The World Cup is pretty much the only soccer I watch. I wanted the United States to at least get to the round of 16. They didn’t make it out of group play. (Despite this, I’ll keep watching. Even though I don’t watch any other soccer, the World Cup is great.)
I don’t like basketball, but I’ll watch the NBA Finals. The team I wanted to win, didn’t.
I like hockey for the most part, and really like the NHL playoffs. (As big a baseball fan as I am, nothing in baseball, or in my opinion, all of sports, compares to an NHL elimination playoff game that goes into overtime. That’s intense.) After Detroit was eliminated, I kept tabs on the playoffs. I wanted the Oilers to win it all. They didn’t.
The Cardinals just got finished being utterly humiliated by the White Sox. I hope the Cardinals thanked the Sox for letting them use their field, because that was an old fashioned, behind the woodshed hide tanning of the HIGHEST order. The only good thing to come out of that series is that Mark Mulder is now on the DL with a “strained shoulder”. Strained shoulder my ass. We all know it’s from whiplash from watching all of those bombs leave the yard. I wish they would release him and let Reyes (or Wainwright) take his spot in the rotation. But that’s a rant for another day.
I think the only thing that could have made this a worse sports week is if the Cowboys won the Super Bowl (thank all that is good and holy that it’s summer, and not football season.)
So after this week, my fellow dopers, if you want your favorite sports team to win, don’t let me root for them. It’s the kiss of death.
Hey, at least Kid Reyes pitched like a guy who should have been in our rotation all season. Complete game one-hitter and but for 1 pitch, could have had a no-no (although he then would have been subject to the Curse of Bud Smith.)
Mulder’s worth too much money to release, and I really think this DL trip could help sort some things out (he’s got structural and/or mechanical problems.) Plus, he’s in a walk year and needs to get this sorted out if he wants to get A.J. Burnett money, so he’s got incentive to fix it. Or maybe we can see if the A’s will give us backsies on that trade so we can have Kiko Calero, Daric Barton and Danny Haren back.
Sidney Ponson, on the other hand, can be released easily. In fact, if we didn’t need him to start Sunday, I’d say the prudent course of action would be to designate his ever-widening ass for assignment and be done with him. Let Wainwright take his spot in the rotation, and let Ponson have his fill of overeating, overdrinking and punching Aruban cops.
I was rabidly anti-Heat until I discovered that Christian Laettner – i.e., The Most Evil Basketball Player In The Universe – had retired from the team. Then I was more or less neutral.
Yes. I hate the Cowboys, because that’s all you hear about here in Dallas when it comes to sports. The Rangers made the playoffs? Who cares?! It’s October, and that means it’s football season! The Stars won the Stanley Cup? Who cares?! It’s June! Don’t the Cowboys have a mini-camp coming up soon? It’s gotten so old and tiresome that I can’t stand the Cowboys anymore.
Plus, Jerry Jones is their owner. Granted, Mark Cuban (the Mavericks owner) can be an obnoxious blowhard. But he’ll at least answer questions honestly and directly. I don’t think Jerry Jones has ever answered a question his entire life. At least, anytime I’ve heard him interviewed he never has. It’s always “Uhhhhhhhh, well… ummmmmmmmm you know…” followed by a minute or two of beating around the bush, dodging the question at hand, and going off on some tangent that has nothing to do with the question that was asked. He sounds like a polititian.
You know, I was going to post “How are things in fair Kentucky?” without looking at your location, but I figured that I should check just in case (fn.1).
I really shouldn’t have bothered.
Oh well, it should make you happy to know that most Duke fans aren’t too thrilled with much at the moment. As is typical of the Duke fandom, most of our rage, whatever its source, is outwardly directed at each other and thus most Duke online hotspots are either stilted or miserable right now. Things should start turning with the release of the first few preseason magazines–Duke fans will start getting out of control with the expectations (fn.2) and the like, thus setting the fanbase up for more misery. (You would think that we would have learned from the example set by the more obnoxious element of the fanbase ~12 miles thataway, but alas, no–the Duke fanbase is growing its own “Carolina” wing (fn.3).)
As I’ve said before, I truly understand why people hate Duke fans; I hate many of them myself. Despite that, I look forward to watching the team in 2006-07 (I’m hoping for a 1999-2000 like season…one of my favorite Duke teams in recent memory), even if I have to do it in a hermetically sealed chamber.
Footnotes
I am of course making the assumption that you are in roughly the same location in 2006 that you were in 1992.
Duke will obviously not be ranked as highly as they were last year, but I’ll bet they are still put too high, as the preseason magazines just tend to be that way. I retain the opinion–which I first expressed (only verbally, sadly) in late September of last year–that there is no way in Hades that the 2005-06 Duke Blue Devils should have been the preseason #1/#2 team and that the Duke fanbase’s expectations were wildly unrealistic from day zero. Does that mean they should have lost to LSU like they did? No, but the idea that an appearance in the '06 Final Four was certain like a birthright was ludicrous.
A reference to that loud and obnoxious wing of the UNC fanbase–which was generally tamed during the Matt Doherty Era–that treated conference and national prominence as a right, had demands set at such absurd levels that they became a laughingstock to the rest of the ACC, and were just generally arrogant and annoying.
I never expected our soccer squad to advance. It’s invariably a collection of spare parts that isn’t within three pitches of the favorites and may or may not collapse horribly in the first round. Screw crazy, fluky, once-in-ten-lifetimes '02. USA soccer is never, ever going to be competitive, and it’s never going to even make the podium in the World Cup, much less win.
So what? That’s simple reality for nation that doesn’t put its time, energy, and money behind a sport. We’ll never have as good soccer players as Germany, just like they’ll never have as good football or baseball or paintball or World Series of Poker players as we do. That’s how it’s set up. That’s how it happens. Exactly what’s my incentive to get in a lather over this?
As for Mickelson…here, this should adequately explain it: That’s golf. It’s incredibly shocking when there isn’t at least one catastrophic collapse, ridiculous bounce, or blindness-inducing shot, ESPECIALLY in the homestretch with all the pressure on. Wasn’t there a South African who three-putted from 12 feet and had to play an entire 18-hole playoff to win the US Open? And? It happens. It happens to the best of them.
NBA finals…I was pretty neutral on this too. I thought it’d be pretty cool for Shaquille O’Neal to win a ring with another team (for his abilities and all the crap he’s had to take over the years, I don’t think four rings in two cities is unreasonable), and I never bought the not-that-long-removed-from-rock-bottom Mavericks as league-champion caliber. Other than that, I didn’t have much of a stake in this. It’s good that a complete psychopath like Mark Cuban didn’t get to hold the trophy, but I’d be a lot happier with him not being the owner anymore. (If the referees really were shafting him on behalf of the commish, I think that’s as good a reason as any for the Mavericks brass to give him the boot).
Don’t know enough about the NHL to pick a team. I am pretty happy that it was went down to the wire, something that’ll definitely help the embattled league.
