[Posted Wednesday AM]
NFL Draft Quiz: Who was the last running back taken with the overall No. 1 pick? Answer below.
Jets fans were waiting for the inevitable and on Sunday it finally came to fruition; the trade of superstar cornerback Darrelle Revis to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the Bucs’ 13th overall pick (and a conditional 2014 fourth-rounder that could turn into a third) in Thursday’s NFL draft. Revis in turn signed a rather unorthodox six-year, $96 million deal without any guarantees, befitting a player coming off a torn ACL. He would have been a free agent after this coming season had he stayed with New York.
But in a conference call with beat reporters after his introduction in Tampa, Revis said the Jets lied to him, specifically new GM John Idzik. The two met each other in person for the first time last Tuesday and had a sit-down the following day where, according to Revis, Idzik said he wanted the cornerback to remain a Jet. Revis said no contract details were discussed. Idzik then said on Sunday that Revis’ perception of his own value was too high after learning of his goal to reach the $16 million level. But Revis says the team wasn’t truthful. He added he would have been willing to accept the same non-guaranteed deal from the Jets, but that the Jets never contacted his agent about even a short-term offer.
Anyway, Revis was a pain in the butt when it came to contract negotiations over his six years with the Jets, holding out twice, and the bottom line is team owner Woody Johnson didn’t want to give Revis a long-term extension…or any contract at all.
As for the Revis / Rex Ryan relationship, Revis said, “As a friend, yeah, I feel for Rex. Rex played a big part in my career, and yeah I feel for him. I feel for him – not just because of my situation, but a lot of the things that have happened in the offseason. It’s a whole new team up there.”
A real lousy one, that is.
Various opinion….
Gary Myers / New York Daily News
“Roger Goodell walks across the stage at Radio City Music Hall next April, flashes a smile as the fans of the team with the worst record are delirious in anticipation as they finally will be rewarded for surviving a dismal 3-13 season.
“The fans quiet down as Goodell steps in front of the microphone.
“ ‘With the first pick in the 2014 NFL draft, the New York Jets select…’
“Will it be South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney, Louisville quarterback Teddy Bridgewater or Southern Cal wide receiver Marqise Lee?
“Three great players, but Rex Ryan probably won’t get to coach any of them.
“Ryan was clearly the biggest loser in Sunday’s trade of Darrelle Revis…as he auditions this season for rooke GM John Idzik to keep his job and get a contract extension. He may need to make the playoffs to stick around. That looks virtually impossible as Idzik has gutted the roster of an underachieving, overpaid team and will attempt to build the Jets back through the draft….
“Ryan…has been put in a position where it’s going to be hard to avoid getting fired in December. He goes into the season with a depleted roster, a quarterback fighting to save his career and now without his best player.
“Who trades their best player?….
“Of course, Ryan must be depressed that Idzik and Johnson took Revis away from him, but there’s no way he can say that publicly. Maybe he will after Idzik fires him in eight months.”
Steve Serby / New York Post
“You’re next, Rex.
“You’ll be Rexiled next.
“It is clear now Rex Ryan doesn’t have Woody Johnson’s ear anymore, because he will now be coaching for his job in 2013 without Darrelle Revis, who is taking his talents to Tampa for a high-risk six-year, $96 million deal but nary a red cent of it guaranteed.
“It’s a ‘deal of historic proportions,’ according to GM John Idzik, Johnson’s new consigliere.
“A franchise-altering deal that will lead this tortured franchise in a new direction.
“With a new head coach….
“Ryan will never admit it publicly, but he has officially met his Waterloo, and assuming he remains gung-ho on collecting his $3 million salary in 2013 for being the fall guy, assuming he is not the type to fax in his resignation, then by the time the season ends, he will be smaller than Napoleon in and around the NFL.
“Mark Sanchez was put in a position to fail in 2012, left alone on Sanchez Island with Tim Tebow, and Ryan has now been put in a position to fail in 2013. He is a lame-duck coach coaching a lame team, and he better duck.”
Pete Prisco / CBSSports.com
“When I asked five general managers if they would make the deal, they all replied with an emphatic no. They pointed at the risk of paying and trading to get a player coming off an ACL….
“ ‘You have to trust your doctors,’ one Tampa Bay source said.
“When healthy, Revis is special. But he’s not healthy. No matter how the spin doctors – see agents – spin it, they can’t for certain say he will be the same player.
“He might be – but no guarantee….
“I just don’t like the idea of paying and giving up picks for a guy coming off an ACL. Medicine has improved a ton, and Adrian Peterson showed you could come back, but there are other guys who have struggled to come back from ACL injuries.”
Mike Sielski / Wall Street Journal
“Yes, Revis is the NFL’s best cornerback. There isn’t a close second, and the chances are slim that the Jets will select a player of the same stature with one of two draft picks (including a first-rounder this year) they received in this trade. But by drafting even a very good player at a more meaningful position – a franchise quarterback, an elite pass-rusher – the Jets in theory could get better more quickly than if they’d kept Revis.”
–On Tuesday in Colorado, Atlanta’s B.J. Upton and his brother Justin became the first brothers to hit back-to-back home runs since Lloyd and Paul Waner of the Pittsburgh Pirates accomplished the feat on Sept. 15, 1938.
Separately, in the first game of a doubleheader, the temperature in Denver was 23 degrees, the coldest game-time temperature in the majors since such data started being collected in 1991, according to STATS.
–The Nationals are 10-10?!
–Ryan Howard with one home run in 21 games?!
–In taking a 2-0 series lead over the Celtics, the Knicks have held Boston to second-half point totals of 25 and 23…good gawd.
And as the New York Post’s Marc Berman noted, on Tuesday night “The Garden rang out with periodic ‘Boston Sucks!’ chants, indicating the world was getting back to normal.”
–The Knicks’ J.R. Smith won the NBA’s Sixth Man award. Where would the team be without this guy…18.1 points per game, 5.3 rebounds…even though as the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay put it, “He (often) shoots like he’s trying to win the giant stuffed panda at the street fair.”
—Mike Brown, who coached the Cavaliers to the playoffs in all five seasons he led them, from 2005-2010, and was fired by the Lakers five games into this season, is returning to Cleveland. Byron Scott was fired after three straight losing seasons.
And Mike Dunlap was fired after one season at the helm of the Charlotte Bobcats.
The opening act for Woodstock died Monday at the age of 72 so I thought it was a good time to reprise a piece of mine from about 3 ½ years ago.
It’s 5:07 p.m., Aug. 15, 1969, on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, Sullivan County, New York – 70 miles from the actual town of Woodstock, which confuses the heck out of most folks, including yours truly (the organizers wanted to take advantage of Bob Dylan’s living in Woodstock, though he then blew off the event), when folk singer/guitarist Richie Havens takes the stage for what is officially known as The Woodstock Music & Art Fair.
The festival was created and organized by four young entrepreneurs who together formed Woodstock Ventures Inc. in March: Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld, Michael Lang, and John Roberts. Roberts, heir to a toothpaste and drugstore business, bankrolled much of the event.
The first day lineup, aside from Havens, had performances by Sweetwater, Bert Sommer, Tim Hardin, Ravi Shankar, 22-year-old newcomer Melanie, Arlo Guthrie, and bill-topper Joan Baez. The “summer of love” (which originated in ’67), hippie/peace movement was at its zenith and an estimated 450,000 showed up in Bethel, when a crowd of 150,000 was hoped for. There would be three deaths, two births and four miscarriages, innumerable conceptions, lots of drugs and alcohol, and the closure of the New York State Thruway (as an eleven-year-old the thing I remember most from the news reports), thus precipitating one of the worst traffic jams in the history of our country over four days.
Day two, Aug. 16….The crowd is up to 250,000 and they see Quill, Country Joe McDonald, John B. Sebastian, Keef Hartley, Santana, Incredible String Band, Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, the Who and Jefferson Airplane…wow…that’s a lineup.
Day three, Aug. 17…it’s Joe Cocker, Country Joe & the Fish, Leslie West & Mountain, Ten Years After, the Band, Johnny Winter, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as the crowd has swelled to 450,000.
Day four, Aug. 18…The Woodstock festival closes after morning performances by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, retro-50s combo Sha Na Na (I still find this incredibly bizarre), and finally, at 9:00 a.m., Jimi Hendrix and his famous rendition of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’
Well, it just so happens I have here in my library Richie Havens’ autobiography, “They can’t hide us anymore,” with Steve Davidowitz. Here is his tale of getting to the festival.
Aug. 15… “I was in New York City and I could feel the swell of energy 100 miles away. Nobody seemed to care that the Woodstock Festival was no longer going to take place anywhere near Woodstock. The only thing that mattered was that it was going to happen. Today.
“I left the city at 5:30 in the morning on the day I was supposed to play – the first day – and drove straight to the Howard Johnson Hotel in White Lake, New York, without a hitch. We were only a few miles away from the farm and all the bands had been told to come there first.
“I was lucky to get up the road so smoothly. By 7:30 in the morning, I was sitting in the lobby with my band. I wasn’t worried. I was fifth in the order and wasn’t scheduled to go on for hours. But at two in the afternoon, I was half-asleep when news came that there was no music; still no way to get through.
“From the edge of the hotel parking lot I could see traffic stopped cold on the approach road. I could tell right there that the crowd was much larger than anyone was saying.
“The road to the stage had disappeared. It was now a wall-to-wall parking lot of abandoned cars. The main highways were backed up with traffic that wasn’t going anywhere. The Northbound Quickway (Route 17) had just been closed by the state police…The whole thing was beginning to look pretty shaky.
“Michael Lang, one of the promoters, rushed back and forth nervously on a motorcycle, weaving between the crowds, riding up and down the hills trying to figure out ways to get a few musicians to the stage. He was mumbling to himself and sweating and we were beginning to think we were all stuck. Right there. No music. At all.
“Yet somehow, through all sorts of missed connections and broken leads, Michael managed to find someone with a glass bubble helicopter about twenty miles away. Now here it was, dropping slowly into the parking lot right outside my hotel window. The prop blades made the air sound like shotguns going off. This would be my first helicopter ride and my first good look at what was really happening here.
“We were squeezed into the glass bubble cockpit. We were the perfect choice; there were only three of us and we had the fewest instruments. Me; my guitarist, Deano (Paul Williams); and my drummer, Daniel Ben Zebulon. We were sitting behind the pilot with two conga drums, two guitars squeezed between us. The glass surrounded us, top to bottom.
“Looking below my feet, I could see the ground clearly, as if I was sitting on the air. I got dizzy for a second. It felt like I was riding a stem that was holding two seats. And we were moving 100 miles an hour.
“It was beautiful below me. A sea of trees – the tops of them whizzing beneath me in the wash of the helicopter’s props. So much green; gray shades of leaves flipped upside down; slight hints of orange and red, the first hues of autumn.
“We banked a bit to the left and the sea of trees changed into a different kind of sea, just as beautiful. My mouth dropped when I saw all those people, hundreds of thousands of them. Definitely more than the 250,000 reported in the New York papers the following morning, a whole lot more like half a million on the first day.
“It was awesome, like double Times Square on New Year’s Eve in perfect daylight with no walls or buildings to hold people in place. The people filled the field and formed a human blanket across the road to the other side of the hill and into the forests all around the field, where nobody could possibly see the stage.
“Hovering above the hill, looking all around, my eyes could not take it all in, but I knew what to call it.
“ ‘We finally made it,’ I told myself. ‘We’ve all finally made it above ground. They won’t be able to hide this picture from the rest of the country.’”
But with Havens due to go on stage fifth, organizer Michael Lang begged him to lead off because the crowd was getting restless. Havens:
“I knew what the situation was. I calmed myself with the thought that it would only be a twenty-minute set. I picked up my guitar and climbed the steps. The crowd went nuts. I felt the people just wanted something to happen after all the hours of nothing.
“So I sat down on the stool and looked out at the huge crowd and said what I had been thinking since that first look from the helicopter at the never-ending blanket of people.
“ ‘YOU KNOW, WE’VE FINALLY MADE IT,’ I said into the mike. ‘WE DID IT THIS TIME. THEY’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO HIDE US AGAIN.’
“The rumbling roar from the crowd was like a small earthquake. It came first in a low-pitched wave, then it rose up and shook the stage. I heard the word freedom loud and clear in my brain. A word I would hear over and over again while I was up there. I was home, among long-lost and newfound friends….
“There were smiling faces in every direction and plenty of people over fifty in the crowd. Huge numbers of college kids, of course, but I had no trouble seeing plenty of parents and grandparents with their families – adults who believed in world peace like we did and wanted to hear the music we played. For some reason, this too was omitted from most press accounts. We were all rebels forced into a cause who learned along the way that we had plenty to embrace. We had ourselves. We had the good sense to prefer peace, not war. We were not down on America. We were Americans with the highest ideals. And we could see all around us that there were way too many of us now to be ignored.
“I didn’t know that being first onstage was going to be anything but a horror. Who knew what to expect? But there I was – in full view of hundreds of thousands of people. So what choice did I have but to start talking and singing? Suddenly I was in any other place I’ve ever been, no fear, just doing what I do. I understood who they were and they understood who I was and we were off….
“I began with a relatively unknown song, ‘Minstrel from Gault.’…It was close to a pure folk song and it felt like an easy way to get things rolling for me. I sang more of my songs, about forty minutes’ worth, which was twice as long as I expected. But I figured if they weren’t pulling me off the stage after forty, nobody else must be ready yet.
“Which is exactly what I found out as soon as I saw Michael at the back of the stage on my way off.
“ ‘Please go back on, Richie. Do three more songs. Please. We have somebody coming. They’re just not here yet. Sing three more songs. They’re on their way.’
“So I went back and sang three more songs and then I looked over at Michael and his people. They were asking me to do another. So the set went on….
“Seven times in all and nearly three hours after I’d first looked out on the crowd, I’m back out there one more time, when finally I’ve completely run out of songs and know I’ve got to get off, no matter what the situation is. So I start tuning and retuning, hoping to remember a song I’ve missed, when I hear that word in my head again, that word I kept hearing while I looked over the crowd in my first moments onstage.
“And I say to the crowd: ‘Freedom is what we’re all talking about getting. It’s what we’re looking for…I think this is it.”
“I start strumming my guitar and the word freedom comes out of my mouth as “FREE-dom, FREE-dom’ with a rhythm of its own. My foot takes over and drives my guitar into a faster, more powerful rhythm. I don’t know where this is going, but it feels right and somehow I find myself blending it in to an old song – ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ – a great spiritual my grandmother used to sing to me as a hymn when I was growing up in Brooklyn. It’s a beautiful song, a song I hadn’t played in six or seven years.
FREE-dom, FREE-dom, FREE-DOM, FREEDOM…
SOME-TIMES I FEEL…like a MOTH-ER-LESS CHI-LD…
“I’m singing it, ‘FREE-dom, FREE-dom,’ picking up the rhythm another beat and the pulse of it is carrying me and connecting the whole Woodstock Festival for me in my very last moments onstage. It felt like I could feel the people I couldn’t even see on the other side of the hill… ‘Clap your hands! Clap your hands!’ And they all did!
“People started to stand, the wave of them rising went over the hill. I’ll never forget it….
“That last song turned out to be an anthem for me and for a lot of other people too….
“I stayed on the grounds for several more hours, talking to people, catching the music….
“More bands were coming in by military helicopter and the National Guard was helping out. After a shaky start and a lot of worries, the festival was moving along great.
“I wanted to stay and catch more music, but we were booked at Indiana University the next night. What happened next I will never forget. There’s no doubt it captured the essence of this event better than anything.
“It was on the Army helicopter transport, heading back to the hotel when I saw it. The first thing I noticed was that this helicopter was much larger than the bubble we came in. The door was like a big bay window without any glass. Exactly the kind of helicopter the troops jump out of. It was huge.
“It probably had seen its share of bodies and severely injured. It probably had been to ‘Nam.
“It’s a Beautiful Day was on board, along with my band and another band. We were all in it with room to spare. The seats were opposite each other, backs to the wall. A long bench on one side and a long bench on the other.
“So I’m sitting there, facing the open door, leaning a bit on my guitar, holding it between my legs, on my lap, bracing my arms around it, staring straight out the door into the evening sunlight, seeing only the treetops, when a thought came to mind that stopped me in my tracks.
“This is what it must feel like to be in ‘Nam, I thought to myself. You can’t see anything below the treetops except the machine gun rounds flying up at you. Imagine what that’s like. You’re nineteen or twenty years old. They’ve shipped you ten thousand miles from Kansas or Brooklyn and you’re sitting there in your uniform too scared to breathe and tracer bullets are whizzing by….
“Slowly I turned to look down the line to the three guys across the way on either side of the open door. I turned again to look down the line on my side and saw four or five guys sitting to my right, while my own guys and another two were sitting to my left.
“Most of them were guitarists and bass players. All – and I mean all – were holding their instruments the same way I was. They were leaning on them like they were rifles, holding them upright on their laps, between their thighs with the guitar necks straight up in the air.
“The image is burned in my brain. All of them sitting there like they could easily have been in uniform on the way to another skirmish with the Vietcong. But I had to laugh at what I saw. I knew what I was really seeing was exactly what Woodstock was all about: ‘We’re the new army,’ I said aloud. ‘We’re the new army!’…
“As long as I live, I’ll never forget that image and there’s no question that I was right. We had no weapons; we had no harm in our hearts. We were musicians and singers and songwriters and we had come to Bethel from everywhere to rally the spirit and the harmony of so many voices, including our own.”
Note: Tickets were just $6.00 for each day, though tens of thousands crashed it by climbing over and through the flimsy fences.
[Other Source: “Rock & Roll: Year by Year,” by Luke Crampton & Dafydd Rees]
–Gonzaga forward Kelly Olynyk announced he is skipping his senior season to enter the NBA draft. I missed this last time. The 7-footer is a definite first-rounder.
—Manchester United wrapped up its 20th English league title, 13th in 21 seasons, on Monday with a 3-0 win over Aston Villa. Man U ran away with it this season, up 16 points over Manchester City with four games to spare.
–Meanwhile, also in the Premier League, Liverpool’s Luis Suarez is in deep trouble after biting a Chelsea player on Sunday. The picture of it is awful.
The thing is, it’s the second time he has done this! Suarez issued a public apology, but the Football Association is likely to ban him for a lengthy period.
The player Suarez bit this time, Branislav Ivanovic, did not file a complaint when asked by police if he wanted to.
Liverpool is a worldwide institution and can’t afford to have Suarez, despite his talent, on the roster.
[The decision is to be handed down later Wednesday, I think.]
–The Department of Justice filed a 28-page complaint against Lance Armstrong that details years of lying and cheating as he earned $millions from the U.S. Postal Service’s $40 million agreement to sponsor Armstrong’s cycling team.
Under the False Claims Act, the government could receive triple the damages, or possibly $40 million times three.
–Mark your calendar…Sat., Sept. 14…College Station…Johnny Manziel and Texas A&M host Alabama! No doubt an 8:00 PM ET starting time…don’t bother me.
–Good lord….hey, Shu….I see at Chase Field (Arizona Diamondbacks), they offer a “Sonoran Dog…a hot dog wrapped in mesquite-smoked bacon that is grilled and then topped with fresh and grilled onions, tomatoes, beans, cream sauce, mayonnaise, mustard and jalapeno salsa.” [Shu being a Feenix resident.]
–Phil W. passed along this bowling story from the Charlotte Observer:
“A North Carolina man has rolled the first 900 series in Professional Bowlers Association history – three straight perfect games.
“Joe Scarborough, a 50-year-old self-employed electrical contractor from Charlotte, opened the first round of qualifying in the PBA50 Sun Bowl on Sunday with three games of 300, throwing 36 consecutive strikes….
“Scarborough wsa a PBA member from 1991-2001 and twice bowled in standard PBA Tour events. He rejoined when he turned 50 in October….
“Norm Duke had three consecutive 300s in a standard PBA Tour event in 1996, the PBA said Monday, but the performance didn’t count as a 900 series because he ended one round with two perfect games and started the next round with his third.”
Scarborough threw another strike to start his fourth game, but then had three straight sub-200 games. He ended up in a tie for 12th.
So it’s time to take a trip down memory lane and recall some of the greats from those Saturday afternoon ABC bowling telecasts that preceded “Wide World of Sports.” I know many of you watched as I did each week. [Also understand this was long before the advent of ESPN and having a ton of college basketball games to choose from.]
Earl Anthony, Mark Roth, Dick Weber, Mashall Holman, Norm Duke, Dave Davis, Nelson Burton Jr., Carmen Salvino, Wayne Zahn, Larry Laub, Skee Foremsky, Art Trask, Teata Semiz and, my favorite, Ray Bluth.
But did you know that Chris Schenkel’s broadcast partner, Billy Welu, only won two PBA titles? Actually, Ray Bluth only won two himself but he always seemed to be on, ball cupped in his right arm.
–We note the passing of actor Allan Arbus, best known as psychiatrist Maj. Sidney Freedman on “M*A*S*H.”
Alan Alda, “Hawkeye,” said Arbus was so believable, “I used to sit and talk with him between scenes. After a couple months of that I noticed he was giving me these strange looks, like ‘How would I know the answer to that?’”
—Glen Campbell’s farewell tour is over, but he announced he would release at least one more album. Campbell’s Alzheimer’s has progressed too far for him to be on the road. The new album, “See You There,” is released on July 30 and will offer new versions of some of his most popular songs. It was recorded at the same time of 2011’s excellent “Ghost on the Canvas.”
Top 3 songs for the week 4/24/65: #1 “Game Of Love” (Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders…put enough beer in me and I do very well with this one…) #2 “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter” (Herman’s Hermits) #3 “I’m Telling You Now” (Freddie and The Dreamers…he was kind of irritating…)…and…#4 “I Know A Place” (Petula Clark…probably her best…we love you, Pet!) #5 “Stop! In The Name Of Love” (The Supremes) #6 “Tired Of Waiting For You” (The Kinks) #7 “I’ll Never Find Another You” (The Seekers…quality tune…) #8 “The Clapping Song (Clap Pat Clap Slap)” (Shirley Ellis…you know, this is far from a great one…but if they re-released it today, I bet it works…it would be a YouTube type hit….flash mob kind of thing…) #9 “Shotgun” (Jr. Walker & The All Stars) #10 “Silhouettes” (Herman’s Hermits)
NFL Draft Quiz Answer: The last running back taken with the overall No. 1 pick was Ki-Jana Carter (Penn State) by the Cincinnati Bengals in 1995. Carter was a total bust and gained just 1,144 yards in seven seasons.
And that’s why teams no longer waste early draft picks on running backs, Charlie Brown.
Next Bar Chat, Monday.
