
I'm still at least two weeks away from recovering from
my "cyber-burnout", so the Ticktionary's benefactor Devin Pike will be dishing
out the Weekly Special in my absence. And get this, he's talkin' sports!. -- Joe Lopez
Well, Junior Miller may not want to take over Blackie Sherrod's
"Scattershooting" concept while he's still kicking around. I'm a little less
patient, so...
Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Ruth Buzzi:
- Yes, I watched the '60 Minutes' interview with Latrell Spreewell --
for about three minutes. "It's not like I was trying to choke P.J. or
anything..." "Yes, I said I wanted to kill him, but I didn't really mean
it..." Folks, I like science fiction a lot. Suspension of disbelief is something you
have to do a lot of in sci-fi. It was not something I could achieve while listening to
Spreewell.
- Question is, why is it so tough for the sports-watching community, by
and large, to take Spreewell at his word? Maybe it's because there's a bigger belief that
the climate for choking -- oh, I'm sorry, Spree, love-tapping -- a coach exists than a
coach belittles a player under his watch so much that person snaps beyond the point of
reapproach.
- Should we, as Mike Rhyner so eloquently put it, cede the whole thing
to the gangsta hoopstas and ignore the NBA? Looks like it's already happening. Ratings for
NBA coverage on both NBC and TNT are down from this time last year, and the Spreewell
arbitration verdict won't help matters.
- The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament could not have come at a better
time... to take the focus off of the travesty they committed last month with the US
Women's Hockey Team. You know, the team we sent over to Nagano that actually DID the job
they set out to do, and brought home the gold medal (unlike their tantrum-prone pro
counterparts)? Well, the folks at Wheaties wanted to pay the women their due by putting
their mugs on a Wheaties box.
Not so fast, said the old white crones at NCAA... college players Jenny Schmidgall, who
will be a freshman at the University of Minnesota next year, Brown sophomore Tara Mounsey,
Providence sophomore Sara DeCosta, and Harvard seniors A.J. Mleczko and Angela Ruggeiro
can't be on the box. That would be an endorsement of Wheaties, they said, and that's
against NCAA regs.
Oh, bite me. It's not an endorsement by the players of Wheaties, it's General Foods
honoring some of the best athletes America has to offer. Just one more piece of evidence
that the NCAA is a waste of human flesh.
- Flipping around the Sunday satellite offerings, and up pops... Cubs
baseball. Spring training game against the Athletics in Arizona. Sorry, kids, but the
world seems more right all of the sudden with baseball's opening day just around the
corner. I stood in line in sub-freezing weather last month when individual game tickets
went on sale, and the only thing I regret was that I couldn't buy more. Bring it on,
bruthah!
--Devin Pike
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