Oh, Paul Pierce Christ

My father is a wise man. (That’s not him in the Dickerson jersey.)

He knows things.

About 8 years ago, at the peak of his soothsaying, he predicted the downfall of the National Basketball Association.

Sadly, although several of our favorite sites would try to convince you otherwise, he was right.

I could care less that the players wear dem danggone long shorts now. Or that they sport tattoos. Or shoot people at strip clubs.

The problem is that it’s no longer about the game play, it’s about everything else.

It’s about Paul Pierce’s fake? injury.

It’s about whether Passing Kobe, Shooting Kobe or Sexually-Assualting Kobe will show up.

It’s, somehow, about Bill Russell teaching KG Celtic history.

The problem is that the League cannot accept that it’s no longer the late 80s or early 90s. I mean, Seriously?

And all this hype and desire to return to the “good ol’ days”, in turn, leads to over-aggressive officiating (see the first two games of the Finals), over-paid rookies in hopes of The Next MJ and announcing exchanges that go something like this:

Mike Breen: Paul Pierce is one of the premiere scorers in this league today.

Jeff Van Gundy: Paul Pierce is one of the best Celtics ever to put on a uniform!

Mark Jackson: Paul Pierce is as good as Larry Bird!

Michelle Tafoya: God, I wish Paul Pierce would just impregnated me already!

All joking aside, what has the NBA come to when Paul Pierce is compared to Larry Bird (yes, the comparison was actually made)? I don’t think I need to tell you that, as far as playmaking skills go, Pierce and Bird are not even in the same Garden.

The bottom line is that it’s no longer 1988. Magic and Bird aren’t going at each other (except via commercial in baggy tank tops). And the NBA we grew up with is no more. (sigh)

Thoughts?

This kind of blew me away. I love the originality. You?

Football, in the cold? Commence whining

There is one argument in professional football that draws more whines than any other.

It’s not the validity of preseason games, or even instant reply.

It’s the site of future Super Bowls.

Recently, the league announced that the 2012 version of the world’s biggest game will be played in Indianapolis.

This, apparently, made ESPN.com columnist Gene Wojciechowski very upset.

Apparently, Gene would prefer enjoying his complimentary Diet Coke and Chipotle inside a 72-degree climate controlled stadium in Arizona — rather than a 72-degree climate controlled stadium in Indiana.

Note: If you have to write a sidebar defending your completely uncontroversial column, it was probably a waste of space.

In between my involuntary vomiting over the fact that people get paid to write garbage like this, I pulled out the following one-liners and nuggets of wisdom for your enjoyment:

I don’t get it. Playing in a Super Bowl is supposed to be a reward, not a reason to visit your local North Face outlet. And attending a Super Bowl as a fan is supposed to be the experience of a lifetime, a chance to break out multiple bottles of SPF 30….The only things you’ll break out in Indy are space heaters.

–Aren’t the playoffs a “reward” for playing well in the regular season? Because they are frequently held outside. Also, raise your hand if you’ve been to a Super Bowl? Final tally: 0. Editor’s note: Space heaters are not allowed in Lucas Oil Stadium.

That’s another thing. The owners needed four secret votes to decide between Indianapolis, Houston and Glendale. Let’s see: In Houston and Glendale, there’s this orange orb called the sun. In Indianapolis, there’s this white orb called a snowball. What was there to decide?

–(silence)

Maybe the owners owed Colts owner Jim Irsay a favor. Maybe Irsay promised them a cameo in Peyton Manning’s next cell phone commerical. Or maybe Mystery, Alaska, wasn’t available.

–Gene’s notes to self: Don’t forget, three derivatives of the word “own” minimum in this graph. Also, Peyton Manning doing lots of commercials = funny. Lastly, reference funny Netflix movie everyone else saw (and forgot) 10 years ago.

I guess we just don’t see the Super Bowl in the way Gene does (most likely because we don’t walk around gathering free goodies at Media Day). You simpletons don’t see the experience of a lifetime, free of corporate sponsors stealing your seats or endless pageantry (see photo above).

I’ll put it this way for all of our 13-year-old female readers: This column is the girl on “My Super Sweet Sixteen” lobbying daddy for the Range Rover instead of that peasantly Beemer.

But daddy, I want my Super Bowl in Glendallllle.

The Illusion of Parity

Damn, it’s been awhile people.

Had a lot on the (small, plastic) plate…wedding, honeymoon, the usual.

Well, we are back, and with a vengeance. (Usually pointed in a specific direction.) Tonight (as usual), the NBA is drawing the ire of the Cut.

As I finished watching Kobe wrap up a 2-point first half against the Spurs, one of my biggest complaints about the NBA solidified in a box score right before my eyes – the illusion of parity.

It’s insane to me that this year’s playoffs have garnered some of the NBA’s highest television ratings ever.

Take a look at the last four teams standing: Boston, Detroit, L.A., San Antonio.

Would you have put your money down on any other four teams when the playoffs began? Sure the Hornets, Hawks and Cavs had nice runs that were more than mildly entertaining. But let’s get real – the last 5 years in the NBA have been owned by a select few – San Antonio, Detroit and Los Angeles. All of which are still standing with just one round to go.

With these three exceptions, any one team can be the toast of the town (and media) one season, and completely out of the public eye the next. (See: Phoenix Suns)

The Chicago Bulls are the most recent victim of this roller coaster ride. Two seasons ago, Chicago was the team rising quickly to the top of the Eastern Conference. A collection of young talent that could finally threaten the Piston’s stranglehold.

Yesterday, the Bulls won the rights to the first pick in the 2009 draft after finishing with a 33-49 record and missing the playoffs.

So goes life in the League.

In October, every fan has hope her team can make it rain confetti come June.

Luckily for Stern and Co., a good chunk is still clinging to this false hope right through April. Just ask New Orleans.

Emmitt Smitth is easy to please

Just to bring everyone up to speed, these are the headlines from the past week in the NFL:

• - Cedric Benson was pepper sprayed and arrested for operating a boat under the influence (you know you’re drunk when you’re resisting arrest in the middle of a lake… Where were you going to go Cedric?)
• - Marvin Harrison is being “questioned” about a shooting where the evidence is so stacked against the Colts’ receiver its a miracle he hasn’t been charged yet.
• - And, of course, there is more silliness from the Pacman Jones saga as the gunmen is trying to claim that Jones ordered the whole thing to go down.

But fear not! Emmitt Smith is here to make sense of it all. The master of morality, the king of Kantian ethics, the… guy in gold shoes apparently stopped by Cowboys camp to set things straight. I would try to summarize, but ESPN pretty much nailed it with their headling “Emmitt stops by Cowboys camp, advises Pacman to make [and they quote] ‘better choices’.”

Well, “better choices” is kind of vague guys. Care to clear that up in the first two graphs of your story?

IRVING, Texas — Emmitt Smith has some advice for suspended Dallas Cowboys cornerback Pacman Jones: Stay out of trouble.

“As long as you’re not killing anybody, getting anybody shot at and going to jail, then I don’t have any issues,” said Smith, NFL career rushing leader. The former star running back for Dallas was visiting Cowboys rookie minicamp Saturday.

Ahh, that’s better. So the three commandments of the NFL according to Emmitt:  Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not get thy neighbor shot, thou shalt not go to jail.

However, thine drug trafficking, human trafficking, brothel, and rape…. Thy league shall looketh the other way.

Amen.

The NBA…and its hypocrisy

About the 16-second mark…KG, getting frustrated that the Celtics are overrated.

Is this no longer a suspension?

Can Amare appeal the Suns’ exit last year?

Oh yea, and Commissioner David Stern was at the game. So I doubt he missed it.

we don’t need no stinkin’ press pass – pt. 4

Some day soon, a book will come out entirely centered around the journalistic phenomenon we now call blogging. Specifically sports blogging. It won’t be written by a blogger, but some Ph.D. at a liberal arts school. The book will analyze all the ways in which this new form of media has effected “traditional sports reporting” and how the landscape of event coverage has changed forever. One of the chapters in this book will be an expansion of this article (or at least the beginning of it), published in the New York Times on Monday, April 21. The chapter will center around access, and who deserves what amount. But before all that happens, we wanted to address this issue in a five-part series. We will view the access question from the perspective of all the major parties involved: owners, players, reporters, bloggers, and we’ll end on Monday with the most important perspective of them all — the fan’s.

Part 4 – The Bloggers

Listen, just because I didn’t land an internship with the Backwoods Ledger out of college, doesn’t mean I can’t give the people what they want.

The popularity of sites like Deadspin and The Big Lead has shown that sports fans don’t have to turn to their local paper for day-old box scores. Fans can get stories the big dogs are afraid to print, and they can get them immediately.

The writing is a bit too snarky, you say? Check out Free Darko — a downright insightful NBA blog. Coverage too varied for your particular taste? Storming the Floor will make you crave March Madness seeding. Even if you just want a good laugh, FireJoeMorgan is there for you.

Bloggers have it all.

So with all these great prosers — why shouldn’t bloggers be allowed in professional locker rooms?

We do more investigative reporting than newspaper reporters, anyway. Beat writers get the quotes/stories/interviews they want by coddling their sources for years. Every story they break that has even the slightest negative connotation has 5 anonymous sources.

Bloggy don’t play that.

If someone has dirt, we discuss it. Remember when Harold Reynolds (by far the best talking head on Baseball Tonight) got the boot from the World Wide Leader? Without blogs, you would never have heard anything about it. You just tune in one night, and bam, he’s gone.

Newspaper reporters have cultivated this horrendous image of bloggers to use to their advantage. As long as the uneducated, prim and proper public associates bloggers with stoned slackers, they’ll have a hard time getting respect.

Now a few of us have made the transition smoothly. In one of the few crossovers from blog to mass media, True Hoop, an NBA blog authored by Henry Abbott, was snatched up by espn.com.

And according to Henry, his sport has one of the most forward-thinking (yet most basic) approaches to bloggers in the locker room:

The only place I have ever been treated any differently because of my medium is in Mark Cuban’s Bizarro-land. But I know of no other place in the NBA where a serious blogger, who has been around for a while, would be expected to be treated as a second-class citizen.

I think the NBA did the perfect thing. From what I understand, they didn’t tell the teams they have to credential any set number of bloggers or anything. They said there can be no special ban of bloggers, and they have to go into the mix with everybody else.

That makes perfect sense to me. You look at how much space you have, you look at all the credential requests you have, and you make some hard decisions, based on stuff like who’s professional, who has influence, who has audience, and all the rest.

People who read blogs don’t think it’s hard to figure out which bloggers belong there and which ones don’t.

Henry sums it up perfectly.

All we want is to be treated like every other writer. Take away that giant-ass credential from the Sun-Times and those 30 years slaving away on agate in Richmond, Ind., and who would draw the bigger readership?

I guess I’ll let the Web (and newspaper layoffs) answer that one.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Press Pass – pt. 3

Some day soon, a book will come out entirely centered around the journalistic phenomenon we now call blogging. Specifically sports blogging. It won’t be written by a blogger, but some Ph.D. at a liberal arts school. The book will analyze all the ways in which this new form of media has effected “traditional sports reporting” and how the landscape of event coverage has changed forever. One of the chapters in this book will be an expansion of this article (or at least the beginning of it), published in the New York Times on Monday, April 21. The chapter will center around access, and who deserves what amount. But before all that happens, we wanted to address this issue in a five-part series. We will view the access question from the perspective of all the major parties involved: owners, players, reporters, bloggers, and we’ll end on Monday with the most important perspective of them all — the fan’s.

PART 3 — THE REPORTERS

Alright, let’s get this out front first. Yes, a lot of reporters write blogs for their given outlets, but it’s not necessarily by our own accord. More often than not, an editor calls us into the office, tells us that management wants to establish more of a “Web presence” because that’s what all the kids are doing these days with their Giggles and Tube Yous, then they tell us to cross our arms and “Oh my god, look at the spider on the ceiling!” then *FLASH*-*SNAP*, we have a blog.

What I’m trying to say is, that’s not entirely by choice. As much as I love being forced to write twice as much as I used to, I’m not the biggest fan of sports blogs. Never really have been.

I look back on how I got to this point, and I see college where I spent countless hours in sweaty rooms writing news leads and memorizing the different between lay and lie. I covered field hockey and volleyball and water polo and track and softball… And what did it all get me? My first job covering all the same shit — except at a high school. My big stories were about a basketball player with down syndrome and a football recruit getting arrested (which I co-bylined with a fat man named Bill who had a burly mustache and a car that smelled like sour hot dogs).

Ten years of that landed me right back at the colleges, and another 15 years after that I finally cracked open the doors to a professional press room. That’s how I got the job I have, how about you bloggers that want a seat next to me? You opened an account at Blogspot and started calling me a shmuck.

I’m not saying all that makes me more or less worthy, I know the world doesn’t work like that. What I’m saying is that you can’t replicate the passion and respect that those 30 years have left me with. I approach these games like a surgeon approaches a patient; like a lawyer approaches a courtroom. These are not some free tickets to me. This is work.

When I look around that press room, I see a bunch of tired faces that carry the same battle scars as my own. And I’m just as dependent on those guys as I am on my recorder and notebook. You see, in the eyes of these athletes, we’re all the same. Lumped into one giant bunch. “The Media.” And the fact of the matter is, if one guy pisses of the coach, he walks out on all of us. I have to tell my editor that my story won’t have quotes tonight, just like the other 20 guys in the room. Around here, there isn’t any room for renegades.

Listen, even though I could go on about “ethics,” and “standards,” and how “I can’t do what you do and get away with it,” I don’t think those are the central issues to this matter. I think journalists have proven they are just as capable of acting unethically. What’s bigger is the history, tradition, and honor that surrounds covering a coach who just won a Super Bowl, or a 22-year-old kid that’s sobbing into your microphone because he just lost the last meaningful game he’ll ever play in his life.

Those are the things that are not to be taken for granted. And unless you’ve seen that same elation on the face of a little league coach or that same anguish in the eyes of a high school softball pitcher, I argue that you’ll never truly understand what a privlege it is to cover these games. So for now, let’s just stick to what we each do best. I’ll keep writing game wraps, and you can keep calling me a shmuck.

View the other perspectives: The Owners and The Players

we don’t need no stinkin’ press pass – pt. 2

Some day soon, a book will come out entirely centered around the journalistic phenomenon we now call blogging. Specifically sports blogging. It won’t be written by a blogger, but some Ph.D. at a liberal arts school. The book will analyze all the ways in which this new form of media has effected “traditional sports reporting” and how the landscape of event coverage has changed forever. One of the chapters in this book will be an expansion of this article (or at least the beginning of it), published in the New York Times on Monday, April 21. The chapter will center around access, and who deserves what amount. But before all that happens, we want to address this issue in a five-part series starting today. We will view the access question from the perspective of all the major parties involved: owners, players, reporters, bloggers, and we’ll end on Monday with the most important perspective of them all — the fan’s.

PART 2 — THE PLAYERS

Today’s perspective is that of the player. And after much Fynal Cut editorial board discussion, it was decided this particular segment could not be done from the first-person point of view. Here’s why:

As far as being opinionated on the media (whether it be traditional reporters or bloggers), we’ve separated professional athletes into two camps:

One group (in the extreme minority) write their own blogs. These range from the ungodly annoying to the extremely insightful and entertaining. It’s fairly obvious that some athletes (cough, Schilling, cough) do this with the specific intent of avoiding media contact. It’s direct contact with the fan. Cut out the middle man.

On the other hand, some, like Gilbert Arenas, probably just do it for fun — which feels pretty damn good to say.

The player blog has even spun off into a news topic of its own — friend of the Cut Ryan Corazza now writes specifically about athlete’s blogs for ESPN the Mag.

The other 98%, which would be most players in most leagues, could care less who gets credentialed to be in the locker room. As long as they aren’t bothered.

Few athletes actually open up to these individuals anyway, so why would they care for which publication these pests write?

I could see a few potential problems developing out of bloggers being allowed in the locker room.

The first is something like this happening, which would be horrific to bloggers everywhere.

The first time a player complains about a writer — who later turns out to be a blogger (gasp!) — would signal the end of the basement dwellers in the locker room. Ideally, bloggers shouldn’t be subject to different treatment than the regular reporters. But the fact of the matter is, bloggers in the locker room will be a disruption at first.

The reporters will question whether the bloggers should be there. The bloggers will have an air of confidence in thinking they will soon be replacing the beat reporters. And the athlete will be thrown out of his comfort zone and complain to the media relations person.

In the end, the athlete will be fine with bloggers in the stadium, on the team plane, in the shower locker room…until they get annoyed. Which is going to make it extremely difficult for bloggers to do their jobs.

We can only hope players like Gil will try and talk some sense into their fellow players.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Press Pass — Pt. 1

Some day soon, a book will come out entirely centered around the journalistic phenomenon we now call blogging. Specifically sports blogging. It won’t be written by a blogger, but some Ph.D. at a liberal arts school. The book will analyze all the ways in which this new form of media has effected “traditional sports reporting” and how the landscape of event coverage has changed forever. One of the chapters in this book will be an expansion of this article (or at least the beginning of it), published in the New York Times on Monday, April 21. The chapter will center around access, and who deserves what amount. But before all that happens, we want to address this issue in a five-part series starting today. We will view the access question from the perspective of all the major parties involved: owners, players, reporters, bloggers, and we’ll end on Monday with the most important perspective of them all — the fan’s.

PART 1: THE OWNERS

I’m a business man and my model is simple: Win. Winning = good press = more fans = dollars. It’s that simple… On the surface.

The only things that fuck up that model are the elements beyond my control: A head case of a closer, my point guard finds out his prozzie is a cop, the backup QB gets caught railin’ lines off a hooker, hell, some punkass fan decides to start a riot… These are the only chinks in my armor. The only ways I loose money. So what I do I do? I control. As much as I can. That’s the name of the game in this business — control. You’re either gaining it, or you’re losing it.

So what are bloggers to me? They’re sharks. I know, we usually reserve that title for prick agents, but let me lay a different analogy on you. See, us in management are like dolphins. We work as a group, everyone with their role, and together we create structure. We organize all the little fish into a perfect, compact space and through this organization and planning, we get what we want. Bonus with sports is, we don’t have to eat the fish, the fish get what they want out of the bargain too.

But bloggers, you see, they exist outside our control. We can’t exude any command over them, we can’t work them into our overarching plan. They’re just out there sniffing for blood in the water, and when they catch a whiff they attack! They come barreling in, caution to the wind, and make a big spectacle out of everything, just trying to gobble up as much (attention) as they can before everything is gone. Then they swim on, back to the darkness, looking for their next meal. And it’s us dolphins that are left with the mess.

I love analogies to nature because it speaks to something bigger than the human mind. It’s nature. It’s the way things are. And believe me, I understand that in the age of the Internet, this is the way things are. It’s the way they’re going to be. These guys writing blogs are no different from what I used to be — just a guy looking to make it on his own, to carve a niche. So, don’t get me wrong here, I don’t have a problem with what they’re trying to do, you’ve just got to understand the differing perspectives.

Granting access to bloggers is just bringing a shark into my family of dolphins. The head case closer, my sex-craved point guard, the QB addict — that’s all blood in the water, my friend. Don’t you see? A blogger’s wet dream is my nightmare. 

What about regular reporters, you ask? All I’ll say is this: Reporters report. I can live with that. Bloggers, they  try to stir the pot even if nothing’s cookin’. Look, this issue is nothing personal, it comes down to a conflict of interests. Where I look for control, they look for chaos. What they see as page views, I see as lost ticket sales.

And at the end of the day, that stadium, those seats on press row… Those are my waters, son.