wrongful severance if he dares? (Good luck explaining away that allegation about a Paris Hilton video.)
We chuckle over frat-boy humor, but it’s not so funny when the frat boy is an adult male in a position of power. Imagine you’d entrusted the care of your daughter to such a man. Imagine you’d seen him lose his position but keep his job and his salary. Would you think that’s fair? Or would you think that Georgia, given the chance to make a clear statement, took the weasel route instead?
Permalink | Comments (68) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
The Tuesday Countdown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
10: I felt pretty good about the reassessment of my house the other day after learning Michael Vick’s property dropped 53 percent in about an hour.
9: You know, there are a lot of reasons why somebody dumps a house quickly. Divorce. Financial issues. A new job in a different city. I never realized image cleansing trumps them all. The dude left so fast, he left behind a half-bag of kibble.
8: By the way, if these dogs buried any bones in the backyard, I don’t want to know about it.
7: Coming to HGTV: “The New Hokie Workshop.”
6: I understand why Georgia had a problem with some of the alleged sexually explicit comments made by fired golf coach Todd McCorkle to his players, particularly the part about him telling them what “blue balls” are. I mean, he should know that blue is a Florida color.
5: Don Waddell had to make a move when Dany Heatley asked to be traded two years ago. But here’s the story of this NHL post-season: Marian Hossa - playoff bust. Dany Heatley - one game from the Stanley Cup finals with Ottawa.
4: I don’t know how many concussions Brett Favre has had in his career. But if he really believes that fans believe he still wants to play for Packers - after it was learned he recently whined and stomped his feet and asked to be traded - he’s had one too many.
3: Toronto general manager Bryan Colangelo was named NBA executive of the year. Billy Knight — not second.
2: I don’t know Chris Landry. But I know Ray Buchanan. Good guy who likes to talk a lot. Sometimes too much. So here’s my dime store analysis: It seems far more likely that Buchanan blurted out something about Vick and is now backpedaling to make peace with his Sugarloaf neighbor than it is that Landry - who’s got no dog in this fight, so to speak - is flat out making something up.
1: I’ve got jury duty today. I’m guessing I won’t get picked. Again.
Permalink | Comments (68) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Falcons coddling Vick too much
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Three minutes and 15 seconds into Michael Vick’s only public discourse since the controversy began over his possible role in illegal dogfighting, his omnipresent Big Brothers from the Falcons’ public relations department ended the questioning.
No surprise there.
Neither is this when it comes to the handling of Vick by those with Falcons ownership and management: They still don’t get it. They’ve contributed to Vick spending his six NFL seasons evolving from a maturing star into a pampered knucklehead.
Then again, given the Falcons’ three-monkey approach for the longest time regarding Vick (see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil), he hadn’t a reason to stop his silliness. He knew Big Brother would protect him, along with owner Arthur Blank, general manager Rich McKay and a slew of others in the Falcons organization who consistently said little or nothing after all of those other Vick controversies just within the last few months.
In other words, Blank is taking revisionist history to the extreme. He said last week that neither he nor others with the Falcons hierarchy have coddled Vick, but the quarterback has had more than a few social visits to the owner’s Buckhead home. Not only that, Vick has played video games with Blank’s kids. There also was that infamous day when the broken-legged quarterback was pushed along the sideline in a wheelchair by the smiling owner.
Still, regarding the latest Vick controversy, Blank told the AJC last week that he couldn’t have been more stern talking to Vick about the consequences of his actions.
So where was such a bold and public reprimand by Blank or any other Falcons officials after that water-bottle fiasco? And the stiffing of those U.S. congressmen in Washington? And the one-fingered salute to booing fans after a home game? And the herpes stuff involving Ron Mexico? And the stolen Rolex (not his, by the way) at the security gate of the Atlanta airport?
If you’re keeping score, those with Falcons ownership and management became Mazaru (the Japanese monkey who covers his mouth) after the congressmen thing and the obscene gesture thing. They issued brief statements that said nothing worth repeating after the Rolex thing and the Ron Mexico thing.
Following the water-bottle thing, McKay said he had a “stressful” meeting with Vick. It’s just that two months after the case was dropped, McKay said he didn’t discuss the contents of the bottle during that meeting. Sort of an important thing to talk about, don’t you think?
Then came Blank’s “stern” meeting with Vick over this dogfighting thing, mostly because Blank hadn’t a choice. He knows the deal with Roger Goodell. After the ruthless NFL commissioner suspended Pacman Jones for a season and Chris Henry for eight games, Goodell said he’ll also punish teams in the future for the misdeeds of their knuckleheads.
That means this Vick deal won’t end pretty, and the Falcons have nobody to blame but themselves. Among other things, if they were as obsessed with trying to shield their quarterback from his posse as they were from the media, they wouldn’t be this close to joining Vick by getting sacked by Goodell.
Consider this: Brett Favre, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Donovan McNabb join Vick as the NFL’s other high-profile quarterbacks. Vick is the only one among the five whose team requires at least one Big Brother in the room whenever he is conducting an interview of any kind.
All these quarterbacks have regularly scheduled media sessions, including Vick, but can be available when approached by their lockers. Vick is the only one with a Big Brother assigned to him in the locker room at all times, just in case somebody has the audacity to try to ask him a question.
There was a different Vick under Dan Reeves, the Falcons’ coach until late in the 2003 season. He hired somebody to work with Vick’s diction, and he required that Vick deal with the media like Favre, Brady and the rest. The idea was to make Vick realize he was the face of the franchise, which meant he had responsibilities — such as interacting with reporters, without having somebody holding his hand and making sure he wasn’t asked something that ownership or management didn’t like.
Then Reeves was fired. Then the Falcons added Big Brothers to Vick, and then they employed their three-monkey approach, and you know the rest.
Flowery Branch officially is a zoo.
Permalink | Comments (202) | Categories: Terence Moore
Mother’s Day was Mickelson’s day
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Ponte Vedra, Fla. — While Tiger frittered, Lefty sizzled. Sean didn’t have a lot of fun. The Spanish Armada put on a charge. The defending champion missed the cut by a mile. In the long run they still played for The Players Championship at The TPC Sawgrass and the winner was Phil Mickelson.
He was not greeted by his usual committee of family, but doing his victory stroll down the 18th fairway, Mickelson got in his own Mother’s Day greeting by television to his happy family in San Diego. So, in a way, Lefty found his way back from that crushing finish at Winged Foot, where he sliced the U.S. Open title into oblivion. It will, of course, reflect on his new relationship with Butch Harmon, once upon a time counsel to Tiger Woods, who, after a 9:25 a.m. starting time was winging away to a point unknown long before the leaders teed off.
It was lousy breaks on the greens that brought him down, he said.
“Tired of hitting good putts and having them lip out,” he said in his benediction to even-par (288) finish. Another way to look at it, good putts go in the hole, they don’t lip out. Woods’ game has never caught fire in this tournament. He has won once, in 2001, but except for one other year, he has never finished higher than 10th.
It was Mickelson’s day, his week, for he was on or near the lead from Thursday forward. You never saw as many leader changes in a tournament as this. Six players led Saturday, but the one who prevailed was Sean O’Hair, 24-year-old native Texan, thin as a 2-iron, boyish as Andy Griffith’s Opie. Sitting there with a one-stroke lead after the Saturday round, he said of facing off with Mickelson, “I just want to go out there and have some fun. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”
And it was, until he and Mickelson, the last twosome left on the course, reached the infamous 17th hole, the island green. Mickelson safely on, O’Hair’s first tee shot was long, wild and wide. Splash. His second, from the drop zone, found the water also. The fun was over. By the time he got the ball in the cup, he was charged with a quadruple bogey, slipped from 10-under to 6-under, over and out, $740,00 by snap calculation. Say this, though, he wasn’t daunted.
“This course fits me. I think I’m going to win here. I’m not going to let this get me,” he said, a rather emboldened reaction to such a crushing collapse. Whether he was exorcising the demons that infected his swing at the 17th, or was making public a personal pledge, it was more impressive than a shower of tears.
With Woods off the stage and in retreat, the show was Mickelson’s. The galleries were in his corner. He played an even-tempered round of golf in 69 strokes, following three rounds of 67-72-69, and the 72 was probably the most impressive of the three. Nothing sensational, just steady, full speed ahead kind of golf that restored much of the glitz and glitter that slipped away with that awful self-destructing finish at Winged Foot.
O’Hair was an unrelenting challenger — “I didn’t bust my butt for four days to get second place” — but one after another others fired across Mickelson’s bow. First, Jose Maria Olazabal, back again after a birdie attack Friday, then the other Spaniard, Sergio Garcia, who eventually wound up second to Mickelson. Just a little earlier, the Atlantan, Stewart Cink, blazed around in 66 strokes, joining Olazabal at 280, and a tie for third place and a big hunk of this $9-million pot.
There is not much more to say about Mickelson, except to say that apparently his recovery is complete. With Woods, Jim Furyk, Retief Goosen, Ernie Els, all the big guns in the field, he covered them all. Four days in this steely atmosphere brought out the best in the best left-handed player, now the second-ranked player in the world.
Oakmont, sight of this year’s U.S. Open, here he comes.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Time for Selig to come out of hiding
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
As inglorious history approaches, baseball commissioner Bud Selig continues to display the most dominant character trait of his tenure.
He stalls.
Nobody is quite certain what he’s waiting for.
A smoking syringe on YouTube?
A breakthrough moment for Barry Bonds with Dr. Phil, leading to sobbing, repentance and retirement?
Blessings from the heavens (Ruth) and the earth (Aaron)?
Not happening. We are way into the inevitable stage with Bonds, even if it has been six days since he last homered. Ten more home runs and he ties Hank Aaron. Eleven more and he claims the most cherished record in professional sports.
Meanwhile, baseball’s high-ranking sock puppet remains uncommitted on attending.
Great time to develop a conscience.
Bud Selig was named “acting commissioner” in 1992 when Fay Vincent resigned and took the soul of the office with him. Six years later, the owners removed the “acting” part of Selig’s title because, well, they knew Bud wasn’t going to do anything, anyway.
In short, Selig, a former owner, has had an executive view of this sport’s underbelly for decades. When baseballs began flying out of stadiums like Superballs, when players like Brady Anderson morphed into statistical cartoons (from 16 home runs to 50?), when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa did their best to obliterate memories of Roger Maris, Selig and owners didn’t investigate. They wore blinders in the light and counted ticket sales in the dark.
Now Bonds is on the verge of becoming the home run champion — and Selig doesn’t know if he should attend? The man should be duct-taped to the San Francisco Giants’ charter.
Never mind waiting until Bonds is only a swing away from tying Aaron. Selig should be there now. He should be made to watch Bonds’ every swing. So should anybody who ever allowed this era’s chemically enhanced assault on history to take place.
Every owner who focused on turnstiles and dollars.
Every TV executive who counted rating points.
Every union representative who stiff-armed cries for mandatory drug testing.
Watch.
Suffer.
Drink it up, like a hemlock smoothie.
Selig is struggling with this, partly because of his longtime friendship with Aaron, dating back to Milwaukee days. How unfortunate, yet deliciously ironic, it would be if Bonds breaks the record in Selig’s hometown June 18, 19 or 20, when the Giants visit the Brewers.
If Selig can’t sleep these days, there are ways to pass the time. Read every page of every transcript of every deposition he can obtain from the BALCO investigation. Watch highlights of Bonds’ 73-home-run season in 2001 at the age of 37, more than double what he hit two years earlier (34). Prepare a dramatic reading from, “Game of Shadows,” to be performed nightly during the seventh-inning stretch.
Personally, I don’t care whether Aaron is in attendance for the record. It’s his choice. He doesn’t owe the sport or anybody anything. He should not feel compelled to witness this, just as no athlete or public figure ever should feel compelled to take a stand on anything. It’s their life.
Aaron just wants peace. Let him have it.
But Selig is different. He represents baseball’s hierarchy. To go into hiding now after being front and center and mute for years seems even more disingenuous than usual.
Bonds is the poster-child for the steroid era. That’s slightly unfair because he was (or is) hardly alone. Other hitters recorded obscene statistics. Other pitchers suddenly grew titanium arms, some of whom Bonds probably homered off of. But Bonds is the standard for infamy because unlike, say, McGwire, he is still playing and he’s about to make history.
Sunday was a day of rest for Bonds. But Selig’s head still hurts. He is hoping for a miracle — manna from above, or at least George Mitchell. He wants something tangible, anything, for a legitimate reason not to board a flight.
But this is baseball’s freak show, and Selig should not be allowed to hide from it. He can always crawl back under the rock when it’s over.
Permalink | Comments (58) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
Unlikeliest victor loses way
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Ponte Vedra, Fla. — Not that you asked, but Craig Perks will not be among us this weekend. So sad, for he had become sort of everybody’s poster child at The Players Championship. (Sorry, gents, but I like tradition, and besides, “The Players” doesn’t finish the sentence.) And in the middle of the second round Friday, he was looking so good, as if life’s puzzle had been solved. Red numbers began to decorate his line, and at the turn, he was three strokes inside the cut line. Then that ol’ debbil doubt began nibbling at his mind, as if he feared becoming famous again.
Bogey followed bogey after bogey, and an unheard sob arose among the TPC Sawgrass galleries. Something like this just isn’t right. With one flashing finish five years ago, Perks had eagled the 16th hole, dropped a long putt for birdie on the 17th, then chipped in for par on 18, and the crystal trophy, plus a check for $1,080,000 and the last remaining invitation to the Masters were his.
Who was this man with the quirky name? More to the point, what was he doing here, in this champion of champions, the “house” tournament? He was a combination of Kiwi and Cajun, from New Zealand to the U.S., eventually to settle in at the University of Southwestern Louisiana on a golf scholarship. Lafayette became his home, and, peculiarly, La Triomphe Golf Club his refuge as he slunk more deeply into the throes of defeat.
There has been, probably, no more unlikely champion of a tournament of such caliber. No player with such faint identity had beaten such a field as this. Even Jack Fleck, with whom his winning was compared, won tournaments after he beat Ben Hogan for the U.S. Open championship in 1955. Ben Curtis has won since he backed into his British Open, and Todd Hamilton had won before he beat Ernie Els at Troon.
But Perks, his background had mainly been Hooters and Nationwide.
But here was this tall, gangly Kiwi with the incandescent smile standing up there caressing the crystal that indicated he was the champion of all pros. And who did the presenting? Tiger Woods himself, defending champion, whose expression said, “What a finish!”
Curiously enough, last week in Charlotte, Perks, now 40 years old, found himself paired with Woods in the first two rounds of the Wachovia. When he won the TPC, at least he had a world rank of 256. Now, he had no rank at all because he had made no cuts and had made no points. He played miserably, 80-76, missed the cut, after which he said, “I was more embarrassed hitting those shots in front of Tiger than all those people watching.”
He went home to Lafayette, there to prepare for this week, his fifth — and last, as it would turn out — Players Championship. He had deposited only $ll,880 in tour earnings last year, this year not a red cent. The story is that Ian Baker-Finch, who himself had lost his game after winng the British Open, felt such a fatherly connection that he counseled Perks: “I have one piece of advice: Don’t change anything,” a story verified by Perks’ wife, Maureen.
Instead, as his woes deepened, he went from teacher to teacher. He made so many swing changes he couldn’t relocate the old one. He even turned to power-lifting. He once said, “You’ve got to be confident that you know where it’s going, and I have no idea.”
Well, this may be the last column written about Craig Perks. For a while, at least. This is the last year of the five-year exemption that comes with the crystal trophy. And here he was, tied with Woods after the first round, three strokes within the cut line halfway through the second, and it all went up in smoke on the back nine. Thus, he is left to cogitate what might have been.
He was close to walking away from it, gave it serious thought last year, when he wasn’t able to break 80. But the smile never left his Ichabod Crane-like features. But quit isn’t in him. “I’m proud of what I’ve done. I’ve worked hard. You just keep on and hope that something good will happen.”
It would put the smile on faces of several who gathered around to get his autograph and wish him well Saturday. He stood there signing and smiling for half an hour, knowing his bell had been tolled. The personality hasn’t been dented, for sure.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Sabbatini fires from the lip, shoots blanks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Ponte Vedra, Fla. — Rory Sabbatini is a saucy little fellow who looks somewhat shorter than the 5-foot-10 measure awarded him by the PGA Tour Guide, a small body under the heavy load of an extended name — Rory Mario Trevor Sabbatini. He came from South Africa on a golf scholarship to University of Arizona and eventually settled in a suburb of Dallas. He came cracking wise, fit right in with the concocted image of the fictional Texan.
He admitted, in a news conference at The Players Championship this week that “I’ve become very narcissistic,” a rather stark confession from an athlete, many of whom have developed the same self-love affair, but wouldn’t admit it, without a sponsor.
“I’ve fallen in love with myself, and I just don’t notice anybody else out there anymore,” he said. Whew! That’s asking for it.
Sabbatini has been a lightning rod for public scorn since he strode ahead and played out the final hole at the Booz Allen Classic at Congressional, leaving behind a plodding Ben Crane. He had just come off the course at TPC Sawgrass on Thursday, tied for the lead in the renewal of the Tour’s own championship, eight strokes better than Tiger Woods, and feeling his oats. Say this for Sabbatini, since his unsporting display at Congressional, he has been more noticeable, though that was two years ago.
In a poll of Tour players taken by Sports Illustrated, 25 per cent of the players said the player they would most prefer not to be paired with was Sabbatini. “I don’t know 25 percent of the guys on Tour, and there are probably 25 percent I wouldn’t want to play with,” he said, rather testily.
Back up a week, to the stop in Charlotte, where Sabbatini had a round 8-under par last Saturday, took the lead and was paired with Tiger Woods in the final round. Woods won the tournament, Sabbatini was 10 shots worse than his Saturday round, and Tiger lost him in his dust. Now the news conference got interesting. Sabbatini was asked if a round with Woods didn’t, say, put a crease in his armor?
“No,” he said. “After watching him play Sunday, I think he’s more beatable than ever, and realizing that gives me even more confidence to want to play with him on Sunday again.”
Give Sabbatini credit for bravado, but the love affair with self began to unravel Friday afternoon. He parred the first five holes, then his game began developing hiccups. Bogey No. 6, bogey No. 7, bogey No. 8, and for some reason, this bold narcissistic fellow found himself trying to hang on. His score plummeted from 5 under to 2 under, and players like Peter Lonard, Nathan Green, Carl Petterson, Sean O’Hair all moved past him. Woods himself was not one to overlook the flying rumors of Sabbatini in the press conference.
“The new Woods,” as Sabbatini had referred to Tiger, eased under the cut line at 4-over par, not one of his better 36 holes of the season. Tiger landed a punch of his own. “I’ve won three times this year, as many as he [Sabbatini] has won in his lifetime,” he said. With a smile: “I like the ‘new Tiger.’ “
But the worst hadn’t come yet. On the 17th hole, the famed but infamous Island Hole — of which Woods is a spoken critic — Sabbatini’s first tee shot found water, then a second found water, and by the time he finished, he was charged with seven strokes. And beside his name on the scoreboard, his self-destruction was recorded. His score fell from minus-2 to plus-2, which shows the damage a quadruple bogey can do.
Just a lesson here, to those whose self-admiration might get out of hand: Don’t fire off recklessly into the air when you’re seriously outgunned.
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Everyone sick of Vick issues
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Flowery Branch — He opened by saying he would only discuss football, and he closed by saying, “Don’t plan on talking about me anymore unless it’s about football.” But there’s another word that begins with an “f” that’s of even greater importance as Michael Vick seeks to go forward with his career and his life.
That word is “fatigue.”
His employer is tired of this. Arthur Blank was described as being “weary” of Vick’s travails in Friday’s AJC. Before mini-camp began, Bobby Petrino felt moved to address the reality of “distractions.” After Friday morning’s session, Petrino repeatedly had to invoke the new party line: “I’m only going to talk about football.”
No, Vick hasn’t yet been charged with anything regarding the pit bulls on his Virginia property, just as he wasn’t charged after the water-bottle incident. (He was charged with trespassing after fishing in the wrong Virginia lake, but the count was dismissed.) And it wasn’t a felony or even a misdemeanor to skip the breakfast meeting with members of Congress. (Crass, yes. Criminal, no.)
But there is, believe it or not, a greater issue than legality. There’s the mighty matter of perception, and the raging national perception is that Vick has lost control of his career and his life. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, the tough-talking new sheriff who has already suspended Pacman Jones for the year, has dressed Vick down, and Blank said Thursday he’d done the same.
Those men are tired of this.
I am, too.
I’m tired of driving up I-985 to witness yet another Vick “apology” — he didn’t say he was sorry for anything Friday, perhaps on advice of his attorneys — or “explanation.” I’m tired of writing about Vick and not describing touchdowns scored and games won. I’m tired of defending Vick as a good guy who’s being undone by shaky friends and relations. See, you can be a victim of circumstance for only so long; ultimately you change those circumstances or you become complicit in your own undoing.
In the grand scheme, it won’t be a grand jury indictment or a Goodell suspension that undoes Vick with this franchise. It will be the aggregate effect these untoward headlines have on those around him.
I saw the same thing happen with the Braves and John Rocker (who was, I should stipulate, infinitely less popular with his teammates than Vick is with his). They simply got sick of answering questions about him and his latest stunt.
And that’s the way it works. Vick can refuse to talk about anything but football, but industrious reporters will troop to other Falcons and ask, “What do you think about Vick?” It happened Friday, when the imported receiver Joe Horn spent much of his post-practice interview defending the quarterback with whom he hasn’t yet played a game.
And this is only May and minicamp. Imagine if there’s another ugly headline during the season, when the press is on hand most every day of every week.
I like Michael Vick. I think, and have always thought, he has a good heart. Petrino said Wednesday he has “to believe” in Vick, and I likewise want to believe. But these last seven months, from the finger-flipping on, have made it hard. How long before hard becomes too hard? How long before the Falcons decide the man in whom they’ve sunk $130 million is more trouble than he’s worth?
For Michael Vick as an Atlanta Falcon, there cannot be another shoe to drop. This dogs-on-the-property thing has to be the last mess. He has told Blank and Goodell he’s taking control of his career and his life, and he cannot merely give it a shot. He has to succeed.
Too many people are tired of waiting. I’m one of them.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley
A classmate a Falcon wishes he could forget
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Flowery Branch — A classmate stood out from day one. He sat by the door, always. He wore sunglasses and a hat indoors, “like a poker player,” a classmate would later say. One day, he walked around the room with a disposable camera in the middle of a poetry reading, taking pictures of startled students. Another day he read his own dark poem, about being rejected by a girl, his anger — and wanting to hurt people.
“I remember when he read his first poem,” Noland Burchette said Thursday. “We all looked at him like, ‘This guy is crazy.’ “
It was the fall semester of 2005 at Virginia Tech, a creative writing/advanced poetry class taught by Nikki Giovanni, a renowned poet, writer and activist. We know how this turns out. The odd student, the 23-year-old who sat by the door in sunglasses and a hat, was Seung-Hui Cho. The troubled youth whose dark poetry alarmed even classmates in a creative writing class went on a shooting rampage last month in Blacksburg, killing 27 students and five faculty members, before committing suicide.
It was Giovanni who first suspected Cho was mentally disturbed, recommended him for counseling and eventually kicked him out of her class. She had 20 other students in the class. One will be wearing a Falcons uniform today.
Burchette was signed as an undrafted free agent and will be in minicamp, trying to make an early impression at defensive end in hopes of winning a job. The assumption is, nothing now can faze him. What happened at Virginia Tech, he said, “is something that I’m going to be connected to the rest of my life. I was in class with a serial killer.”
He counts himself fortunate: He is alive and so are his friends. On the morning of April 16, Burchette was alone, at his parents’ home in Richmond, when the phone rang at 9:30 a.m.
“Did you hear about the shooting?” his mother said.
The TV had been left on in another room but Burchette wasn’t paying attention. He was packing for the drive to Blacksburg two and a half hours away, where he was scheduled to work out the next day for the Indianapolis Colts. After talking to his mother, he went into the other room and saw the news.
He frantically started calling his friends. He estimates he made “20 to 30 phone calls,” mostly to teammates, but couldn’t reach anybody. Naturally, he thought the worst. “These are people you care about and you’ve known for five years in college,” he said.
But Tech was holding spring football practice. His friends were in meetings. It was 30 minutes before he started getting calls returned. “They were saying, ‘Yeah, we just got out of meetings, but there’s ambulances and police everywhere,’ ” he said.
He phoned the Colts to postpone his workout a few days. Then he watched the news. He saw a picture of the shooter and was certain it was Cho. He got a phone call from another former Virginia Tech teammate, Jonathan Lewis, of the Arizona Cardinals, who also was in Giovanni’s class.
“That’s the guy from our class!” Lewis said.
Giovanni was Burchette’s favorite professor. He took at least five classes with her — Poetry, Folktales, Negro Spirituals, etc. But nothing was like the creative writing class. Students were required to write poems and read them in class. Their grades were based on class response.
Cho often turned his work in late, and Burchette suspected it was to avoid reading them. But Cho read two.
“Once he was talking about rich people, how much he despised people who abused wealth, and wealth is power, and all this,” Burchette said. “But that one wasn’t as scary as when he talked about the girl. It was like: ‘I commented on your sexy legs, and you don’t give me a response. So I turn to anger and all I want to think about is killing you,’ or hurting you, something like that. When Ms. Giovanni asked us for our response, nobody said anything. He [Cho] just kind of looked around the room.”
It got stranger when class ended, Burchette said, and somebody approached Cho.
“Somebody said, ‘Hey, if you’re really thinking about hurting somebody, let me know because I’m not coming to class that day,’” he said. “I was walking behind them and I started laughing because I thought they were joking. But he just stopped and looked at us and said, ‘I guess I’ll let you know.’ But he always had those glasses on so you couldn’t see if he was joking.”
After Cho’s poem on being rejected, he disrupted class by taking pictures of others. Giovanni asked him to stop. She approached the head of the English department about his removal.
“If they didn’t kick him out, she was going to resign,” Burchette said. This week is about clearing his mind and playing football. But certain thoughts will never go away. Burchette acknowledges that writing a poem one day could be therapeutic.
“He didn’t care, he just wanted to punish people, with no mercy,” he said, shaking his head. “I have a lot of feelings about it, but it’s still kind of confusing.”
Permalink | Comments (109) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Jeff Schultz
Old and new hit by devilish gusts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Ponte Vedra, Fla. — Gentlemen, start your drivers! Or your 3-woods, or whatever may be your fancy. Keep it on the track and enjoy your new ride to the FedEx Cup — not to be confused with NASCAR’s game of the same name. Welcome to the new world of The Players, where the only change made in moderation is the name. What began as the Players Championship (TPC) and been shortened simply to The Players, for no good reason that I’ve heard. What once was played in mid-March has been moved to May.
You know, to get away from the bad spring-ish weather, the rain, the wind, the conflict of the grasses. You see, everything at the old TPC course is new and different and management would throw in the word “improved.” New clubhouse, new forestry and old, but new, 18 holes of golf. Actually, the golf course looks about the same, same old distances, same old pars, but some different grass on the greens.
Phil Mickelson speaks. “I like it a lot more now. It incorporates the short game more. You have a variety of shots that you can play. It incorporates all different shots.”
Lefty was just in from a round of 67, and looking good up there on the scoreboard tied for the lead with Rory Sabbatini. It had been an evenly played round, his six birdies cleverly distributed. His mood was casually generous, even to describing his verbal experiences with the new professor in his life, Butch Harmon.
“All his stories, whatever they may be about, have a point. I can’t tell you the top five [censorship], but I can give you the sixth,” he said. Could it be that Butch had brought a new sense of relaxation into Lefty’s life?
The new/old course was extracting its pint of blood. The wind, spinning off the storm named Andrea, was a howler. Worst of all, it gusted, it switched courses in a nano-second. “Wind is always tough,” Tom Lehman said, “but it’s gusts that make it more difficult. All you can do is execute and take what you get.”
Some gusts were measured at 40 mph, and to get an idea of the devilishness of them, by mid-afternoon over 30 tee balls had found water on No. 17, the island green, which is about one out of every three. Which, I might insert here, brings up an interesting commentary on this hole that commands spectator attention like a train wreck. Some years ago, your humble correspondent was asked if The Players might ever become a major. My answer: “Not as long as the 17th hole is part of it. It’s like a carnival attraction. Hit the green and win a fuzzy doll.”
Tiger Woods disturbed the hierarchy when he casually said that the hole is “too gimmicky,” particularly for that position in the round. Tough, for this is what they call the “signature hole.” “It would make a great eighth hole,” Tiger said, “but not the 71st of 72 holes. I just don’t think it’s the right feel.”
The commissioner wasn’t disturbed. “It doesn’t trouble me. There are an awful lot of players who haven’t had a good time at 17, for whatever reason,” Tim Finchem said. “He’s the first player I’ve heard suggest that we move it to No. 8” (which, I might add, would require transposing the two sides) on weekends. We don’t intend to do that.”
Which, of course, revived the time-worn question of: Should The Players not be the fifth major, or at least replace one of the present four, meaning the PGA Championship? Which would set off a firestorm too violent to take up in full here. But this was Finchem’s reply:
“I’ve been answering that question for 13 years and I think I have been consistent — that we don’t put ourselves in the middle of that debate.”
The wind that assaulted the course Thursday was a hot, Saharan wind — no chill, no rain, just a constant series of gusts, some fierce enough to knock some of the elderly to the ground. It was a fitting accompaniment to the Mediterranean architecture of the new clubhouse, rising pristinely above all that surrounds it. It is an attention-getter, but also an architectural exaggeration, far over and above the average requirement to accommodate an 18-hole round of golf. Augusta National would fit in its basement.
New course, old course or whatever, the effects of such strenuous exercise took a toll on three players, David Howell, Darren Clarke and Diasuke Maruyama. They pulled out, but Maruyama not until he had checked in with a round of 85, featuring double bogeys on the last three holes. It was either a bad back, or the 85, but the latter is suspected.
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Clock’s ticking on Junior’s career
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
He’s NASCAR’s most popular driver. That’s how Dale Earnhardt Jr. is always identified, and this represents yet another example of how popularity isn’t necessarily a reflection of excellence. Dating to November 2004, Earnhardt has won two Cup races, two of 84. Greg Biffle, who’s rather less renowned, has won nine.
Most everyone who follows the sport regards Teresa Earnhardt as the evil stepmother in the matter of Dale Earnhardt Jr. versus Dale Earnhardt, Inc., but she told a powerful truth to The Wall Street Journal last year. She said her stepson must decide whether he’s going to be a driver or a celebrity. Going 2-for-84 doesn’t say much for his driving.
Conventional wisdom holds that Earnhardt Jr. is better than DEI. He now has the chance to prove it. He can go pick a new employer and show the world he’s more than just the people’s choice. As he told assembled reporters Thursday: “It’s time for me to compete on a consistent basis for championships.”
Junior, as he’s universally known, has always raced best when the tracks are faster and bigger - Daytona and Talladega, the restrictor-plate venues, have been personal playgrounds - but he hasn’t fully mastered the tighter environs that comprise 89 percent of the Nextel Cup schedule. He’s not a tactician on the order of Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart, which is why Gordon has won four championships and Stewart two and why Earnhardt has never finished higher than third in the points race.
Put simply, Earnhardt hasn’t matured as a racer. He was better in 2004 than he is today. He still has his adoring legions because (a.) he’s the son of racing’s Arnold Palmer, and (b.) because he’s a genuinely nice guy. But championships, as we know, aren’t always claimed by nice guys. (Kurt Busch won in 2004. Case closed.) And Junior is, despite his best efforts to present himself otherwise, no longer a kid. He’s older than Jimmie Johnson, the reigning champ. Heck, he’s only three years younger than Gordon, who has won 77 Cup races to Junior’s 17.
Over time, maybe it grew too hard being Dale Earnhardt’s son driving for Dale Earnhardt’s company. Maybe it was easier to bask in the adulation of the masses than to buckle down and outrace his peers. Maybe it was easier to blame the black widow Teresa when something went wrong than to fault himself for being imprudent. Maybe the separation of Junior and DEI was overdue.
Nobody could watch Earnhardt and his team recently and believe it was a happy marriage. Too much furniture was being rearranged. In 2005 DEI shifted Tony Eury Sr., Junior’s uncle, from crew chief to upper management, and moved Tony Eury Jr., Earnhardt’s cousin and car chief, to Michael Waltrip’s car. Soon Eury Jr. was back with Junior as crew chief, but their partnership has since resulted in only one Cup win.
The trouble with being around so much family in your vocational life is that the folks sometimes forget you’re a pro doing serious work. Instead, they remember you as the goofy kid who spilled the gravy that time at Thanksgiving dinner. Junior needs to put goofiness in his rear-view. Junior, to be blunt, needs to cease being “Junior.”
It could take a while. For the biggest announcement of his driving career, Ralph Dale Earnhardt Jr. sported a shirt both untucked and unbuttoned. Doubtless such sloppiness will be seen as endearing in some precincts, proof that he’s still a good ol’ boy. That, alas, is the point. He’s 32. He should put aside childish things.
On Thursday he recalled his father’s advice: “Be a man, race hard and contend for championships.” It’s time to get cracking on all fronts. It’s time to leave home and make his way in the adult world. It’s time for Little E to grow up.
Permalink | Comments (85) | Categories: Auto Racing, Mark Bradley
Norwood sparks excitement
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
I don’t indulge in fantasy football. (I see more than enough of the real kind, thanks.)
But if I did …
I’d pick Jerious Norwood this fall.
Why? Because Rich McKay mentioned him by name before the draft as a player the Falcons are “excited about.” Because Bobby Petrino mentioned him Wednesday, saying, “He excites me with what he can do. We want to get him involved in the passing game as well as the running game.”
Rule of thumb: When the brass is “excited” about you, you can expect to get the ball a lot.
Petrino doesn’t seem at all depressed by what he has at his disposal. He believes he has enough pieces to build a functioning unit. “I think we [do],” he said after his pre-minicamp briefing. “We’ve gotten bigger on the offensive line. The guys who were already here have done a good job of getting stronger and bigger, and that’s important when you’re protecting the quarterback.”
Petrino likes what he has seen of Joe Horn in the flesh and Alge Crumpler, who’s rehabbing after knee surgery, on tape. (“He has unbelievable ability to run after the catch.”) He likes what he has seen of Michael Vick around the Falcons complex. (“He wants to learn this offense and run this offense.”) And he makes it clear he believes his scheme will fit the personnel better than the previous design.
“I never did understand why you had to be little to run the zone-blocking scheme,” Petrino said. “I think our [offensive linemen] are excited about this.”
There’s that word again — “excited.” Yeah, it’s only May and it’s only minicamp, but I don’t think the new man is kidding around. I don’t think the new man ever kids around.
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Rare pitching matchup evokes rarer era gone by
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Smoltz versus Maddux. In the same season where we’ve had Smoltz against Glavine — twice! How great is it to see pitchers bound for the Hall of Fame oppose one another?
Not nearly as great as it was to watch those same exalted pitchers work three games of every five for nearly a decade.
Think about that. Think about a rotation that will soon send 60 percent of its membership to Cooperstown. Leo Mazzone thinks about it all the time. Speaking from Baltimore, his latest posting, he said Wednesday “there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind” that he coached the greatest rotation baseball has ever known, and he wasn’t blowing smoke.
Greg Maddux has won 335 games, Tom Glavine 294. John Smoltz won his 198th Wednesday night — the Braves rallied off Cla Meredith with four two-out hits after Smoltz had been lifted for a pinch hitter — to go with 154 saves. Said Mazzone: “Sometimes I’ll find myself thinking about all these big-bopping American League teams, and I’ll think, ‘I’d take my chances with those three sonofaguns every day of the week.’ “
From 1993, when Maddux joined the other two, through 1999, Smoltz’s last year as a full-time starter until he left the bullpen in 2004, those three pitchers authored a run of excellence unseen in the game’s long history. They weren’t, to be fair, the only ones doing rarefied business; Steve Avery and Kevin Millwood and Denny Neagle had big years, too. But those three were the pillars, three for Valhalla.
Said Bud Black, the San Diego manager and a former pitcher himself: “Those three epitomized pitching, and what’s most impressive is how they passed the test of time so dominantly.”
Glavine, Maddux, Smoltz: As a three-headed entry, they never pitched for a team that didn’t win its division. They each won at least one Cy Young. They fed off one another for seven full seasons until Smoltz hurt his elbow in the spring of 2000. Said Mazzone: “It’s the greatest pitching run in the history of baseball.”
Only two rotations have included three eventual Hall of Famers, and one — the 1966 Dodgers of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Don Sutton — had a shelf life of six months: It was Koufax’s last season and Sutton’s rookie year. The only staff that approximates the Braves’ for excellence fused with longevity was Cleveland’s of the late ’40s and early ’50s. Three staples of that rotation — Early Wynn, Bob Lemon and Bob Feller — are Cooperstown enshrinees. (Satchel Paige, another Hall of Famer, started 12 games for Cleveland in 1948 and ‘49, and Hal Newhouser, yet another, was in the Indians’ bullpen in 1953 and ‘54.)
But Feller was essentially a fourth starter by 1954, having been supplanted by the estimable Mike Garcia. And of Cleveland’s three Hall of Fame starters, only Wynn won 300 games. (Feller, who lost three years to World War II, won 266; Lemon won 207. ) As good as those Indians were, the three Braves were together for longer and for better.
Said Jerry Coleman, the San Diego broadcaster who played against that Cleveland rotation, speaking of Glavine, Maddux and Smoltz: “They’re all going to the Hall of Fame. How much better can you be? And Smoltz is the best of the bunch. He’s a freak of nature.”
Black again: “They all have to rank in the top 30 or 40 of all time.”
And now the three pitch against one another, not one after another. Even as we see them in their different uniforms, it only reminds us of those halcyon days when they wore the same garb. “For the city of Atlanta and the Atlanta Braves, it was a privilege to watch them,” Mazzone said.
And here was the phlegmatic Maddux on a luminous night when his team didn’t win but he didn’t lose: “It was a privilege to go out there.”
Permalink | Comments (48) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
The Tuesday Countdown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
10: I spent $54.95. Was it too much to ask Oscar De La Hoya or Floyd Mayweather to stagger the other guy just once? The promos should’ve read: “Bearded Lady!” or “Six Inch Pony” or “WolfDogMan!” on pay-per-view.
9: But this makes perfect sense! Rumor has it that Evander Holyfield (44) will continue his comeback against another guy who shouldn’t be fighting - Lou Savarese (41). Should be interesting. Or a freak show. Savarese stands 6-5 and weighed 254 for his last fight against Matt Hicks (don’t ask). The probable site and date: June 30 in El Paso. Pay per view — unlikely.
8: Don Turner, Holyfield’s former trainer, on the continuing comeback: “He should forget about it. Why is he doing this? His last good fight was the second Lennox Lewis fight [in 1999]. He can’t see the right hand coming any more. He can’t pull the trigger.”
7: Did Roger Clemens stand under a lamp post wearing fishnet stockings before he got the Yankees made him an offer?
6: When perception isn’t reality: Sports leagues suddenly want to make it seem like they believe beer drinking is devil’s work. (Golden State coach Don Nelson was told by the NBA he can’t bring beer into the post-game interview room any more.) Hey, when teams start canceling endorsement deals with brew companies, then we can talk. But that’s not happening.
5: Don’t misunderstand me. There’s going to be some overreaction to a St. Louis pitcher, who had been drinking, killing himself in a car wreck. Sports teams should present the correct image. But Josh Hancock likely got drunk at a bar, not from a beer he drank in the clubhouse after a game, and according to the police report he was driving from one bar to another.
4: And on a related note, how about a push for a federal law banning talking on cell phones while driving - given that Hancock was doing that when he ran into a tow truck.
3: Some things are worth $54.95. Like watching Paris Hilton in jail. She was sentenced to 45 days for probation violation. I see millions in underground video sales. Said publicist Michael Levine: “It will actually increase her star appeal in a very sick and demented way.” Wait, isn’t that where we came in?
2: Jamaal Anderson, the Falcons’ first draft pick, will wear No. 98, which was previously worn by Ike Reese. No need to wash the jersey.
1: The Leavenworth Hilton and Towers?
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Cox isn’t proud of ejections
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
He is about to break a baseball record many figured would never be broken — and may never be broken again. Do we celebrate it?
“No!” Bobby Cox said Monday.
Barry Bonds and home runs? No.
Bobby Cox and ejections?
“Yeah — is the commissioner coming?” he wondered.
No. John McGraw, the current record holder, won’t be there, either. Something about Cox’s numbers being artificially enhanced by caffeine and Red Man.
Do we stop the game? Recognize this moment on the scoreboard? Give the man a trophy — of a bronze thumb, perhaps?
“I think all of the umpires should get together and give him something,” John Smoltz said.
“He should get at least a plaque or a certificate,” said the former Brave, Greg Maddux. “Maybe something with his name, the date, the umpire.”
Three more and he ties the record. Four more and he breaks the record.
Twenty-eight more ejections and Bobby Cox will have been thrown out for an entire season. (Liberty Media will figure out some way that affects his retirement benefits.)
Baseball is a game of numbers. We associate so many of the game’s legends with digits: 56, 61, 714, 755, whatever unfortunately, bloated figure will come next.
But the number Cox is linked to today — he’d rather forget. He has been thrown out of 128 games, the most recent coming Sunday when he charged out to debate Chipper Jones’ check-swing third-strike call by umpire Bob Davidson. He is only three behind McGraw, a man nicknamed “Little Napoleon” and “Muggsy,” neither being a term of endearment.
Say this for Cox: He has never been nicknamed for a dictator. But the man needs his own exit music. He has been thrown out 14 more times than Leo Durocher, 30 more times than Earl Weaver, 57 more times than Lou Piniella. We’re not talking guys who sat around with candles and incense and discussed metaphysics.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Cox said.
He would prefer this moment in history pass without notice, like a series of unintended oops moments. No ceremony, no handshake, no umpire expressing he’s No. 1 (wrong finger).
Cox’s players will tell you the arguments and ejections illustrate his loyalty, his willingness to back them in arguments and take the heat. Also his fuse. He goes too far at times, and often by design.
Chipper Jones estimates Cox gets thrown out on purpose “30 to 40 percent of the time.”
Cox’s estimate: “Never.” There’s an argument he’ll lose.
Asked how often he leaves the dugout knowing that he’ll probably get thrown out when he reaches his target, he said: “Just about every time.”
He has been thrown out three times this season. At this rate, he’ll need to go to the managerial bullpen 16 times.
“I think Bobby’s one of those guys who sends his fine money in before the season starts,” Jones said. “Then he gets the ejections on credit.”
I Googled “baseball manager ejections” Monday. Cox’s Wikipedia bio was the fourth entry.
He has never been particularly demonstrative. He has never pulled up a base or thrown bats out of the dugout or kicked dirt on an ump. Did kind of spit on one once. In 1980, Cox was arguing with Jerry Dale, who said Braves shortstop Rafael Ramirez missed a forceout at second base, when something wet accompanied an expletive.
“I was chewing tobacco at the time and when I yelled at him it sprayed a little,” Cox said. “Then he spit in my face. He got fired the next year — not over that.”
Generally speaking, however, Cox is not one for theatrics. He’s more of a persistent pain in the posterior.
His self-analysis: “Not really. Well, a little bit.”
The Baseball Almanac has charted all 22 times a player or manager has been thrown out of a World Series game. Cox is the last two entries (1992 and 1996). He is the only player or manager to be thrown out of two Series games.
He’ll tell you he’s not proud of this. He’ll tell you it’s the only record that actually costs you money. And he’ll tell you to change the subject.
Where to put this record?
“Don’t put it anywhere,” he said.
Permalink | Comments (51) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
Street Sense’s ascent slow, steady
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
There is no art to handicapping a Kentucky Derby. It’s sort of like throwing darts - in a darkened room. Who in heaven’s name would ever have picked Giacomo two years ago? The truth is, Smarty Jones was not picked as much for his racing record as for his fetching name. And what horse had an uglier name than Grindstone?
Most average American sports fans are racing fans only once a year - when the Derby is run. Few are impressed that Street Sense was sired by an Irish daddy named Street Cry, and to a mama named Bedazzle on a farm in Kentucky. Irish horses have a history of being able to run until sundown. Bedazzle is a mare by Dixieland Band, of the Northern Dancer family, and whose name frequently pops up in the bloodline of stakes winners. Dixieland Band’s star is fading now, for he is 27 years old and his interest in mares is fading as well.
Street Cry raced internationally, but not until Street Sense has he crashed the headlines as a producer. He now has become the star of Darley Stable, just outside Lexington, Ky., and his $50,000 stud fee will probably go up a few notches.
Everything about Street Sense indicated a horse who could go a distance, but in the early stages of the Derby indicated he was out for a stroll. Calvin Borel, his jockey, let him drift toward the rail after about the first furlong, and there he loitered until he was out of sight of most of the thousands - and the queen.
When you see your choice hanging behind 18 others on the backstretch, you begin to get a choking feeling. That’s when Street Sense began to make an impression. Borel clung to the rail and began surging through the field, then caught an opening, swung wide into the clear and turned it on. The race was his, 2 1/2 lengths over Hard Spun, who gave way unwillingly.
He had run only two prep races, and lost one of those by a nose, but it was another step in his education. On the synthetic surface at Keeneland, Street Sense had ducked in and out and didn’t appear to be enjoying his day. Carl Nafzger, his trainer, was disturbed. After the Derby, he told USA Today, “If you make mistakes like that in the Preakness, you’ll get beat.” Offhand, it might be surmised that his colt earned another degree in Louisville.
D. Wayne Lukas, who was in Louisville without a Derby horse, a rare occasion, said the Preakness might be “his stumbling block.” Pimlico is a shorter, tighter track than Churchill Downs, and lurks with trouble. The Belmont, well, if he gets that far unbeaten, with his Irish breeding, he should make the Triple Crown his, first since Affirmed in 1978.
Now, history will show that another favorite won the Derby, third since Spectacular Bid in 1979. Fusaichi Pegasus was first to break the drought, followed by Smarty Jones, and now Street Sense. Between him and Curlin, the margin was no more than a hairline fracture, but by a margin of 10 cents he went off the favorite, any way you want to slice it, $5 to $4.90.
Borel was as much a sentimental favorite as his horse, probably more. He was born in Cajun country, St. Martin Parish in Louisiana. He “retired” from education after the eighth grade and never looked back. One publication suggested that he is illiterate, but his fiancée angrily told a Lexington reporter, “he may not read at the college level, but he can read.”
Borel raced in the backwoods country of Louisiana and kept moving up until he welded his future at Oaklawn Park. He is 40 years old, tough as a walnut, but still able to cry, as he did after he and his horse crossed the finish line.
As you may have read, the queen of England got almost as much attention as the race. Princess Margaret had been Churchill Downs’ guest years before, and she watched from above the pagoda in the infield. The queen remained out of public eye most of the day, thus she and I were never able to make connection. (I spoof you not.) Actually, at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, two dozen journalists were invited aboard the royal yacht for a chat and a visit, then a libation with Prince Phillip, a charming fellow with a taste for excellent beverage.
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Prospect stuck in awkward position
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
In his first big-league start, he threw out a runner and nearly hit a homer. In his second, he threw out two runners and delivered the game-winning hit. Ten days from now, Jarrod Saltalamacchia figures to be riding bush-league buses again.
It’s a weird deal. Saltalamacchia hits it hard and slings it straight and cuts a dashing figure behind the dish — if you’re into hyperbole, you’d say he looks like a switch-hitting Johnny Bench — but he works for the one club that doesn’t really need a dashing young catcher. Brian McCann, barely 23, is already an All-Star. And Saltalamacchia, barely 22, is simply too gifted to sit behind anybody for long.
“Salty’s going to be a player,” Chipper Jones said Sunday. “I don’t know where he’s going to play, but he’s going to be a player.”
Sometimes such knots untangle themselves, but it’s hard to imagine how this one could. Jones again: “I don’t see it working out any way but Salty moving positions. There are only two other things that could happen: B-Mac could get hurt — and we don’t want that — [or] Salty could get traded, and you don’t want to trade a talent like that.”
Your attention, please: The Braves have no plans to shop Salty. “We’re going to keep him for a while,” Bobby Cox said. But deploy him where? “That’s something we as an organization have to talk about.”
The conversations began long ago, but the matter just became a full-blown Talking Point. Summoned because McCann hurt his finger and backup Brayan Pena became concussed in the same game, Saltalamacchia started Wednesday, when he did well enough, and again Sunday, when he did better. He went 2-for-4 and authored the climactic hit in a fairly epic five-run rally against Chin-hui Tsao, who hadn’t yielded a run all season.
“The first week, you can never forget it,” Saltalamacchia said. “I’ll remember every bit of it.”
No fool, Salty knows where he stands. (Or, giving his position of the moment, squats.) The Braves don’t want to shift him just yet because he’s too good-looking a catcher, and they’d rather not have their No. 1 prospect sitting in the parent club’s dugout five days a week when he might be playing every day in the minors.
“You can’t let him not play,” said Jeff Francoeur, once a No. 1 prospect himself. “But you know what they say: ‘If you can hit, they’ll find a place for you to play.’ “
Saltalamacchia: “I can’t control it, so why even think about it? … If they want me to play another position, I’ll do it if it means staying in the big leagues.”
The Braves haven’t reached that conclusion yet, but seeing the effect Salty can have on big-league games might force their organizational hand. “As a player, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “Make decisions tough for them.”
Some would say Saltalamacchia is the one in the tough spot. He doesn’t see it that way. He has started two big-league games and seen his team win both, and Sunday he retired more opponents (two) with his arm than did winning pitcher Chad Paronto (zero).
“That’s baseball,” said Salty, shrugging like a wise old salt.
And if he’s back in Mississippi two weeks hence? “I knew coming in that could happen,” he said. “If my time here is limited, I’m going to take advantage of it. At least I can say I got the opportunity. Most people don’t even get the opportunity.”
He might get sent down, but the time will soon come when Jarrod Saltalamacchia is here (or somewhere) to stay. The man with five “A’s” in his last name gets an A-plus for aptitude, and you needn’t take that appraisal with a grain of … well, you know.
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No more shadows or silence for Aaron
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The office is still there, overlooking left-center field and sitting a pop fly from the one belonging to John Schuerholz. It’s just that, in recent years, Hank Aaron rarely has been around his designated place at Turner Field as Braves senior vice president.
That’s about to change. Sooner rather than later, this famously private soul who was the face of the franchise from Milwaukee in the early 1950s to Atlanta in the mid-1970s will leave his self-imposed stay among the shadows to flirt with the sunshine around 755 Hank Aaron Drive.
“They all want me to come back [on a regular basis], starting with [Braves president] Terry McGuirk, who has been a buddy of mine going way back, and the commissioner wants me to come back more than anybody,” said Aaron, now 73, referring to Bud Selig, his close friend since the Braves’ days in Wisconsin. “I never actually left the team, but I didn’t want to get into anybody’s way out there. I played baseball for 23 years. I don’t need it. I don’t need the money, so I’m satisfied.”
That said, Aaron wants to help his two baseball pals, and he’ll do so for at least this season. From McGuirk’s standpoint, for instance, why wouldn’t he want a living legend around as much as possible, especially one that was born and raised with the Braves? “You and I haven’t known many greater men during our lifetimes than Hank Aaron, and that’s really true when compared to some of the bums who pretend to be at that level,” said McGuirk, who likely will hold his current position when Time Warner sells the team to Liberty Media. “It’s pretty neat to know Hank personally and to have him in your presence. I want him around forever.”
So does Selig. With a more visible Aaron in public, baseball will have somebody of eternal dignity to counter the growing steroid revelations in the game and the gifted but unpopular Barry Bonds moving just months or weeks away from becoming the all-time home-run king.
In case you didn’t know, Aaron has owned the crown for 33 years. Even so, he couldn’t care less that No. 755 will lose much of its magic to No. 756. He does care about continuing as a strong voice for African-Americans in the game since Jackie Robinson relinquished that role after his death in October 1972.
Which brings us to the primary reason Aaron is returning. “I’m going to stay around long enough to raise people’s attention on some things, because there are a bunch of things that I want [baseball and the Braves] to do,” said Aaron, referring to the ridiculously low number of African-American players in the game. Until the Braves promoted Cairo’s Willie Harris from the minors this week, they were one of two teams in the majors with no African-Americans on their 40-man roster.
Yes, Aaron knows the Braves opened the Atlanta Braves Baseball Academy at the Villages of Carver YMCA on Saturday. Yes, Aaron knows clinics were held at the academy featuring Braves players, coaches and alumni for 100 youths. And, yes, Aaron knows that, according to Braves officials, the idea is to give more than 350 youths from the African-American community a chance to play at the academy throughout the year.
Aaron just has his own ideas for the Braves beyond the academy, and he’ll share them from his office — the one that he’ll actually use in the near future.
It’s the one that is as posh as the office Ted Turner gave Aaron at the CNN Center after his 13 successful seasons (Dale Murphy, Tom Glavine, David Justice, Ron Gant, Mark Lemke, among others) through 1989 as the Braves’ director of player development. “That was a great, big office, and I mean, it was absolutely huge, with three double windows and everything,” said Aaron, chuckling.
When Aaron arrived at the office the next day, the door had his name on the front, but it also had that of Bill Bartholomay, the Braves’ chairman emeritus and head of their executive committee.
McGuirk was not amused. Not only did he rip Bartholomay’s name from the door, but he confronted the guy responsible for such blasphemy. “Terry stomped his feet, and he told the person who did it, ‘This is Hank Aaron’s office. If you want to do something, you come and ask me,’ ” said Aaron, chuckling some more over his old handball partner. Soon they’ll be chuckling down the hall from each other.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
One fight can’t stop boxing’s decline
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
In boxing, there is a tendency with every criminal decision, or criminal arrest, or rankings that seem so obviously criminal, to say: “There’s another black eye for the sport.”
This ignores evidence that boxing ran out of eyes to blacken several years ago.
Tonight in Las Vegas, Floyd Mayweather will fight Oscar De La Hoya in an event that might set gate and pay-per-view records, even though most watching will have no idea what title the two are fighting for or even who the champion is. (Answers: WBC super welterweight, which is owned by De La Hoya, even though Mayweather is favored).
Only in boxing could such a centerpiece event perfectly illustrate a sport’s identity crisis. But identifying corpses often can be problematic.
Boxing, the sport of King and everything below, has been lying prone on the examination table for at least a decade. Every year or two, it shakes for a few seconds when a promoter slaps electronic paddles on its chest with a pay-per-view card and yells, “Clear!” But then it slumps back to its normal state.
Some have billed Mayweather-De La Hoya as an event that can save boxing. It can’t. Think of long lines at a going-out-of-business sale.
“One fight won’t make a difference,” said Don Turner, 68, the former longtime trainer who worked with Evander Holyfield, among others. “Except for a few fights here and there, the talent just isn’t there anymore. The teaching isn’t there. Guys don’t want to listen.
“You think a 20-year-old wants to listen to what I’ve got to say? They say, ‘Don’t listen to him, he’s old school.’ All anybody cares about is getting paid. Nobody’s developing fighters.
“The only reason mixed martial arts has even gotten off the ground was because the buffoons in boxing have made a mockery out of the sport.”
De La Hoya is knocking on the door of retirement. Granted, that’s almost a sport by itself in boxing (witness the resident Holyfield). But because De La Hoya is one of the few with crossover appeal, tonight’s fight likely will be the final major promotion for some time.
Boxing’s problems are not new. They just generate. There is no single governing body, like the NFL or Major League Baseball. The sport is run by a bunch of independent contractors (promoters, cable-television executives, casino executives) who care only about marquee events, not developing a sport. Imagine a commissioner worried only about having a World Series on pay-per-view every few years, without a concern or blueprint to heal a sport.
There are too many sanctioning bodies (four generally recognized: WBC, WBA, IBF, WBO) and weight classes (17, including flyweight, junior flyweight and mini flyweight, separated by seven pounds). This isn’t done to give more boxers opportunities to win titles, as sanctioning bodies would suggest. It’s done to create more title fights, which lead to more mandated sanctioning fees.
Boxers who don’t play along don’t get title shots. Or get ranked.
We scream about too much government oversight. Boxing screams for government oversight.
All of this has filtered down to the amateur level. Olympic boxing used to be embraced. Now it’s off the networks’ radar. For most athletes, boxing’s now a last resort.
And you wonder why Turner has a headache. Now he runs a gym in North Carolina, far from the Las Vegas strip, where he helped train Holyfield for consecutive wins over Mike Tyson. He said he would train another pro, “but only if the situation was right.” He has been worn out by the sport’s mismanagement, the resulting decline and increasing health risks.
“In the old days guys used six-ounce gloves and fought 200 times and still stood upright,” he said. “Today they use 12-ounce gloves, fight 30 times and sound like they have marbles in their head.”
At times he sounds like the old guy on the porch, but old guys can be right.
Turner likes Mayweather big tonight. He says this fight is selling “only because of the perception that De La Hoya is still The Golden Boy. People don’t know any better.”
Tonight, two boxers and a promoter will get rich, and then we’ll wait a few years for it to happen again. There will be no coat tails for boxing to jump on.
Permalink | Comments (21) | Categories: Jeff Schultz
A tip of the derby to personal faves
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Well, perhaps it’s not the “Best of the Kentucky Derbies” I have seen, but let’s call them the “Most Memorable” of all those since my first in 1950.
They are chosen for reasons that don’t necessarily relate to the classics. See, I was a holdout when it came to Secretariat, for which I took a lot of guff. I picked Sham. He was the winner over the long haul, a star in the breeding shed where Secretariat wasn’t.
That said, here’s the list as we approach post time:
CANONERO II, 1971
In the press box, as the horses came down the stretch, the cry went up, “Who the hell is that?” Canonero II was a “field” horse, deemed not worthy of carrying an individual number and lumped into a wagering succotash. Poor fellow, he had been flown in from Venezuela, held in quarantine in Miami for a week, then worked unnoticed. Mainly because none of his connections spoke English, there were no interviews before and very few after he won. He was no fluke. He won the Preakness and set a race record.
By the time he got to Belmont, he was tired and finished fourth. But what a great blue-collar horse.
THUNDER GULCH, 1995
Forgive me if I go bragging a little here. He was one of two horses in D. Wayne Lukas’ stable, but Lukas walked about wearing a Timber Country cap. No doubt about his choice between the two. The Louisville paper polled 30 sportswriters and only one picked Thunder Gulch — (ahem). Mainly, it was his sire that moved me, for Gulch (below) had been a great runner. Not only that, but he paid about $60 for a $2 winning ticket, and money can turn your head.
DARK STAR, 1953
Now, the other side of the coin. My car had been rescued from a ditch on Friday with the help of a small man from the barn area. I thanked him, and he said, “Just be sure to bet my horse tomorrow.” His name was Hank Moreno. The horse’s name was Dark Star, one of the longest shots in the field. I choked. Moreno got his horse on the lead down the stretch and never gave it up. He paid a bundle, none to this unworthy wretch.
FORWARD PASS, 1968
Dancer’s Image won the actual race, but Forward Pass later was ruled the winner. Dancer’s Image is the only winner of a classic major whose number has ever been taken down, far as I know. He was traveling under the influence of some illegal juice, and none of owner Peter Fuller’s legal sparring could make a dent in the decision. Nevertheless, winning tickets on Dancer’s Image were honored before his sin had been made public, and somewhere I still have a $50 win ticket on Forward Pass. Churchill Downs owes me.
MIDDLEGROUND, 1950
A fellow should never pass over his first winner and first Kentucky Derby. Two weeks into a new job in Atlanta, dispatched to cover the great “Run for the Roses,” also the first thoroughbred race I’d ever covered. I remembered Middleground had won the Hopeful at Saratoga the year before, then, as now, one of the superior tests for 2-year-olds. Armed with all that knowledge, I picked him to win, bet $2 on him, and in that one instant became a horse authority. It was six years before I picked another winner. Needles, 1956.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Braves get the start they needed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
There were years when it didn’t matter how the Braves began. Because they were the Braves, they knew where they’d end up. They were 12-14 in April 2001 and 12-15 in April 2002, and the great run of division titles continued apace. That, however, was then.
The start mattered very much this time. The Braves needed to remind the rest of baseball and even themselves that these are still the Braves.
“From a team-identity standpoint, it’s huge,” Chipper Jones said. “Nobody was picking us to win, and that assessment made a lot of people in here mad.”
It was hard to know what to make of the Braves 41/2 weeks ago. They’d buttressed their bullpen over the winter but rendered the right side of their infield devoid of seasoning. Their rotation seemed to hinge on the health of Mike Hampton, never a safe bet. And there was the bigger picture: After the run of 14 first-place finishes, the 2006 Braves finished third. The onset of mediocrity or an overdue blip?
“I didn’t think [the era of excellence] was over,” Jones said. “We have one of the most creative general managers when it comes to maneuvering people and payroll. And we knew what our weaknesses were. We won 79 games and we blew 29 saves. We might have won close to 100 games. We’d be up 6-1 or 6-2, and every time it seemed like we lost the game. We spent a lot of time sitting in here thinking, ‘What just happened?’ We hadn’t done that a lot over the last 14 years.”
Beyond the bullpen, most of the pressing questions have produced positive responses. Kelly Johnson has filled two holes — second base and leadoff. Scott Thorman is hitting .281. After two indifferent-by-his-standards seasons, Tim Hudson is second in the majors in ERA. “He’s the biggest story on our ballclub,” said Jones, being slightly modest.
The biggest story on the 2007 Braves is Chipper Jones. After two seasons in which he played no more than 110 games, he has started all 27. He leads the league with 10 homers. Scheduled to take Wednesday night off due to a tender quadriceps, he played because Brian McCann was hurting worse and, on cue, hit a two-run double.
“We’ve got a good thing going,” he said. “I needed to play … The last two years have been tremendously frustrating. I was tired of having my wife roll me out of bed … I’m fully capable of having a career year at 35. I can still hit as many home runs and drive in as many runs, and I can still play third base.”
The test, for Jones and the Braves and every team in the majors, will come with the fullness of time. Only one-sixth of the season has passed. Jones believes his team, with “a tweak here, a tweak there,” is capable of playing beyond September. Where should the tweaking come?
“The only thing you could possibly point to is the end of the rotation. I still have confidence Kyle [Davies] can throw well, and I’ve hit against Mark Redman and I know how well he can throw. But they’re going to have to do something different than they’ve done.”
What these Braves have done is position themselves nicely. “With so many intradivision games in April, we couldn’t afford [a bad start],” Jones said, “especially against a team like New York, which you know is going to be at or near the top … We’re the reason the Mets aren’t [running away].”
The Braves have taken four of six from the Mets, five of six from the forlorn Phillies. The Braves have all but killed off one rival - Philadelphia will fire Charlie Manuel soon - and kept the Mets from stealing another march. With five months to go, this team is where it needed to be.
“As a player, all you can ask is, ‘Give me a chance,’” Jones said. “Twenty-five out of 25 guys in here will tell you we’ve got an opportunity now. We’re going to try like heck to make something of it.”
Permalink | Comments (26) | Categories: Mark Bradley
I think it’s time to address some issues
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
I think we can all agree that it’s time again for one of those “I think” things.
I think the weakest defense in any argument is the one Michael Gearon Jr. made in support of Billy Knight, which essentially went, “Everybody else messes up, too.” That’s not a real defense. It’s a feeble attempt at deflection.
I think Gearon and the Hawks would have been better served had he said something along these lines: “We wish this process would go faster, and maybe we’ve missed a chance or two to speed things along, but we hope you folks will hang in there with us until we get it right.”
I think if the ping-pong balls finally bounce their way, the Hawks could get it right overnight. (Then again, Knight could decide to take Brandan Wright with the No. 1 pick, as opposed to Greg Oden. Wright, see, is listed at 6-foot-9.)
I think that’s enough about the Hawks. Too much, probably.
I think the Falcons will win at least nine games next season and finish no worse than second in their division. I was thinking they’d win 10 until they lost two defensive starters in one rather uncanny offseason week. I think their offense will be so good as to make all the critics of the West Coast offense scream, “See? Told you!”
I think the Braves are already looking for a starting pitcher. I also think it’s a dry market. If it weren’t, wouldn’t the Yankees have bought two or three by now?
I’d always thought that Thaddeus Young was apt to leave Georgia Tech a year ahead of Javaris Crittenton. I think now it could be the other way around.
I think the Thrashers needed to win their first-round series to get the whole of Atlanta (as opposed to the smallish hockey-loving core) interested. Instead they couldn’t even win a game. I think I’d call that a missed opportunity.
I think we’ll debate forever the merits of the Heatley-for-Hossa trade, and I think we can all agree Dany Heatley needed a change of scenery. But Heatley has scored five playoff goals for Ottawa, and Marian Hossa scored none for the Thrashers. I think that tells a little something, doesn’t it?
I think Michael Vick needs to take his career by the scruff of the neck, and from all reports he’s doing that. Now I think he needs to take his personal life by the scruff of the neck.
I think I hear a motion to adjourn. I second the motion.
Permalink | Comments (103) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Honesty’s Gailey’s strong suit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Chan Gailey is an unappreciated treasure at Georgia Tech for many reasons. Those trips to bowl games after each of his five seasons with the Yellow Jackets. Taking what has become a deceptively solid football program to the ACC championship game last year. A stint in the NFL, where 11 of the 14 seasons he was a coach of any kind in the league concluded in the playoffs.
Even so, the primary reason why those in the Tech Nation should cherish Gailey more than they do is his character.
There is his straightforward tongue, for instance. Few of his peers would ignore the land mines surrounding the following questions and answer them without fear of blowing up.
Given your lengthy flirtation earlier this year with becoming the head guy of the Pittsburgh Steelers or Miami Dolphins, do recruits and their parents ask you about that? If they do, what do you tell them? And how long will you be with the Jackets, by the way?
“All of that comes up, and I tell them that, in this day and age, nothing is guaranteed,” Gailey, 55, said without hesitation behind his meticulously organized desk. Outside the window in his office, you can see the whole field at Bobby Dodd Stadium. That’s where Gailey may or may not be in 2010, when his Tech contract is slated to expire.
Added Gailey, “I tell [recruits and their parents] straight up that, if there is somebody out there next year [in the NFL] that offers me an exorbitant amount of money and it’s a good owner and good people, I’m going to talk to them. That doesn’t mean I’m going, but I’m probably going to talk to them.
“I’ve got a great job, and I love it here, and I’d love to retire here. That’s what I’d like to do, but you can’t say ‘never’ in this business.”
Such honesty must be a requirement for those from Americus, Ga. Dan Reeves also is as blunt as they come, and he once coached Gailey in Little League. Tech athletics director Dan Radakovich isn’t from Americus, but the Monaca, Pa., native was equally blunt when he said he hasn’t a problem with any of Gailey’s answers to those questions.
Then again, Radakovich shouldn’t. It is better to have the anti-Nick Saban, as in somebody who will tell you what he actually believes instead of what he figures you wish to hear for the moment.
“What’s happening in our business is that if you’re not that honest, then at some point and time, people will come back and give you a little bit of the hypocrite side,” Radakovich said. “There are opportunities that surface for people in our athletics department. There could be a better circumstance out there for them and their families. But here’s the bigger issue: Just as we ask of our student-athletes, we ask of our coaches and others that, while you’re here, you give us 100 percent effort, and you make us better every day.”
Exhibit A: Gailey.
Courtesy of steady recruiting by Gailey’s regime, the Jackets will return eight starters from a defense led by accomplished coordinator Jon Tenuta. They’ll also have seven holdovers on offense, including ACC rushing leader Tashard Choice. Plus, they’ll have Taylor Bennett replacing the erratic Reggie Ball at quarterback.
Here’s something else: The old days of the Jackets battling Northwestern, Stanford and Vanderbilt for recruits have been replaced by Jonathan Dwyer bringing his running to Tech instead of Florida and by coveted defensive end Jason Peters choosing Tech over hometown LSU.
According to most recruiting services, the Jackets’ 2007 class ranked among the nation’s elite, and maybe at the top of the ACC. Whether Gailey will be around to see it through is another story.
“Out of respect for the Wayne Huizengas and the Dan Rooneys, if they call you, you’ve got to talk to them,” said Gailey, adding that he hasn’t received many angry e-mails, calls or looks from Tech fans since his old bosses with the Steelers and Dolphins flew him to their towns for those job interviews. Gailey smiled, saying, “The majority of Tech people are very entrepreneurial. They understand that, if somebody is willing to give you an outstanding business deal, you need to talk to them.”
Then Gailey showed his devout Christian side, saying, “I’m one of those that firmly believes you are where you’re supposed to be. I’m supposed to be at Georgia Tech right now. Maybe I don’t know all the reasons, but I’m sure they’ll become obvious as time goes on.”
It’s already obvious: Gailey is supposed to keep Tech vibrant and rising.
Which he has.
Permalink | Comments (49) | Categories: Tech / ACC, Terence Moore
Don’t let fans run amuck
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
It took a while, but leagues, conferences and teams have begun to understand how to stifle abusive fans: Kick ‘em out forever.
Or at least try.
We’ve had two wonderful examples of the way this should work this week. For instance: The bosses at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama just slapped a permanent ban on 14 creeps who were arrested for participating in the massive beer-can pelting of Jeff Gordon’s car after he won Sunday’s race.
Now, you know and I know what’s going to happen. Many of those creeps will have their buddies buy tickets for them. Those creeps realize Talladega track officials don’t have the manpower or the time to monitor everybody who enters the gates - not with more than 160,000 or so folks attending an average race.
It’s a start, though. The same goes for New York Mets officials who just banned a creep from Shea Stadium for three years. During a game last month against the Braves, that creep shined a high-powered flashlight at the eyes of Braves Tim Hudson and Edgar Renteria. And now that creep will spend 15 days in jail, along with receiving that ban.
Here’s another suggestion: Teams should place mug shots of these creeps around their stadiums and ticket outlets.
Those creeps still might not get the message, but potential creeps eventually will.
Permalink | Comments (52) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
These Braves appear built to take punch
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Brian McCann stuck his glove in front of a swinging bat and left soon after with a throbbing hand. Not good.
Edgar Renteria took a pregnant turn around first base with two outs and got trapped in a rundown, prompting Craig Wilson to inch off the bag at third and eventually get smothered between third and home. Not smart.
Mark Redman, who has devolved into this rotation’s festering boil, was eradicated after 54 pitches in 1-2/3 innings, which generally is not considered a good nine-inning pace, unless you’re into 292-pitch games. And losses.
This must have been what John Smoltz was talking about earlier Tuesday when he said, “We’re going to look ugly at times this season.”
The Braves’ game against Philadelphia on Tuesday night qualified as a gentle reminder that even if it’s not 2006 all over again, it’s certainly not 1995, either.
But there is something different about this team, “a uniqueness,” as Smoltz said. “It’s not scared. It’s not overconfident. It’s just there.”
There, in first place. That doesn’t mean a lot on May 2. But there’s no reason to think the Braves are going away. They’re 8-3 against New York and Philadelphia, even after Tuesday’s 6-4 loss to the Phillies. Where are they going?
If the Braves can start 16-10 — a start they’ve equaled only once since 2001 — when significant things go wrong, what happens when more things go right?
They have lost a starter, Mike Hampton. Regardless of whether you expected Hampton to win seven games or 10 or 15, he was this team’s projected third starter. Now, the young Chuck James is third behind Smoltz and Tim Hudson, and they’re followed by Kyle Davies (who can be good, in theory) and Redman (who can be good, perhaps in the fast-food industry).
Redman’s ERA through five starts: 10.62. If he gets a sixth start, it confirms he has pictures.
The No. 1 closer, Bob Wickman, is on the disabled list with a bad back. Having a pudgy closer on the DL with a bad back is never a good sign, particularly a month into the season. Bad backs seldom go away.
The first left-field platoon system blew up. The team gave up on Ryan Langerhans and traded him to Oakland for cash and two parking attendants.
McCann got hit on the hand. His backup, Brayan Pena, got hit in the head and, according to manager Bobby Cox, “He didn’t know where he was for a while.”
He’s where they are: In first place.
At some point, the Braves are going to need help at the back end of the rotation. They might be able to survive the Wickman thing, given the two safety nets under him, Rafael Soriano and Mike Gonzalez.
McCann: The X-rays were negative. Of course. He has a bruised left ring finger, not multiple fractures, which could’ve been the case, after getting hit on the hand by Rod Barajas (the catcher’s interference in the second loaded the bases and led to a three-run inning). So the bottom didn’t fall out — again.
“You can get very optimistic or very pessimistic based on [what’s happened],” Smoltz said. “But last year there wasn’t a lot of optimism. There were just glaring things. You could deflect it all you wanted, but we just weren’t good enough. Now, a closer goes down, but we’ve got a backup. A couple of starters struggle, but we’ve got guys at the top who can carry us for a while.
“We’re just getting by in some areas. But we are getting by.”
Kelly Johnson, the new leadoff man, was hitting .150 in the first 11 games. He hit .478 in the next 13. He’s strong at second base, even if his manager, Bobby Cox, might be prone to hyperbole. Cox: “He’s playing defense as good as I’ve ever seen. I’m talking Mazeroski, Hubbard, Lemke.” (Johnson appreciates the comparison. So do Glenn Hubbard and Mark Lemke.)
Yes, they can look bad. But after taking an early 3-0 lead, it really was only another Redman implosion that separated them from victory.
Jeff Francoeur, who’s suddenly hitting for average, believes the team “felt a little revived” in the spring.
“Guys were used to doing everything businesslike,” he said. “Then we went through an awful year — well, awful for us. But it’s been nice so far.”
Redman’s starts, notwithstanding.
Permalink | Comments (41) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
Everyone has a favorite in the wide-open Derby
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
The Kentucky Derby, I would say — and in this, I’m not alone — is the toughest sports event in the world to predict. You usually have 20 ways to get it right, or 20 ways to get it wrong. A full gate, and axioms to go along with every one.
The Derby coming up Saturday is no different; if anything, it looks tougher than most. But don’t they all. In the past 30 or so years, only one favorite has won it, Fusaichi Pegasus in 2000, who was owned by a Japanese businessman, accompanied in the winner’s circle by his own personal geisha court and trained by the quiet-natured Neil Drysdale.
The fact that Middleground, my choice, won the first Derby I covered in 1950 made it look easy, particularly considering it was the first horse race I ever covered. Ed Danforth of The Journal, a Kentuckian who knew horses, picked Your Host, and The Constitution editors embarrassingly spread their new sports editor’s triumph across the front page. It was six years before I had another Derby winner on the nose.
There are long-shot bettors with money on every horse going to the post Saturday, the dedicated plunger looking to make an exotic combination. The Horse Player magazine, devoted to the serious investor, brought eight racing experts together for a roundtable handicapping session. Now, these were as much devoted to making exotic wagers as to picking the winner. In the overall, three of them went for Street Sense, two picked Curlin and three other choices went to Hard Spun, No Biz Like ShoBiz and Circular Quay. These are not mint-julep consumers; these are hard-nosed hardboots, with reasons for and against them all.
Street Sense: Two-year champion and winner of the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. No Breeders’ Cup champion has ever won the Derby.
Curlin: Won the Arkansas Derby by a mile and a half, but he never raced as a 2-year-old, and no horse has won the Derby unraced as a 2-year-old since Apollo, when Chester A. Arthur was president. And what year was that? In 1882, which is a reach for any horseplayer.
Arkansas Derby winners do win Kentucky Derbies. Sunny’s Halo won in 1983, then came Smarty Jones, who followed up the Derby by winning the Preakness in 2004.
I sat at a meeting when a Texas writer confidently predicted Smarty Jones would win the Derby. During the week, a female acquaintance from Florida called and asked me to get a bet down for her — on Smarty Jones. What could she know about this horse? A lot. I forget the horse I picked, and don’t care to look it up, but my friend collected $175. That’s how it goes at the Derby.
Curlin’s race at Oaklawn was watered down considerably by the questionable quality of the field. Only one other graded winner went to the post, a field so weak that Curlin was bet down to 4-5. He cornered in the stretch with ease and widened his lead to 10-1/2 lengths. It was a rout by a horse that had won his first two starts in a romp.
There are horses in this field I know little or nothing about. Post positions won’t be drawn until this afternoon. So, I have to be impressed by guys who treat horse racing like a science. One, Gary West, the Texan, says this, “I think if there is a superstar to come out of this 3-year-old crop, Curlin is the only candidate. He’s the only one we might be talking about down the road.”
You must consider that West covers Southwest racing, and the Oaklawn beat, so there might be a bit of “homerism” there. Chances are Curlin will go off the favorite Saturday, but what else is there in the field to arouse such interest? In the meantime, I’m concentrating on the Kentucky Oaks, the fillies’ Derby, on Friday afternoon. Dogwood Stable’s Cotton Blossom will likely go off second choice in that one, and that’s Cot Campbell’s best bet to visit the pagoda at Churchill Downs this weekend. Unaccompanied, I might add, by any court of geishas. Hard to find in Camden, S.C.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Furman Bisher
The Tuesday Countdown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
10: May Day. It’s not even mini-camp yet and the Falcons’ defensive already has lost two starters (Demorrio Williams and Rod Coleman) and could be ready to chuck another (Grady Jackson). So much for that post-draft afterglow.
9: Coleman got off the road, which made the world a better place. But he ripped a quad while jetskiiing. That’s sort of a big injury for a defensive tackle. Even if he comes back during the season, he won’t really be back. He’s toast. So is Williams. His torn pecs will prevent him from lifting weights and, even after healing, prevent him from immediately using his arm in tackles and pass-rush situations.
8: So how do you feel about now if you’re Keith Brooking? Poor guy just got moved back to middle linebacker, which he didn’t want in the first place. Now he’s lost his wingman (Williams) and possibly the slabs of beef in front of him. Is it too late to file retirement papers.
7: Rod Coleman’s backup: Jonathan Babineaux. Waiter, check?
6: The good news is that Michael Vick and the offense is stable. They can just outscore everybody. Say, have you seen my pet rabbit, Harvey?
5: Whether it’s fair or not, sports stars are defined by what they do in the post-season. Dirk Nowitzki may not want to read his definition about now.
4: Michael Gearon Jr., one of the Hawks’ owners, says the team might have won between “36 and 46 games” if not for injuries. Great. That should rally the troops.
3: More Hawks News! What does it mean that owners and Billy Knight will not determine coach Mike Woodson’s future until after the draft lottery? So if the Hawks get two really good picks, they fire Woodson because then they can lure a better coach? Look, you either think Woodson can coach or you don’t. Make a decision. This front office makes Charlie Brown look like a Type-A personality.
2: Tony LaRussa has been short with reporters and sensitive to reports about Josh Hancock drinking before he was killed in a car accident. But can LaRussa, who himself was arrested for DUI recently, be objective on this subject?
1: R. Kelly has written a song for Virginia Tech. I’m assuming it won’t rival, “Feelin’ on Yo Booty,” or have anything to do with having sex with a 14-year-old.
Permalink | Comments (54) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
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