The Cowardly Lions

I have refrained from commenting on the Lions' draft debacle in the hopes that it was a bad dream. Instead, the nightmare continues. Sometimes, in planning plan an event, a marketing strategy, an article, it is useful to play the "what can this absolutely NOT be" scenario.

That's what the Lions' executed on draft day. They overpaid for a QB, they drafted a really good TE after signing a TE free agent and with other decent TE's available in later rounds; they drafted a safety when they had signed some free agent DBs, and they drafted an LB that will not start, an OL in R7, a twig-like RB just like the one they have already on the roster. Then, they drafted ANOTHER TE.

It seems that a even a wholesale management and coaching change...and a new logo... is not enough to change the organization's ineptitude on draft day.

Jay Cutler, Pork Cutlet

Jay Cutler feels raw. He's been offered up for sale. He's feels he's been treated like a piece of meat.

Expensive, multi-million dollar meat. He was almost traded for a Boston Market Cassel-cut of high dollar steak that ended up being sent to the home of raw meat, Kansas.

He's a busting bronco ready for prime time. But what can you say about his attitude and his cocky indigence toward the Broncos?

Well done.

Just SHUT IT and play

Now Jonathon Pabelbon is calling Manny Rameriez a "cancer." Gee, Jonathon, thanks for the bulletin. We didn't know that. If you telegraph your pitches like you do your quotes in the press, the Green Monster is going to look like Bonnie and Clyde's death ride by May 23 of this year.

The bigger message is that I, personally, could care less what players think of other players, good or bad. Just suit up, shut up and let your performance on the field speak for you.

And here's the real annoyance: these soundbites do not reflect what's really happening in the locker room, and I don't want to know that either. I respected players like Jack Morris and Steve Carlton, who refused to talk to the press, and I wish that more would follow their example. It would force the media to focus on the game and not on the gamesmanship.

And if Bob Costas opens his yap one more time about Cy Young in his prime, or Sam Rice's Catch, or Bobby Thompson's home run, or Babe Ruth's last World Series start as a pitcher, as if he were there, I'm going to break something.

Whre does it end?

OK, Roger Clemens's syringes have been tested and they are steroid and/or HGH soaked. Clemens has denied and denied he did PEDs.

I ask what will happen next? Does he:
1) Admit he did it a few times (the Andy Pettite defense)
2) Say he didn't know the needles were "loaded" (the J.C. Romero defense)
3) Wag his finger in the face of everyone (the Palmeiro defense)
4) Say he did it because it was wacky, crazy time (A-Rod defense)
5) Break down and cry and throw himself on his sword (the Marion Jones defense)


I pick a combo pack of #1 and #4.

A-Rod and the surgery

I don't get how a professional athlete can finish a season, hang out, party, and then show up months later in spring training and realize he has a serious physical problem from the previous season.

Was he in denial, in avoidance? Did he think the bad hip would go away?

Here's a question

It's understandable why people are outraged over A-Rod's admission of steroid usage. But why aren't more people outraged about his hair plugs?

They're awful.

Where are all the great sports writers?

When I read present sports writers, they do not measure up the writers of the past, and I think that this is the reason: They rarely write about the event itself. That's pedestrian. That's for the interns and beat writers.

The writers who people regard as "great" these days (and I'll not mention them because I don't agree) feel that they have a higher calling: to tell us what an event means to us. Or worse, should mean to us. Past great sports writers, like Mark Kram and Jim Murray as well as legends Ring Lardner and Damon Runyan, established and maintained their greatness by covering great events and then let us determine the significance of it.

These men achieved greatness on typewriters and same-day deadlines, too. They did not have days and weeks to polish their work. My favorite sportswriter of all time is W.C. Heinz, and the greatest sports story of all time, in my opinion, is his Death of a Racehorse, written in less than an hour from the press box of a Baltimore-area race track. It's of a masterpiece quality that I just don't see from today's sportswriters.

http://www.bloodhorse.com/pdf/DeathofaRacehorse_Heinz.pdf