Not sure if you’ve read about today’s arrest of Ole Miss basketball Head Coach Andy Kennedy.  You can find a link with the police report there.

Let me preface this by saying I am no fan of Ole Miss, although I’m originally from Mississippi.  Having said that, all eyes of the sports world will be on the University as well as its fans in the aftermath of this situation.  You have a head coach who has been arrested for public intoxication and has allegedly used racial slurs toward the alleged victim.  The details of the story seem logical (five pedestrians trying to get into a cab, which is illegal in virtually any city in America, allegedly intoxicated individuals then becoming abusive at 1:00AM when cabs are scarce).

You have a University that hosted Presidential Debates, stating to America that they had left their dark past behind them when it comes to race relations, yet a leading representative of the University has been accused of using racial slurs.  I’ve never used racial slurs, although I grew up in the midst of the heart of small-town Southern culture.  It was a part of daily life.

Some would argue that we live in the day of political correctedness and hyper-sensitivity.  I agree, but I draw the line at racism and other forms of bigotry.  The Head Coach of Ole Miss is arguably the third most visible representative of the University behind NY Giants QB Eli Manning and Head Football Coach Houston Nutt.  You cannot ever allow yourself to return to your former Cincinnati stomping grounds, get even close to intoxicated, then allow yourself to lose control of your behavior and your language.

Anything short of an immediate termination of Kennedy will be a sign to America that this proud University and all of its Alumni are indeed not past their dark past.

Pathetic.

Can they just call the World Series and be done with it, much like finishing a NASCAR race in a torrential downpour and giving the win to the leader?  MLB and Bud Selig are Exhibit A for how to drive growth by suboptimizing the long-term future of the business.  Costs and prices have skyrocketed since Selig took over through a steroid-fueled focus on corporate ticket sales at the expense of developing the young male market segment.  Now you’re left with a sport that is more and more irrelevant in America.  This used to be America’s past time, remember?  Now, that mantle belongs to the NFL followed closely by college football.  Is baseball even in the top ten past times that you have?  Nowhere close for me.

On a slightly related tangent, does anyone care about the World Series of Poker final table here in the midst of football season?  Anyone?

Three wide receivers on each side?  One center and two tight ends?  Two quarterbacks?  It’s called the A-11, developed by Piedmont High School in California.  Through some loophole in the high school rules, this offense addresses a situation where a team has undersized, athletic football players, doing away with offensive lineman.  Article in NY Times, plus a video below of the offense in action and an audio report on NPR as well.

Here’s a quick top-of-mind view from here in the basement.

1. Miami Don may have the scoop on this, but I cannot figure out the city of Miami in particular and south Florida in general when it comes to sports.  I watched some of the Jets-Dolphins game yesterday and was struck with the relatively scarce crowd in attendance for the first game of the season and Brett Favre in town.  I expect that here in the ATL, but the mighty Dolphins?  An embarassment.
2. Congrats to Serena Williams for regaining the #1 ranking in tennis and taking the US Open title.  There are few sports figures I dislike more than Chris Evert (she made only about a hundred different excuses as Martina Navratilova routinely toyed with her).  Her calling out of Serena in an open letter in the May 2006 issue of Tennis Magazine.  “I don’t see how acting and designing clothes can compare with the pride of being the best tennis player in the world,” said Evert.  Well, Serena and her sister have simply shown that the two of them can compete at the highest level in sport while balancing their lives with other interests.  Let’s celebrate that!
3. Does anyone care about baseball?  Anywhere?  I get the NY Times on Saturday and Sunday, and I’m amazed how such a big chunk of America lives and dies with the hardball when surely most of the country could care less.
4. If you’re waiting for parity to reach college football, you’re a year or two too late.  East Carolina and Utah may have grabbed the headlines, but look at how many I-AA schools played their big brothers tight the last two weeks.  Furman could have beaten the Hokies, no doubt about it.  Isn’t it time to simply ban these games though?
5. I stumbled upon a young poker pro, Alex Fitgerald, playing online as well as recently in Macau at the APPT.  A sobering look at what it’s like to make a go of playing professionally, especially the tough parts away from the felt.
6. Speaking of parity, is the balance back in the NFL between the NFC and AFC?  I love soccer, but really there is no sports league in the world that approaches the NFL.  All the talking heads get paid tons of cash predicting and analyzing these games ad nauseum.  In reality, is the NFL really sixteen games between mostly teams of equal talent and coaching, where a couple of twists here and there can lead to a victory of defeat?  Do this sixteen times in a season, and standard variation leads to most teams finishing somewhere between 10-6 and 6-10?
7. Speaking of not caring, does anyone care about the PGA’s FedEx Cup?  I’ve casually read about who qualified for what, and to be honest I can’t get even the smallest amount of interest in this.
8. College football polls are moronic.  How can the Top 10 be identical between the two major polls when we’re two weeks into a season with results all over the map?  I know nothing about this, but college baseball seems better to me as their two major polls rarely look similar to one another.

You might say Broadway is the best thing going for New York City.  Grabbing a slice, a bagel with a smear and a regular coffee, shoe shines, Junior’s cheesecake, Stage Deli, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston Sucks t-shirts at Yankee Stadium.  The list is as long as your imagination of what makes New York great.

There is now one less thing that makes New York the best city in the world.  Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo has left WFAN, ending his partnership with Mike Francesca after 19 years.  This pair arguably created sports talk radio.  Their level of preparation for each day combined with their strong opinions and quick recall to make those long afternoon and evening drives something I looked forward to.  I called in a couple of times, awed with the responsibility of sounding coherent and insightful, biting off as little as I felt I could make do with.

Their show is by far the biggest thing I miss about our time living in New Jersey, and there isn’t even a close second (shoveling snow and bailing out our basement after any heavy rain is somewhere way down the list).  It truly is the end of an era for sports fans everywhere.

We’re trained monkeys, we Americans.  Every four years, we plop down to watch teenage girls flipping over and over and over again.  They pound into the floor in ways that would rip every tendon and break every bone in my ankles (I sit here at two in the morning nursing my second strained calf after an afternoon of soccer coaching followed by two sets of tennis).

The daughter of this guy just took the All Around Gold Medal in Artistic Gymnastics (which used to be called Gymnastics).

We’re all experts in the bizarre scoring, with no clue how the parameters of the scoring are either established or ultimately determined.  Much like the ridiculousness that is figure skating, we somehow have to wade into all of this each Olympiad and hope we’ve learned enough to hold a conversation with our neighbor or wife (or our neighbor’s wife).

We weathered the outrageous controversy that the Chinese might actually be too young, giving them the incredible advantage of being too stupid to understand that they should feel terrified that they may lose out on a Wheaties box deal if they fall on their little butts.  I do know that if I need bypass surgery, I’m heading to some Middle School in Shanghai and letting one of those little pre-teens take a crack at it.

And now the lanky SMU student from Plano (where a childhood friend played in a 30,000 seat football stadium in high school in the mid-’80s before heading to A&M) has beaten the next Mary Lou Retton.  Of course, I stayed up to watch all this mess with an icepack on my calf, then cried as Nastia Liukin fought to hold back the tears on the medals stand as her father received hugs from overweight Pageant Moms in the background.

I love America.

I watched most of the British Open Saturday and Sunday and was pulling for Greg Norman.  After his final round, he was obviously a bit disappointed as he pulled in with a tie for third instead of becoming the oldest man to win a major.  He’d kept his head about him the first three rounds, and his new bride Chris Evert spoke what everyone was wondering:  would he be able to do it for four rounds.

I think he made just one mistake Sunday.  He tried to win rather than simply drinking in this gift that he’d received, the opportunity to walk eighteen holes in the last group of the British Open a decade and a half after he’d been a real player.  His wife had restored his passion for the game, and he’d channeled the desire through brutal conditions to be there at the end.  I wish he’d simply been grinning ear to ear from the first tee to the last, hit is 3-wood or hybrid off all those tees, drink in every step, and wave at the end.  He’ll come to relish this gift in the months to come rather than revisiting all of the ghosts of Christmases past.

It was magical.

Too cool!

It’s a constant since we’ve been here in Upstate South Carolina:  head to the golf clubhouse, work until 2:00 (after eating something and drinking a gallon of coffee), watch rain pour from the skies, watch wet golfers flood into clubhouse.

It’s been nice to sleep with my wife (and our youngest), and I have been cranking away here at remote HQ.  I’m working away pretty diligently, not much time wasting and goofing around.

I’ve been into podcasts rather than music the last couple weeks.  The absolute best podcast that I now listen to daily is World Soccer Daily, the #1 soccer program in North America.  When I say the best I mean the best of any subject matter, at least that I’ve found.  Steven and Kenny are a riot and combine technical expertise in football (soccer) with the dry humor of Monty Python and Ricky Gervais.  They don’t humiliate newbie soccer fans, and humor the morons, the kids, and the know-it-all’s.  Steven will go toe-to-toe with anyone on any subject, and they are terrific interviewers with really inciteful questions.  If you’re even a passing soccer fan, listen to just one of their podcasts.  Subscribe if you are a big-time fan and you’ll be hooked.

I really haven’t watched the Lakers-Celtics much but caught most of the 2nd half last night (outside of Pittsburgh last night and today).  In a word, both of these teams are pretty dreadful to watch.  I don’t think I give Paul Pierce enough credit because he just looks goofy to me for some reason.  Garnett has done nothing special throughout the series.  The Lakers really look like not much beyond Bryant.  Gasol can’t magically be transformed into some sort of brute inside, and he actually looked more active around the boards than he ever did in Memphis.  I don’t know, I think I’d just rather see the results of who wins or not.

As an aside, is there any profession where previous experience matters less than an NBA Head Coach?  Would a company take its best salesman and make him CEO?  The NBA perplexes me, I must admit.