So Brett Favre and LeBron James are back in the news today. Sort of.

I mean let’s be honest, Favre deciding to play football this season ranks up there with the sun rising in the east and ESPN trying to claim that tomorrow being Thursday is an exclusive story when it comes to being newsworthy.

The funny thing is I never really pictured this guy as the world’s biggest diva until the past few years. He was always the rugged quarterback who took every hit, got up and kept playing. Now he’s still rugged and takes hit, he just likes to have people fawn over him and plead with him not to retire each offseason. He craves attention the way I crave John’s Pizza. (New York City, the best there is. Okay, now I’ve made myself hungry).

This time three teammates actually had to fly to Mississippi to go to Favre’s farm on bended knee and beg him to come back. Are you kidding me? Look, I don’t blame the Vikings. Favre was a major reason—Adrian Peterson might have been a factor too although that’s often overlooked—they were about two plays from reaching the Super Bowl last year. The other quarterbacks they have on the roster might get them to the playoffs because Peterson’s still there and the rest of the team is very solid, but they aren’t going anywhere in the postseason without a quality quarterback—which Favre probably still is even at 41.

But the diva act really rankles. As with Tiger Woods, Favre clearly isn’t getting very good advice. He’s gone from being one of the most respected figures in football to a punch line (for reasons, obviously, entirely different than Woods). The whole Hamlet thing wore thin a couple of years ago and yet he’s continued it with no sign of any real self-awareness about it. Yes, he did do that commercial where he pokes fun at himself for indecision, I give him credit for that. But, not surprisingly, what did that involve: getting attention and making money. Clearly, that’s what Favre is all about.

Of course as long as he performs few people are going to care. That’s how divas get to be divas. They’re so good at what they do that they’re allowed their foibles because the price paid for putting up with them is worth it. Certainly all the garbage Favre put the Vikings through last summer proved worth it once he got on the field. Clearly they are counting on the same thing happening this fall.

Favre better be aware of one thing though: If he doesn’t perform, whether because of an injury or age finally catching up with him, he’s going to get jumped on. Years ago Bob Knight said this to me: “I know as long as I win, people around here will say I’m eccentric. If I ever stop winning, they’ll say I’m an embarrassment.”

Knight stopped making Final Fours at Indiana in 1992. By 1999, he was vulnerable enough that Myles Brand could get away with firing him. If he’d been to a Final Four in, say, 1998, Brand wouldn’t have dared.

So Favre better crank up the arm and win a bunch of games or he might find himself booed off the stage.

The same is going to be true of James. If by some chance the Miami Heat aren’t dominant, if he gags in the playoffs the way he did the last two years in Cleveland, he will be a laughing stock around the country—except of course on ESPN where Stuart Scott will no doubt still pay homage to The King at every turn—and he won’t be The God of South Beach.

Whether he wins or not, it was certainly amusing to read one quote from the interviewed release by, I think, Gentleman’s Quarterly yesterday. In it, James shoots back at Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, who ripped him after he left for Miami. Look, James is entitled to shoot back, Gilbert got after him in a way I have never seen an owner go after a player. While I sympathized with Gilbert and everyone in Cleveland, James is certainly entitled to tell his side.

But when James says, “I don’t think he ever cared about LeBron,” how can you not crack up?

There it is folks, the prototype 21st century athlete, talking about himself in the third person and criticizing an owner for not CARING about him? If you want to say, “I didn’t think Gilbert’s comments were fair to ME because of ------“ (you fill in the blank) that’s fine. But owners don’t care about athletes, they pay them to win. I’m always amused when I hear players and owners talk about how close they are to one another. They should talk to Knight because he’ll straighten them out. As long as the player performs the owner will ‘care,’ about them. As soon as he stops, the owner will talk about how much he cares about him while he’s cutting him or trading him. And if another owner wants to show a player how much he ‘cares,’ about him by giving him a better deal, the player will be gone the next day. He may or may not stage an infomercial to announce it. (One question: Has anyone figured out why James put on his act in Greenwich yet? Did he feel safe in a community that has lots of people in his tax bracket? Haven’t figured it out yet).

I wonder how much the Wilpon family ‘cared,’ about Francisco Rodriguez before he tore up his thumb punching out his girlfriend’s father last week? Right now they care so much they’re trying not to have to pay him ever again. They aren’t wrong to be as angry as they clearly are but I don’t think K-Rod should tell someone, “I don’t think the Wilpons ever cared about K-Rod.”

Actually maybe he should—because he’d be right.

The New York Knicks have hired Isiah Thomas as a consultant.

Sure, and Barack Obama has hired Bernie Madoff as Secretary of The Treasury.

I mean seriously, the Knicks have hired Isiah Thomas? What are they going to do next bring back Stephon Marbury as their point guard?

This just in: Dan Snyder has signed Jeff George to play quarterback.

You see, even SNYDER isn’t stupid enough to repeat absolute folly. That’s what James Dolan apparently wants to do. He is bringing back a man who brought complete shame to his franchise on and off the court; a man who has about as many friends in the world as, well, Bernie Madoff.

Isiah Thomas?

Already there’s a story in The New York Daily News that Donnie Walsh thought about quitting as team president and general manager and may yet do it. Maybe then Dolan can bring Isiah back as general manager. While he’s at it maybe he can hire Kiki Vandeweghe, who had so much success with the Nets this past season, as his coach. Or Bernie Madoff. I mean, why not?

There are so many questions that are un-answered about all this. The most obvious one is why? But there are others. For example, how in the world can either the NBA or the NCAA be okay with Thomas continuing as coach at Florida International University while being on the Knicks payroll?

Let’s look at it from the NBA side first. The league has very strict rules about contact with players who aren’t draft eligible—either by being college seniors or having declared for the draft. That means, every time Thomas talks to his team, he’s breaking NBA rules. It means every time he talks to a recruit, he’s breaking NBA rules. It means any time he talks to an opposing player—even to put his arm around him and say, ‘nice game,’—he’s breaking NBA rules.

More important though is how it can be possible that the NCAA can allow this. Remember, this is an organization that has about 426 rules that relate to ‘unfair advantages,’ in recruiting. In 1988 when I wrote, ‘A Season Inside,’ and related stories about going on recruiting visits with a number of coaches to player’s homes, the NCAA passed a rule banning any member of the media from making a home visit with a coach. Why? Because (I was told) it was considered an unfair advantage for a coach to be able to imply that he had more access to media coverage than another coach might by bringing a reporter along with him.

The NCAA also passed a rule several years ago which banned any member of the media—even one WRITING A BOOK--from being in a team’s locker room before, during or right after an NCAA Tournament game—UNLESS the locker room was opened to all members of the media. The reason: If a coach can tell a recruit that there is enough interest in his program to merit being part of a book, it is an unfair advantage.

I swear I’m not making this stuff up.

Given all that, how can the NCAA think for one second that this is NOT an advantage for a college coach to be able to say to a recruit, “you know I’m a paid consultant for an NBA team.” That implies a connection to the NBA that other coaches don’t have.

Now, you might laugh and say, ‘who the heck is Isiah Thomas going to recruit at Florida International who is even a long-shot NBA prospect?’ Are you kidding? Ninety percent of the reason he was hired by the school is because it thinks his name will attract higher-level recruits, kids who might have pro ambitions. (By the way, in high school, they ALL have pro ambitions).

Beyond that, you can’t say it’s okay for the coach at Florida International to be on an NBA payroll but not okay for the coach at Duke or North Carolina or Kansas or UCLA or Maryland—or ANYONE—to be on an NBA payroll. Coaches complain all the time that Mike Krzyzewski has an unfair advantage in recruiting because he coaches NBA players as the Olympic Coach. Imagine if The Washington Wizards hired Krzyzewski as a consultant. Do you think Gary Williams (or Roy Williams or anyone else) might have a problem with that?

Imagine if a college coach on a recruiting visit can say to a kid, “you know, the other day Pat Riley (or you pick a general manager) called me to talk about what free agents we should go after next summer.” Or if he said, “Phil Jackson was asking me who the top five college freshmen are going to be next year and I mentioned you right away.”

Okay, which is a bigger recruiting advantage: being able to drop a line like that or having some reporter sitting in the corner taking notes?


If I were an NBA owner, I’d be on the phone with every top college coach right now asking if he wanted to be my consultant. If I were a top college coach, I’d take the extra money and any recruiting advantage it might bring in a heartbeat. And just think, very few of these guys have been sued for $11.6 million for sexual harassment—and lost.


Jim Dolan is the absolute prototype of a trust fund kid who has never gotten anything right in his life and, sadly, never really needed to get anything right in his life. He’s made more stupid, arrogant moves than any owner this side of my guy Snyder. In fact, he makes Snyder look like Steve Bisciotti by comparison.

But he’s not the only one who is screwing the pooch on this one. David Stern must be on vacation. The NCAA is ALWAYS on vacation when it comes to common sense. Thomas must be somewhere laughing uncontrollably thinking, ‘you know what, you might not be able to fool ALL the people all the time, but as long as Jim Dolan is still around, I don’t need to fool anyone else.’

Amazing. Just amazing.

*****

Two notes from the weekend: Yes, I’m as stunned as anyone by Tiger Woods’ performance at Firestone. Sometimes though you have to hit rock bottom (this is a golf reference, not a life reference) before you head in the right direction. Woods may have hit it on Sunday. He was almost CHEERFUL talking to the media—after blowing them off two straight days—following his final round 77. Don’t write him off at Whistling Straits. You never write the great ones off and, whatever else he may be, Woods is still the most gifted golfer of my lifetime. And, thanks to Phil Mickelson completely gagging on the weekend (he shot one stroke HIGHER than Woods on Sunday) he’s still number one in the world.

And finally…Just happened to be watching The Athletics and Rangers on Sunday when Mike Maddux came to the mound to make a pitching change. He was stalling to give his reliever some extra time so—naturally—the home plate umpire came out to break up the mound conference. Only he never got the chance to do it really because Joe West charged over from FIRST BASE screaming at Maddux to make his move—waving his arms, yelling, the whole deal.

Question: Has anyone ever seen the first base umpire do that—WITH the home plate ump already on the mound? Second question: When will MLB crack down on umpires who think they’re God—West being the No. 1 offender? I mean please, who died and made Joe West into Doug Harvey? (whose nickname was God). Enough already.

On Saturday, as The Major League Baseball trading deadline came and went, the New York Yankees made three trades, picking up Lance Berkman, Kerry Wood and Austin Kearns. None of these moves was earth-shattering or even terribly significant. Berkman is an ex-All Star in the twilight of an excellent career. Woods is a former phenom who is now 33 and was pitching to an ERA of 6.30 in Cleveland on those rare occasions when he wasn’t on the Disabled List. Kearns is a journeyman outfielder who can catch a fly ball and throw out an occasional runner.

The Dodgers picking up Ted Lilly—although they may have made their move too late—is more significant. Certainly the earlier trades that moved Cliff Lee to Texas; Roy Oswalt to Philadelphia and Dan Haren (although that may be too late too) were far more significant than anything the Yankees did.

Of course the Yankees made these moves already having the best record in baseball. They were moves made because perhaps each of the three will win one game in the next two months or get one key hit or one key out in postseason. That would be enough because the Yankees didn’t have to give up an important prospect in any of the three moves. All they cost was money and for the Yankees, buying players like Berkman, Wood and Kearns is like buying one of the railroads on a Monopoly board. They’ll wait until this winter to buy Park Place—Lee—and keep on going from there.

This is not, by any stretch, a rant against the Yankees. Even though I’m a lifelong Mets fan I’ve never hated the Yankees and I actually sort of liked them when Joe Torre was the manager because I like Joe Torre. The current rules of baseball say the Yankees can spend whatever they want to spend and the Yankees business plan, brilliantly executed in recent years, makes it possible for them to spend whatever they choose to spend.

The problem is the system. It needs to be fixed during the next Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations. For years, the baseball union has been adamant about not agreeing to a salary cap. Of course that same union was adamant for years about drug-testing and we all know now how that worked out for baseball.

I understand the principle of being opposed to a salary cap. I also understand the principle of opposing drug-testing when there is no evidence that someone has used drugs. It is a violation of one’s rights and freedoms. It is also, in 2010, an absolute necessity in the world we live in just as the humiliating experience we all go through anytime we get on an airplane is also an absolute necessity.

There are salary caps in football, basketball and hockey. I don’t see very many players starving as a result of them. The NFL is about to go through what will be an angry, protracted negotiation with its union because for the first time in a long time the union has a leader—DeMaurice Smith—who is more than willing to wade in and do battle with the commissioner and the owners. But no one is going to debate whether the salary cap should continue to exist. The battleground will be what percentage of revenues the players get and what percentage the owners get. Put simply, the owners want more.

Hockey is a better and more balanced sport since Gary Bettman was willing to sacrifice a season five years ago and it can be argued that the salary cap saved the NBA back in the 1980s although it now needs considerable tweaking with a CBA negotiation coming up there too.

The issue has never really reached the table in baseball. That’s because Don Fehr was smarter and tougher than any commissioner, any owner and any negotiator sent forth by ownership for many, many years. Every time the owners tried to play hard ball on any front, Fehr sat back and waited for the courts or an arbitrator to rule in favor of the players because they always did. Whether Fehr was the smartest lawyer of all time or the owners hired some of the dumbest lawyers of all time is hard to say, but Fehr and the union were undefeated.

That’s why they were able to hold off drug-testing until public embarrassments forced them to give in, first to limited testing and, finally, after the 2005 Congressional hearing—the famous Mark McGwire, ‘I’m not hear to talk about the past,’ testimony not to mention Rafael Palmeiro’s outright lying and Sammy Sosa forgetting how to speak English—more frequent testing.

That’s also why there’s never been any serious talk about a salary cap. Revenue sharing was the compromise agreed to years ago and it HAS helped. The Minnesota Twins, targeted for extinction by the owners nine years ago, are now flourishing in a wonderful new ballpark, contending every year and have a payroll of just under $100 million. They’ve even signed Joe Mauer to an extension that should keep him in Minnesota through the peak years of an already-great career.

The Tampa Bay Rays won a pennant in 2008 and are chasing the Yankees with great vigor right now. The Cincinnati Reds have one of baseball’s best young teams. The well-managed small market teams can contend. The poorly managed small market teams (Kansas City, Pittsburgh) don’t. The Orioles and Cubs are just poorly managed.

But it’s not enough. The Yankees can’t buy a championship every year, but they can buy contending. They’ve missed the playoffs once since the strike of 1994 and their payroll just keeps growing and growing—as do their revenues. The Twins can contend but win the World Series? It doesn’t seem likely. The Brewers made the playoffs a couple of years back but can they, realistically, win the whole thing? The Texas Rangers DID rent Lee and will make postseason this year but can they go deep into postseason? Where will they be next year when Lee is pitching for the Yankees and the Angels go out and pick up two key free agents?

All sports need balance. The Saints winning The Super Bowl was great for the NFL and the Chicago Black Hawks—a big market team, sure, but they hadn’t won a title in almost 50 years—winning the Stanley Cup was good for hockey. Change and variety are good.

No one is proposing that the Yankees be crippled or cease being a dynasty. Their popularity is also good for baseball: they sell tickets and move TV ratings, especially when they play the Red Sox, who just happen to have baseball’s second biggest payroll.

But the time has come for both a salary cap and a salary FLOOR. The Yankees should have to think twice not so much before signing Lee but before throwing an extra $10 million or so at three marginal players who might make them just enough better to win again this year. The Royals and Pirates should be forced to plow ALL their revenue-sharing money into payroll—ALL OF IT—and every team should have a minimum payroll that gives it a chance to compete. If an owner can’t afford that payroll, especially when aided by revenue sharing, make him sell the team. Owning a baseball team isn’t an inalienable right.

This is the time for the owners to make this move. Fehr has retired. The union has finally been dinged by the public embarrassment over drug-testing. The owners need to go public with this battle because for once they will actually be right. They will not just be trying to grab more money they will be trying to bring balance to their sport.

The time to talk about a salary cap and ring hands and blame the union is over. The time to do to it is here and now. It can be called, ‘The Austin Kearns Rule.’ Has a ring to it I think.

Back in 1981, I was the Maryland beat writer for The Washington Post. Lefty Driesell had two clear-cut first round draft picks on that team: Albert King and Buck Williams. King was a senior; Williams a junior.

After games, when I was in the locker room talking to players, I frequently saw two men who very clearly weren’t members of the media circling the room, glad-handing the players. Often, they would wait until those of us on deadline finished and then swoop in to tell King and Williams how wonderfully they had played.

The two men were David Falk and Donald Dell. In those days, they were still partners, Falk working for Dell at ProServ, which was then one of the mega-agencies in sports, trailing only IMG for prestige, power and name clients. I remember saying to Driesell back then, “why do you let agents in your locker room?”

Lefty shook his head and said. “If I don’t let ‘em in, the players will be upset. They’ll think I’m trying to keep them away.”

“You SHOULD keep them away,” I said. “Agents shouldn’t be talking to players during the season under any circumstances and you shouldn’t be sanctioning it by letting them in the locker room.”

Lefty didn’t listen to me just as 99 percent of the coaches alive would not have listened to me. Like most coaches, he was afraid that if banned the agents, they would tell the players (which they would) ‘your coach isn’t looking out for your best interests. He’s only worried about what you can do for HIM.’

At the end of that season, Buck Williams left Maryland a year early and turned pro. The agent who guided him through the process of making that decision was—you guessed it—David Falk. (Dean Smith once told me that the first time Dell introduced him to Falk he said to his assistants, “I don’t trust that young one.” Boy did he have the one right).

Years later, agenting had become more sophisticated. The big-shots like Dell and Falk only made their presence felt when they truly needed to do so. Falk spent a lot of time in the 90s traveling to Duke to woo Mike Krzyzewski. He didn’t spend much time with the players. Instead, he would go in to see Krzyzewski after games to tell him what a great job he had done that night. Eventually, Krzyzewski hired him as his agent and a lot of Duke players landed with Falk—just as virtually every Georgetown player has landed with Falk since John Thompson became a client of his thirty years ago.

In 1994 I was on a trip to Hawaii with Maryland. Joe Smith was a sophomore and a lot of people thought he had a chance to be the first pick in the NBA draft if he turned pro that spring. Throughout the trip there was a guy hanging around the team who was clearly bird-dogging for an agent. He was outside the locker room waiting whenever the bus pulled up and would hug most of the players as they walked inside. One afternoon I saw him walking on the beach with Smith.

Later that day, just prior to a game he walked up to Chuck Walsh, who was Maryland’s sports information director and said, “Hey Chuck, my man, you got a media guide for me?”

Gary Williams was standing no more than 10 feet away and his face was chalk white as Walsh went to get the media guide. He said nothing. As soon as the bird-dog walked away, Gary went off on Chuck. “What are you doing?!” he screamed. “Why are you helping him? Don’t you understand—he’s the ENEMY! You don’t help him in any way.”

Gary was exactly right. He WAS the enemy. Smith turned pro at the end of that season and there was nothing he could do about it. If he had told Smith to stay away from the bird-dog or any other agenting types, just as Lefty had said, Smith would have seen the order as selfish and self-serving and the agents would have reinforced that every chance they got.

That’s what makes this latest spate of NCAA investigations into player-agent relationship so difficult to deal with as an outsider. It’s very easy to say, “police the agents,” but how? To begin with, the NBA and NFL would have to work with the NCAA and that almost never happens. Beyond that, most agents are smart enough to not leave a trail behind. As Digger Phelps once said about coaches paying recruits: “it’s tough to prove cash.”

It’s tough to prove anything—especially given that the NCAA has always been monumentally understaffed in enforcement and seems more concerned with not talking to the media than with actually getting anything done.

Look, I’m not making excuses for anybody. The agents and the people who work for them shouldn’t be anywhere near college athletes and if they go anywhere near one, coaches should have the guts to tell them to get the hell away. If a player gets upset about it, you explain to him why he cannot be associated with an agent or anyone who has even been breathed on by an agent. If they don’t understand that, chances are they already have their hand out and you (the coach) have a serious problem.

Any agent caught dealing with a college athlete should be banned. And if it someone who works for him in any way, same thing. By banned I mean he can’t be registered with the NFL or the NBA or negotiate a contract with a team on behalf of an athlete for at least two years. I don’t mean if he’s caught giving a kid money, I mean if he shakes hands with a kid.

Years ago, when Eddie Fogler was still an assistant at North Carolina, I was standing with him on the court at University Hall at Virginia about 45 minutes before a game. All of a sudden, Eddie said, “oh dammit, now I’ve got trouble.”

I looked up and saw a man walking in his direction, hand out, smile on his face. I honestly don’t remember the man’s name but Eddie began waving his arms and saying, “Mr. Jones (made-up-name) nothing personal, but I can’t even shake your hand, I’ll be breaking the rules.”

The man was a potential recruit’s father. The last thing Fogler wanted to do was be rude. But the no-bump rules back then meant even accidental contact could be a violation.

Did Fogler act that way because I happened to be standing there? I don’t think so, but even if he did—fine—those are the kind of rules agents needs to be forced to live under. We all know all these excuses are, to put it in polite terms, hooey. The agents are friends of the family; they’re trying to help a kid out (that’s the biggest lie of them all); they just happened to have a house they could rent to a kid’s parents for $25 a month—and on and on. Just say none of those excuses wash. If it WAS an innocent mistake, well, too bad, you lose.

And the notion that the players don’t know they’re doing something wrong? Oh please. They’re all told the rules and they’re all told to stay away from three groups of people: agents, gamblers and the media. (We’re bad guys too because we ask questions). Here’s what I’ve heard coaches say to players: “If ANYONE wants to give you something for free, come tell me. Do NOT accept it, not even a movie ticket.”

The players know the rules but they’re also taught that they’re above the rules. And most of the time, even when they get caught—see Bush, Reggie; Mayo, O.J. et al—they don’t pay the price, the next generation of players and coaches pay the price. That’s another problem with NCAA enforcement: it moves so slowly that the guilty parties are usually out of dodge by the time the posse gets to town. (See Carroll, Pete and Floyd, Tim—who is somehow coaching at UTEP this coming season with no penalty while USC is still under NCAA sanctions).

The bottom line is this: It’s a hard problem for everyone. But the solution is NOT to do nothing. The solution is to understand that no answer is perfect but try to find one that sends a clear message to players, coaches and agents that this behavior won’t be tolerated. And if that behavior upsets a player—tough. Gary Williams was right—agents (and their surrogates) ARE the enemy. In college athletics it isn’t some of the time that they’re the enemy it is ALL the time.

Today is a day to write about both the sublime and the ridiculous.

The sublime came early yesterday when my good friend Paul Goydos shot 59—FIFTY-NINE!—in the first round of The John Deere Classic. For those of you who don’t follow golf, Paul was the fourth player in the history of The PGA Tour to shoot 59 in an official tour event. In all likelihood, he won’t even win this weekend—although he’s off to a pretty decent start—but he is now a part of golf history.

The ridiculous, of course, was ESPN’s LeBron James infomercial/love-athon. Let me just say two things quickly now: 1. ESPN flat out lied about when James would actually announce where he was playing. It insisted the public would know, “in the first ten minutes,” of the show. Jim Gray FINALLY stopped asking questions about the ‘process,’ at 9:27. I’m not good at math but 27 is considerably more than 10 last time I checked. 2. Some ESPN suit named Norby Williamson proudly declared yesterday that ESPN was in complete control of the show, “other than what comes out of his (James’s) mouth.” If so, everyone involved should submit their resignations this morning. ESPN at its best is very good; at its worst completely awful. This went beyond anything it has ever done for horrific.

Okay, let’s get back to Goydos because it is a far more pleasant topic. I make absolutely no secret of the fact that I’m in the tank for Paul and have been almost since the day I met him at The Buick Open in 1993 when I was researching “A Good Walk Spoiled.”

On that day, his opening line at a press conference was, “Most of you have never heard of me. There’s a reason for that. I’ve never done anything.”

My kind of guy. He ended up being the cult hero of the book and we’ve been friends ever since through a lot of ups and downs in both our lives. If you follow golf, you know that Paul’s wife Wendy got hooked on methamphetamines years ago trying to find some relief from constant migraine headaches. She ended up in and out of rehab but never was able to get completely clean. Paul ended up a single dad, dropping off the tour for a year to be with his teen-age girls. Then, a year ago in January, Wendy died of an apparent overdose.

I still vividly remember Paul’s phone call that day. I was driving home from a basketball game at Bucknell. I knew he had missed the cut at Hawaii but as soon as I heard his voice I knew he wasn’t calling to complain about his golf. Wendy was 44.

What makes Goydos a unique character is his sense of humor, which is about as dry and self-deprecating as I’ve ever seen—his opening comment that first day I met him being a good example. Later he was explaining how he plays his best golf when he gets his slice going. “I know when you’re on The PGA Tour you’re supposed to call it a fade,” he said. “But when you hit a seven iron and it goes 20 yards to the right that’s not a fade, that’s a slice.”

Paul has always described himself as “the worst player in the history of The PGA Tour.” Given that he’s been out there 18 years, has won twice and lost a memorable playoff to Sergio Garcia at the 2008 Players Championship even before yesterday, he’d have trouble making that case.

But he’s certainly not your typical golfer. He’s got a homemade swing and kind of slumps around the course, looking like a guy you might run into at the local muni on Saturday morning. He grew up on a muni in Long Beach and went to Long Beach State. When a problem with one of his hands—he couldn’t grip a club—seemed to end his golf career he did some teaching in the Long Beach school system, often working at inner city schools. That background has certainly given him a different view of life than most of his fellow pros.

Rarely does Paul get openly excited about a round of golf. I remember years ago when he played a U.S. Open qualifier at Woodmont and shot 63 the first 18 holes.

“Great playing,” I said.

“I didn’t make a single putt,” he answered.

“And shot 63?”

“Well, I guess I hit it pretty well.”

Yesterday was different. When I talked to him on the phone yesterday afternoon, he’d done hours of media because he’ll never say no when people want to talk to him. “Actually it caught me by surprise,” he said. “I mean, I know 59 is an iconic number, I was fully aware of what was going on the last few holes. I wasn’t going to sit there and pretend it wasn’t a big deal. I remember thinking on the 16th tee, ‘okay, lots of guys have the chance to shoot 59 but only THREE have actually done it. Let’s do everything possible to be number four.’”

He made three birdies to do it, holing a seven-footer on 18. “That’s the most nervous I think I’ve ever been over a putt in my life,” he said. “I KNOW winning is a bigger deal than shooting 59 but I also know people will remember me for this more than for the two wins or even The Players—which was a pretty big deal when it happened.”

Of course he had a memorable line which he had been repeating all day: “Most people dream of shooting their age. I shot my height.” He is 5-9 so shooting his height isn’t easy.

The irony is that a week ago when I’d seen him in Philadelphia he’d been legitimately down about his game—not just Goydos, worst-player-in-history down, truly down. He’d had a chance to win at Pebble Beach in February before making a nine at the 14th hole on Sunday. Since then, he hadn’t played well.

“I probably let that get to me more than I realized,” he said. “On the other hand, a four month slump for me isn’t exactly big news. I have one just about every year.”

I hope he’s out of it now. The day after a great round is the toughest one there is for a golfer. The good news is he starts out five shots clear of the field except for defending champion Steve Stricker, who went out in the afternoon and shot 60. “To start your round 12 shots behind the leader and finish it one shot back is pretty impressive,” Goydos said.

To shoot 59 is more impressive. And trust me, it couldn’t happen to a better guy. I hope he can keep it going through the weekend.

Okay, back to the ridiculous. We all knew the so-called, “Decision,” would be bad TV but did anyone imagine how bad? The painful stalling with more mindless chatter and a Stu Scott narrated paean to The King—in which he called him the greatest player in the game—was brutal. I can’t wait for Stu’s next conversation with Kobe Bryant. Even Chris Broussard, who had the story, hedged. “I hear Miami but it could be Cleveland, New York or Chicago,” he said.

I wonder: Was he ORDERED by ESPN to hedge to stretch out the “suspense.”

There were commercials galore; reminders who was sponsoring the show and then the five minutes of torturous questions from Gray—again, no doubt under orders from the suits. No one—NO ONE—cared about the damn process at that point.

Michael Wilbon, after the opening silly, “how tough was this,” question tried to get James to say something but he was strictly on message. Everyone in Cleveland was a great guy. He just wanted to win, blah-blah-blah. It was funny how he kept talking about, “everything I’ve done for the city.” Yeah, there are all those championship banners he helped hang. Oh wait, that’s not The King, he’s hung ZERO banners. Look, he has a perfect right to go wherever he wants but please don’t sit there and tell people in Cleveland how much you’ve done for them. The last thing they saw you do was wimp out against the Celtics.

Worst of all though was after the announcement finally was over and Wilbon’s attempts to get James to answer questions had failed, was Scott saying, “And the King has ANOTHER big announcement to make.” The big announcement was that someone ELSE was giving a bunch of money to The Boys and Girls Clubs. The only thing missing at that point was Jerry Lewis. Then again, Scott posing as any kind of journalist is funnier than Lewis and Martin at their peak.

I’m a little embarrassed that I watched but it was a little bit like trying to drive past an accident without rubber-necking. My new favorite owner is Dan Gilbert.

By the way, the NCAA announced—AGAIN—yesterday that it is ALMOST ready to announce what it is going to do with the 68-team NCAA Tournament format. (They called it the “enhanced,” 68 team field). I think they’re negotiating with ESPN for a special called, “The Decision."




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John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

There’s a fascinating story in Sunday’s Washington Post on John Wall, the Kentucky freshman guard who will be the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft tomorrow night. Eric Prisbell, who does an excellent job covering college hoops for The Post, spent a week in Raleigh interviewing Wall, his mom, his old coaches and some of his friends. Since Wall is about to become the face of The Washington Wizards it was a natural story to do.

The story Eric wrote paints a shattering picture of Wall’s early life: his father was in jail almost from the time he was born until he died of cancer just prior to John’s ninth birthday. The only time John Wall saw his father outside of jail was the last month of his life when he was released from prison because his cancer was terminal.

After his father’s death, Wall became—by his own description—a very angry kid, constantly in trouble, thrown off basketball teams in spite of his talent, often benched, moving from school to school while his mother, raising three kids as a single parent worked multiple jobs.

Then came the intervention of a high school coach, an understanding of his own potential and, now, superstardom. It is a well-reported, well-written story. In return for a job well done, Prisbell is being criticized by a number of people for the story. Here’s why: During his research, Prisbell learned that John Wall Sr. had been to jail more than once and not just on the armed robbery charge that his son knew about. He had been convicted prior to his son’s birth of second degree murder for shooting a woman in the head. (Click here for Eric Prisbell's column)

John Wall Jr. was apparently unaware of this. His mother had never told him. He had never asked for more details about his dad’s incarceration—certainly understandable, especially given how young he was at the time. Prisbell and his editors had a choice to make: leave the detail about his dad committing murder out of the story completely or tell Wall about it before writing the story. Simply writing it without telling him wasn’t an option. Imagine how Wall might have felt picking up the newspaper or, worse, having someone say to him, “hey I read in The Washington Post your dad committed murder.”

I know there will be some people who see the notion of telling someone their father committed murder as cruel and un-necessary. But Wall’s father and his relationship with him and the way he behaved after his death were all a crucial part of the story. Leaving out the fact that he had been convicted of murder would be hiding a crucial—and once you know something and don’t reveal it you are hiding it—fact. What’s more, it was going to come out at some point. Prisbell may have been the first person to check the legal records, he would not have been the last. As Wall’s star continues to rise, there will be other long pieces written about him and his past and his father’s past will be part of those stories.

John Wall was going to find out about his father whether Prisbell told him or not. What’s more he did it as delicately as possible and, if you read the story, the revelation is near the bottom of a very long piece and is dealt with in about three paragraphs. It’s not as if there was a blaring headline that said, “No. 1 Pick’s Dad a Murderer.” If you think some outlets on the internet or among newspaper wouldn’t have handled it that way, think again.

Prisbell is uncomfortable being part of the story, which is understandable. There are also some dopes out there who are somehow connecting the reporting he did here to the reporting he and Steve Yanda did 16 months ago on the Maryland basketball program. Then, with all sorts of (accurate) rumors floating that Athletic Director Debbie Yow was trying to find a way to ease Gary Williams out of his job after 20 years, Prisbell and Yanda did a three part series on Maryland basketball. The single most important thing that they reported in detail was this: Gary Williams had steadfastly refused to get down in the mud with coaches in the slimy world of AAU basketball and that had cost him some superstar players. He had also refused to be blackmailed into giving one star player’s “trainer,” a job and had decided, after wrestling with it for a long time, not to recruit a star player who had a criminal record.

Although Gary got bent out of shape about the series and Maryland fans tried to make Prisbell and Yanda into the bad guys in the scenario, the fact is that the series HELPED Maryland by giving a clear picture of why the program had slid from its peak in 2001 and 2002 when it reached back-to-back Final Fours. Some fool called a local radio show yesterday claiming The Post had to run a ‘correction,’ after the series ran which was simply wrong. Prisbell is a very good reporter who I’ve been fortunate to work with for nine years now. He was dealing with a very tough story once he found out about Wall’s dad and he handled it as well as it could be handled. The notion that he could have just walked away from what he found is ludicrous.

I’ve become part of the story myself on more than one occasion. The two that were most significant were entirely different. One was on a series I wrote along with another Post reporter, Gene Meyer, while I was covering cops and courts. It involved a group of police officers in Prince George’s County who had set-up black teen-agers in the 1960s to be killed. They became known as, “The Death Squad,” and when Gene and I got a number of people—including one of the cops involved—on the record we had to go to the other cops involved, one of whom had risen to No. 2 in the police department, to hear their side of the story.

Since I had been the initiator of the story—having stumbled into the phrase, ‘Death Squad,’ while working on another story—the cops involved HATED me for asking the questions we were asking. One threatened to kill me—on tape—in the middle of an interview. Was I shaken up? No, not a bit. And if you believe that you believe in The Easter Bunny too.

The other time was quite different: When ‘A Season on the Brink,’ came out Bob Knight insisted I had promised him I’d leave his profanity out of the book. At first I thought he was joking when he said it because who in the world didn’t know Knight used profanity? But he was serious and I had to spend a lot of time explaining that I had told Knight that writing a book about him without profanity would be like writing a book about him without the word basketball. I loved the way the book sold; I hated having my integrity questioned knowing that some people would automatically believe Knight.

No one should question Eric Prisbell on this story. He did his job. And he did it very well.



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John recently appeared on The Jim Rome Show (www.jimrome.com) to discuss 'Moment of Glory.' Click here to download, or listen in the player below:



------------------------------
John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

Last night was a bit melancholy for me. The hockey season ended. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy for The Blackhawks and for long-suffering fans in Chicago who went almost 50 years between Stanley Cups. There are few things in sports more dramatic than any overtime playoff game in hockey but when the Cup is decided in overtime it is quite a sight and a scene. That said, you had to feel something for The Flyers and their fans, seeing an unbelievable run end on what has to be considered a soft goal.

If it sounds like I’m Billy Martin on this—feeling strongly both ways—I am. I don’t have any special feelings, either yay or nay for either franchise. I like both cities a lot. I love going to Chicago, especially in the spring or fall. One of my favorite days in recent memory was last November when I flew in (yes, I actually flew) there from a speaking gig in Phoenix the day before Navy played at Notre Dame. I spent the afternoon just walking around The Magnificent Mile and over to Lake Michigan before meeting friends for dinner. The next morning I drove over to South Bend—the weather both days was spectacular, it was 67 (!!) at kickoff inside Notre Dame Stadium—and saw Navy beat Notre Dame. It was a great two days.

I also have a warm spot in my heart for Philly. I laugh when people here in Washington put down Philadelphia. There is no comparison between the two as sports towns. For one thing, all of Philly’s major sports venues are right in the same place in South Philadelphia. The politicians there managed to get it right rather than fighting with one another so that the football stadium ended up in a cow pasture somewhere out in Maryland the way it did here.

Wachovia Center and Verizon Center are similar. Lincoln Financial Field is about 100 times nicer than the stadium formerly named for Jack Kent Cooke because almost any stadium is 100 times nicer than that place. Nationals Park is a fine facility but Citizens Bank Park is magnificent, built so that one can see the Philadelphia skyline from almost anyplace inside the park.

Washington is a transient town and a Redskins town. Philadelphia is a SPORTS town. Oh sure we hear the stories about the drunks who makes fools of themselves at ballgames but I’d rather deal with that than an owner who has signs confiscated from fans trying to send out a message to their husband who is serving overseas.

There’s also The Big Five. While most of Washington’s college basketball teams play silly games to avoid playing one another, Philly’s five major D-1 teams (and you can add Drexel too) play each other every year—many of those games in college basketball’s best arena, The Palestra.

But I digress. Hockey. I love hockey and always have. This winter I actually saw some hope for my long-beleaguered Islanders and my schedule fell in such a way that I got to watch the team play on the hockey package a lot. The Olympics were spectacular—and, in my mind part of the reason the ratings for the finals have been so high. The NHL did a brilliant thing starting the Winter Classic and these playoffs, with the No. 7 seed facing the No. 8 seed in the Eastern Finals and one of the sport’s truly classic franchises ending up with the Cup, have been fabulous.

So here’s to the Blackhawks—present and future. Given the youth of their best players, they should be contenders for a while. Just hearing The United Center rocking again after several miserable years did my heart good.

So why melancholy? It’s something that dates to boyhood. I always feel a little sad when a season ends. I have this distinct memory of watching game seven of The Blackhawks-Canadiens final in 1971. It was a tough series to watch because the Rangers were my team then (no Islanders until ’72-’73) and they had lost to the Blackhawks in seven games—even though they had won game six in triple overtime on a goal by Pete Stemkowski.

I remember that game vividly because it was a school night (Thursday) and a lot of fans came with signs to Madison Square Garden that said, “Let there be Sunday.” I brought my radio, as I always did, to listen to Marv Albert during the game and remember him saying at one point during the overtime something like, “I just want to let our babysitter (can’t remember her name) know we’ll be home as soon as possible.”

There was Sunday, but the Blackhawks and Bobby Hull were too good. In the meantime, Ken Dryden had announced his arrival as a hockey force by single-handedly beating the defending champion Bruins. When the Canadiens then forced a game seven on a Sunday afternoon in Montreal during the finals, I was bereft: I wouldn’t get to see game seven because CBS only did Sunday games. Except CBS made arrangements to televise game seven—first hockey game on network TV in primetime I believe. The Canadiens came from 2-0 down in Chicago to win.

What I remember most about that game—besides Jacques Lemaire’s goal from about 80 feet—is feeling sad that hockey season was over. When did training camp begin? When could I go and buy tickets in the blue seats for early season Rangers games?

As much as my life has changed through the years, I STILL feel that way. The Islanders start camp when?—heck it’s a little more than three months away. Who will they take with the fifth pick in the draft? How good will the Caps be coming back from their disappointment in the playoffs? I’m PSYCHED.

Of course I feel the same way at the end of The World Series and The Final Four. I saw a story in the paper yesterday about the fact that college hoops season will begin on November 8th (I will get into the bogus nature of The Coaches vs. Cancer season-opening event another day. Put simply: Even if Maryland, Illinois, Pittsburgh or Texas LOSE one of their first two games they will still ‘advance,’ to the semifinals in New York. What a joke). And did the math in my head: five months until college hoops starts.

I’ll admit I don’t get as sad about the end of the NFL season or the NBA season in part because the NBA season never ends. (Note to Michael Wilbon: those of us who don’t love all things NBA as you do are not ‘meatheads.’ Come on, quit selling the product so hard all the time). I fall in the middle on college football because it SHOULD end on New Year’s Day and night. In the old days, when the Orange Bowl ended, I would get up after 10 hours of football, sigh and wonder what the best games would be of the first weekend in September. I’m willing to give that up for a true PLAYOFF but not for the ridiculous BCS. By the way, this coming season’s so-called national championship game is on January 10th. January 10th! You could have a full-blown eight-team playoff and the season would last exactly ONE week longer than it does now. What a joke.

Anyway, I was happy for the Blackhawks when Patrick Kane’s shot went in the net last night but a bit sad there would be no game 7. A game 7 in The Stanley Cup finals is about as intense and cool an event as there is in sports. On the other hand, the draft is in two weeks and the Islanders report to camp in, by my calculations, 93 days.


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John recently appeared on The Jim Rome Show (www.jimrome.com) to discuss 'Moment of Glory.' Click here to download, or listen in the player below:



------------------------------
John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

The Golf Channel will be airing a documentary based on the book "Caddy for Life: The Bruce Edwards Story," with the premiere showing Monday, June 14 at 9 p.m. ET.
I can’t wait.

When I got the phone call on Thursday night that John Wooden was in the hospital and not expected to live much longer, the first thing I did was go and dig out the folders I have that contain the transcripts of the interviews I did seven years ago with Red Auerbach when I wrote, “Let Me Tell You A Story.”

I knew there were some great quotes from Red about Coach Wooden and I wanted to use some of them in the column I was going to write for The Washington Post—in The Post when someone dies they call it, ‘an appreciation,’—whenever the sad time came.

As I read through the quotes, I had two thoughts. The first was a funny one, a memory of running into Coach Wooden at The Final Four in New Orleans when I was working with Red on the book. He was 93 at the time, but still sharp as a tack. When I saw him one morning and went over to say hello, he asked me what I was working on.

“Well coach,” I said, “I’m actually doing a book right now on a dear friend of yours, Red Auerbach.”

“Oh that’s wonderful,” Coach Wooden said. “Red is such a nice young man.”

Red was 86 at the time. Everything in life is relative.

The other thing I thought about was how remarkably fortunate I’ve been to know—I would argue—the greatest basketball coaches who ever lived on the pro, college and high school levels. With all due respect to Phil Jackson, I would make the case that Red was the greatest NBA coach because he did more than just coach: he put together 16 championship teams. From 1950 to 1966 he WAS the Celtics: the coach, the general manager, the scout, even the marketing director. He had no assistant coaches. The Celtics kept winning after he stopped coaching because of the work he did as the GM.

I will readily admit to a bias here because of my friendship with Red but I suspect a lot of people will come down on my side of the argument.

With Wooden, there are no ifs, ands or buts. His 10 national titles is more than double the number won by any other college coach. Mike Krzyzewski and Adolph Rupp each won four; Bob Knight won three and then a handful of coaches, led by Dean Smith, won two.

As for Morgan, his record at DeMatha High School over 44 years was something ridiculous like 1,204 and 137. I’m probably off a little bit in those numbers but not by much. His most famous victory was against Power Memorial High School and Lew Alcindor in 1964, ending what was (I think) a 71 game winning streak. The story always told about that game—which was played in front of a sellout crowd of 14,500 at Maryland’s Cole Field House—was Morgan having his players use tennis racquets in practice to simulate what it would be like to shoot over Alcindor.

Working at The Washington Post, I had the chance to get to know Morgan well, which was a pleasure because he is about as nice a human being as you will meet in any walk of life. I’ve always joked that the meanest thing I ever heard Morgan say to anyone was, “how’s it going today?”

Of course when he was coaching it was different. He rarely raised his voice and, like Wooden, profanity wasn’t part of his repertoire. (Red may have used it once or twice). Years ago, I did a lengthy profile of Morgan. As part of my research for the story, I sat in on his history class—he never stopped teaching the entire time he coached.

I was a history major in college and I was lucky enough to have some outstanding professors. Morgan was the best teacher I’ve ever seen. He had a unique way of conveying the information to the students that made you want to just sit in his classroom all day. He was smart and funny, informative and sounded more like a great storyteller as he spoke than someone teaching a class. If I could have afforded the tuition back then, I might have enrolled at DeMatha just to take his class.

All three were great communicators. They had a way of connecting with their players that went well beyond teach x’s and o’s. All understood that you do NOT treat every player the same because every player isn’t the same person. Some need coddling, others need to be pushed—or shoved—to get better.

All knew when to make a point—and how to make a point. Shortly after Red made Bill Russell the Celtics player-coach, there was a snowstorm in Boston. Russell didn’t make it to the game until the start of the fourth quarter. The Celtics, with Red coaching, were leading when Russell showed up and went on to win the game—without Russell.

Afterwards, Red was furious. “Red, there was a snowstorm in case you didn’t notice,” Russell said. “I got stuck. I couldn’t get here. How can you get on me about that?”

“Because,” Red said, “Eleven other guys figured out a way to get here on time. If anything, you should have been the one guy who got here, not the one guy who didn’t.”

It was Morgan who opened the door to my friendship with Red. I had heard about his Tuesday lunches at a downtown Chinese restaurant but never dreamed there was any way to get invited—especially since Red was close to Bob Knight, who, after “A Season on the Brink,” wasn’t the president of my fan club. But I ran into Red one night doing a local TV show and he couldn’t have been more gracious. I wondered if there was any way to go to the lunch once to write a column about it.

I called my friend Jack Kvancz, who was (and is) the athletic director at George Washington and a regular attendee. “If I ask him, I’m not sure what he’ll say,” Jack said. “If Morgan asks, he’ll say yes.”

So I called Morgan. He asked and, as Jack predicted, Red said yes. I went the next week, was invited to keep coming back and never stopped going. I have lots and lots of stories about the lunches but one stands out in my memory. Red always liked to tease me about Krzyzewski, knowing we were friends.

“You know Mike never let Tommy Amaker shoot,” Red said one day, talking about Krzyzewski’s first great point guard, who is now the coach at Harvard. “The kid was a great shooter. He would have been a great pro if Mike had let him shoot.”

I loved Amaker, but he’d always been more of a passer than a shooter. I told Red I didn’t think Amaker was a shooter. Red turned to Morgan. “You saw the kid in high school, what’d you think of him?”

“You couldn’t stop him,” Morgan said. “He could score almost at will.”

I was shaking my head, saying I just didn’t see it that way when Rob Ades, another of the lunch group jumped in. “John,” he said. “You have here the greatest NBA coach ever and the greatest high school coach ever. You think YOU know more about basketball than they do?”

At that point I shut up. My guess is if Coach Wooden had been there he’d have told me I was wrong too.



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John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

To listen to 'The Bob and Tom Show' interview about 'Moment of Glory', please click the play button below:

LeBron James has come out of hiding—sort of. He taped an interview earlier this week with Larry King on CNN in which he apparently tells King that Cleveland has, “the edge,” in terms of signing him once the free agent period begins on July 1.

If you believe that statement has any meaning at all, I would suggest you start baking Santa’s cookies right now because you can never start too early on a task like that.

Let’s start with the venue James chose for his re-coming out party after he absolutely spit the bit in the NBA playoffs against The Boston Celtics. King still has a huge audience—LeBron likes that. King reaches a non-sports audience—LeBron, man of the world, likes that too. King isn’t likely to ask too many tough questions—LeBron likes that most of all.

Now, without benefit of seeing the interview, here are some of the questions I would have asked had I been guest-hosting for King (I actually DID guest host his old radio show years ago but for some reason have never gotten the call from the TV people) on the night LeBron showed up.

1. What the hell happened in the Boston series—especially games five and six and double-especially game five when you were so bad there were people who actually suggested you were tanking?(Follow up if he starts rubbing his elbow: Then what happened in game three when you went off for 38 points? Did you re-injure it? And then: Do you understand why people would be skeptical if this is the best you’ve got as an excuse?).

2. If you’re leaning towards Cleveland, why all the theatrics? You know they will pay you max money, why not just say Cleveland is where you want to be, that you still have unfinished business there?

3. Do you understand how reviled you will be in the state of Ohio if you leave without ever having delivered anything other than boatloads of cash for yourself?

4. If a championship is really your first priority in life (as he will no doubt claim) how about taking a break from peddling products until you produce one? (fat chance but the question might get an interesting answer).

5. Do you understand why people are saying right now that Kobe is a lot better than you as he plays in The Finals for a seventh time and the third straight year without Shaq? By the way, is it sheer coincidence that you scheduled this interview in the middle of The Finals? Is there a little bit of A-Rod (see World Series, game 4, 2007) involved in the timing?

6. What did you mean after game five when you said you had played three bad games in seven years? Three, really? And, to follow up, did you really mean you only disappoint yourself when you play poorly? Those folks paying for tickets and buying all of your products, you aren’t concerned about them?

7. You do understand that no one buys into your numbers in game six? You had nine turnovers and were invisible when the game was on the line.

The one question I would not ask that people might find relevant is the one about his mom and Delonte West. That comes from the wild rumor category and I’d only go there if HE brought it up and somehow decided to confirm it—which I would think is extremely unlikely. My guess is that the tone of the King interview is somewhat different than mine—which may be one of many reasons why King is who he is. He may not be as soft a landing spot as, say, almost anyone on ESPN, but he’s pretty close.

It’s my personal opinion that James isn’t going back to Cleveland. This is not based on any inside information at all, only on my observations of him through the years. To be as great a player as he is—and he IS great even if he hasn’t been able to close the deal in the playoffs yet—you have to have a massive ego. To be surrounded by enablers every day who are no doubt telling him that Michael Jordan should sit at his right hand, probably makes keeping any sort of perspective pretty close to impossible.

Which is why I think his first concern will be the size of the stage and the size of his audience. That to me means New York or it means New Jersey/Brooklyn with the billionaire Russian telling him how he will help market him worldwide. I still don’t see Chicago because he’s going to want a bigger statue than Jordan someday and that’s not happening there. Miami is a dark horse because he might somehow think playing for Pat Riley—or even better, having Riley say he will come back one more time JUST to coach LeBron—makes him even bigger than he already is. Fitting those two egos into one locker room would be worth the price of admission.

In truth, it is all speculation, which is what LeBron wants. The more people talk about his free agency, the less they talk about his meltdown against the Celtics. The more they talk about him at all, the less they talk about Kobe.

So, the King interview does everything LeBron wants it to do. It diverts some attention from Kobe and from The Finals. It allows him to keep people in Cleveland at bay for a while longer with his coy, “Cleveland has the edge,” non-answer and it means he has come out in public without yet facing hard questions about what happened in the Boston series.

It’s too bad the interview was taped. It would have been pretty funny if King had taken questions and had started out with, “New York—you’re next!”

******

Someone pointed out yesterday that in writing about the sports I was looking forward to paying attention to in the coming week I failed to mention The French Open. Wow, talk about a Freudian slip.

It isn’t that I’m completely un-interested in what goes on at Roland Garros. I have a lot of fond memories of covering the tournament in the 80s and early 90s. I mean, just being in Paris at this time of year, can’t possibly be anything other than a great assignment.

But tennis just doesn’t do it for me the way it once did. Some of it, no doubt, is because I don’t know the players anymore. I know the announcers, not the players. Some of it is, I’m sure, the American drought on the men’s side: no American man has won a major title since Andy Roddick won the U.S. Open in 2003 and there’s no sign that may change in the near future—unless Roddick can finally somehow win Wimbledon.

I may be the one guy on earth who doesn’t enjoy watching Maria Sharapova play. Healthy, she’s a superb player and she’s drop dead gorgeous but the screams on every single shot are just too much for me. She makes Monica Seles sound like a mute. And, fairly or unfairly, even though I recognize the brilliance of the Williams sisters, I have never been able to enjoy them as much as I should. Some of it may be their need to constantly call attention to everything BUT their tennis; some of it may be that they are never gracious in defeat—it’s always, “I gave her the match,”—and some of it is the respect I lost for Serena after her behavior at the Open last fall. (Not to mention her moron agent sticking her hand in front of the CBS camera afterwards).

So, I’ll probably watch at least for a while from the semifinals on—although my pal Mary Carillo won’t be there because she’s flying home for her daughter’s high school graduation this weekend—but the truth is I just won’t be as into it as I was once upon a time. I wish that wasn’t the case, especially since Nadal and Federer appear to be good guys, but that’s the way it is.


--------------------------------------

John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

To listen to 'The Bob and Tom Show' interview about 'Moment of Glory', please click the play button below:

I had to be in the car very early this morning to go downtown to a TV interview promoting ‘Moment of Glory.’ I promise this isn’t going to be another rant on the quality of sports talk radio although I continued to be amazed by the hourly rate of commercials, sponsor-drop-ins and self-promos that go on in four letter land.

What got my attention was a ‘story,’ that Phil Jackson has been contacted—indirectly of course—by the Chicago Bulls about perhaps going back there to coach and bringing LeBron James along with him to try to rekindle the glory years of the 90s in Chicago.

Oh please.

Look, all of us in the news business know there are times when people are using us to get a message of some kind out. Most leaks are extremely intentional which is why they are often referred to as trial balloons. You throw an idea up in the air and see if it is allowed to float or if someone sticks a pin in it.

I frequently get phone calls from people which start with the words, “I hear.” My next question is usually, “who did you hear this from?” If I think a source is credible I will try to get him on the record—as in putting his name to the story—rather than allow him to hide behind the ‘I hear,’ anonymity.

Of course there are times when a reporter has to grant a source anonymity. The most important news story ever broken was Watergate and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had to rely on anonymous sources because you just don’t go on the record and say, ‘The President is a crook,’ especially if you are still on that president’s payroll (okay, technically the government’s payroll).

Nowadays though, anonymous sources have become the norm. In fact, in the blogosphere, people will pretty much throw out any rumor they hear and see if anything happens to stick. It’s a different world than the one in which Woodward and Bernstein never wrote anything unless at least two sources had separately confirmed the information they had.

The so-called Jackson, ‘report,’ is a perfect example of what would loosely be called journalism in 2010. Everyone knows Jackson’s contract is up at the end of this season. Everyone knows he wants to stay with the Lakers but wants to be paid in the style--$12 million a year—to which he has become accustomed. Apparently, even though Jackson has been romantically involved with Jeanie Buss, daughter of Lakers owner Jerry Buss, for a number of years, Buss is balking at the $12 million price tag.

So Jackson is floating stories he might go elsewhere. Maybe he’ll go back to his roots in New York and coach the Knicks—forgetting the fact that the Knicks currently have a coach. Maybe he’ll got Cleveland and convince LeBron to stay. And now the Chicago rumor. If you were to lend credence to any of the ‘stories,’ being floated Jackson could wind up coaching about six teams next season.

So what do you do if you’re a reporter and someone anonymously whispers in your ear that someone from the Bulls has contacted Jackson through the infamous ‘back channels.’ What if that someone happens to be Jackson or someone really close to Jackson? Unfortunately, in today’s world, you go with it because if you don’t, someone else will. Plus, if it turns out to be wrong—as this almost surely will be—you just shrug and say, ‘well I had a source tell me it was true.’ Which no doubt you did.

Last week I had a source—one that I might have thought was in position to know—tell me that a prominent college basketball coach was about to retire. I grilled the guy, demanding to know what kind of evidence he had and he insisted that someone close to the coach had told him this was about to happen. When I asked how soon he said, “Forty-eight to a week—maximum.”

Trust me this would have been a big story. I could easily have put it out there and said I had a credible source who said it was about to happen. Fortunately, I know the coach pretty well so I picked up a phone and called him. To say that he denied the story would be a vast understatement. “Why don’t you tell this guy to show up the first day of practice and see if I’m there,” he said finally. “How does stuff like this get started?”

It usually gets started because someone has an agenda. Let’s look at Jackson for a moment. What’s his agenda? That’s pretty easy: He wants Buss to believe there are other teams willing to pay him the $12 million if Buss balks. No doubt there are teams willing to do that, especially if any of them believe that hiring him might entice James to sign on the dotted line.

Here’s the thing: Jackson isn’t going to spend a winter in Chicago, Cleveland or New York. He has enough difficulty getting his battered 65-year-old body on and off of airplanes and living in a cold weather environment isn’t going to make him feel any better. He’s got Kobe Bryant in LA; he’s got Jeanie Buss in LA and he’s got warm weather in LA. If he’s coaching next year—which he almost certainly will be—he’ll be coaching in LA.

That’s why all the talk this morning in response to the ‘report,’ that Chicago might be interested in him was such an incredible waste of time. It ranked right up there with actually reporting that the Cavaliers were ‘studying,’ Mike Brown’s coaching record the last two weeks. Here is what mattered about Brown’s coaching record: He didn’t win the NBA title the last two seasons. Period. He was getting fired unless James said he didn’t want him fired—which he wasn’t going to say.

I realize a lot of what we do these days is fill time and space but the Jackson ‘report,’ this morning was kind of a low water mark. But Jackson got what he wanted: word out in public someone else might want him and people—allegedly credible people—discussing it. Somewhere Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein must cringe on a regular basis.

Then again, they’re both too smart to pay much attention to any of this.


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John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases


To listen to 'The Bob and Tom Show' interview about 'Moment of Glory', please click the play button below:

Let’s give the NBA this much: The league has a certain flair for the dramatic. I mean seriously, did anyone think the New Jersey Nets and their new Russian multi-billionaire owner were going to get the first pick in the draft lottery last night?

Did anyone really think the league was going to turn away Irene Pollin, the widow of long-time Washington Bullets/Wizards Abe Pollin as she stood there wearing her husband’s 1978 NBA championship ring and give the top pick to the towering, scowling Mikhail Prokhorov? No way. Maybe if Prokhorov had sent one of the Russian tennis players/super models to represent him he might have had a shot.

No, I’m not one of those conspiracy nut jobs who thinks the first lottery in 1985 was fixed so that the Knicks would get Patrick Ewing. (It was awfully convenient for the league though wasn’t it?). And no, I don’t think David Stern ordered that the ping-pong balls bounce the Wizards way on Tuesday night. I just knew the Nets and Prokhorov weren’t getting the pick. Maybe it was just the odds—which were three-to-one against the Nets in spite of their 12-70 record. Forget about checking the ping pong balls, re-check the system.

All that said, what exactly did the Wizards win? According to ESPN, they won John Wall—no ifs, ands or buts. Within seconds of the Wizards being awarded the top pick, ESPN was on a satellite hook-up with Wall asking him what he was going to do next season to fit in with Washington.

Does ESPN now do the actual drafting for teams? Has the network informed Ted Leonsis, the new owner and Ernie Grunfeld, the current general manager, that the team is taking Wall? The interview with Wall was conducted from his home in California—at least that’s what I thought Mark Jones said—so I guess he’s taking a break from his post-graduate studies at Kentucky (if you listen to John Calipari talk Wall must be on the verge of getting his Masters and his PhD).

Here’s my question: Do the Wizards really want to draft Wall—ESPN’s expertise notwithstanding? Gilbert Arenas is still on the roster and he’s still owed $80 million by the team. IF the Wizards can convince someone to take Arenas, his contract, his guns and his baggage, then I would absolutely take Wall, who has unlimited potential at what I still think is the most important position in the game—even at the NBA level.

But Wall and Arenas together? Is the NBA going to pass a rule allowing teams to use two basketballs? There are some people who think Arenas can play the two-guard spot fulltime because he shoots the ball well enough to play there. Really? Have you been around the guy the last few years? Do you think he’s going to move without the basketball and hope the guy with the ball (Wall) decides to find him? I don’t think so. And who is he going to guard?

Time will tell of course. The Wizards have options now, thanks to Mrs. Pollin and the anti-Prokhorov karma that went on last night. Maybe they can trade down, get a starter from someone AND a high pick. They gutted their roster after the whole Arenas guns debacle this past season so there shouldn’t be anyone on the team who is untouchable. Leonsis has to decide whether he wants to keep Grunfeld around and then let him go to work. If he’s going to fire Grunfeld he needs to do it NOW, not after the draft. This is a critical time for a long woebegone franchise and, now that they have won the lottery, they can’t afford to go down the Kwame Brown road they went down nine years ago.

On the subject of the playoffs: You have to be impressed with the Celtics and, to be honest, unimpressed with the Magic. Orlando handled the end-game last night like a team that had never been in a close game. There were too many mistakes to count, topped by J.J. Redick’s mind-block with the basketball on the last possession. I can hear the, ‘not very smart for a Duke guy,’ jokes coming out of Chapel Hill and College Park right now.

Those jokes would be accurate.

The only thing that would come close to a LeBron-Kobe Finals for the league would be Celtics-Lakers, maybe the only NBA matchup left in which the TEAMS are as significant to the plot as the superstars. The Celtics don’t have a superstar, just four very good players, which may be why they’ve become so tough to beat. That and the fact that they’re all smart enough to know that this is probably the last roundup, that they aren’t likely to be this healthy this late in the season again anytime soon.

The Lakers of course, have Kobe Bryant and I keep hearing people ask if he belongs in the same sentence as Michael Jordan if the Lakers win and he gets a fifth championship ring. The answer is simple: NO. Bryant’s a great player, certainly a better, tougher and more clutch player right now than LeBron James, but let’s not get carried away. I will say this one more time: There was ONE Jordan. All these comparisons get out of hand. I still remember years ago hearing a TV announcer who will go un-named (but you can look at him live) compare North Carolina freshman guard Jeff Lebo to Jerry West. Seriously.

Let’s get over that. Championship rings ARE important in terms of measuring a superstar but they aren’t the be all and end all. If they were, Robert Horry and Steve Kerr would be Hall-of-Famers. So, if Kobe does win a fifth ring, more power to him and let’s move him up another notch in the category of special players.

But in the same sentence with Jordan? No.

Here’s the list of players who can be put in the same sentence with Jordan, regardless of position: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson. I’m not saying any are better, I’m just saying you can put them in the same breath with Jordan and maybe—MAYBE—make the argument they were as valuable or more valuable at the peak of their skills.

And, in case you’re interested, there’s NO ONE in this year’s draft who is going to end up in that sentence. That doesn’t mean there aren’t very good players but those guys are once-in-a-generation, not once a year.

*******

One thing about yesterday’s blog: I didn’t want to imply there is NO good sports talk anywhere in the country. Someone mentioned Ralph Barbieri and Tom Tolbert in San Francisco—yup, good radio guys and good interviewers. My pal Mike Gastineau in Seattle is also very good and, yes, his colleague Mitch Levy who is on mornings on KJR is a very good interviewer. Mitch just happens to have an ego that makes mine look non-existent and doesn’t know the difference between funny and insulting. Tony Kornheiser is obviously unique and also my friend as everyone knows. And Mark Patrick in Indianapolis, whose son happens to be new Nationals relief pitcher Drew Storen, also does very good and very smart work. Chris Myers does a long-form interview show on Fox sports radio that’s also an excellent listen. There are others I know I’m leaving out but those guys come to mind quickly.

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John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

To listen to 'The Bob and Tom Show' interview about  'Moment of Glory', please click the play button below:

At least LeBron James has learned a little bit in the last year about how to lose. After The Boston Celtics ended his season and quite possibly his career with the Cleveland Cavaliers, he stuck around to congratulate the Celtics with handshakes and a couple of hugs and then came into the interview room to talk about the NBA playoffs and—at least in broad terms—what his future may hold for him this summer.

That’s an improvement from a year ago when he bolted the building as soon as the Orlando Magic had finished off his team and then was un-apologetic about his wounded-diva act the following day. “Winners don’t congratulate people when they beat them,” he said.

Actually, that’s exactly what winners do. That’s one reason why the hockey tradition of the handshake line at the end of a playoff series is one of the great traditions in sports. Do you think it was painful for Alexander Ovechkin two weeks ago and Sidney Crosby two nights ago to line up and shake the hands of the eighth-seeded Montreal Canadiens after each had lost a seventh game at home to Les Habitants? (I love that nickname). Of course it was. But it would never occur to either star to NOT line up and shake hands.

At least James has learned that much about losing. But he still has a long, long way to go. His pre-game ramblings before game six about his performance in game five made little if no sense. At one point he claimed he had played three bad games in seven years. At another point he said that losing this series would have no affect at all on his legacy and acted as if he was a rookie playing his first postseason rather than a seven year veteran who may be getting ready to leave town for another team.

What’s clear when James talked is that, like so many athletes—especially Nike athletes—the carefully concocted marketing image is very different than the reality. James can certainly sell product. Talking off the top of his head, especially when faced with an on-court crisis, he’s not nearly as smooth.

That’s okay too. There’s no rule that says every great athlete has to be Arthur Ashe or Bill Bradley or Arnold Palmer. James is light years ahead of, say Stephen Strasburg, the Washington Nationals pitching phenom, who is so media-shy the team protects him as if he’s The President. When Strasburg gets to Washington the Nationals are going to have to bring the young reliever Drew Storen with him as both his designated closer and designated spokesman.

Back to James. The apologists will point out that he had a triple-double in game six and can’t be blamed for the lackluster play of his older teammates, notably Antawn Jamison and Shaquille O’Neal. The bashers will note the nine turnovers (a ridiculous number) and his unwillingness to try to take over the game. At 78-74, after he had FINALLY made a couple of threes, the opportunity for him to win the game for the Cavaliers was there. Instead, he literally handed it to Rajon Rondo, who outplayed him and everyone else throughout the series.

Let’s be fair about one thing: the constant comparisons to Michael Jordan—many the fault of Nike and his various marketing arms—are unfair and silly. There was ONE Jordan. There is no NEXT Jordan—not James, not Kobe Bryant, not the next eighth grader being over-publicized as we speak. Jordan wasn’t just a once-in-a-generation talent, he was a once-in-a-generation competitor.

He was never surrounded by great players and won six championships. Scottie Pippen became great because he had Jordan next to him. Everyone else was good enough to get Jordan to the fourth quarter and let Jordan win the game from there. That’s about what the Cavaliers are right now. They have a very good guard in Mo Williams and they tried to bring in experience and guys who could take some burden off James with O’Neal and Jamison. They won 65 games in the regular season, which makes them good—but apparently not good enough.

People will correctly point out that Jordan was in his seventh year when he won his first title. That’s true. James has just finished his seventh year. He also didn’t have three years in college under Dean Smith to learn the game the way Jordan did. Even so, he’s not Jordan. That doesn’t mean he isn’t going to win titles, I suspect he will. But his willingness to accept defeat and then to EXCUSE defeat makes him a lot different than Jordan.

Will he leave Cleveland? Probably. “Me and my team will make good decisions this summer,” isn’t likely to fill fans in that long-suffering city with confidence that he’s returning. He’s always been non-committal on his commitment to Cleveland. Some people are even writing and saying this morning that he needs to leave Cleveland because the burden of bringing a title there (the last championship team there was the old Browns in 1964) is just too much and he needs to get out.

Are you kidding? There’s less pressure in NEW YORK where the Knicks last won a title in 1973 and where they will start planning the parade the day he signs? There’s less pressure in Chicago where he can walk past Jordan’s statue every time he plays in The United Center? There’s less pressure in Miami where he’d have to fight Dwayne Wade for the basketball AND deal with Pat Riley’s ego?

In truth, he belongs in Cleveland. He can still be the (almost) hometown kid who brought a championship to the city. The Cavaliers would need to make changes around him: they probably need a new coach (I’d go get Jeff Van Gundy) and O’Neal is certainly done. But with James in town they can get players to surround him who can win a title. They aren’t there, but they aren’t that far away either.

This notion that he needs to go to New York to market himself is incredibly dumb. At James’s level it doesn’t matter where you play. Is Peyton Manning lacking for endorsement deals in Indianapolis?

WINNING makes you a billionaire not clever commercials. What’s more the RIGHT thing to do for James is to stay in Cleveland. It may be a quaint and outdated notion to say that an athlete owes something to a city but James owes Cleveland more than cutting-and-running the first chance he gets. It isn’t as if he’s going to suffer or be underpaid by staying there or he’s with an organization that won’t try to build a championship team around him.

James insisted on Wednesday that his legacy wasn’t at stake in this series. If he leaves Cleveland now his failures the last two years will very much be part of his legacy. And they will be HIS failures because the star gets credit so he must also take the blame. He still has a chance to change that legacy in Cleveland. But he can’t do it playing in New York.

*****

I want to take a second here to thank my friends at “The Bob and Tom Show.” They have been my first interview on every book I’ve done starting with “A Season on the Brink,” and, without fail the interview gives the book a running start. It did so again yesterday with “Moment of Glory,” and I don’t want any of the folks there to think I’m not grateful because I am. So thanks to Bob, Tom, Dean, Kristie, Chic and Joni for all their help through the years.

To listen to 'The Bob and Tom Show' interview, please click the play button below:


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John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases

You may or may not have noticed this but the deadline for underclassmen to declare themselves eligible for the NBA draft was Sunday. The list of players who put their names into the draft was officially released yesterday.

There were 61 names.

There are two rounds in the draft. A total of 60 players will be drafted. I understand that some players will withdraw between now and May 8th when they find out they aren’t going in the first round—where the money is guaranteed—or that they may not be drafted at all. But most of the big-name players whose names are on the list will stay on the list. And quite a few players will leave their names in, not get drafted and then begin nomadic lives that may take them overseas; may take them to the NBA’s Development League and, in a few cases, will land them in the NBA.

I will grant you that this year is not a good one to use as an example because some players have been convinced by agents that they MUST get into this June’s draft because a player strike or lockout is a virtual certainty in the summer of 2011. Even so, I have reached a conclusion that isn’t based solely on the number of underclassmen who have put their names into the pool, but was crystallized when I read the list yesterday morning: The one-and-done rule doesn’t work. It has to go.

I say that not for the reason that some people do: that it makes a mockery of the term, ‘student-athlete.’ That shipped sailed so many years ago that I’m not sure Columbus had learned to sail yet. In fact, in some ways the one-and-done has cut DOWN on the hypocrisy. Now, when someone who is clearly in college only because the rules say he must be there for a year, doesn’t go to class and makes little or no attempt to even stay eligible in his second semester, there’s no faking involved.

Years ago, the work that went into keeping players eligible for three or four years often involved things like having others take tests and write papers for them; getting grades changed and sometimes sending them to bogus summer school classes so they could keep playing—among other things. With one-and-done, it’s a whole lot neater because you don’t have to keep someone afloat academically for more than a semester. Sure, there’s still cheating going on, but less of it involves the very best players.

They’re in, they’re out and then they’re replaced by the next group. John Calipari won 35 games at Kentucky this season with four freshmen whose names are in the draft pool. He’s gone out and signed a brand new crop, most of whom will probably be in next year’s draft pool after Kentucky wins another 30+ games next season. If you don’t like it, don’t blame Calipari. He didn’t make the rules, he just taking full advantage of them. He’s well worth the $4 million a year Kentucky is paying him. My only request is that he not use the term, ‘student-athlete,’ when talking about his players.

Here’s why I initially thought one-and-done was a good idea: In my own naïve way, I believed it was better for kids to be exposed to college for a year, regardless of how many classes they actually took part in. I thought it was better for them to spend a year on a campus as opposed to a year on charter airplanes. I thought exposing them to other teen-age kids was better than exposing them to 30-year-olds who had been bouncing around basketball for 10 years or more.

I still think that’s all true. But I don’t think this is the way to do it. The NBA and the players’ union—remember these are NBA rules, not NCAA rules—need to fish or cut bait in the next collective bargaining agreement. The old CBA has one year left. Sadly, getting this done appears not to be a priority. NBA commissioner David Stern has been pleading owner poverty since the All-Star Break and, naturally, the players don’t want to hear it. So, a money war—which may or may not lead to a work stoppage; my bet is it won’t—is going to break out. The issue of when a player may try to enter the NBA is likely to be an afterthought.

It shouldn’t be, especially for the union, which is supposed to protect basketball players--past, present and future. Basketball needs to put in the same rule that currently exist in baseball: When a player graduates from high school he can put his name into the draft. If he is drafted he can sign with the team that drafts him or he can go to college. If he DOES go to college though, he can’t go back into the draft for three years.

What that does—especially in a two-round draft—is ensure that an NBA team must REALLY want a player to draft him. It should be the player’s option to choose between the NBA and college rather than forcing players to commit to the draft without knowing whether they will be drafted or not. If, however, he makes the decision to go to college, he can’t jump back in the pool again after one year. He has to stay in college and has to pass enough courses to stay eligible through his junior year.

Will there be some fraud involved in keeping some players eligible? Sure. No system is ever going to be perfect. In many cases though, players will at least be somewhere close to a degree if they leave after three years or if they stay for four. What’s more, they will have a much better idea of their real NBA potential after three years in college. Some will find out they weren’t quite as good as they thought they were in college and might even understand that they NEED a degree.

What’s more, it will put a stop to colleges being revolving doors, one-year way stations en route to the NBA. If a player is good enough to be drafted coming out of high school and that’s his dream, why delay it for one year of college he will see only as a burden? In the case of the occasional kid who really wants to continue his education after turning pro, no one will stop him from enrolling in summer school classes and he’ll certainly be able to afford to pay his own way. In most cases, the kids will end up in college and, like their brethren in football and baseball, will stay at least three years. In 95 percent of cases, that will be a good thing. And, if the players and owners sign off on that sort of rule, it will almost certainly stand up to any court challenge.

I thought one-and-done was a step forward when the rule was passed. It was, in fact, a step sideways. It is time for the players and owners to put an end to the current charade and at least attempt to take a step forward.

*****

A couple of notes based on posts and e-mails from yesterday: A few people asked if The Big Ten’s money per school would go down if it went from 11 to 16 teams. Probably not because the revenues would go up so much: More schools will mean more people paying for The Big Ten Network; more ad revenues; more cable systems taking on The Big Ten Network; a more lucrative national TV contract. It will mean The Big Ten can hold a championship game if it so desires. All that will probably double the gross revenues, which will almost certainly mean more than $22 million net per school each year.

As for Notre Dame, it makes far more than that on football each year between NBC, the BCS—remember it doesn’t have to split any BCS or bowl revenue it makes with other conference members--and neutral site games. Plus, it can control its schedule so that if Brian Kelly is even a decent coach it is almost impossible not to win at least nine games a year.

And finally on the Anna Kournikova-Natalie Gulbis comparison: If anything I was being hard on Kournikova, kind to Gulbis. Yes, Gulbis has won an LPGA event, but Kournikova was a Wimbledon semifinalist who was ranked in the top ten on a number of occasions. If Gulbis goes on and wins a major, I’ll change my assessment. As of now, I think the comparison is more than fair.

Gilbert Arenas just doesn’t get it—which hardly makes him unusual in jock-world.

This morning, on the op-ed page of The Washington Post, there’s a column with his name on it (I say that because it was so clearly written by a lawyer) in which he expresses his sorrow about all that he’s done wrong in the last couple of months. He knows now—or so he says—that it was wrong to illegally bring guns into The District of Columbia and into The Verizon Center and that his response to the incident was also wrong.

Right there though, in the second paragraph of his “apology,” is this sentence: “I reacted badly to the aftermath and made fun of inaccurate media reports, which looked as though I was making light of a serious situation.”

Inaccurate media reports? This is still the media’s fault? The guy has pleaded guilty to a felony in a desperate attempt to stay out of jail and this is about inaccurate media reports?

Let’s see, the media reported that he brought guns into the locker room because of a gambling dispute with teammate Javaris Crittenton.

Is that true? Yes.

The media reported that he was twittering about the incident after it became public and joking about it.

True? Yes.

Arenas said ON CAMERA that he was going to be “myself,” and continue to joke about what had happened and not taking it seriously. Was that an imposter, ala Tiger Woods at the sex clinic, saying those things?

And then there was the now infamous photo of Arenas making shooting gestures with his fingers during pre-game introductions that forced NBA Commissioner David Stern to finally say, “enough,” and suspend Arenas. Another inaccurate media report?

Arenas can go on and on—as he does in the piece—about how sorry he is for letting people down, especially the kids who have been fans of his in the past. I don’t think anyone questions Arenas’s desire to help kids; he’s gone out of his way to do so in the past. In fact, almost no one who knows Arenas or has been around him even a little bit thinks he’s a bad guy or a mean guy or a malicious guy.

He simply doesn’t get it. Apparently, neither do his lawyers. If they did, that sentence would never have appeared in the piece. If you say, “I’m sorry,” to someone you do NOT say, “I’m sorry BUT…” You just say you’re sorry.

Regardless of what Arenas said today, many people, if not most people, would see the op-ed as an attempt to mollify the judge who will sentence him on March 26th and, perhaps, a last ditch attempt to convince the Wizards that they shouldn’t terminate the remaining $80 million they will owe on his contract once his suspension is over at the end of the season.

But that one sentence is SO revealing about his true feelings. You see, deep down, it’s still not his fault. That’s the way it is with most athletes and coaches in jock-world. They’re never wrong. The media’s wrong or out to get them. Or people don’t really understand them. I’ve said this before: To this day Bob Knight doesn’t think he did a thing wrong the day he threw that chair at Indiana. I’ve heard him go on about how lousy the refereeing was that day and how “no one was hurt,” when he threw the chair. Remember, he threatened to quit when Indiana President John Ryan had the nerve to bring up the idea that the school should suspend him. When Knight said he might quit, Ryan backed down so quickly I think he may still be back-pedaling.

Right now, as we speak, I guarantee you Tiger Woods thinks he’s been hammered unfairly by the media. If you read Jaime Diaz’s recent piece in Golf Digest on Woods, there’s a quote from Woods in which he tells Diaz that he’s really sick and tired of the media hounding him and treating him unfairly.

The conversation took place WEEKS before his post-Thanksgiving dinner car crash. I’ve been around Tiger and the golf media. The way he’s treated is so reverential I once asked a PR guy who was reciting the “rules,” of a Tiger press conference if we were all supposed to stand when he entered the room. And yet, Tiger has always thought most of the media has been unfair to him. When he was talking to Diaz, he must have been referring to those “inaccurate,” reports that he didn’t win a major in 2009.

What’s also remarkable is how much sports fans want to defend their heroes. Right now there are people out there who think Woods has somehow been wronged in all this. This morning on sports-talk radio shows in Washington there are callers saying today’s Op-ed is proof that Arenas is genuinely remorseful, truly sorry for what he did. He’s sorry—that he got caught.

One caller to a radio show opened with this comment: “I don’t think people should be judged by what they say or by what they do. Gilbert’s no different than the rest of us.”

First: What else should we judge people by if not their actions or their words? Second: Gilbert IS different than the rest of us. Putting aside how much money he makes, most of us don’t illegally carry four guns across a state line and then act as if the whole thing was a joke.

That said, the biggest idiot in all of this may have been Crittenton’s lawyer, who claimed after his client’s plea bargain that Crittenton carried his gun into the locker room because he “feared for his life.” Please. Maybe there was an inaccurate media report that made him fear for his life. Some of the things these guys say would be laugh out loud funny if they weren’t so sad.

-------------------------------------

One note on the Phil Mickelson-Scott McCarron square grooves controversy over the weekend. For those not into golf minutia, the U.S. Golf Association banned square grooved clubs this year (because they allow pros to spin the ball too easily from the rough) with the exception of one old wedge—the PingEye2. The reason for that was a lawsuit 20 years ago in which the USGA agreed as part of a settlement to never ban that one club.

Mickelson—and a few other players including John Daly—dug out old PingEye2’s they had and brought them to their first tournament, in Mickelson’s case San Diego. McCarron, a 16-year tour veteran who is a smart guy said that using the PingEye2 “cheated,” the spirit of the new rule—which it does. Technically, it isn’t cheating because the club isn’t banned, but clearly it violates the spirit of the rule.

Mickelson isn’t used to being publicly criticized by another player. He reacted angrily saying that McCarron had “publicly slandered,” him. For the record, you can’t privately slander someone but that’s another story.

The tour needs to make this go away and it appears likely that it will, perhaps as early as today. It was not part of the Ping law suit and can pass a rule banning the club. It isn’t likely that Ping will turn around and take the tour to court over a golf club it doesn’t make anymore. Even if it does, the tour needs to get this one in its rear view mirror so everyone can focus on when Tiger is going to come back to the tour and tell us everything that happened was caused by inaccurate media reports.

So here’s some of the news of the weekend:

--Serena Williams and Roger Federer won Australian Open titles in matches that tipped off at 3:30 a.m. on the east coast because the Aussies like to play their finals at night to avoid the searing heat that often hits Melbourne in January.

--They played The Pro Bowl. Somebody won. Driving home from the Holy Cross-Lehigh game (more on that later) I could not find a single sports-oriented radio station that was NOT broadcasting the damn game. My God, someone please help me.

--The ACC is a complete mess. Duke, which everyone in the league alleges is the most talented team the ACC has to offer this season got smushed—to use my daughter’s word—by Georgetown on Saturday. The final was 89-77 only because Duke finished the game on a 16-5 run. North Carolina was embarrassed at home by Virginia on Sunday night. Maryland, a team Virginia Tech’s Seth Greenberg said was, “playing as well as anyone in the country,” turned the ball over 26 times and lost to a Clemson team that shot 32 percent. Hey ACC fans, the league is still REALLY good in soccer.

--Ben Crane won the golf tournament in San Diego. Someone wake me when LA starts on Thursday. Crane is one of those guys the Rules Officials like to say takes a lantern with him as his 15th club. Meanwhile, Phil Mickelson is using a wedge with square grooves that is legal in spite of square grooves being outlawed by the USGA because of a court case settled more than 20 years ago. Scott McCarron says Mickelson is “cheating,” the spirit of the new rule. Mickelson says that McCarron has “publicly slandered,” him and is threatening legal action. One thing worth noting: you can’t PRIVATELY slander someone.

--The Islanders have tanked. Five straight losses with six goals scored in those games. Even their last win was 2-1 in a shootout. That makes seven goals in six games. That’s okay in soccer. Not so much in hockey. Meanwhile, the Capitals have won 10 in a row and I think the average score has been something like 14-2. Prediction: Barring injury, they win The Stanley Cup although I’m still not sure about the goaltending. It may not matter if they continue to score 14 goals a night.

--The NBA is still going on. At least I think it is. ESPN is still running those silly commercials so I guess it’s going on. No reported arrests in the Wizards locker room last week. Great line by a radio guy in New York before the Wiz and the Nets played Friday night: “The Nets are going for one for the thumb tonight.” That would have been their fifth win of the season. They didn’t get it. The announced attendance in the Meadowlands was 11,384 that night. Yeah, right. I believe the 384 part.

--I was listening this morning to a radio show and the subject of Cornell came up. I’m amazed sometimes that people who call themselves college basketball fans think that only the teams from the BCS conference matter or are any good—especially since that’s disproven every March. Someone had the temerity to call in and say Cornell deserved some respect and attention. The hosts started laughing at him, saying Cornell couldn’t possibly compete in the ACC. Guess what? The Big Red might not be able to keep up with the entire league for 16 games but one game on a neutral site? There’s not a soul in the ACC that wants to play them. This is a team that’s won At Alabama, At Massachusetts, At St. John’s and almost beat Kansas at Kansas. Its other two losses are at Syracuse and to Seton Hall—very early in the season. One host said, “yeah, I guess they’ll be a No. 14 seed.” Guess what: If they aren’t at least a single digit seed (assuming they win out which they should) the committee should be investigated.

Now, a few words on my weekend. After getting home late Friday night from the Florida trip for the ‘Caddy For Life,’ documentary, I had to drive Saturday to Worcester to do Lehigh-Holy Cross on Sunday. I enjoy doing The Patriot League games on TV. I like my partner, Bob Socci and we’ve worked together for 13 years on Navy games and eight years on The Patriot League games. I enjoy the coaches and the players and the people I’ve come to know through the years at the eight schools.

I don’t usually mind the drive to Holy Cross. I know it in my sleep, I even know exactly where I want to stop to eat and to get gas. I can usually make it in seven hours or a little less if I’m lucky.

Saturday was a nightmare. We were supposed to get a couple of inches of snow in the Washington area. Not exactly. Closer to 10. There was supposed to be no snow north of Baltimore. Not exactly. It stopped snowing when I got to the George Washington Bridge. There wasn’t a plow in sight on I-95. The road was treacherous. There were people spinning out and pulled over everywhere. It took me two hours and 20 minutes—normally 45 minutes—to get to Baltimore. It took four hours—normally two hours—to get to The New Jersey Turnpike. It took more than two hours to get up the Turnpike—normally 1:45 at most. In all, it was just under 10 hours. I think I’m getting too old for this. Maybe I’ll tell The Patriot League it should hire Pete Gillen to do the games next season.

I enjoyed the game. I always like being inside The Hart Center, which is a classic old GYM—not an arena with some stupid corporate name on it. The atmosphere is relaxed. There’s not a single yellow-jacketed security person to be found. I felt for Sean Kearney, who is in his first year at Holy Cross after 22 years as an assistant and is struggling with a team trying to learn a completely different style of play at both ends of the court. There’s not a nicer person in hoops than Sean. I think—and hope—things will get better for him.

The trip home was easy—seven hours on the dot. The only problem was not being able to escape The Pro Bowl. At least that’s over. Now we have seven days of Super Bowl hype to look forward to. Oh joy.

Can we talk this morning about how long it takes to play games these days?

As someone who has spent most of his adult life dealing with deadlines while covering games I’m always aware of how long a game is taking even when I’m sitting at home half-watching while I’m reading something.

It’s truly gotten ridiculous.

I kind of went around the bend on this eight days ago when Louisville and Villanova played a game in which something like 90 free throws were shot and a 7 o’clock tipoff ended (in regulation) at 9:45. Even Brent Musburger, who was doing the next game in the doubleheader couldn’t resist commenting when he was doing an update that, “I hope your game ends before ours does fellas.”

There were about two minutes left in the first half of Oklahoma State-Oklahoma by the time Louisville-Villanova finally ended.

Last Saturday I spent the day at home with games going on from 11 a.m. on. Not one game I watched all or part of ended inside the two -hour window that TV plans for a college basketball game. Most didn’t come close. There are now NINE TV timeouts in every game—and by the way is there some way to stop calling them, ‘media timeouts'? I have never asked for nor been given a time out in my life. They exist for TV and, occasionally, for radio. One of those timeouts is the first called time out of the second half, which is “technically,” a 30 second time out but “becomes,” a full timeout.

Utterly ridiculous. Here are some other things that delay games: the mindless halftime interviews with the coaches. Understand that when the breathless sideline reporter is asking the coach what went wrong/right in the first half and usually getting gems like, “we have to rebound better,” or “I thought we shot the ball very well,” the halftime clock isn’t moving. It’s frozen until the coach pulls free—which Wake Forest’s Dino Gaudio almost literally had to do on Sunday night because the reporter insisted on asking him what he planned to do to rebound better (gee, I don’t know go out and recruit taller players the next 15 minutes?)—and gets to the locker room.

There are also times—especially on ESPN—where coming out of commercial the producer will insist on getting the ‘talent,’ on camera for 30 seconds to say something brilliant like, “What a great atmosphere here tonight,” while play is held until they’re finished.

Wait, I’ve got more: There are two rules changes that need to be made: 1. Once a player is handed the ball to shoot his first free throw he can’t have contact with his teammates until the second shot is out of his hands. All of this slapping hands after the first free throw— they do it make or miss nowadays—is silly and if you add it up over a course of a game adds five to ten minutes. 2. When a player fouls out this bit with both teams running to the bench for an impromptu time out needs to stop. Coaches do not need 30 seconds at that point to decide who to sub. They know who they’re subbing and if they don’t—tough. Give them 10 seconds and tell the players to get lined up at the free throw line in the meantime.

Another thing: Officials need to be far more vigilante about getting teams out of their huddles. This deal with coaches having to stand on the court and talk to one another before they talk to the players is ridiculous. To quote Red Auerbach: “You’re getting paid millions to be the head coach you damn well ought to know what to say to your players during a time out.”

The other night I was at a game (honestly I don’t remember which one) and one team was lagging coming out of the huddle. When the official went in to get the players, the coach actually held up his hand to say, “give me a minute here, I’m not quite done.” The response to that should be simple: Signal the official who has the ball to start the 10 second clock and then put the ball on the floor and start counting to five. Remember when officials did that? People got out of the huddle then.

I know these are all little things but they add up. College basketball games shouldn’t be taking two-and-a-half hours. When we get to postseason they get longer: halftime on CBS goes to 20 minutes instead of 15 (plus the time for the silly coaches interviews); 30 second time outs become 45 seconds to get in extra commercials. At this rate it won’t be long before the national championship game ends at midnight on the east coast.

It’s also worth noting that the 20-minute halftime came about in 2003 when the war in Iraq started on the first day of the tournament. CBS asked for the extra five minutes to do war updates. Fine. But the next year the time outs were still 20 minutes and they’ve remained that way ever since, which certainly isn’t good for the players. I’ve been in locker rooms. By about the eight minute mark, everyone is getting antsy to get back on the court. When I brought this up with the NCAA basketball committee a few years ago someone said, “Well, you know when you’re in a dome it takes longer to get to and from the locker room.”

Five minutes longer? How about 10 seconds longer—if that.

This problem isn’t unique to basketball. College football is a joke. I’ve said for years the first down rule should be changed to stop the clock ONLY in the last two minutes of each half. The notion that you need to stop the clock on a first down with 13:47 left in the first quarter is ludicrous. Four hour games are just too long even if they have dramatic finishes. They may not seem so bad watching at home where you can keep clicking around to other games during the endless commercials but if you’re in the stadium those commercials are torture. Nothing is worse than a Notre Dame on NBC where some commercials last longer than the careers of a lot of college basketball players.

Baseball, especially in the American League or if Tony LaRussa is managing, can take days to play. There are two rules changes that need to be made: Trips to the mound should be limited not to one per inning per pitcher but to one TOTAL for the starting pitcher and one more TOTAL after he leaves the game. A catcher shouldn’t be allowed to go out to the mound more than once per batter. Learn how to change signals with a runner on second base in spring training.

Far more important is keeping batters in the box. We now have a generation of hitters who routinely step out after EVERY pitch. They re-adjust their gloves, tug on their helmet, kick at the dirt, take a deep breath and step back in. PLEASE. Simple rules-change: You can step out one time during an at-bat. The only way you can step out more than once is if you’re hurt or knocked down. While we’re at it, make umpires ENFORCE the 20-second rule on pitchers with the bases empty.

The NFL has gotten better although it is maddening when TV takes back-to-back time outs after a touchdown or field goal: team scores, extra point is kicked—commercial. Kickoff—commercial again. As I said, at home it isn’t so bad. In the stadium, especially when it’s cold—brutal. The NBA needs to make two rules-changes: teams get one time out in the last two minutes and no more and get rid of the move-the-ball-to-midcourt after a time out rule. In what other sport are you allowed to advance the ball half the playing field as a reward for calling time out?

Hockey’s pretty good overall although having the hockey package this year I’ve noticed there are a number of linesmen who think fans come to the arena to watch them drop the puck. I know they want it to be fair and get it right but for God’s sake drop the thing and let’s move on.

The biggest change though is still college basketball. I know I sound like I’m 100 when I harken back to my days as a kid when games were played in 90 minutes. Those days are gone and aren’t coming back but it is completely out-of-hand. I know TV needs its time outs but NINE—seriously NINE? Throw in a couple more commercials at halftime. We can live without the yammering studio shows anyway. Throw in a couple of simple, sensible rules changes and for the love of God get rid of the halftime interviews. The coaches hate them, the fans hate them, please tell me who likes them?

I’m guessing it must be some of the same people who, at the “urging,” of John Calipari are planning to fill Rupp Arena one Saturday to jump up and down in front of the cameras for ‘GameDay.’ My God, The Apocalypse really is upon us.

Carlos Beltran and Gilbert Arenas are both in the news today.

Arenas will be in court later today to accept a plea bargain that in all likelihood will keep him out of jail. I’m going to refrain from saying too much about this until it actually happens because there’s no point in ripping the prosecutors for copping out until I actually know they’ve copped out.

Beltran isn’t going to court or to jail but he won’t be playing baseball for a while. He had surgery on his arthritic knee on Wednesday and is likely not to be able to resume baseball activities for at least 12 weeks. My guess is he won’t be penciled into a Major League lineup card before May. All of which means the Mets have pretty much picked up at the start of 2010 where they left off in 2009.

But I’m not writing about Beltran to rip the Mets—although they are eminently rippable. They are so incompetent that they can’t even get a player they owe $37 million to over the next two years to go and see one of their doctors before having surgery. Then they whine about it and don’t even send their general manager to talk to the media about it. Apparently after some of his bang-up performances last summer (notably in the Tony Bernazard debacle) the Mets don’t trust Omar Minaya to speak in public. Which begs the question: If you don’t trust him to run a simple press conference how can you trust him to rebuild your broken ballclub?

As I said though, that’s another issue for another day. Today is about what Beltran and Arenas have in common. Which is this: The Mets are reportedly considering the possibility of refusing to pay Beltran while he is out of the lineup because he had the surgery without their formal permission OR even going so far as to try to void his contract. The Washington Wizards are reportedly thinking about trying to void Arenas’s contract—worth another $80 million after this season is over—on the grounds that he will have pleaded guilty to a felony even if he avoids jail time.

Chances are very good the Mets will back down. Chances are decent the Wizards will back down too and see if there’s any way to trade Arenas.

The reason neither team is likely to take any seriously punitive action has little to do with the players involved. It has to do with potential future players.

It really doesn’t matter that Arenas acted like a complete bonehead in this whole thing from the moment he put the guns in his car and drove them from his home in Virginia to The Verizon Center in Washington, committing a crime the minute he crossed the bridge into D.C.

It doesn’t matter that Arenas acted as if the whole thing was a joke until he was suspended by NBA Commissioner David Stern. It doesn’t even matter that he has said when this is over everyone will owe him an apology.

The Wizards are probably going to have to rebuild their entire team—again. Arenas has to be gone one way or the other and they will try to trade Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler because both players have considerable value, especially to teams in contention. The draft only has two rounds and if you get one truly outstanding player in a draft that’s a good year. That means you have to sign free agents.

Are there some players (and coaches) who will sign with the highest bidder, regardless of who it is? Absolutely. How else can Dan Snyder, whose reputation as the worst owner in sports always precedes him, continue to sign free agent players and big name coaches? If you believe Mike Shanahan when he says he took over the Redskins because of how much he likes Snyder, I have oceanfront land in Kansas I’d like to sell you. Shanahan’s friends are the checks for $7 million a year Snyder will be writing.

But if someone else had matched that $7 million, Shanahan probably would have been very good friends with THAT owner. And the Wizards will worry that if a free agent has a choice between their organization and another that’s offering comparable money, Arenas’s name will come up. As in, “you guys are the ones that voided Gil’s contract.”

Don’t think for a second that won’t happen. Before this is over—especially if the Wizards do void the contract—Arenas is going to be the victim here. There will be apologists pointing out athletes who have done worse things (there are) and pointing out that Delonte West was acting far more reckless than Arenas last fall when he was arrested on a motorcycle on the Washington Beltway carrying guns. That’s also true. It’s also true that West has kept his mouth shut and not tried to act as if the whole thing was a joke.

Reality doesn’t matter here. Athletes live in their own reality, one in which Tiger Woods’s agent can actually send an e-mail to a New York Times reporter saying, “Give the kid a break.” The kid being a 34-year-old, billionaire father of two who has been in the public eye for 20 years and crafted an image that has been proven to be totally false.

No doubt a lot of basketball players will think the Wizards failed to give Arenas a break. The Wizards know that. They know that voiding the contract (IF their action is upheld when the players’ union contests it) will save a lot of money short term and will give them a partial escape from this disaster. But they also know that anytime a free agent doesn’t sign with them, people will wonder if Arenas was part of the reason. And if by some chance a player comes out and says, “I wouldn’t sign with Washington because of what they did to Gil,” whether what they did to Gil was fair or unfair will be a moot point.

The Mets and Beltran are different. Beltran’s never been in any trouble at all and for a lot of the last five years has been the Mets best player. And yet—he’s been hurt a lot. He also has become for many fans the symbol of their frustrations in recent years. If you are a Mets fan (which as I always confess I am…sigh) it is pretty much impossible to forget the sight of Beltran with his bat on his shoulder while strike three went past him with two outs in the bottom of the ninth of game seven of The 2006 National League Championship Series.

Beltran’s had good moments since then but the Mets collapsed in September of 2007 and 2008 and in early June in 2009. Beltran, like a lot of his teammates (Jose Reyes, Carlos Delgado, J.J. Puetz; even David Wright) missed large chunks of the season. Now, after saying his knee felt fine all fall, he has surgery five weeks before spring training begins.

Beltran’s agent, the lovely and talented Scott Boras, insists that the doctor who did the surgery in Denver consulted with the Mets team doctor, David Altchek and got the go-ahead to do the surgery. Then—according to Boras—after Beltran was IN surgery on Wednesday, the Mets called again to say they wanted Beltran to see their doctors. If that version proves true not only do the Mets have no case against Beltran but they have pulled yet another public relations blunder by ripping a key player who did nothing wrong.

If that’s NOT the case and Beltran did the surgery without letting the Mets know he was doing it, then the Mets do have a case—certainly in terms of not paying him until he can play again.

But don’t bet on the Mets to do any of that. More likely they will come back and say it was all a big misunderstanding and everyone loves everyone. Minaya tried to blame the Bernazard debacle on Adam Rubin of The New York Daily News. Maybe the Mets will blame Adam for this too.

But you can bet they won’t take drastic action against Beltran. They’re going to need to sign free agents to rebuild again. And, while money talks, it someone else has money that’s also talking, a “reputation,” for not taking care of your players can quickly shut your money down.

What a world. And people wonder why I hang out at Patriot League basketball games.

Friends of mine who cover the NBA on a regular basis tell me that LeBron James is a pretty good guy, that, for someone who has been in the spotlight since his sophomore year in high school he is relatively approachable and is also a bright guy.

Maybe.

But he’s a done a couple of things in recent months that make me wonder if he isn’t yet another in the long line of athletes who live in The Land of Never Wrong.

He could not possibly have handled his team’s season-ending loss in the Eastern Conference finals any worse that he did. After the Orlando Magic had knocked his Cleveland Cavaliers out of the playoffs in six games, James left the court without shaking anyone’s hand—including that of his friend and Olympic teammate Dwight Howard—and then left the building without speaking to the media.

Okay, it happens. He didn’t expect to lose and threw a little tantrum when he did. No big deal. But the next day when he did talk to reporters he was completely un-apologetic about his behavior, saying something stupid about winners not congratulating people who beat them. Actually that’s EXACTLY what winners do: part of being a real winner is dealing with defeat because it happens to everyone including Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant and, yes, King James—who still hasn’t won an NBA title.

On top of that bit of foolishness, James showed up for his little press conference wearing a Yankees cap. I’ve heard all about what a big Yankees fan he is and has been. That’s all fine. But when you are from Akron and you’ve played your entire pro career in Cleveland and the town is sitting on pins and needles wondering what you’re going to do when you hit free agency in the summer of 2010 you do NOT show up wearing the cap of a team that plays in the same town as one of the teams that is going to throw huge dollars in your direction.

Harmless fun? Maybe. But it’s like waving red at a bull—especially the day after you and your teammates have failed to reach The Finals in a year when it was expected of you, especially when you may only have one more season left in Cleveland. Go without cap. Show a little respect for your hometown fans.

The latest Lebronism is to suggest/demand that the NBA retire number 23—Michael Jordan’s number—the same way Major League Baseball retired Jackie Robinson’s number 42. James even generously suggested he would be willing to change his number—to number 6.

This goes beyond foolish. To begin with, Michael Jordan doesn’t belong in the same sentence with Jackie Robinson, especially when it comes to breaking down barriers or being politically involved. Jordan, in fact, has made a point of NOT being politically involved. As we saw so vividly during his Hall of Fame induction speech, Michael Jordan has one cause: Michael Jordan.

No one is disputing Jordan’s greatness as a player. Many believe he’s the best player of all time. I think cases can be made for Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. But if you want to tell me that Jordan was the best, I can live with that.

Robinson wasn’t close to being the best baseball player of all time. But he may very well be the most important. The only player who comes close is Babe Ruth, who probably saved the game after The Black Sox scandal. Russell, whose Celtics won five more championships than Jordan, certainly would deserve consideration for having his number retired if Jordan’s is going to be retired. Memo to LeBron: You know what number Russell wore? Six. So how about at least scratching that from your list of new numbers.

Jordan certainly played a major part in the NBA’s renaissance in the 1980s but Magic Johnson and Larry Bird got to the league five years before he did and already had turned it in the right direction before Jordan’s arrival. Jordan didn’t win an NBA title until 1991 when the NBA---thanks in very large part to the Magic vs. Larry duels of the 80s—had re-taken its spot in the American consciousness. Jordan certainly deserves a lot of credit for all he did but he was no more important Magic or Bird. A better player? Yes. More important? No.

There is also the issue of the way he’s lived his life off the court. He isn’t a terrible guy and he hasn’t done anything truly awful. But he’s had gambling problems, he walked away from the game in mid-career for reasons that have remained murky and he hasn’t exactly handled retirement with a good deal of grace. That doesn’t mean we should all line up and say bad things about him but if a number is going to be retired by an entire league the person needs to be as special as the player. Jackie Robinson was special in every possible way. Michael Jordan was an extraordinary player. Period.

One can only hope that Commissioner David Stern and the NBA are smart enough to suggest that James focus on winning games and making commercials, not setting league policy. If James wants to change his number no one is stopping him. I would politely suggest though that he find one other than number six. Because one thing I can guarantee you is that he’ll never come close to winning as many championships as Russell whether he plays in Cleveland, New York, Miami, Los Angeles or anyplace else in the future.

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A couple of comments on some of the recent posts and e-mails: As I’ve said before, I really enjoy them, even those from people who disagree with me since those are often very smart and well worth paying attention to.

First, since this has something to do with today’s blog, someone wrote a while back that I should stop, “trying to make a living off of Michael Jordan.” I think this was after the Hall of Fame speech when everyone in the world was commenting on it and I was in fact ASKED by many people what I thought. I would also suggest—politely of course—that I first wrote about Jordan when he was in HIGH SCHOOL and to comment on him is, in fact, my job…

Last week on Tony Kornheiser’s radio show I was asked if it was true that I had in the past opposed Navy playing Notre Dame. I noticed where one poster wrote that I had “privately,” been opposed to the rivalry for years before Navy’s win in 2007. Let’s get this straight: I don’t oppose anything privately. I opposed the rivalry very PUBLICLY for years, dating back to when I wrote “A Civil War,” in 1995. I never said the teams should NEVER play, I said I didn’t think they should play every year because it was unfair to the Navy kids: not only did Notre Dame have every possible advantage in recruiting and in exposure but Navy never got to play a home game! (Still doesn’t). One year the game’s at Notre Dame, the next at a so-called neutral site overrun with Notre Dame fans.

I changed my stance several years BEFORE Navy won for one reason: generation after generation of Navy players told me I was wrong, that they WANTED to play the game every year, relished it in fact. Even during the 43 straight losses they always thought they could win. So, because they want to play the game, I’m fine with it. I’m not the one who has to go out there and try to do the impossible—which they have now done two years out of three.

As for the couple of guys who called me a “bandwagon,” jumper, that one I think is unfair. I wrote the book in 1995 when both Army and Navy were struggling for any recognition at all. I’ve done Navy games on radio since 1997 including one three year stretch when the Mids were 3-30, including an 0-10 (none of the games close) in 2001. I really don’t think you can call me a bandwagon jumper. It’s not as if I started singing the praises of service academy kids just because Navy beat Notre Dame, although I was pretty damn happy about it.

By the way, did anyone notice that Notre Dame got called for a chop block on Saturday night? Sometimes, there is justice in the world.

Abdul-Jabbar has leukemia; the college basketball season began last night. Abdul-Jabbar, when he was Lew Alcindor, was the greatest college basketball player I’ve ever seen.

There might be some who saw Bill Russell at San Francisco in the 1950s or Oscar Robertson at Cincinnati a few years after that who might argue that one of them was in Abdul-Jabbar’s class. Bill Walton was certainly great and so was David Thompson. But Abdul-Jabbar, who was Alcindor until changing his name in 1971, was—to me—in a class by himself.

I actually first saw him play when I was a kid growing up in New York. In those days, high school teams played in Madison Square Garden in preliminary games prior to Knicks home games. Alcindor played at Power Memorial and was a phenomenon that anyone who followed basketball in the city knew about. He was 7-foot-1 and he was unstoppable. I can remember getting to The Garden at 6:30 for the 6:45 high school starts to see Alcindor play.

When he chose UCLA and not St. John’s, everyone in New York was crushed. His UCLA teams were 88-2, one of the losses coming in The Astrodome when Alcindor played with a scratched eyeball against Houston and Elvin Hayes during his junior year. That was one of the first nationally televised college basketball games and helped put college hoops on the map. A couple of months later Houston and UCLA met in the Final Four in Los Angeles. I think the final score was 101-69.

I actually got Alcindor’s autograph—which I wish I’d kept because it would probably be a big deal nowadays—during his senior year when UCLA played in The Holiday Festival in the Garden. It was an eight-team tournament back then and St. John’s upset No. 2 ranked North Carolina to get to the final. During the third place game between Princeton and Carolina, the UCLA team came out and watched some of the first half. I scurried among the players—Curtis Rowe, Sidney Wicks, Lucius Allen among them—to get autographs and planted myself right in front of Alcindor as he got up to walk to the locker room. He was so tall my neck hurt to look up and ask him to sign. He did—and kept walking.

UCLA won the game easily and went on to a third straight national championship in March. Alcindor went on to lead the once-terrible Milwaukee Bucks to a championship in his second year and ended up winning six NBA titles and retiring as the league’s all-time leading scorer.

Of course there’s so much more to Alcindor than basketball. He did some acting (“Airplane,” among other movies); he’s written books and produced movies. He became very involved in the Muslim religion after his conversion and was also victimized by an agent late in his pro career which forced him to play a couple of years longer than he should have played. He tried television but wasn’t very good at it. He’s coached—including on an Indian reservation—and is now coaching with the Lakers.

I had one up-close experience with him. In 2001, when I was writing, “The Punch,” on the 1977 incident in which Kermit Washington almost killed Rudy Tomjanovich with one punch during an on court fight in Los Angeles, I had to talk to Abdul-Jabbar. He had been involved in a skirmish with Rockets center Kevin Kunnert that led to the fight that led to The Punch. I had tracked down everyone else involved in the incident, including Kunnert, who wasn’t thrilled about talking even 24 years later because he felt that Washington had unfairly made him into the bad guy. But I couldn’t get to Jabbar.

He had a movie production company at the time and I kept leaving messages there to no avail. Finally, I got lucky. One of Kermit’s close friends while he was in college at American University had been Josh Rosenfeld, who had gone on to be the Lakers PR guy during Abdul-Jabbar’s career there. What I didn’t know was that Rosenfeld was one of a handful of people in the world Jabbar trusted implicitly.

When I talked to Josh for the book he asked if I’d talked to Kareem yet. I told him I was having a hell of a time getting him to return my calls. “Let me take a shot at it,” Josh said. “I’ll give him a call.”

The next day the phone rang and a voice said, “Mr. Feinstein, this is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I’m told you need to talk to me.”

If you read the book, you’ll know the interview could not have gone better: Jabbar was, as you would expect, articulate and analytical. What I didn’t expect was his willingness to talk in detail about the incident, about what led up to it, about Kermit and about how he felt about what had happened. To be honest, I thought it was pretty gripping stuff.

Not long after the book came out, the phone rang again. The introduction was the same: “Mr. Feinstein, this is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.”

My first thought was “uh-oh.” Athletes and coaches do not pick up the phone and track down a reporter after something has been written unless they’re upset. I took a deep breath and waited for the complaint. I had already gotten an angry call from Kunnert who had been very generous with his time and felt that—again—a member of the media, this time me, had “bought,” Kermit’s version of events even though I had quoted both sides of the story at great length.

“I read your book,” Abdul-Jabbar said....

Oh boy, here it comes…

“And I wanted to tell you that I thought you did an excellent job. I thought it was balanced, it was fair and it gave a thoughtful picture of how the incident affected all of us.”

I was stunned, not so much that Jabbar had thought I’d done a reasonable job on the book, I always hope that everyone I write about feels that way, but that he had taken the time to pick up the phone to tell me he felt that way. As I’ve said before, the number of athletes through the years who have done something like that can probably be counted on both my hands with a couple fingers to spare.

As always, I’m looking forward to college hoops season. Already freshmen like Derrick Favors and John Wall are being made out to be The Next One by all the various pundits. I can tell you this right now: they may be great, they may end up being very rich and very famous but I guarantee you they won’t touch Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a player and I’m pretty damn sure they won’t touch him as a man either.

Here’s to your health Kareem. And thanks for a lot of memories, dating back to Power Memorial.

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I’m sure it was apparent how much I enjoyed writing yesterday’s blog about Navy’s stunning win over Notre Dame on Saturday. (BTW, did anyone notice Charlie Weis absolutely proving one of yesterday’s posters right by throwing the kid who dared to question the defensive schemes right under the nearest bus?).

I think I enjoyed yesterday’s posts about as much as I enjoyed writing the blog. It was great to hear from Randy Bogle, who was the commandant at the academy when I was writing, “A Civil War,” and also hearing from people who clearly got how special Navy’s win was.

So here’s my question for today: what’s your all-time favorite upset, specifically one you witnessed in person. It might involve two junior high school teams but I’ll bet, regardless of what it was, it is one of those moments in your life that always makes you smile when you think about it.

Navy-Notre Dame in 2009 will be high on my list I can promise you that.

It isn't at all surprising that most of the attention following Friday's Hall of Fame Induction ceremony in Springfield would be on Michael Jordan. Most people agree he was the greatest basketball player of all time--and if you want to argue about Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Oscar Robertson, that's fine. If you put it to a vote, Jordan is almost certainly going to win.

Sadly though, the reason most of the attention was focused on Jordan was the tone of his speech. Most of it--and it went on for quite a while--was angry. Instead of being grateful to all those who helped him become MICHAEL JORDAN, he kept coming back to how he was motivated by slights and putdowns. He even moaned about Dean Smith not allowing him to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a freshman.

Jordan could be the subject of a psychological study that might take years to put together. What was too bad about the way he 'stole,' the show on Friday was that the other inductees were more or less lumped together. As in, "also inducted were David Robinson, John Stockton, Jerry Sloan and C. Vivian Stringer." All four were extremely deserving, but the one who truly deserved a special spotlight is Robinson.

I have to admit to a bias here. I first met Robinson when he was 6-foot-7 inch freshman at Navy who wasn't starting. His coach, Paul Evans, introduced me to him after Navy had lost a game at George Mason and said, "you need to watch this kid, he's gong to be a player for us."

Evans had no idea at the time that Robinson was going to grow six inches to 7-1 before the start of his sophomore season and lead Navy to three straight NCAA Tournaments--including a final eight appearance in 1986. He had no idea Robinson would become the national player of the year as a senior or the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft or that he would go on to a remarkable career in San Antonio that would include three NBA titles and a lock on the Hall of Fame induction that took place on Friday.

What always struck me about Robinson when I began to cover him and talk to him on a regular basis during his sophomore year was his sense of humor, his thoughtfulness and the fact that he was just as interested in engineering (his dad had been a Naval engineer) as basketball. He and his classmate, Doug Wojcik (now the coach at Tulsa) were as good off the court as they were on the court.

“Hey Doug," Robinson yelled at Wojcik in the locker room one day. "There's a reason you're the point guard, you know, and it isn't because of your shooting."

Wojcik never blinked, pointing a finger at Robinson and saying, "David, never bite the hand that feeds you."

During their four years at Navy, Robinson and Wojcik never lost to Army. But four of the five games were decided by four points or less largely because Army had a 5-11 guard named Kevin Houston who could hit shots from just about anywhere. Houston only got to play one season with the three point line. If he had played with it for four years he might have doubled his points since he almost never shot from inside 20 feet. The last time Army played Navy when Robinson, Wojcik and Houston were seniors, Houston scored 38 and Navy needed overtime--at home--to win the game. Wojcik still remembers the day vividly.

"He was just lighting me up," he said. "Every time down court, he'd take on dribble and release--from like 25 feet--swish. I was pleading with him, 'my whole family is here, (it was senior day) my friends, everyone in my company--please stop, you're humiliating me."

The three men remained in touch after graduation. All went into the service, although as everyone knows, Robinson got out after two years and went on to stardom. Wojcik got into coaching after getting out of the Navy, Houston into business, marrying his childhood sweetheart, Liz, having three children and settling down not far from West Point.

The year after they all graduated, I was working on my second book, "A Season Inside." I spent some time with Robinson and Houston, contrasting their lives--Robinson was in the Navy, Houston in the Army. Robinson was a lock to be on the '88 Olympic team; Houston was just hoping to get invited to try out. I went to visit Robinson at a submarine base in south Georgia where he was stationed. We went out to lunch and all we could find was a McDonald's. When we walked up to the counter, the manager recognized Robinson immediately--he probably didn't get too many 7-foot-1 inch African Americans in a Navy uniform coming through the place.

"I know who you are," he said. "You just signed a contract for $26 million to play in the NBA when you get out of the Navy."

Robinson kind of nodded, pretending to be confused about whether he wanted a Big Mac or a double hamburger.

"Tell you what," the manager said. "When you're rich and famous, you come back in here and I'll give you your food for free."

That got Robinson's attention. "Sir, when I'm rich and famous I won't need my food for free. Right now, I'm making $590 a month and I could really USE getting my food for free."

The guy, of course, missed the point.

Robinson not only became rich and famous but has used his money and his fame to build a school in San Antonio and has done as much important charity work as any ex-athlete alive. He is as comfortable in retirement as Jordan is clearly uncomfortable in retirement. He has also remained one of the warmest and most likeable people you are ever likely to meet.

Houston's life has not been as easy. Six years ago, his wife Liz was diagnosed with scleroderma, an extremely rare auto-immune disease mostly found in women between the ages of 30 and 50. In January, Liz Houston passed away at the age of 44. When Robinson heard that he was going into the Hall of Fame, he called his old rival and asked him to come to the induction ceremony as his guest. That says a lot about David Robinson and about the unique nature of the Army-Navy rivalry. Then again, David Robinson doesn't need to justify to anyone who he is or what he has accomplished in his life.

And he doesn't need any free food from McDonald's.

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A quick note on the Serena Williams episode on Saturday night at the U.S. Open. The line judge was probably wrong to call the foot-fault: the only time you make a call like that, especially at a crucial moment is if it is absolutely blatant and it wasn't. Questionable perhaps, but not blatant. That being said, the officials had no choice but to call the point penalty that ended the match after the way Williams responded. You simply can't threaten officials and saying, "You're lucky if I don't shove this ----- ball down your throat," is threatening. Williams may have known she didn't mean it, but the line judge did not. The fact that Williams was un remorseful afterwards--talking about her passion for the game leading to her tantrum--and STILL didn't not apologize on Sunday in a prepared statement, makes it even worse. One more thing: for all the posturing by the International Tennis Federation about perhaps suspending her from next year's Open, you can forget about that happening. The USTA isn't going to let the biggest draw in the women's game sit out the Open. Here's what will happen: Williams will, at some point, perhaps as early as today after the women's doubles final, agree to apologize and the ITF will say, 'apology accepted,' but she better not do that again. Will Williams learn a lesson from the incident? Sure. Check the score before you lose your temper.