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Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times takes a look at "The Eldrick Formerly Known as Tiger," as Mr. Woods came up empty at the U.S. Open. From the Sun-Times:
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. -- If he was still the indomitable champion and not The Eldrick Formerly Known as Tiger, he would have ignored the question. Never, ever would he succumb to a sideshow as beneath him as a hissing match with a former swing coach. There always was an image to protect, corporate sponsors to respect, a cool veneer to maintain, an inner control freak to obey.
But with his game in tatters and Phil Mickelson overtaking him as the epicenter of all golfing buzz, Tiger Woods abandoned his usual political correctness and went on the attack Saturday. He can`t stand the idea that every Tom, Dick and Butch is trying to dissect his woes these days, including his deposed tutor, Butch Harmon, who said Friday on British TV that Woods is ``in denial`` about a flawed swing that continues to send balls to all parts of Long Island but the Shinnecock Hills fairways.
``When Tiger Woods got here, he should have looked at this golf course, this setup, and thought, `Wow, I could win this tournament by six, seven, eight shots,``` said Harmon, moonlighting at the U.S. Open as a commentator. ``That`s the old Tiger Woods. The Tiger Woods I see [now] is missing fairways with irons. For him to stand there in every interview and say he`s getting close and he feels really good about what he`s doing, I think he`s in denial.``
Never mind that Harmon is dead-on-the-dimples accurate with his criticism. Never mind that he eyed the ball, hammered it on the sweet spot and launched it high and far down the middle of the finely trimmed grass, a talent that has eluded Woods since he fired Harmon in 2002. Never mind that Harmon helped reconstruct Eldrick`s swing five years ago, just before his immaculate streak of seven victories in 11 majors, and that he`s about to extend his winless streak in majors to eight since he and Harmon parted ways.
When Woods was asked about being Butchered after another lackluster round -- saved from oblivion only when he holed out from 106 yards for an eagle at No. 18 -- he slammed Harmon right back. Stunned that someone would have the gall to rip him after serving in his kingdom, a wounded Eldrick abandoned all dignity and called out Harmon as a traitor who will get his. It`s the first time, in close to a decade of Woodswatching, that he has aired dirty laundry publicly. Normally, he takes care of touchy matters behind the scenes, such as the firing of caddie Fluff Cowan. But his psyche is soft enough that he feels compelled to put Harmon in his place, which, translated, means Woods can`t handle the idea that a coach was more critical to his historic success than he wants to acknowledge.
A proud moment for Eldrick, this is not. Seeing a legend crack before the world`s judgmental eyes is never pretty.
Learn more about Tiger Woods’ curse here.
Memo to Nebraska: Pittsburgh would gladly take Steve Pederson back, especially if Huskers fans feel he’s the enemy. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and columnist Ron Cook:
Here`s a message for the silly Nebraska people who voted Steve Pederson as the No. 1 Enemy of the State in a Sports Illustrated poll last week:
If you`re not smart enough to realize what you have, you can send Pederson back to Pittsburgh. We`ll take him again in a heartbeat.
Pederson was the best thing to ever happen to Pitt athletics. You can see that every time you watch the Panthers play at Heinz Field or the Petersen Events Center. He`ll also be the best thing to happen to Nebraska as its athletic director, no matter what the 26 percent who fingered him in the Sports Illustrated poll might believe.
"I`m not too upset by it," Pederson said last week. "I`m an optimist. I guess I`m looking at it as if 74 percent think I`m doing OK."
Nebraska`s uneasiness with Pederson is the result of his decision to fire football coach Frank Solich after a 9-3 season last year. He and Solich were friends. Their relationship went back to the mid-1980s when they worked on Tom Osborne`s staff -- Solich as running backs coach and Pederson as recruiting coordinator. Pederson looked at Solich and saw a coach who had a ceiling of 9-3 and had allowed the program to slip behind Big 12 Conference rivals Oklahoma and Kansas State. He wanted a man who could go 12-0 and compete for national championships. He`s betting his and Nebraska`s future on former Oakland Raiders coach Bill Callahan.
"I just felt like we weren`t on the right track both in terms of recruiting and in the direction we were going as a football program," Pederson said. "I came back to a much different place than the one I left in 1996 [to go to Pitt]. We`ve got to get back to Nebraska-type football. If we didn`t make a change now, down the road, we might have fallen off the radar screen."
Firing Solich isn`t what chapped many Nebraskans. Most wanted Solich replaced a year earlier after Nebraska went 7-7, its first non-winning season in 41 years. It was the way Pederson handled the search for his replacement that rankled.
He reached out to Miami Dolphins coach Dave Wannstedt, Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator Al Saunders, Arkansas coach Houston Nutt and Dallas Cowboys defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer. None reached back, making Pederson look foolish and his search sloppy. It also was the secrecy with which Pederson conducted his business. He consulted only Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman. He didn`t include Osborne, the state`s living legend, prompting Osborne to call a news conference to say how disappointed he was in Solich`s dismissal. If Pederson made a mistake, it was allowing that to happen.
Read more about this college football story here.
Larry Brooks of the NY Post writes about the NHL’s labor crisis. But then again, when doesn’t he? From the Post:
The NHL fight isn`t really between the owners and the players. It`s among the owners, themselves. The league strategy of standing behind its non-negotiable, non-starter of a proposal for a $31M payroll cap as hard as Jeremy Jacobs` head will prevail within the Board only for as long as revenue-producing machines such as the ones in Detroit, Philadelphia, Toronto, New York and Colorado continue to give the impression that when the time comes, they will drink Gary Bettman`s Kool-Aid and support cancellation of the 2004-05 season without even an attempt at good-faith bargaining.
Small-market teams and their old-guard hawkish allies don`t fear Bob Goodenow and the PA nearly as much as they do the Red Wings, Rangers, Flyers, Maple Leafs and Avalanche. A majority of owners are deathly afraid that, regardless of adoption of restrictive systemic controls that would include a significant payroll tax, these teams will continue to spend wildly, and thus perpetuate the inflationary spiral the league insists it cannot bear. So much of this is about stopping these five franchises, plus any currently unidentifiable renegades, like Pittsburgh in the early `90s and St. Louis later in the decade and beyond - two teams, by the way, that now have their hands out like the needy outside an ATM vestibule.
It is in this environment that Slap Shots has been told that a substantial number of owners recognize that the league will remain shut for at least two years if the Board stands on its percentage-of-the-gross approach - and acknowledge this as the ultimate Burning-the-Village-to-Save-it strategy - and already, if informally, have begun to formulate an alternate approach that would feature forfeiture of first-round draft picks in addition to a luxury tax for those teams exceeding a payroll threshold that, as we understand it, has initially been targeted at between $45 and $50 million. Fourteen of the league`s 30 teams had payrolls over $42M last year.
While two independent sources shared this information with us this week, league VP and counsel Bill Daly "categorically and completely" denied the veracity of the reports. Without defaming Daly, who, by the way, is regarded by those on the other side as a moderate rather than a bomb-thrower, the league would necessarily be obligated to publicly stand behind Gary Bettman`s cost-certainty approach for as long as possible in order to extract as many concessions as possible from Goodenow and the union.
More NHL lockout talk is over here.
Greg Jayne of The Colombian takes a look at the drug scandals facing American Olympians:
She`s the face of track and field in this country, the most recognizable face in the world`s oldest sport.
She`s articulate. She`s attractive. She`s composed. A compelling figure in a sport that so desperately needs one.
And so there was Marion Jones on Saturday, answering the question before it was asked as she addressed dozens of reporters, microphones and cameras at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene.
"Are the off-the-track things that are going on a distraction?" she asked. "No. I refuse to use that as an excuse.
"It`s been a challenge, but I`ve kind of made it a point that when it`s time to train, that`s what I do."
If only the world were so simple. If only life still consisted of nothing more than running and jumping and soaking up stardom.
Those days are gone for Jones, the soaking up stardom replaced by allegations and denials, by press conferences and polygraph tests.
The heady days of four years ago, when she became the first track and field athlete to win five medals in one Olympic Games, have been buried under a reported link between Jones and the BALCO lab.
The depth of the scandal is difficult to articulate. Barry Bonds. Jason Giambi. Numerous Olympic gold medalists and gold-medal hopefuls. All have been implicated by possibly nefarious links to the steroid-producing BALCO lab. All have labored under the weight of being presumed guilty before being proven innocent.
And so there was Marion Jones on Saturday, competing in the 100 meters and the long jump at the Prefontaine Classic. She finished fifth in the 100; she won the long jump. And for the two hours that she was at the track, you couldn`t help but think that the solitude of competition was akin to solace for her soul.
Is the scandal a distraction?
"I think the results show it," said Tim Montgomery, the world record holder in the men`s 100 and Jones` boyfriend. "It has to be. You`ve got your fate in someone`s hands."
The rest of this steroid scandal story is here.
Marcos Bretón of the Sacramento Bee writes about those wacky Maloof Brothers, and what they want in a new arena:
Tuesday night, the Sacramento City Council will again wrestle with an unpopular idea that won`t die - the proposal to build the Kings a publicly funded downtown arena.
Check it out. It should be interesting, especially if you enjoy the skillful parsing of words, fudging of facts and a good old-fashioned shell game played with your money.
Then again, those pushing for a $300 million to $500 million arena on the K Street Mall could drink some truth serum between now and Tuesday and tell you what`s really going on:
Namely that Kings owners Joe and Gavin Maloof want out of Arco Arena and want the city of Sacramento to bankroll a gleaming new building the Maloofs can control.
That the Maloofs want to reap the benefits of the arena, its naming rights and other money-making features - with no guaranteed residual benefits to the city.
That the Maloofs want what every other NBA owner has or wants - an arena built by taxpayers to grow the value of their privately owned franchise.
Heck, they might even call the proposed new building an arena at Tuesday night`s council meeting - but they won`t.
Instead, the bureaucrats have taken over. The edifice is now the downtown entertainment complex. Oh, how sweet the obfuscation. Don`t you just love it?
The explanation is that the arena supposedly would showcase concerts and other entertainment spectaculars while also attracting conventions too large for the nearby Convention Center. A place, arena supporters say, with events for everyone.
"We don`t call it (an arena)," said Tony Giannoni, the downtown developer spearheading the arena proposal. "We believe it`s greater than that."
More about the Bros. Maloof here.
Staying with the NBA, here’s Peter May of the Boston Globe on the dismantling of the Lakers:
You wonder, maybe, if it`s the Lakers` time. You wonder if the Lakers are now closer to the bottom than the top. Or maybe the middle. It is all starting to unravel in Lakers Nation. In a short burst of time Friday, it was announced that Phil Jackson would not be returning for a sixth season as coach and that Kobe Bryant had, as expected, opted out of his contract. Shaquille O`Neal, the third line of the Lakers` Holy Triangle, then told the Los Angeles Daily News that he wasn`t thrilled at the direction the team was going and would ask to be traded.
You could easily make the case that the Lakers, not the Celtics, are the most successful franchise in NBA history. Certainly they are if you factor in appearances in the NBA Finals, where they outnumber Boston, 28-19. (LA has won 14, the Celtics 16.) They have the best regular-season winning percentage (62.1) along with the best playoff winning percentage (60.4) and the best winning percentage in terms of playoff series won (71). They`ve won 93 playoff series in their history; the Celtics are next with 66.
Of the four teams to have won at least three titles in the last 25 years, only the Lakers have yet to experience an Enronian downturn. The Celtics have been in one since 1995, with one brief emergence from the dark side in 2002. The Bulls? They have not recovered from the forced exodus of all their key people in 1998. The Pistons were outright horrible in the early to mid-1990s and, three years ago, they were 30-52. Combined, these three teams have missed the playoffs 29 times since 1978-79.
Over that same span, the Lakers have made the playoffs in 24 of 25 years. The one blip on the screen: They went 33-49 in 1993-94 and ended up getting Eddie Jones in the lottery. They won 48 games the next year, and two years later Shaq and Kobe arrived. You could say they`re due for a swoon. Maybe even overdue.
It certainly looks as if owner Jerry Buss has cast his lot with Kobe. If that means not bringing back Jackson, so be it. And, apparently, that could also mean dealing O`Neal. Shaq and Kobe are sick of each other and it would be an upset if they both were back.
General manager Mitch Kupchak really can`t afford to wait on Shaq. O`Neal looked occasionally ordinary in the NBA Finals. He is still 32, has two years left on his contract, and, despite his howlings, is really in no position now to demand an extension.
Where could he go and who would take him? I think Kupchak would get more than a few inquiries.
The full Lakers story is here.
Finally, Gwen Knapp is one of the most underrated columnists in the country. In the San Francisco Chronicle, she again tackles a sensitive subject: race, and the athletes who comment on it. From the Chron:
Barry Bonds says that Boston is racist, and immediately you have to wonder, as everyone does when Bonds takes a stance: Who`s on deck?
There has to be another sports icon, right behind him, ready to ruffle the world with racial commentary. The superstars are on a roll.
Less than 10 days before Bonds was quoted in the Boston Globe, Larry Bird agreed that the NBA needs more white superstars. A few months earlier, Paul Hornung said that Notre Dame needed to lower academic standards to recruit more black athletes. He quickly apologized, and the school distanced itself from the Golden Boy.
It`s a sad comment on America`s race relations that these are the most prominent commentators on the topic. Sen. John Kerry and President Bush will duck the subject or speak in code. An occasional candidate for Congress will utter sweet nothings crafted through a focus group. From their perches in the entertainment world, the Dennis Millers and Chris Rocks will have their say.
But no one can slap this issue on the table the way athletes can. As a group, they`re better qualified to understand racial issues, at least intuitively, than most public figures. Bird certainly knows a lot more about competing with and against an array of black colleagues than the typical white elected official.
He is not, however, qualified to be a social commentator. He couldn`t even properly articulate his disdain for being labeled a white star rather than just a star. Bird said he hated seeing a white defender assigned to him. He didn`t know why, but he thought it was disrespectful.
My colleague, David Steele, deciphered Bird`s comments better than anyone else. Bird wasn`t necessarily stereotyping white athletes as inferior. He just objected to racial profiling in defensive matchups. Put a white guy on the white guy. The equation ignored the fact that Bird was the best shooter on the floor.
So why, in the same interview, did he agree to see race as a factor in marketing the league?
More about race and sports here.
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