(Note, this entry has been edited due to the facts brought up to me by our loyal readers in the comments below)
When you live in an area where you don't get to watch your favorite baseball team your summer sports entertainment can get really limited. I seriously got excited tonight when ESPN announced they would be showing live coverage of the USA/Spain Confederations Cup semi-final game. So I spend a lot of my time wishing these days. Something like this....
-Somehow the San Francisco Giants become more popular and the MLB networks start showing their games more on national TV. It is some what plausible. The Giants are around 6 games over 500 with seventy games played and their is a general buzz and star power surrounding this team. Good or bad.
Like Tim Lincecum. The kid rocks some sweet locks that makes you wonder, "Is that guy rocking a mullet?"
But don't forget Barry Zito. Here is the 84 mph Cy Yound fire baller who is one of the highest paid pitchers in baseball. If this guy falls apart it is always in the print, but how cool would it be if he puts it together and brings back 2002? How can ESPN stay away from this?
-I wish we could get a NCAA decision on the scandals at USC. In the past two years the NCAA has discovered that USC booster's may have bribed OJ Mayo and Reggie Bush's family to play for the Trojans. Also add former basketball coach Tim Floyd just flat out gave some guy cash to ensure Mayo would play in LA. It's a slam dunk for a "lack of institutional control" so why haven't we seen anything on this?
How insane would it be if the NCAA is just digging and digging and finding crazy stories that even the writers of Blue Chips couldn't make up? Is it so bad that if the NCAA did nothing less then what it did to SMU football with the death penalty it would be a blatant definition of the double standard?
Could you even imagine if this happened to a football and basketball program at the same time? It would change west coast sports forever. Sure some other schools would get these freak of an athlete types but just taking USC out of football would automatically put about 10 teams in competition for the west coasts top program.
But don't forget the lost attention the Trojans give the teams that play in the Pac-10. Not only are they a media magnet but the challenge of having USC in your football conference only makes team strive to achieve more (unless you are UW).
I'll get back to you on how this hurts Pac-10 basketball.
-I wish somehow magically the PGA Championship actually became a respectable major in the golf grand slam. Either that or get rid of it. I know that you have to have four tournaments so you can complete the "grand slam" but why do events like the Australian Open and PGA Championship get lumped with their more respectable three?
I guess the Aussie Open is the solid #4 for the tennis circuit and I'm sure all of Australia would come unglued and blame it all on the Yanks. But who is going postal on America if we started calling Torey Pines or Sawgrass the final piece of the golf slam?
Seriously, if Phil Mickelson had won 6 tournaments and all of them were the PGA would any one be calling him "the 6 time major winner?" Even Fox Sports has enough respect to stay away from that one.
-I wish the 0regon ducks would never change. They are like the weird 2nd cousins at the family reunions that you love ripping on.
This past week our 2nd cousins unveiled their new "outfits" which included the addition of two new colors, "carbon" and "white steel." The helmets are even different with a strip down the middle saying random duck stuff and the "carbon" or "white steel" (I can't tell which color is meant to describe which) helmets have circles in its solid color pattern to give it the look of chain mail.
But the best news was they got rid of the steel plating and are going 100% wings (except they are getting rid of the knee section all together). But the wings are fantastic. When I heard about the idea of putting wings on their shoulder pads last October I thought it was a joke. But soon they were wearing all black uniforms with wings and the fans were eating it up. And they had to have because by now if their was a strong sense of opposition we wouldn't be here right now.
(And this is way worse then prancing around in a bro/manzier for a full football season. When our fans saw them in person we were all calling for a recall but I think the stupid ass person who made that decision got locked into a season contract with the new design before he could say "the strap is stuck." This was worse then when Millhouse bought 10,000 of the nerd super hero comic books while Bart was away from their store.)
The best part is our cousin just thinks he's the cock of the walk. Talking up the light weight material and 80 possible uniform combinations. And since everyone is talking about it any press is good press. Plus their players love the uniforms and that their number one concern. Because we know that self respect isn't high on their list.
-I wish the Blazers never have to get rid of Rudy Fernandez. Unfortunately he looks like the odd man out when you have players like Brandon Roy and Lamarcus Aldridge staring for the team. With salary cap and ego issues to arise, you know someday we'll have to watch the next Drazen Petrovic electrify other fans.
But if he was the unheard of star who wanted only to play in Portland for his entire career no matter what that would be too cool. The guy is going to have the passing skills that bring down the house like Magic Johnson, his own posterizing effect that brings on a whole new level of international shame, and a charisma that just makes it fun to watch basketball.
And this blogger thinks that if the refs didn't have some cheap calls on Rudy in the gold medal match then we wouldn't have to hear about how Kobe saved the US team when all of us who stayed up to watch that game know that Kobe did more to put the US team in the whole then anyone else there. It was Dwayne Wade who kept the US team in it when it mattered the most.
But I digress. Regardless, it will suck to see Rudy making sweet passes, dunks and "score the ball" for another team. And my fiance will stop rooting for the Blazers and move onto Rudy's team's bandwagon. As will the entire female population of Portland.
-Beavers415