Under the Lights

It’s a simple formula.

As a child, you watch a sport, you begin to like a team, and you begin to like players on the aforementioned team, which leads you to wanting to see the team live and purchasing products with the team’s name on them. From there, you teach your children about the team (every single day if you idiotically marry a fan of a rival team), which gets them interested in the team and the tree of sports continues to grow.

This is the story of sports and the spreading of sports.

Blacking out games is a chainsaw to the sports tree.

Any Chicagoan (yes, all life lessons come back to Chicago), in their 20s or early 30s are prime examples of what blacking out a sport can do.

Bill Wirtz was the owner of Chicago Blackhawks for 41 years. He was known as “Dollar Bill” Wirtz thanks to his enjoyment of keeping money in his pocket.

Wirtz was blamed for allowing Bobby Hull to leave the Hawks along with the loss of Dominik Hasek, Ed Belfour and trading Denis Savard, Chris Chelios, Jeremy Roenick and Phil Esposito.

Wirtz was a huge reason for the Blackhawks’ owning the second longest championship drought in NHL history and longest in team history. In 2004, the Chicago Blackhawks were named the worst franchise in all of sports and in 2002 Wirtz was named the third greediest owner in all of sports.

Aside from trading hall of fame talent and causing hockey stars to never want any association with the Blackhawks, Wirtz was and never should be forgiven for forbidding Blackhawks home games to be shown on TV unless they were picked up by national broadcasters, which only happened when the Blackhawks made the playoffs.

He actually tried to explain the nonsense by saying broadcasting regular home games was unfair to season-ticket holders.

Wirtz even tried to start Hawkvision, a pay-per-view service, which cost $29.95 a month during the 1992 and 1993 seasons for Blackhawks home games.

Thanks to this, my generation did not grow up with hockey in what was once considered a hockey town. Only now, after Bill Wirtz died and his son took over and changed everything, has hockey come back to life in Chicago.

Blackhawk jerseys are now seen everywhere in Chicago and the generation behind me had a chance to understand and love hockey.

Now onto the Vikings. The attempt to attach a bill forbidding blackouts to the stadium bill was a pipe dream, but was commendable. Considering the taxpayers are paying for this new stadium, shouldn’t they be guaranteed a chance to watch their team play in it, regardless of who shows up?

The idea of blacking out a game if it did not sell out within 72 hours was introduced in 1973. Vikings don’t have too much to worry about, considering they have sold out 144 consecutive games and have not been blacked out since 1997.

The blackout, however, is a slippery slope. It’s basically a league scolding fans for not showing up to see what the fans feel is a bad product. The NFL could care less about the little kid wanting to watch his newfound favorite player from his living room.

Let the kid watch his team. Let him enjoy sports now before he gets older and all he reads about is arrests, steroids and basically anything associated with the NCAA.

According to a statement from the NCAA, the University of North Carolina football program was punished Monday for the following:

1. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is responsible for multiple violations, including academic fraud, impermissible agent benefits, ineligible participation and a failure to monitor its football program.

 
2. Over the course of three seasons, six football student-athletes competed while ineligible as a result of these violations, and multiple student-athletes received impermissible benefits totaling more than $31,000.

 
3. While employed by the university, a former assistant football coach [John Blake] was compensated by a sports agent [Gary Wichard] for the access he provided to student-athletes and failed to disclose the income to the university. The former assistant coach and a former tutor [Wiley] both committed unethical conduct and failed to cooperate with the investigation.

 
UNC has to forfeit 15 scholarships over the next three seasons, will not be bowl eligible in 2012, receives three years probation, a $50,000 fine, loses all wins from 2008 and 2009, multiple players cannot be associated with the program, including former UNC wideout Hakeem Nicks, and Blake is banned from all recruiting activities in college football for three years

 
Blah. Blah. Blah.

 
It’s March Madness, but college athletics are the only maddening thing.

 
So because of past indiscretions, the future athletes at the University of North Carolina will be punished?

 
It’s nearly as backward as the BCS system or the fact human beings decide the road teams have to take to win the national championship in basketball (Surprise, surprise. Duke gets yet another cakewalk to the Elite 8).

 
College sports are amazingly entertaining, but the people who think they are more pure than professional sports are out of their minds.

 
As for the madness, it’s going to be Duke, Michigan State, Kansas and Syracuse…and I do see the irony in tearing college sports apart and filling out a bracket.

 
It’s almost as ironic as calling players on college teams “student athletes.”

Before you read the story and follow it through the newspaper, there is the headline. It’s those words which are meant to punch the reader in the face and say, “Read this.” It’s a small space from which to describe what a 300 or 3,000-word story speaks about and the description must be quick and clever, but not too cute.

It is the reason I have 30 ways of saying a team lost or won (beat, defeat, fell to, dropped, throttle, edge, cruised by…etc). It’s really sad how excited I get when I think of a different way to say a team won or lost.

It’s one of the most irritating jobs of an editor, but also one of the most important. It is one thing (there are plenty) you can count on having a call, a copy of the newspaper with a giant red mark and a few e-mails the next day waiting for you if there is a mistake, considering the mistake could change history (see the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline that was in the Nov. 3, 1948, issue of the Chicago Tribune).

Aside from our ability to devilishly dance with words, journalists are human. We eat, drink and sometimes we even sleep. When you’re looking at thousands of words a day, some just escape you; even the big ones.

I’ve woken up in the middle of the night thanks to nightmares of incorrect headlines, as if I were having war flashbacks. Sometimes the nightmares come true (I wholeheartedly apologize for putting JCC’s Whitney Burmeister on Windom’s basketball team in a headline).

All you can do is say, “I knew that didn’t look right,” and proceed to yell, throw and/or punch something to relieve the anger and never forget it.

It’s usually impossible to forget if you have loyal friends in the newsroom to consistently remind you of and belittle you for your mistakes. We’ll call mine A. Hagen and J. Froemming. That’s too obvious. Let’s call them Aaron H. and Joe F.

ESPN recently wrote a headline involving a phrase used to describe when a fault is found in someone, but also includes a word often used as racial slur for Asian people in regards to a story about New York Knicks’ guard Jeremy Lin, who is of Chinese and Taiwanese decent.

It was taken down 35 minutes after being posted, editor Anthony Federico was fired and anchor Max Bretos was suspended 30 days for saying it on air, even though his wife is Asian.

It was Federico’s last headline of the night, posted at 2:30 a.m. I’m sure he didn’t get much sleep that night.

It was an inexcusable mistake which will ironically point the spotlight on those of whom are normally directing it.

It’s a mistake and we should assume it was only that. Making a racial remark is probably not worth being fired from the center stage of sports journalism.

Always remember, people, to re-read everything. And, after that, re-read it again.

There are things the all-powerful spellcheck simply can’t see.

As we speak, I just realized I had Murray County Central as the Huskies in my headline rather than the Rebels.

I can sleep knowing I changed it before deadline, but I’ll certainly be waking up in the middle of the night thinking I didn’t.

So Texas Rangers centerfielder Josh Hamilton had three to four beers recently and relapsed, since last relapsing in 2009, after being sober since 2005, after the former No. 1 pick was forced to miss the entire 2003, 2004 and 2005 seasons because of suspensions for drug and alcohol use in the Tampa Bay organization.

Get all that?

The real question is why do we care?

If you’re in the Rangers organization, it’s a tad irritating that you’ve spent money on babysitters to keep this guy focused and he brings this news. Then again, considering Hamilton is a free agent after this season, people in the Rangers organization could hold this over his head as to why they won’t give him the contract he wants.

Regardless, outside of the Rangers organization and the Tampa Bay organization — who should never forgive Hamilton — the only reason the sports world cares about this relapse is because we put too much focus on the bad guys who go good for a brief stint, rather than the good guys who have always been good (see Jim Thome).

Everyone loves the feel-good story about someone climbing back to the top from the bottom, but at the same time, why do we, as sports fans, give these guys more credit than the guys who’ve never done anything wrong?

Why do we hate guys like Jay Cutler because they seem like jerks, but cheer for guys like Michael Vick or Hamilton because they did terrible things and are trying to make up for their actions after getting in trouble for them?

Would they have stopped if they hadn’t been caught?

What did Hamilton and Vick really do to earn back our trust as sports fans? They performed well at the job they weren’t able to do thanks to their negative actions.

Let Hamilton have a couple beers if he wants to. Don’t get angry because you and the media put him on a pedestal.

Talk to me when he’s not doing his job or doing something morally wrong because of those couple of beers.

So often we are given an idea or a rule and we just accept it, rather than question the hand giving it to us.

“Tradition” or “that’s the way it’s always been” is the worst reasoning for anything in life.
Old doesn’t mean good. Sorry, Baby Boomers, who jam “classic” rock music down our throats, but it’s true.

In sports, the traditional excuses are used way too often.

Faulty playoff systems are put in place with undeserving teams winning championships and we simply accept it because that’s the way it is. Rules, which simply don’t make sense, are enforced and we carry on and say, “What can you do?”

Well, you can question these rules and wonder if the outcome of a season is justified rather than just accept it.

My first question is: Did the New England Patriots deserve to defeat the Baltimore Ravens?

In the AFC Championship, there were 30 seconds remaining in the game and the Ravens were down by three. Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco found wide receiver Lee Evans in the end zone for what appeared to be a touchdown catch.

Evans caught the ball, got one foot down and appeared to get his second down just as Patriots cornerback Sterling Moore came from behind and knocked the ball loose.

Whether Evans’ second foot got down before Moore jarred the ball loose is not the question. The question is why does someone running toward the end zone just have to break the goal line with the ball, but a receiver needs to catch the ball, get two feet in and “make a football move” to declare a play a catch in the end zone?

Evans had the ball in the middle of the end zone far past the goal line. How much time does a defender have in the end zone to make a play? If a running back reaches with the ball toward the end zone, breaks the goal line and the ball gets swatted out of his hands, it’s still a touchdown, so why does a receiver have to “make a football move” in order for a catch to be a touchdown?

This doesn’t take away from the heads-up play by Moore, but it does call into question the NFL rule. Unfortunately, these rules are only questioned when they may have cost a team.
And, perhaps, I’m just mad that we now have a Super Bowl between two fan bases that feel the rest of the world starts and stops on everything its teams do thanks to Eastern Seaboard Programming Network (ESPN).

So ESPN is going to talk about New York and a Boston-area team over and over again? Must be a rerun.

My second sports-related question: With Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder now in the American League, does the National League deserve a World Series representative?

Quick. Name five star hitters in the National League. Not that easy, right?

For far too long, the National League has been allowing mediocre to bad teams to enter the playoffs in MLB.

And seeing as a team just has to go 11-8 in the faulty MLB playoff system, we end up with champions such as the 83-win St. Louis Cardinals in 2006, the Philadelphia Phillies, who had Cole Hamels, Brett Meyers and Jamie Moyer as their No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 starters in 2008, the 2010 San Francisco Giants, who had Aubrey Huff as their best hitter, and last season’s St. Louis Cardinals of whom I bet you can’t name five players outside of Albert Pujols.

These teams are not champions. They aren’t even close. In most cases, every American League team in the playoffs was better than the NL team that made the World Series and in some cases, the World Series champions don’t even deserve to be in the playoffs. Once you make the World Series, you just need to win four games out of seven versus an AL team that just had to play the best teams in baseball and you’re dubbed world champs.

Talent changing hands is usually cyclical, but this is getting outrageous, especially with Pujols and Fielder changing leagues and the reigning NL MVP possibly being suspended for 50 games. The difference between the leagues just went from not even close to not the same sport.

Since 2005, the AL has a 979-785 record in interleague play. 2012 may not be the end of the world, but it looks like it could be the end of relevance in the National League. And, yet, it still gets a representative in the World Series and, thanks to an idiotic rule, perhaps even home field advantage in it.

The best way to do things would be one giant league where the top eight teams make the playoffs, but that would take away division rivalries, which means ticket prices couldn’t be raised for those games.

With the added wildcard team possibly happening this season, we could see a team under .500 headed to the playoffs in the NL. A 12-8 record over three weeks later and you have yourselves another undeserving champion.

And that’s just the way it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.