After a weekend of watching football, basketball and hockey and, for the most part, it was quite enjoyable. Then, on Monday, the sports world hit the proverbial fan. So to speak.
From Mark McGwire to the Green Packers and from bad announcing to a general load of mainstream media bullcrackers, it’s been quite a few days.
Let’s review and discuss…
1) On Monday, Mark McGwire, the new hitting coach of the St. Louis Cardinals and the man who saved baseball in 1998 sent out a release saying that he used steroids during his big league career.
Wow! Who knew?
I wrote a lot about Mark McGwire’s use of Androstenedione in 1998 and was told quite clearly by a Winnipeg Free Press editor that I should leave the man alone. Funny, how the mainstream media mob changed after people realized that andro was, indeed, a steroid precursor and a pretty solid stacking agent.
These scoops just keep on coming.
2) Monday, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers played down the alleged facemask penalty that was missed (what else is new?) during his overtime fumble, the one that cost the Packers the game.
While a group of Packers fans threatened to sue the NFL for the non-call, Rodgers said his team had a couple of chances to win that football game, but the defence didn’t have an answer for the Cardinals offence.
Meanwhile, it was still a penalty and it was missed (or ignored). But what else is new in the NFL?
3) My old friend, Bruce Dowbiggin had a great item in his Usual Suspects column in the Globe and Mail on Monday. Dowbiggin wrote: “Why we’ve missed Joe Theismann, Master of the Obvious. ‘When you don’t have a field-goal kicker who can make the kicks, it’s so deflating for everybody.’ Deflating. We know how that feels. ‘It’s so important to get into the visual sight of the quarterback,’ the former CFL QB told us Saturday. Yeah, that invisible sight is a real beyatch.”
I tend to watch a lot of football with the mute button on. I have no problem with the play-by-play guys. Jim Nantz, Joe Buck, Don Criqui, Gus Johnson, they’re fine. It’s the colour analysts that drive me nuts.
Thiesmann is bad, Jon Gruden is like fingernails on a chalkboard. But Darryl Johnston and Phil Simms take the cake. They just talk for the sake of talking. Or cheerlead for the sake of cheerleading. And by the fourth quarter, they’ve contradicted half the things they said in the first quarter. After awhile, it just gets silly and annoying.
Thankfully, we have a mute button.
4) Received this from my good friend, Fort Rouge Ted on Sunday:
“PLEASE I NEED YOUR HELP. Does anyone know how to cancel an e-Bay bid?
“I put in a bid for a ‘Mickey Mouse Outfit,’ and now it seems I’m only six minutes away from owning the Toronto Maple Leafs.”
I know it’s cruel. But it IS funny.