It's amazing how much has happened in the sports world since the last time I posted. I have so many to attack for so much. First, how elated we all are that the Celtics franchise record losing streak has been halted before it reached NBA record levels. While some are inclined to accentuate the positive (consider this slide show on Boston.com which tried to find one positive aspect of each of the 18 straight losses and highlight it), I choose to focus on the negative because I'm good like that.

While it's nice to get a win, and always good to get ESPN to stop beating the record losing streak angle to death, I think it does one good to remember the axiom of Winston Wolfe from Pulp Fiction and wait a bit before giving one another the gift of oral gratification. Let us not forget that not only are the Bucks a bad team, but they were also short handed. Michael Redd and Charlie Villeneuva were not in the lineup. You might not be tremendously impressed by either of those players, it is still a significant loss for a team with only 19 wins.

While I'm on the topic of the Celtics, I might as well attack the team's promotional "Guys Night Out/Girls Night Out" ticket packages. For $99 you and three friends/acquaintances can enjoy a Guys Night Out at the Celtics game where you will receive 4 hot dogs, 4 sodas and 4 autographed pictures of the Celtics dancers to go along with the chance to see the worst team in the worst conference of the NBA. Apparently women need even more inducement to see these "games." Their $99 gets them the same 4 hot dogs and sodas, but they also get 4 15% off coupons at the TD Bank North arena Pro Shop and free admission and line privileges to the Greatest Bar on Portland St. after the game.

That $99 package gets you seats in the balcony (if you want the four tickets in the loge section, it will set you back $149) for the following opponents: New York, Atlanta, Charlotte, Toronto and Orlando. If you want a higher class opponent, you can shell out $119 for balcony/$179 for loge to get one of these amazing four seat packages for Houston, Seattle, Philadelphia, Milwaukee or Detroit. It's a good deal, I guess, if you really want to see the Celtics. What I really resent is the patronizing gift of 4 hot dogs and 4 sodas to a party of 4 which probably represents a cost of $0.25 incurred by the concession people. Maybe throw in a bag of peanuts or two, or another round of soda, or even a second hot dog a piece to take a little of the sting out of the price.

The trouble with the Celtics as a team is that they are basically a poor man's version of the LA Lakers. Pierce is a slower, slightly less competetive, slightly whinier Kobe. Al Jefferson is a poor man's Lamar Odom. Perkins and the other spare parts at the 5 need to work a bit before we can consider them to be a poor man's Bynum/Kwame Brown/Brian Cook combo. But you get the general idea.

Then there is my hero, and yours, Jim Rome. Lately, he's been hammering Joe Torre for his handling of the A Rod situation in NYC. Now, there is probably some room for improvement in the way he dealt with A Rod, but I think Rome might want to step off his high horse before criticizing Torre for dropping A Rod in the batting order in the playoffs. It's not as though Torre sat in his office one day while he was bored and said "What can I do to Alex to make him fail and hurt this team?"

The fact of the matter is that A Rod was dropped to 8th in the order because he was underperforming by the standards of a player who was payed 1/25 of A Rod's salary. When I think back on Torre's decision, I am inevitably reminded of the scene in Patton when the General, as played by George C. Scott, slapped an enlisted man and said in his apology that his intention was to remind the young man of his obligations, both as a man and as a soldier.

Perhaps Torre thought that the gentle approach had brought little success, so maybe a sterner approach might work. And as for Jeter running the town and extending no welcome to A Rod, what should Jeter do? It was his town, and it is his town. Until some other player comes in and leads the Yankees to four rings, it will always be Jeter's town.

What we really need, as sports fans and as a nation, is a primer from the media on how all people ought to react to any given situation. Some commandments would be nice, but if there isn't a burning bush handy, some guidelines would be really help. Then we'd know what to do, and we wouldn't antagonize the reporters, talking heads and writers who, after all, only have our best interests at heart.

This brings us to the Tim Hardaway situation. The real issue isn't necessarily what he said. It would have been nice if he kept his motuh shut. He certainly hurt himself with his incredibly insensitive remarks. But some of the fault lies with Dan LeBatard, too. Until he put his foot into his mouth, no one in the whole wide world really needed to know, or cared to know, Tim Hardaway's position on homosexuals in the locker room. Or in the world at large, for that matter.

LeBatard said today on OTL that he asked all of his guests that question lately. That's a lame defense. If a gay athlete comes out then he should be treated like a human being. If he elects to remain in the closet, that's his business. It certainly isn't my business. Or Dan LeBatard's. Or LeBron James' business. Or Tim Hardaway's business. No one waits with bated breath to hear what Athlete X thinks about a given situation. Or at least they shouldn't.

Amaechi was right to an extent to shift focus away from Hardaway per se and direct his concern to what others who might be inspired to harm homosexuals because of his words. However, I think that Tim Hardaway bears no responsibility for any act committed against homosexuals. Unless he commits said acts. People have to be responsible for their own acts.

Almost as bad as the general insenstivity is when insensitivity masquerades as sensitivity. I thought Mark Cuban's response was as shallow as shallow gets. Perhaps there are more concerns than just the bottom line. And this writer from San Francisco who took a Utah columnist to task for mentioning that Amaechi was one of the worst players in Jazz history immediately after the announcement. But the thing about that is who even thought about Amaechi before he revealed he was gay? There is nothing particularly homophobic in saying that John Amaechi was one of the worst playes in Utah history if the stats support the argument. And if the piece had been written out of the clear blue sky, would we attack the writer for being mean-spirited.

In the end, there is very little any writer, TV reporter, politician, religious figure or athlete can do to stop homophobia. You can discourage it, punish it, ridicule it, but if we want to live in a free society people have the right to be ignorant. But I believe that in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: "My right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." People have the right to be homophobes, but they don't have the right to harm homosexuals physically or verbally. So Tim Hardaway shouldn't be punished beyond what the NBA has done so far, and maybe we should stop looking to our athletes for social commentary.

But I really hope I haven't ended up sounding like this guy. It's certainly not my intention. I certainly didn't want to go to the other extreme and imply that Hardaway's reaction might bear some similarities to Ted Haggard's. All I can say is that it's a very good thing for pro basketball that the Lakers Cavs game is going down to the wire as I write this. I am interested to hear Barkley's take on this whole mess, so I will stay up, edit this a bit and watch.

I will leave you with Charles Barkley's last words of the evening: "Ain't no 67 year old man in the entire world gonna outrun me." Amen Charles, Amen. I'm tempted not to do this, but I'm picking you in your footrace with Dick Bavetta this weekend. It's the one thing I'm looking forward to at the All Star Weekend.

The Pro Bowl has come and gone, and very little remains for the football fan until the draft. Baseball hasn't started spring training. The Celtics are frustratingly bad because they come oh so close to ending their losing streak only to drop games by 2 points or 4 points. And no one can watch college hockey because of the vicious injustices which occur each and every night.

Can you imagine that another Beanpot has just concluded and against all probability Boston College was on the outside looking in. You just knew it had to be their year. After all, it hasn't been a very good year for BC athletics. Another middle of the pack football season led to an appearance in the Feel Sorry For Us Bowl, and their coach headed to greener pastures at NC State. Then there's the basketball team and their recent legal troubles.

It must be getting tough for the sweatstains in their cute, little yellow superfan shirts to carry around the burden of athletic disappointment along with their room temperature IQs and bizarrely inflated egos. It's not easy being the Greater Boston area's premier Catholic institution of higher learning, but if they don't pull it together, Regis is just waiting in the wings. But there are more important things in this world than BC, believe it or not. So Jerry York can retire to his lair and dream of that 3rd Beanpot championship and rest his troubled soul with the knowledge that he has been cheated out of his just due. Like Mark Cuban, but with a measure of dignity since he is a good coach and not a total douche.

I was stunned that Marty Schottenheimer was fired today. I guess I'm a little less surprised, having read this piece by John Clayton. I noticed that Manusky had signed to be the 49ers defensive coordinator. I remember being surprised when I saw that on the ticker on ESPN, mostly because I thought Mike Singletary was already filling the position. I guess there is a semantic difference between assistant head coach/defense and defensive coordinator that I'm missing.

Yeah, Marty has a terrible playoff record, but at least he gets teams to the big games. It's not like his teams have gotten worse in each season since he's been there like Danny Ainge or Jon Gruden. I'm having a hard time accepting the coach of a 14-2 team losing his job. It's also amazing to think that grown-ass men (to borrow a phrase from Charles Barkley) working dream jobs in professional sports can't put petty squabbles aside and work together. Actually, it's not that odd, I'm sure that if I were a coach or GM I would allow personal rancor to ruin all kinds of relationships because I'm rude, ill-tempered, sarcastic and difficult to get along with under the best of circumstances. But I try to be a better person once a week, for about an hour at a time.

I'm interested to see where the Chargers go from here. The obvious favorites have to be Ron Rivera and Caldwell from Indy. I wonder whether the Chargers will try to sign Singletary as payback for Manusky. But there has to be a big problem filling their vacancies, since it's come out that AJ Smith wanted to prevent his assistant coaches from interviewing for other positions. Will other teams let the Chargers talk to prospective offensive and defensive coordinator candidates? I also wonder if the AJ Smith-Schottenheimer relationship fell apart because Marty might have wanted to bring in his son Brian from the Jets to be his offensive coordinator.

But away from the mess unfolding in San Diego, where my friend will have so much trouble that even his man crush on Marcus McNeill might not sustain him through a cold winter (figuratively speaking) in paradise. As I sat watching the Pro Bowl, a friend of mine as disappointed in the outcome of the Super Bowl as I was suggested that Peyton Manning bears an uncanny resemblance to Ted Haggard, the disgraced evangelist from Colorado. You be the judge:

Peyton vs. Ted









That remark made me laugh like hell, and it got me thinking that Merle Haggard must be pissed whenever the story about that cat and his man-whoring and meth escapades comes across a news ticker. I apologize for the formatting, still learning some of these things, even 10 months into the blog's history. Now you see why I never post pictures.

Watching the Pro Bowl brought out one of my less impressive moments as sports fan this year. I went on a mini-tirade on how terrible the NFC wide receivers were. How they should have had TO on the team. And then Anquan Boldin made that amazing play to score the final TD of the game and Steve Smith got the two point conversion to tie the score briefly on a great individual effort. There is nothing quite like being wrong (and spectacularly so most of the time) 90% of the time to wound the ego. Bad times.

I am glad Duke fell out of the top 25 for the first time in almost a decade today. I hate Duke. I hate Coach K. I hate the Cameron Indoor Stadium. I hate the Cameron Crazies. Coach K deserves all that he's reaping this season. In my mind, he forfeited whatever claim to legitimacy he had as a basketball coach when he brought in Shane Battier to play for the US National team.

I know the argument that the team needed his toughness and his defense. Alas, the TSA must have confiscated them before he left the country, since they weren't evident in the tournament.
No matter how you slice it, there is no way that he would have been picked for the team if he hadn't raised the flop to an art form in college. If he didn't play for Duke, a better basketball player would have been on the team. It might have made a difference, but not likely. At least it would have been a more entertaining disappointment.