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Out of Left Field |
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 John McEnroe needs a plug for that gaping yap of his (see Rant #3) |
Our Stan really lets go
with some Grade A rants
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
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It was wonderful and
inspiring to see recovered cancer victim Lance Armstrong win
the Tour de France bicycle race for the fifth straight time.
But should the U.S. Postal Service be sponsoring his heroics? The Postal Service has been losing money for umpteen years. It has spent $40 million over the last six years sponsoring Armstrong and his team. Why does the Postal Service need to advertise anyway when it has a monopoly on letter mail and is a highly recognizable brand name? A U.S. postal rate commissioner defended the expenditure on Armstrong on the grounds that the $40 million is only a tiny fraction of the agency’s $66 billion annual budget. Pleeease! And it turns out that the agency not only sponsored the cycling team, but the New York Yankees, the New York Football Giants and two golf tournaments. Money to promote the Yankees, the richest team in sports? Oy vey. By the same token we cannot understand why the U.S. Army needs to reach out to young people to join up by being a sponsor of National Football League and Super Bowl telecasts. Super Bowls are the most expensive of all television availabilities. Thirty-second Super Bowl spots went for more than $2 million a pop the last time we looked. Is this the best bang for the taxpayers’ buck? Or does it inflate the ego of the Army bigwigs to be associated with the most glamorous of all sports on TV on its big day? Oy vay, indeed. |
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The tears shed by Pete
Sampras at a press conference at the U.S. Open Tennis championships
were touching. But some of the yoots covering tennis these days
are going a bit overboard when they declare Sampras the greatest
tennis player of all time. There are four grand slam tennis tournaments--the ones that determine greatness in the sport-and Sampras never won them all. He won the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. He has never won the French Open, the only one played on clay. Sampras’ big game-huge serve-was not enough to win on clay because a player has to hang in with an all-court game to survive long rallies. Rod Laver had the big serve and the all-court game. He won all four grand slam tourneys in 1962 and then again in 1969. Only one other male player has won the grand slam, Don Budge in 1938. Maureen Connolly in 1953 and Margaret Court Smith in 1970 achieved grand slams among the women. |
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Has there ever been a more annoying case of motormouth on television than the run-on jabbering of John McEnroe on tennis telecasts? Not one, but two networks--CBS and USA--allowed McEnroe to ventilate at the US Open. He was frequently off on tangents like Mets baseball and was Johnny One-Note telling players they had to rush the net more. Mary Carillo, on CBS, didn’t say much, but when she interjected a comment it usually was interesting and enlightening. Tennis viewers are short-changed by the absence of the colorful and keenly knowledgeable Bud Collins from play-by-play on Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. TV tennis nirvana would be achieved with a Collins-Carillo pairing. |
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Miami U. President Donna
Shelala, a former member of the Bill Clinton administration,
spoke volumes when she explained how Miami and Virginia Tech
would be able to compete in the Big East Conference as lame ducks
next year before jumping the following year to the Atlantic Coast
Conference. Asked how Miami would handle the distraction, she
said, “We’re pros.” Indeed they are. And so are almost all the big time college factories whose abuses of academic integrity are rampant. A few years ago Michigan, personified the evil hold big time sports has on the college landscape, Despite enriching its football coffers by selling out its 100,000-plus capacity stadium every season, it canceled some physics programs because of a lack of funds for that department. No doubt the colleges abuse athletes by employing them on the football and basketball fields to rack up millions for the institutions, yet they too often don’t provide the athletes with the tools to deal with the world should they not make it in the professional ranks. Bill Bradley, the onetime Princeton and New York Knicks whiz and New Jersey Senator who failed as a would-be presidential candidate in 2000, is one of many who says athletes should be paid. I agree with Bradley up to a point. I say that big-time colleges should have two teams. One would consist of semi-pro players who would be paid, who would not have to attend classes; they would represent the school in endeavors raking in television and gate money. (Notre Dame, for example, appears on television each week now--more than most professional football teams.) The school’s other team would consist of honest-to-goodness students in school colors playing against other honest-to-goodness students in non-televised games. |
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Some baseball TV announcers’
usages that make me turn down the sound: They don’t say
a lead-footed runner is not a fast runner. They say “he
doesn’t run well.” Or a speedy runner “runs well.”
Grr. I run well, but not very fast. These tired ears have heard
only Tim McCarver actually say some bloke is “a slow runner.” When a fellow with a batting average of .200 is in the midst of an 0-for-15 draught, he is not, as many announcers say, in a “slump.” He is at his level. “Slump” is one of the most overused crutches in baseball lingo. |
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Some fun went out of baseball
with the invention of the malleable catcher’s glove, one
that folds like a first baseman’s mitt. This makes it easy
for catchers settling under foul pop-ups to fold their mitts
and squeeze a pop-up. In the old days the stiff catcher’s
mitt had only a deep pocket in which to snare a ball and many
a pop-up was dropped, making a catcher’s pursuit of a pop-up
an entertaining adventure. When Allie Reynolds pitched a second no-hitter for the Yankees in 1951, catcher Yogi Berra, using the stiff mitt of that time, dropped a pop-up that would have been the final out. The next pitch also produced a foul pop and this time Berra, huzzah, caught it. When I mentioned my longing for the old-style catcher’s mitt to McCarver, a former catcher, he deserted his usual instinct for entertainment by declaring a liking for the new, softer mitt. Aargh. |
©2003 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.
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