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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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 "Oh, no! They're going to put on a cartoon! They said they just ran out of sports anywhere in the world!" |
The Greatest Sports Arena: The TV Hearth at Home
of TheColumnists.com
Sports fans really
have it tough. Consider the slim pickings on television Saturday.
Justine Hedin-Harenne won the French Open women’s title.
England beat Paraguay; Trinidad and Tobago tied Sweden; and Argentina beat Ivory Coast in World Cup soccer.
The Oakland Athletics beat the Yankees in a nationally televised game-of-the-day telecast.
Jazil
won the 138th Belmont Stakes.
The Edmonton Oilers won a Stanley Cup finals game over the Carolina Huricanes.
In a pay-per view fight Bernard Hopkins defeated Antonio
Tarver to win the world light heavyweight boxing title.
There was also an NCAA outdoor track championship, some golf
and auto racing.
All this was a prelude to the much-awaited tennis showdown between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the French Open final Sunday. Whew.
* * *
There was a tendency to pooh-pooh this Belmont Stakes because
it lacked a bid for a Triple Crown, because the injured Barbaro
seemed more important to many than the actual horses in the race.
Not here.
Horse racing is an involvement sport. Betting is at the heart of the attraction of the enterprise. Rooting for a team or player in any sport is a vicarious thrill. Putting your money on a horse makes you a player. This is involvement of a high order. Place your bets gentleman and ladies, indeed.
It is exciting when a horse comes into
the Belmont with victories in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness,
thereby aiming for a Triple Crown success in the Belmont. But
that usually produces a small field and does not make for exciting
betting possibilities.
Saturday’s field of 12 none-glamorous horses produced tempting
betting possibilities, both in straight (win) bets and go-for-broke
exotic bets. The favorite went off at almost 6 to 1, and the
winner, Jazil, went off at more than 6 to l, paying $14.40 for
a two-dollar bet. Ask any Jazil bettor if that wasn’t a
thrill to match watching a horse win the Triple Crown. We all,
at heart, can be pretty selfish when the dough is on the line.
One of the silliest things attendant on the race was the action of the people at Penn’s New Bolton horse hospital putting a television at the stall where the injured Barbaro was recuperating. Barbaro showed more sense than his keepers. He ignored the machine, choosing instead to ogle the pregnant mare in the adjoining stall.
A dumb pre-race angle was the babble that Todd Pletcher, one of the outstanding trainers in the world, had not won a Triple Crown race. Big deal. He has won just about every other race in his relatively short career, including a few Breeders Cup races. His horses, Bluegrass Cat and Sunriver, finished two-three in this Belmont. I am sure he can live with that until he tries again--and again.
ABC’s news sense paid off big Saturday. Because of Barbaro’s Preakness incident breaking out of the gate too early, ABC had former jockey analyst Jerry Bailey do a taped piece on the trials of jockey and horse in the gate before a break. This became particularly relevant because of an incident in a race preliminary to the Belmont. A filly, Miraculoaus Miss, reared up in the gate, throwing and pinning his rider, Kent Desoreaux, under him in the gate. It was a frightening thing for a moment because it looked as if another tragedy would tarnish the sport. Somehow the jockey and the horse, who was scratched from the race, escaped serious injury.
I also liked ABC’s graphic superimposing Pimlico race track over Belmont Park to show how much larger the mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes track is than the mile-plus Preakness track.
So now two brother Sheiks have won the last two Triple Crown races. Sheik Mohammad bin Rashid-al Maktoum won the Preakness with Bernardini. And Jazil is owned by Sheik Hamdan bin Rashad al Maktoum. Methinks a Sheik Showdown match race in Dubai is in order.
The shape of things to come on the Sunday NBC telecast of the heralded Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal match was set early. As Natal approached the court, he jumped up and down like a fighter. Then, as the pair met at center court for the coin toss to determine serve, Nadal jumped up and down, boxer-like for sure, even more. It was funny, but seemed perfect for this confrontation, which had the element of a big heavyweight match because so much was at stake.
It was an unusual moment, something to take in. But not analyst John (the Chatterbox) McEnroe. He rambled on as is his usual wont prattling about something other than what was on screen. The first rule of any TV announcer is to pay attention to the monitor to see what the viewer is seeing. But McEnroe is a motormouth, a master of the obvious, and he was in his usual form, frequently talking over play action, having the chutzpah to interpret what the players were thinking.
When Nadla was behind, 0-4, on the way to losing the first set, McEnroe said, “He looks like he’s afraid now.” Natal was so afraid he went on to dominate the next three sets and win the match.
McEnroe gabs away while Bud Collins, the redoubtable tennis journalist who used to be in the booth for NBC, is relegated to features, reporting from the stands and post-match interviewing. A mistake. Right off he set things straight with his incomparable knowledge of tennis history. He said these matches should be called majors not grand slams; only victory in the four majors in one year constitutes a grand slam.
He then noted that the term “grand slam” was coined by onetime New York Times columnist John Kieran when Australian Jack Crawford won three of the four majors and was going for the fourth in 1933. Kieran said that if Crawford won, it would be like a grand slam in bridge. Crawford didn’t make it. When Don Budge went on to win the grand slam in 1938, Times tennis scribe Alison Danzig popularized the term. Thank you, Bud Collins.
©2006 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection. This column first posted June 12, 2006.
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