Tiger is bigger than the game

Maybe it’s just me, but I doubt it, but I believe most eyes tomorrow belonging to golf fanatics are waiting to see how one pro golfer performs at the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Ga.

That golfer is Eldrick “Tiger” Woods. 

He hasn’t played much competitive golf in recent years, having to recover from surgeries and the effects of that near-fatal car crash in California. 

Woods is teeing it up tomorrow. A lot of fans — and I am one of them — want Woods to do well. If he doesn’t and falls out of the race for the trophy early, well, I am not likely to watch much of the event.

That is, unless one of the older guys rises to the top, which can — and does — happen on occasion.

Still, I am rooting for the fellow who truly is larger than the game he plays.

End these all-star games!

Here’s a thought, and I admit it’s not an original one … but the National Basketball Association needs to end the annual all-star game.

The same for the National Football League and the National Hockey League. End ’em! Don’t bother putting on these charades where the athletes play zero defense.

The NBA’s latest disaster this past weekend had one of the teams scoring 211 points. 211 points! What the hell?

This is preposterous! I get that the athletes don’t want to get hurt. I don’t blame them for that. I do believe that the NBA is doing a disservice to them and to the fans who show up to watch these guys perform. Same for the NFL, which too often has players going through the blocking and tackling motions. Oh, and the NHL, which often produces all-star games with scores like 12-10.

OK, that all said, Major League Baseball should continue its all-star contests, which because of the nature of the sport can produce actual competition featuring players working hard to win the game.

Perhaps the most famous — or infamous — MLB all-star moment came in 1970 when Cincinnati’s Pete Rose sought to score a run and crashed into Cleveland catcher Ray Fosse who was guarding the plate. Rose was running full tilt down the third base line. The crash injured Fosse so seriously that he never was able to play the game at a high level; the event essentially ended his playing career.

The rest of the major pro sports leagues, though, need not bother to stage these idiotic exhibitions. They aren’t worth watching.

Dallas Stadium? For real … ?

A mild bit of grumbling can be heard in some North Texas communities over the temporary renaming of AT&T Stadium in Arlington.

The place — known colloquially around here as Jerry World — was named over the weekend as a semifinal site for the 2026 World Cup soccer tournament. The locals had hoped the place would become a site for the finals. But … no dice.

FIFA, the World Cup governing body, doesn’t like to have corporate names on its venues, so it demanded they take down the name of the telecommunications giant. The new name?

Dallas Stadium!

The name has rankled some folks. I tend to agree with their hurt feelings. 

The place is 30-some miles from Dallas. It’s closer to Fort Worth than to Big D. I can think of several non-corporate names one could have put on the place other than Dallas Stadium.

North Texas Stadium. D/FW Stadium. Arlington Stadium. They all come to mind. I’d even settle for Cowboys Stadium. 

It just ain’t in Dallas. I get that FIFA wanted to have a name associated with the largest city in the region. That would be Dallas, with its towering skyline full of gleaming office buildings. Then again, Fort Worth has its share of cowboy glitz and glamor, too. 

I should point out as well that the Dallas Cowboys, the pro football team that calls the place home, hasn’t played in Dallas since the team’s founding in 1960, when they played their home games in the Cotton Bowl. They have since moved to Irving and then to Arlington … where team owner Jerry Jones built the place now known temporarily as Dallas Stadium. 

As for the grumblers, well, I’m with ’em.

Get a life, conspiracists

Conspiracy theorists, seemingly to a person, have too much time on their hands.

Thus, they need to find something to occupy their usually vacuous skulls. Absent anything constructive, they are left to concoct idiotic theories that simply defy any sense of what’s real.

Example? The conspiracy theory du jour involves the Kansas City Chiefs, their tight end Travis Kelce and his girlfriend Taylor Swift. The Chiefs and Kelcie are playing in the Super Bowl a week from Sunday. The conspiracists have come up with a beaut, I’m going to tell ya.

Republicans across the land have glommed onto a notion that the National Football League has rigged the Super Bowl to ensure that the Chiefs defeat the San Francisco 49ers, that Kelce will bring his squeeze onto the field to celebrate and that Swift will endorse President Biden’s bid for re-election.

Supposedly well-informed conservative talking heads are actually breathing life into this nonsense by endorsing the notion they said could possibly be true.

Oh, my ever-lovin’ goodness. The insanity of it all simply makes me want to hurl.

This kind of baloney too often takes on a life of its own. I mean, we do live in an era of social media where such nonsense spreads so damn quickly that the truth never seems to catch up.

I should point out, too, that Kelce happens to be a pro-vaxxer, displaying proudly in recent days a bandage on his arm that reveals his belief in the vaccines that protect him against contagions such as, oh … the COVID-19 virus. That’s anathema to the right-wing MAGA crowd that looks for reasons to despise public figures.

Social media is pervasive to be sure. It produces plenty of good in this world of ours. It also is largely to blame for the nonsense that permeates the atmosphere, which then gains even more traction when ostensibly bright people believe it.

Try someone new … Jerry

Jerry Jones, the egomaniacal owner of the Dallas Cowboys, won’t accept any advice from someone who in truth doesn’t really give a crap about the organization he calls “America’s Team.”

But I’m going to offer it anyway.

A Dallas man submitted a letter to the editor of the Dallas Morning News, which published it in this morning’s paper. The fan writes that the team has gone “28 long years” since it last played for an NFL championship; the team has burned through 1,484 players, six head coaches and one general manager. “Can you guess the common denominator for all these … failures?” he writes.

Sure. That’s Jones, who doubles as GM as well as the guy who signs the ample paychecks.

Jones’s ego compels him to pretend he knows something about pro football. He won’t give up the GM post to a real football pro. But he damn sure should.

The Cowboys choked this past weekend against a team described as “upstart.” The Green Bay Packers came to play tackle football. The Cowboys didn’t. There likely should be a coaching change in the Cowboys’ immediate future.

As for the GM matter, that’s up to the owner … who must decide whether to “fire” himself and then hire someone who knows how to build and maintain a professional football team. 

That won’t happen. It certainly should, if only the owner’s ego would allow it.

Going back to the beginning

Back in the olden days, I was a young whipper snapper looking to break into the newspaper industry as an up-and-coming reporter.

We had a weekly newspaper in my hometown of Portland, Ore., that decided to hire me as a part-time sportswriter. It was the Community Press. I worked for a guy who served as sports editor; he later went on to work as a reporter for the Oregonian. I went on to something else, too.

But now, nearly 50 years later, I am going back to the beginning in my freelance capacity while working for KETR-FM public radio. I am going to cover a college football bowl game. The Scooter’s Coffee Frisco Bowl awaits next Tuesday.

I won’t cover the game, reporting on the snaps, touchdowns, turnovers, and the final score. Instead, I am going to focus on one team’s rather dramatic rise to bowl-quality football. University of Texas-San Antonio built a football program from scratch over the course of just 12 years. The Roadrunners are now going to face off against Marshall University in the Frisco Bowl.

This is quite a novel assignment. I write a feature each month for KETR.org; my boss at the Texas A&M-Commerce radio station publishes the feature on the station’s website. Honest to goodness, I am really looking forward to covering this game and reporting to our readers and listeners about how UTSA rose so quickly to a bowl-quality college football program.

I’ll have to dust off my knowledge of football lingo so that I can know what I’m writing. It’ll come back to me quickly.

What a way to go!

Someone has to explain this one to me, because my sometimes-pointy head can’t quite grasp certain realities.

OK, Texas A&M University fired head football coach Jimbo Fisher over the weekend after the Aggies blew out Mississippi State by 40 points or so. That means that Fisher — for whatever reason — wasn’t doing the job the Aggies expected of him.

So, does the coach clear out his office and skulk away into the night like a scorned hound dog? Oh, no.

Dude gets tens of millions of dollars! The university is going to pay Fisher $75 million over the course of several years. The money, according to the Texas Tribune, will come from “donor dollars from the school’s 12th Man Foundation and athletic department funds.”

“The decision to part ways with Coach Fisher is the result of a thorough evaluation of the football program’s performance, and what’s in the best interest of the overall program and Texas A&M University,” the school said in a statement.

“The best interest of the overall program” obviously didn’t include Coach Fisher. Which meant he wasn’t doing the job!

What in the world am I missing here?

‘Home field advantage’?

OK, kids, we now know the first two games of the 2023 Major League Baseball World Series will occur at Globe-Life Field in Arlington, giving the Texas Rangers “home-field advantage” in the best-of-seven series.

But … wait. Is that “advantage” worth having?

The Rangers and the Houston Astros played their guts out in the American League Championship Series. The “away” team won every game. The Rangers won their four games against the ‘Stros in Houston.

So, this year, allow me to declare that the “home-field advantage” that the Rangers have might not matter … unless of course they can peel away one win on their home field.

From ‘zero’ to ‘hero’ … just like that!

Let’s see now. At the end of the 2022 Major League Baseball season, Dallas/Fort Worth baseball fans were wondering if the Texas Rangers had lost their ability to compete at the big-league level.

The Rangers stunk. The were a laughingstock. They reminded longtime fans of some of the worst teams in American League history. Then came the offseason. They hired a new manager, Bruce Bochy, who brought in some new coaches. They went to work to rebuild the team.

Have they succeeded? Yeah. They have.

The Rangers so far — if you’ll pardon the baseball pun — are pitching a shutout in the 2023 playoffs. They went to Tampa to sweep the Rays. Then they went to Baltimore and took the first two from the Orioles and sent the Birds packing with a third victory at home.

Now the Rangers are playing the Houston Astros in the American League Championship series and have defeated the ‘Stros in the first two games. They have to win two more to advance to the World Series. Let’s see … that’s 7-0 so far in this playoff extravaganza.

Not a bad turnaround.

Transfers dominate college football

Well … I got through another college football Saturday with a smile on my mug as I got to watch my Oregon Ducks deliver a beat down to the Colorado Buffaloes on national TV.

But … I am troubled by the trend that has developed in college football. It’s the “transfer portal” that, to my mind, has resulted in a form of intercollegiate free agency among these student-athletes.

Football players frequently “transfer” their eligibility from one school to another. It allows them some additional college football playing time, which presumably could enhance their financial windfall come draft day in the National Football League.

The old-school fuddy duddy in me isn’t entirely sold on the transfer portal. Watching the Ducks-Buffs game Saturday filled my ears with lots of commentary on all the transfers playing for both Oregon and Colorado. Indeed, the Ducks’ quarterback, Bo Nix, is a kid who transferred from Auburn to play for Oregon. Head U of O coach Dan Lanning calls Nix ‘an elite quarterback” who, after the Saturday blowout of Colorado, has become a Heisman Trophy candidate.

But my point is that the transfer portal vehicle creates a sort of traveling road show quality to all these athletes moving from one university to another to burnish their marketability with the pro franchises. It’s not unlike what has happened over the course of 50 years to Major League Baseball, where athletes shop themselves around the league when their contract expires with the team for which they have played.

It’s difficult these days to attach any loyalty to players who come to a major league franchise, and then leave after three or four seasons. Which is why I always enjoy seeing players inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame who played their entire career with a single team.

Now it’s intercollegiate tackle football that’s been bitten by this transfer portal bug.

Finally, I will stipulate that my devotion to my home state Ducks won’t diminish over the transfer notion. I hope Bo Nix wins the Heisman … but I would enjoy it even more had he played the whole time for Oregon.