I'm sorry I haven't posted in so long. With the football season over, and a moderate interest in basketball until the NCAA tournament starts, what was there for me to say? Yeah, the Patriots videotaping scandal has shown surprising staying power (or maybe not so surprising since it gets elected officials headlines while forcing them to take no risks to their future career prospects whatsoever), but I've already said all that I have to say about that, for the most part.

I know NBA teams are scoring more, and sinking ships in the league are offering big name players to potential contenders at bargain basement prices. But I still can't get fired up to watch too much basketball until the playoffs start. No matter how intriguing some teams are starting to look, that doesn't change the fact that there are 8-10 teams more than the market can support.

While there are enough basketball players to fill the league's rosters in the sense that they can all put enough warm bodies on the court, there are far too many guys who have no business in an NBA arena unless they paid the price of admission or sold beer at a concession stand for my taste. There was a time when a player with so little talent and so few discernible skills in the basketball industry like Brian Scalabrine wouldn't be cashing checks from an NBA team. I'm old enough to remember and miss that time and young enough to be depressed when I do remember it.

I do want to talk a little about the big NBA trades that have come down lately. It gives me a chance to do something that I almost never do, and that is compliment Bill Simmons. I guess I'd file it under the "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then" theorem, but Simmons was dead right on Jason Kidd going to the Mavericks being much more likely to blow up than pan out in the short run or the long run. Simmons nailed every one of Kidd's flaws as a basketball player, and how specifically his competitiveness won't overshadow his inability to fit in on an already flawed basketball team.

That said, I am thrilled that Mark Cuban did this. First, it brings together three people in the NBA that I hate more than anyone, even Ainge, in Cuban, Kidd and Dirk. And it puts the three of them on a ship that will almost certainly sink. As Simmons said, Kidd can't shoot and he's too old to consistently drive to the basket. The players who should benefit from an upgraded point guard position were already shooting very well before Kidd came to town. And best of all, Kidd makes $20 million a year at his age, granted the deal ends after next year, but that's a lot of money to pay for a product that just may be past its expiration date. Good night and good luck to any hopes of a Mavericks' title run in the immediate future.

Simmons made an interesting point that Portland would have been a better fit, but Kidd nixed that deal. Apparently he had his heart set on going to the Mavs. Personally, I can't help but wonder if there might be some small motivation for Kidd coming out of the Toni Braxton fiasco, which ruined the chemistry of the young Mavs teams of the mid 1990s after Kidd and Jim Jackson fell out over their interest in the R and B singer.

I also found it interesting that Simmons dared to ask hard questions about whether this Garnett move might not come back to haunt the Celtics from a competitive stand point down the road. I am actually looking forward to that unfolding, considering the fact that I still hate Ainge and wish this team no success. If they don't win this year, all the players will be a year older. More than that, the issues that can arise on a team with three superstars trying to share shots won't be as easy to work around. If people put the team first for a year and it doesn't get it done, particularly if they lose to a one man team like Detroit or Cleveland, it's not going to work like this again.

As Simmons said, and we all know, the simple, pure economic decision was to go for Garnett. Even without the win differential, it got people excited and interested in the Celtics for the first time in 6 years. It sold a lot of tickets and jerseys and other assorted memorabilia. And something tells me, that even if this team comes apart at the seams in the playoffs and never gets close to bringing the 17th banner to Banner 17, those tools won't lose much sleep over it. Not so long as they make money.

So much for the thought that Mark Cuban is a brilliant business man. I wonder how the people who were desperate for Cuban to acquire the Cubs have taken this. I notice Jay Mariotti hasn't had the time to devote an entire column on this story. I'm not surprised, what with the fact that he had to tell us Tiger Woods had overtaken Michael Jordan. Aside from the horrendously half-assed stab at some sort of poetry to start the piece, the worst aspect had to be comparing a golfer and a basketball player.

Consider the fact that Tiger Woods goes ballistic if a fan dares snap a photo of him while he's in his back swing. Then set against that image a picture of Jordan trying to drive to the hoop against the Bad Boys era Pistons or the Pat Riley Knicks whose hacking habits did what just might be irreparable damage to basketball as a sport. At the end of the day, it's got to take a bit more than a few ads for Amex and Buick for a guy who excelled at a hobby to pass by a guy who took a shameful amount of contact in a non-contact sport.

As for college basketball, I'm really not all that hard up for something to watch that I can force myself to sit down and watch a game featuring two teams that I really could care less about battle it out in conference play. The only thing I feel strongly about in the entire college basketball landscape is that I hate Duke. I just hope that the upcoming NCAA tournament provides some earth-shatteringly interesting story lines, otherwise college basketball might be dead to me forever.

I've been waiting nearly a week for the chance to publish this post. On Monday, I got a call from the guy I go to for my Red Sox information. Thankfully, he didn't want to talk baseball. One of his closest friends from college was en route to the Meadowlands to watch Game Four of the Cavs Nets series. And that night, my Red Sox source wanted to talk basketball.

The two of us had gone to see Game Three and Game Four of the Celtics Nets Eastern Conference Finals Series back in 2002. We were there screaming ourselves hoarse during that epic comeback. He hasn't abandoned the Celtics during the shameful administration of Banner 17 and Danny Ainge, so he asked me an interesting question. His question: if I looked back to that series, who would I have projected to be a playoff team five years down the road?

I think most people would have gone with that Celtics team. They were young, athletic and they enjoyed playing as a unit. Essentially they were like this Celtics team, but with leaders and their players who had hit their developmental ceilings (Walker, Williams, Battie and Pierce) were to a man better than Al Jefferson, Ryan Gomes and Delonte West, all of whom will never be as productive as they were this year. Think about the fact that this year's lottery selection will have to take minutes and touches and shots away from some one and tell me I'm wrong.

The Nets, on the other hand, weren't young (Kidd was a bit slower than he was in Dallas/Phoenix and legitimately rattled by fans like me reminding him that he had hauled off and punched his wife in the mouth), they weren't very athletic and their window was closing. Let's not forget that Kidd and Jefferson are the only members of that team contributing to the squad that just collapsed in the fourth quarter tonight (I can't exactly define what Jason Collins does on a basketball court, but I wouldn't call him a contributor).

And that brings us to the Nets of today. As you may have deduced, I still harbor a certain amount of personal animosity toward the Nets as a team. I may have had my affection for the Celtics wrested from me in the horrible, haunting episode that is the Walker for LaFrentz and Welsch trade (don't forget that the release of Telfair was one more in a long line of catastrophic effects from that mistake), but I have not been robbed of my hatreds stemming from my days as a Cs fan. Like the Count of Monte Cristo, I still cherish those hatreds.

Jason Kidd's decline has not been as fun as I had anticipated. He is obviously slower and his skills have deteriorated. Unfortunately, a true point guard in the NBA has essentially gone the way of the dodo. If people really understood basketball and were not hoping for a highlight reel of posterizing dunks, they'd know that Nash and Kidd are fortunate to play in this era.

If they played when guys like Oscar Robinson and Bob Cousy walked the Earth, no one would even give them a second look. It's just one of those things, like the fact that no one bothered to mention that Hank Aaron played in a canyon in Fulton County Stadium, or that the wall in straightaway center field in the house that Ruth built was 457 feet away when Ruth was in the process of building it. For all today's sports fans pretend that they know the history of sports, they have a superior command of the hydrodynamics of the Marianas Trench in late August of odd numbered years in which a Federalist was President of the US.

And then there's Vince Carter. His defining moment will always be the day he attended his college graduation and then flew to play the 76ers in Game Seven of the Eastern Conference Finals. I don't know what impact it would have had, had he stayed with the team and prepared for the game as he should have. I don't know that his ostensible commitment to education had any effect on his fan base. Maybe he made the right call, and for a few of my readers the fact that I think it was the wrong decision will absolve Vince Carter because I am almost always incorrect. Who knows?

I do know Vince has always played the game with an eye toward the audience. I will always believe that Vince Carter is more concerned with looking good than he is about winning games. Even when he mailed it in to force a trade out of Toronto, people were inclined to sympathize with him. The problem there is that only Jordan has (with apologies to St. Thomas More and the excellent film about him) been able to be the man for all seasons in the NBA. He's the only guy that could handle being the face of a team, the league, a dozen corporate sponsors and win while doing it.

Bird didn't really start doing major national campaigns until after 1986 when the Cs were slipping into mediocrity. Magic always had Kareem with him. Kobe had Shaq. Kobe is also an interesting case, because he didn't suffer through bad seasons and playoff catastrophes the way Jordan did. So people didn't empathize with him before he got to the pinnacle, and as such are little now that he's struggling.

And finally there is the most overrated "superstar" in recent memory, Richard Jefferson. If the media and casual fans were given to reflection on events as opposed to making immediate judgements and clinging to them in the face of all reason, I think they would look back and realize that Jefferson's status as a star is tenuous, at best. At worst, the Nets should have arranged for him to have been run over by a truck the day after the Celtics traded Antoine Walker and surrendered the division to them.

Jefferson's reputation stems from the fact that he owned Paul Pierce in the two playoff series the Nets played against Boston in 2002 and 2003. Some people might think that that is a tangible achievement, but I do not. Paul Pierce is a petulant crybaby. Slow him down, hold his jersey when he tries to come off a screen, get away with a hack on him, handcheck him and do that for a quarter, and he's done.

He'll spend the rest of the game whining to officials and rushing ill-advised shots with ample time remaining on the shot clock. Occasionally, he might lower his head and try a suicide charge on the basket in the face of 4 defenders for the sake of variety. And doing that will net him the 25 points he needs to pretend that he contributed to a team effort. That's what Jefferson did to him, and it took Pierce off his game enough that the Celtics lost each series to the Nets.

LeBron James was a different story. After this series, I think Jefferson should be morally obligated to carry LeBron's baggage for the rest of the playoffs. LeBron would have humiliated Jefferson if there were a reason for Richard Jefferson to feel pride in the first place. It was edifying and depressing to see, all at the same time. Good to see New Jersey exposed by a one man show Cavaliers team, and depressing to think that the Celtics should have been at this point had they not made a trade that atoned for the Joe Barry Carrol deal of 25 years ago.

I am not the only one who is not impressed by the "galaxy" of stars on the Nets. My friend up on the frozen tundra south of Portland emailed me to talk about the same thing. The two of us can see it, but will USA Basketball? If Team USA takes Kidd, Jefferson or Carter (to say nothing of any combination thereof), they'll be lucky to reach the medal round. These guys may command star treatment from a league that has no idea what it's doing at this point, but international officials don't know (and don't care who they are). Without that star treatment, they aren't even three average players.

Today is Muhammad Ali's 65th birthday. Watching the various retrospective on his career as a boxer, a champion, an athletic icon and social activist made me sad. Not just to see what age, a genetic disease and too many rounds in the ring have done to him, but to remember that boxing was once a great sport. Perhaps it could be great again, but I'm not holding my breath.

Now the 17 governing bodies award 35 title belts, the three or four uber-promoters that cripple the sport, the two cable conglomerates that own any fight worth watching and charge ridiculous sums for the right to watch a meaningful fight have all but crushed boxing. But people still like boxing. That's why recent movies like Rocky Balboa, Undisputed and Cinderella Man do so well at the box office.

Boxing, when it's done right, is the most compelling sport. It's so compelling that a boxing movie that is even remotely well done is all but guaranteed to become an instant classic. More great movies have been made about boxing than any other sport. Raging Bull, Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky Balboa, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Great White Hope, The Champ, Cinderella Man, Undisputed and others are among best sports films ever. People who never saw LaMotta, Graziano, Marciano, Braddock, Louis, Baer, Ali, Frasier or Foreman fight live still watch these movies and remember the fighters they featured. Rocky is one of the great iconic characters of all time.

Undisputed might have had potential as a franchise had they not gone the straight to video kick boxing champ goes to prison controlled by Eastern European organized crime ring route. Seeing a heavyweight champ played by Ving Rhames imprisoned for sexual assault did not require much suspension of belief, since it happened to Mike Tyson. While it seems unlikely that an elderly organized crime figure in prison for life could wield enough influence to set up the climactic bout, it's still a damn sight more likely than the factors which had to be set in place for the second film to happen. But back to boxing in the real world...

Part of boxing's demise has to be attributed to the increased popularity and expansion of the professional sports leagues. If some one had two avenues to wealth and success, but one of which entailed getting punched in the face and gut for a living, who would take the punching option? To choose getting punched in the face over playing basketball or football or baseball one would have to be dumb enough to think that Adult Swim on Cartoon Network presents keen satire and not something that a middle schooler place in a flaming bag and leave on the teacher's doorstep (the lone exception is Venture Brothers, but Assy McGee and Moral Orel are two of the worst shows that have ever been on the air).

I think Ali is another part of boxing's demise. He was too big a star for the sport, if that makes any sense. He was too good, too charismatic. Maybe that's what made him hang on too long and take some vicious beatings from Larry Holmes and Ken Norton. The Rope-a-Dope was a brilliant ploy, but taking everything George Foreman had to dish out, he probably shortened his career, at least as far as his best years were concerned. But more importantly, he set a standard that no successor could live up to.

Now that boxing is terrible and, for the most part, not accessible to the average sports fan, what has taken it's place? For the most part, the casual fan has gone over to the NFL, or one of the other sports leagues. Some have gone to the WWE, which enjoyed a resurgence in the last decade, which led to the ill-fated XFL. But as soon as any wrestler builds up a following these days, he ends up making terrible action movies like the Marine. I mist say, I liked the Rundown and Scorpion King, so the Rock is forgiven.

Then there is cage fighting. Some people seem to enjoy it. I've never been all that impressed by it. Maybe because the scrawny wuss of an older brother from Napoleon Dynamite was training to be a cage fighter. Maybe because I am not all that interested in watching two men in their drawers roll around in a cage. Maybe because Joe Rogan is involved. Life without News Radio has not been easy for him and Andy Dick. Yeah, he was hosted Fear Factor, but he was also part of the team that forever killed the Man Show (not that it deserved to live).

I think the main reason I don't like UFC is that I miss boxing. There was a comforting sameness to boxing. No matter who is fighting whom, there is one set of rules by which both combatants compete. In cage fighting, almost anything goes. By that rationale, one might as well have the Cleveland Cavaliers show up to run the pick and roll against the Bears defense this Sunday. Or Burger King might run horrible commercials in which the whoppers are portrayed as a human family. I keep hoping that one day I'll wake up and those commercials will just have been a nightmare.

I know it's a strange thing to write on Muhammad Ali's birthday, but I've been wanting to go on about this stuff for a little while now, and I'm still trying to face the reality of a Pats-Colts showdown for the right to play in the Super Bowl. Would that there were a way for them to tie and the Bears and Saints play for all the marbles.And there's the Jason Kidd divorce situation. I find it amusing that he has accused his wife of intolerable cruelty when he pled out on charges of punching her in the face. But there will, I think, be a whole series of amusing revelations emerging in that divorce.

But we have a moral quandary in the tool of the week award. First because there is a tie. This nitwit on YouTube is certainly worthy of mention. As impressive as it is to sink trick shots on a pool table, the accomplishment loses a little bit of luster as soon as you videotape it. But when you sync it up to a little teen angst music and post it on YouTube, you just cry out to the world that you are a guy who never moved on emotionally from the days when you ruled the pool hall in the mean streets of the suburbs and all the overweight women thought you would be the ideal father for illegitimate child 3.

I feel a little bit bad about it, but this guy deserves it too. He might not deserve it as much, since he didn't go into all the effort that our trick shot artist did. Plus the guy's audience was tooling on him already. But the fact still remains that he was drawing freehand circles, and he just wasn't very cool.I don't know if one can look cool drawing freehand circles, but I'm willing to bet that this particular person couldn't look cool, no matter what he did.

But the moral quandary, aside from mocking total strangers who may possess strange ass-kicking powers, is that it isn't much cooler to link to these videos and make my snappy comments than it is to make them in the first place. After all, I watched these videos. I feel a little better that I found these videos through a friend rather than searching for them myself. He sent me the link to the freehand circle guy because I had an algebra teacher who used to draw perfect freehand circle. I wouldn't say he looked cool doing it, but it was a damn sight cooler than the video from YouTube. But the fact remains that these tools made their videos and I looked at them, so who is the real tool here?

Great Moments in Red Sox History #3

Dateline: 5/25/02

I must confess, I don't know who the Red Sox played on this date. It seems like a strange intro for the third episode of Great Moments in Red Sox History, but you have to bear with me for a second. All will become clear in time. Or at least it will become less clear but in a way that I hope is somewhat entertaining.

The scene for our great moment in Red Sox history is the Fleet Center. It was a great day for Boston sports. The Celtics completed the largest 4th quarter comeback in NBA playoff history, overcoming a deficit of 21 points at the beginning of the last quarter. They beat the New Jersey Nets, a team which I really hate. Antoine Walker had a big game (he ended up with 23 points, but he kept the Cs alive when the rest of the team was ice cold from the floor).

I was at this game. I was having a hell of a time. When Jason Kidd touched the ball, I booed and screamed "Wifebeater" at him with the rest of the crowd. Perhaps it was not an enlightened way to pass an afternoon, but life is too short not to do dumb things on occasion. Over the course of the game, I noticed something I found disconcerting. Fans in the Fleet Center started up a "Yankees Suck" chant. I found that to be pathetic.

Since I am not a Red Sox fan, I do not suffer from the inferiority complex that bedevils Bostonians when it comes to the Bronx Bombers. I don't have a problem with negativity and hostility against opposing teams (as I said in the preceding paragraph, I booed Jason Kidd). I do, however, have a problem with chanting "Yankees Suck" at every opportunity.

There is a time and a place for that sort of behavior. It's at Fenway Park when the Yankees are in town. If you chant "Yankees suck" when the Royals are in town and losing by 10 runs, you are a tool. One day when I have more time and find myself less depressed than I am at the moment (there's nothing like a 3 game Red Sox winning streak to put a damper on a weekend), I might describe in detail the order of magnitude for tools of the human variety. Tonight just isn't that night.

I don't really know where I'd put the tools who chant "Yankees Suck" at Fenway when they aren't playing the Yanks. It's not really that high on the list. It certainly doesn't challenge the level of tool that sings U2's One at the top of their lungs in a bar.

That image is fresh in my mind since I recently witnessed such a spectacle. Now I like U2 a lot, and I really like that particular song. I merely think Bono recorded the definitive version. I certainly don't want to hear some jackass with a beard the like of which hasn't been popular since Sir Walter Raleigh stalked the Earth sing it. It was not a good time, but I digress.

That kind of tool, the lizard king of the yuppies in Anytown, USA is the same kind of tool who chants "Yankees Suck" at a basketball game. A basketball game. A playoff basketball game. The first time the team had been to the conference finals in over a decade. The series was tied 1-1. The team pulled off a miraculous comeback. And all that people in the crowd can think about is that now would be a good time to chant "Yankees Suck."

You can tell yourself whatever you want about the myth of the inferiority complex in Red Sox Nation. You can't change the fact that Red Sox fans chant "Yankees Suck" at the drop of a hat, regardless of time and place. I've seen people with "Yankees Suck" shirts walking up to the Communion line at Mass. It really makes me question whether intelligent life exists on this planet.

I suppose I'm overreacting to this particular instance of the "Yankees Suck" phenomenon. Just because it was an historic moment for the NBA and for the Celtics organization does not mean that it should displace a preoccupation with New York and the Yankees for even an instant. After all, it was just another moment. It's not as though Red Sox fans saw fit to chant Yankees Suck at a moment as significant as Bruce Springsteen playing the first rock concert in Fenway Park's then 91 year history. Oh wait, they did.


P.S. I have it on reliable authority that Danny Ainge was quoted in the Herald in the not too distant past intimating that he had no idea what direction the team needed to take in the upcoming draft. What a shock! I must say, I'd be infinitely more surprised if he did know that. It might be a first sign that a man who has been around the NBA as a player, broadcaster and executive since 1981 is developing a small measure of basketball IQ.

Here's an idea for you, Danny. Draft the stiff from West Virginia. The best way to find out if he's really the second coming of Raef LaFrentz has to be to pair them up on a team. Then we could completely reverse conventional wisdom as it applies to basketball. Guard could go down and post up, and 7 footers could stand at the three point line and look useless. That will sell some tickets.