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Friday, October 26, 2007
Tebow gets hype machine cranking
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
All hail Tim Tebow, the czar of mankind. Unless he’s needed to quell those wildfires in San Diego or to solve the national mortgage crisis, he’ll take a break from saving the universe to play quarterback today for the Mighty Gators.
So here’s the question: If Tebow graciously lowers himself to take part in this little football game at Jacksonville Municipal Stadium, will he walk across the nearby St. Johns River before or after he takes Florida against Georgia?
Here’s the bigger question: Do the Bulldogs actually believe The Great Tebow hype, which would trigger something like another Florida meltdown for Georgia by the end of the evening, or do they realize he pulls on his shoulder pads like everybody else?
“Well, when I think about hype, I think about a player that everybody makes a big deal of that isn’t very good,” said Georgia tight end Tripp Chandler. “I think [Tebow] has proved that to be wrong. I think he’s a great football player, and that’s why I think our team will have [its] hands full trying to contain him. He seems to make plays week in and week out. He’s fast. He’s strong. He’ll run you smack over.”
In essence, Chandler joins others by suggesting that Tebow is Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Thor, Flash Gordon, The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man and Mighty Mouse. To hear Georgia coach Mark Richt tell it, Tebow is even more impressive than that combination — at least in a football sense. Said Richt, reflecting on his version of The Great Tebows over the past 20 years, “Michael Vick certainly was that guy.” Then Richt mentioned Vince Young for being “sort of freaky.” Finally, Richt said of his former pupil, Charlie Ward, “He also had some of that.”
Whatever “that” is for Tebow, it has scorched Florida opponents on the ground and through the air. His statistics are ridiculous this season, which is why we won’t bore you with the details. Just consider this: Tebow is sprinting toward the Heisman Trophy as a sophomore by leading his peers across the country in touchdown runs (10), passing efficiency and hype.
We’re back to that. Even so, Richt delivered encouraging news to the Bulldog Nation, not only about Georgia’s approach to Tebow, but to those 15 losses for the Bulldogs during their past 17 meetings with Florida. “Our motivation is to win the game whether or not a guy has an aura about him,” Richt said. “I don’t think we’re too concerned with that [aura], but he’s the key.”
Ask the Auburn Tigers, upset winners over Florida for the second consecutive year. They allowed Tebow to have his pretty numbers (completing 20 of 27 passes for 201 yards, rushing for 75 more and managing a passing touchdown and a running one), but they stifled his love affair with big plays. They also forced Tebow into an interception that led to a field goal in Auburn’s 20-17 victory that stopped the defending national champs’ 11-game winning streak.
The next week, LSU slid by Florida courtesy of a miracle pass at the end in Death Valley, but it proved again that even The Great Tebow is quite beatable. He’s also quite human. He damaged his non-throwing (right) shoulder during Florida’s victory last week at Kentucky. That’s why Georgia linebacker Marcus Washington said the Bulldogs will go after Tebow’s shoulder “to ding it up for him a little more.”
This doesn’t mean Washington views Tebow as more hype than reality. Or does it?
“I guess I can tell you a little bit more about that after the game,” said Washington, straight-faced, pausing before adding, “Of course, you’re always going to have a guy getting a little bit more hype than what he really deserves. So we’ll just go down there, and we’ll play, and we’ll actually get a chance to find out for sure.”
That is, if The Great Tebow has time to show up. You know, with his need to finish developing a cure for sneezing and all.
Permalink | Comments (28) | Categories: Terence Moore, UGA / SEC
Georgia must keep up its end of rivalry
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
St. Simons Island — Well, the circus hit town again. Christmas comes in October to the shopkeepers, the restaurants, the motels and, of course, the barkeeps around the marshes of Glynn. The shop windows along Frederica Road have developed a reddish glow. Just a while ago I heard the wail of a siren. You don’t hear sirens wail around here a lot.
They’re here. Georgia Bulldogs gathered along the state line to make the mad rush into Jacksonville on Saturday.
The two university presidents of Georgia and Florida joined in a personal campaign a while ago to dismiss the famous old, though unofficial, slogan, “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.” And Jacksonville for years has tried to live down its reputation for traffic snarls. One has been about as successful as the other. Time goes on. Little changes in this old football rivalry that has gone lopsided over the turn of the century.
In fact, it has developed such a Gator flavor that a columnist in Jacksonville, living dangerously, has decided that this series needs Georgia to win one. Publicly announced his out-and-out hope that Georgia wins this one. Just so all these Georgians might feel better about coming to Jacksonville every year. None of this home-and-home stuff, see.
You know, they did that once back in the mid-’90s, while the old Gator Bowl was being remodeled, one game in Athens, one in Gainesville. Nothing changed. Florida won on both sides of the border by a total score of 104-31. They went back to Jacksonville in 1996, and the stadium soon had a new name, Nextel or Alltel, or one -“tel” or another, and now it’s back to what it is really is, Jacksonville Municipal Stadium.
Tell you one thing, these Bulldogs are going to give Jacksonville as little business as need be. This has become a regular pilgrimage destination, come to St. Simons, Brunswick, St. Mary’s, once-upon-a-time Jekyll Island — now it’s in a state of parliamentary squabble — and a weekend becomes an extended vacation. They drive down to the game on Saturday and back that night, leaving as little to the Florida tax budget as possible. It’s a transfusion to the Glynn County economy.
“If it wasn’t for Georgia-Florida weekend, we’d be out of business,” Stan Robinson, manager of Brogen’s, a central gathering place for many a Bulldog on St. Simons. Its “Bulldogs” banners have been beckoning Georgia nomads all week. “It’s bigger than Fourth of July and Labor Day combined. This is what you’d call our ‘season.’ “
I’ve been to Army-Navy, when the two academies were of national rank. And I’ve been to the “Red River Shootout” between Texas and Oklahoma. Neither carries on with such an uproar, with such bitterness as Georgia-Florida. And neither is as much a part of the health of the commonwealth as Georgia-Florida is to its part of the South.
There is this caveat, however: Unless the Bulldogs begin picking up and shouldering their side of it all, chances are the intensity will wear away, and it takes two to make a rivalry.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Categories: Furman Bisher, UGA / SEC
Boston off to a familiar start
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Denver — There was this team, see. It fell behind 3-1 in its LCS. It won its next five games by the collective score of 48-2. Maybe you remember. I’ve never been able to forget.
That team: The 1996 Braves.
That was the team I likened to the ‘27 Yankees after Game 2 of the World Series. (Contrary to popular belief, I did not write that the ‘96 Braves were better than that legendary crew. I only dangled the possibility.) I called the Braves the greatest team of the post-free agency era. I hailed them as the new dynasty, the new standard of baseball excellence. I gushed like Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch.
And then the Braves let me down. They didn’t win another blessed game. They blew the Series and gave inadvertent birth to a rather different dynasty. (The Yankees would be champs four times in five years.)
Now there’s this other team, see. It fell behind 3-1 in its LCS. It won its next five games by the collective score of 45-7. It’s taking batting practice as I type. I’d like to say the Boston Red Sox will blow their 2-0 Series lead and make other premature pundits look as silly as I looked back when, but I really can’t see it.
The Red Sox look too good. (Then again, so did you-know-who.) The Colorado Rockies look outclassed. (Then again, so did the 1996 Yankees, who actually sacrificed with the second batter of Game 3 — Derek Jeter, of all people — because Joe Torre just wanted his team to get a lead.) This Series doesn’t figure to return to Boston. (Then again, the Braves figured to send off Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, which was to be razed over the winter, with a champagne party.)
Maybe I’m the only guy in the world who sees the parallel because I’m the only guy in the world who ever invoked the ‘27 Yankees and the ‘96 Braves in the same silly sentence. (But I should note that I’m sitting next to Paul Bodi, who was the AJC sports editor on site in Yankee Stadium in 1996 and who works for MLB.com now, and he just said, “I didn’t argue with you, did I? I think we were all on the same page at the time.”)
I asked Jason Varitek, the Sox captain who attended Georgia Tech from 1990 through 1994, if he recalled the ‘96 Series. (Eleven years later, I’m still looking for commiseration.) He said he didn’t. “I just remember being in Atlanta during the worst-to-first year [1991]. At the start of it, we were able to go down and sit by the dugout. When we got back from playing summer ball, we couldn’t even get in the stadium.”
If you’re looking for the reason the surging Sox won’t crash as abjectly as the ‘96 Braves, it’s this: The Sox are too smart to let it happen. They won’t waste a 6-0 lead. (The Braves did in the infamous Game 4.) They won’t be undone on their best reliever’s third-best pitch. (Jim Leyritz hit a Mark Wohlers slider.) They won’t get flustered and hang their heads if adversity arrives. (The ‘96 Braves were dead after Game 4, which technically only tied the Series.)
“We can’t look at all that,” said Varitek, speaking of precedents distant and recent. “We’ve got to think about what’s gotten this team to where we are.”
Who are the Sox? They’re a team that runs deep counts and puts the ball in play, that has dominant starting pitching and a lockdown bullpen, that plays deft defense and pays attention to detail. They don’t look that dominant on paper, but on the field they’re a colossus.
Then again, the 1996 Braves were riding as high as any team ever had. In the span of five days, it all fell to pieces. Baseball’s a funny old game. If the Rockies win tonight, maybe this Series changes the way that one did.
Me, I’d love to see it. Even if it’s deferred by more than a decade, misery can always use a little company.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
A special pitcher, yet again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Boston — For as much as Curt Schilling has been labeled at various times in his career as pompous, egomaniacal, disingenuous, long-winded and just to the right of Goldwater — not quite going with the political flow in Massachusetts — universal adoration is seldom a problem in October.
Great athletes excel in the regular season. Special athletes are born in the playoffs.
The Braves have had John Smoltz, possibly the best postseason pitcher of all-time. Philadelphia, Arizona and Boston have had Schilling. But it’s with the Red Sox that his October legend has been cemented. That legend grew more Thursday night.
After a mediocre regular season in which he was plagued by tendinitis in his shoulder — Old Pitcher’s Disease — Schilling has again flashed brilliance in this postseason. He is three weeks short of his 41st birthday. But he squeezed a little more fall magic out of his aging and ailing body in Game 2 of the World Series, allowing Colorado one run and four hits in 5 1/3 innings, jump-starting the Red Sox to a 2-1 win over the Rockies.
The win lifted the Red Sox to a 2-0 Series lead. It elevated their starting pitcher another notch in history.
Schilling is now 11-2 with a 2.23 ERA in 19 postseason starts. He is 4-1 with a 2.06 ERA in seven World Series games. He is 3-0 in four starts in these playoffs (with one rough no decision in Game 2 of the ALCS).
Sorry. No bloody sock this time.
Manager Terry Francona watched Schilling help will the Red Sox to a title in 2004. He has learned to trust him, especially in October. Asked what separates Schilling from others, Francona responded: “His will to make sure the score ends up in our favor. I’ve been around him so long that I probably expect unfair things out of him. It’s a good feeling when he pitches.”
The Rockies drilled Schilling in June for six runs (five earned) and nine hits in five innings. But he was a different pitcher Thursday. “He got the ball where he wanted to, probably with more consistency,” Colorado manager Clint Hurdle said.
Boston fans may want to embrace Thursday’s game for a while. It may have been Schilling’s final start with the team. He took the mound at Fenway Park cognizant he doesn’t have a contract beyond this season. Red Sox management felt uneasy in the winter about his age and his health, and frankly, the way the season unfolded, their concerns were justified.
Schilling admitted on the eve of the game that the thought of this being his Fenway farewell was on his mind. But after the game, he said: “I guarantee everyone is sick of hearing me asked about that. I am. Whatever happens happens. We’re just trying to win two more games in the World Series. That makes it very easy not to think about.”
This would be Schilling’s third ring, two with Boston, which hadn’t won a Series in 86 years before his arrival in 2004. He went 21-6 that year. Then he made the regular season an afterthought.
You know the story. The ALCS. The Yankees. Game 6. The right ankle injury. The experimental medical procedure in which a tendon was sutured to a bone for stability. The bloody sock. The win. The comeback. The Sox, down 3-0 in the series, rally to dump the Yankees in seven. Then they sweep St. Louis in the Series. Euphoria.
Now, Schilling is near the end of his career, like a handful of other top pitchers in this era: Smoltz, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson. For most of this season, there were doubts Schilling would be back with the Sox next season. Now you wonder.
He considered retiring after this season but announced in January that he would return in 2008. He asked Boston for a contract extension. Management’s response: We’ll get back to you. He went 9-8 and missed seven weeks with shoulder problems.
Then came October. He blanked the Angels in the divisional playoffs. Cleveland dented him for five runs in Game 2 of the ALCS, but he rebounded to win Game 6. The Sox rebounded to win the ALCS. Again.
Now the Series. Now this. It’s October. After a while, you expect this.
Permalink | | Categories: Braves / MLB
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