Though there were no mega-events this past weekend, I was practicing
for vacation. So I did my best couch potato work in months. What I saw
and heard left me wondering about many things.
*When are we going to hear Roger Clemens say, "Oh, you mean that party?"
*After showing a moving documentary
about the great heavyweight champion Joe Louis, was HBO just a little
bit embarrassed to follow it Saturday night with that slog of a
heavyweight championship bout. Wladimir Klitschko could have gone 100 rounds in the ring with this paluka, Sultan Ibragimov, without incurring any damage, but he still wasn't willing to take any risks.
*Virtually every NBA contender—Los Angeles, San Antonio, Dallas,
Phoenix, Houston, New Orleans and Cleveland—made moves before the
trading deadline, most of them big and dramatic, to boost their
playoffs prospects. Could the big winner be a team that stood pat?
Detroit made no moves and also the biggest impression over the past
weekend, blowing out a hot Phoenix team
that, despite several wins with Shaq at center, is still struggling to
integrate the big guy into its offense. Detroit is likely to pass
Boston for the #1 seed in the East and they can only hope to avoid
LeBron James, who singlehandedly knocked the Pistons out of the
playoffs last year.
*Why bother? The Boston Bruins, a solid, middling team in the NHL,
have gone something like 8-1-1 in their last 10 road games, but the
team is barely over .500 for the season at home in the Fleet Center.
While making the playoffs is obviously paramount, playing for position
in the NHL is a waste of effort; unlike home-field or home-court, home
ice advantage is pretty much a non-factor in the NHL in both the
regular season and the Stanley Cup playoffs.
*That Tiger Woods can play. Might he be the most dominant athlete in any sport ever?
*What would Memphis' record and national ranking be if it played in a first-rank conference like the ACC or SEC rather than C-USA?
Sure, they've met some decent out-of-conference teams in Connecticut,
USC, Gonzaga and Oklahoma, but the Tigers' conference schedule provides
too many nights off. Memphis still figures to rate a #1 seed despite
losing its unbeaten mark to Tennessee, but you will not win your March
Madness pool if you back Memphis reaching the Final Four.
*How gruesome can it get? The Oscars gave us a taste Sunday night,
celebrating a bunch of violent films. But the worst of the weekend came
Saturday—on the field in the English Premiership. The broken leg
suffered by Arsenal star Eduardo da Silva
ranks with the Joe Theisman injury years ago for on-field horrors. The
more difficult question—one the NHL and NFL must wrestle with too—is
how to treat a player whose penalty, deliberate or inadvertent, knocks
a player out of the lineup, in da Silva's case possibly for as long as
a year. It is hard to imagine that the Brazilian-born player, whose
heroics helped Croatia knock England out of the European Championships
this year, will ever regain the quickness or mobility that has made him
on of Europe's rising stars.
*How about this for turnabout? Cornell lost to Princeton 2-1 in hockey over the weekend and is in fifth place in the ECAC standings, three spots behind the Tigers. At the same time, Cornell's basketball team is 10-0 in the Ivy League—Princeton
is buried in seventh—and has virtually clinched a berth in the NCAA
tournament. Either of these results would be a remarkable departure
from both schools' athletic histories, but I can't recall a single
season when Cornell finished both behind Princeton in hockey and ahead
of Princeton in basketball.
