The World in sports from my view

We’ve had another busy weekend in sports and I’m bringing you all the action from my perspective. Miami and Dallas are up 2-1 in the NBA playoffs, Sam Hornish found a way to slip past rookie Marco Andretti to win the Indianapolis 500, Barry Bonds finally hits home run number 715 and the Detroit Tigers still have the best record in baseball. That’s a nice week of action to keep any sports fan “juiced” for another week.

The Miami Heat, led by their stars Shaquille O’Neal and Dwyane Wade are leading and outplaying the favored Detroit Pistons 2-1. Miami has taken homecourt advantage from the Pistons and unlike last year when they lost in 7 games with homecourt advantage, they are playing strong. Wade, a guard, is shooting an incredible 69% from the floor. Detroit has no answer for Wade and when they slide over to help, he’s tossing alley oop passes to Shaq. The hack a Shaq strategy that teams try to employ to catch up against Shaq, isn’t looking impressive right now. In fact, Miami employed the hack a Ben (Wallace) and he missed his free throws. Detroit is in trouble unless they discover their early season offensive explosion real soon.

Dallas lost the first game against Phoenix when they chose to try and run with Phoenix. This is a terrible recipe for success for any team to try and run with Phoenix. Dallas slowed the games down in the last two games and have thrown the Suns slightly out of whack. Phoenix has been minus Raja Bell in those two games and I won’t minimize his impact, but the strategy is sound for Dallas and it will be hard to change the momentum in this series if Phoenix doesn’t start running and throwing Dallas out of sorts. Steve Nash may be the two-time reigning MVP, but Dirk Nowitzki after 7 seasons in the league, is finally gaining his overdue recognition as a superstar in this league. Stars often don’t live up to their star billing, but Nowitzki is lighting it up and leading his team every game. Nowitzki is averaging 28.5 points, 12.1 rebounds and even throwing in 3 assists a game. This guy is for real so watch out for Dirk next season and see if his MVP total goes up after this playoff season now that people are seeing what he does every night for his team.

Sam Hornish, even after splashing gas all over his pit crew, found a way to creep back into the front row and win the Indianapolis 500. The crew of Hornish told him to go, but the gas nozzle was still in the car. Hornish fought his way back into the race and made a daring pass of 3^rd generation Andretti racer Marco right near the end to finish less than a second ahead of Marco. Father Michael Andretti finished 3^rd. The curse of the Andretti’s continues as father/grandfather Mario, was the last Andretti to win the race in 1969. Danica Patrick finished in 8^th place. This race should help Indy car racing gain fans as this was one of the best races ever and fans may be able to appreciate the sport rather than just seeing if Patrick can win.

Barry Bonds finally hit his 715^th home run off of Colorado pitcher Byung Hyun Kim in the 4^th inning. Kim ought to be getting used to big home runs as he almost cost the Arizona Diamondbacks the World Series in 2001 as he gave up several huge home runs, but the team came back to win the series. I predict Bonds will relax for a few weeks now and will probably hit several home runs in the next week as the pressure to hit a home run in every at bat will ease. I saw his swing against Kim and it looked like the swings we got used to over the last 7 years. Early in the year, Bonds was literally falling down trying to swing so hard to try and hit home runs. I respect what he’s done over his career and steroid use doesn’t sour me on what he’s done in his career.

Detroit is still in 1^st place in the American League, but they play New York, Boston and Chicago, so we’ll get a good idea how good they are in the next 2 weeks. Boston is playing well and the Yankees have found a way to hang in there after all of their injuries. Ozzie Guillen went off on his Chicago team, so we’ll see it wakes them up like the tirade by Jim Leyland did with Detroit.

Sports Musings: Things I just wonder about.Could someone please explain to me how A.J. Pierzynski, Chicago White Sox catcher, was first thrown out of the game and later fined for allowing his face to be used as a punching bag by Chicago Cubs catcher, Michael Barrett last week? Pierzynski was thrown out of the game and the league said he was fined for raising his hands in the air just before he got to the dugout. Does this mean anyone that raises their hands will be fined if they get mad or have they been fined and we just never heard about it? How can you get punched in the face, not retaliate and still get punished twice? What kind of message does that send if you get punished for getting your face slammed into another players fist? I would send out my 25^th player and purposely get their star into trouble so he gets ejected.

The same thing happened in the last regular season NBC Saturday hockey game involving Philadelphia and the New York Rangers. Their star Peter Forsberg received a very hard, but clean check into the boards by a Rangers player and two Philadelphia players proceeded to jump on him. Both Flyers players were given a 2-minute minor penalty, but the Rangers player that made the clean check was also given a 2-minute minor penalty. I was completely lost on this penalty because it was a clean hit and the Flyers skated over and jumped on him. What exactly are they thinking when a guy makes a clean play, the opposition follows up with an illegal play and yet the clean play is penalized with the same punishment? You’ve all but told every player on the ice that you can start a free for all and hurt someone because there’s no true penalty for whatever you do. Hockey lets guys fight and the refs stare at them for 30 seconds before they step in, but the player gets suspended if he hurts his opponent. In basketball and football you automatically get thrown out for throwing a punch. I guess the “thug” image in basketball is worse then actually being a “thug” in hockey.

Something that has always bothered me in sports also is can you be the face of your sport without ever winning? Apparently, if you’re a woman, yes you can be the face of your sport. Annika Sorenstam has won everything in golf there is to win on the women’s tour, but all everyone talks about is Michelle Wie. Wie hasn’t won anything, yet wants to play on the men’s tour. She says it will make her better. Is it going to help her win a tournament on the women’s tour. If yes, I guess she should go for it.

Danica Patrick has become the face of the Indy car racing tour and everyone knows she isn’t the best driver by any standard of greatness. The Indianapolis 500 was so exciting this year that just maybe, fans/people in general will watch because it’s fun rather than just to see where Patrick finishes. I hate to say this, but a man would never be considered the face of his sport if he hasn’t won anything. The Tiger Woods hype came about because he actually started winning big golf tournaments and brought in a new diverse group of fans and players because he won/wins. Maybe I’m just being difficult, but I just don’t understand the hype machine when it comes to any individual, team or sport.

As great as LeBron James has proven himself to be, can we just let him play without actually treating him in the press as “King James”. It really bothers me when you try to crown someone as the savior because then it influences everyone from the fans to the referee also. Remember Michael Jordan in his heyday when no big call would ever go against him. You would swear LeBron was playing in the NBA with his St. Mary’s high school team rather than the Cleveland Cavaliers. He can never do wrong and it’s always about time his teammates do anything in the game when they do well and help LeBron win games. One star rarely ever wins games by himself and nowadays, it’s getting tough for even 2 stars to beat a good team.

Something that bothers me also is when sports shows or announcers during games bring up useless facts that have no bearing on the game. I heard a fact that a team (name slips my mind and is a useless fact, so it doesn’t matter, even though it may have been Florida) was the first team to ever face Pedro Martinez and Greg Maddux in back-to-back games. Why would you even go back through history to look that up? How about when the Lakers were preparing to face the Phoenix Suns in game 7 of their first round series. Several times I heard the Lakers were something like 13-7 in game 7′s all-time. That drives me crazy because this particular Lakers team had nothing to do with that earlier record except maybe Kobe in the series against Portland in 2000. Most of those game 7′s were attributed to the “Showtime” Lakers in the 1980′s and the earlier Lakers of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s. Why bring that up if they’ve never faced that situation before. I know there’s a bunch more, but not enough space to rattle them off. You tell me yours though.

By the way, the World Cup starts 12 June for the USA against #2 ranked Czech Republic. They are also in the same division with the top team from Africa, Ghana and traditional power Italy. The bookies in England rate the USA team 80-1 favorites. This means they aren’t very impressed and justified their rankings by saying the USA doesn’t play a very tough schedule, so they haven’t proven anything to gain too high a respect quite yet. I have to agree because it’s just like a young hotshot boxer fighting a bunch of guaranteed wins to gain confidence and then start saying he deserves a shot at the champ without having fought a top contender. We’ll see.

That’s my view from the sports world for this week, but I gladly will listen to what you saw and thought about the action in sports over the last few weeks.

 

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.