Leave Spitz Alone

Some newspeople are quick to forget that the reason they have other people's quotations to critique is because their colleagues go ask those people questions. Most of the time, the reaction that's being dissected is exactly that -- a reaction to tiresome questions by pesky media types. Mark Spitz was not seeking out the microphones; they came to him.

I was getting along just fine in the world, not really hearing anything about the 1972 Olympics superstar. But as this summer's games drew near and Michael Phelps appeared poised to break Spitz's record for most gold medals in a single Olympics, naturally, Spitz returned to the spotlight.

Reporters disrupt his life by asking questions, Spitz gives them answers. A centuries-old practice.

People cannot control their feelings. We can control what we do or say, but there's no way to force a feeling. If Spitz feels like he's been slighted by not being asked to join a U.S. contingent in China and support Phelps' gold rush, then he is plenty entitled to feel that way.

Americans celebrate so many things and so often in over-the-top fashion, that it's indeed a surprise that the USOC didn't extend such an invitation to Spitz. It wasn't too long ago that we made a big deal about Hank Aaron not getting too involved in the Barry Bonds hoopla when the surly slugger was chasing down Aaron's all-time home run record.

Though 36 years have passed, Spitz still feels strongly about his contributions to an otherwise tragic Olympics in Munich. I've always been a sucker for passion, especially when for years it's tactfully kept quiet and only brought to the surface by an annoying television reporter whose colleauges later sit on their air-conditioned sets and ridicule a man who accomplished in one week more than we'll achieve in a lifetime.

Caaashtastic

Those great Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals matchups in the 1980s were happening at the same time as that "NBA Action ... It's Faaaaantastic" campaign. And ever since, commissioner David Stern and other NBA suits have claimed that the game is for the fans.

Is that why the Finals is being stretched out over two weeks, with no games on Fridays or Saturdays, and school-night games running from 9 p.m. until midnight when much of its target audience has to wake up early for work the next day?

Must Shut Up

Dear Sports Media:

A must-win situation is only a situation where the team facing it will be eliminated from the playoffs if it loses that next game.

A 2-0 series deficit in a best-of-7 is not a must-win for the trailing team, so please quit trying to make things more dramatic than they are. That's called lying.

And a "virtual" must-win is the same thing as being somewhat pregnant. It's either a must-win or it's not. Please make a note of it.

Clemens Fallout

From my boy Dave in Cincinnati: "I disremember the last time I've been this entertained by Congressional testimony."

I've got a few, random takes on things here, and I'm all over the place, so please forgive.

On McNamee: Our society wants people to do the right thing. We also believe in second chances, being able to turn a wrong into a right. So when he finally comes forward to right his wrong, we throw our arms up and say he must have some personal vendetta against Clemens. That's weak of us.

On Clemens: When this fat hillbilly wasn't making up words, he was throwing everyone close to him not under the bus, but directly in front of it. In the fast lane.

When you're a great athlete, as Clemens is, you're used to a different set of rules. Sure he's famous for his offseason workouts, but at age 46, he's had things easier for him for more than 30 years now. He was probably the best pitcher in his little league, then again in high school and college and was a dominant MLB pitcher for two decades. As a result, he's out of touch with what reality must be like for ordinary people, so he probably has no idea how bad he looks by throwing these people in front of the bus and continuing the pampered star's habit of not taking any accountability. Up to this point, his life has been such that there's been no reason to take accountability.

From Wall: "I thought he was going to trot out, 'I thought it was the ball,'" a reference to Clemens' jackass move of throwing a broken bat on the ground toward Mike Piazza in the 2000 World Series when the well-like Piazza broke his bat on a foul ball.

On the media: Those who work in the 24-hour media cycle are people who, unlike Clemens and others they cover, aren't under the microscope and therefore have the benefit of being able to spend the rest of their lives formulating opinions about things they'll likely never fully understand. I wish these TV people got that.

Old dude Barry made a good point yesterday when he said he really doesn't care about the Clemens story. Nowadays, everybody cheats, so why is this such a big deal? A baseball player might have broken the rules to get an advantage, and it goes before Congress? Shoot, politicians cheat, spouses cheat, universities cheat, corporate execs cheat; it's just the norm for many people.

From Miles: "Fix the economy, education system, welfare, health care, jobs, blah, blah, blah ... Then worry about baseball. A-holes."

We want to romanticize this and say, "Oh, but it's the national pastime," but judging by some of the top stories in sports these days, the national pastime has shifted dramatically. The new gig is being a scumbag. Just hours after the Clemens/McNamee hearing started in Washington Wednesday, the NCAA announced that Indiana University -- one of the most respected athletic departments in all of college sports -- will have some serious questions to answer regarding men's basketball coach Kelvin Sampson.

And what have we been hearing about for six months? Bill Belichick and Spygate, that's what.

(Again, I'm all over the place. Hope you're still with me.)

Remember when we thought we'd be cool and be all rebellious and not go to baseball games after the last strike? Do you know what has happened? Not only do we keep going back, but we do so despite the ongoing steroids scandal, not to mention rising ticket prices, our favorite teams' poor play, poor managing, poor general managing and perhaps the off-field arrest or nine.

These 30-year-old children are getting paid obscene amounts of money to play a sport, objectify our women and drive fast cars with guns and weed inside them. But what we hear most from these people is, "Not guilty, your honor."

And boy do we allow for some audacity. That old, angry congressman from Indiana sure did let McNamee have it, yelling at him about trust and lies and believability. I'm sorry, but did this hearing not take place in the birthplace of lies? Isn't there a fairly heavy bullshit quotient in Washington, D.C?

And other politicians told Clemens he was going to heaven, thanked him for his service to the Yankees and asked which team's jersey he'll wear when being inducted into the Hall of Fame. Good Lord, I was waiting for someoene to ask, "Would you like me to wrap my mouth around all of you, or just take half of you in?"

And another suit saying "This is really about the children." We have such a boner for things like "what kind of message we're sending" and so forth. Sheesh, can we just call something as it is? It's a controversy, sure, but don't make it bigger than it is. Kids are cute and all, but screw them for just one minute; this has nothing to do with children or messages. It's about one fat hillbilly lying about how he was able to stay competitive late in his career.

But it's great for the eternal news cycle because, I mean, we don't really think there will come a day when we say, "Hooray! The steroids era is over!" Do we?

That's almost like expecting one day to hear, "I'm so glad there's no more racism" or "I'm just glad that time period when good-looking women got a lot of TV sports jobs was short lived."

On arrogance: And lastly, we'll still hand out the WORLD CHAMPIONS tag to those who win titles in our major sports, arrogantly ignoring that they play some pretty good baseball in Japan and other countries, and basketball all over Europe.

Hockey got it right, but that's because it's not an American sport. The last team skating every June calls itself Stanley Cup Champions, not world champions.

GOOD NEWS: At least there is something to be happy about in the world of sports, and that is that Duke is still Duke. Coach K once again has his kids ready for a nice postseason run. Sometimes they fall flat in March, but when expectations are to get to the Final Four every year, you're obviously going to have some disappointments.

But nothing can be too disappointing when you have the perspective that freshman Kyle Singler has. He's one of many top-level freshmen who are playing lights out this year, but he doesn't get the hype that Michael Beasley (Kansas State), O.J. Mayo (Southern Cal) and Derrick Rose (Memphis) get. But I doubt any of those cats have said anything like this this season: "It's great to be able to play the game I love and share it with my best friends here at Duke," as he said after Duke's defeat of Maryland Wednesday night. And in this week's Sports Illustrated, when asked what Valentine's Day makes him think of, he replied, "buying my mom some flowers."

Say what you will about Duke, but then ask yourself why you say that. Why do you hate Duke? All we do is complain about the never-ending thuggery in sports, but when you're given an alternative, you're critical of that? At Duke, you have good, suburban kids from solid families, kids who are good in the classroom and maybe active in the community, kids who inspire teammates by pounding the floor before a defensive possession or who make the extra pass on offense, finding the open man, practicing that team-above-self approach. Why is that so difficult to appreciate?

Nontroversy

This public service announcement is to be the final word on Tom Brady's Super Ankle Story.

Keyshawn Johnson on ESPN's "Sunday NFL Countdown" made a good point Sunday morning, and this is pretty much where I find myself coming out on the whole Brady nontroversy. "If there was really something wrong with Tom Brady's ankle, he wouldn't have been limping around in New York bringing his girlfriend flowers," Johnson said. "He'd be at the stadium in Foxborough getting around-the-clock treatment."

Emmitt Smith, who usually makes it hard for me to agree with him because I'm usually busy looking up words he's inventing as he speaks, made a good point too. "If I'm the Giants, I'd want to play the Super Bowl today. They went into Tampa Bay and won, went into Dallas the next week and won, and went into Green Bay the next week and won again. The layoff might affect their rhythm," Smith said.

But then, surprisingly, Tom Jackson, far older than Johnson and Smith, and presumably better able to recognize a non-story when he puts his horse-sized teeth around one, returned to the topic of Brady and his ankle, and showed that he completely missed the mark.

"What is the purpose of the boot? To distract the Giants? To distract the media?" He continued on in the same, ignorant direction.

The purpose of the boot is to protect Brady's ankle. Is it broken? Dislocated? Sprained? None of the above. It's just sore. Sometimes that happens in football, the big game played by tough, strong men who love to eat red meat and fornicate deviantly with strippers. Fe fi fo fum.

Does anyone think Brady is going to miss the Super Bowl? Of course not. The boot is just a precautionary step.

And though not classically trained in journalism, Jackson is a splendid analyst with good on-air skills. Alongside host Chris Berman, Jackson is a staple of the network's NFL coverage.

But he's become what so many in the media -- especially sports media -- have become: ignorant to his own shortcomings. Jackson's rhetoric shows he thinks it's logical for TMZ's cameras to wait at Gisele Bundchen's door until Mr. Boyfriend shows up, and how dare Brady give football analysts something to overdissect to fill the 24-hour cycle for each of the next two weeks before the Super Bowl? Do you really think Patriots coach Bill Belichick called Brady into his office and said, "Hey, No. 12, why don't you head down to New York tomorrow and visit your girlfriend? And put a little air cast on your foot in case there might be a photographer hanging around, and limp a little. Distracting the Giants I think is our only shot."

Sure Belichick is a secretive a-hole who will be required this week to release an injury report, but none of what the TV morons have analyzed for the last six days has been worth a fraction of the time they've spent on it. Especially in sports, the media creates the distractions about which they so frequently inquire and ultimately write. They use clever "Bradygate" nicknames as if the quarterback himself is to blame for the tiresome scenario. "Will this be a distraction?" is possibly the most polite way a reporter can ask, "do you and your teammates hate me and all the other idiots in my profession?" And even when they do get an answer to that question, it's not good enough to match up with the story they're wanting to write -- or that they've already written -- so they question it further just to get the last word.

On Media

+ Though ABC's upcoming "Cavemen" has been roundly dismissed before airing its first episode, at least the promos look pretty decent. There are a couple of slo-mo shots to simulate hidden-camera video of the title characters out partying at the clubs.

Will you watch "Cavemen?"

+ This week's Sports Illustrated has some good letters to the editor regarding Michael Vick. One reader opines, "After years of seeing athletes being convicted of spousal abuse, the lopsided outrage over dogfighting shows the insanity of our society. Dogfighting is bad but nowhere near as horrible as a man beating his wife or girlfriend."

And another reader urges, "Let me, with just five words, caution everyone running in all directions because a sports star has apparently done something that is revolting: Remember the Duke lacrosse team."

A third reader with a little bit of a sense of humor writes in: "Where is a Paris Hilton story when you need one?"

What's your take on Vick?

+ Best Hour Of Comedy You've Never Watched:
It's on cable. It's on kind of later on Sundays. And no, it's not "Entourage" and "Flight Of The Conchords."

IFC airs "The Business" and "The Minor Accomplishments Of Jackie Woodman" from 11 p.m. to midnight each Sunday.

Each show is in its second season, but since it's IFC, you probably haven't watched either of them.

Both shows are excellent. "The Business" shows a male-heavy movie production house high on sexual immaturity and low on office correctness. Smartly written and surprisingly well acted, the show is carried by prude producer Kathleen Robertson (Beverly Hills, 90210), but strongly backed by the childish antics of her male co-workers. eBay has the first season available on DVD for as low as $3.99.

Laura Kightlinger writes and stars in "The Minor Accomplishments . . .," a story about two women who do their best to derail any professional or even social successes that approach them. Kightlinger has been a stand-up staple for years, and even became a regular on the underappreciated and eventually canceled "Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn." She's actually pretty funny, and much like herself in real life, her title character is far sexier than she's given credit for. First season available right now on eBay for $.99.