By Jim Coffman
When Sean Marshall chose Sunday night for the worst start of his career (and what has been a very successful Dodger lineup even without Manny Ramirez finally busted out against the Cubs after scoring three runs in the three previous games), how many viewers even thought of switching to NBC for the Stanley Cup finals? I did, but only because my older daughter, still a little ways short of big-time sports fan status but occasionally hyper-aware of current sporting events, reminded me. I think her brother may have been the one who reminded her but he wasn’t around when we switched from the Cubs to the Cup.
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The NHL in general still isn’t on my radar. Of course the Blackhawks were, but I didn’t watch a whole lot of the playoffs other than their games, and I watched even less non-Blackhawk hockey during the regular season. That was despite the fact that oftentimes during the winter sports months, I’m willing to watch just about anything to avoid the latest lame basketball doubleheader offered up by ES “We’ve made about as much money as we can off unpaid college athletes – now we’re turning more and more of our attention to high school kids” PN.
The problem with many of this year’s regular season broadcasts on Versus were that they featured only one East Coast game that started at about 6 p.m. I’m not settling in to watch weeknight sports until 8, and by the time I got over to Versus on the relatively rare Monday or Tuesday nights that I remembered televised hockey was an option, I either found the second intermission in full swing or the final few minutes winding down.
I’m not sure I was ever really in the habit of watching all of the NBA or NHL finals before Michael Jordan came along (and the Hawks made the Stanley Cup Finals in the early 90’s before being summarily dismissed by the Penguins). I’ve been in the habit of watching the NBA Finals ever since, but not the NHL.
The best news is Sunday evening’s game was quite entertaining. A part of me feels as though a fan should root for the team that knocked his team out of a given playoff to go on and win the championship (thereby proving that one’s own team might well be the second-best in the league). But a bigger part of me refuses to root for the Red Wings. For a while it looked good for the Penguins but the lucky ducks from Detroit (at least half of their six goals so far in the Finals have been total flukes resulted from ridiculous bounces off the boards or pucks on edge being shot from unpromising spots but then turning into knucklepucks that somehow found their way into the net).
Still, this year is better than last year. Last year the Wings shut out the Penguins in both of the first two games in Joe Louis Arena on their way to a dominant Cup win. It appears Pittsburgh will at least be putting up a better fight this time around.
One final hockey note: Everyone loves to bash Versus, the former Outdoor Life Network that has put on almost all televised professional hockey games during the past few years, and the channel that will show games 3 and 4 of the Cup Finals this year – apparently because NBC was so determined to show daily episodes of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, or some such absolute nonsense.
Networks, try to remember, sports are the absolute original reality television and they are only about a million times more dramatic than the newfangled reality dreck that passes for entertainment these days. Versus hasn’t done a good enough job promoting itself (heck, a huge portion of the populace doesn’t know it exists and couldn’t find it on in a directory even if it knew it existed). But if forces are ever to break the hold that the grim East Coach SPorts Network has over so much of televised sport, Versus has the best chance to do so at this point..
Bloom Off Rose
And how about that Derrick Rose? The only thing the Rookie of the Year has had to say of late is that he will have nothing to say about the fact that an internal CPS investigation found that a grade had been changed on his transcript in order to make sure he was eligible to play basketball for Memphis.
And while it may not have mattered so much that Rose’s grade was changed, it mattered plenty that his teammate Kevin Johnson’s was changed. I’m sure Johnson was one of those typical star athletes who always got away with everything. Sure enough when he didn’t study hard enough to get a scholarship, his grade was changed.
And surely that state of affairs was a big part of Johnson thinking he could get away with armed robbery in Kane County. Except this time he didn’t get away with it. And now he sits in jail.
I suppose Rose also believes at this point that he will not comment on allegations that someone else took his SAT. Hey Derrick, you’ll need to be a little more of a man than that. You need to step up and talk about what happened, at least pumping out a few of those delightfully meaningless generalities that athletes so often employ to great effect these days. And there is also one pragmatic reason in particular that should send you running, not walking, to the microphones.
This story is out here and the one way to make it go away quickly could not be clearer. Make a statement about how much you regret that this happened. Show that most beloved of virtues (to American sports fans): a little contrition. Then you can move ahead unbowed.
And finally, regarding the administrative dolts at Simeon High, you know, the ones covering each other’s ass in all off this, do they have any conception of the fact that by hiding the culprit in this case, the person who changed a critical Rose grade, they are implicating everyone? If school officials can’t find a way to see to it that the guilty party is punished, the CPS ought to just shut the school down.
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Coach Coffman welcomes your comments.
Posted on June 1, 2009